October in the studio has seen much movement, but not in the direction I anticipated.
At the end of September, I had a sense of the forward direction of travel in terms of the Graves Commission I’m working on, drawings I’m going to create in relation to their collection. And just as I was about to begin… I didn’t.
I didn’t know it, but I needed to pause and review my work. I’ve found myself guided by unconscious impulses and intuitions and research encounters so that now, at the end of October I feel enriched and inspired. But I didn’t plan it that way. In fact, I abandoned the to-do list and forward momentum in favour of feeling the backward drag. The ebb tide.
I could feel the pull of drawings I’d been unable to resolve, and then abandoned in the summer. A drawing series I’m making from dancers I’d photographed at Sexplicit, a worker-run pop-up strip club event. It’s a departure for me to make drawings from photographs taken now of other people. I’ve been wanting to find ways to make this series. I experimented with creating two drawings of each dancer: mirror images. I also experimented with patterning the figures. I’m borrowing a book on Gustav Klimt, which is on my desk. Looking at his paintings inspired the shapes I’m using to decorate the images. Only this month I saw, he decorated the negative space around the figures. That’s what I began to do. I used black paper and gold pen and decorated the negative space. Not every drawing is resolved, but I’m learning how to make this work, how to render these figures in a way that honours them.
Near the start of the month, I went to see Now You See As, Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 at Tate Britain. In the exhibition, a caption described how the artist, Mary Black, in 1764 painted Messenger Monsey and expected to be paid £25 for the work. This was half the amount Joshua Reynolds, the leading portrait painter of the day charged. However Monsey thought her expectation to be paid was improper, and he described her as a slut in a letter to his cousin.
The slut in the studio. The slut in the gallery. The slut in the theatre. The slut in the stripclub.
I remembered a photograph I took at Windmill International, a gentlemen’s club that operated in the famous (Mrs Henderson Presents) Windmill Theatre. I made the photograph in 2011. Installed on the stage walls in the club were versions of Klimt paintings. The Klimt in the club.
I felt the urge to revisit all my theatre photos. Reviewing them, I saw many alternate images I hadn’t worked on before that add to the visual narrative of the series. I saw something now I hadn’t been able to see before. I spent a day in the community editing suite at the Site Gallery using Photoshop to edit and tidy them all up. On a trip through Lancashire, I organised photographing another theatre and another strip club. And then I took over a dozen images to Untitled Print, for printing, editing, but more importantly, another eye on the work.
I listened to podcasts on Gustav Klimt as I worked on the drawings. I’ve been thinking about decoration. The subversive potential of decoration. As I look back over October in the studio, I see connections and preoccupations that drive my work anew.
It’s not that I can see all the connections, nor can I make sense of everything I’ve been thinking about this month. But a few phrases linger in my mind to make sense of: ‘the muse and the slut’, ‘decoration and defiance’, ‘become hypervisible in the areas we’ve been shamed’.
Ascending A Staircase, Funny Girls, Blackpool, 1939, 2024
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