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[Discursive Spaces]|
T H E R E S A B R A D B U R Y
Exploring Heterotopias and how they contribute to or restrict [Discursive spaces]. These heterotopias or non-spaces will inform the research and the output of the final works. Six westmidlands based artists have been invited to contribute to the publication and a final group show at Wolverhampton Art Gallery to present a narrative between 'the in-between' and what that means in our current climate.
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| Artist statement |
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Theresa's current practice is an exploration of ideas about the feminine being a social construct – an artificial masquerade. The female as living as her own spectator, the female as always accompanied by her own image. Theresa's concerns surround the masquerade and performative nature of femininity and the display and objectification of the female body as commodity within Capitalist society. Utilising a live art, performance and sculptural practice to reinforce positive feminist perspectives on the female body. To subvert the prevailing tropes of femininity as prescribed through a patriarchal lens.
The work investigates questions relating to the body in site, alongside themes of representation and gender. With the work, the artist is exploring and interrogating social boundaries and acceptable codes of exposure. The appropriate/inappropriate dichotomy, particularly in relation to femininity. The idea that the female body can be acted upon and coerced by external forces must be disrupted to reframe the body as active and autonomous. If the body is a surface to be inscribed upon by cultural and societal forces, what is real? The body as alienated, as belonging to the other. Constant awareness of the body, not as it is for you, but for the other. Femininity formed through the constant surveillance of ourselves against others through the mirror image. A device used to measure yourself against.
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The work references an anti-aesthetic, a disruption of the social and symbolic ordering of the female body, exploring a rejection of woman as idealised surface. The work questions and disrupts the idea of a proper social body and confronts the viewer with its abjection, refusing containment and allowing seepage and immersion with bodily fluids.
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The work attempts to erode the fetishishtic dominant structures of patriarchal Capitalism. By presenting the abjectness of the body, the work both solicits and repels the viewer and refuses the link to commodity culture. The construction of femininity as temporal and manipulable, an artifice. What constitutes femininity and who draws the boundaries? The work subverts the socially dictated artificial femininity represented through media imagery. Femininity which is something that must be purchased and imposed artificially upon the surface of the female and a radical acceptance of mess, fluids and flesh are part of feminist resistance.
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