High Maintenance Beef Curtains

My paintings arise in response to historical artworks which take gendered violence as their theme, and form the response portion of my current practice-led PhD research, which I am undertaking at the University of Leeds. Running through all my work are the seams of things being healed from rupture, the scar of having been brought back together, pregnant and uneven, forever imprinted with what came before. I begin in the lineage of Rubens and Titian: Belgian linen, sutured together, sized with rabbit skin glue. Veneitian turpentine, a chalk under-drawing. I render up scenes of gendered violence found in evidentiary crime scene photos, described from victim impact statements, my memory, or taken from popular culture entertainment - television shows and films in which the inciting incident is the capture-and-kill of a woman. I render up her form, her most violent moment, the moment where her identity becomes enmeshed in her end, and free her from that misalignment and identification of self with the act that was her end. Using the language of the Baroque, with Rubens as my main influence, I build the painting in layers, pouring, scraping, varnishing, until her form is atomized and she is freed from that moment and back into time - back into the fuller life she lived, the things that define her as a person, a human.