We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The Archaic Torso Of Apollo
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Monday, September 21, 2009
Cleanliness Is Next To Grubbiness
Consider the tomboy; independent, adventurous, outdoors, free - pertaining to elements of social surprise. The acts of climbing trees or cutting up worms might be the sort’s of stuff a girl, who wouldn’t be seen dead playing with dolls gets up to, but does this render her a tomboy? Further, what clues contribute to our impression of a girl who is a tomboy, when not observed outdoors roughing it up and behaving akin to a ‘rambunctious boy’ – a hoyden?
An alternative view of the tomboy is a girl who, [and we can’t quite put our finger on it] demonstrates a way of being that is different, or not the same as the general girl/boy templates. It is this, the essence of the girl who calls herself ‘tomboy,’ that I am interested in exploring and the bathroom the space I have chosen to intrude upon.
A private and intimate space, the bathroom, amongst other things, can be viewed as a place of transformation and cleanliness. Cleanliness contradicts grubbiness; a usual state in which the tomboy’s scuffing around would bring about, which highlights the cliché of the tomboy who can’t stand having a bath.
So, if it is not the bath that draws the tomboy to the bathroom, perhaps it is the privacy? Here she can lock the door, occupy the space, explore her reflection, emulate current heroes, apply bubble bath to her chin and say, ‘ho ho ho.’ Here she has no costume and here she can simply be.
An alternative view of the tomboy is a girl who, [and we can’t quite put our finger on it] demonstrates a way of being that is different, or not the same as the general girl/boy templates. It is this, the essence of the girl who calls herself ‘tomboy,’ that I am interested in exploring and the bathroom the space I have chosen to intrude upon.
A private and intimate space, the bathroom, amongst other things, can be viewed as a place of transformation and cleanliness. Cleanliness contradicts grubbiness; a usual state in which the tomboy’s scuffing around would bring about, which highlights the cliché of the tomboy who can’t stand having a bath.
So, if it is not the bath that draws the tomboy to the bathroom, perhaps it is the privacy? Here she can lock the door, occupy the space, explore her reflection, emulate current heroes, apply bubble bath to her chin and say, ‘ho ho ho.’ Here she has no costume and here she can simply be.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Ban On Tomboys -26.10.2008
In October 2008, the National Fatwa Council forbade the practice of girls behaving or dressing like boys in Northern Malaysia. This news was brought to us by, Harussani Idris Zakaria, the mufti of northern Perak state, who attended the gathering held last year.
Harussani said an increasing number of Malaysian girls behave like tomboys, and that some of them engage in homosexuality. Homosexuality is not explicitly banned in Malaysia, but it is effectively illegal under a law that prohibits sex acts “against the order of nature.”
Harussani said the council’s ruling was not legally binding because it has not been passed into law, but that tomboys should be banned because their actions are immoral.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a law or not. When it’s wrong, it’s wrong. It is a sin,” Harussani told The Associated Press. “Tomboy (behavior) is forbidden in Islam.”
Harussani said an increasing number of Malaysian girls behave like tomboys, and that some of them engage in homosexuality. Homosexuality is not explicitly banned in Malaysia, but it is effectively illegal under a law that prohibits sex acts “against the order of nature.”
Harussani said the council’s ruling was not legally binding because it has not been passed into law, but that tomboys should be banned because their actions are immoral.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a law or not. When it’s wrong, it’s wrong. It is a sin,” Harussani told The Associated Press. “Tomboy (behavior) is forbidden in Islam.”
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Throw Like A Girl: The Tomboy Project#1
BIG MASSIVE THANK YOU TO - Mieke, Dharma, Harry, Shiraz and their families; you are all amazing!!!
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
What Does It Mean To Be a Woman?
Is there ‘a’ gender which persons are said to have, or is it an essential attribute that a person is said to be, as implied in the question: ‘What gender are you?’ (Judith Butler, p.10)
Can ‘construction’ … be reduced to a form of choice… that one ‘becomes’ a woman, but always under a cultural compulsion to become one?
(Butler, p.11)
In 1946 Simone de Beaviour asserted: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” (de Beauviour, p.21). This leads to further questioning: What is a woman? How does one know if one has become a woman? After being born, does one’s biological and chromosomal arrangement (Butler) hold sway on whether becoming a woman is a viable option?
Is there an option?
In philosophical tradition that begins with Plato and continues through Descartes, Husserl and Sartre, the ontological distinction between soul (consciousness, mind) and body invariably supports relations of political and psychic subordination and hierarchy… The cultural associations of mind with masculinity and body with femininity are well documented within the field of philosophy and feminism. (Butler, p.17)
In the cradle of Western civilisation, gender politics took root. In Greek myth of Troy, if we know the story at all, we think of battles and Achilles and big strong male warriors. If we try to recall any women, it is Helen – considered to be the epitome of the ‘fair maiden’ – any other women are rendered invisible in his-story.
Consider Helen’s sister, Cassandra, “an illustration of women’s so-called treachery”(Gitzen, p126). An alternative view by historian Christa Wolf rewrites Cassandra not as the ranting half-mad woman of literary tradition but rather an individual who changes and grows and finds new alternatives for living, as the world around her disintegrates.
When she prophesies the downfall of Troy, Cassandra’s insights are dismissed as irrational, emotional and fragile: she is derided by the patriarchy as a ‘hysterical woman’; thrown in gaol, her prophecy ignored - to the peril of the kingdom and the abduction of her sister, Helen.
In the last three centuries of western culture, a hefty amount of critical theory has been written on the subject of ‘woman’. The notable psychoanalytical theories on sexuality and gender difference developed by Sigmund Freud, as well as post-Freudian theorists (most notably Jacques Lacan) created an “arena for discussion in response to the internal needs of feminist debate”(Rose, p.92).
Affinity with psychoanalysis for feminists in accordance to Jacqueline Rose “lies in the acknowledgment of resistance to identity at the very heart of psychic life”(Rose, p.91). For Rose, psychoanalysis becomes one of the few places in our culture where it is recognised as more than a fact that “most women do not painlessly slip into their roles as woman, if indeed they do at all” (ibid).
Male drag, female impersonators and drag kings suggest that gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as ‘the real’. Judith Butler asks: Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatise the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established?
This ambiguity underpins Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, who shifts between genders:
She remembered how, as a young man, she had
insisted that woman must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled.
“Now I shall have to pay in my own person
for those desires,” she reflected, “for women are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature. They can only attain these graces, without which they may enjoy none of the delights of life, by the most tedious discipline”(Woolf, p.89).
Woolf’s Orlando explores the constructs of gender, creating an androgynous world in which “the best qualities associated with woman and with man exist, integrating strength with humility, independence with empathy, rationality with intuition, and thought with emotion” (Pearson p.153).
For post-structural feminist artists in the mid-late 1970’s, the prevailing subject of sexuality and gender was increasingly perceived as constructions largely produced through signs of representation. Their work, largely informed by Lacan, examined the construction of difference in visual representation and deployed the use of performance and installation art as political expressions.
Barbara Kruger used text: cut, pasted and juxtaposed over documentary-style photographs with block colours. Her poster-pictures resonated with the history of propaganda. Linguistic ‘shifters’, consisting of the personal pronouns: ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘we’ and ‘you’, are used by Kruger to ask what it is we are being told by advertising and whether or not we are paying attention:
Instead of being invested with the coercive authority of advertising, they [pronouns] begin to reveal ways in which the place of the viewer in language is indefinable, refusing alignment with gender. Rather than ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ positions, there emerges interplay between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ relations (Phelan, p.123).
For artist, filmmaker and writer Laura Mulvey, the language of semiotics holds significant interest. In her 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey explored the messaging of cinematic imagery and narrative. By coining the concept of the heterosexual male gaze, she speculated whether western society was largely constructed of codes and signifiers bound by a patriarchal symbolic order:
Woman [then] stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.
If feminist critical theory and psychoanalytical discourse have deconstructed constructed notions of femininity written from the constructed masculinist point of view, shouldn’t constructs of masculinity ought to come under scrutiny? Without one, there is no other; without either, there is neither; thus gender and sexuality would cease to exist. If this were the case, so-called gender defiance would dissipate and we would simply have oneness: personhood.
Simplified by the language of dualities, sex and gender have historically been coded, coupled, contained and compartmentalised into binary structures of female-male, girl-boy, woman-man and masculine-feminine. These coded couplings present a black and white theoretical framework for debate where “compulsory heterosexuality” (Foucault, p85) only served to push societal expectations of conformity onto designated gender norms and sexual identity.
‘Identity’ is assured through stabilising concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality; the very notion of ‘the person’ is called into question by the cultural emergence of those ‘incoherent’ or ‘discontinuous’ gendered beings who appear to be persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined( Butler, p23).
Fluidity of gender and sexual identity informs the conceptual framework for Del LaGrace Volcano, whose photographic narratives explore the “morphing of female sexual identity through performances created for the camera” (Marsh p 210). By referencing historical representations of the woman as subject to the male gaze, his photographs “punctuate optical histories of the female subject” (ibid).
Describing himself as a ‘gender terrorist’, Volcano claims to “subvert, destabilise and challenge the binary gender system.” This “masquerade for the camera” (Marsh, p211) displays masculinity within the biology of woman thus gender–blending the female not so much into the male, but rather to an ‘other’, introducing a third trans-gendered person.
This ‘other’ has informed my work. I began by looking at myself in context to historical representations of ‘woman’: idealised, objectified and some may say “posited as something that the male experiences, a possession, object or phenomenon delivered up to him” (Nunn, p.142)
The dichotomy of the woman as wife – mother, domestic goddess - adulteress, object – prostitute, opened up an investigation of gender constructs in western culture that could be seen as designs to define ‘identity’ into binary structures of feminine and masculine.
Initially using myself as the subject in my photographs as a way of both representing ‘woman’ and of ‘self’, I began to explore how I look at myself, how I think others look at me, and how I could be viewed.
As a girl, I was a tomboy. Interestingly, it seems that what’s tolerated in girls becomes taboo in adolescence. The crossing over into pubescence is riddled with the politics (and ambiguities) of gender.
In my research, I have found virtually no representation of the tomboy in the history of visual arts. There are plenty of images of girls, notably the imagery of Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret-Cameron.
In childhood and in puberty, girls and young women are usually portrayed as highly feminised and/or sexualised. But just try to find visual representations that focus on the tomboy?
Drawing on Marsh whose comparison of Cameron and Carroll, one male and one female, both photographers who use girls as subject during the Victorian era of pictorialism.
Opening up the issue of “theatricality and the masquerade of femininity directed by the photographer”, Marsh in turn draws upon Lindsey Smith who quotes Helmut Gernshiem as proof of a patriarchal writing of femininity:
Mrs Cameron was urged on by great ambition, and her work is the expression of an ardent temperament. Lewis Carroll had no ambition; his art springs from delight in the beautiful; he is feminine and light-hearted in his approach to photography, whereas she is masculine and intellectual. (Marsh, p.137)
The word “Tomboy” originated in England in the 1500s. A derivative of ‘Hoyden’, it meant “a rude, boisterous or forward boy” (Oxford English Dictionary p.211). In the 1570s the term shifted from characterising rambunctious, spunky, young men to like-minded individuals of the opposite gender.
Morphing again in the 1590s and unlike the innocent playful connotations the term possessed when it referred to an actual boy, a tomboy now began to signify a “bold and immodest woman” (211). The term ‘tomboy’ continued to shift its essential meaning. In the 1600s, ‘tom’ was common slang for both prostitute and servile black person; ‘tomcat’ was a sexual predator; a ‘tomfool’ a clown. The word transformed again to its current definition: “a girl who behaves like spirited (or boisterous) boy; a wild romping girl; a hoyden” (OED p.212).
The topic of the tomboy is an area I am keen to navigate. There is a rich and largely ignored history here that seeks representation. If the notion of gender defiance is lurking in the shadows, I want to shine a torch, shout ‘boo’ and see what emerges.
Who was I now – man or woman? That question could never be answered as long as those were the only choices… (Feinberg, p.222)
Can ‘construction’ … be reduced to a form of choice… that one ‘becomes’ a woman, but always under a cultural compulsion to become one?
(Butler, p.11)
In 1946 Simone de Beaviour asserted: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” (de Beauviour, p.21). This leads to further questioning: What is a woman? How does one know if one has become a woman? After being born, does one’s biological and chromosomal arrangement (Butler) hold sway on whether becoming a woman is a viable option?
Is there an option?
In philosophical tradition that begins with Plato and continues through Descartes, Husserl and Sartre, the ontological distinction between soul (consciousness, mind) and body invariably supports relations of political and psychic subordination and hierarchy… The cultural associations of mind with masculinity and body with femininity are well documented within the field of philosophy and feminism. (Butler, p.17)
In the cradle of Western civilisation, gender politics took root. In Greek myth of Troy, if we know the story at all, we think of battles and Achilles and big strong male warriors. If we try to recall any women, it is Helen – considered to be the epitome of the ‘fair maiden’ – any other women are rendered invisible in his-story.
Consider Helen’s sister, Cassandra, “an illustration of women’s so-called treachery”(Gitzen, p126). An alternative view by historian Christa Wolf rewrites Cassandra not as the ranting half-mad woman of literary tradition but rather an individual who changes and grows and finds new alternatives for living, as the world around her disintegrates.
When she prophesies the downfall of Troy, Cassandra’s insights are dismissed as irrational, emotional and fragile: she is derided by the patriarchy as a ‘hysterical woman’; thrown in gaol, her prophecy ignored - to the peril of the kingdom and the abduction of her sister, Helen.
In the last three centuries of western culture, a hefty amount of critical theory has been written on the subject of ‘woman’. The notable psychoanalytical theories on sexuality and gender difference developed by Sigmund Freud, as well as post-Freudian theorists (most notably Jacques Lacan) created an “arena for discussion in response to the internal needs of feminist debate”(Rose, p.92).
Affinity with psychoanalysis for feminists in accordance to Jacqueline Rose “lies in the acknowledgment of resistance to identity at the very heart of psychic life”(Rose, p.91). For Rose, psychoanalysis becomes one of the few places in our culture where it is recognised as more than a fact that “most women do not painlessly slip into their roles as woman, if indeed they do at all” (ibid).
Male drag, female impersonators and drag kings suggest that gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as ‘the real’. Judith Butler asks: Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatise the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established?
This ambiguity underpins Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, who shifts between genders:
She remembered how, as a young man, she had
insisted that woman must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled.
“Now I shall have to pay in my own person
for those desires,” she reflected, “for women are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature. They can only attain these graces, without which they may enjoy none of the delights of life, by the most tedious discipline”(Woolf, p.89).
Woolf’s Orlando explores the constructs of gender, creating an androgynous world in which “the best qualities associated with woman and with man exist, integrating strength with humility, independence with empathy, rationality with intuition, and thought with emotion” (Pearson p.153).
For post-structural feminist artists in the mid-late 1970’s, the prevailing subject of sexuality and gender was increasingly perceived as constructions largely produced through signs of representation. Their work, largely informed by Lacan, examined the construction of difference in visual representation and deployed the use of performance and installation art as political expressions.
Barbara Kruger used text: cut, pasted and juxtaposed over documentary-style photographs with block colours. Her poster-pictures resonated with the history of propaganda. Linguistic ‘shifters’, consisting of the personal pronouns: ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘we’ and ‘you’, are used by Kruger to ask what it is we are being told by advertising and whether or not we are paying attention:
Instead of being invested with the coercive authority of advertising, they [pronouns] begin to reveal ways in which the place of the viewer in language is indefinable, refusing alignment with gender. Rather than ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ positions, there emerges interplay between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ relations (Phelan, p.123).
For artist, filmmaker and writer Laura Mulvey, the language of semiotics holds significant interest. In her 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey explored the messaging of cinematic imagery and narrative. By coining the concept of the heterosexual male gaze, she speculated whether western society was largely constructed of codes and signifiers bound by a patriarchal symbolic order:
Woman [then] stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.
If feminist critical theory and psychoanalytical discourse have deconstructed constructed notions of femininity written from the constructed masculinist point of view, shouldn’t constructs of masculinity ought to come under scrutiny? Without one, there is no other; without either, there is neither; thus gender and sexuality would cease to exist. If this were the case, so-called gender defiance would dissipate and we would simply have oneness: personhood.
Simplified by the language of dualities, sex and gender have historically been coded, coupled, contained and compartmentalised into binary structures of female-male, girl-boy, woman-man and masculine-feminine. These coded couplings present a black and white theoretical framework for debate where “compulsory heterosexuality” (Foucault, p85) only served to push societal expectations of conformity onto designated gender norms and sexual identity.
‘Identity’ is assured through stabilising concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality; the very notion of ‘the person’ is called into question by the cultural emergence of those ‘incoherent’ or ‘discontinuous’ gendered beings who appear to be persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined( Butler, p23).
Fluidity of gender and sexual identity informs the conceptual framework for Del LaGrace Volcano, whose photographic narratives explore the “morphing of female sexual identity through performances created for the camera” (Marsh p 210). By referencing historical representations of the woman as subject to the male gaze, his photographs “punctuate optical histories of the female subject” (ibid).
Describing himself as a ‘gender terrorist’, Volcano claims to “subvert, destabilise and challenge the binary gender system.” This “masquerade for the camera” (Marsh, p211) displays masculinity within the biology of woman thus gender–blending the female not so much into the male, but rather to an ‘other’, introducing a third trans-gendered person.
This ‘other’ has informed my work. I began by looking at myself in context to historical representations of ‘woman’: idealised, objectified and some may say “posited as something that the male experiences, a possession, object or phenomenon delivered up to him” (Nunn, p.142)
The dichotomy of the woman as wife – mother, domestic goddess - adulteress, object – prostitute, opened up an investigation of gender constructs in western culture that could be seen as designs to define ‘identity’ into binary structures of feminine and masculine.
Initially using myself as the subject in my photographs as a way of both representing ‘woman’ and of ‘self’, I began to explore how I look at myself, how I think others look at me, and how I could be viewed.
As a girl, I was a tomboy. Interestingly, it seems that what’s tolerated in girls becomes taboo in adolescence. The crossing over into pubescence is riddled with the politics (and ambiguities) of gender.
In my research, I have found virtually no representation of the tomboy in the history of visual arts. There are plenty of images of girls, notably the imagery of Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret-Cameron.
In childhood and in puberty, girls and young women are usually portrayed as highly feminised and/or sexualised. But just try to find visual representations that focus on the tomboy?
Drawing on Marsh whose comparison of Cameron and Carroll, one male and one female, both photographers who use girls as subject during the Victorian era of pictorialism.
Opening up the issue of “theatricality and the masquerade of femininity directed by the photographer”, Marsh in turn draws upon Lindsey Smith who quotes Helmut Gernshiem as proof of a patriarchal writing of femininity:
Mrs Cameron was urged on by great ambition, and her work is the expression of an ardent temperament. Lewis Carroll had no ambition; his art springs from delight in the beautiful; he is feminine and light-hearted in his approach to photography, whereas she is masculine and intellectual. (Marsh, p.137)
The word “Tomboy” originated in England in the 1500s. A derivative of ‘Hoyden’, it meant “a rude, boisterous or forward boy” (Oxford English Dictionary p.211). In the 1570s the term shifted from characterising rambunctious, spunky, young men to like-minded individuals of the opposite gender.
Morphing again in the 1590s and unlike the innocent playful connotations the term possessed when it referred to an actual boy, a tomboy now began to signify a “bold and immodest woman” (211). The term ‘tomboy’ continued to shift its essential meaning. In the 1600s, ‘tom’ was common slang for both prostitute and servile black person; ‘tomcat’ was a sexual predator; a ‘tomfool’ a clown. The word transformed again to its current definition: “a girl who behaves like spirited (or boisterous) boy; a wild romping girl; a hoyden” (OED p.212).
The topic of the tomboy is an area I am keen to navigate. There is a rich and largely ignored history here that seeks representation. If the notion of gender defiance is lurking in the shadows, I want to shine a torch, shout ‘boo’ and see what emerges.
Who was I now – man or woman? That question could never be answered as long as those were the only choices… (Feinberg, p.222)
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Unleashing Billy
I watched Billy Elliot last night and something unleashed within me. I started to cry and could not stop. Fully bubbling my face wet and contorted, i watched as Billy let his internal world of anger and confusion metamorphosis into a silent, screaming, running, kicking, jumping, punching flurry of dance.
I identify with Billy.
My response revealed to me that some very deep and damaging conflicts still persist below the level of my consciousness. It's mysterious and constant.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Friday, August 14, 2009
fridays gratitude list
thank you for another day
thank you nose, the memories you capture
thank you morning-mist, your atmosphere
thank you space, i can move through
thank you light, you draw me from my head
thank you light, for rousing me
thank you light, you take me out
thank you body, for keeping up
thank you feet, for peddling through the wind
thank you wind, you urge me forth
thank you hands, for holding on
thank you hands, for letting go
thank you self-will, you concede
thank you knees, upon which I surrender
thank you blood, for warmth and feeling
thank you Neve, symbol of hope
thank you lunges, your bellows i breathe
thank you gravity, i am grounded today
thank you nose, the memories you capture
thank you morning-mist, your atmosphere
thank you space, i can move through
thank you light, you draw me from my head
thank you light, for rousing me
thank you light, you take me out
thank you body, for keeping up
thank you feet, for peddling through the wind
thank you wind, you urge me forth
thank you hands, for holding on
thank you hands, for letting go
thank you self-will, you concede
thank you knees, upon which I surrender
thank you blood, for warmth and feeling
thank you Neve, symbol of hope
thank you lunges, your bellows i breathe
thank you gravity, i am grounded today
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Aquitting My Proposal
The Work
I made four prints from four photographs I shot of four tomboys.
22 x 15.5 inch in size - unframed and pinned to a white wall
two up, two down to construct a square .
The Methodology
I investigated what it means to be a girl by reading text of theorists who wrote/write about gender; the likes of Bulter, Rose, Mulvey and de Beauvoir.
I looked at visual artist who explore themes of identity, gender and the sexed body; Collier Schorr, Roni Horn, Warhol, Sherman, Claude Cahun, Catherine Opie, to name but a few.
I studied two of my favourite fictitious tomboys; legendary Scout from Harper Lee's
classic tale, To Kill A Mockingbird and mostly forgotten, shunned and ignored, Anybodys from West Side Story.
I asked myself, my friends and sometimes strangers, 'what does it mean, do you think, to be a girl?'
The next step was to find some girls who thought of themselves as tomboys. Originally i was looking for 8-10 tomboys, but his proved be a little difficult in the time frame i was working within.
I started by making a really basic poster, more as a curiosity to see if anyone actually would respond. I pasted it up onto lampposts and railing outside and nearby
primary schools. I skulk around in the school grounds photographing the playground
and sometimes i ventured into the schools and just walked around. This felt a little
weird and i was never stopped or questioned about what i was doing, which i found interesting to say the least.
I spoke to one school administrator, told her about my project and that i was looking for tomboys to photograph.
She suggested that i speak to the school principle and gave me the card; suppose i don't look as weird as i can feel at times.
The Preliminary Works
One Tuesday I received a telephone call from a guy called Andy who told me that his 11 year old daughter had returned home from school, handed him a tattered A4 piece of paper and proclaimed: 'this is me, can you call? I want to do it.'
Dharma had torn down one my paste-ups and brought it home. This was great, and not just that it's a great story, but because this girl had identified herself as a Tomboy.
The methodology changed from my proposal after preliminary shoots. I had proposed 8-10 portraits, head on, neutral backdrop, outdoors, uniformed aesthetically using a square format. I digressed from this to the inclusion of props, types of clothing, environment and animals. Semiotics which characterised the tomboy. I began to look at encompassing a feeling of what it is to be a tomboy, such as attitude, playfulness, strength, independence, courage, the gaze, the contained gentleness.
Unrealistic aspects to my proposal lay in the sourcing of subjects within the timeline. Working with children has it's challenges in that I am essentially working with the mum or/and the dad and on occasion their siblings. Trying to agree on suitable times to shoot was also an issue, and particularly because these people where essentially strangers to begin with. I still feel amazed at their giving me so much of their time.
Most of my frustration came from the fact that i was shooting on a new camera and therefore unfamiliar to me eg: i didn't know how to work it properly. Not a good state for a photographer to be in. This meant i could not be as spontaneous as i like to be. I took loads of shots, and off course more than often, the stand out ones, the ones I wanted, where out of focus or under/over exposed. In the end i had to work with this, which is not ideal since it wasn't my intent.
The solution to this issue is pretty simple: master my tools!
Did I Achieve My Goals?
Yes and no.
Conceptually yes, because through my photographs an embodiment has ensued of the tomboy. This was my intention.
Technically no, because I want more clarity in the photographs and the blur was not my intent. To know what i am looking for is one thing, but to orchestrate it is quite another. In working with children i have learned they are comfortable and at ease straight away and this is the window of opportunity. On the second shoot they usually became bored and wooden as a result. So, the lesson for me here is: be prepared!
I made four prints from four photographs I shot of four tomboys.
22 x 15.5 inch in size - unframed and pinned to a white wall
two up, two down to construct a square .
The Methodology
I investigated what it means to be a girl by reading text of theorists who wrote/write about gender; the likes of Bulter, Rose, Mulvey and de Beauvoir.
I looked at visual artist who explore themes of identity, gender and the sexed body; Collier Schorr, Roni Horn, Warhol, Sherman, Claude Cahun, Catherine Opie, to name but a few.
I studied two of my favourite fictitious tomboys; legendary Scout from Harper Lee's
classic tale, To Kill A Mockingbird and mostly forgotten, shunned and ignored, Anybodys from West Side Story.
I asked myself, my friends and sometimes strangers, 'what does it mean, do you think, to be a girl?'
The next step was to find some girls who thought of themselves as tomboys. Originally i was looking for 8-10 tomboys, but his proved be a little difficult in the time frame i was working within.
I started by making a really basic poster, more as a curiosity to see if anyone actually would respond. I pasted it up onto lampposts and railing outside and nearby
primary schools. I skulk around in the school grounds photographing the playground
and sometimes i ventured into the schools and just walked around. This felt a little
weird and i was never stopped or questioned about what i was doing, which i found interesting to say the least.
I spoke to one school administrator, told her about my project and that i was looking for tomboys to photograph.
She suggested that i speak to the school principle and gave me the card; suppose i don't look as weird as i can feel at times.
The Preliminary Works
One Tuesday I received a telephone call from a guy called Andy who told me that his 11 year old daughter had returned home from school, handed him a tattered A4 piece of paper and proclaimed: 'this is me, can you call? I want to do it.'
Dharma had torn down one my paste-ups and brought it home. This was great, and not just that it's a great story, but because this girl had identified herself as a Tomboy.
The methodology changed from my proposal after preliminary shoots. I had proposed 8-10 portraits, head on, neutral backdrop, outdoors, uniformed aesthetically using a square format. I digressed from this to the inclusion of props, types of clothing, environment and animals. Semiotics which characterised the tomboy. I began to look at encompassing a feeling of what it is to be a tomboy, such as attitude, playfulness, strength, independence, courage, the gaze, the contained gentleness.
Unrealistic aspects to my proposal lay in the sourcing of subjects within the timeline. Working with children has it's challenges in that I am essentially working with the mum or/and the dad and on occasion their siblings. Trying to agree on suitable times to shoot was also an issue, and particularly because these people where essentially strangers to begin with. I still feel amazed at their giving me so much of their time.
Most of my frustration came from the fact that i was shooting on a new camera and therefore unfamiliar to me eg: i didn't know how to work it properly. Not a good state for a photographer to be in. This meant i could not be as spontaneous as i like to be. I took loads of shots, and off course more than often, the stand out ones, the ones I wanted, where out of focus or under/over exposed. In the end i had to work with this, which is not ideal since it wasn't my intent.
The solution to this issue is pretty simple: master my tools!
Did I Achieve My Goals?
Yes and no.
Conceptually yes, because through my photographs an embodiment has ensued of the tomboy. This was my intention.
Technically no, because I want more clarity in the photographs and the blur was not my intent. To know what i am looking for is one thing, but to orchestrate it is quite another. In working with children i have learned they are comfortable and at ease straight away and this is the window of opportunity. On the second shoot they usually became bored and wooden as a result. So, the lesson for me here is: be prepared!
Friday, July 24, 2009
Opening Night featuring: The Incubator - Plus Review form Arts Hub
REVIEW FROM ARTS HUB:By Matthew Bolden ArtsHub | Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Lesley Turnbull's - Teratoma Lesley Turnbull's - Teratoma
Through Lesley's installation we are drawn into a world inside the body, inside the pain and triumph of human experience.
As we enter the gallery one needs to squeeze through strips of black plastic, which just as the artist intended, feels like one is entering through skin into darkness of our insides. And encased in small bottles inside a clear cabinet are X-Ray snapshots of the malign growth within.
The downstairs installation is clinical yet personal at the same time, an intimate view shown through the impersonal medium of a radiographer's still.
Upstairs we are treated to Leslie's journey in a film, with voice and visuals providing a scrapbook of intense pain and the prolonged feeling of hospitalisation. We are guided through a woman's intimate odyssey, sparing us nothing, showing only truth. I had to watch the video twice and found the other observers around me equally entranced. The honesty of this piece is unrelenting but that is what is so wonderful about it. In a world where we are drowned in artifice, raw authenticity like this is a rare pleasure. I thoroughly recommend to all that they see this show.
Lesley Turnbull's - Teratoma
Incubator and Teratoma Mixed Media and Video Installation by Lesley Turnbull
10th of July to 7th of August at Off the Kerb 66B
Thurs-Fri 12.30 to 6pm
Sat-Sun 12 _ 5pm
Incubator Front Gallery
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
It's all in the process
i shot these medical vials
using out of date Polaroid film,
a process of which I feel
preserves the authenticity
of that which lurks within
bloody ages
well, it's been bloody ages
(hasn't it?)-since i added
anything new to my blog.
Might be something to do with my
consistently moving things around
my studio with the intention
of creating a space that will
somehow allow gold to flow from my
finger tips out onto the keys of my laptop...
that and facebook-the killer of
all things, full-stop
I suppose i have been working on my show,
and now that work is over,
though the show continues
and indeed the show must go on!
So now, let the gestation commence
and the the work flow!!!
aaaarrrrgggghhhhhhhhhhhh.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Friday, July 10, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Throw Like a Girl-a Tomboy Project
BIG MASSIVE THANK YOU TO - Mieke, Dharma, Harry, Shiraz and their families; you are all amazing!!!
Enjoy The Ride or Get Of The Bus Hen
Bloomin heck!
What a drama i like to make of everything;
yes indeedy-do!
Here I am, in a position to show work that
I am proud of, work that speaks of an experience
some may share - personally or vicariously, and
here I am moaning about how scared I am!
Well Ms Lesley Annne Turn-the-bloomin-bull
wake up and smell the glorious gum trees then
count your fucking blessings that most
of your problems today are nothing less that quality!!
(Ooo I scare myself when i talk in third person)
What a drama i like to make of everything;
yes indeedy-do!
Here I am, in a position to show work that
I am proud of, work that speaks of an experience
some may share - personally or vicariously, and
here I am moaning about how scared I am!
Well Ms Lesley Annne Turn-the-bloomin-bull
wake up and smell the glorious gum trees then
count your fucking blessings that most
of your problems today are nothing less that quality!!
(Ooo I scare myself when i talk in third person)
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
the incubator - coming soon
In Two weeks I will have my first solo show
and i cant help wishing that it was all over.
i know this is the wrong way to be thinking
about it all, but, right or wrong, its just
the way it is!
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Saturday, June 13, 2009
This Is a Photograph of Me
by Margaret Atwood
It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;
then, as you scan it,
you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.
In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.
(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned).
I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.
It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion
but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)
It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;
then, as you scan it,
you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.
In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.
(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned).
I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.
It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion
but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)
Friday, June 12, 2009
unravelling
11.06.09 6:59
..I am so glad
that
you did that
with me today.
Really.
Even just for
your history,
that is always
in the making.
Love
to you
eddy
L>E
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Today's Gratitude List
8.03am Sunday
Thank you dear life for another day
Thank you Autumn, your fog that hovers
Thank you morning, your streaming light
Thank you cold, your under bite exhilarates
Thank you bike, with you I glide
Thank you gravity, you keep me grounded
Thank you dreams, without you I'm a goner
Thank you faith, why I stay
Thank you time, for bamboozlement
Thank you stone, your smell a constant reminder
Thank you camera, chamber of beauty
Thank you vision, you keep me moving
Thank you everything i cannot see.
Thank you dear life for another day
Thank you Autumn, your fog that hovers
Thank you morning, your streaming light
Thank you cold, your under bite exhilarates
Thank you bike, with you I glide
Thank you gravity, you keep me grounded
Thank you dreams, without you I'm a goner
Thank you faith, why I stay
Thank you time, for bamboozlement
Thank you stone, your smell a constant reminder
Thank you camera, chamber of beauty
Thank you vision, you keep me moving
Thank you everything i cannot see.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Not having Kittens
L came out after I did.
Well, I'm the oldest, so it goes without saying really.
L came out after I did.
Thing is though, L was a girl as a girl, and I was a tomboy as a girl. So years later, when Mum commented on how 'unnatural' it was for two teenage girls (M and me), to be lying in bed together at eleven in the morning, she already knew the word 'unnatural' was merely a palatable replacement for the word lesbian.
I left home shortly after that, to escape the increasingly heavy iron fist of my dad, and to pursue my lust for all things lesbian. A wee while after I left home, my sister was given an ultimatum by my Dad on his discovery of a sports bag containing dildos, strap-ons and several thumbed explicit queer magazines found not-so-firmly stashed in L's closet. The ultimatum was this;
'IF YOU WANT TO LIVE UNDER MY ROOF,
YOU WILL ABIDE BY MY RULES.'
With that, L left.
She was fifteen.
Turned out the stuff didn't even belong to L, she was merely minding it for a friend, who was not a lesbian, but a homosexual. Which is by-the-by and neither here nor there. Still, the exposure was glaring, and she had now entered the fold.
A self confessed lezzo.
Several'same sex' relationships, houses, dogs, cats, kittens, cars, biscuits and cups o tea later, L jumped the fence for a Mister MacDonald from Oz. Oz came to Scotland. L got knocked-up, then hitched-up. Her baby due to arrive on June 27th.
I wish you well my lovely L
and can hardly believe what is happening,
but believe it never-the-less.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Throw Like A Girl-tomboy take 2
Does becoming a woman retain the belief in a ‘mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is restricted by it?’ (J.Butler 1990).
What does it mean to be a woman?
It seems to me, to be inexplicable, when I ask myself the question: What does it mean to be a woman?
And if in accordance to Simone de‘Beauvior;
‘one is not born a woman, but rather, becomes one’
How, does one become one?
What does it mean to be a woman?
What is a woman?
Is there a fixed template on becoming one?
Does becoming a woman differentiate geographically?
Is it culturally constructed?
What does it mean to be a woman?
How do we read, woman?
What are the signs,codes?
Are there signs, codes?
How does one recognise, whether one has become one; or not?
What does it mean to be a woman?
Does one need to have a point of departure, for example; after being born a person, does ones biological and chromosomal arrangement hold sway on whether becoming a woman is a viable option?
Is there an option?
If so, is it viable?
What does it mean to be a woman?
Is woman a construct to fit with a dumbing down phenomena of ‘keeping it simple;' where notions of duality and rigidity exist designed to teach us, for instance; good-bad, right-wrong, right-left, positive-negative, black-white, fat-thin, in-out, up-down, girl-boy, woman-man, feminine-masculine....?
etcetera-etcetera-etcetera!!??
What does it mean to be a woman?
One could argue a point of departure for becoming a woman, is to grow up as a girl.
What does it mean to grow up as a girl?
What does it mean to be a girl?
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
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