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Part 1: September, Part 2: From Flemish Portraiture to Czech Cubism

This research, a body of paintings and objects, responds to a set of questions arising from an engagement with diverse art historical precedents. These include: Flemish portraiture, German Romanticism, Dutch seascapes and still lives, Czech Cubism and the Weiner Werkstaette. A purposefully subjective selection, within historically disparate genres and movements share characteristics of having visually acute, often descriptive formal languages; complex psychological ambitions and specific conceptual intentions.

Through appropriation, re-evaluation and an accumulated reworking of this visual material – imagery, objects and genres, Hebson explores questions relevant within her field of contemporary figurative painting:

Given the once emotive currency of dramatic iconography, how can contemporary painting re-approach an emotional seriousness?

Given the contradictions, ambiguities and specificities of portraiture, how can portraiture, expressly of women, move beyond simple objectification into a subtler terrain?

Can the re-assessment and reworking of a divergent set of historical sources and painting approaches allow new interpretations and readings of established visual languages and iconography to emerge? Can these contingent meanings be heightened and extended through installation?

The research differs from that post-modern lineage of painting that employs appropriation and pastiche as a form of historically disconnected, frequently ironic, quotation; rather it attempts to identify, understand and extend the currencies of specific iconography and languages through a self-reflexive painting process, questioning the complex continuum between historic practice and contemporary manifestation through rigorous visual enquiry.

Working directly through a variety of material processes, the research explores the perceptual nuances that result from different ways of looking/working through painting. Characterised by its consciously subjective form, the research, in ambition parallels the work of Zambreno and the distinct form of écriture feminine ‎she practices.

More broadly, through this methodology, the research seeks to approach the articulation of a feminine experience through and in relation to painting and its on-going currencies.