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Black Magic

Research project leading to the solo exhibition, Black Magic, and further developed into the work 'She Shook' as part of a group exhibition, Australia.

The solo exhibition Black Magic was the result of a research project which interrogated the problematics associated with the female artist as author/performer. Largely influenced by Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), the exhibition set out to construct an identity for the female artist which foregrounded ‘an anxiety of authorship’. This project offered a way out of this debilitating fear by employing the conceit that the artwork occurred in the performative creation of the work itself. The exhibition of works then became a museum of artefacts which directly referenced the performative nature of their creation.

Therefore, performative repetition played a major role in both the creation of the work and how the work actually looked. The many screen prints displayed referenced not only the repetitive nature of the medium, but also the performative nature of gender creation itself. Text was employed to show modes of feminine writing and recording (the diary, the confessional memoir). Imagery use (including screen prints of original drawings of inverted eyes & Alexander McQueen dress designs) emphasised the gendered nature of looking and being looked at. The materials employed (for instance black rubber, a clothes horse) referenced both a performative sexuality and domestic entrapment. Viewers of the exhibition could infer that the artist had conjured works as possible ‘escape routes’ (an open gate; a closed door) from an ad hoc magic circle. This use of a magical interpretation of creation was used to circumvent the fear of failure in authorship. Through this maximalist approach to display, the overall narrative of ‘an anxiety of authorship’ was emphasised and a possible emotional or physical breakdown of the feminine identity of the artist/author was signposted. The anxiousness that accompanies any attempt to master a feminine identity was revealed through neurotic repetition and obsessive mirroring of imagery.