Ironic Iconographies

Re-working the classic – ironic iconographies of the female form

list of works available for sale 

Paintings that explore women’s experience and lived reality and parody classic rhetorics of painting. These works utilise and play with conventions of tableau and decoration, imitating and reworking classic figures from historical works that created allegories for the concreteness of human presence. They slyly condemn the way in which the female form has been associated with nature or used as a vehicle to represent male values.

Like the figures or pallid personifications in Chavanne De Puvis’s The Sacred Wood, these female figures are no longer merely allegories for virtues or for various realms of learning – which women ironically were not admitted to – these figures gesture and mock, creating alternative meanings that belie their beauty.

These paintings are compositionally premeditated, beautifully drawn and then subverted by clumsy bitumen and paint processes. There are strange additions – of domestic objects, small children dragging at skirts, playful or painful gestures and fragmented architectural features.

Many more new and updated works available.

Many works are framed by Nigel Bispham. for more information about the framing process read on… Framing Collaboration