BIGGIRL
The failure or success of any painting, any work of art, any endeavour for that matter, depends on the context in which it is placed. That being said, we might conclude that success or failure, like meaning, are human inventions, the purpose of which are to keep us from experiencing the deathly discomfort and anxiety of uncertainty. Somehow certainty and absolutism keep us solidly linked to the illusion of immortality and thus safety and stasis. Exile from that illusion (indefinite circumstances, transition, loss of status, financial security, love, health), i.e. being forced to live in the gaps between familiar cultural constructions of "O.K.ness", can have much the same result as protracted solitude (successful aloneness). That is, it brings us closer to the reality of out limited and insecure existence and to the "dirty, sublime, sacred realness" of our Self. The process of searching and re-searching this experience is documented in the "visual" art of the BIGGIRL exhibition. This work is born of that space, as fish are born of water (or perhaps in the space where a fish is born out of water). It could not have been created in any other context but that place of the confusion of loss of familiar ground beneath our feet, bodies beneath our lips, people under our thumbs. Under these circumstances, I believe, one has no choice but to become — a BIGGIRL."
While this work relies heavily on the tenets of modernist "Bigboy" painting (e.g. the painting as object and essence of sublime communication, materials such as house paint; expressive, gestural, textual and intensely physical processes; scale, i.e. BIGNESS; and the notion of the non-objective image as language), it does so at great risk of being misunderstood. That is to say it flies in the face of post-modern feminist propaganda that denies the validity, strength and appropriateness of this medium as one that women do and can own and engage in as a gift to each other and to global culture in general. The work in BIGGIRL is an expression of permission without conditions to reinstate and reinvent ourselves within this expressive form, to embrace the sensual, joyful and ecstatic quality of the medium (and thus of ourselves), and to affect/effect our cultural environs through the process of discovering more complete definition of the possible feminine wholeness within human identity and language.
Beyond all notions of right and wrong, art and not-art, male and female, BIGGIRL defies concepts of dualistic thinking, polarities, and "difference" as a model for production and growth by celebrating the gifts of stereotypically "male" creativity and accepting ownership of those gifts for herself. She does this not by reinventing Bigboy painting, but by simply revealing, uncovering what was always there.
"Women's abstract painting can be seen as one site in which questions about feminism and representation are being re-addressed... and to insist that such painting is simply an individual enterprise carried out in the studio paradoxically ignores questions of the critical and discursive contexts which are crucial to anybody's art practice..."
Much of the writing, thinking and looking work that occurred before, during and after the completion of these paintings has involved a focus on, and an attempt to, understand more fully the notion of the authentic image, automatism in written and graphic symbolic expression, and the instinctual need to communicate our feeling of connectedness to one another that is inexpressible in words. As a process the creation of this work is illustrative of an attempt to bypass at least in part, mechanisms of conscious thought to access a reality metaphorically beneath that surface — the place beyond form. Like the early hieroglyphics of children's drawing, each painting functions as a wordless storytelling object, as a document of the human desire to leave a mark or "to tell" from a true place, and finally as a palimpsest woven of symbolic language, energy, memory and voice. Like history itself the nature of BIGGIRL cannot be contained but encompasses the aesthetic, the anthropological, the archaeological and the archetypal, reaching out in all directions for an understanding of what it means to be.
— Caroline James
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