Francesca Woodman was an American photographer who created black and white images often using herself or other young, female models as the subjects.  During her life time her art was not well-known and it was only after her death (she committed suicide at 22) that her work received attention.  She is considered to be a progressive feminine voice in photography and her work explores themes of isolation and self-displacement. Woodman explained to her parents (who were also artists) that she used herself as a model as a matter of “convenience” because she was always available and knew exactly the effect she wanted to produce with an image. The main subject of her work was broadly an exploration of her own body in relation to space.  Her photographs test the boundaries of the body but she rarely revealed her whole body with her face often blurred or masked and parts of her body are hidden behind elements of the environment. This creates an interesting relationship between observation, self-display and mystery. Some critics have interpreted this as an attempt to resist the male gaze with the tendency to camouflage herself. In some images Woodman also most becomes one with her surroundings by blending into the wallpaper or floor so that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the two. By fragmenting her body in this way, hiding behind furniture or using reflective surfaces such as mirrors to conceal herself she dissects the human figure and emphasises isolated body parts. This creates the idea that she is simultaneously there whilst also absent and relates to the idea of disappearance.

Woodman often used long exposure techniques to capture movement within her images and create surrealist compositions . The concealed figures have a mysterious, ghost-like quality . There are also no modern buildings in her work which the critic Elizabeth Gumport describes in this article as crumbling ruins “whose disintegrating forms evoke the wrecks admired by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic revivalists often cited as [some of Woodman’s] major influences”. Woodman often photographed herself nude or wearing old-fashioned clothes  such as white petticoats and is typically sited in empty dilapidated rooms containing old furniture. Her photographs look as though they belong in a much earlier time with her choice of costume meaning it is impossible to date the images and the use of old buildings and absence of modern objects create a Gothic appearance.  Woodman was apparently an avid reader of Victorian Gothic fiction such as novels by the Brontes which could be said to be reflected in her work with the idea of spectral female figures, confined to attics. The soft focus and black and white nature of her images is also similar to the style of earlier generations of photography which further emphasises the timelessness of her work. The soft greys that shade her images add to the mysterious tone and show her eye for light, shadow and form.

Critics have disagreed about the meaning and purpose of her art with some comparing her to surrealist photographers (with her use of Surrealist motifs such as mirrors, gloves, birds, and bowls) and others hail her as a feminist hero.  Her images are also very personal, lending them an autobiographical quality and therefore interpretation of her work is often based on psychoanalysis in light of her suicide. However her images are also often subtly amusing and contain playful visual jokes such as the example below with her arms covered in bark and mimicking the form of the trees. Family and friends have argued that while many think her work was about death and disappearance, Woodman’s light-heated sense of humour and energy is also apparent in her work. They say that  “Her life wasn’t a series of miseries” and she was fun to be with.

I have researched the work of  Francesca Woodman because her art has inspired many contemporary photographers within the area of performance and self-portraiture. In my own work I am also going to be considering the relationship between myself and different environments and I am going to experiment with a surrealist approach, using long-shutter speeds. I am also intrigued by Woodman’s use of props such as mirrors and this is something I am going to use, potentially within the context of old buildings.

Clare Rae is an artist based in Melbourne, Australia but she is currently visiting Jersey as part of the Archisle International artist-in-residence program. She is here to to research the  Claude Cahun archive and shoot new photography and film in Jersey.  This week I attended a talk she gave at the museum about her photography and film. She spoke about how she explores performance and representations of the female body and her connection to physical environments. Performance photography normally involves as artist staging a performance for the camera and testing the physical and psychological limits of the body.

Rae began the talk by discussing the research areas that have influenced her work such as feminist theorists like Laura Mulvey. She also mentioned her artistic influences; photographers such as Francesca Woodman, Jill Orr and Cindy Sherman. She went on to talk about her own photographic methodologies and techniques. Her work is mostly self-portraiture which involves her exploring physical environments and challenging female representations of being passive by exploring things actively/ dangerously and using awkward poses. For example in her project ‘Desire and the Other’ she analysed the idea of passiveness of the female body by lying on the floor, often with her face concealed by furniture or her hair.

She spoke about how she carefully chooses her outfits before going on shoots, for example she described how she changed from wearing tights because these are a very fetishized garments but now she often wears the same green skirt because it is easy to move in.

Her projects are often captured and displayed within the same environments and she is interested in how the camera can act as a collaborator, rather than mute witness, to the performer. She is known for her engagement with domestic and institutional spaces and she spoke about how her work is influenced by notions of private and public and how her performance is influenced by the gaze of onlookers. For example she talked about her experiences in engaging with the environment of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in particular the photography and print store rooms. She explained that she was followed by a guard and a curator and the idea of being watched had an impact on her final  outcomes.

The environments she explores are often fascinating in themselves for example she has explored the site of the Magdalen Asylum which is a place where girls and women were housed whilst working in laundries. On her website it explains that, “These rooms are laden with history, and provided a dense and loaded environment within which to make artwork. Using this history as a starting point,I attempted to activate these spaces using my body, gently testing the physical environment”. 

In the talk I attended Rae also spoke about her project ‘20+9+5′ which is a black and white series which she did whilst pregnant with her son. She explained that being pregnant is a very ‘feminine’ state and she wanted to explore the experience of her body. She said that during pregnancy women seem to lose some control over their bodies and she wasn’t prepared for the amount of people that commented on her bodily appearance on a daily basis and how people thought they had a right to touch her. Rae later returned to the same location that she took these images once her son was born and photographed them together. She explained that her use of a mirror was influenced by a previous project ‘Stages’ which was a collaborative project with Simone Hine and involved exploring the environment of the Rosina Auditorium and she was intrigued by the use of mirrors and reflections involved in this.

Rae also spoke about her work on the Claude Cahun archive and how she has been able to look at almost every image produced by her. She says that it was interesting to see how Cahun’s body changed and aged over time because she began photographing at a teenager and the oldest photograph of her was  from a year before her death. Cahun was born as Lucy Schwob and was from a wealthy Jewish family living in France. Her work was political as well as personal and focused on challenging traditional ideas associated with gender. This often involved  using costumes to experiment with different personalities from ultra feminine to masculine. She adopted the  gender-neutral forename Claude and by shaving her head she actively and outwardly rejected social constructions of gender and sexual identity. Her partner Suzanne Malherbe (who was also her step-sister and life-long collaborator in artistic projects)  adopted the pseudonym Marcel Moore. During the rise of the Nazi party the couple fled from Paris in 1938 for Jersey.  When the Nazis invaded Jersey Claude and Moore employed avant-garde art practices as a form of resistance. For example they created anti-nationalist leaflets mocking Nazi ideology and distributed them throughout Jersey in soldier’s pockets and on their chairs. They were sentenced to death for inciting the troops to rebellion and refused to sign letters asking for mercy, perhaps believing that martyrdom would be the most fitting end to their lives of resistance. However they were saved from execution anyway because of the Liberation of the Island.

Cahun’s revolutionary examinations of gender and sexuality were well ahead of her time and inspired many artists including Clare Rae. Cahun’s work has many connections to Rae’s in that is focuses on feminism, self-portraiture and performance.

Performance photography and self-portraiture is not something I have explored greatly in previous projects although I think it is an interesting concept.  The work of Rae and Cahun have strong links to the theme of ‘Environment’ because it relates to their psychological and personal environments as well as the politcal context of the time. After attending Clare Rae’s talk I feel I have developed a better understanding of the messages behind her art which is interesting to consider in relation to the work of Claude Cahun. If I was going to respond to this style of photography in some way I might be able to bring in the idea of the mirror from my previous project and explore ideas about self-portraiture and mirrors/reflections.

Environmental art as a movement includes a range of artistic practices such as historical approaches to nature as well as new politically motivated works which  explore the deeper relationships to environmental systems and social concerns.  The physical environment has always inspired art, for example it could be said that it began with Palaeolithic cave paintings which represented aspects of nature such as animals and humans interacting with them.

Environmental art is an umbrella term which encompasses many different art styles , techniques and objectives. The artists associated with it often share similar beliefs about  human interconnectedness  to the natural world-socially, economically or spiritually.  Environmental art contains a variety of sub movements including romanticism in the way that it seeks to celebrate the  beauty and greatness of nature and the people connected to it as well as  Eco-realism and Gaga art.

The growth of environmental art as a specific movement began around the late 1960’s and early on it was associated predominantly with sculpture and land art. It partly arose out of criticisms that sculpture was out of harmony with the environment. In 1968 Robert Smithson organised an exhibition in New York titled “Earthworks” which challenged conventional ideas to do with exhibitions because his artwork was too large to be collected. They were represented by photographs which emphasised the resistance to acquisition .

Earth art uses the natural landscape to create structures, forms and sculptures and it grew from ideas associated with conceptualism and minimalism. These were popular during the 1960’s when artists began to abandon traditional approaches and new ways of engaging with the world through art.  There was a change from representing nature in art to utilising it as a material which has connections to primitive artists who used the natural materials available to them. Although some artists such as Smithson used mechanical earth-moving equipment to make their artworks, other artists made minimal and temporary interventions in the landscape such as Richard Long who simply walked up and down until he had made a mark in the earth.

The system of presenting art went through radical change as the Book ‘The representation of nature in art’ explains, artists reject the “traditional workshop-museum-gallery circuit”. It goes on to say that Land artists are grouped together by their desire to “work on the spot so that they can leave their mark, in one way or other, on whatever scale, and for however long, without deciding in advance how their works are to be accessed. They use photographs, film, maps and drawings to describe their work, which usually remains inaccessible… these artists use nature, not to reveal its beauty and evoke emotions but rather to dig, mark, plot, and transform. In this way the sculptural dimension emerges”. It is explained that Land art is “more the result of different intellectual, sociological and artistic paths than an aesthetic manifesto. The only thing the paths have in common is their medium: nature.”

By using the most basic materials Earth artists aim to get as close to the essence of their work as possible. The often ephemeral nature of their work means that they accept the inevitability of their work disappearing which means the role of photography in recording it is very important. I find this connection between art, sculpture and photography interesting as well as the way that it is reflective of very primitive methods of creating art but utilises new technologies to record it.