With this issue we tackle identity, "the fact of being who or what a person is". But just how do you identify: with your name; family; your cohorts; friends; country; politics; how you look; your education, hobbies, colour or gender? Do you want to be associated or disassociated with others? Do you make every effort to conform or every effort to stand out, apart from the crowd? How do you see yourself, and how do others see you and do you care? How as artists can we affect change in how we identify ourselves and others? And this is how you responded …
Artist name: Svetlana Ochkovskaya
Title: Adapting To The New Reality Of Life Under Lockdown
Media: Photography of Wearable Sculpture/ Performance
Description: In Adapting To The New Reality Of Life Under Lockdown I want to make familiar things unfamiliar, to remove normal everyday life experiences, from familiar associations, to turn it over and to displace it. I would like to give an everyday domestic experience a new meaning, in order to change the way we perceive the things around us. Explore the idea of fantastic, strange and 'other' I produce my wondrous world of curiosities.
Instagram: @svetlanaochk
Artist name: Megan Thorpe
Title: 253.
Media: Acrylic ink, pencil and pen on paper.
Description: My practice is a continuous exploration of the formation, breakdown and emotions of the ‘self’. This self portrait aims to communicate the layers of identity I feel constricted and trapped by. However, the work feels organic, showing that identity is constantly changing and evolving.
Instagram: Www.Instagram.com/megthorpe.art
Artist name: THE NAKED ARTIST
Title: Gay
Media: Photography
Description: I document my life through reflection of ones self. The obstacle isn't to the viewers eye but more for myself in the fact that sometimes when I look in the mirror I struggle with the fact how masculine/androgynous I am. I have accepted myself but it took many years to overcome being gay and the way I look.
Instagram: @suziepindar
Artist name: Sharon Bradford
Title: Mother
Media: Wood, steel, cable ties. hosepipe, found and collected materials.
Description: I make sculptures from repurposed materials which suggest the nature of a body. I wanted to make a scaled-up version of a mother's legs, in an attempt to revisit, and inspire in others, first memories and discoveries as small child, but from an adult height. I am interested in why people are often reluctant to look at, scared of, or disgusted by, the internal workings of our bodies, and I aimed to present a dichotomy in terms of innocent childhood acceptance without judgement or awareness.
Instagram: george_sculpturaloperations
Artist name: Tamir David
Title: High heels
Media: Gouache on cotton
Description: A period soldier sitting next to his dog .It is a painting done as self portrait of different aspects of my identity. The past as a soldier ,the uniforms that represent all that is social construct and the stockings which are my inner and gender complexities combined.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tamirdav/
Artist name: Laurence Morgan
Title: Absolution
Media: charcoal & spray paint on paper
Description: A painstaking and detailed work. Trying to capture male tenderness and fragility. I had been exploring pointillism, trying to find a way to overcome the loss of use in my dominant hand.
I am too restrictive in all walks of life. I'm disabled and gay but that combination don't align with media expectations and they're not pretty. I struggle with a limb deformity that isn't sexy or conforming. I saw myself getting trapped by my expectations.
I rashly spray painted over the image, obscuring much of the delicate detail. I feel nervous about this piece because it isn't the control I desire but I believe it still attains beauty and a subtle intrigue I feel.
Instagram: @laurencemorganart
Artist name: Thyme James
Title: Figure No.2
Media: Screen print
Description: Beginning as a photographic performance this screen print is one from a series of three. This figure series made up an body of work looking at women's place in the art world, both historically and contemporary, where I manifested myself simultaneously in to model, muse and master (traditional male artist) as art practice, in an attempt to further the understanding of my practice and place as a contemporary female artist.
Wanting to have the half tone layer light and delicate, while also choosing to print white on black paper proved more difficult than imagined. It took numerous attempts to work out the optimum pressure and how many layers of white ink to print, as a result the final edition consists of only 5 prints.
Instagram: @coat.myself.in.paint
Artist name: Divya Sharma
Title: Misfit
Media: Video
Watch it here: https://youtu.be/OiepY1fTmnY
Description: This video is one of my many iterations of the thoughts that are going through my mind as I struggle every week to learn Tamil, my mother tongue. India's complex political history and its ambition to 'catch up' to the western world post independence meant that English continued as a primary language of education and a conduit to western thought and lifestyle. The result was that my siblings and I never ended up learning to read and write our mother tongue. When I started learning with online classes last summer during the lockdown, the tug of nostalgia I felt was a revelation. I then decided to push further with this feeling of longing to (re)connect with my heritage. My performance in the video highlights my frustration and my struggle to understand and internalise a language so familiar yet not. The layer of English in my thinking and training acts like a barrier that needs to be slowly worked through to really understand my roots and culture.
The use of red on my body is a nod to that ever present layer of 'English' thought, religion and language in my subconscious . The irony of the conversion of the ‘primitive’ native to English ways still continues to this day with the hegemony of English language in erstwhile colonies and with globalisation, more and more people have had to learn it for better job prospects at the cost of local vernacular languages. So the native continues to remain primitive by painting herself with the red cross over and over again.
Instagram: divyasharmastudio
Artist name: Katie Maria Francis
Title: Stereotype I
Media: Creative Photography
Description: Living with anxiety and PTSD can be all consuming, severely distorting self-perspective and outlook toward the world.
A focus on image and looking good all the time has created a society whereby we are almost always striving for perfection.
We should be striving for imperfection, and searching out the beauty to be found in the broken.
The stereotype series explores looking differently, and seeing differently whilst challenging reality and the 'perfect stereotype'.
Instagram: @katie_francis_art
Artist name: Huner Emin
Title: Identity
Media: Acrylic colours and mixed media on canvas
Description: The concept of my artwork is to print my poem about identity on an abstract painting inspired by Iraqi identity card in Pahlavi extinct writing style. I made this piece to showcase that Kurds have lost their Identity as a nation divided among four different countries. For example, Kurds in Syria are not allowed to have identity cards and they are discriminated based on ethnicity in Iraq, Iran, and Turkey.
Instagram: Huner Emin
Artist name: RONIS VARLAAM
Title: 'PAINTING 10'
Media: OIL ON DEEP EDGE CANVAS
Description: I am going to state something obvious but surprising: We never see our faces. in a way we can see ourselves in the faces of others, of how they react to us. Our sense of self, our identity depends on others and on mirrors. We are a mystery to ourselves because we can only know ourselves through ‘the other’.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ronisvarlaam
Artist name: Katie Lorimer
Title: WHO DO YOU WANT TO BE?
Media: Lino print
Description: WHO DO YOU WANT TO BE? is a print highlighting our cultures obsession with the perfect social media life. I thought about how we can become absorbed with the fake online world and lose part of our identities. That’s when we have to question ourselves on who do we want to be, rather than who does social media expect us to be.
Instagram: @_lorimer
Artist name: Alice white
Title: Forgiven
Media: Print
Description: Juxtaposition, representing our relationship with social conformity and the restrictions we place on our selves that impact our freedom
Instagram: Alicewhite862
Artist name: Charlotte Easingwood
Title: In Two Minds
Media: Ceramic Plate
Description: I began to make these Sgraffito plates to make sense of the new world, my work address's the difficult landscape of being a 20 something woman in the year 2020, floating within the isolation of a 30x30cm plate. "In Two Minds" is an image about dealing with yourself and accepting the contrasting aspects of a personality. After being diagnosed with PMDD last year I am learning how to reconcile with different parts of myself which can often feel like two sisters bickering for control.
Instagram: @charlotteeasingwood
Artist name: Emma Shapiro
Title: Cuerpas
Media: Collage of Self Portraits
Description: I've been thinking about how my idea of who I am hinges on who I remember myself to be, how I adapt to new circumstances and "lives" by twisting this concept of who I "am" into them. But as I move farther from this person I identify as, who is it that I am bringing into my present? While I hold on to my identity as a touchstone, I am reminded that even who I believe myself to be distorts and changed over time. To explore this idea, I used old images from my previous life as a professional art model, cutting and recombining them into contortions, impossible positions that can only exist in concept and not reality, while it is still my own body.
Instagram: @exshaps
Artist name: Elaine T. Nguyen
Title: Đẹp Quá
Media: Embroidery on Fabric
Description: Đẹp Quá, which translates in Vietnamese to "so beautiful" addresses a common cultural experience of young Asian women and their relationships to beauty through their female relatives. There is a strong emphasis to mold our features in a way that is more culturally desirable that starts from a very young age. Completing this piece required a lot of reflection on all of the things I was praised for at a very young age when I did not understand why beauty was important at all, let alone why certain features were prized.
Instagram elainetnguyen
Artist name: Yana Bachynska
Title: Self-portrait as a vulva
Media: Photos
Description: The first thing that people notice is my female sex. It bothers me because of my male gender identity. I used the method of subversive affirmation to express my ressentiment. I made different photos, but each of them is an image of the vulva. It's the same with different people of the same sex and the same with many other generalizations.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/janus_head/
Artist name: Terry Gregoraschuk
Title: "In Transition"
Media: Mixed Media on Canvas
Description: A man trapped inside a woman's body who is walking through the amniotic fluid of change while in the process of transitioning their gender identity. They hide their face in fear of being scrutinized by friends, family and the public.
Instagram: @terrygregoraschuk_art
Artist name: Fermín Díez de Ulzurrun
Title: 33430467-J
Media: Identity card
Description: 33430467-J / Identity card / 7,5 x 5.2 x 0,35 Cm. / 2003
Instagram: @fermindiezde
Artist name: Tara Power
Title: Family Portrait 2020
Media: Digital Photograph
Description: This is a collaborative photographic performance piece, where I asked each of my family members to adopt the guise of, or "become" one another. This work explores identity in terms of family roles, gender, and the cultural context of rural Ireland. Each individual was photographed separately, and edited together for the final image.
Instagram: tara.p0wer
Artist name: Alexandra Buxbaum
Title: Gender Constructs
Media: Photography
Description: Masculine and feminine are cultural constructs, who decides the proper norms that define what a gender should look and behave like, in ancient Egypt both men and women used cosmetics and wore jewellery. What one chooses to wear often perpetuates stereotypes that can cause psychological harm to that individual.
LGBT people still in many cases have to hide their authentic selves, personal relationships, and have to change their lives to avoid harassment or discrimination. The struggle for gay rights and equality continues to be a long, uphill battle to move the needle.
These photos show some of the positive gains that have been made, there are places and public events where LGBT people can now openly show their love and affection for one another, they can get married, and hold festive public parades to show the world - this is me…let’s celebrate who I am.
Instagram: @buxbaumphoto
Artist name: Leandra Brandson
Title: Balaclava
Media: Ceramic and acrylic
Description: I created this piece as an exploration into my current identity as a part of a larger body of figurative sculpture. I am currently experimenting with the concept of obscured identity as a means with which to create said identity.
In covering the individual's face, I am creating a scenario in which particular key identifying features are taken away. You cannot look in this person's eyes to see who they are, you cannot speak to them. All of who and what they are is assumed. What is put out into the world has been curated to tell you as little as possible.
I find that now more than ever we are seeing this curated version of who people are and we are prone to making assumptions about their identity long before they are actually physically in front of us. There is a large disconnect. Identity in my mind is inherently performative, and I wish to confront that with my works to create conversation surrounding not only who my audience is looking at, but also why.
Instagram: @pastasaladbrandson
Artist name: Iona MacLeod, work created in collaboration with Michael Mandarano
Title: The Ecstasy of Saint Sadie
Media: Video, 3 minutes
Description: Through concealing our identity we can give ourselves the opportunity to express ourselves. Through concealing her identity Sadie feel comfortable speaking openly about being a sex worker, and shares with us her experiences and opinions about what she does.
Link to video: https://vimeo.com/157875378
Artist name: Thyme James
Title: Bedroom View I
Media: Reduction Linocut
Description: Cut and printed during the tier 4 restrictions placed on Glasgow and the west of Scotland, this print is part of a larger body of work attempting to question and visualise the impact of online spaces on relationships (as a response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic) while also upholding her ongoing feminist critique, addressing how women are presented through art, the male gaze and self-representation. Working primarily from her own nude selfies she uses highly saturated colour fields to render form; considering digital design, namely vector imagery, and applying this to traditional mediums -bringing online and offline worlds together. An absence of face or head in conjunction with the poses used suggests the anonymity one can present on the internet and the voyeuristic nature of the interactions through the screen.
This is the first reduction linocut I have made so it was a challenge working with a new technique - making sure I cut away the correct areas and aligning each layer to ensure the registration was correct, it took a while to get my head around it but am thrilled to have learnt this new method.
Instagram: @coat.myself.in.paint
Artists name: Olivia Rowland
Title : Don't wanna glow up
Media: Animation
Description:
I explore a mimetic and fluid interplay between text and image which is not illustrative, but rather a language overall that uses a convulsing, writhing animated line.
It plays a game, narrating anxiety, identity, anecdote, and self-criticism through quasi-human, quasi-fictional parasitic creatures (or parts of them), poetry, wordplay, and spoken dialogue, some of which is linguistically recognisable; some taking the form of guttural sounds or what we consider ‘noise’. The narrator is unreliable to a linear, structured order of language, being, and recognisability; for such order facilitates hierarchy and a binary appointing of otherness.
Instagram: @oliviarowland