Francesca Woodman - the later years

 

This post is part of three and is best viewed in conjunction with the other two which are here and here .

 

 

The later years, New Hampshire and New York

 



 

Untitled, 1980

Untitled, 1980

Woodman spent three weeks as resident at the MacDowell Colony in Petersburg, New Hampshire. She appeared to feel somewhat out of her comfort zone in a rural environment. In a letter to her friend Betsy, written on the back of a study of birch trees, she wrote: 'Nature? What am I supposed to do with nature?' and talked about her eagerness to return to working indoors. Much of her work in this three-week period wrestles with this question.

In this work she undercut any easy treatment of nature, clumsily taping plants to her or her model's arms. In one series she photographed stands of birch trees that grew on the property. In several of these pictures, she has wrapped or bandaged her wrists and forearms in long curls of shed bark. The strips curling around her wrists recall the peeling wallpaper of earlier Providence pictures in which her body appears engulfed, even devoured by its environment - like Daphne caught in a perpetual state of transition into a laurel tree, Woodman once again adeptly straddles the material and the evanescent.

Untitled, 1980

Untitled, 1979

Untitled, 1979


Is Woodman's work simply a feminist inquiry into the overlapping arenas of female subjecthood and objecthood?

Untitled, 1979-80

Untitled, 1979-80

It Must be Time for Lunch Now, 1979

Untitled, 1979-80

Untitled, 1979-80

Untitled, 1979-80

Untitled, 1979-80

Untitled, 1979-80

Untitled, 1979-80

Untitled, 1979-80

Some Disordered Interior Geometries, 1980-81

Some Disordered Interior Geometries, 1980-81

Untitled, 1979-80

Untitled, 1979-80.


'But latelly I find a sliver of mirror is simply to slice an eyelid'.

John Eaves

 

John Eaves at the White Room Gallery in Leamington Spa.

 

John Eaves is a West Country artist. His early works depicted still life and landscape: he travelled extensively studying coastlines, rock formations and vistas all over Europe and as far as Mexico. Over time his work became increasingly abstract, focusing on the interaction between colour and form. Talking about his more recent work he states:

 

'I now make images that run parallel to nature rather than rely on direct observations or reminiscences. Echoes and sonorities of landscape will inevitably persist'.

  

 

Open Season, 2006, oil

Orange Gift Wrap, 2005, oil

Way Out West, 2005, oil

Rough White, 2005, oil

Criss Cross, 2011, oil

Four Waves, 2012, oil

Rain, 1997, water colour collage

Playtime, 2012, water colour collage

Pink Decay, Venice, collage

Magenta Music, 2012, water colour collage

If music be...., 2012, water colour collage

Marloes detail, water colour collage

Tilt, 2012, water colour collage.

Francesca Woodman - the middle years

This post on Francesca Woodman's art is a continuation of  a previous one and is best viewed in conjunction with the one before.


Italy, 1977-78

Following two years of regular coursework at University, Woodman elected to spend her junior year in Rome as part of the programme offered by the University to juniors who were selected for their academic excellence, to spend the year working largely independently under minimal supervision. It was a transformative period for Woodman: she met a group of Italian artists and was the sole photographer and only American to be included in an exhibition of five young artists at the Ugo Ferranti Gallery. It was during this time that Woodman encountered for the first time surrealist texts whose ideas had indirectly influenced her work, but to which she now had direct and powerful exposure.

Untitled

Woodman's use of nudity is more complex than it might at first seem, oscillating between a position of sexuality and one of innocence, from fleshy embodiedness and transcendent otherworldliness.

Untitled

From Fish Calendar - 6 Days

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

The exploration of photographic temporality, the body's relationship to space and architecture are themes that keep recurring in her work.

The motion-blurred pictures she describes as 'ghost pictures' evoke the spirit photographs made in the 19th and early 20th centuries to provide photographic proof of life after death. In order to achieve this she had to invent an iconography of the invisible: how does one depict something, a body, that cannot be seen? It is a challenge made all the more acute by her use of photography, a representational medium which is rooted in the real world.

Untitled





Untitled from Angels Series

Untitled, from Angels Series

Angels

As for her famous 'blur', Krauss defines this as the 'transgression of boundaries' of both mediums and styles.

Untitled

Untitled





Self-Deceit

Self-Deceit, no. 3

Self-Deceit, no. 4

Self-deceit, no. 5

Woodman worked serially on particular formal photographic problems such as 'space', or 'depth of field'. This modernist approach understands photography to comprise a set of formal qualities that are specific to the medium.  She repeatedly returned to a theme over and over again, each time from a new angle.

Self-deceit, no. 6

Self-Deceit, no. 7

Untitled, from Eel Series

 

Several Cloudy Days

 

Untitled

 

 

Art historian George Baker calls her a 'photographer's photographer'.

 

'What might make Woodman's work unique, a complete transformation of the context out of which she emerges, is that her reading of Minimalism's engagement with space flips it into an excessive, desperate mode rather than a euphoria of bodily experience. That one can know oneself, that one is constituted in a constant, mobile transformation of one's own sensory experience of space and interaction with objects: this is the utopian project of phenomenology and Minimalism ... For Woodman to transform that project to a photographic as opposed to sculptural model is a major step'.