Profane baroque and a woman's experience : an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the postgraduate degree of Master of Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
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2024
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Massey University
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“Profane Baroque and a Woman’s Experience” is a practice-based MFA research project that reflects my experience as a woman navigating a veneer of liberation. This exegesis address es enduring gender inequities of women and references early professional experiences as a burgeoning artist. From this formative experience, issues of authorship and hierarchy of voices are foregrounded as subject matter in my canvases. As part of my feminist practice, I fold in auto theory as work emerges from my body as an embodied but highly fractured feminine corporal self. I developed my own feminist identity and voice aided by subjectivities from feminist contemporary painters such as Jenny Saville and Jacqueline Fahey. To subvert value hierarchies, I explore contrasting high and low art by desecrating sacred materials with profane subjects and, as such, critically engage with a legacy of ‘feminine aesthetics’ in art, in which women and feminine bodies are positioned as objects for consumption rather than active subjects. Sacred and profane themes are innate in seventeenth-century Baroque, and I draw further on the movements’ inherencies by placing my dynamic body as the heroine at the centre of the action as it wrestles amongst excessively liberated drapery and contemporary single-use profane objects. I employ varied invented, contemporary and ancient painting techniques, methods and materials to reclaim my identity through materials. These painterly explorations incorporate feminist theories about how bodies and identities are shaped by social forces by Elizabeth Grosz and Simone de Beauvoir and the marginalisation of women in contemporary New Zealand work organisations by Nilima Chowdhury. They also include ideas about waste from prevalent consumer ism by Ian Sinclair and Walter Benjamin’s writings on Baroque and his concept of history.
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