All of Your Women and Some of Mine

Abstract

All of Your Women and Some of Mine was an installation featuring paintings, prints and furnishings which playfully but critically engaged with the representation of women in canonical Modernist painting traditions. The installation drew attention to the way “the female form”, as an abstract concept, is frequently deployed in these largely white, male, heteronormative painting practices, but at a remove from the reality of individual women’s bodies and experiences. The work examined the way women’s bodies, particularly in traditions of the nude, are what is at stake in these practices; individual women’s bodies are frequently displaced in the rhetoric of avant-gardism, where the male master translates specific female bodies into a generalised (experimental) formal play.

Each work in the show was largely appropriation based. Some paintings echoed the composition of an original canonical work but were “translated” into a decorative and ornamental language. Others utilised forms from canonical works as decorative motifs or brought the body to patterns and shapes that might otherwise be read as abstract and purely ‘formal’. The work poses a a counter-Modernist tradition of image making, one that was feminised and female: decorative, domestic, gendered, and bodily.

The work was initially shown in the form of a solo exhibition at Milani Gallery in Brisbane in 2016 which was widely attended and critically received by the general public and curatorial staff from the QAGOMA, IMA, and the QUT and UQ Art museums. It was then commissioned as a solo exhibition at the Caloundra Regional Gallery. A further iteration was then shown at the Art Gallery of South Australia as finalist in the Ramsay Art Prize.