“The human body is the best work of art.”

“To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.”

― Simone de Beauvoir

I have begun working with digital and hand rendered positives to produce silkscreen and textile designs, which can be translated onto both fabric and paper, inspired by the female form. The patterns that make up these images are taken from a variety of sources and blended digitally to provide colourful compositions that I am ‘playing’ with.

Using a combination of my own figurative work, organic studies and projections alongside recognisable photographic and fine art images, where the idea of the feminine becomes more stylised, I have blended these variations so they appear as an amalgam of repeated pattern, colour and form.

I have taken reference from personal nostalgic sources to iconic filmic representation of women in the 20^th century. I wanted to use ‘snippets’ from my childhood of my mother and grandmother, but have also chosen Hollywood actors and captured movie stills, which, for me, evoke the essence of 1960’s and 1970s era. “ The Odd Couple” - the go-go dancing girl at the beginning of the film and also the waitress scene, “Dirty Harry” – captures a half tone image of Clint Eastwood on the hill overlooking San Francisco.

Arnolfini’s Wedding Portrait by Jan van Eyck and Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’ were initial starting points for another series of potential textile patterns and also classical Greek sculptural forms photographed in Amsterdam. All the subject matter for my work is feminine and has been combined with linear aspects of the female shape.

There is a recurrent theme throughout my current work – a Madonna and child style schematic which was unintentional initially.  The shapes I use  - curved halo-esque patterns – are repeated, as are the interlocking faded figurative patterns - which are taken from my earlier silkscreen, linocut or life drawings. Angie Butler noticed this religious undercurrent therefore I am starting to explore Religious Iconography again (see my earlier work on Shrines).