Artist Statement

The Gaps and Silences are Where You Find Yourself

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The paintings that comprise this thesis embody research into both the networks of painting and gendered embodied knowledge. These two networks are analyzed individually and in relation to two resonating topics. The two resonating topics consider the roles that labour and digitization play in both networks. This research attempts to answer the questions: How can painting function as a method to describe and come to understand the networks of gendered embodied knowledge? What roles do digitization and labour play in the networks of both painting and gendered embodied knowledge?

 

This research is conducted using the methodology of research-creation and the methods of painting and printmaking. The female embodied knowledge represented in these paintings is explored through intersectional feminist theory and social reproduction theory. It also takes a critical position against neoliberal postfeminism by representing the female body and face at sites of resiliency and autonomy. The networks of the exhibition and distribution of painting are examined using critical literature in art theory and practice as theoretical framework. Drawing from the personal, this research finds digital space as the location of a fragile and hopeful feminist room because it is where feminism is happening between my mother, sister, and myself. The thesis work embodies and visually represents this feminist room, which is created using both paint and embodied knowledge as materials. These paintings critically bring together artistic and gendered labour, drawing attention to their exceptional and unique role in the capitalism system. Painting functions as a method to recontextualize female embodied

 

knowledge from the invisible utilitarianism of housework into painting’s networks of exhibition and distribution. Through both the gendered and artistic labour embodied in these paintings, this thesis work is painting the gaps and silences in the transdisciplinary archives of feminism.

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