From my excellent trip to Berlin, I brought you the most beautiful piece of work I have seen in a long time… Look at the knife, the necklace, the transparent fabric… And there there is the look. What is that look saying? Ah, so much defiance… She will do it if you push her, you [...]
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… from Susanna Hesselberg
… from Melanie Pullen
… from Sylvie Fleury
… from Pilar Albarracin
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Sometimes, at periodic intervals, my job takes the task of delicately reminding me why I am doing this out of all possible career options. I am currently working with a student whose work is intense and exciting, both at an intellectual and practical level. I have a lot of respect for most of my students [...]
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Hannah Hoch
Kiki Smith
I am still surprised to find that this subject of feminine seduction has been so unconscious within my research. But the evidence is there! With the two new images above, let’s recap where we are at:
Pilar Albarracin, Iranzu Antona, Naia del Castillo, Vicky Civera, Sylvie Fleury, Hannah Hoch, Mary Kelly, Sharon Kivland, Cathy [...]
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Douglas Gordon, 100 Blind Stars: Mirror Blind Greta, 2002. Photograph by Robert McKeever. Courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery.
Just like people queued to see the empty space of the Mona Lisa when the painting was stolen in 1911, each time I see Gordon’s Greta, I can stop looking at it. To me, this image is [...]
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I have uploaded images of work-in-progress created as part of my PhD project. Engaging in practice has been productive, even if difficult. The practice of analysis and of art are beginning to converge in a weird sense and I am hoping that writing my confirmation report will bring that very point into some clear focus. [...]
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Disturbingly, Lexa Walsh’s objects are very similar to mine. She calls them seductive too, although they embody everything I don’t want mine to be. I think they are closer to a fetish, someone else’s fetish, than to a seductive object. They silence my look somehow, I don’t want to be near them. That revulsion, however, [...]
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From the John Moores 24 Exhibition of contemporary painting 2006, at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool:
Jeff McMillan, The Seducer, Oil on found painting, 51 x 61.5cm, 2005
Artist Statement
For many years I have collected second-hand oil paintings from boot sales and thrift shops. These form a curious compendium of subjects and styles. ItÄôs only in the last [...]
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Finally, one of my favorite paintings has returned home to the Munch Museum in Oslo. I have always loved this Madonna: its nudity and, more than anything, its face, which I regard as a combination of Manet’s Olympia and the abandonement of Bernini’s St Teresa.
But Munch’s virgin is a lot more than a mystic in [...]
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Laura Gonzalez is an artist and writer. Her practice encompasses drawing, photography and sculpture, and her work has been exhibited in the UK, Spain and Portugal. She has participated in numerous conferences, including Research into Practice (2008), College Arts Association and the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (2007). When she is not following Freud, Lacan and Marx's footsteps with her camera, she lectures postgraduate students at the Glasgow School of Art.
She is currently immersed in an interdisciplinary project, which investigates psychoanalytic approaches to making and understanding objects of seduction within the fields of fine art, consumption studies and material culture. Her research includes an examination of parallels between artistic and analytic practices, a study of Manolo Blahnik's shoes as objects of desire, a disturbing encounter with Marcel Duchamp's last work, and the creation of a psychoanalytically inspired Discourse of the Artefact, a framework enabling the circulation of questions and answers through a relational approach to artworks. She seeks refuge and inspiration in psycho-geography, especially if it takes her to shopping centres, those mysterious places.