My fellow judge was Susana Medina.
Here are my reviews of some of the winning pieces:
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| Consumed Debauchery by Lauren Kelly |
Consumed Debauchery
by Lauren Kelly
Lauren Kelly's sculptures cannot help but draw you in
with their sheer madness and sense of abandon. The sensuality and physicality of
Kelly’s work recalls that of Louise Bourgeois, whereas the scale and humour
reminds me of some of Claes Oldenberg’s early works. We chose Kelly’s Consumed
Debauchery for the top spot because of the clear vision, insight and
consistency of this artist’s work. I feel she knows what she wants to say and
how to say it; there is a single-mindedness here that is utterly compelling. I
found myself unable to stop thinking about Consumed Debauchery, and kept
returning to it to look at it over and over. Her pieces are not simple or
straightforward, they attract the intellect and then swiftly bypass it, taking
the viewer somewhere odd and strange and peculiarly pleasant. There is a pop
art sensibility in Kelly’s pieces which brought to mind the Pop Art mantra of the
sixties: to make the ordinary extraordinary. I feel with Lauren Kelly there is
an element of making the extraordinary even more so through a timeless
recreation of the physical world, which is by no means ordinary in the first
place. This is partly what sets her work apart for me. She takes our physical
world and gives it back to us in a form that makes us see our physicality
afresh. Although perhaps not strictly speaking erotic, this defamiliarisation
is indeed exciting.
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| Hand by Gloria Oyarzabal |
Hand
by Gloria Oyarzabal
Of all the
works in this competition, ‘Hand’ by Gloria
Oyarzabal was one of
the more erotic ones. This layered and evocative photograph shows a hand, which
could be either male or female, hovering tantalisingly over the blurred
triangular sex of a woman. The image is repeated twice alluding to the
repetition of erotic strokes, while celluloid sprockets along the side of the
photo emphasise the filmic nature of the piece. The placing of this hand, an
almost classical hand from ancient Greece or Rome, with a vague hint of hair
under its palm takes one into the realm of self-pleasure as much as into the
realm of pleasuring another. The artist, who works with found photos, has
recontextualised clips from pornographic films shown in an outdoor cinema in
Bamako, Mali. She has taken them out of the porn cinema and brought them into
daylight, thus giving them an extra—and very different—lease on life. The
cinema, which is close to shutting its doors for want of business, is
ironically only kept going through the showing of illegal porn films. This
anomaly lends the piece a political dimension as well: can porn be the saviour
in this drama?
Because
of the obsolescence of the 35mm format in favour of the colder, flatter digital
aesthetic, this photo harkening back to the heyday of celluloid contains a
strong melancholic and nostalgic element. Inherent in this beautiful, textured
image is also a sense of danger. The artist has smuggled these frames from
their illicit environment (pornography is illegal in Mali) and has brought them
out into the scrutinizing light of day. These images exist originally to
satisfy those in search of sexual fulfilment and have become images for those
in search of perhaps much more. I found this piece of work exciting formally,
aesthetically and erotically. It is a stunning homage to the power of cinema
and its historical links to desire. Who has not witnessed or experienced a
celluloid encounter and not felt the pang of longing for love, sex and cinema? Oyarzabal’s
‘Hand’ is a powerful piece of work that resonated with the judges on several
levels and was always a contender for recognition as a strong piece of work in
the competition.
Of all the
works in this competition, ‘Hand’ by Gloria
Oyarzabal was one of
the more erotic ones. This layered and evocative photograph shows a hand, which
could be either male or female, hovering tantalisingly over the blurred
triangular sex of a woman. The placing of this hand and the vague hint of hair
under its palm takes one into the realm of self-pleasure as much as into the
realm of pleasuring another.
The
artist, who works with found photos, has recontextualised clips from
pornographic films shown in an outdoor cinema in Bamako, Mali, where ironically
porn is illegal. She has taken these images out of the porn cinema and brought
them into daylight, thus giving them an extra—and very different—lease on life.
The cinema, which is close to shutting its doors for want of business, is only
kept going through the showing of illegal porn films. This anomaly lends the
piece a political dimension as well: can porn be the saviour in this drama?
Because
of the obsolescence of the 35mm format in favour of the colder, flatter digital
aesthetic, this photo harkening back to the heyday of celluloid contains a
strong nostalgic element. I found this piece of work exciting formally,
aesthetically and erotically. It is a stunning homage to the power of cinema
and its historical links to desire. Who has not witnessed or experienced a
celluloid encounter and not felt the pang of longing for love, sex and cinema? Oyarzabal’s
‘Hand’ is a powerful piece of work that resonated with the judges on several
levels.
 |
| Detail from Sieve Boobs by Sarah Fordham |
Sieve Boobs
by Sarah Fordham
This
installation of hand-stitched tapestry moulded onto kitchen sieves and arranged
on a wall is both humourous and deadly serious. The variety of colours and
shapes of these breast-simulacra reflect the variety of the female form and
calls into question the idea of the perfect breast which daily bombards us in
the form of badly made porn, MTV, Hollywood movies and advertising. There is almost
no part of the body more contentious, more vilified, more desired, more argued
over, more airbrushed and Photoshopped than the female breast. Beyond their
beauty and eroticism, breasts are also supremely functional. Their milk can
keep an infant alive, which is in itself an area of discord. Is breastfeeding a
shackle around a woman’s ankle or simply a way for nature to allow a mother to
feed and bond with a child?
Through
the symbolic resonance of the sieves and their association with cooking and the
domestic realm, the artist enters head on into the debate around the female
body and the boundaries, limits and abilities surrounding its function and
eroticism. Can the two exist simultaneously?
The
hand-stitching contrasts beautifully with the mass-production of the kitchen
sieve, thus heightening the rhetoric around the fabrication of art and its
place in the production line of history. These Sieve Boobs are beautiful and
useless objects—they function not as erotic objects, nor as kitchen implements
and yet their totemic quality is imbued with both function and eroticism. This
piece is also alive with an element of surrealism much like Meret Oppenheim’s
fur-lined tea cup, saucer and spoon. And like much art that takes on issues of
female sexuality and posits it within the sphere of the domestic and the
mass-made, this piece is a reminder that art can and should function on many
levels, and in the best of all possible worlds is also capable of asking
questions that have yet to find answers.
