and I don’t think I ever really did. One of the themes in my work or rather, one of the things that has been blocking me, is the idea of gesture and pose. I am still interesting in having figures in my work, but abstracting them. I still want a figure to be visible. For most of my art career I had nude female forms. I explored sexuality and gender. But now, in menopause, I am not as interested in that anymore. It feels like I am appropriating a younger woman’s concerns when I repeat familiar those contours. I still have a body, but it wants some dignity and privacy now. Many menopausal women talk about feeling invisible. Yes, I do, thank god. My sexuality is not something I need to process through my art anymore. Rather, it is not something I WANT to process through my public art.
I’m not particularly interested in exploring the ageing body, or our societies obsession with youth. Meh. I recognize those things. I want to explore something else, that is what I am searching for.
I still have these figures in my work, they have bodies. I want them to have bodies, I want them to have a form. But I don’t care what they look like? So drawing and rendering them is mystifying when you don’t use beauty, or anti-beauty, as a guide. I’ve started giving them gowns and bags to be in. I like arms, hands, feet. But faces? Also tired. I’ll keep the eyes. The parts that seems most expressive and tender, I guess. But a lot of it is being so tired of grappling with beauty standards. If I give my archetypes a face, then….are they beautiful? Are they plain, ugly? Can I just not? They don’t have faces when I encounter them in visualizations. I think that is the appeal of giving them animal heads is that I don’t have to think about their human identity. Because they aren’t that. They have eyes, they like to play dress up and fly about and be near me. I don’t know what they are. Spirit guides? Some kind of entity. They are happy to just be in a mumu.
But there is this problem of pose and gesture. What are their bodies doing, however hidden?
What is my own body doing?
I did ballet when I was younger. Like many, I gave it up when I realized I was not going to have an body that met an ideal. I’ve had other opportunities to dance in a more artistic, non-club ways. I have an attraction and apprehension to dance therapy. I’ve had a few moments with it during my expressive arts experiences, but not as much as I would have liked.
I look at reference images often, or take my own photos of myself, but I don’t want my own body in my art anymore. I found a video of a performance by Fine Lines, a dance company of older dancers. I had the thought, I can find a gesture or pose that one of them does. And had the thought, I need to find it in my own body.