Alice Brookes
ART Habens
Alice Brookes: I also avidly follow social media activity to see how women are being celebrated, portrayed and judged. Depictions of harassment and aims to silence women are not too dissimilar to the early witch hunts, Seeing phrases like, ‘she was so drunk’, ‘she deserved it’, ‘she met him on Tinder, what did she expect?’,Journalist Jessica Valenti makes it clear “Women don't get raped because they were not careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them”...This sort of misogynist dialogue is always paralled by predictable media coverage of men who have commited extreme violence against women with phrases like ‘but he was a good dad’ ‘was he just pushed too far?’ accompanied by images of him as a child or his personal achievements.
Alice Brookes: My artist practice relates to being a female human and the experiences that brings. Resistance and Collusion seeks to engage with the contradiction of liberation and breaking down boundaries while at the same time creating self induced limits. In our media driven world, saturated with images of women self filtered beyond recognition, these distorted nymph-like filters create fantastical ideals of female perfection that have been depicted by male artists for centuries. I question are we simply being filtered or phazed out. As Gloria Stienem states “It's not only that we live in a patriarchy, it's that the patriarchy lives in us”. My practice is also informed by a narrative of femininity that surrounds us from childhood with societies persistence of girl and boy toys, of perfect mummies and Princesses. Classic fairy tales with their displays of young beautiful women suffering silently, almost contently under their oppressors. This tradition of relating suffering and silence is intrinsically female.
Another interesting work of yours that has particularly impressed us and that we would like to introduce to our readers is entitled CORNERED, a stimulating performance that hightlights your interested in the residue as you are in the process, and that has struck us for the way you sapiently created such unique ambience, manipulating human figure: in a certain sense, CORNERED seems to stimulate the viewer’s psyche and consequently works on both a subconscious and a conscious level: how important is for you to trigger the viewers' imagination in order to address them to elaborate personal interpretations? In particular, how open
We have really appreciated the way your artworks embody an interface between realism and imagination, as well as the way you include elements from ordinary experience. Scottish painter Peter Doig once remarked that even the most realistic paintings are derived more from within the head than from what's out there in front of us: how do you consider the relationship between reality and imagination playing within your work? And how does everyday life's experience fuel your artistic research?
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