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PART II ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Fallen angel
Francesca Woodman
FOAM kicks off 2016 with On Being an Angel, a retrospective of the intimate and utterly captivating portraiture of Francesca Woodman. text Catalina Iorga
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ften referred to as a child prodigy, Francesca Woodman, born in 1958 into a family of American artists, began taking surreal and highly conceptual black and white self-portraits as a teenager. One of the 102 photos displayed at Foam, as part of a travelling exhibition organised and first shown by Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, shows a 13-year old Woodman sitting on the edge of a bench in an oversized jumper and trousers, her long hair obscuring her face, while her left hand holds a shutter-release cable linked to the camera. This is only one of the ways the young photographer expressed herself, oscillating between blurry movement and eerie stillness, fully baring her naked body or hiding behind clothes and countless props – anything from fossil displays to peeling wallpaper. Before her tragic demise at the age of 22, when she jumped off a building, lovesick and broken by disenchantment at the fickle art world, Woodman took thousands of photos on a spectrum ranging from the occasionally comical to the downright disturbing.
An image titled ‘Three Kinds of Melon in Four Kinds of Light’ demonstrates the artist’s lighter side, as she pokes fun at a euphemism for breasts. Woodman covers her left breast with a photo of a melon, her face once more out of the frame, while two other melons lay on the table. But humour is sparse in her enigmatic oeuvre, which was informed by strong influences, such as her frequent trips to Italy or the abstract imagery of decay established by master of American photography Aaron Siskind, one of her Rhode Island School teachers. Many of her photos are staged in derelict urban settings and possess a narrative quality, often presented in series such as the Angel Series made in Rome, which sees Woodman become the eponymous angel, clad in a Victorian white petticoat, jumping next to floating pieces of white fabric resembling wings; or again hidden from view, as a hand shakes a translucent cloth in front of a door frame. One cannot help but wonder about her artistic evolution, had she managed to overcome depression. Woodman treaded a fine line