Joanna Walker, "Nancy Spero, Encounters" Ashgate Publishing, 2011
Spero worked with contentious and unpopular subjects and her body of work became legacy due to the potency of her message, her vision, and her backbone to communicate artistically despite disability due to rheumatoid arthritis. She was a militant social commentator who saw her role was to provoke and incite political protest.
She interrogated macro politics from a feminist perspective - and the output was micro politics at an artistic level.
Spero correlated the media to the message - handprint, collage, fragile paper and unconventional wall space / quotation, repetition and fragmentation. By this she communicated her political aims and beliefs. How do I do this in my work?
She sought an art that could function as a vehicle for her voice and her artistic identity. How do I do this? I use stitch and textile as gender appropriate media, so an appropriate vehicle for my voice, but what is my artistic identity?
Spero quoted and referenced other women and art forms to publicise a repressed cultural feminist tradition. She used multiple art forms to enable empathy and the bridging of difference, and she, in turn, was quoted by them.
Artwork can be a meditative vehicle for your own views - this is certainly how I use my artwork.
No comments:
Post a Comment