All My Threads Are Bare, 2023 – Rediscovering Ferens Identity – Ferens Art Gallery

As a Future Ferens member I was a part of co-producing/curating the exhibition with other Future Ferens members and The Warren members.

Rediscovering Ferens Identity is exploring what identity means to us as individual, as a community of Hull and generations. Therefore how identity is reflected in the Ferens Collection.

We selected 20 works from the collection, we could response to one piece each. Rather through visual art, writing a label of our interest and thoughts in how the work mirrors identity within or both. I decided to response to ‘Asters,’Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson.

In ‘All My Threads Are Bare,’ I wanted to challenge myself in experiment and work with new materials, that I haven’t ventured with before in building 3-D form and texture personifying to the Human Body.

Therefore I was drawn to responding to ‘Asters,’ as the juxtaposition in the painting explores themes (objectification and beauty) that I am interested and relate to in my own practice and everyday life.

I wanted to explore the contrast of these themes through mirroring the abstracted legs to the depicted bust in ‘Asters,’ to suggest the pressurization for women’s bodies to be perfect and we are often referred to as objects/possessions.

I think it was interesting for me to be able to compare the narrative with the bust being openly displayed in front of objects – books and flowers, which are usually admired and paraded in peoples’ homes. In analyzing these factors in the painting, I wanted to incorporate this demonstrated the analogy of the grotesque and abstraction in sculptural form.