Emma Cousin, An Elephant Never Forgets, 2023
Niru Ratnam is pleased to present a booth that focuses on the different practices of female-identifying or non-binary artists working in London today. It features the work of three artists: Emma Cousin (b.1986), Alicia Reyes McNamara (b.1984) and Jacqueline Utley (b.1964).
The works on the booth by the three artists foreground a deliberate strangeness in order to go beyond normative conventions of identities as well as explore new spaces for female subjectivities. This is achieved sometimes through the use of deliberately contorted figures, expressive colours and use of paint, or more simply an assertion of spaces which do not have a male presence. Instead these are figures that are wrapped around each other, mirror each other or are quietly immersed in each other’s presence.
There are nods to art historical tropes in these works, for example the nude, the icon or the domestic, but in ways that seek to actively difference art history. These are figures that create their own spaces and their own stories, unconcerned with the heteronormative, masculinist gaze that once structured art history.
The works on the booth by the three artists foreground a deliberate strangeness in order to go beyond normative conventions of identities as well as explore new spaces for female subjectivities. This is achieved sometimes through the use of deliberately contorted figures, expressive colours and use of paint, or more simply an assertion of spaces which do not have a male presence. Instead these are figures that are wrapped around each other, mirror each other or are quietly immersed in each other’s presence.
There are nods to art historical tropes in these works, for example the nude, the icon or the domestic, but in ways that seek to actively difference art history. These are figures that create their own spaces and their own stories, unconcerned with the heteronormative, masculinist gaze that once structured art history.
