Feb 9th - thoughts

I couldn't get into the studio after work - I'd wanted to add the oil pastel to the witch portraits- I think having the idea of what I want to do in my head but the delay in doing it.  (finding the oil pastel, considering if it was what I should actually do/ not getting into the studio)..got me thinking about witches' hats and how I would bring back the veiled Venus using this as an instrument to create dialogue.

In some of my artworks, the face is obstructed or censored. I wondered what it would do to pull the witch's hat over the face - using the witch's hat as an analogy for anything that obscures the view of the woman's face -whilst being loaded with its own language. The hat could easily be replaced with a veil or scarf...

This feels a much safer area for me to operate my practice in - touching on ingrained social constructs and erasure without tapping into personal dialogue -which was clouding my head a bit.  I found it really distracting and my practice was getting muddled. So I'm going to focus entirely on women and the witch's hat -using the hat as a symbol.

I considered an image of eve with the apple, wearing a witch's hat - the irony that the images of eve and a witch don't exist together but what the witch's hat represents in my practice jars against the image of eve. like calling bluff on things that don't add up - what do we accept - what do we question - where is there a taboo? 

Thinking about deconstructing and recreating visual language - I might source some images to collage to see what ideas it brings..

It was installed in me by my primary school that christianity was sacred and some things simply demand respect. But this religion has been damaging to how I operate as a person and the experiences that I've lived so why shouldn't I call it out?

Veiled Venus