Miranda Whall

(selected by Judith King)

Miranda Whall's videos, photographs and drawings create unique contexts in which to represent specific relationships between herself, nature and the wider external environment. Self-portraits absorbed in the scatological necessities, autoerotic pleasures and the pragmatic monitoring of her fertile conditions are played out and coexist alongside arbitrary and seemingly indiscriminate non-hierarchical groupings of images and objects such as birds, farm machinery, rural architecture and transport. Whall, often humorously, attempts to establish an equality between herself and her co-habitors or locality. She is interested in purposefully ignoring the boundaries that exist between her and other things and through doing so questions what and where it is appropriate and inappropriate to be female.  

Whall's work has recently evolved through a series of intricate, linear digital drawings that mimic lace patterns: 'Paradise Place' 2003, 'Softly Softly' 2003 and 'Sue Lawley' 2004. She performs and photographs herself according to the scenario she will inhabit; the other images are taken from the artist's developing archive of photographs.

All the images are drawn or traced to develop a series of hand drawn scenarios. Each scenario is then repeated, rotated and manipulated digitally to form a lace like pattern. The images are arranged to create a wilderness of spiraling, rotating and interweaving orgies, held within the confines and restrictions of pattern. The content of the work is staged within the pattern so that the images are both implicit and explicit, caught within something that disguises and reveals its implications.

Her recent work presents the artist in search of her fertility. She humorously explores an uncompromising and seemingly undignified journey into the internal workings of her own body and beyond. In 'Peak Days' 2003 the search takes her into deeply romantic landscapes: lake, forest, meadow and corn field. In 'looking for eggwhite' 2004 she creeps into corny 19th-century pastoral scenes printed on linen table mats, and in 'S.C.A.T Test' 2004 into Beatrix Potter's fictional landscape, in the hope that she might find her most fertile phase, or the right conditions, to observe her primary fertility signs.

In the video 'S.C.A.T Test (tacky/opaque/2/crumbly)' the artist finds herself on a lilly pad with Mr Jeremy Fisher; while he fishes for a dish of minnows for his supper she checks her cervical mucus. In 'The 11th Day  (pasty/sticky) (low/firm), 2004 the artist finds herself in an engineering merchants; while the shop assistants sell emory paper, spirit levels and bolts she checks and tests her cervical fluid and the position of her cervix. 

Miranda Whall 2005

www.mirandawhall.co.uk

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