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Theresa Bradbury

Shrewsbury
My art practice addresses current contemporary debates surrounding Feminism, investigating ideas about femininity being a social construction. An interest in the opposition between essentialism and c
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Artist Statement – Theresa Bradbury  

My current practice is an exploration of ideas about the feminine being a social construct –  an artificial masquerade. The female as living as her own spectator, the female as always accompanied by her own image. My concerns surrounding the masquerade and performative nature of femininity and the display and objectification of the female body as commodity within Capitalist society. Utilising a live art, performance and sculptural practice to reinforce positive feminist perspectives on the female body. To subvert the prevailing tropes of femininity as prescribed through a patriarchal lens. 

My work investigates questions relating to the body in site, alongside themes of representation and gender. With the work, I am exploring and interrogating social boundaries and acceptable codes of exposure. The appropriate/inappropriate dichotomy, particularly in relation to femininity. The idea that the female body can be acted upon and coerced by external forces must be disrupted to reframe the body as active and autonomous. If the body is a surface to be inscribed upon by cultural and societal forces, what is real? My body as alienated, as belonging to the other. Constant awareness of my body, not as it is for me, but for the other. Femininity formed through the constant surveillance of ourselves against others through the mirror image. A device used to measure yourself against. 

My work references an anti-aesthetic, a disruption of the social and symbolic ordering of the female body, exploring a rejection of woman as idealised surface. The work questions and disrupts the idea of a proper social body and confronts the viewer with its abjection, refusing containment and allowing seepage and immersion with bodily fluids.

The work attempts to erode the fetishishtic dominant structures of patriarchal Capitalism. By presenting the abjectness of the body, the work both solicits and repels the viewer and refuses the link to commodity culture. The construction of femininity as temporal and manipulable, an artifice. What constitutes femininity and who draws the boundaries? My work subverts the socially dictated artificial femininity represented through media imagery. Femininity which is something that must be purchased and imposed artificially upon the surface of the female and a radical acceptance of mess, fluids and flesh are part of feminist resistance.

 

Keep Intact the Circulation of Pretence by Enveloping Herself in Femininity

By  Theresa Bradbury

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