Artist Tracie Peisley's Irreverent Series takes portraits by famous Masters and superimposes women into those positions. The imagery has been cut and pasted from books rendering women as equal models and role models.
We caught up with Tracey to find out more about her latest exhibition showing at The Gallery above Artisans & Adventurers Margate store from 6 - 18th March 2018 as part of POW! Thanet.
Private View 6-9pm Tuesday 6th March.
POW! profiles the work of local female artists in Margate, Ramsgate and Broadstairs annually over a 4-5 day period to co-incide with International Women’s Day on 8th March.
/// T R A C I E P E I S L E Y - C O L L A G E S
I have been an Artist for thirty years and I work in different media. I am led by my creative process, it helps me to metabolise my lived experience, chart my sense of self, imagine wildly and reach for the unvarnished truth
Collage is one of the most difficult and stubborn mediums to work in, using static concrete images which can look like remote satellites impossible to integrate into a cohesive image. I take on the tensions and challenges of things being immovable and aspire to something lyrical… I like to lend symbolism from all cultures, believing in universal messaging that connects art to audience and audience to self.
Many of my collages are about relationships, identity, status and desire. I trust that my psyche will tease out what I need to find, as I sift through found imagery in magazines and books, and that my hands will make sense of any latent conflict or drive. When viewing them I invite you to think of them as being unfathomable as dreams or as multitudinous as poetry. Let them rest in your mind’s eye. I hope they resonate with a common ground and begin to embody something you yourself wish to see.
For the irreverent series I worked late at night, to a point that my conscious mind was dull from exhaustion. Thrashing through old art books I looked at a plethora of refined anonymous figures. Irritated, I dissected them and re-configured them, irreverently ignoring the status of Artist and sitter. I feel strongly that the class system, wealth, gender, race, age and appearance all push and pull individuals into lives with restricted, proscriptive parameters. I oscillate between owning my fortuitousness and my raging envy of the others. I want to step outside of what I know, to know something else, even if it is just in my imagination.
As I applied paint to the collages I felt I was making a smearing protest in a decorous way. As I roared across pieces with a sewing machine I felt like I was carving a way in. There is aggression in the cutting and wiping out, pouring over. A devouring hunger.
They are theatres full of secrets! I say I pursue the unvarnished truth but I am a liar. Collage is the best place for exploring the shadow self, the murderess, thief and adulterer. It’s a tussle.
The resin pieces were about glossing the ordinary truth, making it more dream like. It’s a medium that refuses to behave itself, adding to hours of frustration, but it has the purpose of holding image and object still and in my fast-moving mind this is a rare thing. I rejoice in playing with materials and gave up all pretentions falling gleefully for the easy gratification of jewels, glitter and shells. Some of the pieces added have tender significance for me.
I live with my collages over years and I don’t tire of them. Scraps from time, dreamscapes, moments of re-configured history.