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Rose Gibbs

Country of residence United Kingdom

Crude images of consummation and pregnancy are painted on earthen pots, significantly pointing to the symbolic relationship between the utility of these age-old objects and women as objects of sex and vessels of childbirth. When I see great paintings, like the dynamic moments described by Caravaggio, I want to be able to describe my own moments in some attempt to give the world something different. While I walked round his exhibition last year I imagined being able to explain the moment of giving birth with that sense of immediacy, both in terms of how it feels to have another body coming out of mine - the collision of the intellect and the emotions, and in terms of how definitive that moment is.

Simone de Beauvoir writes in the first part of her autobiography that she could not think of having children as she could see no point in doing just as her mother and her grandmother before had done. It is with a similar outlook that I am compelled to make art in an effort to break and illustrate this cyclical nature of life. This is how I felt while I was pregnant, on my way to work, watching a mother and child walk down the street: the futility of existence, life creating life to create life, its repetition, while being at the same time fundamentally incredible, and more so because of this repetition. This duality is what I aspire to with my work. This is why I am painting on vases, referencing everyday objects in crude form, taking useful objects and subverting them, using them as a tool to describe relationships that I have with the world. My pots become about being more than just one thing as you move around them. They can stand for the utility a woman has as a mother and as a sex object; something to use and something that is usually required to look good. While looking round the Frida Kahlo exhibition this year, I understood why she only did self-portraits, as she said of herself, "I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best”, it is with this sentiment that I continue to create autobiographical work.

I attempt to create something that stands out, ugly and gruesome like the anodyne nature of mundane life, buying, eating, shitting – the repetitive and oppressive obsession with objects and lifestyle. The language I use is basic, using obvious opposites to describe relationships. On my pots man woman and child fuse, to shake up comfortable ideas which seem all consuming and all powerful. We are surrounded constantly with convention and expectations, it becomes almost impossible to escape them as they are everywhere in novels, drama, advertising. With art there is a chance to say something different, propose a different way of looking at life and this is what I strive for.

Exhibitions Abigail' s Arty, 22.Nov - 21.Dec.08, Crimes Town, Start Your Collection 2008!, 01.Aug - 20.Sep.08, Contemporary Art Projects, 00' Nature Part 2, 15.May - 14.Jun.08, Contemporary Art Projects, '00 Nature Part 1, 10.Apr - 15.May.08, Contemporary Art Projects, The Free Art Fair, 08.Oct - 14.Oct.07, The Free Art Fair, Start Your Collection 2007!, 01.Aug - 30.Sep.07, Contemporary Art Projects, Summer exhibition 2006, 17.Aug - 03.Sep.06, Contemporary Art Projects

 

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