Anna Phillips (Art Forum)

Abstract

Anna Phillips’s investigations and art making have been informed by her interest in the materiality and plasticity of transformative materials such as detergent, plastic and feminine beauty products. By the introduction of certain processes, either physical or alchemical, she creates alternative means of expression and visualization of feminine identity and representation. Phillips presentation will focus on her work from the last decade, which includes her exploration of the mundane and low status material plastic bags. Phillips answered the challenge set by Roland Barthes in Mythologies, (1957) that plastic has only been valued as a medium of imitation. Barthes contended that plastic could be “jewels as well as buckets”. Philips response to this task has taken her in the last ten years to some of world’s major consumer hotspots, Paris, Germany, Rome and South Korea, to study and collect plastic bags, not only to learn the origins and molecular matrix of this substance, but also to learn of its mythological connections to classical history, and marvel at its great array of aesthetic selection and visual appeal in Asia.