Render me naked : the painted self and the spectator

The research project investigates the representation of an empirical model of female bodily experience as a formal pictorial project. The aim is to present the spectator with a personal, specific and intimate embodied subjectivity that evokes an awareness of corporeal experience. Further, the project investigates possible avenues for setting up reciprocal feelings of embodiment within the viewer. It explores this through fonns of pictorialism including scale, point of view, pictorial space and the rendering of tactile surfaces. The project aims to present the spectator with a representational image of a female body that defies objectification and instead evokes the physical and emotional presence of a person beginning to impinge upon the actual space occupied by the viewer. The project is concerned with formal pictorial construction and parameters were set to enable specific methodologies to be isolated and refined. The focus was on the body, the pose, the space and the rendered surfaces. The subject is autobiographical, exposed and singular. The paint is a record of my body in the marks that it made and the work is a point of intersection between my body and the body of the viewer. The pictorial space in the images was deemed to be very shallow, and ambiguous as to its orientation. Thus the spectator is led to resolve the ambiguities as to their spatial orientation within the image, and locate himself or herself physically in relation to the subject. The outcome of the research project is a group of paintings that present a new approach to the positioning of the spectator in relation to a figurative painting and more specifically in relation to the representation of female embodiment. The paintings in the submission constitute the outcomes of the research and form the original discourse of the project. The exegesis chronicles the practical and conceptual inquiries, placed in context through discussions of historical and contemporary practice.