#proyectoartistico

Meet the acclaimed photographer who created surreal, humorous and at times painfully honest images.

1. SHE WAS BORN TO BE CREATIVE

Francesca Woodman was born on 3 April 1958 in Denver, Colorado. Her father, George, was a painter, her mother, Betty, was a sculptor and her brother, Charles, is an electronic artist. Woodman started taking photographs when she was 13 years old. She moved to New York in 1979 with the dream of pursuing a career in fashion photography.

2. SHE TOOK INSPIRATION FROM SURREALISM AND FASHION

Woodman attended the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975. She idolised fashion photographers, such as Guy Bourdin and Deborah Turbeville. This influence is noticeable in the way Woodman sensitively used clothing throughout her works.

While studying in Rome during 1977–78, Woodman regularly visited the Maldoror bookshop, which specialised in books on surrealism. There she learnt about the pioneers of this movement, including Man Ray and Meret Oppenheim. Woodman applied some of the characteristics associated with surrealism to her own work. She created dreamlike environments with interesting and unusual objects, such as shells and eels, and combined familiar things in unfamiliar contexts to evoke uncanny feelings. She transformed extremely limited and unpromising environments into spaces of fantasy and experimentation.

3. HER BODY WAS THE SUBJECT OF HER WORK

During her career, Woodman produced over 800 black and white photographs. She featured as the subject in many of them, sometimes partially clothed, naked, disguised, hidden or a blur. She used ordinary objects and materials, such as mirrors and pegs, to transform her body parts into distorted and surreal versions. She experimented with glass panels, pressing them against her body to squeeze, reshape and flatten her flesh to make her physical features appear grotesque and exaggerated. When questioned about why she was the subject of her own photographs, Woodman replied 'It’s a matter of convenience, I’m always available'.

4. SHE BLURRED HER IMAGE TO CREATE MOVEMENT

Woodman used long shutter speed and double exposure when photographing so that she could actively feature in her own work. This also meant that she could capture different stages of movement, in a way that could trace the pattern of time. As a result, her image is blurred, which suggests motion and urgency.

Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner …? Francesca Woodman

5. HER WORK HAS INFLUENCED AND CONTINUES TO INFLUENCE ARTISTS

Although she died very young, there is no denying that Woodman was one of the most innovative and promising artists of her generation. She pushed the boundaries of experimental photography and played with the potential of shutter speed and exposure. Cindy Sherman (known for her conceptual portraits) and conceptual artist Sophie Calle (whose photography examines human identity and intimacy) both nod to Woodman as a huge influence on their own work.

She had few boundaries and made art out of nothing: empty rooms with peeling wallpaper and just her figure. No elaborate stage set-up or lights … Her process struck me more the way a painter works, making do with what’s right in front of her, rather than photographers like myself who need time to plan out what they’re going to do. Cindy Sherman

From Tate’s website

“For Sediment, Neudecker will present some key-pieces taking the visitors through various strands of her practice. This ranges from early map works, the “Plastic Vanitas” Still Life series, Deep-Sea and Arctic projects, including a new 2-dimensional and new tank work specially commissioned for the exhibition.  Harking back to the motifs, themes and aesthetics of Romanticism and the Sublime, her series of tank works contains sculptures of the natural world both nourished and mummified by the liquids in which they are preserved.  In promoting her enquiry into the relationship between the actual and the mediated, she keeps returning to looking at landscape traditions in art, dealing simultaneously with questions around technology, science, changes to our environment, collective experiences and time.”

From Dnote

Beatriz Sánchez Santidrián, 2013

“...Y ¿dónde proyectar su cuerpo? En la superficie de un espejo. En la mayoría de sus obras, Francesca se sirvió de él para enfatizar la subjetividad de su fotografía, ya de por sí personal por el hecho de cultivar casi exclusivamente el autorretrato. Al utilizar el espejo, su imagen quedaba reflejada doblemente: en el cristal, pero también en el propio soporte fotográfico; porque incluso cuando no introduce el espejo, éste “está” indirectamente, ya que la fotografía suele definirse como el reflejo de una imagen.

Siguiendo los estudios psicoanalíticos de Jacques Lacan, discípulo de Sigmund Freud, la construcción de la identidad, es decir, de la subjetividad, se da a través de lo que él denomina “orden imaginario”; esta fase se produce en la primera etapa de vida, y en ella el bebé se reconoce a sí mismo por primera vez en la imagen de su madre, que es la única figura que ve, la única realidad que hasta entonces existe para él. Precisamente Lacan llama también a este orden el “estadio del espejo”, ya que éste facilita la construcción de la propia identidad a través de la identificación con el otro, que es su imagen reflejada en el espejo. Puesto que sujeto y objeto coinciden (yo), no existe la dualidad yo-lo otro: somos lo otro, lo que nos rodea. Y puesto que en este orden no existe ni espacio ni tiempo, nos movemos en coordenadas espacio-temporales indeterminadas, difusas. En la más absoluta universalidad.

Trasladando la idea desde la madre que ve el bebé al tema que nos ocupa, se podría decir que Francesca se enmarca en este orden imaginario: a través de la visión de su imagen vertida en el mundo, su propia realidad pasa de estar en un plano interno, subjetivo, a formar parte de una dimensión exterior; y esta “ficcionalización”, que le conduce a una experiencia de realidad, es lo que le ayuda finalmente a comprenderse mejor como persona y artista, y por tanto a construir su identidad. 

Pero esta proyección de su imagen no sólo la lleva a cabo en el espejo, sino también en la atmósfera y en el decorado que sirven como marco de sus fotografías. En ellas, el cuerpo se mimetiza con el escenario, se confunde con las sombras, se funde con el papel desprendido de la pared, se subordina al mobiliario, se disuelve en la luz; parece que quiera desaparecer entre las grietas de la pared o en el interior de una alacena. Francesca se autorretrata fundiéndose con su entorno porque no encuentra otro medio de reafirmarse y revelar su propio ser, porque “visible y móvil, mi cuerpo es numerable entre las cosas, es una de ellas, está cosido al tejido del mundo y su consistencia es la de una cosa. Pero cuando ve, cuando se mueve, cuando mantiene las cosas en un círculo a su alrededor, hace que las cosas se le adhieran o lo prolonguen, se incrusten en su carne, formen parte de su definición total; el mundo está hecho del mismo tejido que el cuerpo...”

From BaidBlog

Mariele Neudecker A landscape is far more than just a view. It is charged with history, with politics and ideas that cut deep into our consciousness.

Mariele Neudecker’s work keeps returning to the landscape tradition in art, but through this she deals with questions around technology and science, collective experience and time. Neudecker is interested in our perception of the world and how we hold on, re-create and memorize our experiences. Through the use of a broad range of media including sculpture, installation, film and photography, she examines what defines the line between nature and landscape, and reflects on how any definition of the contemporary sublime is continuously changing.

“Singers sing. A sorceress laments her failing powers and an elusive conquest. A lover rehearses his desolation. A parent keens for lost children. Soprano, bass-baritone, contralto: voices have flooded the worlds of Mariele Neudecker. 

Neudecker has chased time about the globe, miniaturised mountains and charmed three dimensions out of two. Sound is the perfect territory through which to pursue these persistent preoccupations with time and space being materially indivisible from its temporal and spatial extension. 

In Neudecker’s tank works, such as Morning Fog in the Mountains (1997) and I Don’t Know How I Resisted the Urge to Run (1998), sculptural landscapes are viewed through fluids and suspensions that emulate romantic weather: mists, clouds and hazes. In Stay Here or Die (2002), Winterreise (2003) and Kindertotenlieder (2005) it is music that spills through the spaces around the image; it is music that gives us the vapours and shapes the atmosphere. We view Port Talbot through clouds of despair; we see sights from the sixtieth latitude north through misty heartache; alpine grandeur through a haze of grief. Of all art forms the discourse of music has maintained its faith in emotional affect and its hold upon a vocabulary of feelings. We listen to feel. The lover and the mourner sing to change the way the body feels, to breathe differently, to physically perform the sense of loss. 

In song, language works on the body and the body works on language. For Roland Barthes 1 this is why song thrills us: the visceral and symbolic rub against one another: we hear an image of the body in the utterance of the voice, the body at play in language.

Implicit in Barthes’ analysis is that all song defamiliarises language, heightening the acoustic, displacing the semantic, requiring a relearning. The body forms itself about the sounds of a language and about the emotional surfaces of the song. It becomes a matter of diction, of testing the sound of each letter against palette and tongue and throat and teeth; and of the body remembering the architecture of each sound.”

Extracted from Mariele’s Neudecker website

"In her work Neudecker is exploring the interphases and overlaps of the two and three-dimensional, as well as analogue and digital. She uses a broad range of media including sculpture, film, photography as well as sound. Her practice investigates the formation and historical dissemination of cultural constructs around the natural and technological world and notions of a Contemporary Sublime. Neudecker often uses technology’s virtual capabilities in order to reproduce a heightened experience of landscape, thus addressing the subjective and mediated condition of any first hand encounter. She has worked with scientists and engineers and their methods and research. For her, technology both enables and limits our perception and experience of the worlds we inhabit"