exhibitions & events 2019

Andrea McIlhatton Cardow

Andrea McIlhatton Cardow - Paper Dolls

This series started with exploring visual representations of women through digitally manipulating tiny black and white found images. The process of isolating the figures, separating parts of the image, rearranging, cutting and layering was perfect for screen printing so the layers of the image were printed as separations, exposed onto a screen and pulled out in colour onto paper. Interacting with music while working on the images is very much part of the process; the tracks merge with the images as the ideas develop.

Pre-punk playlists were particularly inspirational especially The Nerves track ‘Paper Dolls’, which played as I moved figures around exploring concepts and representations of women and printing them onto paper, playing with “paper dolls”’. This title worked for me as it conceptualised a blasé attitude to women as commodity as explored in some of my images but also contained a fun element and much of my work is about women enjoying being women. I focused on progressing the work into a series with the vibrancy and energy of the music that influenced me.

With some of the prints, by upping the scale quite significantly from the tiny found images that were the source material, I could create a zoomed-in, anarchic and trippy view, pushing the viewer close to the subject and in that way it gave the image power. Through truncating the figures, I could give the bigger images a static and sculptural quality, which can be disconcerting in that, what you see, are torsos, decapitated, limbless but the images retain beauty. This fits with some of the concepts of the uncomfortable ways in which women can be portrayed and the need to address this, moving away from depictions of the female form as commodity.

The series explores contradictions in representations of women, depicting female confidence, beauty, exposure, manipulation…and is ongoing.

Image: Andrea McIlhatton Cardow, 'Refrain', screenprint on Somerset Satin 300gsm, 89 x 69.5cm. Varied edition of 6.