Feminine Sublime
“The sublime has long been understood to mean a quality of greatness or grandeur that inspires awe and wonder. From the seventeenth century onwards the concept and the emotions it inspires have been a source of inspiration for artists and writers, particularly in relation to the natural landscape.”
The Feminine Sublime?
For centuries, the concept of the sublime has been entrenched in White, Eurocentric, masculine metaphors, frequently linked to man’s power in transcending and conquering immense or cataclysmic nature.
Sensations of awe, terror, and transcendence in response to the vast power of the natural world, are common to all humanity. Artistic responses to these sublime experiences have historically been limited to the heroic, and powerful dominance of “man-over-nature.”
My “feminine sublime” paintings suggest alternative responses to the sublime: the concept as seen by those whose views and experiences of the sublime have been traditionally discounted, ignored, and devalued by dominant forces in western society.
I use the term, “feminine sublime” as coined by feminist scholar Barbara Claire Freeman, to describe the sublime as experienced by “the other.” My abstract paintings offer a different take on the dark, looming, limitless, seemingly unknowable, power of the universe. Rather than engendering the sensations of overcoming and conquering nature, these works speak of our inherent connections to the somewhat incomprehensible nature of the vast cosmos.
My works consider relationships and connections in origins, whether in the unfathomable universe or the microscopic worlds of science. They speak to the power of the human mind and imagination to visualize concepts of geological time, limitless space, and the insignificance of our own lives, and yet to recognize that through the very atoms of our existence, we are part of nature, forever connected to it and to each other.
This engenders a different type of awe and transcendent sense of the sublime.
Finding the Eternal in the Everyday. Oil over Acrylic on Canvas. 58x101 inches
Curator Constance Mallinson writes, “Male narratives of transcendent experiences within the natural environment were symbolic encounters of the maternal body of Mother Nature. Transcendence was achieved by overpowering and subjugating female otherness and all categorizations relating to the feminine, thus upholding patriarchal structures.” The largest work in this series, Finding the Eternal in the Everyday, responds directly to that notion of subjugating female otherness.
The work was primarily painted using articles of domesticity—kitchen sponges, mesh onion bags, wooden spoons, makeup tools, whisks, and spatulas. These everyday domestic tools assigned to women for generations were reclaimed for a new purpose. Although the work contains a pleasing palette and references to Monet’s impressionism, it is more complex and multi-faceted than the initial glance would indicate. Reference to vast oceans and skies are lightly smeared with bloody marks.
Landscape of a Dream. Oil on Canvas. 60x60 inches
Landscape of a Dream offers no grounding moments at all. With no horizon lines and only imaginary forms, it becomes a dreamlike, fluid vision that, depending on what the viewer brings to the work, feels like water, atmosphere, planetary explosions, Biblical grandeur, terror, awe, science fiction, or simply weightlessness.
Distant Voices Before Sleep
Oil on Canvas 36x36 inches [SOLD]
Carl Sagan wrote: “The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home.” The elements of life on Earth were formed in the nuclear furnace of stars. When pondering the profound question of how all human life developed, as the product of nuclear fission, somewhere out in the Cosmos, one cannot help feeling insignificant in an immense uncharted “beyond.”
Voice of a Dream
Oil on Canvas 36x36 inches
Dreams, the unconscious mind, the unknown, things beyond our understanding: these are the stuff of the sublime. Philip Shaw wrote that, “…whenever experience slips out of conventional understanding, whenever the power of an object is such that words fail and points of comparison disappear, then we resort to the feeling of the sublime.” In my view it is our ability to have abstract thoughts and to experience moments that transcend the everyday, which make us human.