Tag Archives: Roberta McGrath

Alison Watt: Hiding in Full View

24 November 2011 at 6pm

Hiding in Full View is a new series of paintings by Alison Watt in which she has been looking at the work of the American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-98), taking indirect inspiration from the almost hypnotic imagery of Woodman’s intense and dreamlike tableaux.

In the spring of last year Alison Watt was commissioned by the Uffizi Gallery in Florence to make a work for their celebrated collection of self-portraits by women artists. This was an unusual commission, not least because it came nearly 15 years after Watt had last painted the human figure. Since relinquishing the figure in 1997, she has edged towards abstraction, painting swathes of fabric suggestive of both a human presence and absence. During her time spent at the Uffizi Gallery, Watt found herself looking closely at the photographs of Woodman, fascinated by the way that she used the object in her self portraits and how the two elements of self and object often merge.

If it was possible to create a painting that was difficult to identify and at the same time incredibly intimate, that was what I wanted to do  – Alison Watt

Joining us in discussion will be Roberta McGrath who is Associate Lecturer in Photographic Theory and Criticism at Edinburgh Napier University. Roberta has published widely on the theory of the image and questions of representation, and has published “Seeing Her Sex: Medical Archives and the Female Body” (Manchester University Press, 2002) which focuses on issues of sexed subjectivity through visual representations of the reproductive female body made between 1750-1910.

Francesca Woodman

28 May 2009 at 6pm

Francesca Woodman has become one of the most talked about, most studied and most influential of late twentieth-century photographers. She started taking photographs when she was barely thirteen, and in less than a decade, created a body of work that has now secured her a reputation as one of the most original American artists of the 1970s.

The figure of Woodman herself appears frequently in these exquisitely odd and unsettling photographs. In some of her photographs, her body seems to blend into the surroundings – caught in a state of metamorphosis – she is not quite here, nor quite there. In other images, she uses a variety of props to create strange and dreamlike tableaux, tinted with uncertainty, melancholy, and a sense of ethereal timelessness. Woodman committed suicide at the age of just 22, but in her brief yet extraordinary career, she created an enduring body of photographic work that continues to fascinate and influence today.

Joining us to examine this exhibition of silver gelatin prints is Florence Ingleby and Roberta McGrath. Florence Ingleby is Director of Ingleby Gallery and Roberta McGrath is Associate Lecturer in Photographic Theory and Criticism at Napier University, Edinburgh.