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.
