For my presentation, I decided to research 49 year-old contemporary artist, Ruth Claxton. Claxton was born in Ipswich but lives and works in Birmingham. She got her BA Fine Art degree at Nottingham Trent University and later got her MA Sculpture degree at the Royal College of Art in London. I decided to choose Claxton for my presentation as she is often found using found and ordinary objects in her work.
‘FOUND’
‘Found’ was an exhibition that Claxton took part in, in 2015 alongside artists: Paul Chiappe, Julie Cockburn, Ellen Gallagher, Vesha Pavlovic, Erik Kessels and John Stezaker. All 7 are contemporary artists who work with found images. As in our own project, Extraordinary Object, these artists transformed, cut, embellished and reworked their objects.
They sourced their materials from elsewhere, neglecting their own personal collections, from places like the internet, flea markets and magazines. This forced the artists to connect with these pieces, making them fall into the histories and narratives of other peoples lives/strangers images. Throughout this exhibition, the artists explored themes of loss, memory, mass cultural experience, socially contructed hierarchys– race, religion and mass culture.
‘POSTCARDS’
‘Postcards’ is an ongoing project by Claxton that she started back in 2005. In this project, she has been manipulating the surfaces of postcards, similarly to her group work ‘Found’. However, in this work, she uses historical paintings as the starting point and inspiration for her work. By manipulating these objects, she is able to create a narrative of her own- seperate from the original artwork adding her own spin and creativity.
I find it so interesting how a slight cut or change in an object can warp its narrative and change it’s subject matter. For an example, neglecting the original artworks stories, the changes and additions to the pieces below could perhaps convey: two men looking for something, two men being caged/contained, a woman crying, two men perhaps crying and being tied up and a young girl looking at/reading something. The lines could also just emphasise the original story of the painting or perhaps just point out the obvious.
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