Contemporary Australia: Women

65 Brisbane-based artist Kirsty Bruce creates large-scale installations of figures plucked straight from the pages of women’s fashion magazines. Floating on a sea of white gallery wall, Bruce’s painstakingly recreated subjects are presented en masse. A deep sense of ambivalence pervades the work on every level, beginning with the artist’s love/hate relationship with her source material. This continues throughout her technique, which refuses to be defined neatly as illustration, and, instead, reimagines fashion photography as installation through drawing and watercolour. At every turn, Bruce’s engagement with process and subject matter darts from quiet introspection to collective concern, allowing the viewer to approach the material from both viewpoints. Each time she installs her work anew, Bruce uses her subjects’ sightlines and surrounding space to create a work that draws the audience into a fantasy-fuelled world of endless narrative possibilities. Bruce admits to compulsively collecting fashion magazines. She began collecting as a teen, neatly cutting out images for pleasure and putting them in a box. Upon arriving at art school she began to unpack them. Fashion provides a constant avenue for both constructing and deconstructing ideas of femininity and its representation; however, there is little visible malice in the way Bruce uses this imagery: I find fashion photography interesting, I am naturally attracted to the production quality of the photographs, their formal qualities and their chimerical sensory appearance. However, the fashionable clothes are not the reason why I choose my images . . . Above all, I am attracted to a certain sense of vulnerability, melancholy, dramatic tension, atmosphere and introspection. Most importantly, on one level or another, I can relate personally to each selected image and elements of myself are imprinted in each one. 1 While she describes her image selection as being based on her ability to relate to it ‘on some level’, Bruce has an obvious predilection to working with loaded subject matter. In one image, a model with a tiara atop tousled hair wears black nails and a look of disinterest. Another young woman lazes side-saddle across a velveteen armchair — she’s beautiful and bored, her black and white ensemble is chicness and entitlement embodied. Bruce recognises the artificial perfection marketed by magazines as being ‘unrealistic and unattainable’ but her ongoing desire to find escape in her process drives her to continually mine this material. 2 In the catalogue Feminism Never Happened (2010), produced to accompany the exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Robert Leonard provides an apt diagnosis for the viewer’s position in relation to Bruce’s work: ‘she refrains from analysis or critique. She leaves that for the viewer who, paradoxically, becomes interested in precisely what it seems the artist overlooked.’ 3 The laborious perfection in which Bruce recreates these images draws her audience in to inspect the fine detail of each figure. Bruce fastidiously cuts out each photographic image and skilfully replicates it: first drawing it in lead pencil then filling in with acrylic paint and creating form with the use of watercolour pencils. Christine Morrow, the curator of the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art’s 2009 ‘I Walk the Line’ drawing exhibition, in which Bruce was included, claims that the medium of drawing is currently enjoying a state of vitality. Morrow locates the impetus for this trend as a shift away from photography as the dominant means for exploring representation, which was prevalent in the 1980s. 4 Negotiating or blurring lines between these mediums and their uses, Bruce addresses the representation of women — and the effect magazines have had in shaping this — by drawing photographs. This calls upon our constant exposure to photography, as well as drawing’s association with illustration and storytelling, to elicit a sense of personal familiarity and cue closer examination. Feminist art historians have long noted the historical relationship between art made by women and the domestic or private sphere, with which drawing and watercolours are frequently aligned. In her 1988 essay ‘Modernity and the spaces of femininity’, Griselda Pollock Kirsty Bruce Australia b.1973 Untitled (detail) 2010–11 Synthetic polymer paint and watercolour on paper 55 sheets ranging from 14.6cm x 7cm to 39.5 x 27cm Installed dimensions variable Kirsty Bruce Kirsty Bruce Cut and paste