‘Redaction…’

‘Redaction…’, is a series of work which responds to the set of conditions that women experience: namely the capacity we have to take up and hold space, maintain agency and maintain bodily autonomy in public spaces and through public speech.

The work has a particular material language, subject matter and colour palette, and has focused on the slow and extended experience of large-scale pencil drawing.

Exploring methods of making the works harder to ‘read’ I’ve experimented by: laying them at table-top height, making the entire image impossible to master from one view point; hanging from steel structures with light permeating their surfaces, making the image into a proto-projection, one that requires an audience to move around it to understand it.

These decisions are based on my understanding that agency, visibility and the capacity to take and hold space for women is a process of push and pull, fluid and mutable.

For this reason, I consider the idea of redaction (as a means of sanitisation and occlusion) as something that women experience in public spaces: the capacity to hold space being contingent on a perception of safety, something that changes according to time of day and presence of others (often men) who frequently police women in a numerous ways in public, making the space uncomfortable or outright dangerous. This series has been supported by a Metal residency in 2021-2022.