Julie Bartholomew Transitional Bodies Digital/object installation, wooden bench, four life-size ceramic figures, 2006
Purchased 2006 with the assistance of Arts Victoria Regional Galleries Collection Fund, Shepparton Art Gallery
So white! One-off clay prototypes of sculptured female forms make up most of the ceramic components in Julie Bartholomew's recent exhibition, Transitional Bodies at Shepparton Art Gallery. Composed as still-life settings or installations, each work is masterfully crafted. It is difficult not to be impressed at the realism with which each piece has been rendered, revealing textured body surfaces, wrinkles, creases and folds. Although modelled directly from human casts, each object conveys an aura of femininity as ‘perfect porcelain white, fragile and rarefied'(Lacy, 2007). In displays that are reminiscent of alluring department store counters, enigmatic forms are anchored only by their shadows against whitened shelves, tabletops, and walls of the gallery.
Although the exhibition space is roomy, almost sparse, several blown-up photographic posters and a billboard-sized digital installation component featuring four life-sized figures ‘cast' a sense of intrigue.
Over recent years, Julie Bartholomew has produced a number of exquisitely sculptured works using white porcelain. Art works, some cast directly from moulds, others quite large scale, that refer to the human interface between communication technologies and materiality. As extensions of ‘real' lives, human body imprints dent the side of a telephone, a stylus on a gramophone turns into an index finger, or a finger morphs menacingly into sharpened tool, also revealing Bartholomew's fascination with the haptic and sometimes morbidly visceral aspects of the imagination.
Undertaking a Doctorate at Sydney University , she was initially concerned with altered female bodies/selves emerging from a body/technology interface. As stated in her thesis, her focus has shifted to visual media technology, specifically the world of advertising and marketing. Living in Japan for three months in 2004, her current studio practice and research has developed in response to her observations and experiences of Tokyo, arguably the world's most media saturated city. While all of the exhibits in Transitional Bodies draw upon a mimetic relation to the subject, the representation of the female body stresses transitory rather than fixed perceptions of self or identity.
Borrowing directly from department store counter or window displays, the series ‘Rapt', presents six female body limbs who are literally and metaphorically ‘wrapt', as in a state of ecstasy, the ‘animated body parts are like mannequins in a state of permanent rapture'. (Lacy, 2007) Although resembling the sleekness presented in mannequined displays, on closer view, the impression left of imperfections in hands and feet and wrinkled skin recalls the corporeal rather than ideal body.
Despite the alluring nature of white porcelain, a much more sinister seduction is at play. The first real clue is with two works entitled ‘Illuminating Beauty 1' and ‘Illuminating Beauty 11'. Revealing a hidden discourse surrounding cosmetic surgery and recalling the precision arrangement of surgical instruments, clay implements are elegantly placed into a bed of ‘flesh' pink silicon rubber. Despite a translucent warm glow, which emanates from a light box within, the beauty of each piece is diminished as associations of cut and remodelled abject skin, flesh and bone are evoked.
Bartholomew's interest in body modification through surgical manipulation, critiques marketing claims that women's bodies are remodelled ‘to look more ‘natural' rather than to conform to particular cultural beauty ideals. Supporting medical spin, women's magazines are highly complicit in promoting cosmetic surgery to transform or assert one's sense of self.
Also recalling the exclusive cosmetic counter, compacted into three sets of elegantly shaped bottles, fragmented body parts are squeezed and twisted tightly together in the series called ‘Product'. Despite the grace and symmetry of the exterior bottles the sectioned female body parts inside are anything but elegant. Even more vividly the ‘I am' series appears almost as a pastiche: ‘I am Manolo; I am Louis Vuitton; I am Coco' feature high fashion, high-heeled shoes and boots that morph horribly into mangled, distorted feet.
This satirising of elite branding linked to particular designer labels such as Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel are almost scary in the series titled ‘Markings'. Here Bartholomew takes the well-known folkloric phrase of beauty being merely ‘skin deep' quite literally. Merging emptied out hand and arm casts with leather gloves, rather repulsive images of high fashion are conveyed by ‘utilisising the morphing possibilities of clay' to its limit: there is a dark and even macabre sense of ‘intermingling of flesh' and designer fashion as logos are incised directly onto human wrists.
Fuelled by global fashion industries that are premised upon fetishist impulses, new packaged identities emerge of feminine ideals where the imaging of bodies/selves can be considered is a site of continual struggle. In her analysis of Bartholomew's work, Laura Mc Ewan in her review of exhibition ‘Rapt and Branded' suggests that a form of ‘culture jamming' confronts the viewer. Both enticing and confronting us with the allure of elite handcrafted objects, Bartholomew disrupts the ‘insatiable commodity fetishism' of brand name products by revealing a distorted and branded self or body. (Mc Ewan, 2007, p.16) This sense of disruption is complemented by elements of subversion.
According to ‘Transitional Bodies' curator Kirsten Paisley (nee Lacy, ‘A deliberate conflict operates in Bartholomew's work which enables her to identify the female body as both complicit and passive, and also unengaged and dissident.' (Lacy, 2007) The centrepiece of the exhibition is the component entitled, ‘Transitional Bodies'. (recently acquired by Shepparton Art Gallery ) This installation locates the liminal spaces of image-based advertising, by locating fissures in the cultural skin of the feminine. On first impression the full body casts of four seated women appear as replicants; white, nude, eyes shut. A moving sequence of digital images projected onto the bodies of the women and the wall behind infer train travel. In transit, initially, their individual differences are overridden by the ‘whiteness' they share. The viewer needs to spend time with each of them to separate or ‘unwrap' each figure as distinct, according to their body size and shape, pose and poise, creases and folds of skin. Being white and nude they appear vulnerable to images of perfect feminine ‘whiteness', which flow, from the digital screen projection. In contrast to the advertisements for skin whitening products and the refinement of facial forms, photo-images of real women disrupt the seamless flow.
Formulated upon recent postmodernist versions of Orientalism, where Japan can be seen as a ‘figure of dehumanised technological power' Mc Ewan questions politicised representations of Japanese culture by contemporary western artists. However, while Bartholomew's work acknowledges the manufacturing of commodity fetishism, she stresses the importance of difference and dissonance arising from within. ‘Despite an individual right to attain their own notion of beauty in order to feel satisfied with a sense of self', (Bartholomew, p.160) acts of consumption by Japanese women override cultural specificities to conform to Caucasian standards of beauty.
On one wall a very large poster sized advertising image of Eurasian beauty, entitled the ‘Everyday White Face', represents the proliferation and omnipresence of magazine advertisements. Opposite this on the far wall is the juxtaposed photo-image of Toyama. Emanating from the Harajuku subculture, which emerged in the mid-1990's, ‘Toyama 2005', is a fully stylised gothic-like street figure. Wearing a leather-buckled neck brace, punkish hair and theatrical make-up she is wrapped in a traditional black kimono. Also emerging from the fringes of society ‘Lisa 2005' demonstrates ‘experimentation with body change practices', such as tattooing and scaring ‘as a way of expressing self and autonomy'… ‘amongst aspects of Tokyo 's youth'. (Lacy, 2007) A poster of a very complicit ‘Barbie 2005' forms another juxtaposed image of the feminine.
Where ‘white skin' acts as a metaphor for the dominant Western ideologies, Bartholomew's body of work presents us not with an alienated disengaged ‘other' but inadvertently, with a globalised culture that ‘reflects' the West. Transitional Bodies is ‘our' mirror image. This is witnessed in the body castings and photographs taken of ordinary and extraordinary Tokyo women who present us with ruptures in the cultural skin of consumer capital. Representative of the diversity and dissidence from within, the stylised faces and theatrical garb of Toyama and Barbie are almost a parody of the West.
Bartholomew presents her art practice as a critique of commodification culture but also an affirmation of ‘a desire to express difference and diversity' (Bartholomew p.161). Just as the pervasiveness and conformity entrenched in global consumer culture seems to completely overwhelm the corporeal body/self reveal transitions emerging from within.
References
Julie Bartholomew, unpublished Doctoral thesis, Chapter 5, Studio Practice: Rapt and Branded.
Mc Ewan, Laura, Semiotic robin hoodism: the work of Julie Bartholomew , The Journal of Australian Ceramics, April 2007, pp. 16-20.
Kirsten Paisley (nee Lacy), Transitional Bodies , exhibition catalogue, Shepparton Art Gallery , April 2007.
