Art and the Female Form

Art and the Female Form

Friday 20 February 2015

Last night we played Late Bedtime Roulette to take the children out in town. We try not to do it very often, because any activity that takes place after dinner is universally unwelcome to my offspring.

Still, God loves a trier, so try we do.

There was a concert in the park, and it was also the first night of The Performance Arcade 2015 so the entire waterfront had a chilled out vibe with the lilt of music and the smell of food stalls floating on the warm evening air.

I will share some of my photos from the evening next week, but despite being singularly unqualified to talk about art, there is one piece from the Arcade which has bored into my mind and demands that I tell its story.

Viewing #2 by Kelsey Woodford is housed in a shipping container, just like all the others around it. You wait your turn and step inside to be greeted by a beautiful young lady wearing nothing but a warm smile. In her hand is a Polaroid camera and on the walls around her are photos of all the visitors she has received: Her piece is intended to reverse the role of the nude from passive viewee to active viewer and to challenge how we view nudes in art.

But Kelsey accidentally challenges another perspective with her figure and that is the the very definition of a beautiful woman.

Kelsey is the owner of a stunningly Boticelli-esque figure, which is very much at odds with the current fashion for size bugger-all hips and spindly gapped thighs. She shouldn't exude a warm confidence about her body, she should be covering up, hiding in her room crying into her salad and wishing she were thinner.

She's not; and her statement has been playing on my mind because I just couldn't shake the comparison to Boticelli's nudes.

It felt like an obvious comparison because Boticelli was an artist who courted controversy his entire career. But looking past the scandal of painting women as sexual, he also made a bold statement about beauty by painting women with curves when large swathes of the population could barely consume enough calories to stop themselves from blowing over in a stiff breeze.

How strange to realise that we have come full circle and how comforting to know that the grass has always been greener when it comes to the size of our bodies.