I used to be a painter said the photographer to the computer

Back in the olden days there was painter called Jo Howell who fell in love with photography. Mixed media and hidden messages galore. She became the only photographer in 2009 to present paintings as her final major project.

Cut out and keep, mixed media on canvas, 2009

Most people who are doing a degree in Photography, Video and Digital Imaging don’t present a series of paintings as their final major project. I am not most people. A lot of the time I am one foot in the real world and one foot in nonsense. Being contrary is a way of life.

The art was an attempt at exploring positive female influences at the time being hidden by overtly sexual stereotypes of women. They are there. Poking their faces through the stencilled image of boobies desperately trying to show that womanhood is more than sexual objectification.

In this stencil Norma Jean, Marilyn Monroe, was under 18. She was desperately trying to escape her custodian who was abusive. She was one of the first culturally acceptable pin-up women.

I had grown up in the 90s with the overly sexualised ladette and girl power movements. There was no hiding from boobs in the 90s. They were everywhere! Baywatch, page 3, zoo, Melinda Messenger and so on. It was a bizarre decade, as I guess they always are.

These type of works are conceptually pretty poor but they were fun to create. The images in the background are from 3 months of trawling newspapers for positive female stories. There really weren’t that many! Hence the 3 months.

Stealing from Richard Prince I reframed and photographed the articles I found. This was useful two fold:

It totally gets around copyright laws because the photographs are my images in the real world. Decisions like including text in the frame and the angle ensure that this is my view and not just a flat copy.
It made my favourite ones infinitely reproducible and I could make them different sizes. This allowed me to mess around with scale and make several versions of each painting.

I sold most of these to be fair. They combined photography, research, collage, spray paint, handmade stencils, tiny scissors and parcel string. They were created in layers starting with the collage. I quite liked the texture of the creases in my collage layer because by the time I got to my spray paint layers they looked pretty dramatic.

I added sequins, feathers and small things for texture.

Making art in this methodical systematic way has always appealed to me. I want and have always wanted people to help me create my art. This way of working allowed me to employ friends in exchange for wine and laughs to help me fill huge canvases.

Work imbued with fun and friendship. Lovely.

What was particularly funny was that when my mam saw this canvas she asked if it was me in the background! I was like, Sweet Jeebus! No! That’s cheap porn!

For example the above canvas was quite big and this was early on when I was figuring out the process. I went to the shop across the road and bought some housewife porn. Just a newsagent across the road and several bottles of wine. I’m sure he thought we were doing something tremendously filthy but we were getting drunk and putting papier-maché porn onto the canvas.

It was really silly and fun. I decided not to use the housewife porn in the end. The paper was too shiny and we were just ripping up the magazines. No actual photography involved.

I had to change this up dramatically to try to present it as photography. Honestly, I was such a contrary jerk.