Thelma van Rensburg

My work is grounded in a 'feminist aesthetic of embodiment' were I aim to present the female body in a way that will elevate it to a place of power and becoming. The formal qualities of my work therefore include a reliance on strategies associated with feminist modes of production such as the engagement with the tactility of the painting medium, layering, subversion and fragmentation. I am, like the artist Leora Farber, particularly interested in representing the female body as 'a site of rupture and transgression of the patriarchal order' through the utilisation of the grotesque. My creative methods include fashion magazines (containing idealised images of women as source material) and the dripping and manipulation of ink on paper. Akin to Marlene Dumas and Penny Siopis, I work with the immediacy of the flowing properties of ink. I spontaneously react to what happens on the paper at the moment of execution. My goal is to let the figure become what it wants to be, thus following my conceptual goal of elevating female self-representation as a natural flow of power and becoming.