Diving Queens: Portraits of Resilience
Phoenix Art Space, Brighton
5 to 27 April 2025
The gloves are off, or rather on. Diver’s helmets too, plus rigid ruffs and helmet-like attire from Elizabethan and Flemish portraiture. In this impactful exhibition by June Nelson the viewer will most certainly sense the presence of an implied wittiness and sense of humour conjoined in a serious and profound range of imagery.
The dramatis personae are unidentifiable as they are everywoman and, I surmise, the artist herself. It’s a clearly contemporary collection of works too, that take in historical references for the present day. What makes the choice of imagery for this exhibition at the Phoenix Art Space so pertinent for today are not only the almost cartoonish and comical images that might (but do not) undermine a serious visual discussion, but also forms a presentation of evidence of a dynamic and self-questioning undertaking aligning a feminist perspective with images to match. These portraits of resilience proclaim a contemporary voice operating from the painting studio, rather than from some alternative social media pulpit. Punches are not pulled.
Aligned to a notion of portraiture, that is in fact far from trite or superficial, the works create, with narrative devices such as gestures, gender related costume and the blank gaze, a stage on which to enlighten the viewer. In these sixteen paintings, Nelson holds back from presenting too much detail and is being cleverly and purposely simplistic in not overworking the visual language or the immediately readable content. There’s something here about proclaiming painting as relevant as any other medium too, with a feeling for the materiality of this colourful but sometimes crude substance that is what it is – just as any implied narrative is presented with a rawness of self-awareness and realisation through the crucial activity of painting. Paint, and painting, offers itself up as alchemical process, turning emotion, anger, thoughts and feelings (personal, social and, maybe, familial) into a positive, dynamic realisation and outcome.
In a statement on her website, Nelson has stated:
“I am fuelled by an interest in female agency and our sense of self, using history, mythology, and personal memories to stand witness to often hidden or silenced lives, particularly those of women.”
With this declaration in mind, I therefore assume that there is both a rallying cry, aimed at female observers who share a common sense of unfair, ingrained prejudices in society, alongside a wake up message to the male audience. This could be challenging subject matter for someone like me (a male, liberal, Late-Boomer) who likes to think that he is liberated from gender-based prejudices, when in fact he knows that he still has a lot to learn and to understand. Nelson therefore imposes, via engaging imagery and painterly expertise, a perspective and a position that should not be ignored or discounted.
The artist further explains that:
“Recent paintings… continue to explore the same themes and motifs – seeing and silencing, suppression and repression. In a union of the personal and the historical, paintings portray women wearing deep-sea diving helmets, ruffs or boxing gloves. Often taking Tudor portraits or medieval ‘Doom” paintings as a starting point, uncanny faces gaze out at or hide from the viewer. As a modern woman looking back along the matriarchal line, not much has changed.”
This is certainly an absorbing theme and the exhibition, which initially invites a stroll from one end to the other in the corridor-type viewing space, has enough range to encourage looking at individual works as well as carefully selected groupings of pairings or threesomes. This display policy creates a healthy sense of the artworks as an ongoing project, with further possibilities for all sorts of juxtapositions or giving individual paintings their own space. There is both a sense of self and of belonging to a community offered up in this project. With similarities in content, such as entrapment, silencing, battling against the odds, and understandable frustration with progressive developments in ‘modern’ society changing so slowly, there is yet the sense of a series growing quite organically rather than as a too forcefully premeditated or programmatic endeavour. On a more individualistic level for the painter herself, I sensed that there is a form of self-revelation through the practice of being a visual artist, expanding and advancing a challenging discipline, which might always be on the verge of failure. I mean this in a positive context, as both an exploration into conditions of identity and as a necessary condition of painting.
There is also a sense of the work-in-progress, as the artist engages in a creative studio-bound journey that is open to trial and error and who refuses to fall into the trap of producing some colourful decoration for the living-room wall. This, I hope, is the kind of project that makes the viewer stop and think, to be unsure, and even to be left feeling a little uncomfortable – particularly if the image initially looks somewhat humorous. For example, as in ‘Red Gloves’ that reveals a naked woman, not conventionally delivered for the male gaze, but almost as a take on a crucifixion of sorts. The outstretched arms, with red bulbous, stump-like ends representing boxing gloves, rather than blood, has a potentially defeated feel to it, but, ironically proclaims a rising strength of character.
I also felt (but could be totally wrong) a measure of sadness and loss. This unexpected reaction initially emerged from a very small work, ‘Helping Hands’. This was not so much from the caring yellow hands that cradle either side of the outside of the diving helmet, but there is something about the paint application and the gently applied, painterly wash of blues and greys, with perhaps three horizontal strokes of the brush blanking out the eyes, that implied a melancholic theme. A greenish oval floats beneath the helmet like a brooch, a medal or a heart. There is enough scope here for the viewer to bring his or her own interpretation to a subtle yet robust image.
Above this small work was a more immediate kind of message, a hand gesture implying secrecy or suppression, conveyed in ‘In Silence Sealed’. This striking portrait brought to mind the anonymous imagery of a nun from a silent order, with an almost halo-like disc that hid the face of the unaccredited portrait. Yet the icon-like image was not so much religious in a denominational sense, but more universal and quietly empowering, representing a vow of collective, female, knowingness. These are paintings well worth taking time out to see and to allow the imagery to enter one’s own thought-space. To prompt recollection of the roles, say, that our historical (and/or family) predecessors played, or that our contemporaries in society undertake today. Nelson’s characters form a sort of Commedia dell’arte for the past, the present and the future. But any implied comedic element is wittily and unambiguously turned into serious content. The female viewer is both in the ring and in the audience.
LINKS:
Ruminations: Exhibition Reviews 