Daughters of Medusa | 2019 | Zebra One Gallery/Koppel Project

Mythology is full of stories of powerful and fearsome hybrid women such as the Medusa whose magical powers must be contained. She is a symbol of womanhood in itself, a representation of woman as the other. A dual image, beautiful and pure on the one side and monstrous on the other. This image is one we’ve carried with us for millennia and it continues to shape our views of womanhood. Indeed it is one reflected in Picasso’s famous statement that women are either goddesses or doormats, and it is inextricably linked with fertility, menstruation and power dynamics.

The paintings, of myself and women I know, become both personal and universal at once; reflecting the lived experience of inhabiting a woman’s body. They are inspired by a combination of mythology, as well as personal stories and experiences. The power of the female gaze, which plays such a vital part in the story of Medusa, serves as one of the main focuses for the series of paintings. Even in medieval times it was considered that the glance from a menstruating or menopausal woman had the ability to poison, even kill, speaking to the immense threat perceived not only from women’s menstrual blood, but also from female power itself, from being seen by a knowing gaze.

This body of work reflects on the creative potential present in this very primal aspect of womanhood, which still holds so much fear and shame. The mixed emotions most women in today’s society still have towards their bodies and themselves, especially on those thresholds of change during the menarche and the menopause speak of Medusa’s legacy.

The paintings celebrate the female body through the power of the female gaze. Acknowledging and challenging negative cultural conditioning around women’s bodies and menstruation, as exemplified by the enduring myth of the Medusa.

Amar / Curated interview | 2018

Q1: a) Can you tell us about your recent collection 'Dreams, Promise and the Divine Series' 

The series is inspired by the female archetype, from saints to voodoo spirits, to the goddesses of the Greek Pantheon. It’s creative exploration into the many forms these archetypes inhabit, offering a plethora of possibilities of what it means to be a woman. “Traditional” feminine traits, such as kindness, passivity and a desire to nurture do of course feature, as so do icy determination, power, cunning, and everything in between.

The starting point for this body of work was an interest in how female spirits and goddesses could serve a way of externalising and giving character to many women’s experiences, making them visible and thereby legitimising them.

These spirits, goddesses, and archetypes, felt very familiar despite being so far removed from contemporary life and seemed to be reflected in the many women I’m surrounded by. The culminating series was born from a playful interpretation of these ideas in which archetypal characters, goddesses and symbols were incorporated and reimagined with images of my contemporaries.

b) how you see your work developing from this point?   

Each series I paint is like a new branch growing from the previous one, and it’s only through the process of making and continued research that these branches form and reveal themselves to me.

One of the paintings in the Dreams Promise and the Divine series, ‘Lifeblood Venus’ opened up the path for my new body of work. It is a painting of a female nude, which features a lot of red and proved to be quite problematic for some viewers because of the colour’s connotations with menstrual blood. I’m interested in the taboo this still represents despite being a reality for half of the population, and being an integral inescapable part of fertility, something which contemporary society still places a huge emphasis on when it comes to women.

The development of this body of work starts from this taboo, looking into different mythological, religious and symbolic references to menstruation, the cyclical nature of women’s experience within their bodies and also the lack of any rights of passage for the onset of a girls menarche in contemporary western society. 

The resulting body of work ‘The Moon’s Animal’ which I’m still working on doesn’t aim to shock, but instead to explore, to celebrate and possibly help normalise conversation about this very natural part of women’s experience.  

Q2: Tell us what initially inspired your practice to focus on fantasy, beauty and identity? 

These themes are ones I’ve carried with me since childhood. Over time they have matured and evolved into my current practice. I come from a very maternal family, and have always drawn and painted women, especially mythological characters. These early fantastic, explorations into idealised female identity represent the beginnings of how the female form became the primary barer of meaning in my work; a vehicle though which to explore themes of identity, mortality, desire and a search for meaning in itself.  

 Q3: Women's rights, equality and gender are at the forefront of global attention.

What representations of womanhood are you portraying within your paintings? 

Absolutely, and I think there are a lot of interesting conversations to be had about this as our perceptions around gender are slowly changing and evolving.  I think that even seeing more art about women by women changes the view of womanhood simply through offering a broader perspective.

In Dreams, Promise and the Divine for example I look at a very classical theme, but offer a playful and contemporary take on female archetypes which hopefully invites us to question how they continue to shape our view of womanhood.  

I paint the women in my immediate surroundings. My contemporaries, my friends, fellow artists and their children; women from real life. I’m interested in capturing their unique beauty and essence whilst also exploring the overarching themes of identity, mortality and desire.

The women I’m representing in my paintings are therefore both fantastic and real.  They are representations of the feminine divine present in all women.

Q4:You've experimented with various mediums and surfaces, tell us about your unique processes and how this adds to the conceptual framework? 

I like to try out new materials and mediums, which I feel drawn to either because they add something to the ideas I’m currently working on, or end up leading the ideas through their materiality.

My paintings generally exist on a sliding scale between chaos and control, which varies from piece to piece and series to series. This relationship is deeply rooted within the concepts of my practice, and my interest in female identity and mortality; just as the young woman holds both forces of life and death within herself symbolically, these oscillating opposites of activity and passivity, chaos and control, are a vital component in the act of making art. Whilst painting, I’m often aware that as much as I have to consciously manifest a mark or an image, I also have to surrender to and accept moments of chaos, allowing ideas or images to be destroyed in order for something new to be born. Incorporating new mediums and surfaces is part of this process.

Q5: What's next? Do you have any upcoming news you would like to share?

I will be having a solo showing of my next body of work, ‘The Moon’s Animal’ at the end of October at Someth1ng Gallery, and am also very proud to be part of “Muse, Model or Mistress?,  a show I am co-curating with Gallerist Karina Phillips at Gallery Different this September. The solely female exhibition based on the question Marcel Duchamp posed to Peggy Gugenheim about the role of women in the art world, which led to her New York exhibition in 1943 : 31 Women Artists, will be held in collaboration with Flying Elephant’s production of Picasso’s Women. It comes at a time when, as you mentioned, there is a global spotlight on the role of women in society and the way in which they are portrayed and perceived.  I hope that this exhibition together the monologues will open up a discussion of how the muse’s position changes through the female rather than the male gaze.

Artwave West | 2018

A woman contemplates, averts direct gaze, she is partly in brilliant sharp focus and partly diffused in a soft dusty area of shadow; there is linear drawing of immense accuracy that can only be the result of careful consideration of a particular individual, and there is also loose gestural manipulation of the paint that has all the liberated movement of an artist perfectly in tune with expressive abstraction. The viewer senses immediately when in the presence of a painting by Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf that some profound questioning is taking place about what it is to be this woman, to live as a woman at this moment in time when self-image and the search for identity take on a particular contemporary tension.

Fontaine-Wolf is fascinated by female identity; aware on the one hand of the crushing weight of historic symbolism as it appears in depictions of the female form throughout Western art, but also very much concerned with a contemporary standpoint that has as a backdrop the mass proliferation of self-generated imagery through the technological revolution, the culture of the ‘selfie’. Here we find not only a narcissistic obsession to pursue the perfect image, the woman caught forever at the moment of ultimate beauty, but also through social media the need to project this outwards in an attempt to seek personal validation. This is why Fontaine-Wolf is interested in the tradition of the ‘Vanitas’, that theme that was so important to Dutch and Flemish painters of the 17th century, the reminder of the transience of the things of the world, the emptiness of possession; she has stated that she has become “increasingly aware of a search for meaning, not just personally, but in the people around me”

The portraits painted by Fontaine-Wolf both draw upon and question these constructs and she has developed a highly individual approach to using working methods that mirror and explore her concerns. For example, noticing that there are many ways and occasions, both in the short and the long term, in which the face might be masked, altered, changed, aged, her working process involves many different applications of paint and sometimes other material; pouring and spilling over, allowing paint to make spontaneous surfaces, bleeding, running, resisting, absorbing into the canvas in a soft matt stain, translucent glossing. Areas of raw unpainted canvas are sometimes left, suggestive of the painting in a process of becoming.

Precise figuration coexists with looser abstraction, muscular definition is set off against nuances of expression, deep softness finds its counterpart in rigid flat blocks, seemingly monochromatic colour reveals subtle tints of grey blues, pinks or lilacs, and then a shining copper colour or a strong red defies the assumption. The interplay of oppositions, of clarity and dispersion, is an intrinsic part of the process as the form repeatedly finds itself, indeed entire paintings might go through many incarnations, starting as one thing but becoming another; it is as though she wishes to take the painting itself through a cycle of life. Some paintings are reborn by a process of whiting out, white is brushed over and partly washed off, this reactivates old layers underneath; white takes on a symbolic significance, everything disappears into vacant space so that something new can emerge.

Fontaine-Wolf has been drawn to working from models who are themselves creative people, or who are mothers – some of the paintings are of mothers and children – reflecting an interest in expressing feminine creative force. There is usually a dialogue with the model, but much of the actual studio work is carried out while referring to photographs. This gives her the freedom to allow the painting to move in its own direction, to transcend the portrait likeness and express the concepts that emerge out of her own creative thinking.

Martin Goold PS , 2018

ARTWAVE WEST