In this series we chat to NewBlood artists, finding out more about their practice, what makes them tick, and what we’re looking forward to seeing from them in the future.
This week’s artist is Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf, a NewBlood Art Master, meaning she’s been with us as her career has progressed successfully over the years. Rebecca’s work has a distinct focus on the female form, working between different media to create images that draw from contemporary life whilst participating in the archetypical. Read on to hear about the liberation the artist experiences using her own image in her work, thoughts on the relation between painting and digital processes, and Rebecca’s new studio in Lisbon.
What have you been researching around for your recent work?
My recent work has been focusing on contemporary concerns with self-image and it’s digital representation. I’ve been exploring how this disparity between the physical and digital self can lead to a dissociative effect much in the same way mirror gazing can. I’ve also been continuing my research into the use of mirrors in Vanitas symbolism and Lacanian mirror theory, whilst also delving further in my interests in mysticism and the occult.
How would you describe your practice (in three words, if you like).
An interdisciplinary figurative practice exploring the human condition as seen from my own subjective female point of view.
Tell us a bit about your studio.
I am currently in a very beautiful studio space in Lisbon, called MAD AIR. (Marvila Art District artists in residence – photos attached) where I have to use 2 rooms in a beautiful historic house along with 7 other artists. I’ve only been here since September so I’m still getting properly settled in. I have started a new photo series based on the building itself. I’m finding that over the last 18 months, my practice has been directly affected and transformed by my different studios and working environments – as I have been semi-nomadic, doing several residencies. Each different space has infiltrated my practice in some form, and this current studio is no different in that.
You curate as well. Do you find these two practices, art and curating, relate to each other in any way?
Absolutely. Firstly, I tend to be invited to curate, or choose to curate works that are concerned with similar themes to the ones I explore in my own work – mainly works concerned with women’s experiences, or works by female artists. In both practices I like to create visual balance and harmony, working tonally whilst also playing with areas that jarr, or disrupt the viewing experience.
Curating allows me to see each work in a different light, and to create an immersive experience through art. I love the way that you can tell completely different stories with the same works depending on how they are placed together.
Art history icon, and/or contemporary influence?
I really adore Helen Chadwick – the elegant way she represented the female body whilst simultaneously challenging stereotypes and gender norms, creating images which are beautiful and disturbing at once. I am also incredibly inspired by the variety of her work. It can be really hard to break out of a creative routine once you’ve become known for producing certain kinds of work, so the fact she continuously innovated and renewed her practice is really encouraging and powerful to me.
You showed widely as a solo artist, such as last year at the Espaço Galeria in Lisbon, and in group shows, such as the ING Discerning Eye show at Mall Galleries, and other group shows across London, Lisbon and Bristol this year. How does your relationship to your work change when it goes on show?
I think it always changes when it enters a public sphere and is placed alongside other works, as well as being in a new context. It’s really interesting to see what role it takes on and what it means to different people. There’s a sense of removal from the work once it ‘leaves the nest’. What has been really interesting for me has been showing my photographic and video works in contexts where people have only known me as a painter.
From history, and in contemporary life, there’s no shortage of images of women. Where do you find your images of women?
Since the beginning of the pandemic my practice has become completely self-referencial. I work pretty much exclusively with self-portraiture right now. Within this I use lots of image references from art history as well as popular culture, and occult imagery. Previously I worked a lot with models, who were always women I had some kind of relationship to personally – as it’s really important for me to represent everyday women rather than women who are professional models. As well as this, it’s important to me to bring something of the sitter into the works, so the images I create become both personal and universal – referencing archetypal imagery whilst still being rooted in the real world. Therefore this personal connection is vital. When it comes to myself, I feel I can be completely free with the way I treat the image, because after all I am free to do with myself and my image as I please. There is something liberating about this artistically speaking.
You work in paint and with digital materials. How do these two mediums inform each other in your work?
The digital element has really stepped into the foreground of my work since the beginning of the pandemic, as the changing landscape of our lives and shared experiences of isolation meant that I became very aware of the disparities between my physical and digital selves. Hours spent in video calls, and online, had the effect that I felt it was necessary to reference this process in my work too. The physical and digital processes feed into each other in a cyclical manner where the work comes out of the digital sphere into the physical and back again several times, each time it loses something of it’s previous self and gains something different, until it is completely other from its original incarnation. Even when I’m working with photography, I still consider it painting in my mind, because I employ the same processes. Creating abstraction and ambiguity through the use of mirrors rather than paint. Playing with form, composition, and light. Also: always allowing for chance and accident to enter and seeing where I end up, rather than beginning with set ideas.
What’s the role of abstraction in your figurative work?
My work inhabits a liminal space between the real and the imagined, the archetypal and the everyday. Mixing Figuration with Abstraction allows me to extend the images outwards from their original state, and open up space for interpretation; space for ambiguity.
You’re a NewBlood Art Master, and it’s fair to say your career has already had longevity to it at this point. What will the next year bring for you?
Yes, I have been doing this for a long time now and I think it’s safe to say that I’m in this profession for life now. I have several personal projects coming up with my work in Lisbon with Movart as well as a two man show with a brilliant London Painter Kritian Evju, exploring our shared interest in mirrors and portals as ways of exploring the self. But I’m predominantly focusing on my work with my art collective InFems (Intersectional Femiist Art Collective) for next year where I have the role of creative producer, amongst other things. We have several shows coming up both in the UK and abroad in Ghent and Berlin where the five of us will be teaming up with local institutions, galleries, and artists to create exhibitions and events that hope to encourage women and girls from diverse backgrounds to share their stories through art, and initiate conversation about the role of intersectional feminism today.
by Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf, £760