Iness Rychlik is a Polish-born artist based in the UK. Rychlik uses her skin condition to imprint patterns/writing/drawings into her skin for her photography. Her art is centred around self-portraits which explore themes of pain, solitude, and vulnerability. Alongside her photographic practice Rychlik has also directed several short films.
For my “Response to Persona” project I chose to focus on the main scene that makes you question whether Elisabeth and Alma are different people or the same person. The repeated speech they each give about the restraints and expectations of motherhood and “motherness” as well as the splitting image of their faces together are what stuck with me most from the film. I decided to focus on the “split face” moment in Persona - but instead of splitting the image down the middle I decided to combination print the portraits over each other to create a sort of “hybrid face”.
The photos are lined up to merge towards the middle 50/50 split of their faces, moving from a seperate portrait, to the other individual entering the frame, to a 75/25 split portrait, and finally the halfway split of their faces (and then back again in reverse for the other model). I also contrasted my models by having one wear white and the other black, white the white-based model posed against a dark background and the black-based model posed against a light background.
Here is the speech from the movie that I am referring to, as although it didn’t directly influence this work I think there is a lot that I may potentially pull from it in my work later on:
A party, wasn't it? It was late and rather noisy. In the early hours, someone said to you… "Elisabet, you have everything as a woman and as an artist...but you lack motherliness…”
“You laughed because you thought it was ridiculous...but you couldn't stop thinking about what he had said. You grew more worried... so you let your husband make you pregnant. You wanted to be a mother. When you knew it was definite, you became afraid... afraid of responsibility, afraid of being tied down, afraid to leave the theater... afraid of pain, afraid of dying, afraid of your swelling body. But all the time you acted, played the part of the happy expectant mother. And everybody said, "She has never been this beautiful." You tried several times to get rid of the fetus. But you failed. When you knew it was inevitable you started to hate the child...and wished it would be stillborn. You wished that the baby would be dead. You wanted a dead child. It was a long and difficult delivery. You suffered for days. The baby was delivered with forceps. You looked with disgust at your screaming child and whispered, "Can't you die soon? Can't you die?" The boy screamed day and night, and you hated him. You were afraid. You felt guilty. In the end, relatives and a nanny took care of the boy... and you could leave your sickbed and return to the theater. But the suffering was not over. The boy was seized by a massive and unfathomable love for his mother. You resisted desperately because you felt that you could not return it. You try and try...but the meetings with him are cruel and awkward. You can't do it. You're cold and indifferent. And he looks at you. He loves you, and he's soft, and you want to hit him for not leaving you alone. You think he's repulsive, with his thick lips and ugly body and his moist and pleading eyes. You think he's repulsive, and you're afraid. No. I'm not like you. I don't feel the same as you.”
-the photos were taken with my 35mm camera (Fujica St-801) with Kodak 400TX film. I took them in the lightroom using studio lights and my camera’s flash.
Exhibition (past): https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/feminist-avant-garde
-this exhibition consisted of 48 artists (including names such as Martha Rosler and Francesca Woodman) and over 150 works from the Verbund collection, which is responsible for this international touring of said body of work. Lesser-known artists included in the show include the poet, actress, and performance artists Katalin Ladik and the Austrian artist Birgitta Jürgenssen.
This “exhibition highlights groundbreaking practices that shaped the feminist art movement and provides a timely reminder of the wide impact of a generation of artists.” The art exhibited as part of Feminist Avante-garde of the 1970s: Works from the Verbund collection consisted of photographs, performances, video art, and collage, and “reflects a moment during which practices of emancipation, gender equality, and civil rights protest movements became part of public discourse. [The exhibition] operates across public and personal realms - as well as used [the artists body] as central motifs - [through which] these artists sought to address broad political issues and confront patriarchy and sexism in art. In doing so they created new, positively assertive female identities.”
The publication:https://www.amazon.ca/Feminist-Avant-Garde-Sammlung-Verbund-Collection/dp/3791354469
-The art present in this book is “provocative, radical, poetic, ironic, angry, cynical, and heartfelt.”
For my photo book/final project I want to focus on the transitional space between girlhood and womanhood by exploring but also intersecting traditionally contrasting themes such as innocence and sexuality. The project will employ my own feminist perspective on sexualization of young girls through worryingly youthful beauty trends amongst women. The book in a way will pull from and challenge themes of the lolita (for example, Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita and the (far more troubling) film adaption and various book covers.. while using a rather “coquette” aesthetic in the books execution - that being hyper-feminine. I think this said space itself between girlhood and womanhood can be extremely uncomfortable and unsure, but is something that obviously a number of go through (not exclusive of course to cis-gender individuals).
The book itself will be more of a collage work of sorts, with lots of inclusions other than traditional print styles, such as photograms, scans of writing, and maybe even painting/drawing. In short, there will be a contrast between the innocence of girlhood and self-empowerment in one’s sexuality as a woman. I think that this contrast may be difficult to pull off correctly (that is without leaning into something that unintentionally may come off as exploitative), but I think it will be a really interesting challenge and is something I am very interesting in exploring. The girl and the grown woman coexist inside of many of us.
Photographers that I will be referencing:
Karin Mack
- The feminist avant-garde of the 1970s
-Austrian post-war artist
-First explored woman’s role as housewife, then moved to work more centered around her own feelings as a woman.
“I grew up in a period in which the glue of suburbia was denial. It maintained the culture, the mentality, the outer face. I didn’t accept the myths that families tell themselves and present to the world. I saw very early that my experience could be negated. That I never said that, I never did that, that never happened. I needed to get away.
I took the pictures in this book so that nostalgia could never color my past. I wanted to make a record of my life that nobody could revise: not a safe, clean version, but instead, an account of what things really looked like and felt like and smelled like. I don’t think I could, at this age and in this body now, live the life that I lived then. It took a certain level of fearlessness, a wildness, quick changes—of clothes, of friends, of lovers, of cities.
When I wonder what people are talking about when they say that the Ballad helped them, I guess that it showed young people there was another way to live, that they didn’t have to swallow the version of the norm that hurt them, that they didn’t feel part of, that was destroying them. The book gave a mirror to kids who had no reflection of themselves in the world around them. They knew that they weren’t alone.”
-Nan Goldin
