Lauren McCartney
Gallery 2
Friday 9 September - Sunday 25 September
Dressed for Desire explores the perceived guilt associated with the stillness of the female body in the domestic realm. Masses of dough, as representative of forbidden female flesh, are stuffed into vases. Expanding slowly the sensual and grotesque material secretes and leaks, disrupting the fragile vessels.
These works reflect on the absurdity that women should be anything but still during lockdown periods. Instead, we should be focusing our new βfreeβ time in isolation, not in quietness or contemplation, but working our bodies and modifying our food consumption, to not only survive but to blossom into βimprovedβ physical versions of ourselves as we do so. Drawing from representations of indulgence, excess, and the abject, the female body is framed as yet another absurd homeware in a parody of womenβs roles in heteronormative Australia.
Lauren McCartney is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works on Dharawal Country/Wollongong, New South Wales. Her work parodies objectification and conventions of appropriate female behaviour. She creates situations where the female body is playfully exaggerated to the degree that it becomes a spectacle and an object of laughter, whilst simultaneously disrupting stereotypes and myths about femininity and misbehaviour.
McCartney holds a PhD (2018) through Curtin University and a Bachelor of Creative Arts (2010) (Honours Class I) from the University of Wollongong. Her work has been collected by the Art Gallery of Western Australia. She has exhibited her work, participated in art prizes and residences, and presented on her practice both nationally and internationally.
Image: Puff, 2022, framed archival pigment print, edition of 10, 54cm x 60cm.
Image: Lauren McCartney, Bloom, 2021. Framed archival pigment print, edition of 10, 54cm x 60cm.