Elizabeth MacKenzie

Interpreting faces

elizabethmackenzie — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 02:28:11 +0000

“If through faces we interpret others, than these interpretations are not precise. Rather they inhabit a world of the preconscious, which we are aware of and act on, but find difficult to describe.”

–About Face by Jonathan Cole

Finding Parameters

elizabethmackenzie — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:00:59 +0000

It’s important to develop parameters to help shape the development of a project. Although the parameters always change during the process it’s useful to have a plan from which to proceed. Without a plan I can easily become overwhelmed by the number of possibilities.

Although the subject of this new project is already determined (I will draw the faces of the eight people involved) I’m struggling to develop parameters that reflect the nature of our relations. The materials, technique, scale and arrangement of the drawings will affect how the images produce meaning. The decisions I make at this stage of the process help me maintain the momentum needed to continue.

Prevarication

elizabethmackenzie — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:49:08 +0000

I experience a certain tension when I draw a face. While I am moved to represent its features and unique characteristics, I am also interested in the non-specific aspects of the face. Humans have an inherent willingness to see and imagine faces, even where none exist. How far can a face be abstracted and still remain a face? Drawing provides endless possibilities for prevarication.

Self portraits

elizabethmackenzie — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:36:32 +0000

Over the past ten years I’ve produced numerous drawing projects depicting faces. This is an ongoing investigation. Each project accumulates over an extended period of time and involves multiple representations of a single face. As I’ve noted elsewhere in this blog, these multiple drawings reject the idea of a portrait as a fixed, singular image. They represent portraiture as an ambiguous, shifting field of interaction and interpretation, that explores the relationship between the self and other, as well as the selves within the self.

Through the process of repetition and accumulation, as well as the vagaries of the process and materials used, the faces shift and transform in ways that are both engaging and repulsive, monstrous and transcendent. These transformations imply the changes that occur within lived experience, as well as the externalization of psychic projections.

I’ve produced a number of self-portrait projects over the years and each time I’m conscious that these images simultaneously reveal and conceal my identity. I’ve used one of these drawings to represent myself on my “About me” page, for instance. This evasion acknowledges the problematics of being both the subject and the object of an artwork. As Marsha Meskimmon writes in The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century, “‘Woman’ has been the object of art for centuries, while women have remained marginalised as producers. To act in both roles, simultaneously, is to stage a crucial intervention.”

Relational autonomy

elizabethmackenzie — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:03:21 +0000

Theories of relational autonomy* suggest that autonomy is fundamentally dependent on social relations. Our development as individuals is predicated on our dependence and/or interaction with others. It’s impossible to develop a sense of self outside of social relations.

These drawings will result in an installation that acknowledges the development of a self that is constituted in and through social practices and exchange.

* For an in-depth discussion of this concept see: Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self, edited by Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar. New York + Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Assymetrical Reciprocity

elizabethmackenzie — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:51:37 +0000

The collegial exchange I’m engaged within has been a fruitful space for me to consider assymetrical reciprocity, a concept described by philosopher Iris Marion Young in her essay of the same name:

Thus the ethical relation of asymmetrical reciprocity looks like this. We meet and communicate. We mutually recognize one another and aim to understand one another. Each is open to such understanding by recognizing our asymmetry. A condition of our communication is that we acknowledge the difference, interval, that others drag behind them shadows and histories, scars and traces, that do not become present in our communication. Thus we each must be open to learning about the other person’s perspective, since we cannot take the other person’s standpoint and imagine that perspective as our own. This implies that we have the moral humility to acknowledge that even though there may be much I do understand about the other person’s perspective through her communication to me and through the constructions we have made common between us, there is always a remainder, much that I do not understand about the other person’s experience and perspective

A consideration of the concept of asymmetric ethical relationships is important for artists developing projects with other people. Our interactions with others cannot be based on the belief that we know what that other person is thinking and feeling. If we imagine ourselves capable of speaking for someone else we are bound to fail.

Virtue + terror

elizabethmackenzie — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:13:22 +0000

In motherhood I have experienced myself as both more virtuous and terrible, and more implicated too in the world’s virtue and terror, than I would from the anonymity of childlessness have thought possible.

—Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother

I resent the pervasive sentimentality often associated with babies and their care. It may the most difficult work I’ve undertaken in my life. The daily minutiae of caring for a baby forcibly reiterates both the power and powerlessness experienced within the maternal role. Elsewhere in her remarkable book Rachel Cusk writes, “…motherhood is a career in conformity from which no amount of subterfuge can liberate the soul without violence.”

Collegial exchange

elizabethmackenzie — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:00:10 +0000

As mentioned in my previous post, my newest project will explore relations between individuals connected through the exchange of ideas, rather than kinship. Although these kinds of exchanges are provisional and impermanent the connections created within them have lasting impact.

For the past two years I have been involved with a group of cultural producers—curators and artists—who have been meeting regularly to develop a residency/exhibition project. The group is predicated on a speculative model of exchange and dialogue over a sustained period of time.

Before the exhibition I will produce of a series of drawings of each of the eight members of this group, similar to those produced for the Family (Yoon) project. These will be drawn with brush and ink on rice paper. My installation will acknowledge (and represent) the relatedness and differentiation experienced within this type of collegial exchange. The images here represent a group of new drawings, based on one of my colleague’s faces.

Proximity + engagement

elizabethmackenzie — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 22:18:26 +0000

As one person responds to another (or to the Other in oneself), each party becomes the expressive medium for the other’s self-understanding.
—Marlene Dumas

I’m beginning a new series of drawings, representing the faces of a group of women with whom I’ve been developing an exhibition, that will take place this spring. Our project is based on the idea of exchange and reciprocity within the production of art, over an extended period of time. Each of the participants is developing a project that allows for interaction and transformation. We will produce a series of autonomous projects within a shared relational context.

I’m starting from a place of familiarity—drawing each of the participants’ faces a number of times—but I am ready to see where the process of exchange takes me.

A baby’s face

elizabethmackenzie — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:58:00 +0000

When I can’t get to my studio I work in notebooks I have at home (or take with me when I travel). Each of the notebooks contains a different series of drawings (usually done in watercolour).

These drawings are from a recent series of a baby’s face (still in progress). As I’ve discussed elsewhere in this blog, a baby’s face is a peculiar subject within portraiture. Portraits usually attempt to capture the enduring character of the subject. A baby’s face expresses that which is mutable and transitory.