Yvonne Nevard

Artist

Artist Statement


Central to my practice is the fragility and monumentality of the feminine, its importance for informing an understanding of what feminism means to me, examining how female specificity contributes to the symbolic structure, dealing closely with the familial and relational experience. We are moulded by the relational contexts in which we live. The meaning of the maternal is forever at the forefront of my explorations, particularly between the conflict of maternal emotions and the need to protect and maintain one’s individual identity.


Constantly oscillating between my childhood, and the experience of bringing my own children into the world, my insecurities with both childhood and motherhood are always present and inform my life and my practice. Through a process of deconstruction and reconstruction, in the notion of the Mother, I attempt to retrace and account for the ephemeral and substantial steps lost and forgotten, recovering some of the memories of life. Using the physicality of my body and the fluidity of paint I navigate and evacuate inner journeys to the surface. Colour and marks become a language, as memories and experiences are faded or artificially embellished through my emotional translation of them. My paintings are a place where the duplicity of abstraction and figuration compete for supremacy, finding balance in their differences. Painting is the crucial medium in which I can begin to dissolve the order of language; this process becomes a significant project as regard to the feminine.


I am proposing to bring the female, familial and relational narratives, to have a dialogue with painting.


Trapped in an interminable interlude, as I continue to battle with the idea of what feminine is for me, my practice is located in this area of tangled tension. Perhaps in my notion of the feminine, we are both tender and terrible and these become for me, inseparable polarities.


My paintings are a constant exploration of this idea, and the constant flow literally, between a visceral and an intellectual. So then, why is painting a crucial medium? Because it is fluid. A fluidity over which I try to have mastery. I pitch myself up against the paint, perhaps the paint represents the ‘other’ and the touch (the paintbrush and me) take it on in small bursts of energy. How I define success seems to be half way between figuration and abstraction. As if it is, the moment when both sides have equality. In other words is it, how good am I as a painter, or is it, how good am I against the other? Or perhaps it is both. This is the process but what about the end result? If the importance is in the process, then does the aesthetic outcome matter? My belief here is that animalism combines with learnt painting skills and my psyche, and for me, the success of this triad is being able to read, what I could not know or predict until it had reached the surface.


Finding my voice and understanding my own subjectivity in society has been challenging. Knowing the torment, terror even, of speaking publically, a phobia which has developed from childhood. Painting has released this mutinous mute from some of her shackles. Transcribing the trammel, with the language of painting. Sometimes reaching back into childhood, trying to crack my personal code. I am making portraits of my psyche but my hope for the work is to convey a shared experience.


The depiction of women also represents my continued concern with engendering the positive and enduring existence of women in the world that cannot be contained in one image. I also present the role of victim and survivor to expose the complicity of one in the other. If I choose to paint women, I do so authentically, not somatically in isolation but in an honest attempt at presenting the whole woman, perhaps not in a figurative sense but more abstractly, an inner emotional reality meeting an exterior reality ‘other’, however potentially conflicted the two maybe. It is this very conflict that interests me. Does my understanding of the exterior world, match or misfire with others? How is that dependent on my gender, personality or social conditioning? Does this also translate or contribute to my own and other women’s lack of voice in society?


Watercolour may also be seen historically as having a contested status, perhaps of the domestic, bringing an oblique seductive subterfuge to the work, putting the viewer on an uncertain footing. In essence, the seduction of the surface is a lure. Beauty and the Beast lie within us, I give you both in my paintings.