These nudes were painted from vintage reference photographs for artists, these artist models were photographed by Bertram Park, in a publication co-authored by Yvonne Gregory and C. Montague Ellwood in 1926. The authors of ‘Living Sculpture’ frame their work in scientific and anthropological terms, building on the reputation of art schools (particularly the Slade) for drawing from life as the foundation of good art. Touching also on neo-classical art history references, ideals of beauty, narrative and a legacy of allegorical bodies. These women are anonymous muses, adaptable to the artists purposes, photographed for convenience, and reproduced anonymously here, and in other painter’s studios, somewhere.
365 Collages
A 365 project of collages; a collage a day, every day for 2022. The work draws on classical art history, the Hollywood golden age and the studio nude. Themes of the muse, the goddess, the model and the object of the gaze interweave throughout this year-long endurance project with collages that touch on abstraction while being rooted in the traditions of the figuration.
Selected prints available
collage, posca pen and sheer vitriol
a series of collages from 2021
Vintage Hollywood golden age mixed with classical statuary, Diana the Huntress and Medusa
December 2020
Pandemic postcards, stickers on vintage postcard. Kiss-cutting is the process of cutting paper stickers in which the cutting die cuts the shape of the sticker, but leaves the backing intact. A cutting kiss might be something else. And a collagist might also be one who cuts as they kiss, or vice-versa
A collection of vintage National Gallery postcards with Sharpie created in response to the Left Overs, a question posed by the Procreate Project. What is left of the mother artist after motherhood? Here classical representations of the Mother and Child from the National Gallery collection are redacted with black marker pen. The mother, and her domestic setting, are removed leaving only the little gods. Hidden mother photographs, veils, shame and female erasure were in mind when creating this series.
Torture The Women (The China Cupid) 2013/14 is a short film composed of a series of scenes taken from Hollywood screen tests for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca.
These scenes are digitally re-drawn and re-animated, the text edited and spliced to explore the cultural and literary manipulations of woman as romantic object. The phrase ‘torture the women’ was used by Hitchcock when asked for his advice on how to make a thrilling movie; the film seeks to take and yet subvert his advice, using repetition and digital manipulation to isolate the actress and draw attention to the peculiarities of the script and by extension Du Maurier’s novel and the whole genre. The original footage was gleaned from YouTube, a digital flea-market of junk and gem imagery which blurs the distinction between big screen and the domestic scale.
Small calling card collages which form part of the everyday workings out of my practice. I enjoy the texture of vintage print, and analogue photography. The anonymised portrait, the sitter’s identity lost to posterity lends poignancy, a unanchored punctum trailing. Some of these pieces have been reversed using oil paints, so that the sitters faces away from the viewer. In others I have played with the notion of the gaze, using collage and decollage. Some of these pieces were exhibited as part of IN QUOTES, a survey of contemporary collage.
A series of collages conflating Venuses of varying antiquity.
2016
collection
postcard collages
sizes variable
A blog documenting a year long correspondence with Roland Barthes’ text, A Lover’s Discourse. Each week of 2016 I posted one new postcard collage into the virtual postbox (a tumblr blog) and pinned it, offered up for the lover’s regard. Barthes’ text dissects and discusses each element of a love affair, documenting obliquely his own love life, and exploring the literary and philosophical basis for his thoughts on each moment. The surrealist interpretations which form the body of this project were conceived to keep me making art whilst at home with a new baby, and became a key developmental step towards my current postcard and small collage practice. The art practice of a new mother is necessarily smaller, taking up less space and time; postcards as an ephemeral, low value, yet sentimental item seemed a fitting medium.
A collaborative two person exhibition with ceramic fine artist Jane Harris.
Desire & Procrastination
What’s desired in the Vita Nova associated with the Work is a particular type of time, a particular kind of daily temporality; the writer must, almost despite himself, bind himself to a time with no rough patches, no “disturbances”…indeed, what he wants—an almost mystical, paradisical desire—is a smooth time: a time with no endpoint, with no expiration date, which contains, for instance, no appointments, no “things to do” to interrupt the thing to be done… (Barthes: 2011/216)
Alex March and Jane Harris would like to invite you to consider how, when and where an artist makes work.
Using a wry reading of Roland Barthes’ The Preparation of The Novel to reflect on the process of making (or not making), Jane Harris is producing a series of over 300, (not quite identical), slip-cast porcelain pots using plaster moulds taken from Barthes’ favourite dessert, the Crème Caramel.
In a desperate attempt to get her work-shit together, before giving up on art completely and blaming her children, she has taken on a mind-numbingly dull, time-based study in porcelain, (a suitably neurotic material). Just like Barthes’ lecture course, where the outcome is the preparation itself, the process of committing time to these relentlessly awkward pots will become the event.
At the time of writing, Harris is at the ‘stuck’ phase of the project. She has no choice, but to carry on, ‘as if’ (Barthes: 20) it is all going to be ok…
Alex March’s installation presents the accumulated evidence of her sporadic making. Small and large collage and paper pieces which reflect on a practise rooted in and often disturbed by the domestic. These pieces will be brought together in the space as part of the process of installing as she goes in search of smooth time.
Collage
now available as prints
21 x 30cm
Limited Edition of 100
Giclee print on Hahnmuhle rag paper.
This Glitched Rose series of collages was completed in 2017. These collages are based on a series of photographs celebrating Dutch horticulture taken by J.F.Ch. Dix and Walter Roozen. Published after the second world war, this beautiful survey of floral treasures almost did not happen, as the photographers struggled through wartime deprivation, hunger and chaos.
In times of crisis, of grief, and difficulty, it is so often the beauty of nature which sustains us.
Experiments with large scale graphite drawings of orphaned vintage portrait photography, found photography, and sea washed beach stones, with holes.
Site specific installation for Rules of Freedom at Collier Bristow Gallery, of a three dimensional knot of collage bringing together the möbius strip and the gordian knot. The möbius is the infinite loop, a three dimensional structure with only one edge and only one side. The gordian knot is the classical unsolvable problem, a knot so complicated it could not be untangled, and could only be solved by being cut.
The collage features a repeated painted set of motifs inspired by the female icons of Golden Age Hollywood.
The Rules of Freedom?
Through my collages I aim to explore and dissect the imagery of structural patriarchy. What, why and how should a woman be, and who gets to decide?
Collage on vintage book cover
