Art Notes from Down Under
By Robyn Hunt
New Zealand Artists: Intimate Encounters
Positive photographic images of disabled people are hard to find, so I was really pleased to discover the photos of Bellinda Mason-Lovering, an Australian artist.
She has created a rare, highly emotive series of photo essays called Intimate Encounters. Each essay takes the viewer through a journey that confronts thoughts and feelings often dismissed and denied. The essays include a range of often socially taboo subjects, body image, identity and grief. Even the series on Family does not deal with family in a conventional idealized way.
In the Body Image series, Mason-Lovering examines the relationship between sexuality and disability. She challenges as a myth the prevalent belief that only the most glamorous and attractive people can have a healthy and fulfilling sex life. Everyone in her world has their own unique sexual journey fraught with pan and joy that determines and moulds their identity and self-worth.
The universal need to be accepted needed and unconditionally loved beginning with ourselves is poignantly conveyed in her work.
Each encounter in this series is a journey through personal belief. The common theme is a challenge to hidden but powerfully influential norms and beliefs about who is allowed to be sexy. Mason-Lovering creates a powerful challenge to these norms that permeate western culture at least.
The subjects of her essay proudly identify themselves. They challenge the prejudice and stereotyped views and misconceptions about disabled people as sexual beings.
I left the gallery feeling moved and uplifted by the warmth, the love and the sheer humanity I encountered I encountered in the photographs.
It is especially exciting and stimulating to find such quality international photo- essays with a direct disability focus on the Internet, as they can still be quite rare in individual countries.
Mason-Lovering's work can be found at www.intimate-encounters.com.au
Promising New Zealand Artist Celebrates First Show
Vision impaired artist Kate Lynch took two months off from her day job as a policy analyst in the Department of Labor to prepare for her first exhibition.
The resulting show recently opened at popular downtown Wellington cafe City Limits with fifteen works. The paintings in oils reflect the natural environment, and in particular the beautiful and wild south coast of Wellington where Kate lives
A series of nude figures in pastels and charcoal completed the exhibition. Lynch has attended life classes for seven years and the models are her inspiration for the figure drawings. Her attention to technique is evident.
Technique is not the only strength she brings to her work.
Although this is her first show, Lynch has always painted and drawn since before she lost most of her sight. She reflected on the positive developments this meant for her work
'I have painted and drawn using visual memory but not worrying too much about accuracy. My work has freed up a lot because of the loss of vision. It has forced me to be more free. Before that my style was more narrow and photographic. It may have been my natural inclination or just a stage.'
'I focus more on colors now, and I am more confident to mix them and not care what they look like.' Lynch says she now works to a bigger scale.
'I feel I now have permission to play around with the rules and with perspectives and work more with the overall design of a painting or drawing, than a perfect image.'
Lynch would like to paint full time if she could make a living that way. At least six paintings sold at the exhibition opening which is a good start. In the meantime she will keep her day job and continue painting. She is interested in taking commissions.
Lynch is one of an increasing body of New Zealand disabled artists and craftspeople producing quality work that is selling well. It is a sign of maturity that art is beginning to be viewed as the creative endeavor of talented individuals, whose impairments may or may not bring a particular perspective to their work. Their art is increasingly being recognized as 'just that,' not some kind of occupational therapy.
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