Juliette Blightman
ARTISTS TO WATCH (a2w)
Each month we invite a member of the She Performs community to share their Artists to Watch - a personal selection of three artists whose work has caught their attention. This month’s a2w have been chosen by Marita Fraser. Published over three consecutive days, the first of Marita’s three a2w is Juliette Blightman …
Juliette Blightman Stages of Seed Development (detail) 2020
28 tarot cards, pencil on paper, print and watercolour
Each 29.4 x 20.8 cm
Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist and Arcadia Missa, London
Juliette Blightman
Juliette Blightman is an artist working across, painting, drawing, text, photography, moving image and performance. Her practice interrogates the life of the artist as a maker and a mother, engaging with the specificities of domestic life and intimate relations through an ongoing examination of what Blightman describes as spatial ‘atmospheres’. The temporal movements, with and through, domestic, maternal, creative, and personal interrelationships within the home and studio are played out through details of her own, friends and celebrity mothers’ lives. For Blightman the trampoline, the hamster, the fish tank and the toilet become sites of intimate enquiry.
In Blightman’s work, it is the seepages of domestic and intimate experience into public and institutional spaces that brings a complex spatial alignment to her exploration of the artist’s life. She redraws and repaints her toilet and cactus sculpture as it sits within an exhibition space. A trampoline, painted from life in the garden, is relocated into the gallery space as a sculpture and site for performance. Domestic atmosphere is often replicated in gallery spaces with the addition of plants, the screening of windows and removal of artificial gallery lights as in her exhibition of 2011 at Isabella Bortolozzi Gallerie, and through her depiction of emptied out spaces of loneliness and solitude. She approaches intimacy in tender and humorous ways. Her large-scale paintings of flaccid penises, from 2016 at the Kunsthalle Bern, included a banana peel and floral underwear and were propped up by beer crates.
In her recent work Stages of Seed Development, 2020, Blightman draws on her meeting of the artist Dorothy Iannone in 2014. Iannone’s work (Ta)Rot Pack (1968-69) is a series of twenty-seven cards depicting her life with the artist Dieter Roth. Drawing from the idea of a set of tarot cards, her works describe domestic, erotic, social, and working moments from Iannoe and Roth’s lives over a year. Blightman takes Iannone’s tarot pack as a starting point, to draw on her own life narrative presenting 27 images examining the qualities of spaces, domestic materials, objects, pets, plants, light and bodies that she and others come into an intimate proximity to, assigning each of the images a title from the tarot. The toilet becoming Blightman’s tarot Throne (2020). Where we contemplate, live, dream, create and parent or not, become portent symbols for reflecting on lived experience past, present and future.
Prologue: Juliette Blightman & Dorothy Iannone, 19 September – 22 October 2020 at Acadedia Missa (Soho), continues to Kölnischer Kunstverein, October 2020 and Vleeshal Middelburg in 2021.
Marita Fraser is an artist, writer and researcher exhibiting internationally, including exhibitions with Kunsthaus Vienna, Städtisches Museum Engen, Atelierhaus Salzamt Linz, Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe Ettlingen, MU Eindhoven and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2016 she was awarded the ArtReview Casa Wabi Residency Award and was resident at Museums Quartier Vienna (Q21). She is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art supported by an AHRC/TECHNE doctoral award.
If you would like to contribute your Artists to Watch, please get in touch: contact@sheperforms.com.
