MATCH (-ING)
performance/ photos
My drawing In The Ring triggered my wish to transfer it into the three dimensional, the object in action.
Therefore I soon found some boxer gloves to work on and to appropriate them for their actual purpose of fighting with and against me.
Before sending the gloves to be part of an exhibition, with the risk to loose them on the delivery way, I decided to stage them in relation to me.
In consequence the conflict and incapacity of solving emotional issues easily were peeled and framed into photography. For me there is a big intimacy in this work, of standing up, fighting again, being in the ring, passing the match, loosing, winning, being the bad or the good guy, putting all my physical being/entity into the fight until the moment to be able to give up. Never it is the last time…
„The look expressed in Self portrait of a feminist Boxer expressed the fatigue in my soul. It shows a woman boxer, Barbara Phillip, on the floor („floored“ as they say), and it’s as if she sees me in the audience. Like two women in a room of men understanding a private woman issue, she allows herself for one moment to abandon the persona and be real. She still has her boxing gloves on, so it’s obvious she is going to get up. But her look says „this fight is exhausting“. The interesting thing is that even though the image denotes the feeling of being defeated- which few of us want to admit in this success driven „we can do it“ culture, I was filled by a feeling of joy- the one you get when someone finally understands what you are going through. I, a 50 year old feminist Mother Artist, am tired of seeing the fist of feminism as the symbol of feminism. At my age, this feminist boxer, who has sobered to the truth, is more realistic to how I feel.“
