Joy Gregory
Gregory is a british artist, whose used their work to explore and investigate into concerns of inequality and oppression in terms of race, gender and cultural differences. One of her particular pieces/ series I want to explore and aim to take inspiration from is, "Girl Thing". In these series she made a collection of cyanotype prints containing imagery of objects and items that are stereotypically associated with femininity. She made this series as a way of exploring gender construction through the use of "feminine" items. The recognition of the objects that have a direct association with femininity is used in Gregory's work as a way of assessing their wider meanings and communicating to her audiences, to emphasise that although over the past century the different waves of feminism have been presumed to have decreased the limits and expectations society has on women, their is still evidence in modern day society that there are still limits and expectations of women and that "the essence of gender expectations still remains the same".
Below are some examples of her work:
Throughout this course I have chosen to assess femininity in this project through the photographic medium of portraiture. However, Gregory's work subverts this and instead she used imagery of materialistic values and the wider meanings hid behind them, and how they are a reflection gender constructions and how they are still effective and present in modern day culture and society. I really liked this abstract yet direct way of confronting the constructions of gender, in particular femininity, in the mode of a cyanotype print. I would like to further my research into gender construction and the meaning of the word, "women" through the process of cyanotype printing, taking technical and conceptual inspiration from Gregory and her series of work, "Girl Thing".
Before, you begin the printing process of cyanotypes, you have to edit your image so that it is ready to print. It is a short yet important step that needs to be taken when your preparing to do the process of cyanotype printing, where you first have to put your image in grayscale mode and then you can invert your images, in order to create an effect like in the images shown below.
The reason why you have to invert your images is because when cyanotype printing there is a limited tonal range, and if you were to print the images as it appears when you first take your original images, you would lose the detailing in the shadows and highlight areas. After doing this you then print your inverted images onto acetate sheets, in order to then be able to transfer the images into a cyanotype print, so that I can continue my experimentation of different methods/ processes of printing, whilst also exploring the ever-changing and fluid construction of gender and femininity.
