Please tell us who you are and what you’ve been working on recently.
H.S: I work with clay to make ceramic sculptures that explore how form and colour might suggest embodied narratives. My work is informed by feminism and psychoanalysis and is inspired by a female-led art-history with a particular emphasis on practices that convert body politics into humorous and provocative art forms. I graduated from Chelsea in 2011 with the generous help of the Stanley Picker Foundation. I have recently shown work at shown at Sid Motion Gallery, Richard Saltoun and Art Basel.
I.B-M: I am a French artist based in London. I graduated with an MFA from Goldsmiths University in 2017. My work primarily uses sculpture, painting, installation and the body as a playground to toy with identity, sexuality and consumerism as a way to examine the construction of gender identity and its behavioural consequences in our society. The body is also seen as a sensitive receptor which bears the visual traces of our emotional turmoil and is also a source of information and power not to be neglected. In 2020, I developed the ‘I Lack It, I Like It’ project where I interview women on their experience of lacking in the hope to expand the somehow negative notion of lack into something positive and assertive. The answers are posted on the Instagram account @lacktitlikeit.
In 2021, I have been selected for the Mark Tanner Award, the Ingram Prize Collection and the Drawing Room Biennial. I am currently showing in the ‘Faire Corps’ group show at the Galerie Paris-Beijing in Paris.
What drew you to each other’s practice?
We both share a conceptual and political approach to making art. After centuries of women’s bodies being used as objects of desire by men our practices consider what the contemporary body as art /object may mean in a feminist sphere.
How will you use the 1:1 FUND?
The 1:1 FUND will used to fund a dialogue about the ritual of touch. This dialogue will ultimately be made manifest in an itinerant exhibition that will involve a peer-group of artists and art-world workers as guest recipients.
Why did you choose the idea you will be working on?
During lockdown via Zoom we read Byung Chul-Han’s The Disappearance of Rituals which prompted long conversations about the loss of touch. Our digital time together developed into a new collaboration that seeks to explore communication reliant on physical touch. As two artists art-working through the lenses of feminism, psychoanalysis, art history and motherhood we share a common interest in the body as a place for political thought and we learned that the route into our collaboration is to make a series of investigative ‘Hand-Held’ works. Works imbued with touch and that convey a belief in a ritual approach to making.
What is the one thing you most hope to gain from undertaking this work?
Connectivity. We hope to gain a sense of what it means to be connected to and with the practice of making art as female artists working in London now.
https://www.ingridberthonmoine.com
