Body (1), 2010, after Michael Joyce’s “this,” oil on canvas, 60″ x 60″

What are you currently working on?  [April 2010]

Alexandra Grant:  A new series of work called “bodies.”  The initial idea came from the last show I did with [Honor Fraser] gallery – there was a painting titled the Fifth Portal (touch) – a representation of the sense of touch but really mapping of the human body.  I was struck by the idea of representing the body as a series of ideas and perceptions, of language and sensory experiences.

These continue to be language-based paintings?

AG:  The “body” of work began with an exchange with my long-term collaborator Michael Joyce – for the purposes of this series he wrote me a cycle of poems in a form called “haiga” which describe sensations and experiences related to the physical: sensuality and sexuality, romantic love, creation myths are some of the themes.  I used the poems as starting points for the paintings – riffing and responding and repeating the themes in them.

Can you talk about the visual aspect of this work?  In what ways have you evolved your “language”?

AG:  For the body series I decided that the material equal to the subject matter was oil paint on canvas or linen – that the material needed to have physical presence, to ooze, to accrete in a different way than the material I had been using for many years, acrylic on paper.  The oil has changed the work in the way it gains density, in the brightness of the color.  In order to suggest the body, the works are all symmetrical, the words and forms reflected along a central mirror-line.  As a result they could be the organs and symmetry of the body, and even the brain itself.  In every work I use a non-language symbol and in this series I chose the arch, which can be ceremonial, or become a rainbow, legs, a sliver of moon.  The images are built-up layers of these words and arches, interconnected.

You’ve always made work that is highly “visual” – concerned with mark-making and color and composition as much as it is “conceptual” or intellectual.  Can you describe how that works here?

AG:  My work has been an exploration of how language operates in an image.  In these particular paintings, I’ve been interested in thinking through how a woman painter represents the body, especially in terms of language.  In this case Michael is my muse, a male muse.  But the paintings are also a map of the exchange with him, with his texts.  On the one hand, they are intimate maps of a specific dialogue and conversation.  But on the other, like any “portrait” of a person, they are much more than the specifics of the exchange.  The works become about a woman artist representing the body on her own terms – about femininity and desire, of the gendered politics of representing the body.  I keep thinking of Mary Kelly, who I heard speak at UCLA recently about “Post-Partum” document.  Kelly wanted to make work within the ven diagrams of Artist, Woman, Parent, and used a conceptual vocabulary to map this particular experience (a vocabulary influenced by Hans Haacke).  Likewise the body paintings are very much a complex and nuanced tracing of both subject and form.  The bodies are very much grounded in a history of painting – looking at text as image, thinking deeply through the issues of material and the craft of painting, the physicality of the work, making decisions about color (vivacious) and composition (symmetry among other choices).  At the same time, they are an intellectual analysis of the function of language, in this case poetic texts, to suggest imagery and a certain kind of process.

To see the texts that inspired this series, please click here.