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The Age REVIEW ART, Saturday, November 20, 2004
Copied Body Parts take Shape: A dilapidated looking photocopier is collagist Joan Letcher's tool of trade.
By Ashley Crawford
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Joan Letcher does not like to be pinned down. Her studio sits on the third floor of an abandoned city building and, as one climbs creaking stairs in darkness, the surrounds become more dilapidated the higher it gets until, there it is: Letcher's tool of trade - an equally dilapidated looking photocopier.
The machine isn't that old, but it has seen its share of use. Letcher tackles her medium, the photocopy like a deranged secretary on speed; grasping at images from newspaper and magazines tearing into them until the source becomes irrelevant. Arms, buttocks, legs and heads are
disassembled and rearranged like the subject of some manic taxidermist.
After reading an article about a man who killed people in order to create decorative clothing apparel and accessories with human body parts. Letcher felt compelled. He had made belts adorned with eyes and ears, scarves with skin and nails. Being a collagist, Letcher saw a bizarre familiarity between her trade and the macabre activities of the murderer: the human desire to construct and de-construct.
" Human beings like to take something that already exists, destroy it and make something new," she says. "It's a mental desire to take control over the physical aspect of our lives; to take control when we fear we have
none."
"This is an artist who likes to work broad and bold. Lee takes off from impromptu and almost automatic sketches. We see Lee's figures and forms distended, dilated and augmented. His figures lounge, pout, stare, smoke and pose with a slacker casualness verging on disdain. These people are idiosyncratic characters, and yet are also vague, blank personalities. Pretty but dumb, they make up a languorous and droll, ambient crew, carelessly hanging out while checking each other out. They are what we look like when we look at our own contemporary models of good-looking deportment."
Headless figures join in a macabre dance; a face peers from a vase, disembodied heads reside in champagne vessels, a bar is held up by a torso in a nightmarish conflation of body parts. But there is no suggestion of overt violence in Letcher's images, indeed, the are oddly elegant.
In the past Letcher's work has featured a rough-hewn approach to montage. In her latest show, half full,half empty, the works are far more refined and minimal.
" I wanted to create more space and depth so the work was not as claustrophobic as collage can tend to
be." she says.
For Letcher, the truncated female form is a refutation of reality. " I think it's to do with a dis-satisfaction with the way things are. The process of collage lends itself to the dismantling of things in order to rebuild them. A sort of make-over of an unsatisfactory reality. Sometimes it even seems, strangely enough, related to the way a psychopath might try and 'improve' things by dismantling a body and making ornaments out of the bits and
pieces."
Letcher's work hints at a diversity between the sensual and the intellectual, the sexual and the cerebral.
" Humans naturally try and transcend their physical limitations," she says.
"I think in these works the unknown or covered parts of the body - but not necessarily cut off, as in beheaded, although they might look like that - are maybe the unknown parts of the self. Also, the covered parts are being protected and maybe also
imprisoned."
Letcher is enthusiastic about the work of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Although she says she wouldn't make too much of a link to her work, to an extent Letcher's oeuvre is imbued with his philosophical musings.
"I appreciate Schopenhauer's determination to see beyond the illusion of surface representation, but I don't try to specifically illustrate his
ideas," she says. "But I have always tried to blend pattern and figuration - often awkwardly - and use pattern as a basis for a form, and I do see in this a possible link with Scopenhauer's concepts of the energy and forces that make up phenomena.
"Schopenhauer was aware of the constant tumult that underlies the world and life. He thought optimism blind, callous and unrealistic, although to me, his love of art and curiosity about the world shows optimism as well as pessimism.
"This relates to the title, half full, half empty," Letcher says. "To say a glass is half full, or half empty, are not conflicting points of view but are in fact both true, and reflect the nature of the world. Schopenhauer's point is to face up to the unpleasant nature of existence, it's the only way, and art can be a way of transcending
it."
Surrealism is a comparatively obvious genre to place Letcher in. Art aficionados may see hints of Hieronymous Bosch, Hans Bellmer and Max Ernst in her works, but she denies any overt influence.
"I wouldn't say it was a direct influence. Not consciously, but I'm aware of all those things and I'm sure fragments stick in the
memory."Artists are drawn to the medium that best suits them. For some it is the computer or the airbrush, photography or painting. The photocopier came to Letcher naturally.
"I Like photographs but felt too self-conscious to take the photos I'd want, and wasn't confidant of mastering painting
technique," she says. "But the possibilities of combining photocopies, photographs and painting appealed to me. Eventually, the painting has dropped away a bit and I've worked out various techniques to make the photocopying a more flexible and expressive process." There's no particular process of choice except to say that the limitations presented by a fairly narrow choice of source images and the restrictions of a not exactly state-of-the-art copier are a challenge that can be more fruitful than working with an abundance of choice in a high-tech
context."
Ashley Crawford Freelance Arts Writer, Co-Author of
"Spray-Howard Arkley".
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Further Information:
Helen Gory
03 95252808 0413123705
[email protected]
www.helengory.com
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