Womxn or Fiction?
In conversation with Charlotte Hicks
Confronted with the topic ‘women and fiction’ in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf famously asks herself: “Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?” This question is as pertinent now as it was to Woolf in 1929. Depictions of women that appeal to the male gaze are plastered across the media, by far exceeding the number of images we see of men, and the disparity we see is bound up with Woolf’s question.
For the overwhelming majority, the interest in these images is sexual. This alone is enough to bring the blood of feminist-kind to a justified boiling point, but Charlotte Hicks’ practice is no raging diatribe. She engages with her subject material playfully, lifting images she finds from the places where female objectification is most rife.
In a conversation about her art, which features in the current online exhibition ‘Egg Woke’, Charlotte explains: “it’s so ubiquitous in the media that it doesn’t even stand out to us. I wanted to highlight this in a subtler way than other feminists might. So, I choose images I find across the media, and put them through my own female gaze, using female oriented processes and textures to dignify the images we so often see. I use fabrics and textiles, materials which have strong female connotations and are often relegated as a ‘low art’ craft, to elevate the images to a ‘high art’ sphere.”
Lucy by Charlotte Hicks. Fabric collage and acrylic on dyed cotton 90 x 120 cm
She went on to lament that we are having these conversations about objectification over and over again, seemingly to no avail. On these themes, which are inherent to her current work, Charlotte tells me: “I know this is by no means original, but I think it is important today because of the sheer ubiquity of it.”
“I am drawing attention to the fact that there is this myth that it is easier for us today to distinguish between what is meant to be empowering and what isn’t. We are bombarded constantly with images of the female body, and I think it is useful to take a step back and think about these things. I think it is really important today because there is this myth. We need to consider if we are actually seeing what we think we are seeing.”
Charlotte’s work stands out in a social climate where feminism and woke culture are still frequently misappropriated. She mentioned reading a lot about how Sheryl Sandberg specifically had co-opted feminism: “there can definitely be an underlying and sinister capitalist level to feminism at the moment. People find ways to monetise it.”
This is pertinent in light of Zara’s new lingerie collection: released last month and titled ‘The Female Gaze’, it boasts and markets a feminist agenda. Paradoxically, the campaign’s images pander blatantly to recognisable tropes that are male gaze centric. In most of the photos, women’s heads are decapitated by the camera. Charlotte has engaged with this particular phenomenon of objectification previously in a body of work titled ‘Faceless Women’, influenced by Headless women of Hollywood site. She sees their facelessness as dangerous, telling me: “people with power treat people who identify as women as faceless, powerless, anonymous. This can be really dangerous when it filters into real life and influences how we treat each other. It can have the same effect as bad porn. The women in these images are anonymous sex objects, ready to be objectified.”
Whilst Charlotte’s work reflects her thoughts and ideas about the politics of objectification, when she is making art she likes to avoid thinking too much, creating on impulse. “Don’t judge anything you make in the first few moments of making it. Don’t overwork it, try to make it as instinctive as you can. I am a very intuitive maker; I try my hardest to keep things fresh and not overthink them. If I think about it too much it becomes stilted and boring.”
(yellow) lips, fabric collage on canvas, 35 x 50cm
We talked about some paintings she did at nursery, which she found in a box recently. Interestingly, these reflected exactly the uncurbed creative intuitions that Charlotte tries to cultivate as an adult artist: “When you’re little you have no inhibitions, you create on impulse. But before long you are fed this idea that something is only good because it looks ‘accurate’. It is a shame that our intuitions are subdued in this way from a young age – I think we are taught to judge out own work so harshly.”
Keeping off the pressure that comes with being overly self-critical brings playfulness to Charlotte’s art, despite its relationship with serious subject matter. “First, I make small, quick drawings from images I find online, abstracting them and condensing them into basic shapes and colours”. When we spoke, she was in the process of making them bigger. “I give myself plenty of room to play - sometimes the colours or textures don’t work once I make things bigger. Although I do try to keep things fresh and immediate, nothing is set in stone.” Inspired by Judy Chicago to start working with fabric, she tells me: “Now more and more female artists are reclaiming these traditionally domestic processes. Of course they are still associated with women, that will never change, but it feels powerful to relate the female bodies I depict through my own gaze back to cultural traditions that previously boxed them in to the house, the domestic realm.”
Charlotte’s work is a product of the thoughtful and refined use of her own female gaze. There is more to this concept than using a female photographer and superficially feminist marketing (I’m looking at you, Zara). Linking back to Woolf’s question, this may be about more than just men and women. Why are female bodies so much more interesting than male bodies to marketing and media enterprises? For Charlotte, the answer is sad but simple: “women’s legs or lips will be used in movie posters when they’re not even a part of the plot. They are sexualised, marketized and monetised. Where the female body is concerned, there is still a huge emphasis that sex sells.”
Charlotte Hicks solo exhibition, Egg Woke can be viewed here
Words: Alice Keeling