Julia Overmeyer

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

bodies becoming

“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. Thus determines not only relations between men and women, but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed, female. Thus, she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” 

[Berger, 2008:41]

“… I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself… There I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border.” 

[Kristeva, 1982:3]

The patriarchal and anatomical gaze of categorisation and objectification subjects my physical feminine body to a violating dehumanisation. Willing a transcendence from this subjugation, I use a parallel methodology of dissection to subvert and deconstruct the ideal white female nude through my paper collages of art-historical nudes, medical illustrations, anatomical scans, photographs of dissected computers, and watercolour paintings. 

My work sits within the thematic framework of abjection, the grotesque, and the disconnect of the mind and body due to technological advancement. Through the intuitive, repetitive process of cutting, dissection, scanning, printing, rescanning, and reprinting, I create abstracted feminine forms that are simultaneously postured in poise and pulled outside of their bodily boundaries.

As a coloured South African woman, raised in the UK as an immigrant, my work often deals with states of ‘being in-between’. Drawing from my own experiences, these abject forms express both the painful objectification and violation of the gaze and the desire to transcend this corporeal subjugation.