Friday 28 November 2014

Kathoey

As I'm interested in the transgender and transsexual communities I had a look online to see if I could find any documentaries or films with other cultural backgrounds (besides western). The first culture that came to mind was the Ladyboy culture in Thailand and I found this recent documentary (2013) by Vivienne Chen. I found it really interesting to hear how they grew up in society and at what age they started to identify themselves as a female not a male. I also didn't know about a lot of the culture apart from the sex work (as this is televised a lot), many of the Ladyboys or Kathoey (as they are called in Siamese) work as hairdressers or at restaurants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathoey

Vikki Stevens is an emerging artist interested in many areas including body image, mental health and abstraction. Her latest series of work aims to show how images and perceptions of women are “put- together”/ manufactured, and how these images and perceptions affect how women feel about their own body image. Vikki’s ideas for her artwork are expressed in mediums such as paint, collage and sculptural objects, mostly incorporating repurposed images from magazines and found documents. Artists such as Tracey Emin and Hannah Hoch have a large influence on her work. Both the personal perspective and distorted images play a major part in creating pieces that discuss personal as well as cultural issues within mainly the western world/media sphere. Stevens is planning on developing her work into a more abstract sphere to investigate feelings that she has herself and how she can communicate them by using and developing abstract techniques, continuing with collage as a starting influence. Currently the materials and processes she has used in her past work and the work in development are having a large impact on how the work develops and the message behind the work is entirely open. Rather than having a stand out message Stevens is now moving towards a more indirect way of working, focusing more on feelings rather than statements. Current concerns within the work reflect how Stevens feels about herself in day-to-day life and how outside influences affect her and her work. More specifically Stevens is dealing with feelings of anxiety, panic attacks, depression and how she feels as an individual in the world. Artists such as Gerhard Richter, Barbara Kruger, Yago Hortal and Steve Salo are having a large impact on the current work in development.

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