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Olivia Foster​

'Sex Scene '​

6ft X 12ft​

Acrylic on mixed fabric​

​

This work explores the nuances of sexuality and gender within my personal biography and within the context of society today. Both figures depicted in this work are myself, this concept explores the dualities of self-realization and self-destruction. As well as self-love and self-resentment. This work explores feelings of confusion and dysphoria. Exploring my battle to find my place within society and my community. This work explores my own self rejection and liberation, a paradox of emotions I found to be common in people struggling to come to terms with their identity within the terms of sexuality, gender and race. To produce this work, I investigated a range of artists such as Jenny Saville and Tracy Emin. I also referenced life drawings I had made and used a range of sketches to develop the work further, I found this fabric to be hard to amend mistakes, so I had to paint it with confidence and conviction and ensure that my errors are what made the work have value. ​

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the dualities of both dominance and submission within a social context

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the dualities of both dominance and submission within a social context

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if both bodies are me then this work explores the the dualities of both dominance and submission within a social context. This work also explores the male gaze. the objectification of the female body and the social conditions women live in today

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Sheering the sheep as a metaphor for self-actualization and self-liberation

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Sheering the sheep as a metaphor for self-actualization and self-liberation

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Traditionally, lambs represent innocence. In the Christian Gospels, Jesus Christ is compared to a lamb because he goes meekly to be sacrificed on behalf of humanity. Moreover, lambs, as baby sheep, are connected to the theme of childhood that runs throughout the Songs of Innocence.

in Christianity, the lamb represents Christ as both suffering and triumphant; it is typically a sacrificial animal, and may also symbolize gentleness, innocence, and purity.

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What does a lamb symbolize spiritually?The "lamb of god" -- representing innocence, purity, and sacrifice for the greater good -- is a symbol found in all thre

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Marlene Dumas born 1953

Marlene Dumas was born in Cape Town, South Africa. From 1972 to 1975 she attended Cape Town University, where she studied for a BA in Visual Arts. She then completed her studies in Haarlem, in the Netherlands.

She has lived and worked in Amsterdam since 1976. From 1978 she has exhibited internationally, and is one of Holland's most widely admired artists. In 1995 she represented Holland in the Venice Biennale, and in 1996 the Tate Gallery exhibited a selection of her works on paper.

In the past Dumas produced paintings, collages, drawings, prints and installations. She now works mainly with oil on canvas and ink on paper. The sources she uses for her imagery are diverse and include newspaper and magazine cuttings, personal memorabilia, Flemish paintings, and Polaroid photographs. The majority of her works may be categorised as 'portraits', but they are not portraits in the traditional sense. Rather than representing an actual person, they represent an emotion or a state of mind. Themes central to Dumas' work include race and sexuality, guilt and innocence, violence and tenderness.

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Artist page for Marlene Dumas (born 1953)

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Gifford plays with the idea of canvas and paint, Blurring the lines between them both.

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Lydia Gifford, Born 1979,United Kingdom. Lives and works in London. Graduated from MA Fine Art (Painting), Royal College of Art, London in 2008. Exhibitions include: Midsection, solo, Micky Schubert, Berlin (2016), I am vertical, solo, Centre International d'Art et du Paysage, Ile de Vassiviere (2016), Valerie Beston Artists' Trust, Marlborough Fine Art, London (2016), To. For. With, solo, Laura Bartlett Gallery, London (2015) , Drawn, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2014). Awards include: Valerie Beston Young Artists' Prize (2008).

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Lydia Gifford, Born 1979,United Kingdom. Lives and works in London. Graduated from MA Fine Art (Painting), Royal College of Art, London in 2008. Exhibitions include: Midsection, solo, Micky Schubert, Berlin (2016), I am vertical, solo, Centre International d'Art et du Paysage, Ile de Vassiviere (2016), Valerie Beston Artists' Trust, Marlborough Fine Art, London (2016), To.

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my final painting, still planning on working further on this

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!!!!!

A disorientating and absurd world, where the boundaries between fact and fiction blur, and the undercurrents of hysteria, rage, euphoria and violence lurk beneath the surface, erupting in ever more frequent outbursts. The Lost Head & The Bird explores a frighteningly fast-changing, post-truth world where actions are fuelled by appeals to emotions and facts are increasingly ignored.

I think of the work as a balloon into which I keep blowing air. What one sees is just the skin of the balloon that keeps stretching. But at some point if I don't stop blowing air into it, that balloon will burst. What I want to do with the work is to take you to that point right before, from where you might start to anticipate the bursting of the balloon.

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A disorientating and absurd world, where the boundaries between fact and fiction blur, and the undercurrents of hysteria, rage, euphoria and violence lurk beneath the surface, erupting in ever more frequent outbursts. The Lost Head & The Bird explores a frighteningly fast-changing, post-truth world where actions are fuelled by appeals to emotions and facts are increasingly ignored.

I think of the work as a balloon into which I keep blowing air. What one sees is just the skin of the balloon that keeps stretching. But at some point if I don't stop blowing air into it, that balloon will burst. What I want to do with the work is to take you to that point right before, from where you might start to anticipate the bursting of the balloon.

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A disorientating and absurd world, where the boundaries between fact and fiction blur, and the undercurrents of hysteria, rage, euphoria and violence lurk beneath the surface, erupting in ever more frequent outbursts. The Lost Head & The Bird explores a frighteningly fast-changing, post-truth world where actions are fuelled by appeals to emotions and facts are increasingly ignored.

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Tracey Emin’s expressive and visceral art is one of disclosure, dealing with personal experience and heightened states of emotion. Frank and intimate but universal in its relevance, her work draws on the fundamental themes of love, desire, loss and grief, unravelling in the process the nuanced constructs of ‘woman’ and ‘self’ through probing self-exploration. ‘The most beautiful thing is honesty, even if it’s really painful to look at’, she has remarked.

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Tracey Emin looks to her life for her primary material. With soul-searching candour, she probes the construct of the self but also the very impulse to create. Unfiltered, irreverent, raw, she draws on the fundamental themes of love, desire, loss and grief in works that are disarmingly and unashamedly emotional. 'The most beautiful thing is honesty, even if it's really painful to look at', she has remarked.

Self-portraiture and the nude run throughout her practice, which Emin has described as being about 'rites of passage, of time and age, and the simple realisation that we are always alone'. Her earliest works refer to her family, childhood and chaotic teenage years, growing up in the seaside town of Margate and leaving home at the age of fifteen. What happened next is explored, in a manner that is neither tragic nor sentimental, in drawing, painting, film, photography, sewn appliqué, sculpture, neon and writing, as the vicissitudes of relationships, pregnancies and abortions intersect with her commitment to the formal disciplines of art. Most recently, the artist has experienced her body as a battleground, through illness and ageing, on which she reports with characteristic fearlessness.

The playful title of Emin's first solo exhibition, My Major Retrospective 1963-1993, suggests the artist felt, despite being at the beginning of her career, significant things had already happened. Her obsessive assemblage of personal memorabilia included tiny photographs of her art school paintings that she'd destroyed, a 'photographic graveyard' that revealed an admiration for paintings by Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch. She details this 'emotional suiside' in Tracey Emin's CV Cunt Vernacular (1997), among several early video works that give further insight into her formation as an artist, highlighting moments of epiphany through the use of first-person narrative. 'I realised there was the essence of creativity, that moment of conception,' she says in How It Feels (1996), a pivotal film in which she tells the story of her abortion. 'The whole being of everything... it had to be about where it was really coming from'. Speaking to camera while walking through the streets of London, she concludes that conceptual art, as an act of reproduction, is inseparable from the artist's inner life. Developing this connection, the haunting film Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children (1998) shows the artist on the pier near Munch's house, naked and prostrate in the foetal position, the dawn rising over the water as she lifts her head and screams - a guttural response to great painter's iconic image.

In 1998, Emin created My Bed, an uncensored presentation of her most personal habitat. The double bed has become abstracted from function as it sits on the gallery floor, in conversation with art history and a stage for life events: birth, sleep, sex, depression, illness, death. The accumulation of real objects (slippers, condoms, cigarettes, empty bottles, underwear) on and around the unmade bed builds a portrait of the artist with bracing matter-of-factness, defying convention to exhibit what most people would keep private. The work gained international attention as part of the Turner Prize, entering Emin into public consciousness. Another work that became a byword for her art of disclosure was the sculpture Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963−1995 (1995, destroyed 2004), where the names of all those she had ever shared a bed with - friends, lovers and family - were sewn on the inside of a tent, a crawl-space that invites the viewer to reflect on their own inventory.

Explicitly feminist, and acknowledging the influence of her friend and collaborator Louise Bourgeois, Emin's choice of medium is integral to the story she tells. In hand-embroidered blankets and quilts, traditionally associated with women's work, she pierces the visual field with words, combining scraps of different material with uneven stitching to spell out statements whose syntax and spelling remain uncorrected. With titles such as Mad Tracey from Margate. Everyone's been there, (1997) or  Helter Fucking Skelter (2001), they register the artist's acute sensitivity to the views of those around her and give a riposte, just as the medium is a riposte to the classification of fine art, for centuries dominated by male artists. As she herself became newsworthy, both nationally and internationally, Emin used the publicity to prick other forms of decorum in the professional art world - such as never over-explaining. In longer form, her memoir, Strangeland (2005) offers an account of her journey to becoming 'a fucked, crazy, anorexic-alcoholic-childless, beautiful woman. I never dreamt it would be like this.' The text is riddled with spelling mistakes that challenge the form and carry through a sense of unfiltered process, as was also the case with her long-running newspaper column for The Independent (2005-09), in which she narrated her weekly goings-on under the title 'My Life in a Column'.

Emin's ongoing series of neons features snatches of text in her recognisable slanted handwriting, elevating fleeting thoughts and feelings as aphorisms: You touch my Soul (2020), I Longed For you (2019) or I don't Believe in Love but I believe in you (2012). Her formulation of statements in the second person has the effect of placing the viewer squarely in the situation, and can encapsulate an entire romance in a pithy phrase, as in I want my time with You (2018), a twenty-metre-wide neon that greets passengers at London's St Pancras Station. A critical part of her practice since the 1990s, the neons evoke the seafront lights of Margate, latent with the sense of dusk and faded glamour. Her birthplace is an abiding subject; it resurfaces in large-scale sculptures, where reclaimed wood and found materials are assembled in jagged structures that allude to the beach, pier, huts and tide markers. Margate's famous theme park 'Dreamland' is referred to in several works, among them Self-Portrait (2001), which recreates the pleasure ground's helter-skelter, and It's Not the Way I want to Die (2005), which recalls the undulating roller-coaster in rickety, worn wood, fragile to the point of collapse. Margate is 'part of me', Emin says, and while looking back she is now looking to the future with the establishment of TKE Studios, a new art school and artists' studios.

Questions of mortality and the centrality of the female reproductive body drive The Mother (2021), one of Emin's most significant public sculptures. Permanently sited next to the new Munch Museum, Oslo, it marks the death of her own mother, and brings her lifelong admiration for Munch full circle. Fifteen tonnes of bronze standing nine metres high, this woman with 'her legs open to the Fjord' is visible from afar over land and water, a monument to the female figure as protector without compromising on her vulnerability or eroticism. By contrast, Baby Things, Emin's accurate rendering of children's tiny lost shoes and clothes in bronze, was installed as if by chance outside the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007) and around Folkestone Triennial (2008), intimate tokens that might inadvertently provoke a range of reactions, from fear for those we love most, to the indifference with which we treat a discarded object.

Most recently, Emin's work has been charged by the seriousness of her medical situation, since in 2020 she was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Self-portraits taken on her camera phone in bed find the artist facing her 'crippling' insomnia in the small hours, and in recovery from extensive surgery. Her paintings of the nude figure have a tempestuous energy. Emin's graphic line, by turn delicate or vigorous, imparts a sense of urgency; with each abandoned and assertive gesture, she is flaying herself open. Drips and obliterations point to the fluidity of the body, as it fluctuates between joy and suffering on its journey between birth and death. Explosions of colour allude to a self that is overcome by feeling and triumphing in sheer sensuality.

Tracey Emin was born in 1963 in London. She currently lives and works between London, the South of France, and Margate, UK. Emin has exhibited extensively including major exhibitions at Royal Academy of Arts, London (2020); Musée d'Orsay, Paris (2019); Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, France (2017); Leopold Museum, Vienna (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2013); Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2012); Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2012); Hayward Gallery, London (2011); Kunstmuseum Bern (2009); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2008); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Malaga, Spain (2008); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2003); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002).

In 2007 Emin represented Great Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale and her installation  My Bed  has been included in 'In Focus' displays at Tate Britain with Francis Bacon (2015), Tate Liverpool with William Blake and also at Turner Contemporary, Margate alongside JMW Turner (2017). In 2011, Emin was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and in 2012 was made Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts.

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Tracey Emin looks to her life for her primary material. With soul-searching candour, she probes the construct of the self and the very impulse to create.

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stills from film

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exploring the concept of 'self' using the imagery of the sheep to symbolise myself. 

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Film - 03:07

Film I made and used as my source material for painting.
my statement for the work -

'Foster is an interdisciplinary artist from Scotland currently based in Toronto. Fosters work ‘self-Portrait’ explores the intersections between self-discovery and self-destruction, commenting on subjects such as the Anthropocene, globalization and feminism. Exploring the paradox of empowerment and oppression within the rural Scottish landscape. This film illustrates Foster’s battle with identity within her landscape, beckoning the question ‘where do I belong?’ This work is a manifestation of Foster’s experiences of coming to terms with her identity within the context of rural Scotland. This work explores the essence nostalgia and memory throughout childhood and adolescence. The use of a black sheep further describes her experiences of alienation within her landscape, coinciding with the intrinsic practice of sheering a sheep. A practice she became very familiar with while growing up on a farm in Scotland.'

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Prodger mainly works within film, self shooting intimate footage of her surroundings. Prodgers work mainly focuses on her experience living in Scotland and making work as a woman.

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Charlotte Prodger is a British artist working with moving image, printed image, sculpture and writing. Her work explores issues surrounding queer identity, landscape, language, technology and time.

Charlotte Prodger was born in Bournemouth, UK in 1974. She studied at Goldsmiths, London and The Glasgow School of Art.

Recent solo exhibitions include: BRIDGIT/Stoneymollan Trail, Bergen Kunsthall; Subtotal, Sculpture Center, New York (2017); BRIDGIT, Hollybush Gardens, London; Charlotte Prodger, Kunstverein Düsseldorf (2016); 8004-8019, Spike Island, Bristol; Stoneymollan Trail, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2015); Markets, Chelsea Space, London; Nephatiti, Glasgow International Director's Programme, Glasgow (2014); Percussion Biface 1-13, Studio Voltaire, London; Colon Hyphen Asterix, Intermedia CCA, Glasgow (2012) and Handclap/Punchhole, Kendall Koppe, Glasgow (2011). Recent group exhibitions include: Always Different, Always the Same: An Essay on Art and Systems, Bunder Kunstmuseum, Chur; ORGASMIC STREAMING ORGANIC GARDENING ELECTROCULTURE, Chelsea Space, London (2018); British Art Show 8 (2016); Weight of Data, Tate Britain, London; An Interior that Remains an Exterior, Künstlerhaus Graz (2015); A Survey of Recent Artists' Film and Video in Britain, Tate Britain, London; Annals of The Twentieth Century, Wysing Arts, Cambridge (2014) Holes In The Wall, Kunsthalle Freiburg and Frozen Lakes, Artists Space, New York (2013). Prodger received the 2014 Margaret Tait Award and 2017 Paul Hamlyn Award.

Prodger works with moving image, printed image, sculpture and writing. She has been nominated for the 2018 Turner Prize for her solo exhibition BRIDGIT/Stoneymollan Trail at Bergen Kunsthall (2017) comprising two single-channel videos. Moving image has been at the core of Prodger's work for two decades. Its ever-evolving formats are inextricably bound to the autobiographical content of her work. She has mined the material properties of numerous moving image formats, not just because they inherently get replaced over time, but because she is fascinated by their formal parameters and socio-political histories; the sticky relationship between form and content. Prodger's recent videos set up complex tensions between the body, landscape, identity and time.

BRIDGIT is titled after the eponymous Neolithic deity whose name has had multiple iterations across different geographical locations and points in history. BRIDGIT was shot entirely on Prodger's iPhone, which she approaches as a prosthesis or extension of the nervous system, intimately connected to time, social interaction and work. Body and device become extensions of each other, and the work becomes a unified meditation on shifting subjectivity.

Stoneymollan Trail is named after an ancient 'coffin road' on the west coast of Scotland. A non-linear miscellany of visual material from her personal archive (shot between 1999 and 2015), it traces a history of recent video formats as well as the artist's personal history. Much of Prodger's work looks at what happens to speech - and the self for which it is a conduit - as it metamorphoses via time, space and technological systems. For voiceovers, she frequently asks friends to read out her own diaristic content, while she inhabits other subjectivities by re-speaking the words of people living and dead: friends, anonymous YouTube users and historical figures of influence. The material perpetually shifts around but is locally grounded in its means of production - based in queerness, communality, technology, language and loss.

Charlotte Prodger is 44 and lives and works in Glasgow.

Turner Prize 2018 was at Tate Britain, 26 September 2018 - 6 January 2019.

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Charlotte Prodger is a British artist working with moving image, printed image, sculpture and writing. Her work explores issues surrounding queer identity, landscape, language, technology and time. Charlotte Prodger was born in Bournemouth, UK in 1974. She studied at Goldsmiths, London and The Glasgow School of Art.

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'Thinking thought usually amounts to withdrawing into a
dimensionless place in which the idea of thought alone
persists. But thought in reality spaces itself out into the world.
It informs the imaginary of peoPles, their varied poetics, which
it then transforms, meaning, in them its risk becomes realised.
Culture is the precaution of those who claim to think thought
but who steer clear of its chaotic journey. Evolving cultures
infer Relation, the overstepping that grounds their unity diversity.
Thought draws the imaginary of the past: a knowledge
becoming. One cannot stop it to assess it nor isolate it to
transmit it. It is sharing one can never not retain, nor ever, in
standing still, boast about. '

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researching Saville's paining style.

Jenny Saville is probably best known for her large scale oil paintings of fleshy, obese female figures. Saville’s work invokes a deep fascination in the palpability of flesh, extremities of anatomy, and the grotesque combined with a masterly and yet intuitive instinct for the handling of paint. She graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1992 and was appointed as lecturer at The Slade School of Fine Arts, London between 2000 - 2006.

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Jenny Saville | Artist | Royal Academy of Arts

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Jenny Saville is probably best known for her large scale oil paintings of fleshy, obese female figures. Saville’s work invokes a deep fascination in the palpability of flesh, extremities of anatomy, and the gr…

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studies of my face using continuous  line

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making mono prints from my drawings, sometimes working from the mirror still

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blind contour self portrait

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self portrait quick sketch in charcoal

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getting frustrated and unable to keep working on the same drawing for prolonged amounts of time, i feel like this happened because i have spent may years drawing myself and I find now that I struggle to make academic drawings of myself, there are too many aspects of my image i struggle with.

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very quick sketch

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at home: Artists in Conversation | Peter Doig

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I am planning on developing this into a diptych, I was also planning on installing this work outdoors so the fabric can freely float in the wind making it a moving image that will constantly nuance with wind. this also allows the object to interact with its surroundings.

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These are some sketches I had made in preparation for the painting, i was thinking about successful compositions , what images i found worked the best to paint.

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Left canvas inscribed on back in black felt-tipped pen 'Tryptich [sic] August 1972 | Left Panel' top left

Central canvas inscribed on back in black felt-tipped pen 'Tryptich [sic] August 1972 | Centre Panel' top left
Right canvas inscribed on back in black felt-tipped pen 'Tryptich [sic] August 1972 | Right Panel | Francis Bacon' top left

Purchased from Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London (Grant-in-Aid), 1980

Exhibited:
Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings 1968-1974, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March-June 1975 (23, repr. in col.)
Francis Bacon: oeuvres récentes, Musée Cantini, Marseilles, July-Sept. 1976 (5, repr.)
Francis Bacon: oeuvres récentes, Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris, Jan.-Mar. 1977 (13, repr. in col.)
Francis Bacon, Fundacion Juan March, Madrid, April-May 1978, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, June-July (5, repr. in col.)
Francis Bacon, Tate Gallery, London, May-Aug. 1985, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Oct. 1985-Jan 1986, Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Feb.-Mar. 1986 (81, repr. in col., front cover, detail of left panel)
Francis Bacon: Loan Exhibition in Celebration of his 80th Birthday, Marlborough Fine Art, London, Oct.-Nov. 1989 (11, repr. in col. pp.28-30)
Francis Bacon: Paintings Since 1944, Tate Gallery Liverpool, Feb. 1990-Jan. 1991 (no number, repr. in col. pp.22-3)
The Transformation of Appearances: Andrews, Auerbach, Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Tate Gallery exhibition at Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Sept.-Dec. 1991 (19, repr. in col. [p.7])
Francis Bacon: Figurabile, Museo Correr, Venice, June-Oct. 1993 (20, repr. in col. pp.66-7)
Visualising Masculinities, Tate Gallery, London, Dec. 1992-June 1993 (3)
Francis Bacon, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, June-Oct. 1996, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Nov. 1996-Jan. 1997 (65, repr. in col. p.177)
Francis Bacon, Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Humlebaek, Jan.-April 1998 (26, repr. in col. between pp.72 and 73 and on front cover (central canvas detail)

Literature:
David W. Boxer, 'The Early Work of Francis Bacon', unpublished Ph.D thesis, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 1975, pp.139, 154, 195, figs 97 (right panel), 156 (centre panel)
Lorenza Trucchi, Francis Bacon, Milan 1975, trans. John Shepley, London and New York 1976, p.13, repr. in col. on dust jacket (central panel detail), pl.166 (col.)
Hugh M. Davies, 'Bacon's "Black" Triptychs', Art in America, vol.63, no.2, March-April 1975, p.65, repr. pp.62-3 (col.)
Fenella Crichton, 'Paris Letter', Art International, vol.21, no.2, March-April 1977, p.57
Alice Ann Calhoun, 'Suspended Projections: Religious Roles and Adaptable Myths in John Hawkes's Novels, Francis Bacon's Paintings and Ingmar Bergman's Films', unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of South Carolina 1979, p.140, repr. p.194, fig.35
Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation, Paris 1981, p.36, pl.70 (col.)
Tate Gallery Acquisitions 1980-2, London 1984, p.42, repr.
Wieland Schmied, Francis Bacon: Vier Studien zu einem Porträt, Berlin 1985, pp.67-8, repr. p.78, pl.98
Emmanuel Cooper, The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West, London and New York 1986, 2nd ed. 1994, p.231, repr. pp.230-1 (left and right panels exchanged)
Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Francis Bacon, New York 1986, pp.67-9,77, repr. pp.68-9 (col.)

John W. Nixon, 'Francis Bacon: Paintings 1959-1979; Opposites and Structural Rationalism', unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Ulster, Belfast 1986, pp.78, 86, 273, 309, 324-5, 326, 327-8, 330, 614-5 (no.321)

Andrew Graham-Dixon, 'Bacon in Moscow', Independent, 1 Oct. 1988, p.30
Andrew Durham, 'Note on Technique', in Francis Bacon: Paintings Since 1944, exh. cat., Tate Gallery Liverpool 1990, pp.11,12
Simon Wilson, Tate Gallery: An Illustrated Companion, London, revised ed. 1991, p.247
Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, London 1992, p.126
John Russell, Francis Bacon, 2nd ed. London and New York 1979, 3rd ed. 1993, p.153, repr. pp.162-3, pl.87 (col.)
Jeremy Lewison, 'Venice: Francis Bacon', Burlington Magazine, vol.135, no.1088, Nov. 1993, p.782
Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times, London 1993, p.220
Andrew Stephenson, Visualising Masculinities, exh. leaflet, Tate Gallery, London 1993, [p.2]
David Sylvester, 'Bacon's Course' in Achille Bonito Oliva (ed.), Francis Bacon: Figurabile, exh. cat., Museo Correr, Venice 1993, p.68
David Sylvester, 'Francis Bacon in Venice', Independent on Sunday, 13 June 1993, Sunday Review, p.4, repr.
David Sylvester, 'Bacon's Course', Modern Painters, vol.6, no.2, summer 1993, p.21
Philippe Dagen, Francis Bacon, Paris 1996, p.52, repr. [pp.80-1], pl.51 (col.)
Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London 1996, p.250
Wieland Schmied, Francis Bacon: Commitment and Conflict, Munich and New York 1996, p.82, repr. [pp.135-7], pl.40 (col.)
Fabrice Hergott, 'La Chambre de Verre' in Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 1996, p.52
Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, 'Notes sur Francis Bacon' in Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 1996, p.47
David Sylvester, 'Un Parcours' in Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 1996, p.28
Hervé Vanel, 'L'imagination technique' Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 1996, p.70
The Twentieth Century Art Book, London 1996, p.82, repr. (col.)
Carter Ratcliff, 'Francis Bacon - An Exhibition', Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Humlebaek 1998, pp.29-30 (English text)

Reproduced:
David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1975, rev. ed. as The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1980, 3rd ed. 1990, 4th ed. as Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1993, pp.76-7
Gerard-Georges Lamaire, 'L'Entrée en Matiere', Opus International, no.68, summer 1978, pp.20-1
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, face et profil, Paris, Munich and Milan 1983, trans. John Weightman as Francis Bacon: Full Face and in Profile, Oxford 1983, pl.89 (col.)
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, London 1988, pl.83 (col.)
René Major and Anne Tronche, 'L'Agonie du jour', Artstudio, Paris, no.17, summer 1990, p.38 (left hand panel only)
Bacon Triptych '71, exh. cat., Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Cologne 1993, pp.32-3 (col.)
José Maria Faerna, Bacon, trans. Wayne Finke, New York 1994, pp.54-5, pl.61 (col.)
Philippe Dagen, Francis Bacon, Paris 1996, pp.87-8, pl.51 (col.)

Each of the panels of Bacon's has the male body as a point of focus. In the centre, a mêlée of limbs embodies a homosexual coupling, while to either side reassuringly domestic-looking chairs (such as the artist had at home) [1] each support a single fragmentary figure. The detailed and intense working of the body contrasts directly with the flat expanses of the setting in a way that is typical of Bacon's . The dense and energetic application of paint is confined to the figures, for which sand may have been added as a thickening material alongside dry paints reminiscent of .[2] As was his usual practice, the figures were completed in almost every detail before the background was finalised around them. Triptych - August 1972 is distinguished from preceding works by the severity of the setting: the black voids framing the figures, the mute colours of the planes denoting wall and floor, and the dark wedges of the side panels. The latter secured the formal symmetry of the triptych.

in the early 1960s and, by 1972, it was his established means for major statements. The three-part
As a format, Bacon had resumed use of the large-scale triptych (each panel usually 78 x 58 inches) [3]composition had the advantage of simultaneously isolating and juxtaposing the participating figures in such a way as to guard against qualities that he was at pains to avoid. [4] The simplicity of Triptych - August 1972 may be compared to that of the significantly earlier Three Figure in a Room, 1964 (Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris), [5] in which the figures control open spaces by the simple contortions of their poses. Nevertheless, Hugh Davies has suggested that the compositions of the 1970s can be divided into and 'idea' triptychs, the latter - of which Triptych - Studies from the Human Body, 1970 (private collection) [6] is an example - reflecting 'the conjugation of several ideas, both literary and visual'.[7] Davies went on to suggest that Triptych - August 1972, which might be taken as a portrait triptych, encompassed both categories. In this respect it fitted with a number of works from 1972-4 which have been linked thematically. [8]

The bodies in Triptych - August 1972 are not whole, and it is especially difficult to disentangle the central coupling figures. Their torsos appear very abbreviated but a single head - mouth pressed to the floor, eyes tightly closed, thin brown hair thrown forwards - emerges to the left of the amalgam. Most of these details are masked by suggestive overlaid strokes of white. In 1973 Bacon described his recourse to chance in the similar coupling in the earlier Triptych - Studies from the Human Body:

I wanted to make an image which coagulated this sensation of two people in some form of sexual act on the bed, but then I was left completely in the void and left absolutely to the haphazard marks which I make all the time. And then I worked on what's called the given . And, if you look at the forms, they're extremely ... unrepresentational.[9]

Bacon was helped towards the irrationality of this amalgam by adapting the pose from one of his favourite photographic sources: 'Some Phases in a Wrestling Match' from Eadweard Muybridge's sequential
photographs of moving bodies published as The Human Figure in Motion. [10] The painter owned a copy of an of this book and the removed page with this image has been documented;[11] in 1966 he described these photographs as a 'dictionary' of human motion.[12] Attracted to the display of the active male nude, he had adapted this particular frame for his earliest images of homosexual sex: Two Figures, 1953 (private collection) and Two Figures in the Grass, 1954 (private collection). [13] In a succession of , the bodies from the Muybridge photograph gradually lost their separate individuality. Two years after their appearance in the Tate's painting Bacon cast some light on this homogenising process, saying: 'I've often used the wrestlers in painting single figures, because I find that the two figures together have a thickness that gives overtones which the photographs of single figures don't have.'[14]

If parts of the bodies were omitted, there were also unexpected additions. The two seated figures appear to ooze amorphous forms suggestive of cast shadows, which have the blue and pink colouring of the body. The lilac pool below the central pairing is simpler in form and less suggestive of flesh. Both types of detail recall how (in a discussion of proposed
As distinct from the painter's own formal discussions, Otto Karl Werckmeister has proposed that all of Bacon's art was circumscribed by the fact of his homosexuality. [15] Although this has been qualified by others - Emmanuel Cooper contended that 'homosexuality ... has never been treated by Bacon literally or as a separate concern'[16] - the depiction of such a sexual pairing must be considered significant (especially as it had remained illegal in Britain until 1968). In this light, the small arrow above the legs of the central figures in Triptych - August 1972 overtly signals the movement of their coupling just as the splashes of white signal its consummation. In 1975 Donald Kuspit's expressed the view that Bacon's use of such chance marks was masturbatory in so far as it was associated with the individual's isolation and 'creation ex nihilo'. [17] While assuming that the work might be analysed on the basis of 'homosexual traits', Kuspit drew parallels between Bacon and Jean Genet; he quoted Jean-Paul Sartre's distinction of heterosexual from homosexual sex - 'the recognized gesture sends him back to the world'[18] - meaning that each partner is aware of the other's experience without the mystery which divides the sexes. This contention has since been specifically contradicted by Ernst van Alphen's discussion of the central panel of the Tate's triptych with its 'total disintegration of selves, caused, again, by the blurring of the self/other relationship.'[19] Across these differing views runs the shared conviction that autobiography, and specifically, Bacon's homosexuality was a key determinant of his work.

The fragmentary nature of the two seated figures in the outside panels of Triptych - August 1972 may appear to be related to Bacon's haphazard methods. By reconceiving the human body in a process that accepted the irrational - whether through modifying a source or through the application of chance marks - he observed in 1974 that the image 'seems to come onto the nervous system much more strongly'. [20] Certainly these figures are missing parts of their chests and limbs, and it is often suggested that such bodies in the paintings have been eaten away; one commentator has described those in Triptych - August 1972 as having 'literally been absorbed by the "blackness" of the void behind'. [21] Close inspection of the canvases shows that they were conceived as partial and that no revision was undertaken. Thus, the lower part of the left hand figure's torso was simply never painted. The resulting opening was controlled by the addition of a fine dashed white line demarcating the torso (running through the absent nipples); as well as projecting into the black , it serves to lend spatial recession to the torso-less figure.

[22] It was a device particularly favoured in the works of the first half of the 1970s. One commentator has seen the pools as 'life draining from the figures' and associated them with Bacon's admiration for Shakespeare,[23] presumably referring to 'O that this too too solid flesh would melt' in Hamlet (I,ii).[24] Since his death, Bacon has been reported as describing the figure in this painting as having 'the life flowing out of him'.[25] As this happens the shadow is made fleshy.[26]sculptures in 1971) Bacon envisaged 'a kind of structured painting in which images, as it were, would arise from a river of flesh'. He qualified this apparently 'terribly romantic idea' by noting 'but I see it very formally'.

Triptych - August 1972 was first shown in Bacon's exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1975. In many ways, its three panels closely reflect Harry Geldzahler's general description in the accompanying catalogue:

Bacon's subject is most often the single human being, alone and flayed by a haunting series of circumstances, dire and nonspecific. Where there are two figures, brutality and tenderness are coupled so intricately that we are left with the impression of high drama, quintessential moments that could be exorcised only through the paintings. The grotesque, even sadistic, content of Bacon's art, realized through the masterful application of paint, lies at the heart of his aesthetic achievement. It is possible to feel excitement at the traditional bravura of the paint handling, and horror at the rawness of the subject. [27]

While the 'quintessential moments' and the contrast between technique and imagery remain pertinent, the description of 'grotesque, even sadistic' qualities particularly reflects anxieties about Bacon's art in that period and perhaps especially for an American audience. The popular association of his work with anguish and debauchery was confirmed when the film director Bernardo Bertolucci used Bacon's paintings in the opening credits of the controversial and sexually explicit Last Tango in Paris (1972).[28] At the same time, Bacon's sat uncomfortably with contemporary perceptions of - a distinction neatly encapsulated by the contrasting receptions of his exhibition and the concurrent show of the work of Brice Marden at the Guggenheim Museum.[29]

The New York exhibition was the first major show since Bacon's much larger Parisian retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1971, [30] and, remarkably, only one other solo exhibition (in Milan) had intervened.[31] The personal reasons for this dearth of public exposure are not hard to find. The artist's former lover, George Dyer, had accompanied him to Paris for the final preparations in October and - under the influence of a cocktail of drink and drugs - committed suicide in a hotel bathroom on the eve of the opening.[32] The emotional turmoil that followed this loss was reflected on different levels. The number of surviving paintings decreases in the years up to the New York exhibition: fourteen works from 1972, ten from 1973 and six from 1974. The artist's biographer, Michael Peppiatt, has seen this period as reflecting Bacon's gradual realisation of his 'loss and guilt'. To a conversation in the 'early summer of 1972' - just prior to making the Tate's triptych - he attributed Bacon's remark 'Not an hour goes by, of course, when I don't think about George.'[33] It prefaced the artist's description of his lover's earlier attempts at suicide, and the regret felt at helping him out of his life of petty crime into comfortable indolence.[34]

Knowledge of Dyer's death has circumscribed the interpretation of the ensuing paintings. [35] He had been the subject, identified or not, of many of Bacon's works shown in Paris, and his appearance in subsequent images indicates a deliberate commemoration. He is recognisable as the left-hand figure in Triptych - August 1972. Although some have suggested that the right-hand figure resembles Bacon himself, it seems likely that this, too, was Dyer, as asserted in an earlier Tate catalogue. [36] Both figures wear underpants, a code - as Sylvester has pointed out - that Bacon habitually used to refer to Dyer's reputed modesty.[37] This presentation of different aspects of the same figure is not unusual in the related works. The memorial process was initiated in Triptych, 1971 (private collection)[38] which is also sometimes known as Triptych in Memory of George Dyer, [39] and was seemingly painted immediately after the event.[40] It shows three aspects of the man including (in the central panel) his enigmatic presence unlocking a door on a staircase, which appears to relate to Bacon's admiration for T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. [41]

The dark silhouette of this figure, though set with its companions against a lilac ground, heralds the noticeably more restrained colouring of the works first discussed by Hugh Davies as the 'Black' triptychs when they were shown in New York. [42] Although other canvases were completed alongside these, Davies identified the Tate's Triptych - August 1972 as the first of a trio, followed in the next year by Three Portraits - Triptych 1973 (Marlborough Fine Art) and Triptych, May-June 1973 (private collection). [43] Both of these have at one time or another assumed titles recalling Dyer's death: Three Portraits - Posthumous Portrait of George Dyer, Self-Portrait, Portrait of Lucian Freud and In Memory of George Dyer - Triptych respectively. Although the characterisation as 'Black' dramatises the change in mood around late 1971, it literally denotes the shift from the strong colour of such works as the orange Triptych - Studies from the Human Body, 1970. In revising the grouping a decade later, Davies (with Sally Yard) reduced the emphasis on Three Portraits - Triptych 1973 in favour of Triptych, March 1974 (private collection) [44] identified as 'the final work of the black trilogy'.[45] This revision - based upon the black backgrounds - may be open to question, both because the 1974 painting came significantly later than the ten month period in which the others were made and because its figures appear deliberately generalised and anonymous.

Given the concentrated period in which the earlier triptychs were completed, an increasingly programmatic approach may be assumed in their conception. Certainly Triptych, May-June 1973 is one of the few paintings in which there appears to be some deliberate narrative content, as the three panels isolate the stages of the final death-throws of Dyer (who is easily recognisable) in the Parisian hotel bathroom in which he was found. In each the figure is crumpled and isolated in a black space beyond a doorway, though in the central panel it casts a black-winged shadow onto the mushroom foreground. Three Portraits - Triptych 1973 also features the doorway device in order to frame the three sitters, although the colouring is muted rather than threateningly dark, with the exception of the black shadows extending from each figure. The portrait of Dyer here is closely related in pose to the left hand panel of Triptych - August 1972, as Davies has noted, [46] although the handling is softer than in the more robust Tate painting. No such narrative is legible in Triptych, March 1974, where a nude is flanked by a butcher and a photographer.

There is no clear evidence that the painter conceived these works as a sequence. Indeed he is reported as having chosen the black background of the Tate painting 'because the images looked best against that colour, and not for any symbolic reason'. [47] However, some indication may be gleaned from the selection of his four solo exhibitions between 1975 and 1978, over which Bacon may be assumed to have had some influence.[48]Triptych - August 1972 and Triptych, May-June 1973 featured in all of these shows and remained in the artist's possession throughout this period; this suggests a deliberate establishment of their thematic and compositional relationship. Different works were selected to accompany them at different venues. In New York, both Three Portraits - Posthumous Portrait of George Dyer, Self-Portrait, Portrait of Lucian Freud and Triptych, March 1974 were shown. The latter was included in the exhibition in Marseilles, where Triptych, 1971 (with Dyer standing on the stairs) also featured. In both the Parisian and Spanish exhibitions that followed, Triptych, 1971 remained but Triptych, March 1974 was omitted. From this it may be concluded that Davies's limited grouping was not recognised by Bacon, but that the central pairing of Triptych - August 1972 and Triptych, May-June 1973 had some significance for him perhaps within a wider accumulation of related works. It is worth noting that the illustrated pages of the catalogue of the 1977 Paris exhibition - Bacon's first since Dyer's death there - were prominently edged in black.

Within the evolution of the works shown in these exhibitions Triptych - August 1972 was pivotal in setting the standard for more austere compositions. This having been said, its devices and colouring recall the much earlier Three Figure in a Room, 1964, a fact which has encouraged Philippe Dagen to observe that a biographical interpretation is inadequate as Dyer's suicide could have no bearing on the earlier composition. [49] The link may have been established by the fact that the 1964 triptych was the first in which Dyer had featured, and, in the early 1970s, Bacon kept a reproduction of it pinned to the wall; it is visible in Peter Beard's photographs of the studio.[50] While the poses of the 1964 painting were not reiterated eight years later, the isolated display of the male nude in both compositions is set in a similarly ambiguous mushroom coloured space, with the symmetry of the outer panels established by dark foreground wedges. Other details in Triptych - August 1972, and the notable introduction of black, seem to be deliberately resumed in Triptych, May-June 1973, the painting with which Bacon paired it most often. The simple flat openings provide a dark foil for the figures, but this was further dramatised in the later painting by an angling of the door-frames which induces a sense of claustrophobic space. As well as showing a development, this may reflect the different themes of (remembered) sex in Triptych - August 1972 and death in Triptych, May-June 1973.

The triptychs have been characterised by Davies and Yard as dealing with 'a struggle against death'. [51] This follows Davies's earlier description of 'a life-and-death struggle' in the central panel of the Tate's painting where the homosexual coupling is 'perilously close to a darkened doorway invested with all the threat of a limitless void'.[52] He proposed that the painter attempted 'to elevate his friend's internal struggle to the level of a universally tragic image by adopting the metaphor of the two wrestlers locked in mortal combat'.[53] A suggestion of an 'internal conflict' for the painter himself may be found in the way in which the self-portrait turns away from this central scene. Michael Peppiatt saw death as almost pervasive in the painting: 'What death has not already consumed seeps incontinently out of the figures as their shadows.'[54] This contemplation of mortality may be reflected in the parallel increase in Bacon's self-portraits at this time - seven in 1972 and five in 1973 - as well as his contemporary comments to Peter Beard:

Death is the only absolute that we know in this life. Death is the one absolute certainty. Artists know that they can't defeat it, but I think that most artists are very aware of their annihilation - it follows them around like their shadow, and I think that's one of the reasons most artists are so conscious of the vulnerability and the nothingness of life [55]

Bacon's repeated use of Dyer's likeness in subsequent paintings, through which an
iconography was evolved for him (which included the white underwear seen in the Tate painting), [56] reflected this contradictory need to commemorate in the face of mortality. This has some concordance with the traditional use of the triptych format for religious images, so that the confrontation of death in these paintings has connections with Bacon's secularised versions of the sacrifice of the Crucifixion.[57]

As has been suggested, the designation of a trio of works as 'Black' triptychs is problematic in enforcing their isolation from the rest of Bacon's output at that moment - as well as that of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, it serves a purpose in focussing on works widely regarded as remarkable and as marking a shift in the artist's career from violent to tragic subject matter. In justifying the addition of Triptych, March 1974, Davies and Yard noted how it 'transcends the pathos of its companion triptychs to become an enigmatic and summary work'. [58] A sense of the achievement in these works of a tragic art - aspirations to which Bacon had been questioned about by more than one observer[59] - has been summarised by Wieland Schmied:

In the 'black' triptychs Bacon gave the world a series of images that not only explore fundamental forms of human experience, but are also entirely new ... the paintings can be seen as a 'pathos formula' for our own time: in the midst of the modern world they remind us of the brute facts of existence and force us ... to acknowledge the fact of our own frailty.[60]

Such claims fit with the sustained tendency to read Bacon's work as 'existential' and this may be justified by the biographical information which surrounds this group. As Michel Leiris observed of the painter's output in general, they 'help us, most powerfully, to feel the sheer fact of existence as it is sensed by a man without illusions'. [61]

Matthew Gale
September 1998
Revised April 2001

John W. Nixon, 'Francis Bacon: Paintings 1959-1979; Opposites and Structural Rationalism', unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Ulster, Belfast 1986, pp.133-6

E.g. David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1975, rev. ed. as The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1980, 3rd ed. 1990, 4th ed. as Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1993, p.63

Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion, London 1901, p.75
Repr. Sylvester 1993, p.33
Ibid., p.30
Repr. Alley 1964, p.81, no.75 (col.); ibid., p.85, no.80 (col.) respectively
Sylvester 1993, p.116

Otto Karl Werckmeister, Citadel Culture, Chicago and London 1991 reported in Schmied 1996, pp.106-7

Emmanuel Cooper, The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West, London and New York 1986, 2nd ed. 1994, p.230

Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, London 1992, p.126

David W. Boxer, 'The Early Work of Francis Bacon', unpublished Ph.D thesis, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 1975, p.139

David Sylvester, 'Bacon's Course' in Achille Bonito Oliva (ed.), Francis Bacon: Figurabile, exh. cat., Museo Correr, Venice, 1993, p.68

David Sylvester, in conversation with the author, April 2001

Harry Geldzahler, 'Introduction' in Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings 1968-1974, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1975, p.6

Francis Bacon, Grand Palais, Paris, Oct.1971- Jan.1972, Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, Mar.-May 1972; this exhibition is mistakenly given as occurring in late 1972 in Simon Wilson, Tate Gallery: An Illustrated Companion, London, revised ed. 1991 p.247
Francis Bacon, Galleria del Milione, Milan, Dec.1972 - Jan.1973
Peppiatt, pp.239-41
Ibid., p.247
Ibid., p.248
E.g. Sylvester 1993, p.68; Peppiatt 1996, p.250; and Tate Gallery Acquisitions 1980-2, London 1984, p.42

Ibid.
David Sylvester, in conversation with the author, April 2001
Repr. Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London 1985, 77 (col.)

Lorenza Trucchi, Francis Bacon, Milan 1975, trans. John Shepley, London and New York 1976, pl.155

Davies 1975, p.63
Repr. Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London 1985, 82 (col.) and 85 (col.) respectively
Repr., ibid., 87 (col.)
Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Francis Bacon, New York 1986, p.78

Davies 1975, p.66
Tate Gallery Acquisitions 1980-2, London 1984, p.42
Respectively: Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings 1968-1974, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Mar.-June 1975; Francis Bacon: oeuvres récentes, Musée Cantini, Marseilles, July-Sept. 1976; Francis Bacon: oeuvres récentes, Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris, Jan.-Mar. 1977; Francis Bacon, Fundacion Juan March, Madrid, April-May 1978, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, June-July 1978
Philippe Dagen, Francis Bacon, Paris 1996, p.52

E.g. Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings 1968-1974, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1975, p.4

'Francis Bacon: Remarks from an Interview with Peter Beard', in Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings 1968-1974, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1975, p.15

Davies and Yard 1986, p.78

E.g. (in 1966) Sylvester 1993, p43; and Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, face et profil, Paris, Munich and Milan 1983, trans. John Weightman as Francis Bacon: Full Face and in Profile, Oxford 1983, p.42

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'Triptych August 1972', Francis Bacon, 1972 | Tate

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Artwork page for 'Triptych August 1972', Francis Bacon, 1972 This work is generally considered one in a series of Black Triptychs which followed the suicide of Bacon's lover, George Dyer. Dyer appears on the left and Bacon is on the right.

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I’m In The Bath On All Fours — Flora Parrott

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Charlotte Prodger | Turner Prize Winner 2018 | TateShots

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The imagery will portray a direct relationship between humans and cultivated land and animals, commenting on how our relationship with land and animals has evolved and globalized. This film will provoke questions such as, where do we exist within our landscape? Do we still belong in certain landscapes? How do we interact with our environment? And how has our relationship with land evolved? This work will combine performance art with moving image. This work has been informed by artists such as Charlotte Prodger and Flora Parrott, as well as readings throughout the course.

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original still from short film,
film footage I had captured back in rural Scotland. The short film touches on subjects such as identity, the queer experience, South Asian culture and the politicised landscape. The footage pictures me sheering a black sheep. The black sheep is symbolic of my experience growing up in rural Scotland, illustrating my experience being outcast, from my community for being one of the only non-white people in my community, as well as being alienated for my own family for being queer.

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AI generated imagery, typing in key word sheep sheering, the images they created are Bacon style