Chelsea Swan

I love to go to charity shops and vintage emporiums to find lost treasures to use in my work. I find sequins, buttons and beads, bits of fur, fabrics, embrodery cottons, old dolls and little figures, clothing, lampshades, and all sorts of other lost treasures. To me these are a a collection of the symbolic language of girlhood and feminity.

This got me thinking about other types of semiotics which could be connected with feminity.

Components could be feminine shapes, like how Louise Bourgeois uses boob like shapes and their opposite of penis like shapes. There are a lot of phallic symbols around us every day. Kids graffiti cocks on everything. Now anything oval can be said to be phallic. It is not so with a V or a W or an O. We do not see tits and vaginas as they have not been so sublimated into visual culture that they have been paired down into graphic forms.

How meaning is formed – you could use the shapes of a penis, two circles and an oval to convey man, you could do two circles and a v to indicate woman more than you could by using the components alone. The female body is used so widely that their are designers that simply use curves and it is recognisable as feminine or a feminine form. You could also use simple objects associated with woman hood to convey womanhood or a state of womanhood. A lipstick and a mirror – a woman that wants to look good etc. Or like in Coppola’s films there are shots of objects that convert states of mind, states of femaleness, and age all at once.

Reading the sign – connotation – as I said above the combination and choice of symbols can convey age, states of being, states of mind, femaleness. They can also be subverted. feminine symbols could be put out of context or juxtaposed with male symbols, a gun, a he-man doll etc. Some symbols can be more subtle. I often use boxes as little prisons that women are put in. These can only be read once in context. Single items can convey a state, such as a doily. Adoiley is a very feminine item but of a certain age and a certain archetype of womanhood, The homemaker of yesteryear. A barbie has many connotations, the bimbo, the sex symbol, unrealistic body standards, that women can be anything, that women put looks first. She is a symbol with many connotations.

Text and Image combined cortrol how the image is read. I like to use text in my work to expand upon or re-enforce or explain the image. I believe that Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois used text in their work in a similar way. I believe text can be quite beautiful in an image and heighten its message. I also think it can be used to shock, to question, to inform. The word cunt next to a drawing of a young girl would raise many questions, far different than questions raised if the image was a man, or an old woman. Text on symbols, such as my writing on the lampshade can change the meaning of the symbol and its connotations.

Official and unofficial language – in terms of femininity what is official and unofficial, who gets to decide. Is something official because it is long standing, traditional, widely used. I believe we are constantly in the process of making new languages and adapting / creating new symbolic cultures around femininity. An official symbol of femininity could be considered a lipstick, it is traditional, widely recognised, widely used as a symbol of femininity, the same with a tampon. However this does not symbolise all of womanhood as many do not use either but are still women. Unofficial language could be whatever you as a woman use and therefore decide is a feminine item. New symbols can be created. A new visual language, as with the way in which the emergence of the feminist movement coincided with new audio visual technologies which feminist artist adopted in order to create a female dominated genre of art.

Symbolic creativity consists of identity, subcultures, expression. It is the different cliques, the new romantics and the goths. It is bimbofication. It is using signs and symbols to create an identity, a genre, a theme. This is my favorite area of semiotics as it where the language can be used and manipulated to push the image to its clearest communication centered around once concept, theme or idea. You can manipulate, enhance, reduce and push the symbols to heighten the visuals.

Junk and culture also really interest me as I use a lot of ‘rubbish’, discarded objects, lost things, treasures seen as trash that once belonged, in the highest likelihood, to another woman. I like to change the context, change the value, move craft items to art items, bring new meaning to rejected things. These things can be used as ‘evidence of’ A broken umbrella is evidence of rain, discarded embroidery cotton is evidence of a creative woman etc.

Open work is readability. It is the interaction of the viewer that brings meaning. Like with ink blot tests. i think a lot of womens work is seen by men as irrelevant, not male, sexed, narcissistic. I think women read it as pieces of themselves or of the community. Like in the Love Witch film, the director expected men to see symbols of womanhood, she expected women to delve deeper and see meaning.

I had no point. Just thought it was interesting