Cathy de Monchaux
(1960 - ) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Cathy de Monchaux |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
London, England |
| Nationality: |
British |
| Birth: |
1960 |
| Death: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Installation
Sculptor
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Biography
Cathy de Monchaux's wall and floor installations make use of suggestive imagery, all curving, parting folds, that appear as vaginal as one of Judy Chicago's place-settings for The Dinner Party (1979), albeit with a nasty twist - the vulval forms often peter out into sharp metal spikes - in place of the celebratory atmosphere. De Monchaux's materials are a marriage of opposites; elegant black ribbons and butch buckles and straps, velvet and muslin and leather and denim. Fabric can be delicately cruched or brutally pierced with bolts, shiny brass contrasts with rusty steel.
De Monchaux has said: 'I don't think it's possible to work from a woman's perspective in terms of the way the world has been ordered. You have to find a way of dealing with that, or of inventing an alternative to that male perspective.'30 She can be seen as part of a feminist move to reconfigure sexuality and the female body for women. There is a sense of a subtle take on psychoanalytic accounts of sexuality, one of the greatest influences upon "the way the world has been ordered'. Instead of Freud's phallic symbol of power, we look at row upon row of forms that at first appear explicitly feminine, but which, despite being rendered in loving detail, are difficult to categories. They seem contradictory, hard where they should be soft, insistent when they should be acquiescent; ft is as if de Monchaux has moved on from constraining binary definitions of sexuality, charting instead a more fluid sensual terrain, whose liberties are seductive and also dangerous.
De Monchaux has been influenced by Marcel Duchamp, making reference to him in titles such as Once upon a fuck, once upon a Duchamp, once upon a lifetime (1992). In 1995 she was chosen along with Helen Chadwick and Cornelia Parker to represent Britain at the Sao Paulo Biennale in the exhibition Something the Matter. In the catalogue essay, critic Louisa Buck related de Monchaux's work to the writer Georges Bataille's definition of eroticism as 'a breaking down of established patterns'. Boundaries, and the possibility of pushing through and opening them up, is an identifiable theme in a number of de Monchaux's works. In Defying death I ran away to the fucking circus (1991) padded red velvet doors appear to usher you inside. While at the centre of Wandering about in the future, looking forward to the past (1994) a long pink leather slit is clamped shut with ribbons and rivets, suggesting that it is longing to yawn open.
Like several of de Monchaux's works Once upon a fuck looks like a decorative ladies collar (her preparatory drawings look like designs for lace). But it is made out of metal plates bolted together, with fabric pressed tightly between them. The crushed material could be interpreted as a visual metaphor for the constraints of social conventions and physical restrictions suffered by women historically, particularly during the Victorian period. De Monchaux is fascinated by the Bronte sisters, and their exploration, in their writing, of the division between femininity as prescribed by their time, and femininity as they imagined it. The exquisite, almost obsessive craftsmanship of de Monchaux's work (and her odd collection of media) also recalls the leisure pastimes ladies were encouraged to pursue in the past, making painstaking decorative art works out of materials such as cut paper and human hair.
Recently de Monchaux has begun to use photographs in her work. Looking at Assuaging doubt through others' eyes (1997) entails peeping voyeuristically through narrow slits at a series of fifty small images that appear at first to be erotic photographs of wet, swollen forms, but they are actually pictures of a market full of flowers, fish and vegetables. De Monchaux is taking part in a game played by other women artists, from Georgia O'Keefe's early twentieth-century part-views of flowers, all protruding stamens and curling petals, to Helen Chadwick"s Bad Blooms as the century neared its close. In Fretting around on the brink of indolence (1998), a row of light box photographs of a lush landscape is interrupted by an elaborate vaginal form, with multiple ripples of fabric echoing off it.
De Monchaux has written: 'Historically, as a female, one has been culturally conditioned to experience desire from the male perspective. 1 think that is true at least for someone my age. Maybe for a woman twenty years younger, something else is taking place. I hope so.'" She was nominated for the Turner prize in 1998.
Source: Alicia Foster, Tate Women Artists |
Samples of Work
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