HANDS FACE SPACE
Oil on canvas
£6,100
About the Artist
Mia Wilkinson toys with Western stereotypes of the domestic female in her art. She undermines the performative nature of women as “the angel in the house,” electrifying her figures with a grotesque, playful sexuality and situating them in caricaturized, lurid domestic settings. Born into a single-parent, working-class family in the North-East, the artist has no relationship with her Asian father and limited experience of that aspect of her racial heritage. Shaped by a strong but complex matriarchy, she learned that a female body holds both social currency and relative social invisibility. The experience of paternal absence, and its ramifications for her racial identity, combined with the dominant female forces that raised her, find presence and voice in the bawdiness of the women she depicts-skewing and skewering culturally imposed expectations and artistic traditions. Wilkinson finds herself as “subject” deeply discomforting and increasingly turns the gaze onto her own image in an effort to further challenge traditions of depicting women and explore the female relationship with art.
