Friday, November 8, 2013

Erika's Move

 Since Left-Field start earlier this year Erika Wolters has made the most of the cabin, working in there from Tuesdays to Thursdays. Her provocative mixed media portraits openly accentuate today’s fascination with one’s physical appearance and the lengths women are encouraged to go to in the desire for so called beauty. Luckily, I caught up with Wolters before she moves out of Left-Fields cabin and into her new studio at home…………



 Wolters is a soft spoken woman, engagingly modest, who herself is naturally attractive, and looks after her health. She drinks herb tea and doesn’t buy any food that has more than 3 ingredients, so there are no demons knocking on her door about self-worth, Wolters just cares; she is attentive and works in a delicate, administrative, methodical manner.

Erika Wolters at her desk
 
Currently she is excited about getting her website up and running and seeing her work online as well as just finishing a large Great Gatsby backdrop mural for a local ball that challenged her in terms of scale and space.


 Wolters portraits are an imperative discussion about beauty and in art beauty is a big subject that makes me think of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work and his quote,


“I am obsessed with beauty. I want everything to be perfect, and of course it isn’t. And that’s a tough place to be because you’re never satisfied.”[1]

 His photography was sophisticated and confrontationally ground breaking, showing images of people that an audience wasn’t used to seeing, his work is pivotal to the perception of beauty and what we think it is. Wolters though, is seeing through eyes that have possibly come full circle, she is looking to capture the ugliness and ridiculousness that the desire for beauty has now come to and in doing this her distorted images become caricature’s that prompt me to associate characters like Leela, of Futurama, set in portraitures of black humour. Wolters makes a mockery of the portrayed sophistication used in the advertising world that she sources her images from and manages to make appealing images out of something that theoretically she is suggesting is unappealing and sad. 


 One of Wolter’s latest paintings utilises the surface of a clock where she sees the fun in juxtaposing her imagery with the idea of time. I for one, generally, admire her provocation and would quite happily place one of her portraits next to my mirror, if only to bring me back to reality as I slowly notice the lines of age creep onto my face every time I look and wonder where the real me has gone. Of course, I am just mourning my youth. Maybe when people have children they should give them a best before date, so as young adults they have no misconceived notions of eternal youth like they seem to have when they talk and look at their parents as if they were never young. I know I looked at my parents this way! Now this starts to sound like I think there is only beauty in youth, which isn't so, really it just demonstrates the multiple complexities of beauty as subject.

Text and Images S Walker-Holt 2013