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 |
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.
1 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/513824-i-am-obsessed-with-beauty-i-want-everything-to-be accessed 7/11/13
Text and Images S Walker-Holt 2013
