Ali Noble

When one of my favourite authors, Siri Hustvedt, wrote an essay, My Louise Bourgeois, about one of my favourite artists, I got a little excited. Emotional, even. Louise Bourgeois has become the poster-grrl for many women artists, embodying and transcending the moniker of Confessional Artist. Woman Artist. Confessional Woman Artist. Mother. Difficult Woman. Hustvedt’s essay is the catalyst for My Emotionalism; an exhibition where the primary mutual endeavour of the artists gathered is to translate emotional states. And more.

The artists exhibiting in My Emotionalism – Grace Burzese, Cybele Cox, Danica Firulovic, Ali Noble, Katy B Plummer and Helen Shelley – share compelling affinities and complexities. They are frank about the role of emotion in their practices, and they are materialists.

Eliciting feeling through colour and form. Expressing emotion through gesture, action, video, and sculpture. The artists in My Emotionalism consider the deliberate articulation of their emotional selves as a central component of their practice. Concurrently these artists are also avid object makers. The physical presence of the artist is evidenced through the visible handling of paint, clay, fabric, thread and perspex.

Importantly, the practice of these artists cannot be simplified or confined to the disclosure of their internal lives. Greater than their autobiography, the artists also engage in active dialogues with minimalism, expressionism, feminism, capitalism, ornamentalism, high-low art, symbolism and ritual, psychoanalysis, craft and humour.

Louise Bourgeois revelled in the ambiguity of her art making. She was at once fierce and tender, protector and aggressor, she-he. Her work is the site of her emotional and psychological struggle – fear, rage, love – it is, ‘a visceral experience of the artist’s war with and love for the materials themsleves, yielding fabrics and threads, but also, resistant marble and steel and glass’. I suspect her broad appeal lies within the multiplicity of her art making and personality. ‘For LB it is rarely either/or; it is usually both-and. Hers is the Janus face’. Contrary. Ambiguous. Clever. Vitriolic. Loving.

My Emotionalism takes it cue from the complexity of Louise Bourgeois’ works. Hustvedt endorses artists, particularly women, to keep making work coaxed from the emotional realm. Works that are cryptic, inconclusive, personal and that have multiplicity, she understands the drive to, ‘translate real experience into passionate symbols. The experience that must be translated is both deep and old […] It is of the body, female and male, male-female […]’

Quotes taken from Siri Hustvedt’s essay My Louise Bourgeois, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, 2016.

Ali Noble 2017