She Paintings – Mikey Cuddihy

 

The source for my work comes mainly from small doodles or ‘aides memoires’ transformed in the past to large-scale installations, paintings and drawings. In these new works, the doodles are simplified to emblematic, life-sized forms where gesture and the body come into play when painting them.

More recently I’ve been taking the forms away from their flat, wall-based context, and turning them into stuffed paper shapes placed on the floor, as if they’ve escaped their moorings.

The altered magazine page – a series made at the beginning of the year, stands as drawing in its own right, the imagery interacting with, and altering the meaning of the original photograph and text.

But what are these painted shapes hanging in the sweetshop window? What have they become now I’ve brought them out into the world? I see them as female, as women, sometimes with an almost comic reference to female body parts. Ultimately, these works have moved in stages from an intimate space to a very public one: on the wall / in the window facing out to the street. I like that.

 

• Works: L-R (hanging) She: 1, 2, 3, 2019 (watercolour on heritage paper)
• Painted shapes on the floor: Shapes of things (various) 2019 (watercolour, paper, staples).
• Magazine drawing: Late Night Melancholia, 2019 (spirit-based marker on magazine page)

Referencing the body in earlier work: Romola 1989 and Animal Vegetable Me 1989 (below) –  doodles were enlarged for the first time, enlarged into biomorphic forms, and painted out on the floor, referencing the body in a more visceral form.

In later work, from 2000, I make a series of knicker drawings, which were selected by Mary Kelly (feminist icon) for inclusion in East International. Another series of these drawings were later selected for the Jerwood Drawing Prize.

I also write, and recently published a piece with DACS – about artists’ provenance, and how a piece of work I threw away ended up on a famous YBA artist’s wall.

https://www.art360foundation.org.uk/blog/guest-blog-artist-unknown

In 2014, I published a memoir about my childhood and early life as an artist living and working in London. Here’s a review:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/28/conversation-happiness-summerhill-school-review-mikey-cuddihy

You can read more about me in this biography page on my website:

http://mikeycuddihy.co.uk/biography.html