In the art tradition, and elsewhere, men have historically determined how women are perceived. BAZAAR’s Head of Digital Content speaks to the Australian artists using self-portraiture to take back the narrative.
OPENING WEEKEND of the Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers, is one of the highlights of my year. As much as the subject and technique itself, the story of the relationship between painter and subject is what captivates me: protégés and mentors; artists and politicians. How often strangers will come together for hours, days; then perhaps never again. Still, they’ll always have this intimate knowledge of each other.
In the case of Natasha Walsh’s simply titled Self-Portrait – a diminutive yet captivating painting I lingered at during the 2016 exhibition – I’ve always since wanted to know more about the artist’s experience of deepening her relationship with herself.
Walsh’s artmaking process is divine, to be sure; pigment and linseed oil is applied to copper, and though it takes time, eventually the painting becomes something entirely unlike its first iteration, as the colour reacts to the oxidising metal. “It reminds me that the illusion of timelessness within an artwork is just that, an illusion,” Walsh writes to me in an email. “It takes time, but everything is in the process of change…this is a reflection of an internal self that is in a constant state of flux.”
Despite the utter fascination this experimental process inspires, there’s more still to the experience of witnessing Walsh’s self-portraits. You see – for those unfamiliar with this national portraiture prize – subjects must be ‘preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in art, letters, science or politics’. As someone who has often struggled with owning any sort of achievement as a consequence of self-possessed talent, that a woman several years my junior could submit herself for the nation’s most prestigious portraiture prize was revelatory. It felt to me like rebellion.
“I actually don’t enjoy confronting my reflection. At times the vulnerability of this can be very disheartening and unpleasant,” Walsh confides. “The conflict between that internal self and my reflection is always quite confronting.”
“[However] painting my reflection has in some ways been empowering, as a painting is not life,” she explains. “It is the manifestation of an internal, invisible self that is the synthesis of your internal thoughts, ideas and feelings.”
Long inspired by the female artist throughout history who took it upon herself to upend the status quo, to speak for herself though self-portraiture, Walsh says, “There was a sense of empowerment in having the ability to shape my own representation as a young female. The representation of women has been dominated by the male gaze.”
