sarah sutton paintings the female gaze

the female gaze - sarah sutton motherland, 2017

sarah sutton
motherland
2017
time, charcoal, oil, dirt & scratches on salvaged wooden kitchen door

the female gaze

or, being framed

A consideration of how the female gaze calls us into being & frames our experience of ourselves & the world.

The fact that this forms a matrix for living has a power that can be disturbing; taken at the flood, it is unassailable. Our mother’s state of mind is the state in which we find ourselves. When it is preoccupied, traumatized, for any reason unable to offer the whole orchestral range of a responsive gaze, it is experienced as oppression, even annihilation. This is the silent force behind misogyny, which becomes a way of getting our own back, appropriating – colonizing – territory that should have been our birthright. Hostility is directed against any woman, all women, as representations of the original woman, who had/has such power in our interior landscape.

There are any number of ways in which the creative power of the female gaze is neutered. Sheer brute force is one way of doing it. The sentimentalizing of motherhood is another way, & has the advantage of masking the hatred. Making sacred is a good way of writing in stone, petrifying, preventing a fuller, more nuanced experience of something other than awe. Denial of the conflicting emotional undercurrents also prevents transformation & the disturbance of change. See artworks studio thinking on memorializing.

It brings conflict, too, for the female doing the gazing. The fierce devotion, the intensity of concentration is a powerful effort, depleting if it is never turned inwards. It can bring bitter resentment in its undertow if it’s squandered – a debt that both must & can never be repaid.

Sarah Sutton has a particular interest both in what the female gaze makes visible, and in making the female gaze visible. See her book Being Taken In: the framing relationship for more of her thinking on this process.