Rebecca Ounstead

Artist Statement

My work includes; sculpture, painting, performance, costume and photography. I am concerned with aestheticisation of gender roles, materiality, sexuality, consumer product identity and advertising.

The work attempts to place the viewer in a manipulated and controlled environment. Often with each sense (scent, sound, touch, vision, taste) catered for. Offering the audience an immersive yet subtly discomforting or strange experience that tussles between the familiar or the normative and the unknown.

The performers offer living, moving, breathing sculptures to the practice that could previously only have been imagined. As an extension of the fabric of the sculptures, the performers are dressed in the same or similar materials, colours and patterns as the 3D objects. This fabric unites the objects (performer and 3D Object) together in an aesthetical bond, that visualises their belonging together, a co-existence.

Sculpturally the work exists in multiple parts, existing as an assembly of tactile, structural, display devices that support each other and the rest of the environment (the performers or other 3D objects). To support and create the fabric of the practice, I work with hand dying processes, digital fabric printing, resin marbling, wood work, vinyl, hand painting and upholstery techniques.

Lured into a fetishistic play; materials beckon to be teased and manipulated, fluffed up and glossed. Swathes of organza lick cool steel, Egyptian cottons lay sodden, soft faux furs flirt with becoming sullied. Object becomes ornament. Painting becomes pattern. Fabric becomes framework.
Arrangement and precise placement activates the work, suggestive of a lustful touch.
Protruding. Straddling. Hanging. An aesthete's eye un- dresses the scene, noting moments of intimacy between materials. Brushed cotton fibres. Corpulent folds. Glossy blonde ponytails.
A seasoned, tasteful awareness of colour palette, pattern and texture are inherent in creating a dialogue which is then performed through the components relationships and proximities to each other.
The work endeavours to stimulate and titillate the ob- server. Proposed, Poised, Precise.