“Unproductive” (I)

This artwork is represented by Young Soy Gallery; queries may be directed directly to them. Exhibited in their Autumn 2024 show, and will be at Affordable Art Fair 2025. Shortlisted for the Colours of Humanity Art Prize and displayed at Goethe Institut Gallery, Hong Kong, from December 2024 to January 2025.

This is a self-portrait. I suppose sharing context on the scene is me breaking the proscenium, as it were. With that in mind, I enjoyed making the reading light look like a stage light, and the curtains a bit theatrical, which is a twist I happen to love in Diego Velàzquez’s Las Hilanderas. I put in a soft sense of darkness around the lit scene, and played with the paint to make it scrim-like.

The title is a wink as a comment on contemporary capitalist culture in which leisure is often commodified, and everything is an activity in prescribed blocks of time. Time seems to be removed from life, and is often not our own. 

Besides, women are often not considered “productive” unless they’re very obviously working in commonly understood ways, or having children. Historically, to depict a woman in recline meant to see artwork made through the male gaze. There is rebellion in a woman depicting herself, unbothered, in recline.

36x36 inches, oils and acrylic on stretched canvas