School of Fine Art Sculpture & Environmental Art
Vera Bartolozzi
As an Italian artist based in Glasgow, her work explores gender roles within her cultural heritage. She works as a multidisciplinary artist, currently focusing mainly on sculpture and performance. While her sculptures employes life casting with the use of soy-derived wax, bread and sugar, her performance practise is based on dramatic characterisation and contemporary dance. Her philosophy is rooted in Feminist Studies from the Second and Third Wave and on Jungian Psychology, which allows her to investigate the representation of women’s stereotypical gender roles and archetypes, immersed within cultural discourses and personal memories. With a cultural background that has impressed in her practice the insistence on questioning violent historical structure, Vera’s work is directed towards healing, communities and shared experiences of self-transformation.
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Molting Goddess
This work is meant to represent a female figure, emerging, reassembling and exploding. This piece originated from the idea of dismantelling religious archetypes from the artist’s personal cultural background. The casted figure is positioned on the ground to suggest an emergence from the underworld, like some ancient long-forgotten goddess being recalled from the underworld. The figure is broken, with different pieces floating in the space: a fragmentation that formally correspond to a dislocated identity, such as those often felt by women in the negotiation of their identity beyond gender roles. The soy wax used in high percentage for this life cast, offers a more organic aesthetic to the sculpture whist also preserving remnants of the original plaster mold and imprints from the process of de-moulding. Thus the piece functions also as a process, where its different wax layers and the signs of the physical gestures employed in its creation come to contribute to its textured and uncanny quality.