Print Contemporary Practice
Clodagh Laffan
I want my work to be a celebration of the historically spiritual feminine connection to nature in a world that increasingly feels disconnected from our roots. I explore these concepts in my work because there is a clear relationship between patriarchal oppression and the destruction of nature. By morphing humans with the natural world I want to acknowledge that we are all a part of nature, not above it and show that we are not as different as we think.
I centred this series of work around the symbol of the ‘Enclosed Garden/Hortus Conclusus’, which was a popular subject in Medieval and Renaissance Art that has always been associated with the Virgin Mary and her purity. In many paintings and manuscript illuminations, the ‘Enclosed Garden’ is often depicted as a walled garden or yard, supposedly representing her ‘closed off’ womb, which was to remain untouched, and also of her being protected by a wall, from sin. I found this idea really interesting as traditionally, gardens are manmade spaces where nature is controlled and dominated and the ‘enclosed garden’ traditionally symbolises a space where women, particularly women’s sexuality is controlled and contained. Drawing imagery from fairy tales, medieval folklore and the Victorian decorative arts, I made my own series of enclosed gardens that explore ideas of femininity, nature and control.
Living and making work under lockdown restrictions pushed me to experiment with accessible methods such as watercolour painting, drawing with ink, embellishing objects, marbling papers and hand building small sculptures with clay, wire and paper. By incorporating these techniques, that have often been dismissed as decorative or ‘women’s work’, I wanted to pay tribute to the skill and artistry of traditional ‘feminine’ crafts. Through the process of making these works, I started to feel that they also came to represent my experience of living in lockdown these last few months. The cage, the shells and the bell jars all began to symbolise the way we are all living now in our isolated bubbles. The enclosed garden, despite being a protective, safe space feels suffocating and claustrophobic.