Julia Andrews-Clifford is a photomontage artist based in Hastings.  Her work explores the connection between the personal and the political, the private and the public, the person and the icon – through art galleries, pop-up shows and public installations. For International Women’s Day this year, she created a series of ‘Everyday Icons’, in which ordinary women doing routine domestic work photographed in a high fashion style popped up guerrilla-style on bus shelters and a billboard in Hastings. These anti-ads aimed to show the clash between domestic work and public recognition, especially as it affects women.

Keith Rodway went to her studio in Hastings to interview her, accompanied by her husband Ross.

KR – How did you get into doing the billboards?

Julia – I consider myself an artist and activist, and I realised that a lot of my work has a feminist thrust, and I thought it would be more powerful having it as an anti-advert than having it in a gallery, and that a lot more women – and men – would see it and it would be more something in the public domain.

K – What are your feelings about gallery work?

J – That’s an interesting question. There’s nothing wrong with the gallery aesthetic but it does limit your audience to a certain demographic …obviously it’d be great to get [the work] into galleries as well, and I suppose if I think about it, it’s about the female gaze, looking at women and women’s experience. If that could be represented in the Tate, rather than Picasso’s nudes, that would be fantastic. But, in the absence of me getting into the Tate (laughs) and maybe just getting in to a gallery where there’s a very small footfall, or where people are going into a cafe but not looking at [the work], it becomes just furniture or interior design. With the billboards and at bus shelters, because it’s about advertising, it’s about representation; it’s the right place for it to be.

K – What sort of effect are you hoping to have on… it’s not a defined audience…what are you hoping the work will do, in an ideal world?

J – Provoke debate, and in an ideal world give women more representation – ordinary women doing ordinary things – having that hidden domestic life brought into the public sphere – making visible the invisible work that women do.

K – What’s the precise impetus behind wanting to do that?

J – Maybe my own experience of feeling taken for granted as an unpaid domestic labourer, and sometimes not getting the job satisfaction from that because of the isolation and invisibility of it. Even though I know it’s really important work.

K – What do you feel qualifies you to be making these statements?

J – I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I do unpaid domestic labour, I try and balance it with my own creative life and I struggle with that balance. I don’t qualify to speak for all women but I do qualify to speak for my own experience, and I do talk with a lot of mums and a lot of my thoughts chime with theirs. But I’m not really speaking for them, it’s more…Actually it probably is a more personal axe to grind (laughs)…maybe. Though I do think it’s more than that; the impetus comes from turning male gaze dominant representation on its head, and giving a more female slant on things, and having that out there.

K – How would you respond to the charge that the women who you might reach at the bus stop or [the shopping mall] don’t give a fuck about art? Or might find the whole thing patronising and presumptuous? If they did?

J – (laughs) I’d hear that. I can see that might be a thing certainly – you know, ‘so what, I’m too busy getting on with my life making money, making ends meet to be concerned with such a thing’ – like the debate between the suffragettes who were middle class privileged women, as compared to the working class women who didn’t have time for such debates. So I’m totally aware of my privilege in that respect – but it was the same argument for suffragettes, they were arguing for a cause that they thought would help all women and they had the financial stability to do that, and they were well intended – so I suppose I feel similarly in trying to do something  with that privilege.

K – I ask that because once when I was putting up flyers [for an art event] a guy came up to me – I’ve seen him often, I think he’s a street sweeper – and said, ‘that looks interesting, what is it?’ and I said it was for an art show, and I asked him if it was something that would interest him. His attitude completely changed. He said quite emphatically ‘No’ – which I completely understood – why would he be interested? It was a completely honest response, which you wouldn’t necessarily get from someone who might not want to go for other reasons.

J – It is off-putting, which is maybe another reason for not wanting to be in the art gallery, because it’s like an arthouse cinema – with avant-garde art the danger is that its radicalism misfires because it’s a very elite niche audience who are going to see it. I myself used to be intimidated by galleries and arthouse cinemas because I saw them as being pretentious, and bastions of middle-class white privilege. Later, I realised that was a very disabling point of view, and that there is a lot of fun and joy to be had. And with my teaching, it’s a lot about breaking down those barriers, and about making [art] more accessible. That’s not to say ‘Oh, you need to have this art in your life’, but it’s about not cutting your nose off to spite your face, or someone else doing it. Once you get past those barriers there’s a debate to be had for everyone.

K – What would you say to women who are quite happy as mothers and carers, and who don’t necessarily agree with you about the disparagement of their lives?

J – I would say that it’s not about individuals, it’s more about a system, it’s more about unpaid domestic labour than it is about individual experiences…but if they don’t see the problem, then the work falls short, which of course is a disappointment for me but I can’t dispute it. I’m interested in the fact that all these years after second-wave feminism argued that barriers have been broken down, Hillary Clinton did not win the presidency, that there is still entrenched gender division. But of course there will be individuals who, if they experience that, might not object to it. It’s as much about where feminism has got to as anything – and how we can represent women’s experience as equal to men’s  but different, and have value attached to that. And that comes back to the over-worked mum who’s got a full-time job and kids and probably doesn’t understand or appreciate what feminism is because they’re completely overwhelmed.

K – For me the issue is that a lot of feminism stays in the Academy, or where middle-class people gather to talk about what’s wrong with the world. It assumes the right to speak universally without necessarily considering its impact on the lives it presumes to champion.

J – So what’s the point of art, basically? it’s just about getting more female artists, more female advertisers, more female filmmakers- and then you would get a range of voices out there. For whatever reasons, it is still a male gaze – of course it’s changed, and of course I’m generalising, but you talk about people not being interested in art, but I think film is art, I think advertising hoardings are a form of art – it’s imagery that we are absorbing, and I think that’s incredibly powerful. It’s really there where art comes into its own, because people can say ‘oh it’s just a peripheral thing in people’s lives’, but billboards are like…furniture – billboards, films, TV, magazines, newspapers – it’s all being taken in, and that’s what I’m reacting to. It’s about getting different voices out there and if I just make stuff that I’m not even consciously thinking about, but it’s just my spin on things –

Ross – You mentioned the graffiti that appeared on the first billboard…It’s more the fact that there is a dialogue out there, and people are responding to it, interacting with it –

J – When we did the billboard this year a guy living nearby came out and said, ‘Hey, you’re doing it again, we saw the one last year, loads of people looked at it’ – and because he’s got a CCTV camera he saw people stop and look – so we’ve had a little bit of that…kind of nice feeling –

K – You’re communicating with people…

J – Yeah…maybe  we should have put a hashtag on it so people could follow it up…

K – The thing I find with what I do, music principally, is that the person listening to it can have a completely different experience from the one you thought they were going to have –

R – (laughs) – Yes…

K – You get it down, you mix it, you think ‘That’s it. That’s what it is, everyone’s going to see this, they’re going to see it exactly the way I think they should – but of course often they don’t…So anyway, is there anything you’d like to say to your public – your readership?

J (laughs) No, I don’t think so, I think it’s said with the work. I have invited responses through the Hastings Independent [newspaper] to nominate their own everyday icons – to ask ‘Who do you think is undervalued in the work they do – paid or unpaid’? So I’m aware of my lack of comprehensiveness on this but not much has come up so far. And the whole thing with the ‘saint’ – it’s not just women who are saints. I did do [the billboard] for International Women’s Day but I am going to do something for International Men’s Day in November.

K  – Is this a debate about art, gender, privilege, lack of privilege – all those things?

J – Maybe. I don’t know, I don’t always have conscious intentions with my work.

R – There’s something very physical about getting the images into the billboard frames –

J – The irony that I need two tall, strong men to help me with getting the work out there is not lost on us! It’s hilarious.

Read the original post on International Times here.

In celebration of International Women’s Day 2018, we are also showcasing the film-inspired work of photomontage artist Julia Andrews-Clifford. Using fragments, cuts, splices, paint and glue, she creates surrealist portraits and landscapes of real and imagined people’s lives. If you would like to nominate your own “everyday icon” for Julia’s new work please email Julia a good quality photo and some information about the work your icon does or has done. See below for contact details.

Inspired by film and feminism, her work explores the tensions between public/private life and the personal/political, and sometimes re-presents hidden herstories from the film industry. She exhibits through art galleries, pop-up shows, public installations, and site specific works on advertising columns, billboards and bus shelters. You can buy Julia’s work as originals or limited edition prints through her website shop.

Julia is currently working on a project for International Women’s Day 2018 with a series of large-scale works or ‘Everyday Icons’ that will appear on billboards and bus shelters across Hastings, East Sussex and explore the disconnect between domestic work and public recognition.  Her ‘Feminist Artwork of the Week’ challenge will also run until December 2018 in celebration of Suffrage100, the centenary of the first UK women getting the vote. It’s going to be a busy year!

#EverydayIcons

Read the original post on Media Parents here.

Julia Andrews-Clifford has worked in the creative industries since the late-nineties as a part of organisations such as the British Film Institute and the Museum of Moving Image, New York. Therefore it is no surprise to find a depth, and awareness of the function of images in her artwork that very clearly has its roots in film. However it is in this moment of social uncertainty and the age of the Facebook meme that Andrews-Clifford has turned her attention to pulling apart film and imagery, not only analytically but literally, in her first solo exhibition at The blackShed Gallery.

Andrews-Clifford makes photomontage with a clean, confident intention. The graphic quality of her works clearly derives from the ripping of text and images from advertising, fashion magazines and vintage publications. But while the process may be destructive; the result is crisp, portraying an underlying intention that goes beyond a simple subversion of her sources. Andrews-Clifford’s practice has grown from her interest in psychoanalytic film theory. In itself quite an esoteric area of film criticism, however it’s relevance not only to film but to many aspects of modern life is revealing of the underlying systems that dictate our behaviour. Most significantly for Andrews-Clifford in our relationship with advertising and film publicity. Since the middle of the last Century, the use of highly sexualised imagery has been used as a very successful means of selling which Andrews-Clifford grapples with in her practice. Much of her source material is drawn from print advertisements and even installing her own subverted versions over billboards as statement guerrilla artwork. Despite the sharp-edged finish to her works, there is a jarring quality to Andrews-Clifford’s compositions that leaves an underlying ambiguity that rings of the post modern – everything is definite but nothing is certain.

In recent years, photomontage has seen a resurgence as its digital equivalent, the meme, has risen as a means for satirical comment in the digital sphere.  In Andrews-Clifford’s work however she seeks to confront issues more directly; she provokes consideration of the position of women through her work. Her feminist position especially deals with the male gaze and points out its pervading presence in our culture and society, an objective that seems ever more necessary to reach for in this post – Trump era. As a result, much of her source material comes from the middle of the 20th Century, especially employing imagery of the starlet of the post-war era.

Andrews-Clifford’s knowledge of film always underpins her work and this collection marks a sort of appraisal of our time. Having looked back over the last Century and considering the power of the women making films in the 1920s, looking on to the strong ‘femme fatale’ of the 30s and 40s, the role of women changed after the war and female characters were put in far more domestic roles. The rise of second wave feminism fought back in the 70s, and the shift in postmodernism through the 80s led to the ‘ladette’ culture and the feeling that ‘everything is going to be alright, we can do what we want’ in the 90s. However the inauguration of President Trump has caused Andrews-Clifford to wonder if we are not about to see another shift? Where does the locker-room end and the Oval Office begin?

In this body of work, Andrews-Clifford confronts what she perceives to be a new trend of ‘porno chic’. She has identified the growing use of highly sexualised poses in fashion magazines to the point of being pornographic. She wishes to highlight these provocative poses and create a moment of realisation in our passive consumption of media. While also making a record of what it is to be a women today, she says: “In all my work I take a feminist stance while looking at the domestic sphere of woman, how they are used to sell and how they are sold to.”

Read the original post on The Black Shed Gallery here.