Sally Mann

Some controversial but I think, beautiful photographs.

Fragile yet creepy in an early horror movie type way, these photographs are very sensitive and incredibly well created. They're macabre but ultimately deal with the fragile beauty of life and death.

Candy Cigarette 1989

Hayhook

Christine Borland

Another contemporary female artist that relates a lot to my own work.

I find her interesting due to her medical/bodily approach to her work and the way she uses collection and repetition.

At the moment, I've been thinking about collection and museum presentation and artefact. These pieces feel to me like they're using that same language to communicate. They are cold and presented, collected and kept.

Lynda Benglis

Here's a real feminist artist who makes work that I think connects to my own rather well.

Very bodily, very 'fuck you' to male dominated art.

Come 1964 (I think it should be spelt Cum)

 I love these melted metal shapes. They almost move, they're incredibly sexual and erotic whilst being cold and hard at the same time.

Alina Szapocznikow

This Polish artist is one I look up to and respect a great deal. Having been a child and a Jew during the Houlocaust, and living through it, her relationship with parenthood, feminity and most of all, her own body is so there in her work. She's subtle and shocking and investigates her own form without shame or secrecy. This stuff is incredible. I have been so inspired by her work.

Herbarium XIII

These images are so disturbing, so honest and so utterly powerful that I find myself staring at them for hours.

She seems trapped and yet free at the same time. Her body is her subject.

Dessert III 1970

This dessert series really makes me shiver. The idea of a womans body being served up for male consumption is not something that is alien to any woman living in today's world.

Yayoi Kusama

This crazy Japanese artist has got me thinking recently.

I definatley feel a connection with her and my own work. It's so different, but I feel her obsessiveness, that compulsion to do something again and again and again. Repetative, but for a reason.

Marino Marini

One of my favorite artists, I can hardley begin to explain why I love Marini. There is something so incredible about his work, so free and freeing to see. Sexual yet innocent at the same time. It reminds me of children being naked on the beach; no shame in their exhibitsionism. But then again, the sexual themes that I'm sure Freud would have picked out with ease of the man and horse are so obvious I almost feel stupid saying it. 
But I think there is something deeper in Marini's work than pure sex/beastiality which is so easy to interpret. It's something that makes a man with a massive erection on horseback with his arms spread out beautiful, rather than weird. It makes you smile, and makes you feel liberated rather than sexual or disturbed.

Where I first saw Marini : at the Guggenhiem in Venice

" It is very difficult to explain how exactly a work of art is born. In fact, it is almost inexplicable, but at a certain moment an emotion falls upon an artist and for some artists this feeling arrives in a descriptive form, while for others in a world of color. In my case the emotion arrives in color. For example, I have a color that torments me.. let's take perhaps a red, a blue, a yellow - this color continually invades my mind until I begin to put this color onto paper and imagine this color becoming a drawing. Then, all of the sudden, this drawing begins to take form, the form, and this form becomes true form."

The Angel of the City 1948

Susana 1943

Horse and Rider 1947

Horseman 1947

Juggler 1953

 Marini also had his roots in painting, and prepared for sculptures by drawing, which I respect a lot, and alone they are works of art too;

Horse and Juggler 1953

Juggler and Two Horses, Blue, Yellow and Black 1953

Marini was inspired by Etruscan art (from Nothern Italy between 9th-2nd C BC) and you can see the connection he made with these ancient peoples;

Perhaps he got his very male sexual freedom from Greek images such as these

Here are two from the Marini museum in Florence;

The Great war

Walking Woman

Sindney Nolan at the Scott Polar in Cambridge

Whale

I thought this was a great collection of works by Nolan, I loved the combination of science and art and the way his gloves and gear inhibited (or improved?) his painting style.

The images have so much character, like the landscapes and the sweeping brush marks and the scientists, cold but sweet, in this vast alien landscape. Almost a psychedelic feel to the eyes.

Scientist 1964

Mount Erebus 28th August 1964

McMurdo Sound 12th September 1964