ART HOUSE 14

1 Dec

2025 Art House for Art Walk Porty was a shared effort with Ailsa Lochhead.

We decided in Spring to focus on creating works with mixed media collage and cyanotype. I haven’t exhibited any collage work since 2018 so I was a bit shy about it but I like my Skinny Dippers.

I gave myself the perameters of sticking to portrait format, as each collage features a torso from a portrait session with Ailsa just prior to her getting a preventative double mastectomy. I only used squared paper and off-cuts from previous work - photographic prints, riso, giclee fine art paper prints and cyanotypes mainly.

The series is a playful look at the idea of how as a nation we are a bit uptight about women being topless and even swimming in the sea on a sunny day you’ll see swathes of men taps aff and no women. Ailsa had experienced a lot of presumptions in the course of arranging her surgery about the idea she’d been expected to want reconstruction and that all literature and online research failed to show any results of the surgery without reconstruction - which is either implants or taking tissue from the person’s belly, butt or thighs, meaning 2 parts of the body have to recover.

I’ve written a little about the theme of this year’s Art Walk Porty in relation to our shared but very different experiences around breast surgery which you can read here.