Introduction text femmeBRUT
In the late 1980s I consciously started to use buttons, threads, pieces of fabric or large pieces of cloth in my paintings, but in this series of canvases they take the leading role. I am familiar with textiles and haberdashery from my early home life; sewing with clothes, curtains, etc was central to female bonding within the family in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Grandma, mother, sisters and nieces, they were all involved. And I too, as a six-year-old girl, was already sewing borders on the machine! For me as a painter it has always formed a natural combination: paint and textiles. Working with textiles quickly took on a warm and personal meaning. For far too long this has been labelled ‘women’s art’. In this series I have set myself the challenge of attacking the stigma that still clings to the material.
I do this by working in a large format of 2 x 2 metres, and by the often ferocious use of a needle and thread, without the obtrusive rules of fine craftsmanship. The canvases are partly made with the longarm sewing machine, which I use in a quilt shop in Schagen with the assistance of a professional in this field. I pluck elements from the traditional world and use them freely. This produces an abrasive contrast during the initial making process. Then the adventure with paint begins.
Is there a female visual language?
This question has occupied me for some time. I think there is, but as soon as I attempt to name things I immediately get tangled up in semantics. There are also too many exceptions to make a definitive statement on this.
But what is it all about?
When I was a student at art college, I noticed that materials, colours and shapes are all in a sense coded. Meanings are more or less fixed: steel is hard and therefore male, wool is soft and therefore female. But there is also hard wool and soft steel, and in this respect wood has many variations in its appearance. I then started to label everything I came across in my environment according to a self devised system. A system that gave room for nuance and reversals. An often-cited example is the number of words that the Inuit have for snow. This example has also been criticised, and yet there could be many words for what is masculine or feminine.
Why does it matter?
Labelling, stigmatising and criticising from a basis of fixed ideas is not doing art or artists any favours. All too often, ideas about gender, and about the backgrounds that also determine someone’s identity happen unconsciously. I believe that dealing with this more consciously enriches life, art and human relationships. Hopefully these works will give an impetus to that, precisely because of its abstraction, images without figurative form or immediately recognisable content.
Marja van Putten
december 2021