Plymouth College of Art   2008/2009

Francesca Steele

I am a live and video artist who has used my own body and presence in numerous works over the last seven years. Throughout this time, my body has changed notably, and so has my relationship to it, and too, the observing audience and visa versa. Over time, multiple concerns and layers of interpretation have built up, to the point where the weight of interpretative discourse asks me to question and dissect my own practice. To direct this process, I am undergoing an ongoing transformation.

Since the beginning of this year I have been training as, and becoming, a bodybuilder as part of my artistic practice. I follow a typical bodybuilder’s training regime and diet as art practice – firstly, aiming to redefine and test what we consider the boundaries of art practice to be, and secondly, to use the practice of bodybuilding to change my own physical form, taking it further away from the more conventional female figure – to a modified one. A figure that begins to invade the territory established as masculine beauty.

Here, it is my body itself, which will become the document of my arts practice. As an artist I am working with the living material of the body, physical and aesthetic manipulation, and conventions of gender. Through performance works I aim to question how all these considerations and revisions of the body impact on its presence.

With this in mind my time on the AA2A scheme has assisted me greatly in terms of the realisation of work developed from this project. Although my original aims did not materialise as I had imaged, I am very happy with the work I have produced which took the form of a video diary of my posing practice from the beginning of the project. As a result I have exhibited at the KUBE gallery, Poole and visited as a lecturer at PCAD.