Phoebe Logan

My practice details my relationship with femininity and my subsequent experience of bulimia. Femininity constructs an impenetrable web of shame around fatness, ugliness, and desperation for thinness. Thus, eating disorders are culturally under-discussed and unequivocally unrepresented in art practice. My practice endeavors to establish a reciprocal understanding between painting and viewer, filling the void of art about eating disorders, and connecting with women with similar experience. My practice is situated between the poles of ambiguity and the explicit. Bulimic motifs that connote the plumbing of my parent’s bathroom (the showerhead, toilet bowl, and drains…) are universally comprehensible and construct the compositional scaffolding of my paintings, whilst the text can be visually obscured, warped, or spliced in such a way it becomes dense and incomprehensible. The utilised text is derived from edited writings executed through stream of consciousnesses, in which I transcribe my unadulterated, disordered thoughts. Selected phrases then inhabit my practice, reappearing throughout my works like a nagging thought or pestering voice: “Do you like me? I love you” and “Stupid, Fat, Ugly, Bitch” and “If I could, I would be flushed down the drain”. The text plays an important, confessional role, acting an an expulsion, itself, and leans into the linear quality of the paintings. Elements of absurdism are portrayed with a comic tone: If I Died At Eighteen renders a showerhead hanging a naked figure, and three spiders that chant “awful shame”. Depictions of vomit, identified as a feminine bodily fluid, situates my paintings as explorations of the abject. I work to create a short, oppressive, and chaotic space within my paintings in which text and form densely interlock in a homogenous surface, representing the obsessive and panicked nature of an eating disorder. Colour is often used straight from the tube, uncontaminated, generating a garishly bright and lurid impression that permit a primitive and childlike pictorial language to emerge. This subversion of sophistication is intrinsic to my practice.