Hastings photocollage artist on redefining the male gaze

How often when you walk down the street do you pay attention to the billboards around you? We are so used to the fashion images we see would you notice if something was a bit of off?

“For international women’s day this year we decided to take over a billboard,” explains Hastings artist Julia Andrews-Clifford.

“I had seen this Yves Saint Laurent advert so I decided to take her flesh away and use images of roast beef instead.

“The way she is sitting back on the slab of stone made me think that she looked like a piece of meat but what I did like about the image was the fact she is looking quite aggressively into the camera.”

Looking at the male gaze and how women are depicted is something that has always interested Julia, who initially worked at the BFI as a film educator teaching people how to make and analyse films.

“I was teaching all these people to be creative and it got to the point and I realised I wanted to do something myself,” she reveals.

This saw Julia go back into education at the age of 40 attending the Chelsea School of Art as a mature student.

“A lot of my work was in the fine arts category as I did a lot of painting,” she says.

“But I slowly started to do more and more montages and collages using film magazines I had collected over the years as well as from current fashion magazines.”

The techniques she uses for photomontage she says is very similar to filmmaking in that you pick the bits you want, edit and then do a composition of what you want and where.

The thing that Julia says she loves about what she does is that it doesn’t have to be perfect.

“The end product isn’t always what I envisaged at the beginning,” she reveals.

“Sometimes I will spend four hours working on the composition and putting it together and then a breeze will blow a piece onto the page and it will work better than my initial idea.

“I have an idea of what message I want to do, look through the images I have and work on a piece, or sometimes I will see an image that will grab me and I will work on that and think about what I want to portray.”

Key to Julia is that the work doesn’t look too clinical, contrived or forced, instead opting for something a bit more ambiguous.

Much of Julia’s work is created by cutting and pasting images by hand.

“I have thousands of images,” she smiles.

“I think a lot before I cut up a magazine as I have to be sure that I won’t want to use it for something else as a whole, so I don’t just cut away.

“It is sad cutting up these vintage magazines but I just think if I didn’t use them it would sit in a cupboard or attic not being looked at whereas what I do gives it a second life giving them a new purpose so people can look at them again.”

The reason for using vintage film magazines Julia says relates to the male gaze and the fact that during the 1950s the starlet was very much objectified.

“I want to refocus that look and make her almost confrontational,” she adds.

“In the early 1920s women were making films and had more of an identity. For films of the 30s and 40s you think of film noir and the strong femme fatale, but then after the war the roles shifted and you see women put in these other more domesticated roles.

“The 80s and 90s marked a shift in feminism and postmodernism, the ‘ladette’ and the feeling that ‘everything is going to be ok we can do what we want’, but now with the Trump inauguration is it interesting to look at women and their roles and how there may be another shift.”

For Julia’s latest exhibition she is looking at the latest trend of ‘porn chic’ where women are photographed in highly sexualised poses.

“I want to open up the line of debate,” she says.

“I have noticed recently in fashion magazines that a lot of the poses have become quite pornographic.

“As I am showcasing my work in a gallery I know I push what I do a bit and showcase these provocative poses with explicit material behind.

“In all my work I have the feminist stance while looking at the domestic sphere of women, how they are used to sell and how they are sold to.”

Julia will be holding her debut solo show at the Black Shed Gallery in Robertsbridge from June 17 until July 29.

For more information on Julia, visit julia-andrews-clifford.co.uk

For more information on the gallery visit theblackshedgallery.org.uk

This first featured in the May edition of etc Magazine pick up your copy now.