Slow Heat

‘Slow Heat’ emerged from Stroude’s collaboration with 3 actors. Together they worked with the question of women’s potentiality, their ability to endure, acknowledgement of their innate capabilities and the need to move beyond past preconceptions. Their ideas and imaginings embodied by performance became the source for this series of work.

In the investigative act of painting, Stroude developed works in conversation with writings by Virginia Woolf, archetypes embedded in our cultural DNA and the representation of women in art history.

Virginia Woolf was a persistent presence in the studio during the making of ‘Slow Heat’. In her writings, Woolf uses fire and heat as a metaphor for the energy necessary for transformation, to tear down, rebuild and restructure the patriarchal system that we are all born into so that we may integrate the equality for women that we still endeavour to achieve today. In her diary from the 1930s, Woolf imagines her collection of newspaper cuttings denoting the stories of women’s public and private lives as ‘enough powder to blow up St.Pauls.

The painter Chantal Joffe notes that ideas happen at the end of your brush. As she worked from the collaborative source material, Stroude recognised familiar and sometimes iconic archetypes emerge, from Incy Wincy Spider and The Fool to Mary Magdalene. She noticed links in pose and subject matter to feminist artists such as Paula Rego, Rebecca Horn and Ana Mendieta. Researching archetypes and artists led to further learning that in turn enriched the works in this collection.

Since the illuminations of Woolf’s incendiary words, Stroude believes there has been no sudden solution for women but rather a simmering heat, a ‘Slow Heat’ that burns steadily and makes changes by degrees. This heat is the steadfast intention that permeates her paintings. She paints the performed experiences of the female body through the female lens. In these works, young women undergo transformation, protect each other and themselves, they share love, loss and hope together without shame and they invite you, the viewer, to do the same. They show their potential to become, their acceptance of the hard road ahead and their determination to succeed.

With thanks to the three actors from ATU Sligo who collaborated to create source material for ‘Slow Heat’: Ruth Maty Fundu, Emilia Mononen and Liana Mosneanu, Declan Drohan their tutor who facilitated the connection and David Smith, the project photographer. Emma Stroude would also like to thank Tamsin Cavaliero and Ejiro Ogbevoen for their mentorship during the making of this body of work.