Charis Copp
Charis is from Wales and is intrigued by the strange and unusual. Her work explores themes of feminism, body horror, memory, and phobias with a colourful yet grungy overtone. Her current project focuses on the internalized and intimate relationship we share with our bodies. She uses traditional mediums such as oil pastels, oil paint and watercolours to straddle the line between historic and contemporary.
Eyes are a central part of my work. They are associated with social anxiety and the feeling of constantly being watched. The claustrophobic natures of the tightly zoomed in images represent the constraint and anxieties one feels to bare all to the world; in a patriarchal society of socially imposed rules. I started this project at a point in my life where I was constantly feeling watched and judged. Not always in the best way. I suppose my capturing of eye injuries is a way to deflect the eye looking at me.As a sort of defence mechanism. Anything to obscure its vision. These past couple of years I feel I have really come out of my shell and I am very glad of this. However, I’m still uncertain about the feeling of being known. This has become an exercise in trust as I only focus on extreme close ups of the body and my life drawings have their faces cropped to maintain a level of emotional distance and ambiguity. My hope for this project is to gain the confidence to start depicting my own face and to learn to embrace the gaze on my own terms.
I use traditional mediums such as oil pastels, oil paint and watercolours to straddle the line between historic and contemporary.Through the traditional figurative painting and the post-modernist urge to express oneself through pigments; I would like to think of my work as a marriage of old and new techniques. My material of choice would have to be Oil Pastels. They are a material I am really getting to grips with. It is more precise and detailed than a traditional paintbrush, allowing me to have far more control over the drawings. I love the way the pigments blend, creating a sense of tone and depth that is extremely similar to actual skin.
The reason I work in colour is because, in my mind the world is made up of so many connections and coincidences. Is it really that unreasonable to think that our bodies, our skin, our hair, our eyes are made up of more than just blacks, whites and pinks? There are layers to everything and that goes for colour too. There are so many factors at play that should not be ignored.
Charis Copp 