https://www.murrayedwards.cam.ac.uk/womens-art-collection/artwork/models-triptych-madonna-cascade
Models Triptych: Madonna Cascade
Garrard’s work Models Triptych: Madonna Cascade depicts fragments of a self-portrait by the Dutch Golden Age painter Judith Leyster, created around 1630, who holds her paintbrush and palette and stares out at the viewer. Leyster was almost erased from history after her death, by dealers who attributed her work to male contemporaries like Frans Hals. The portrait is created with a central panel using plaster, then reinforced with layers of a fabric called scrim, often used in theatre design. Garrard copied the self-portrait as a fresco, intending the acrylic paint to be absorbed differently by the plaster and scrim, and build up in uneven layers. The self-portrait is framed by cascading plaster figurines of the Virgin and Child, based on one which Garrard’s Catholic mother placed by her bed when she was a child.
The ‘Model Triptych’ series re-creates the self-portraits of historic women artists who were once highly regarded, but fell into posthumous obscurity: Artemisia Gentileschi, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Judith Leyster. Garrard created these works after attending an exhibition called the Women’s Art Show at Nottingham Castle in 1982. She later described how she ‘had a feeling of literally being encircled and wrapped by women’s paintbrush-marks spanning over 500 years’ and that this was the ‘first feeling [she] had of a sense of place, of continuity […] like a discovery of loss.’ She also described experiencing an ‘anger and rage that for so many years there had been this absence that [she] couldn’t even identify until now’. Garrard has described the act of repainting women artists self-portraits as an act of reclamation and celebration of their achievements in the face of historical occlusion.
I’m fascinated mostly by the fragmentation of the paintings and the 3D everexpanding, cascading formtat of the frame, feel inspired to do something similar with the frame for my Triptych, but with soft, knitted unravelling elements rather than realistic sculptural elements
