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Julie Rrap continues to place herself firmly in the centre of the picture. For well over two decades she has been utilising her own body at the heart of her work in order to confront and play with the sometimes determining, sometimes uncertain gaze of her audience; to pick-away at, reveal and unravel much of the fundamentally masculine underpinnings of Western art; to explore the expressive potential of the body both as persistent trace and reminder of the basic fact of her being in the world and as a vehicle of imaginative flight; and perhaps more obliquely in recent work to track the relationships between changing photographic technologies, the body and experiences of selfhood.
Right through Rrap’s practice, from the beginning of the 1980s to the present day, we can bear witness to a concerted exploration of female selfhood, ranging from its codification in masculine structures of social formation through history (and their imbrication within and continued drive by representation) through to experiences of unique individual consciousness, subjectivity, desire and the like. Rrap’s work consistently travels back and forth between exploration of communal states of womanhood and the driving experience of the individual, from the public to the private realm and back again, perhaps seeking that point where these poles might at least appear to dissolve momentarily into a singular state of being.
While the photographic image has remained as core conceptual and representational touchstone for Rrap’s practice, she has incorporated it within and worked across a wide range of media. She has produced installations of multiple photographs as well as quite self-contained images; large photographic prints that reassemble photographic fragments of the artist’s body and expressive painted surfaces; combinations... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline