Strange Hungers: Strange thought processes

A good exhibition should spark a thought which sets your whole mind alight, a beacon of artistic ideas, illuminating a world of experiences and memories. Today an artist set me thinking about feminism or being a feminist. It’s not a fashionable term or label but as an intelligent thoughtful human, I take it for granted that women can participate fully within society. The merest suggestion I can or can’t do something because of my sex, is for me, a ridiculous idea.

Skin Deep at Hay Hill Gallery

Artist Jamie McCartney(left)

As I get older and wiser experience confirms that judging by appearances is never a good idea. One of the benefits of social media is swapping ideas and inner most thoughts, getting to know people from the inside first, allowing inner beauty to shine through. Then should you meet, you already know the mind of the person, if not the superficial flesh. And their looks, really, does it matter? Why are people so judgemental regarding what is on the surface? 

Skin Deep explores ‘notions of beauty and society’s obsession with the physical self’. The artist Jamie McCartney ‘depicts his models in their natural state without recourse to the scourge of image manipulation …they celebrate the human body and human condition.’ The exhibition contains over forty large photographs, bronzes, and plaster casts and is deeply intimate in subject; the human form is stripped bare leaving skin and personality exposed.