Vanessa Notley

Vanessa Notley back to mainpage DK back to mainpage DE

French/Scottish artist, born in 1965, lives and works currently in Beijing, China.

Vanessa Notley has been living, working and exhibiting in Beijing for over two years. Before coming to China, she worked near Stuttgart for over to years and she lived in France for many years where she studied and worked at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Bourges before moving to the south of France. She continues to be represented by the galleries AL/MA in Montpellier and Jacques Girard in Toulouse.

Vanessa Notley’s work plays with language (words and sounds, translations and entertaining idiomatic expressions and meanings) and with a certain humour and flexibility she seeks to give language a visual, tangible and sometimes nonsensical form in steel and fabric.

The verb “to wander” means to deviate, to stroll, to meander, to have no fixed course and in the series of sculptures entitled Wandering out of Formation she sought to create forms that go physically astray. Like most of her work, they are made of stainless steel which is polished, the edges are precise, their volume contained/ restrained. Steel, by its very nature, does not lose shape, float or expand. These sculptures of dresses and the little “Tang dynasty sculpture” hairdos lose their restraint; they suggest a sense of spilling out and over. Their wavy, buxom forms give a rather comical result of lopsidedness.

The expression “ladies-in-waiting” is the title of another series of sculptures. The term designated servants who were at the beck and call of their superior, usually the queen but it has also come to mean a waitress, a woman waiting on someone. A woman who waits is one waiting for a man, a customer, a suitor, a husband. A waiting woman is also a pregnant one. Here, the artist has added lace sleeves to the sculptures. Protection sleeves are still worn by waitresses in Beijing, by men selling copper tubing in Guang Zhou but here they are rather beautiful, transparent, fragile and impractical attributes emphasising (with a certain irony and humour) a lack of real protection at every level.