Patricia Sharman

Patricia Sharman is a multi-disciplined artist. She graduated from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in Fashion and Textiles, a P.G.C.E from Reading University and more recently gained an MA in Fine Art from Winchester School of Art.

Her work is autobiographical; it explores fundamental issues of female identity and sexuality, and conflict caused by love, loss and longing.

‘We are not so much surfaces as profound depths, subjects of a hidden interiority…’

Volatile Bodies, Towards A Corporeal Feminism by Elizabeth Grosz

Patricia’s creative processes incorporate painting, digital photography and sculpture. In her solo show ‘Render’ she installed 28 images of her wax sculptures; each reconstituting, reimaging and reclaiming the female form from the inside out.

Artist’s statement:

Where does one’s self and identity reside? Are we dressed by social conventions and do these conventions attempt to transform flesh into something recognisable and meaningful for women?

Is the body dressed from the outside in or the inside out? What happens when the ‘in’ and ‘out’ begin to resist and contest each other?

We drape and clothe our bodies to shield, protect, to sexualize and mark out our identities. We constantly reinvent and reconfigure ourselves in new outfits.

In the reforming process, what is really taking place? Is it more than just the economic activity of over consumption? Is it about dreams and consolation?

Dressing up has a transformative effect on the female psyche, much more than just a personal aesthetic, it penetrates and reveals something of the emotional body beneath.

Moving through and beyond the corporeal, in search of the authentic self, my work charts the slippage between the layers of the conscious/unconscious world, exploring other worlds that take the form of the mythical or fantastical, arousing hidden impulses, longings and desires where the repressed states of immobilization and entrapment are set free.

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