BACK CATALOGUE: I have decided to now and again post work from my back catalogue in the absence of a website that I can easily update. A new website design will appear at www.nataliedowse.co.uk as soon as I have the funds!
So in the meantime...
Here follows a text written by Ken Pratt (Curator) from the press release for 'Sugar and Spice" at Vegas Gallery, London, 2007.
Sugar & Spice…
a show about little girl’s dreams and lost innocence...
The paintings of British painter Natalie Dowse tap into a world that is now almost gone. The melancholic imagery of little girls on forlorn seaside fun fairs, of gymkhana girls on ponies and petite gymnasts contorting their androgynous bodies before the glare of international television cameras speak of a world that is already purely nostalgic. Dowse’s work taps directly into the narratives of aspiration and desire pushed at a few generations of British girls through popular media at a certain time, a strangely English response to dealing with the onslaught of the Swinging Sixties.
For a period from the 1960s until its eventual death at the hands of MTV and the invention of a teen pop press in the 1980’s, British girls no longer content to exist on stories of plum-mouthed lacrosse champions fiercely loyal to their boarding school named after some suitably Anglican saint were offered a compromise set of aspirations. Arguably a containment strategy for worried adults intuiting the end of 1950’s style patriarchy yet fearing the impact of the sexual revolution on their daughters, a range of comics, magazines, annuals and television programming offered little girls a range of supposedly suitable role models. Gymnasts such as Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci seemed to be the perfect solution: undeniably active and mini career women of a sort, they nonetheless presented an apparently innocent and upstanding (non) sexual identity. Ditto for powerful little girls who could control much larger horses and make them jump over fences in competitive environments.
And of course, it is over. Tammy is a single mother living on benefits. Bunty has been beaten by Britney and Lady Sovereign and her gang of streetwise inner city rude girls would tell any pony to talk to the hand.
Dowse’s work is acutely aware of the strange contradiction of the world presented to the particular generation of girls in which their sexuality would be apparently contained by sublimating it into a range of suitably sporting, ideally exhausting activities, upon which they could be encouraged to fix their dreams and aspirations. Dowse frames this in terms of examining the use of sport as a form of propaganda used to control and ultimately abuse little girls, an interesting position given the similarities between this construct from the 1960’s and 1970’s and vision of right-wing European thinking in the early 20th century that encouraged girls to hang around in groups doing callisthenics, simultaneously containing them and strengthening them for marriage and childbirth.
The work relies on a fatalistic hindsight: there are those who remember Comaneci’s descent into anorexia, drug and alcohol dependency as clearly as her historic perfect ten Olympic score. This sense of a disappointed hindsight about girlhood dreams, even if they were dreams encouraged by a social machinery way beyond the control of the little girls who dreamt them, is heightened in the blotchy, soft style of the works that make their source as screen images evident. In this sense, Dowse’s practice is not only concerned with the content, but also with the formal aspects; the historical context of image production, the relationship between painting and photography and television.
Text copyright © Ken Pratt
Olga 1 2 3 exhibited at Grey Area, Brighton:
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