The Friendship Project
Although female friendship has been explored deeply in literature, its visual language is limited. This project is an attempt to start filling that gap. During my isolation at the start of the pandemic, contact with friends was limited to rare, anxious, 1-1 conversations in my back yard. As the year evolved, conversations grew more intimate, relationships deeper. In the studio, I brought my friends into the work; they gave solace, even in solitude.
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Other Selves
Oil on Linen 52” X 77” October, 2021 |
“Other Selves” is the first work I’ve made for the series on female friendship. In the painting I’m exploring the continuous interplay of psychological states, sensations, memories, and self-images that make up who I take myself to be. By disrupting what is seemingly solid and permanent in the figures and their context, I seek to convey the way we journey—moment-by-moment, back-and-forth—between the fluidity of sensations and emotions, to instances of consolidation and a fixed identity. Some of these identities are old and reified, others may be freshly discovered within the conversation itself. Ultimately, they are mere constructs, and we their active creators in collaboration with our environmental and relational context.
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Would you like to participate in the friendship project?
There are two ways you can participate.
1) Send in your story by filling out the form below. |
2) Add a photo related to female friendship to the FRIENDSHIP QUILT. Your photo doesn't have to be sweet- it doesn't even have to be a person - just something that means friendship to you. Goofy, sad, mad - just keep it real.
* Please note that the stories and photos will be curated for relevance and the safety of our viewers.
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Towards a visual language for friendship |
"I have a flower pot that a friend gave me that she’d painted with starfish – starfish grow back a limb if it gets removed and that was her reminder to me during my divorce recovery years." |
A concept map of Female Friendship
Thinking about the language of friendship: finding connections between what inspires me in life and the idea of friendship |
"Images of coffee cups and baby diapers come up first off. A parachute and a safety net too. Elastics that stretch, and ones that break.". |
Laura Malone's Artist Statement
I paint in response to emptiness — not to fill it, but to break through its shell. Choosing themes of vulnerability, impermanence, and intimacy, I land at the intersection of beauty and sadness. I explore the body as both subject and object, to elicit a felt sense of its interiority and to know its pleasure through the act of painting.
Beauty matters to me. Not the beauty attained through mere pleasure or happiness, but that which is revealed when examining the immanent and embodied tensions of death, sexuality, and grief. Often, I am attempting to reconcile ideas that are in some way alienated from each other: formed and formless; connected and alienated. These dichotomies present themselves to me as images and the act of painting is my way of resolving a paradox. By juxtaposing this simultaneity of opposing forces, I hope to penetrate a deeper truth.
I paint in response to emptiness — not to fill it, but to break through its shell. Choosing themes of vulnerability, impermanence, and intimacy, I land at the intersection of beauty and sadness. I explore the body as both subject and object, to elicit a felt sense of its interiority and to know its pleasure through the act of painting.
Beauty matters to me. Not the beauty attained through mere pleasure or happiness, but that which is revealed when examining the immanent and embodied tensions of death, sexuality, and grief. Often, I am attempting to reconcile ideas that are in some way alienated from each other: formed and formless; connected and alienated. These dichotomies present themselves to me as images and the act of painting is my way of resolving a paradox. By juxtaposing this simultaneity of opposing forces, I hope to penetrate a deeper truth.
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