Art Exhibition | Changing Face: New Meaning Through Distortion by Kristen Flynn

Flynn's art process includes photography, digital art, and printmaking methods. Generating a unique visual language in her art practice allows play in a 'grey area' of life, where she creates an embodied approach to visual communication. Flynn creates artwork to stimulate her thoughts and feelings of transcendence- a moving between worlds, whilst foregrounding the abject nature of her female body and its destiny to return to the earth. "This series explores my identity. I transform my face in order to explore notions of motherhood, beauty, decay, life cycles, and what Bulgarian French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva calls the abject. The abject alludes to the destruction of borders, and here I have disturbed the borders of my facial flesh. I have a particular interest in using found objects and appropriated Sandro Botticelli works, to create self-portraits that act as my own 'mirror stage'- a concept from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The 'mirror stage' is an early stage in life when you see yourself separate from your mother and as a complete being. The split composition of each work can be seen as a metaphor for Lacan's mirror stage. All ten self-portraits are created using Prussian blue oil paint and Fabriano Rosaspina paper and printed with my printing press in my studio. All ten self-portraits are numbered and signed on the back." - Kristen Flynn