Artist Scarlett Budden talks about writing scripts for paintings, staging ideas, how she thinks about surface in relation to her subject matter, and more.

Scarlett’s work explores the complexities of spectatorship and the voyeuristic exploits within both cinematic practices and the traditions of figurative painting. The female protagonist occupies theatrical yet ambiguous spaces that collapse the divide between reality and fiction. A space known only to the sitter. Close-up stills of the body are framed and disguised within illusionist portals to empower the observed to become the observer. These ghostly psychologically layered images haunt their audience. The spectator is given as a cold shoulder as the relationship between abjection and desire is questioned.

Through its fragmentation, the body breaks down traditional modes of representation. Instead, the aesthetic whole of the female frame is replaced by an inner voice, as the interior and exterior fuse. The mouth recurs as a metonym for this liminal space and the body becomes a site of rupture, autonomy and agency.

The work seeks to move beyond the threshold of conscious perception through the use of subliminal messaging and symbolic imagery such as fish, forests, and the ocean. All of which are symbols of the depths of the human psyche in Jungian psychology. The body is framed as morphic and escapes existing archetypes. Just as the Surrealist’s Exquisite Corpse, the self finds power in its fluctuating and indefinite state.

Scarlett’s work: scarlettbudden.com

Scarlett’s Instagram: @scarlettbuddenstudio