Oska Lappin
Drawing began on my Mother’s Hippy Farm at the age of three as a means of escape from the chaotic ecstasy of Nineteen Seventies counter culture.
I continue to use Art as escapism to attempt to create an allegorical dream-like alternative world.
My work starts with the inner desire to create Beauty. Using the ‘feminine’ in the nostalgic register, I create psychologically charged representations of human dramas.
Constantly intrigued by people’s stories, I combine these with the reworking of fairytales. This reality and fantasy results in a form of strong visual storytelling. Subconsciously creating a tension beneath the surface of my work, I use ideological aspects of the female figure to discuss the sexist politics of art and the world on a higher and wider level, layering the iconographic imagery somewhere between politics and raw emotion.
When I’m lost in my work and unaware of my physical self - when the ‘Dreamtime’ takes over and I’m able to travel to the enchanted worlds of the French Romantic period; the British Bucolic era; the Renaissance, this mental time travelling allows me to re-imagine my female protagonists extracted from their expressive dreamlike worlds. I return covered in paint physically exhausted from my metaphysical time travel.
My transcription of the neoclassical form allows the surprise arrival of the horrors and the grotesqueries of history to emerge. This creates a visual foundation that captures my moods and emotions through sexuality, humour and death. Additional elements of my own oppression as a contemporary female artist, allows my work to exist through the exploration of the Gothic; my enduring love of nature and the unknown.