Artist Belinda Ireland works with themes that I, and maybe you, are deeply familiar with. I was born in the 70s and enjoyed a childhood of hot summers with no thought of global warming, coke floats with no knowledge of calories, and weekly power cuts that I found as thrilling as any ghost story.
My memories of the 80s are filled with American television, too much makeup, and the social horror of school discos, along with the predictable tensions of my teenage years. My childhood was happy, but like everyone I faced bewildering moments and emotional difficulties, and had to find ways to navigate through what was certainly one of the most culturally complex eras in history.
These are the ideas that Belinda explores at her studio on Devon’s beautiful Dartington estate, through the lens of a lifespan that crosses the millennial divide.
‘Amongst my ordinary childhood and adolescent experiences, I spent a lot of time yearning for things,’ says Belinda. ‘I felt a lot of angst growing up: feeling left out, feeling in love, feeling unloved, feeling bored, scared, angry or unsure. My escape from those things was through pretended games and imagined worlds of heroes and heroines from books, TV and film.’
Using vivid colour and complex compositions to emphasise the dreamlike quality of her drawings and paintings, Belinda shares the imaginary worlds that she retreated to as a young girl, where her fears and insecurities mixed with the stories, symbols and icons of late 20th century culture.
Sometimes Belinda includes herself in the image, as a small child or awkward, adolescent figure. In other works, her presence is only hinted at as the dreamer or viewer of a curious, passionate, or unsettling scene.
Belinda’s way of working begins with found imagery that links to her childhood. ‘Ideas come from a variety of sources.’ she says. ‘I might glimpse a moment between two people in the street, or see something on TV that triggers a childhood memory. Then I will draw and cut out characters or components and arrange them in a scene, playing with shapes and dynamics as a sort of blueprint for a final artwork.
‘At other times I may want to paint something specific and will hunt for the right visual ingredients, looking at books, magazines, films, or perhaps just people watching. That free fall period just before sleep is a particularly rich time for travelling into creative ideas, while I am free to wander through my thoughts without the distraction that daylight brings. No matter how much I plan, though, the actual painting I make will take on a life of its own and reveal even more possibilities.’
Belinda’s blending of personal memory with cultural imagery makes for intriguing works of art, but they are also notations on a much-changed era in time, reflecting attitudes to gender roles, race and relationships that have altered significantly over the past 60 years.
‘As you age you see older things through a contemporary filter, and contemporary things through an older filter,’ she says. ‘The images I source for my artwork, perhaps from old movies or magazine adverts from the 60s and 70s, are often politically incorrect in today’s terms, but they do reflect the world I grew up in, with its outdated attitudes to women, romance, money, lifestyles and the young.
‘The irony of that imagery, from a modern point of view, resonates with people of my own generation as part of our shared history, but in fact the themes they present are timeless, regardless of generation. We all go through childhood and adolescence in similar ways, wrestling the same emotions, facing similar social challenges. They are just viewed through a different lens as times and attitudes change, and my work reflects that.’
Belinda points to the way in which contemporary longings are now reflected in reality television, paralleling the imagined scenarios of her youth, the perfect lives as yet unlived: ‘Media culture today is dominated by longing and desire by people playing with love, or searching for their dream house in the country, new lifestyles abroad, the perfect garden, the perfect relationship, the perfect figure or face. It shows a continuation of that yearning for age-old desires, and I was playing the same games and dreaming up those same stories when I was young.
‘As an artist I am making work that explores that eternal theme of longing, exploring what was, for me, a very powerful emotion. My hope is that the visual narratives in my work, which are deliberately open ended, might encourage the viewer to recall their own adolescent memories and experiences, and renew that lost connection with their younger, more innocent self.’ .
belindairelandart.co.uk
