Critical studies

 Feminism talk  

We were asked to find two separate pieces of art and discuss, one piece created from the male gaze dealing with the female body and one piece contrasting by a female artist. For an art piece dealing with the female body by a female artist I have chosen to look at Sophie Tea.

Sophie Tea is a UK based, mixed media artist, her work has explored a few themes but the most prominent is her work being the female nude. With no formal educational art training, she abstained from traditional gallery representation and used social media to gain her large presence. Her work spans a large range of media like VR stuff, NFTs, endurance performance and glass but I'm mainly looking at her paintings and shows. 

On her website she describes her work as carrying a "profound message of inclusivity and celebrates the unique beauty of the female form". Her paintings tend to be quite large bright pieces naturalistic to real female bodies but usually colourful with textural marks. Her paintings have this sense of realness and rawness to them but in a positive way. She's also put on a few shows, the first being called "send nudes" and the next two being called "women" where she painted women's physical naked bodies and put on a kind of cat walk. She uses a wide variety of women as her models, young to old, different body types and races, women with physical disabilities, all really showing this celebration of diversity of women in a beautifully inclusive manner. This artist is really challenging the years of beauty standards on the naked female body by taking it back as the main subject and reframing it in a positive way.