Tribes – Aerialist

A portrait in varnished acrylic on card based on a drawing from life of Kitty Peels, an aerialist and burlesque performer. From Kitty’s strongly curated personal style I created a second persona by changing style elements in clothing, tatoos and hair colour. The role and control of the model and artist starts to change…

From the series: ‘Tribes’

Tribes
We are expected to decode the non-verbal symbols given out by the people around us. As children, we are taught to judge others by the way they look (evil and good characters in stories are almost always signalled visually for example). As adults we align ourselves to social tribes by the way we dress to symbolise our similarity or difference. Social tribes could constitute generation groups, or economic groups, or cultural groups and I am interested in how we use specific non-verbal language of taste (be that in clothes, music, labels etc) to communicate with others.

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