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TBA
Thea Proctor was "A gorgeous picture in navy blue and petunia purples", whose art reflected her fashionable style. Proctor was an Australian woman artist - a modernist, well known for her prints and drawings of the 1920s and 30s, a period when fashion was as likely as art, to signify modernity. But while Proctor embraced fashion, fashion contributed to the critical neglect of her art. Moreover, her subject matter of 'elegant young things' was seen as reinforcing the stereotype of woman as passive/ object/ other.
In contrast, in this paper I argue that Proctor's repertoire of stylized faces, fashionable clothes and fancy dress, amounts to an 'over-doing' of the signs of femininity, thus subverting traditional notions of gender as natural. First, I will show how fashion and pose in Proctor's work alert the viewer to the construction and performative function of gender. I will follow this with an account of how fashion and style support a reading of female agency by indicating the subject's use of costume in constructing identity. Finally, I will draw on Luce Irigaray's theory of feminine difference to demonstrate how the rendering of costume, as in the artist's drawings, can be read as facilitating the articulation of a desire that privileges a tactile and corporeal economy.
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