Interrupted Ejaculation

The artist says of this work: “I'm fixated on the idea that art should encourage the viewer to simply look at it before trying to read into it and make judgements. So I purposely use very obvious titles that operate as a 'shortcut' to figuring the work out straight away. Sometimes they are quite provocative, like ‘Interrupted Ejaculation’. The hope is that once the determination to label an artwork into a fixed category has been settled through the title, the viewer will look past their judgements and start seeing the painting itself. I work primarily with found materials – like the sediments of boat varnish or paintings and installation props made by my friends and fellow artists that were either too big or too frustrating for them to keep. Instead of picking up brushes, I pick up a broom and go on a kind of 'pathetically heroic Don Quixote' journey with my hoover where I find cut-outs or blobs of paint sitting on my desk or on the floor. Some of it eventually ends up on a painting.I love terracotta. I’m currently working on a series of paintings on terracotta that have an almost furiously uncompromising tone in their appearance, smell and heaviness. It’s a wonderful red, rich, open clay, and the texture has a robustness to it and an immediacy you don’t find in much else. I’m obsessed with it”.

2016

Enamel paint, sawdust, acrylic and college, plasticine sculptures on rug

70.0 x 81.0 x 6.0 cm

869

© Tahmina Negmat. Image courtesy of The Ingram Collection & Tahmina Negmat

This work is part of The Ingram Collection of Modern British & Contemporary Art and was on loan to the Lightbox for the exhibition "Redressing the balance: Women Artists from The Ingram Collection" (11 August - 20 September 2020).