Sally Butcher Fine Art

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Sally Butcher’s Art practice is inextricably linked with her theoretical work in Cultural Studies, embracing a more holistic view of the artist as practitioner, researcher and social commentator.

Her work questions issues of identity and subjectivity in relation to women as they are mediated between art, culture and the viewer. She is particularly interested in formations of gender, power and the manipulation of desire in contemporary advertising and often appropriates such mass media imagery within her own work, to explore its power of seductive distortion and its ability to structure our way of seeing through everyday consumption. Drawing on surrealist traits under a postmodernist guise, she aims to re-contextualise these images with elements outside the typical frame of representation, to challenge orthodox understandings and pose new visions within signifying practices.

Within her pieces she employs techniques of painting, drawing, and printmaking, at times combined with hand-sewn & collage elements. Inspired by popular advertising imagery and fashion campaigns, her work toys with ideological depictions of “feminine” beauty – models of sweet little girls, beautiful brides and pretty princesses – creating juxtapositions that reveal the inherent connotations often exploited in the original texts, to produce images which themselves are intentionally disturbingly beautiful.