Houmous Starter by Rosalind Faram, 2019. Winner of the 2020 Beep Painting Prize [Image source: publicity photo taken from Turps Banana on Facebook]
Rosalind’s talk was frank, starting with her early life as a goth. She spoke of her love of ‘things that aren’t what they seem on the surface, with a sense of menace’. Her slow and deliberate delivery of personal details felt, at times, raw and wounded. She revealed a tormented inner core of vulnerability. It felt to me almost as if alienation had been her excuse for living. Faram felt she had to go through a long process, and travel to California, to reinvent her style as a painter after a long period of shock and depression.
Rosalind made a point of her early rejection of “anti-craft snobbery”. It led her to combine sewing and painting with photography into bright, cheerful work (yet always containing that element of underlying goth edginess) that was widely appreciated. And yet, later on, she mentioned “decorative” as if it were a dirty word, thereby revealing herself to be a fully-fledged member of an art world that rejects decoration as mere craft.
In my mind, Faram has been endlessly inventive and perhaps doesn’t give herself enough credit for her own cleverness. “Art was my world”, she says, as she recounted changing her media and style of working over time in unexpected ways. For example, she uses Instagram posts as an art form in themselves, creating a dark and funny heterotopia in an exploration of identity. She has rebounded strongly from the abject disappointment of not being accepted for an MA at Chelsea. That, to me, speaks of bravery and resilience. I look forward to seeing more of her work.
Find out more about Rosalind and her work here:
