“My recent project addresses the problem-complex of middle-aged and older women becoming less and less visible in our society. There is pleasure in being seen and this pleasure becomes more and more problematized for women around the onset of menopause.
The paintings of the series I am working on are studies of various aspects of that problem. Some paintings focus on socially isolated women and some show the internalization of the problem by the victimized women themselves, as they self-consciously cover their bodies up and hide themselves away. Still other paintings concentrate on the basic dichotomies structuring our perception that underlie the problem of invisibility: inside and outside, hidden and exposed, older and youthful, shame and pride, barren and fecund.
The paintings of this series are not only interested in identifying the root cause of this social as well as individual problem, but demonstrate various possible solutions involving small, intimate and creative communities of women characterized by playfulness and artistic activities. Those paintings concerned with the solutions that do not show the communal joy of creating artworks together, present protagonists who are truly seeing one another. These paintings demonstrate that it is possible to establish a parallel world to Yeats’s “no country for old man” and become its citizen.
In addition to the proposed solutions to alleviate the pain of social disappearance and self-erasure, as a painter, I have the power to actively counteract invisibility by focusing my works on middle-aged and older women.”
Nora Juhasz