Spray paint on paper

75 x 51 cm

Around 2010 and 2011 I made a series of works called The Fashion Martyrs. In March 2010 I exhibited my altarpiece A Last Supper at St Martin-in-the-Fields before it was installed in its permanent home in St George's church, Nailsworth. When preparing for the double exhibition A Last Supper/Sacred or Profane I met medievalist Dr Emily Guerry at a birthday party. Within 10 minutes of meeting her she had offered to write me two catalogue essays. Friend for life that woman.

Emily's PHD was on the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, which is essentially a huge stained-glass reliquary. It was built by King (later Saint) Louis IX in the 13th century to house that most epic of holy relics, the actual crown of thorns and a fragment of the True Cross. Emily was studying a series of round medallions which stud the wall beneath the windows, faded by time, their origins fairly forgotten. She worked out what saint went where, picking out clefts in the stone and pigment clues as to whose grisly fates they each depict. (Most saints met a grim death. It's a trade-off I guess.) 

Hearing her do a talk there set my mind going about the fashion house Chanel, and how the signs and symbols of the brand, which are reinterpreted every season - the pearls and leather threaded chain - have taken on an almost religious significance in contemporary society. They are elevated and rarefied - dare I say deified. Surely it is a form of transubstantiation to take costume pearls, as Coco Chanel famously did, and make them as pricey as real pearls by dint of putting a little CC logo on them.

I wanted to visually explore the complicated and somewhat masochistic relationship women have with the fashion and beauty industries in a series of panel paintings which reinterpreted the same motif over and over, in different styles, of a model gagged with huge costume pearls, wrists bound with my Chanel handbag strap.

I decided I wanted to riff on the idea of Banksy spray painting over a ‘masterpiece’ in one of the panels, and so worked out stencils to achieve this effect. The series was exhibited in my retrospective at Graves Gallery Museums Sheffield. This artwork is the test spray I made before working on the gesso panel artwork.