#37 (The Female Form II)

Elizabeth Pulie has been exploring the possibilities of painting over the last three decades. Her research-led practice places equal emphasis on the conceptual and the material and her work often possesses a distinctive decorative sensibility. Pulie’s practice deftly flirts with the line between fine art and craft to examine the philosophy, aesthetic value and commodification of decorative arts and female labour. Her early work was grounded in large-scale acrylic paintings and in more recent years she has turned to experimentation with new materials and processes, most notably textiles, working fabrics such as hessian, jute, cotton and linen into capes, banners and large-scale, graphically patterned and overtly sculptural paintings.

The textile banner, '#37 (The Female Form II)' 2013, is among the first works on hessian Pulie produced. It’s from a trio of banners where the geometric forms also function as portraits of three women in Pulie’s life.

‘My initial use of hessian as a medium … was both pragmatic and aesthetic; I made what I considered a tribute to secondwave feminism, four-metre high banners that were based on the female form, exaggerating the sense of the female form as a feminist trope’. – Elizabeth Pulie 2019

For Pulie, the use of hessian evokes the provisional and craft aesthetics of the 1960s and 70s feminist artist trailblazers she is paying tribute to, such as Miriam Schapiro. '#37 (The Female Form II)' is a self-portrait of Pulie herself. The way this work tips into figuration is significant within Pulie’s practice and the idea of figuration and the body continues in some of the later hessian works.