March is Women’s History Month, a time to think about the immense contribution of women to all aspects of society in cultures all over the world. They truly hold up half the sky. Throughout March, Professional Women Photographers will take a look at the work and contributions of women artists. Today we are honored to present British artist Sadie Hennessy.

In 2010, Hennessy won the Jealous Graduate Art Prize for her final MA show (Accident & Emergency) at Central St. Martins. In 2011, she was artist-in-residence in the Croydon College of Art printmaking department, which culminated in a solo show called Freud in Dreamland at the Parfitt Gallery in January 2012. She exhibited work at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), Crunch Art Festival (2011), London Art Fair (2011) and Strange Hungers WW Gallery, EC1 (2012). She is currently Artist-in-Residence at Resort Studios, Margate.

PWP: Why is photography important in art and how is it being used in more than a “pure,” stand alone way?

SH: I think these days everyone thinks of themselves as a photographer, as we all document and curate so much of the minutiae of our everyday lives (using, mainly, the cameras in our phones). If something hasn’t been photographed, it almost didn’t happen. Perhaps that is why artists are doing other things with photographs, alongside pure photography–to push the form in other, less accessible directions. Personally, I am interested in old photos and found images, as they seem to have an inherent authenticity and carry a freight of unanswered questions–that appeals to me. I try and create images that reflect on contemporary life whilst simultaneously embodying a sense of nostalgia, so collage (digital and analogue) created using old photos works very well for me.

PWP: Can you tell us about the technique of photographic screenprinting?

SH: Yes, this is a four-color screenprinting process that only uses cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink (CMYK)–the same process as color newspaper printing (for example). I usually create my images in Photoshop (digitally), though sometimes make screenprints from scissors-and-glue collages too, which I photograph. When the image is ready, I convert it to 4 layers in Photoshop–the CMYK separations–and each of these is printed onto acetate. I then expose 4 separate screens (one for each layer) and print them in the following order: yellow, magenta, cyan and black. With luck the end result is quite photographic, but still clearly a hand-made print, due to the quality of the paper and the inks. I was initially inspired by Andy Warhol’s photographic screenprints, though his use a different technique than the one I’ve described. His most famous works tended to mix stencil printing with a single, black photographic layer.

PWP: Tell us how your work relates to issues of gender?

SH: I consider myself to be a feminist artist, and all my work relates to the way I see the world as a woman. As I get older, I am particularly interested in portraying the experience of aging as a woman, in our youth-obsessed society. I use a lot of humor in my work, and hope I make my political points in both a thought-provoking and humorous way.

(Note: Hennessy’s work also explores darker themes as in the following triptych which reflects on the misogynistic phenomenon of acid attacks on women’s faces.)

– Catherine Kirkpatrick, Blog Editor