Issue 16
Sarah Maple
By Catherine Wagley
“I heart Jihad”, Digital print
British artist Sarah Maple’s sleek self-portraits juxtapose confessional audacity with comic, pop-culture quips. They also explicitly confront religious identity. Born in 1985, Maple grew up in Sussex, England. As a child, she drew her own portrait again and again, beginning a trend toward identity-probing that would drive her career as an artist. Raised by a British father and a Kenya-born mother, she and her siblings were brought up as Muslims. She says, “When I was growing up, I always wanted to be more Islamic. And then, when I grew up, I felt like I wasn’t very Islamic at all because of my Western influences.”
Maple studied fine art at Kensington University. Upon graduation in 2007, she won the 4 New Sensations prize—an award created by Channel 4 and The Saatchi Gallery, bestowed to the “most imaginativeand talented artists graduating in the U.K.” The award targets recent graduates who don’t yet have gallery representation. Art world hot shots—including Antony Gormley and Tim Marlow— choose four finalists from a short-list of 20 artists. The finalists were each given £1,000 to create new work, which would then be judged by Internet voters.
Maple created a series of campaign posters—slick images that called to mind a cross between Ron Paul’s current “Revolution” banners and John F. Kennedy’s “Leadership for the ‘60s” campaigns. Each poster captured a different cultural identity that made coercive but lighthearted pulls for her art prize candidacy: “Vote for Me or You’re Racist,” “Vote for Me or You’re Sexist,” “Vote for Me or You’re Islamaphobic,” and “Vote for Me or You’re an IslamaphobaSexistRacialist.” She won the popular vote—and the £3,000 prize money—which jumpstarted her art career. Since winning the Saatchi prize, her work has been shown at Scream Gallery and exhibited in London’s Tube, with Art Below’s project to turn railway “ad space into art space.”
Top Left: “Bananarama”, Oil on Board;
Top Right: “Burka Chic”, Oil and acrylic on board
Bottom Right: “Fighting Fire With Fire No.2″, C-Type print
Bottom Left: “I heart Peter” Oil and acrylic on canvas
Although it is difficult to look at Maple’s work without thinking about cultural, religious and political issues, the artist says that her personal experiences, above all, drive her vision. “A lot of the work is about my personal feelings about my religion and it’s about growing up and figuring out who you are,” she says. “So the political climate affects me, but I think that I would have made this work anyway.”
Maple takes a humorous approach to her work, which underplays the intensity of the content. In her self-portraits, she blurs the boundaries between pop-culture and religious devotion, portraying herself wearing a burka on Brighton Pier, or praying with bunny ears attached to her veil. “I don’t think that I am criticizing the religion itself,” she says. “I’m questioning the way some Muslims interpret the faith. I’m not saying we should all go and break the rules. I’m just saying that if you’re going to be a Muslim and pray every day, that doesn’t necessarily make you a good person… Sometimes people find that a bit disturbing, the fact that I take Islam and I address it in a way that’s sort of playful. It’s a quite serious thing, and then I make light of it, and I think a lot of people find that unsettling. But then they grow to like it.”
Last year, an anonymous commenter on myartspace.com described Maple’s art as relying “purely on her being attractive and Muslim.” Initially taken aback when she encountered the comment, Maple quickly realized that it was a gem, a comic insight that speaks to the sort of misperceptions she routinely encounters. The myartspace rover did get one thing right, however: Maple is attractive. With full-bodied dark hair, big eyes, and youthful charisma, Maple’s physical magnetism plays an inescapable role in her work. Most of her images center on her sometimes charming, sometimes seductive, and sometimes introspective facial expressions. “I don’t think, ‘Oh, I’m attractive, I should use that in my art,’” says Maple. “But when I went to do the work I realized that I could sort of manipulate my sexuality in order to make certain points.”
Of her photographs, Maple says, “I really like them when they look minimal. When I take a picture, the main emphasis is on my face. To get that right is the most important thing.” She is influenced by third-wave and lipstick feminist artists like Tracey Emin, Sophie Calle and Sarah Lucas—artists who, like Maple, used their bodies to probe cultural identity.
“Even though all the work’s about me, I’m still quite a private person,” says Maple. Personal identity can never be fully captured by a photograph or painting. No artist can ever truly expose all her complexities. Comparing herself to Sophie Calle, an artist whose self-exploratory photographs have a coolness and distance from the viewer, Maple says, “She’s confessional but she’s also detached emotionally from her work. I’m a bit like her. I’m confessional, but I’m trying to keep myself separate, emotionally.”