Alexandrya Eaton

Busy Woman

  • Apr 15 - May 8, 2011
  • Gallery 78
  • Fredericton, NB

"These paintings treat culture like a colour and tag surfaces with urgency. They’re rocking and running and gleefully alive."

Leopold Kowolik

Dancing Queen
  • Dancing Queen
  • Painting
  • 122 cm × 122 cm

The “Busy Woman” series began as an exploration into self-identity, yet evolved over time into a playful social commentary on the idea of a modern everyday superwoman.

Female silhouettes figure prominently and examine the idea of a ‘woman being’, a female figure rushing to keep up to the expectations placed on her in today’s society. The paintings document a contemporary woman’s attempt to come to terms with typical female roles, and her constant renegotiation of relationships and other elements in her surroundings. 

The repeated stenciled outline of the anonymous female icon facilitates a fascination with the repetition of images; the use of multiple images strengthens the painted representation of identity. The stenciled images become a visual vocabulary, presenting possibilities of characters, questioning perceptions, reassembling reality.

The paintings develop slowly and deliberately by building layer upon layer of vibrant acrylic colour. This way of working, by always adding incrementally, is a very female way of working, and identifies closely with other forms of women’s cultural production such as knitting, quilting and rug hooking.

Influenced by everyday life, “Busy Woman” is a continuous response to a natural cycle; ultimately, the result is a joyful interpretation.