Ingrid Berthon-Moine

Artist Statement

Ingrid Berthon-Moine is a French artist currently living and working in London. Her practice employs a variety of media including video, photography, sculpture and text to examine themes relating to gender, technology and personal biography. Her work investigates sexuality and the human body as vehicles for questioning new forms of sexual representation, challenging conventions by merging opposing visual signifiers in order to highlight absurdities and collapse cultural preconceptions. Her photographic portrait series Red Is The Colour invited women to pose in front of the camera without makeup and were solely presented with menstrual blood on their lips as if it were lipstick. These images expose the cultural expectations of cosmetics and female representation, reflecting upon ideas of media representation, societal pressure and sexual identity. In the film Ma, a mother walks side by side in the street with her daughter in a seemingly innocent every day manner until the mother let's go of her child's hand and continues to walk away, running ahead and out of sight and eventually leaving her daughter alone in the street. The video explores nostalgic and historical conventions around family, guardianship and responsibility, examining how these pressures impact and affect the contemporary female psyche. Alors tu m'aimes? is a series of videos which focus on the intense beauty regime of women. Here kitchen utensils and domestic products are interjected within a conventional beauty routine. The application of these tools ironically interrogates the beautification and aestheticization of the female body, contrasting associations between housework and the labour of beauty. Berthon-Moine is currently completing an artist residency at Metropolitan University in East London. The screen printing studios at the University have provided her with an opportunity to experiment with print making techniques in order to diversify her practice and ultimately realise a new series of screen prints. This new body of work entitled Posters examines the personal challenges and complexities of life as a practicing artist commenting on biographical modes of art production and the political structures contained within the artworld itself. This series follows on thematically from one of her earlier text pieces entitled Unfortunately where she compiled all the rejections emails received from open call competitions applied to since graduating in 2009. She is also developing a project which examines female representation within technological media reflecting upon female identity and gender roles disseminated through online imagery and digital platforms. A similar set of preoccupations were explored within her 2011 video I Touch, which parodied an iPhone application that contrasted ideas of tactility and human desire with representations of the female form. Ingrid has been exhibiting across London, the UK and Internationally.