Guest Artist: Emma Cormier Simola, Student, Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Emma Cormier Simola, Le buste
My name is Emma Cormier Simola, I am a French-Finnish artist. I am currently studying Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Arts in London. I started doing art during COVID-19 when I had to keep myself busy and found my father’s old film camera in a drawer. As I continued to produce art over the years, my artistic voice grew stronger. My art focuses mostly on the female experience and how society has different expectations of women just because of our gender.
This artwork called “Le buste” (The bust) is a plaster sculpture that I created for my art course in high school. It is a cast of a woman’s bust hanging off hangers and covered in sexist ads from the 60’s. What I tried to represent with this artwork is how as women we are often expected to fit into a certain mold, to want and have different things than our male peers. It’s like a second skin that we have to put on in order to “fit in” and be accepted. The material was chosen very specifically as plaster isn’t flexible at all, and represents how these expectations and the sexism that we experience throughout our lives is restricting us of “movement” and freedom. The process of making this sculpture was also quite peculiar. I actually cast it onto an actual woman, a friend of mine, who had to sit for many hours as the plaster dried. I then had to cut it off from her and stick it back together.
Laure Vincent, 2023, photo by Emma Cormier Simola, CETTE ARTISTE series
For this photo series called “CETTE ARTISTE,” I took portraits of 10 women artists working in Sete, a city I'm from in the South of France, and interviewed them about their experience as women in such a male-dominated industry. It was a wonderful experience, and I got to learn a lot about how they experienced being a woman in the artist world. Some didn’t see it as a handicap, but rather as a strength, while others recognized that it did cause them to have to work harder.
Elisa Fantozzi, 2023, photo by Emma Cormier Simola, CETTE ARTISTE series
With this series I tried to capture each of the artist’s femininity as they chose to present it. I often feel as though in art the artists impose their gaze on women and only represent them as they see them. When taking these portraits, I told the participants that they were free to hold themselves however they wanted. I refused to impose my gaze as a photographer and rather let them have power over their own image, effectively turning traditional portraiture into collaborative self-portraits.
Above are portraits of Laure Vincent and Elisa Fantozzi, two of the 192 photographs taken for this project.