Burkhas and Stilletos has now been renamed to ‘Whitechapel Women”

‘Whitechapel women’ takes ways of seeing a step further exploring the cultural gaze and is a print-based art practice research project. The East London Whitechapel area has been a place of repeated influx of immigrants over centuries and is starting to show a degree of social unease as in other 21st century European cities. Whitechapel is an area where professions and ethnic boundaries seems to repeatedly cross over, thereby providing fertile ground for my PhD studies called ‘An honourable practice: printmaking and social engagement’. The project aims to look at four groups of women; artists, Muslim women in veils, professional women employed in the finance industry and prostitutes by employing the image to investigate the women’s perceptions of not only themselves but ‘the others’.

The visual outcomes, a series of visceral prints , are to be form the impetus for a series of interviews, calling on Kesters’s and Linde’s texts on art as dialogue, while testing the use of art integrating Maggie O’Neill’s method of ‘ethno-mimesis’ order to develop further research methods for art-based investigations. The project will be presented midway in questioning how combining image –making and methodologies outside an art practice can enhance an understanding of the ‘social body’ in a wider cultural and social context. Current approaches pivot around the concerns of audience, location and iconography, but have yet to establish to what degree the interdisciplinary cross-over between social science and fine art can be effectively integrated. Therefore, social science researchers will be invited to participate.
Finally, ‘Whitechapel Women’ asks in what ways the image can explore meanings, and engage unknown audiences to became participants forming new understandings in a culturally fragmented community?

It may be that the image which appears ambivalent about its message which gains more power by allowing the viewer room to wonder.Seruton writes in his’ Gentle regrets. Thoughts from Life’ that ‘ Shakespeare’s plays are works of philosophy - philsophy not argued but shown.’ Some images work in the same manner, underpinned by humanist values, they may become timeless.Yet- can they be universal?

” Burkhas and Stilletos” is the forthcoming case study looking more closely at how women shape their identities by clothing.