Geraldine Carton: ‘Shame and embarrassment can be life-limiting for women’
Contemporary artist and activist Geraldine Carton’s work is fuelled by a desire to push forward social change. Here she discusses her first solo exhibition, ‘Sisters, Not Twins’, the hypersexualisation of her art online, and devoting her practice to feminist issues.
An artist whose oil paintings have the ability to stop you in your tracks, Geraldine Carton’s first solo exhibition, ‘Sisters, Not Twins’, gave voice to the female experience and the stories of the body. With over 100 women taking part, the exhibition featured a ‘Wall of Boobs’ comprising individual anonymous breast portraits featuring a range of sizes, ages, breastfeeding women, trans women, pregnant women and women post-surgery.
Geraldine’s interest as an artist lies specifically in the human condition, oscillating between humour and vulnerability to capture moments that further connection and challenge the status quo. She is passionate about creating inclusive work that connects with her audience on an interpersonal level, seeking to represent experiences and realities often overlooked by modern and historical media.
Word of the ambitious project caught the attention of documentary filmmaker Nicola Leddy and went on to inspire the subsequent documentary, Boobs. The winner of the Catalyst International Film Festival Short Doc Bursary Award 2024, the short captured Geraldine Carton as she set about painting over one hundred nude breast portraits from the female perspective, embracing the spectrum of race, gender identity, disability, age and sexual orientation and standing as an inclusive and unapologetic celebration of the diversity of female-identifying bodies. The film premiered at the Catalyst International Film Festival this April.
We spoke with former IMAGE staffer Geraldine Carton about her career so far, the ways in which her work has been hypersexualised and censored online and how feminism and politics inform her art.
Was a career as an artist something you always aspired to?
I always loved art all throughout my school days, but to be honest I never actually considered the possibility of a career as an artist. It just never dawned on me that this is something you could actually do. The vast majority of people in my school went on to study business or medicine or nursing, art college barely got a mention so I was under the impression art and creative pursuits were purely something for fun and not something I could make a living off of.
What is your process when approaching the canvas?
On a good day, it’s free-flowing and full of confident, expressive brushstrokes and openness to the process. The ideal is when I get caught up in a flow state, which leaves me kind of baffled hours later at how I even managed whatever I had painted, as the time just flies by and I get to bask in delight at my unexpected output. On a bad day, however, it’s a flux of anxiety and fighting against my inclination towards perfectionism, wanting to get it “just so” and ultimately falling into a pit of doubt about my ability and merit as an artist.
Practically, I tend to prefer to go straight to the slapping-paint-on-canvas stage, skipping over the preparatory drawings as I feel it keeps the piece feeling fresh and exciting to me, which is an important requisite to ensuring I actually do the work and don’t procrastinate.
Tell us about your exhibition, ‘Sisters, Not Twins’, and the subsequent documentary, Boobs.
‘Sisters, Not Twins’ was the culmination of nearly two years of work, and thanks to the participation of over 100 women it became an incredibly special project which opened to the public for ten days in Dublin’s City Assembly House in November 2024. Via a series of figurative nude paintings, culminating in a final ‘Wall of Boobs’ (comprising 100 individual breast portraits), the show’s ambitious scale and sentiment encouraged and provided a point of challenging inquiry into women’s experience of their own bodies. A celebration of sisterhood and imperfection, this show shone a light on the lived experience so often overlooked in Irish society: that of women.
In the figurative paintings, we saw depictions of women as refreshingly multi-dimensional — expressing anger, exhaustion, mischief and eye-rolling ennui. The ‘Wall of Boobs’ then looked at the discrepancy between the breast as a symbol of sex and desire, and how it is at odds with women’s own lived reality of this contentious body part.
It was actually when I put a call-out on my Instagram page looking for women to get involved that Irish filmmaker Nicola Leddy saw my post and got in touch because she thought it had the potential to become so much more than a finite exhibition. After a brief Zoom, we realised we were both totally on the same wavelength. Nicola told me a story about how she stopped going to swimming lessons when she was 12 because she was poked fun at in her swimming suit—and she says now she’s a terrible swimmer—which just infuriated us both when we chatted about it!
This is just one example of how life-limiting shame and embarrassment can be for women. We both saw this as an opportunity to own the joke, so girls and women out there can watch this and know that there’s nothing wrong with them. We wanted to create something that reminded women to never let this kind of shame stop them from doing what they want to do.
I know that some of your art was censored online for being ‘hypersexualised’. Tell us about that.
It’s been a really infuriating part of this whole experience. Despite continually seeing very sexual images and videos all over Instagram, not to mention videos of children being blown up in Gaza, I found it frankly galling that it was paintings of real women, in unsexual presentations of their imperfect bodies, that social media apps drew the line. It has felt deeply problematic and emblematic of the pervasive belief in our society that women’s bodies are only acceptable when presented as sexual objects to the male gaze. Any kind of nudity outside of this remit is unwanted, and literally banned.
How do politics and feminism inform your work?
My work is fuelled by a desire to push forward social change. I am deeply interested in human connection and feel a large pull towards social justice. Before becoming a full-time artist I worked in social work, then journalism, then environmental and community activism. Although my career path has had many turns, the desire to connect with and fight for people and human causes that resonate with me is longstanding.
It was only upon overcoming my own personal struggles with my body and coming to a greater understanding of the extremely harmful impact that the patriarchy has on all of us that I started to devote my practice to feminist issues and fighting back against these norms. I am inspired by artists such as Paula Rego and Katarina Janeckova Walshe who created and create work that actively stands against the status quo and is imbued with integrity.
Geraldine Carton’s life in culture
The book I keep coming back to… Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. It’s truly my bible and I re-read it every year in chunks. A source of unwavering strength and direction.
I find inspiration in… Brave, bold, hilarious women.
My career highlight is… Opening the doors of City Assembly House for the private launch of ‘Sisters, Not Twins’, when it was initially just the 100+ women who volunteered to take part. The immediacy of the connection between everyone there, each of us literally “having skin in the game” and hearing stories being shared between the participants who each showed up alone… that was a really special and emotional moment for me and still fills me with pride whenever I think back on it.
The song I listen to to get in the zone is… Honestly anything Celine Dion.
The last book/film/show/piece of work/artist I recommended is… Maiden To Mother by Sarah Durham Wilson. In it, she talks about how our society, by priming women to fear ageing and cling to youth at all costs, has left us immature and lacking the thresholds of maturity that our ancestors once enjoyed. I read passages of this book to any friends who will listen, I think it holds such important messages for all women, especially in this modern context.
I never leave the house without… Hand cream and lip balm. Crusty extremities be damned!
The best advice I’ve ever gotten… “If you refuse to integrate the teaching, you will have to take the class again.”
The most challenging thing about being an artist is… Finances, taxes, figuring out how to make money, knowing how much to charge for your work – anything to do with money melts my brain.
If I wasn’t an artist, I would be… Realistically, I would probably be running events. But unrealistically, I would love to work as a professional dream interpreter. I am forever fascinated by people’s dreams and the wildly different associations people make to convey their inner realities.
The magic of art to me is… Continuing a primal inclination towards mark-making that has been in existence since the cave times and the ability that these wordless images have to communicate meaning and ideas.
Photography by Ruth Connolly.
