I discovered Eva Hesse in my first few weeks at art school. I was reading a book about conceptual art, and had flicked to the index, where all artists were named alongside a headshot. Her face stood out as not only a woman in a sea of men, but a beautiful one. I put the book down and went online to find more images of her.
Having sensed this mild fixation getting in the way of any critical evaluation my nascent art student brain could offer on her work, I hatched a project to out myself as the shallow, surface-obsessed creature I must surely be.
I called it 4EVA – a play on the word FOREVER, which I had learnt from the pencil cases and gym bags of my classmates in high school, where it was most commonly written, usually after a boys and girls name had been conjoined with the word LOVES, or more likely a heart. Would that be easier to just demonstrate instead of describe? Here you go:
BILLY
LOVES
JULIE
4EVA
My project, titled 4EVA, would further play on that usage, so that it also carried the meaning FOR EVA, as in ‘dedicated to Eva’.
I had no idea what the project would look like, but I very much enjoyed the name, yet somehow the idea of outing myself as a sexist pig in the earliest days of my time as a student didn’t quite appeal enough for me to follow through with it.