Bod Mellor

Police Constable Norika Datta (Seeta Indrani) 2016 is a painting in oil on canvas by the British artist Bod Mellor. It is one of twenty works in Mellor’s Sirens series, all completed in 2016. The paintings depict female police officers from popular and long-running British television dramas that focus on crime and police work, such as The Bill, Prime Suspect and Happy Valley. The characters of the police officers are painted in costume as though on set but have been defaced with additional elements, such as netting, lollipops or water with bubbles, overpainted on their figures, or with disembodied fingers falling out of their mouths.

This particular painting is a portrait of the actress Seeta Indrani playing Police Constable Norika Datta, a character in the police drama The Bill from 1989 to 1998.The painting depicts the head and shoulders of Datta in police uniform. Muddy water reaches up to her chest and can be seen in the foreground of the painting. A leaf painted in autumnal reds, greens and browns is placed on top of the left side of her chest. The majority of the actress’s face is obscured by bright red lines which look like netting, while a camera or lens covers her left eye. Other works from the Sirens series also in Tate’s collection are: Sergeant June Ackland (Trudie Goodwin), Police Constable Jamila Blake (Lolita Chakrabarti), Police Constable Di Worrell (Jane Wall), and Police Constable Kate McFay (Maxine Peake) (all 2016, Tate T15208–T15212).

The title, Sirens, is a triple play on words, evoking the sounds emitted by police cars but also the vernacular term for a sexually provocative actress (particularly associated with the glamorous Hollywood era of the 1950s) and the deadly seductresses of Greek mythology who lured sailors to shipwreck and death with their irresistible song. There is thus an implicit tension between the shrill noise associated with emergency vehicles and the softer yet still dangerous allure of the female goddesses of the silver screen and of mythology. As with all of Mellor’s paintings, the women depicted are objects of lust, firmly under her (and the viewers’) gaze while also being feminist figures, strong and capable professionals played by well-known women. This tension subverts and complicates ideas around the gaze and the gendered societal expectations placed on artists in addition to those around heteronormative behaviour. There is a conflict between desire and repulsion, between objectifying women and submission to their powers that runs through all of Mellor’s practice.
In these ways Mellor’s paintings act as a rebellion against the media industry’s colonisation of public consciousness in relation to attitudes towards women and towards celebrity. In appropriating and debasing photos of celebrities, turning them fiendish and tawdry, the artist negates the passivity usually associated with image-consumption – by taking ownership over the pictures, as well as performing a scarring defacement on their subjects. A critical element of Mellor’s practice is the queer gaze and their presentation of desire and lust for women, particularly a desire that can be read as fetishistic and rejecting any polite or commodified reading of the queer experience. On their fascination with television and celebrity culture the artist has stated: ‘Television was one of the few areas where I could access information when I was growing up, which was before the internet, and I believe made me vulnerable to manipulation as a child. I was seduced in my early years by excessive consumption of mainstream stars from various cultural fields due to a lack of access to other voices.’ (Quoted in Hatty Nestor, interview with Dawn Mellor, Studio International, 8 April 2018, https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/dawn-mellor-interview-activism-and-resentments-due-to-economics-class-racism-and-gender, accessed 30 October 2018.) Mellor’s work thus focuses on an investigation of sexuality, class and popular culture. By concentrating on depicting largely female bodies of different ages, races and nationalities, their paintings highlight the stereotypes surrounding the depiction of women in historical painting through the lens of popular culture.
Further reading
Raphael Gygax and Dawn Mellor, Dawn Mellor, Zurich 2008.
Dawn Mellor, Michael Jackson and Other Men, Zurich 2011.
Richard Riley, J.P. Stonard, Linsey Young, The Painting Show, exhibition catalogue, British Council touring exhibition, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania and tour 2016.

Linsey Young
October 2018