There’s something so powerful about women’s bodies that’s comparable to the natural world, according to body positivity artist Clíodhna Doherty.
In her somewhat unconventional career, the Newry native is faced with her followers’ nudes on a daily basis as they become increasingly empowered to embrace their natural beauty.
Clíodhna was always a creative soul growing up, but her road to becoming the artist she is today wasn’t as smooth sailing as one might think. The fear that artistry wasn’t going to make her any money led her to pursue a teaching degree, but she swiftly discovered that path wasn’t for her.
Clíodhna then found herself enrolled in art college, learning everything there is to know through different mediums from fashion and textiles to fine art and sculptures. Her one true passion, however, was life drawing.
Speaking to EVOKE, she said: ‘I suppose it was [when I specialised] I fell in love with life drawing. If you can imagine, like a bunch of 18 to 21 year olds, a mix of genders in the class, and this 60-year-old woman with grey hair just drops a towel in the middle of the class.’
‘After a couple of minutes the awkwardness was gone and everybody realised that it was just a body,’ Clíodhna continued. ‘She was so confident that it made us feel really confident.’
‘I just remember thinking “I want this”, that same confidence about my body as this woman does and she’s in her late 60s.’
Clíodhna has been on a whirlwind journey with her career. She recently showcased her work at the International Fine Art Cannes Biennale, which took place during the Cannes Film Festival.
It’s her empowering representations of the female form that resonate with women globally, and this is certainly reflected in her DMs where she’s constantly met with her followers’ nudes as they want to commission a piece from her.
Clíodhna established her intimacy campaign when she couldn’t find images on the internet of the female form that weren’t sexualised.
‘I think if you typed in a naked female form for painting on Google, really heavily sexualized images of women came up,’ she told EVOKE. She knew then that she needed to ‘create a body of work that was solely based on real women.’
‘I do get asked a lot to paint people and they send me their nudes on Instagram and they willingly offer them up,’ Clíodhna explained.
On the back of her intimacy campaign, a lot of people wanted to get involved in her ‘Send Blooms’ campaign. ‘A lot of people wanted to get involved in this one. I received a crazy amount of emails of women and their stories and everything that empowered them and why they wanted to do it.’
The ‘Send Blooms’ campaign, Clíodhna tells us, is ‘all about the women of Ireland and how they’re the natural beauty, not our landscapes which is normally what people think of when you say Ireland.’
‘You think of the Cliffs of Moher and all of our beaches, so I really wanted to focus on how the natural beauty is actually our women. The women that are so strong and beautiful.’
