Working in painting, printmaking and sculpture, Tchiprout’s figurative works are both fantastical and intimate, informed by Yiddish literature and the artist’s Jewish culture.
Tchiprout’s dolls are central to her practice, the basis of a self-referential realm from which the artist draws her subject matter. Building upon a wooden mannequin base, or covering her own metal wire armatures, Tchiprout’s figurines are based on herself, her closest friends, and fictional characters of literature and her own imagining, animated through modelling clay, handmade clothing, and human or animal hair. These dolls form the basis of her painterly compositions, groups of figures that bow their weighty heads, emotive in their slack physicality. As Tchiprout paints the dolls, they mediate her experience of painting from life. They establish a visual shorthand for the artist, a set of motifs and expressions that are distillations or signifiers of real human figures, yet also unreal in their upholstered lifelessness, abject in their departure from their subjects. In this way, the works span opposite concepts of real and imaginary, living and inanimate, forming a closed circuit of self-referential observation and world-building.
Having established her practice in printmaking, the artist’s transition to painting and sculpture also bears evidence of the mark-making of her earlier monoprints and etchings. In her painting and her sculpture, Tchiprout considers how light arranges itself across the roughly hewn surface of the dolls’ faces, shadows falling into the concave impressions of her finger-marks in much the same way that tactile gesture informs her monoprints.