Abstract

COSTUME DRAMA, 2010-13, body of work comprising 20 works on paper, (watercolour, gouache, acrylic), 5 etchings, 15 large and 30 small oil paintings.

The work considers and investigates the human need to escape, albeit on a temporary basis from paramount reality, see Escape Attempts, Cohen, S & Taylor, L, (1976). A troupe of female figures, (first encountered in PALCE), escape from the vicissitudes of daily life, adopting personas borrowed from C17, 18 & 19th Spanish, Persian and French paintings and inhabit new or different pictorial spaces in which responses to living in a contemporary patriarchal society can be safely acted out. Playfully employing a range of making strategies and using a mix of representational and abstract forms, referencing a wide range of sources from the histories of painting from Abstract Expressionism to devotional imagery, the resulting works are silent, obscure and mysterious. The COSTUME DRAMA webpage includes a number of studio shots showing some of the paintings installed as part of a large-scale drawing installation: REVISIT, REVIEW, REPRISE.

Two paintings from the COSTUME DRAMA group were shown in MALERIE, a touring group exhibition, (11 artists), jointly curated by 3 exhibitors, Natalie Gale, Sarah Bowker-Jones and Sarah Kate Wilson. MALERIE disseminated current approaches to ‘painting as object’ through the artists’ engagements with process, substance and materiality. The exhibition began at NewBridge Project Space, Newcastle, (20.4.2012- 24.5.2012), and then toured to Transition Gallery, London (9.6.2012-1.7.2012), and will conclude at Project Space Leeds in 2013, (Leeds venue and date TBC). This exhibition extended the remit of Unbound: Possibilities in Painting, Hayward Gallery, 1994 and Painting to Object, Tate Gallery, 2009 and also provided new perspectives – insiders’ accounts of the current concerns of a group of cross-generational artists including Alexis Harding, Phyllida Barlow and Paul Merrick.