Abstract

Works were selected from 3 series of paintings: Interiors, Costume Drama and Presentiments, (see http://virginiabodman.com). The paintings continue to investigate ideas/concerns initiated in work shown in PALCE, (one-person exhibition, BayArt Gallery, Cardiff, 2009), particularly the use of figures drawn from a range of historic and contemporary sources, able and disabled forms were developed from Indian and Spanish cultures and from the work of Gainsborough and Manet. Each of these tropes has its own particular history and each invokes discourses of power and domination that regulate and censure the body; be they pertaining to codes of sexual difference, normative representations of the human body or colonialism. The paintings employed a full palette, a range of size/scale ideas and the visceral use of paint to create an all-female cast of characters whose dress hints at a variety of meanings and possibilities. The figures in the paintings act out obscure dramas in spaces that suggest the exotic, the domestic and the dislocated - scenarios with uncertain outcomes. These shifts of figure, dress and spatial behavior invite the viewer to construct their own narratives.

Storm Jameson, writing in her autobiography Journey from the North provides a good description of both the process and the outcome of this mode of investigation:

“The change of milieu (space in paintings) produces its own complexities and depths of meaning, one change involving another, and another, until the original chain of events is completely overlaid. The personages move farther and farther from their point of origin and become truly autonomous, and are enriched, complicated, changed in depth, by the working on them of circumstances. And, of course, the fusion of all these many elements is fed and animated by personal memories and emotions entering spontaneously at every level".

L/D/D/L was reviewed in The Journal (14.10.2015) where it was favourably compared with the Daniel Buren exhibition showing concurrently at Baltic, (see http://www.thejournal.co.uk/culture/arts-culture-news/virginia-bodman-north-east-artist-7935726). Three artist led Tour and Talks were given in the gallery, subsequently invitations were received from York St John and Newcastle Universities to give lectures on the exhibition. “Circularities: Painting a Life” was delivered on 3.2.2015 at Newcastle University.