Output details

Costume Drama - A series of paintings

As an artist working through painting, drawing and etching, Bodman is specifically concerned with the considering the displacement/invisibility of women in relation to the landscape. This work was developed through her studio practice, and considers and investigates the human need to escape, albeit on a temporary basis from paramount reality. 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. A troupe of female figures escape from the vicissitudes of daily life, adopting personas borrowed from 17th, 18th & 19th Century 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.

The large paintings were exhibited as part of a group exhibition ‘Malerei: Painting as Object’, with other artists including Phyllida Barlow, Sarah Bowker-Jones and Sarah Kate Wilson, first shown at The NewBridge Project Space, Newcastle, (April 2012- May 2012) and touring to Transition Gallery, London (June 2012-July 2012).

‘Malerei: Painting As Object investigates painting as a process, its guises and paint as a substance. Each artist shares a love of material and the qualities of their ‘thing-ness’, whether it’s colour, oozing oil paint, balloons, cellophane or jesmonite. The artists however do not remain slavish to the visceral but also embody and appropriate particular areas of Paintings’ history in their multidisciplinary practices. Artists will reveal a painterly investigation of the Modernist concern ‘objecthood’, Postmodern eclecticism and the Post-production – trend of continuous re-working.’

http://www.transitiongallery.co.uk/htmlpages/shows.htm