Charlotte Hodes at the British Academy
21/12/2017
Charlotte Hodes at the British Academy
Charlotte Hodes, reflects on Flower Panel I & II and her development as an artist.
Since 2010, the British Academy has been proud to display Flower Panel I by Charlotte Hodes. We were therefore thrilled when Flower Panel II became available this summer. The Academy is very grateful to UCL for lending us these two paintings which are now hanging together in the Lecture Hall. In the piece below, Charlotte Hodes reflects on the two panels and her development as an artist.
I made this pair of paintings, Flower Panel I & II, as an undergraduate student at the Slade School (1978-1982). As procedures were extremely informal during this period, I have no record for certainty, but I believe that they were selected by Sir Lawrence Gowing, the then Principal of the Slade School (and hung in the School offices for a while) as a consequence of my being awarded the Marion Richardson Prize for Painting. I was grateful for Gowing’s support, as he was responsible for subsequently securing a place for me as a postgraduate student there in Painting, after I had unwisely, in his view, applied for a postgraduate place in Printmaking.
Flower Panel I & II represented my struggle to find a pictorial language and to shape a painted space. The elements in the paintings consist of still life objects, selected for their shape and colour, and their relative artificiality. I arranged these objects on the floor to emphasize their abstract qualities and painted them viewed from above.
I was deeply influenced by the structure and verticality of Chinese landscape paintings as well as the flat and patterned shapes that characterize Japanese wood cut prints. At that time, I was also looking at the work of the American abstract expressionists, such as Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell, alongside that of Patrick Heron, Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard and Wassily Kandinsky.
Reflecting now, thirty-five years later, I realise that these paintings contain many clues to how I was to develop as an artist, not least through colour and pattern as my building blocks for image making. It is also evident to me now that through looking at the ‘real’ world of objects, I was searching for a painted space that encompassed not only the world as I experienced it but also one onto which I could both project my imagination and create my own sense of order. My imagery has become increasingly layered, a poetic, imagined equivalent to the physical world around me.
At the time when I made these paintings, there was a huge gulf between my own identity as a woman artist and those ‘feminist’ artists who had rejected oil painting in favour of a more politically driven use of film and performance. It took me many years to harness my subject matter; the domestic, the feminine and the decorative, to create ambitious, formal artworks that spoke of a female, sensed internal landscape. Sonia Delaunay as well as Paula Rego (I was her first tutee at the Slade 1982-84 and she has remained a good friend) were important influences.
After leaving the Slade in 1984, I made paintings that were made up of parts suggesting a quality of collage, influenced by the first Turner Prize winner, the painter Malcolm Morley. I very soon then began to make large papercuts that became increasingly intricate. These formed the basis for my solo exhibition, Fragmented Images at the Wallace Collection in 2007, then under the directorship of Dame Rosalind Savill, the result of two fabulous years as Associate Artist at the Collection. The papercuts that I exhibited alongside a group of ornately worked ceramics were the result of visual research into the eighteenth-century fête galante paintings and Sèvres porcelain in the Collection.
I have used many archives and collections as source material for artworks including being the only contemporary artist to work at the Spode ceramic factory, where subsequent research in their archive of copper engravings led to my project Spode Trees & Dressed Silhouettes 2015 and Dressed in Pattern 2016.
My iconography has become increasingly centred on the female figure featuring as a silhouette, juxtaposed with motifs loaded with female associated references such as the vessel, the dress and the domestic. I trawl from the fine and decorative arts, drawing from photographs, fashion, dance and ‘home’ life magazines.
Recent solo exhibitions include Remember Me: Charlotte Hodes Papercuts & Ceramics Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 2017, Grammar of Ornament: Papercuts & Ceramics jaggedart, London & New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge 2014; grants include AHRC 2005 & 2007, Arts Council England 2004 & 2013; awards include the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2006 and appointment as Professor in Fine Art at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, 2012.