Silhouettes and filigree: ceramics and papercuts

Solo show.

The exhibition featured ornately decorated ceramics, alongside a series of intricately cut collages.

The depiction of the female figure, drawn from contemporary and historical sources which include skirt pattern templates from the LCF archive library, is the overriding and recurrent theme. The work seeks to evoke a sensuousness and a sumptuous feeling of celebration, simultaneously questioning the position of the female figure as decorative motif.

Catalogue Introduction

Charlotte Hodes

'Drawing is the way in which I begin. I make pencil drawings and take photos from observation which enable me to construct images in my mind. I do not invent. The drawings become modulated and changed through subsequent drawings, tracings, digital manipulation or as hand cut paper stencils according to how I intend to use them.

Both the ceramics and papercuts come into existence through the process of collage. In developing the images for the ceramics, a multitude of enamel silkscreen and digital transfers of colour sheets, figure motifs, domestic elements, computer icons and patterns are hand cut with a fine scalpel blade which are applied directly and intuitively to the ceramic surface and then fired.

I use a similar process but on a larger scale for the papercuts. Colour and pattern as well as drawn figures are composed and printed on a large format digital printer which are then collaged with other fragments of painted and coloured papers in the studio. The 'cut' and 'paste' of the collage is inherently playful and full of surprises. There are collisions of imagery, of scale, of edges and of shapes. The many fragments invite a myriad of possibilities.

The female figures are depicted as silhouettes either walking or sitting. They are contained shapes which are held in place and sometimes interrupted by the filigree patterns which spread across the surface.

They coexist with elements which have over decades been represented and re-presented in the fine and decorative arts; drapery; cloth; ornament and pattern. They acknowledge their origins but exist, I hope, in the present as new incarnations. They are a celebration of the art histories from which they have come, whilst existing in a painterly space with my rules.

I have endeavoured, through the tactility of making, to evoke a pleasure of dense surface, colour and filigree pattern in which these figures are momentary participants.'

'Collage to Montage' A 25 minute film made following the making of the artworks for this exhibition by Emmy Award winning documentary film maker Susan Steinberg SDS Productions <sds48@aol.com>. Watch the film here:

https://files.me.com/sds48/dwjcgu.mov

In addition Charlotte Hodes in conversation with Professor Reina Lewis on 2 December 2009 at the Rootsein Hopkins Space, LCF.

• https://files.me.com/sds48/dwjcgu.mov
• http://www.marlboroughfineart.com