From the Inside Out is a group exhibition of female artists who employ expanded forms of drawing to navigate a passage from personal experience to the outside world. The exhibition explores the capacity of drawing to convey the complexity and diversity of female experience.
These artists utilize the immediacy and directness of the drawn line to document experience, lived or imagined, giving form to memories and private thoughts. Taking inspiration from literature, popular culture and folklore, the artists use drawing to tell stories about age, sexuality, gender, the domestic and politics. The works incorporate assemblage and collage, testing the boundaries of drawing as it merges with sculpture. Traditional craft techniques, such as embroidery and quilting, are employed as a conceptual strategy with which to explore the construction of female identity. Exploring states of being, both interior and exterior, the artists tell stories that are as personal as they are universal.
The works of Nilbar Güreş place everyday life realities in theatrical settings. Telling stories of the invisible and inaudible, her works discuss ideas of gender, sexuality, race, class and the systems that sustain oppression and control. Employing a diverse range of media such as drawing, embroidery and appliqué, her works are imbued with a poetic and humorous inventiveness as well as a critical and political underside.
Marie Jacotey portrays contemporary relationships and conversations in drawings interspersed with text in a comic-strip form. Working across media and scale, she is inspired by social interactions and the stories of friends, strangers, literature and popular culture. Drawing functions as a means to tell highly personal and self-reflective stories.
Athena Papadopoulos uses autobiographical references combined with images and text appropriated from popular culture, historical and contemporary literature. Bringing these materials together in the form of collages, she weaves herself as subject into a narrative thread that explores issues around contemporary gender politics and social relationships.
The works of Emma Talbot refer to interior psychological space. Using a highly stylised figure motif to describe the self, she articulates internal personal narratives as visual thoughts of her own experience, her memories and psychological projections. Her drawings, made in watercolor, pencil and ink on paper or silk, often incorporate her own writing and other sources that describe her sense of the world.
Courtesy the artists and Drawing Room, London
From the Inside Out at Drawing Room
20 Sep, 2018 to 11 Nov, 2018
1-27 Rodney Pl, Elephant & Castle,
London SE17 1PP,
UK
