PREFACE :
Anima Mundi is delighted to present ‘Poem’, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Joy Wolfenden Brown taking place on two floors of the gallery. ‘Poem’ is Wolfenden Brown’s sixth solo exhibition at Anima Mundi.
This collection of exquisitely intuitive and intimate, small and larger scale oil paintings are imbued with the artists renowned sensitivity to absorb the physical and metaphysical world that surrounds and precedes the present moment. Evocations of fortitude combine with vulnerability resting beneath an ethereally layered and unmannered, yet luminous oily surface. The ritualistic painting process flows continuously from the artists' subconscious, as a visual reflection of deep felt experience and emotion, simultaneously confronting whilst offering the viewer comfort through the sharing of a profound and fragile truth. Figures often appear awkward, perhaps guarded, as if attempting to close the breach created through the wide eyed protagonist, offering a unique and singular window in to the soul of the subject, the artist and in turn, ourselves.
EXHIBITION INSTALL IMAGES (CLICK TO ENLARGE) :
EXHIBITION ARTWORKS (CLICK FOR FULL DETAILS) :
INTRODUCTION :
‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’
There comes a time when we all stand by the open grave, clumps of earth held in our hand staining our fingers, our unfocused eyes staring into the infinite abyss. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. As these poignant, bittersweet words are spoken, the soil drops like tears, falling into the void from where it has come. Earth returns to earth, a reminder of our fragile physicality. In our life we stand on the spinning ground, in our death we are enfolded in it. These words form an ending that is also a beginning. As granular soil disappears into the darkness of solid earth and words disperse into the aether, they remind us that our solidity is an illusion, our edges an impossibility. We are an energy field of atoms, a momentary coagulation of matter caught in the gravity field of this Earth.
The painter takes ground up earth, loose dust particles of pigment and binds it into coagulated matter that solidifies on the paper surface, each mark an arrested gesture, a frozen moment of bodily flow...
There comes a time when we all stand by the open grave, clumps of earth held in our hand staining our fingers, our unfocused eyes staring into the infinite abyss. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. As these poignant, bittersweet words are spoken, the soil drops like tears, falling into the void from where it has come. Earth returns to earth, a reminder of our fragile physicality. In our life we stand on the spinning ground, in our death we are enfolded in it. These words form an ending that is also a beginning. As granular soil disappears into the darkness of solid earth and words disperse into the aether, they remind us that our solidity is an illusion, our edges an impossibility. We are an energy field of atoms, a momentary coagulation of matter caught in the gravity field of this Earth.
The painter takes ground up earth, loose dust particles of pigment and binds it into coagulated matter that solidifies on the paper surface, each mark an arrested gesture, a frozen moment of bodily flow...
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Even in our stillness there is infinitesimal movement, a breathing in and a breathing out, the gentle rise and fall of the diaphragm, our edges dissolving as we inhale the void: earth, air, ashes, dust, our body, all floating in an atomic sea of potential creation, remembering in anticipation what will come; time past, present and future bound together in fragile forms.
But in-between the reuniting of earth and earth, ashes and ashes, dust and dust there is the ‘to’, two letters holding the space between, the gap where we exist. Two letters that contain the whole journey of life, a brief coalescence of particles, where ashes dance and dust floats and we exist for a short moment of time.
Joy Wolfenden Brown’s paintings allow us to glimpse the ‘to’. Her figures are caught in the space between, suspended in momentary stasis, a reminder that we are a breath of stardust; a fleeting, fragile form caught like condensation on a window; a passing shadow crossing the earth, leaving behind the subtle imprint of our passing. They confront us with the transience of the ‘to’, their stares inviting us to fall again into the void, where we find an emptiness full of presence. We reach out to hold them, but they dissipate before our gaze, evaporating into an evanescent mist of exquisite memory. They appear before us, kneeling, staring, standing, sitting; gentle souls too fragile to be grasped, teasing us like a half-remembered whisper, or a tender annunciation of invisible presence.
These figures are held in delicate spaces where what was solid has dissolved into shimmering clouds of immateriality and where colourful prisms surround them in a waterfall of invisible light. In this stillness her figures find quiet communion with nature, the deep interconnectedness of the earth’s shalom, a peace that transcends time and space, heaven and earth, life and death pulling us into an eternity where we are all one.
Dr Richard Davey, 2020
Richard Davey is an internationally published author, curator and member of the International ‘Association of Art Critics’. He was a judge of the John Moores Painting Prize 2016 and recently wrote the major exhibition publication for Anselm Kiefer’s solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, in 2014 alongside the 2015 and 2016 ‘RA Summer Exhibition’ catalogues.
ONLINE CATALOGUE (CLICK TO VIEW) :
BIOGRAPHY :
Joy Wolfenden Brown is a British artist born in Stamford, Lincolnshire in 1961. She currently lives in Bude, North Cornwall.
Wolfenden Brown’s intimate oil paintings feel hauntingly familiar possessing a raw, emotional, honesty. She captures fleeting fragments of memory, moments in time where the inherent vulnerability of the figures depicted, often in isolation, is palpable. These are lovingly yet spontaneously executed reflections on the human condition, which have an unnervingly, yet simultaneously comforting, unguarded quality.
Joy Wolfenden Brown graduated from Leeds University then completed a post-graduate diploma in Art Therapy at Hertfordshire College of Art & Design. She worked as an art therapist for ten years before moving to Cornwall in 1999. Wolfenden Brown has had a number of sell out solo exhibitions and was the First Prize Winner in The National Open Art Competition, 2012. She was also awarded the Somerville Gallery painting prize in 2003, was first prize winner at the Sherborne Open in 2007 and won the Evolver Prize at the Royal West of England Academy in 2019. Works were acquired by the Anthony Pettullo Outsider Art Collection in Milwaukee with further works held in collections worldwide. Wolfenden Brown has exhibited internationally with six solo exhibitions at Anima Mundi marking a long and fruitful working relationship. Joy Wolfenden Brown is represented by Anima Mundi.