LAUGHING WHILE 2020 -
The impetus for Laughing While Digging was a conversation with scholar and artist Michael Eden, who has written on my work on a few occasions in magazines and academic journals, and with whom I discussed the ancient English poem Sir Gawain & The Green Knight. Early English writing interests me, and I was especially intrigued by the potential for a feminist pictoral reading of the two powerful female characters in the poem, Morgan le Fay and Lady Bertilak. I find these protagonists compelling, and whilst aware of the various pre-Raphaelite representations of these women, I knew I wouldn't go down an explicitly Arthurian route with my painting. My tangential path arrived at this image of two women standing amidst an ancient woodland, surrounded by forest creatures, laughing while wielding implements.
While this painting sits in dialogue with other works of mine where women laugh while explicitly performing an action or fleeing its aftermath, there's something more elemental and indecipherable about this painting: the women, their laughter, the forest, the watchful creatures, their unseen spoils.
One key part of the theme of this painting is deeply personal: these woods are a specific place called Piles Copse, situated on Dartmoor, which was very special to me during the period in which I lived in Devon before returning to London, my place of birth and where I've lived for most of my life. As a mid-childhood transplant from the city, I saw the countryside through an incomer's urban eyes, enthralled but estranged. I would return often to the moor and its woodlands - there is a profound strangeness to such places, and a sense in which they simultaneously surround you and yet feel interior to you. In Laughing While Digging these gnarled, dense branches could be the alveoli of a great enveloping lung, the low muting mist could be its breath.
Finally, an adjacent influence was my love of Renaissance era Edenic and Arcadian landscape paintings in which improbable groupings of flora, fauna and humans congregate. I'd always wanted to experiment with this genre.
As with all these works of mine, the viewer brings their own narrative associations: I am curious to learn of these and not prescribe my own. Many viewers imagine this a crime scene and invent a body, which is perhaps inevitable. But I also see that these women are excavating deep into time and both discrete and shared histories, uncovering roots and preparing for new growth. The audience of animals are still but anxious, intuiting that what they unearth and we will soon discover in these English lands might not be entirely treasure.
Laughing While Digging was exhibited in
EYES OF ROXANA HALLS, Gallery 46, London 2022
FUNNY HA HA, Maddox Gallery, London 2022/23
DIE AUGEN DER ROXANA HALLS, Haus Kunst Mitte, Berlin 2023