A Soft Refusal

SOFT PASTEL DRAWING

On view at ‘Pyschic Anemone’ at Cob Gallery, November 18 2021 – January 22, 2022

Work Details:
A Soft Refusal
2021
50 x 65cm
Soft pastel on 350gsm sanded paper

Cob Gallery is proud to present Psychic Anemone, a group exhibition of mixed-media work by Bea Bonafini, Charlotte Edey and Zoe Williams. These artists are brought to comparison for their multilayered artistic approaches to the transcendental image.  Through their powerfully individual languages of symbolism Bonafini, Edey and Williams address similar themes which include the body politic, ritual, magic, gender, mythology, spirituality, eroticism and sensuality. 

The works in Psychic Anemone are anchored to a liquidity of form and as such, can be explored through an implication of ‘hydrofeminism’ – a mode of posthuman feminist phenomenology that understands our bodies as fundamentally a part of the natural world, not separate from it or bearing any privileged relation to it.

The soft pastel drawings consider the role of container as detailed in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K Le Guin. Without the contours of the container to define and hold the form, how does this essence exist without a preordained shape, what shape will it take or will it just run without direction?