A Disruption

About

An exhibition of paintings and drawings by Kitty Jenkins and Shireen Qureshi exploring the human body disrupted, meaning broken apart and reimagined. 

Kitty’s work is rooted in an exploration of the human body and representation, with a particular emphasis on concepts of identity, recognition and form inherent in depictions of the human figure. She deliberately works between figuration and abstraction and presents the figure as a fluid structure, capable of encompassing references to multiple identities, ideas and emotions. Fragmentation plays a key part in the construction of these works and multiple references are introduced within a singular work in an attempt to create a structure that contains more than necessarily appears. Kitty’s paintings and drawings act as an experiment into the subtlety of emotion and content that can be conveyed in the space between rigidly defined methods of painting the human form.

Shireen presents a series of paintings called Circle Sorrow exploring the cyclical nature of grief and how it exists, is held, and reworked inside the body. The pixelated shadow forms in the paintings also reference the impact of technology and digital imagery on our perception of existence, bodies which exist on the edges of dream. Shireen often sees the figures which appear in her work as travelling through our current reality, with flesh borders ruptured and reshaped by the intense pressures of existence. Alongside this, Shireen’s drawings operate as a kind of escape from reality, moving through imagined transformations which are inspired by nature. 

Central to the exhibition is a collaborative piece inspired by the exquisite corpse game, where players draw or write on a piece of paper, fold it, and pass it on for the next contribution. The piece consists of a long mixed media work which travelled between London and Margate, with Kitty and Shireen both adding to it over a number of months. The final form is a completely new entity which is unknown and yet somehow familiar.

Both artists’ work hints at violence and discomfort in their unrelenting unscrambling and reworking of the known body. This is also an intervention into preconceived ideas and traditions around the nude body in art history. By confronting concepts of representation and likeness the artists respond to the unsettling nature of being human today.