Creature (dis)comforts

About

The uncomfortable closeness, or uncanny quality of being 'too close' for comfort is a key idea throughout the work presented.  An international group of artist, including both established and emerging artists, will exhibit their own worlds of creatures highlighting the key piece of the exhibition by Paula Rego.​

Paula Rego

Paula Rego is not stranger to working with discomforting ideas in her artworks as can be seen in her print “The Unicorn Artist”. 

Originally from Lisbon, much of Paula Rego’s work refers to her childhood memories and Portuguese roots. Rego has consistently used paint and printmaking techniques, as well as collage, but drawing has always been the foundation of her practice. She pursued a process of experimentation, trying all the various forms of lithography, from stone to zinc and aluminum plate; sometimes combining the processes together.

Tina Crawford

Tina Crawford, aka Tina Tobyboo, uses the sewing machine as her main artistic medium. Her powerful and fantastical images reveal the potentiality of the supposedly humble technique, when placed in the hands of an insightful and informed artist. Tina uses a wide range of materials, from the more traditional textiles to paper or even food packaging.

John Tedstone 

John Tedstone creates paintings that imply a world of escapism, suggesting a form of flight from the modern world; the images, simultaneously suggestive of both the comic and the tragic are submerged between bathos myth & nostalgia. This work although not focused upon any particular social, cultural or political commentary, nevertheless opens up to reoccurring themes of loneliness and isolation.

Tilla Crowne

Tilla Crowne primarily works with living material, especially growing plants, insects and fungus. Contained within artificially created environments, the work retains an air of experimentation, of the research laboratory, of museum display. Crowne works with images from places she lived as a child, empty rooms and dead sets that in the artist’s eyes are carriers of memory and events. Her aim is to arouse intense curiosity rather than to shock, please or disgust.

Kaya Tokuhisa

Kaya Tokuhisa mostly paints in the style of classical realism and prefers to work from life whenever possible as it is the only way that enables judging subtle shifts in light and colour. After the rough sketch is transferred to the canvas, her painting method is mostly direct, with some glazing in the finishing stages. Studying the techniques of old and new masters, Kaya is implementing the knowledge into an evolving personal method.

Rosina Godwin

Inspired by recent political events, Rosina Godwin’s artworks examine the pressure from society to conform to a standard role and beauty ideal. The work subverts the nurturing associations of textiles to challenge the traditional hierarchy of the arts, by a medium associated with women’s work, and consequently considered craft, or low art. In her current work, Rosina Godwin takes inspiration from the unconscious mind and Sigmund Freud’s and Carl Jung’s research into our early psychosexual development.