About
Innerworkings is the first solo exhibition of the work of visual artist Lydia Stonehouse, who’s closely layered sensual paintings visually translate moments of heightened bodily awareness within the everyday, paying attention to the crossover that occurs between the internal ‘abstract’ world and external more ‘literal’ world in these momentary sensory experiences.Darting between abstraction and figuration, these energetic paintings embed identifiable pictorial forms from the outside world such as figures, window frames, landscapes and furniture within luminous veils of colour, pattern and gestural marks. This abstracted language of the un-articulatable and often invisible forces at play such as sound, light, taste, smell and touch dissolve the edges and merge the recognisable forms within these often overlooked scenes. Circling around Stonehouse’s curiosity of the inner workings of things, be that the mind, functions of the body, change in seasons, fundamental forces, or relationship dynamics; this body of work focuses on the interconnectedness of these innerworkings that in any given moment rub-up against each other, transferring their sensory effects to, and through, the present body. The build-up of marks on the surface bring a tactile sensory hum to the work and presents us with an all-seeing, x-ray vision where the body becomes a membrane like transformer between internal and external worlds - receiving, processing and emitting these sensory triggers. Within a process driven approach to painting, Stonehouse works with intuition and elements of chance that appear through physical actions of dragging, wiping, and scrubbing paint on and off the canvas in the studio. Stonehouse draws parallels between this need to be fully present to these accidentals that occur when making the work, and being present to sensory stimuli in daily life as a way of remaining grounded and living a more embodied existence.This slicing through of everyday sensory moments further exposes already intimate scenes of connection between bodies and places depicted, letting the viewer in on the vulnerability that comes with a sense of overwhelm, something that we are all becoming more and more familiar with in the fast paced, burn-out imposing, attention dividing modern world we move through.~Lydia Stonehouse (b. Cambridge, UK) lives and works in Brighton having received her BA in Fine Art Painting from the University of Brighton and is the receiver of the Cass Art X Phoenix Studio Award 2022
