Vanessa Garwood
Present Tense
27 January – 28 April 2024
Somerset
About the Artist
Vanessa Garwood’s art first focused on portraiture, developing a language of oil painting through both commissioned work and her own subjects. These themes ranged from narrative storytelling, male nudes and dancers, as well as performance collaboration with choreographers.
In 2020, her practice shifted to include acrylics and ceramics, working in these new mediums to build a world where more personal themes could be explored. These paintings are fragments of the artists memories and imagination, lost between good and bad, light and dark, part nightmare part satire.
Garwood uses humor to express the despair and compassion that she feels for the light and dark all around us. They take an unapologetic empathetic look at what it feels like for a woman to grow up in London. Stripping back to use only black and white helped her to access a more instinctive and emotional language of painting.
Garwood‘s selected group exhibitions include: ‘Poison,’ OHSH Projects, London, UK (2023), ‘Small is beautiful,’ Flowers Gallery, London, UK (2022), ‘Small is beautiful,’ Flowers Gallery, London, UK (2021); and ‘BP award,’ National Portrait Gallery, London, UK (2020).
