Hannah Woodman, Spring field flowers, early
May 2007
Hannah Woodman, Winter red, Trevellas
Coombe 2007
28 July – 29 August 2007
The Victoria Art
Gallery is delighted to host Hannah Woodman’s fourth one-woman
exhibition, following on from three sell-out shows in London and
Truro. The Bath show is her first in a public gallery and the only
exhibition she is staging this year.
Woodman’s Cornish landscapes and seascapes occupy that
borderline territory between realism and abstraction. She is very
much an individualist, and has formed an intimate association with
the wild Cornish coastline between Gwithian and St Agnes.
A consummate craftswoman, Woodman creates richly textured
surfaces that repay close scrutiny: “I enjoy the process of working
in layers, building up a density of marks both deliberate &
spontaneous, constantly agitating the surface of the picture –
scraping, scratching, splattering, palette knife work etc. Some of
my best pictures were created out of a furious exasperation with
not being able to get the results I was after. There is obviously
an energy in anger that reproduces well on the surface.”
Woodman is particularly drawn to the more bleak areas, where the
human presence is more restrained. She would like people to feel
that quiet solitude when they look at her paintings and put
themselves there just for a moment.