Sarah Woodfine |
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Untitled (Branch) II 2015 pencil on roll of Saunders
Waterford paper, steel and perspex 72 x 24 x 24 cm photograph by Peter White |
She has an interdisciplinary practice that is rooted in the process of drawing in its expanded form. Engagement with the material nature of drawing is explored three dimensionally into sculptural form, asking questions about the nature of materiality in relation to perception. At times Woodfine works collaboratively with groups and communities, utilizing drawing as a starting point to interrogate personal narratives, histories and folklore myths through her relationship with these subjects. She is currently working on a commission researching and reinterpreting specific stone works within the Tout Sculpture Quarry Park, Portland Dorset. Woodfine’s work touches both on our mainstream ideas about moral behaviour – what is good, right, desirable and true, and upon repressed or otherwise obscured drives, intentions or beliefs. These “drawing-sculptures” – for they are both these things at one and the same time – operate at a level that is realistic though imaginary, being pictures formed of natural elements distended or distorted so as to assume a fantastic otherness, a striking strangeness that simultaneously seduces and repels. — Peter Suchin |
Curriculum vitae |
Exhibitions at the gallery: Mercurious 2019, We can hardly imagine how much the angels love the truly chaste 2015, VOLTA NY 2015, Enclosure 2014, Glass Cat 2013, So That I may Come Back 2010, Riddle Me 2008, The Drawn Curtain 2006, Staged 2005, Transmogrifications 2005, Great Piece of Turf 2003, In Splendid Isolation 2002, Five Years 2000, Perfume 1998, Works on paper 1997. |
Press |
Text |
SELECTED WORKS |
Just as the fire burns away all dross and rubbish, so the three-fold suffering purges the heart from all impurity |
2019 bronze 60 x 60 x 5cm |
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Untitled (Forest) |
2016 pencil on paper, MDF, perspex 16 x 140 x 15cm |
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This idea of keeping out the wolves, of trying to restrain the uncontainable, is entrenched in our relaying of fairytales. Stories, myths and tales may physically be contained within the bindings of books but their most potent telling is through the mouths of others. They exist in oral histories, with their books remaining as material reference points, words spilling out of the sides. As Angela Carter retells the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood in her short story “The Company of Wolves”, Sarah Woodfine retells, interprets and revises both stories in her work Untitled (Forest), mirroring the mutation that the story undergoes when passed from mouth to mouth. Woodfine plays on the (im)possibilities of containment here, with the forest enclosed within the parameters of the art display. Its perspex box seals its world, allowing viewers visual entry but safeguarding them from the wolves within. Blurring the boundaries between drawing and sculpture, between the three dimensional and the two dimensional, Woodfine creates a stage set on which the viewer can remember the chill of a cracking twig in an uninhabited woodland, of wolfish eyes piercing between your ribs. The sinister nature of the beast is alluded to here but undercut by Woodfine’s characters that straddle both the human and the wolfish, emerging as creatures in drag. In this hybridity, Woodfine both dispels the hierarchy between human and animal and alludes to the human tendency to dress up our violence and mask its primacy. With the neatly cut tops of trees and amputated limbs, (bandaged feet and stumps where hands once were, take centre stage), executed with Woodfine’s sharp monochrome pencil, we could believe that these cuts were clean. But with the red cloaked by the graphite trees and seeping from between the legs of the central wolf, a mother figure perhaps, we see that even the forest cannot camouflage its violence and its loss. We are privy to the underbelly of the forest here and its cannibalistic nature. Woodfine’s forest is a site of the unconscious; a place of transformation but also reparation. The wolves look towards the malevolant figure on the right, anticipating their own transitions through the stages of the moon until they enter the snarl of its madness, limbs intact. - Tess Charnley |
When all the birds are in the sky |
2015 pencil on paper and steel dimensions variable |
photograph by Peter White |
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Untitled (Branch) I |
2015 pencil on roll of Saunders Waterford paper, steel and perspex 72 x 24 x 24 cm |
photograph by Peter White |
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Untitled (Branch) III |
2015 pencil on roll of Saunders Waterford paper, steel and perspex 72 x 24 x 24 cm |
photograph by Peter White |
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Untitled (Branch) IV |
2015 pencil on roll of Saunders Waterford paper, steel and perspex 72 x 24 x 24 cm |
photograph by Peter White |
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Stem |
2015 pencil on roll of Saunders Waterford paper, steel and perspex 90 x 49 x 49 cm |
photograph by Peter White |
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Forever and ever |
2015 pencil on paper and aluminium 32 cm diameter |
photograph by Peter White |
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We can hardly imagine how much the angels love the truly chaste |
2015 pencil on paper, canford card, found object 16 x 12 x 12 cm |
photograph by Peter White |
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How to grow an apple tree |
2014 plant stand, plant pot, pencil on Saunders Waterford paper 150 x 32 x 32 cm |
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I would do anything for love |
2013 steel axe head, pencil on paper, MDF 85 x 48 x 48 cm |
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Recipe for a kiss of shame |
2012 pencil on paper, MDF 120 x 220 x 40 cm |
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Darling Trust Me It's For The Best |
2010 pencil on paper, MDF, Formica, enamel paint, hammer head |
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Crypt |
2010 pencil on paper 30 x 21 x 21 cm |
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