Lot 205 - Faye Eleanor Woods - Lady I

Acrylic on paper
2024
A6 (10x15cm)
Original Artwork
Signed on Verso
Curated by Art on a Postcard

About
Faye Eleanor Woods' sensual paintings act as a love letter to her own experience, full of life’s joy, absurdity, humour, loss, and fear. Using raw pigments and acrylic ink, she forces rich colour into the grain of the canvas, blurring edges with copious amounts of water or using thin layers of oil to blend the figures with their backgrounds, creating an ethereal presence. As Woods says, “I try to bring attention to the surreal aspects of life and the way the oddness of experience manifests within individuals and how that manifestation then affects me. In my vulnerability, I crave strange moments of intimacy. I imagine drinking straight from the tap of all emotion, drinking so much of it, I take on too much and I’m sick and everything I spew out ends up in my work.”

Inherently influenced by British folklore and folk horror, Woods' paintings tell their own tales rooted in corporeal experience which then becomes heightened or exaggerated, resulting in a form of magical realism. A spirit of excess runs throughout the scenes that she depicts. Empowered yet vulnerable, the behaviour of paint sensualises her ruby red mouths, flushed cheeks, pert nipples, and knees rubbed raw. Dancing, leaping, cavorting figures in various states of consciousness or undress partake in a bacchanale that defies the hypocrisy of supposed propriety and convention, challenging the stiff upper lip. Eyes shine with ecstatic bewitchment as her animalistic protagonists dance and leap in a debaucherous state which teeters on the fine line edge between calamity and joy. What is conveyed is the relatable oddness that exists between the magical and the mundane.

Education
2017 - 2021
Painting and Drawing BA Hons

Solo Exhibitions
2023
The Grass Are Green, The Flowers Is Brown and Crimson, Anima Mundi, Cornwall, UK

Group Exhibitions
2024
My Soul Hurts and I Think I Have Tinnitus, Calcio Gallery, London, UK
198th RSA Annual Exhibition, Edinburgh, UK
VESSELS, OHSH, London, UK

2023
Ostara, Anima Mundi, Cornwall, UK
New Contemporaries, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, UK
Blue Shop Cottage WOP 5, London, UK
Intersections, Black White Gallery, London, UK
Bodies, Gluttony and Me, Pictorum Gallery, London, UK
Neo Gothic, OHSH, London, UK

Awards
2021
New Contemporaries RSA
Gray’s School of Art Purchase Prize

2024
RSA Latimer Award

Statement about AOAP Submitted Artwork
All four of these works are monoprints made with acrylic. I have been exploring accidental mark-making with my smaller works, and I feel like this experiment captured them perfectly!