The Story of the Next Generation - Ruth Borchard Collection Exhibition

Online Viewing Room The Story of the Next Generation

28 May - 30 September 2021

In 2017 my work was collected by The Ruth Borchard Collection. This year, in conjunction with The Ruth Borchard Portrait Prize, recent self-portraits by artists in the Next Generation Collection are presented online; new works alongside work already held in the Collection tracing the shifts and continuities apparent in each individual artist’s practices.

On a Green Day She Wears Her Felt Dress.  90 x 167cm, 2021 rabbit skin glue, gesso, oil paint and oil crayon on canvas

In 2011, the Next Generation Collection was established to continue Ruth Borchard’s project into the twenty-first century. Alongside the Prize, the fundamental tenet of the Next Generation Collection is to bring together diverse artists, rarely traditional portraitists, who briefly, inquisitively, turn their eye upon themselves. Subject and object become one and the same, seeing and being seen elide in a moment of revelation and self-reflection. Artists represented in the collection range from those at the outset of their artistic practice to those with established professional careers. It also holds a multitude of media and includes artists usually known for practices other than painting. As a whole body of work, the Collection traces the trends in contemporary art practices. Dedicated to self-portraiture the Ruth Borchard Collection is a unique body of British and Irish visual art from 1921 to the present day.

RE: A Bermondsey Artists' Group Exhibition

Southwark Park Galleries Lake Gallery, 1 Park Approach Rd SE16 2UA
10 October - 3 November Thurs - Sun, 11am - 5pm (4pm in Nov)

Re marks the 35th anniversary of the Bermondsey Artists’ Group. It celebrates the diversity and progression of practices by the membership and charts creative approaches and evolving processes within this diverse group.

The exhibition brings together work by over 50 local artists. Some of the works go back to the early years of the group’s existence; some are from the artists’ current practice. Each of the works has been selected by the artist to reflect upon their membership of the BAG and how their practice has developed during that period;  reconsidering, reconstructing and reinventing.

Re is generously supported by Arts Council England and Southwark Council.

I will be showing The baby Jesus in a Hazmat Suit and will be taking part in an artist walk and talk for the closing event on November 3rd. This painting became a starting point for a larger scale tryptic reconsidering the scale it was reconstructed to form the first panel the next two panel reinvented the structure of the first to form a coherent narrative.

Laura Hudson The baby Jesus in a Hazmat Suit [92x122cmx2cm] oil on canvas, 2019

The Red Studio After Matisse

Matisse learned to allow his subconscious peripheral vision to dominate the central macular in order to see more and to notice his emotional responses to colour, as inThe Red Studio (1911) .

Henri Matisse, The Red Studio, 1911

Matisse’s The Red Studio was a major inspiration in the transition from my previous body of work, The Nail House Series (2018) to the work I am making now. The Nail House series interrogated photographs circulated on the internet of architectural holdouts, where people refused to make way for new developments. Translating the images into paint was an act of slow archival resistance, an intervention against erasures on digital platforms or city streets. Using a limited palette of just three colours and a restricted scale, the paintings resisted both beauty and stature, they too became “nails that stick out”.    

Laura Hudson The Red Studio After Matisse: Studio Building, West London, 2018

Matisse’s The Red Studio provided a way to think about the interior spaces, not just of the nail houses but of other interior worlds and the ways in which they might be depicted as rooms or psychological spaces. In his essay of 1908, Notes of a Painter, Henri Matisse writes ‘Now that I think I can see further, [rather than be satisfied with the passing colour sensations of a moment] I want to reach that state of condensation of sensations [...] Nowadays I try to put serenity into my pictures (Matisse, 1908)’.

I also want to record a ‘condensation of sensations’, but while Matisse was looking for serenity I am attuned to friction and disruption.

The Red Studio After Matisse, follows the same spatial structure of Matisse’s original, however I replaced the artwork on the walls with my own paintings of nail houses. On the left, where a picture was leaning against the wall in the original, I punched through the wall looking out onto Grenfell Tower, a social housing block that had been clad for visual appeal with substandard materials. When a small fire started in the tower, it spread uncontrollably around the building via the external cladding and caused many deaths. By including the image of Grenfell beyond the window I hoped to allow the reality of life to encroach on the artist’s studio, and suggest that the studio is not an ivory tower, as in Matisse’s world, but part of a wider social context in todays.

I learned a lot of formal lessons by working from Matisse; reverse-lines - In Matisse’s Red Studio the red ground is painted up to the lines that describe forms, flat areas of colour and using peripheral vision to look at space.