Class of 2021: Dannielle Hodson
Turps Banana Studio Programme.
“Turps has been amazing, the studio programme creates a really nurturing environment with incredible tutors who are generous and thoughtful but not afraid to give you some honest constructive criticism to push you to the next level. The students on the course are all also very diverse and supportive and it’s been a real honour to have such talented peers. I feel like I now make paintings that are the paintings I want to make not what I think I should make.
“Each work begins with a process of unplanned, almost automatic mark making, during which I’m concerned not with creating imagery, but rather with channelling energy from the world outside the canvas onto its flat, bounded plane. Once enough pigment has been amassed, it starts to suggest motifs, in much the same way as certain clouds seem to mimic the shapes of Earthly objects, or shadows on the lunar surface summon up a ‘man in the moon’. (This subcortical characteristic of visual perception is known as pareidolia, and is intimately connected to the human fight or flight response).
“Aware of the embryonic faces pressing through my paint, I work consciously towards bringing them into full being. This is a process that involves both embellishment and sublimation, creation and destruction, and one that tracks my shifting focus, stimuli and emotional state over the gestation period of a given canvas. The result is a seething mass of pigment, in which the physical boundaries between one monstrous, cartoonish figure and another are destabilised, and any hierarchy between image and abstraction is replaced by a roiling, polymorphous field of paint.”
Instagram @danaedoodles
Degree Show: Turps Studio Programme Leavers Show, 10-24 July 2021, Thames-Side Studios Gallery, Harrington Way, Warspite Rd, London SE18 5NR. www.thames-sidestudios.co.uk/
Images:
1. Dannielle Hodson, Curtain Call, oil on Linen, 150×180 cm, 2020.
2. Dannielle Hodson, Cool Cats and Dirty Dogs, oil on canvas, 130×190 cm, 2021.
3. Dannielle Hodson, A Problem of Domestic Proportion, 150x180cm, 2021.
