From the Inside Out is a group exhibition of four female artists, Emma Talbot, Nilbar Güreş, Marie Jacotey and Athena Papadopoulos. Who utilise expanded forms of drawing to navigate a passage from personal experience to the outside world. Featuring new works by all four artists, the exhibition explores the capacity of drawing to convey the complexity and diversity of female experience.
These artists utilise the immediacy and directness of the drawn line to document experience, lived or imagined, giving form to memories and private thoughts. Taking inspiration from literature, popular culture and folklore, the artists use drawing to tell stories about age, sexuality, gender and politics. The works incorporate assemblage and collage, testing the boundaries of drawing as it moves into three dimensions. Traditional craft techniques, such as embroidery and quilting, are employed as a conceptual strategy with which to explore the construction of female identity. Exploring states of being, both interior and exterior, the artists tell stories that are as personal as they are universal.
Telling stories of the invisible and inaudible, Nilbar Güreş places everyday life realities in theatrical settings. Her works discuss ideas of gender, sexuality, race, class and the systems that sustain oppression and control. Employing a diverse range of media such as drawing, embroidery and appliqué, her works are imbued with a poetic and humorous inventiveness as well as a critical and political underside.
Working across media and scale, Marie Jacotey is inspired by social interactions and the stories of friends, strangers, literature and popular culture. She portrays these contemporary relationships and conversations in drawings interspersed with text in a comic-strip form, drawing functioning as a means to tell highly personal and self-reflective stories.
Also drawing on pop cultural, literary and autobiographical references, Athena Papadopoulos uses a wide range of materials (including cosmetic products and animal matter) and in her structural and collage works. Combining these with found text and image, she weaves herself as subject into a narrative thread that explores issues around contemporary gender politics and social relationships.
Emma Talbot's work explores an interior psychological space. Using a highly stylised figure motif to describe the self, she articulates internal personal narratives as visual thoughts of her own experience, her memories and psychological projections. Her drawings, made in watercolour, pencil and ink on paper or silk, often incorporate her own writing and other sources that describe her sense of the world.
