Steph Goodger
Circular Paintings © Steph Goodger
I studied at the Kent
Institute of Art and Design from 1990 to 1992, then at the Surrey
Institute from 1992 to 1995. My Master of Arts
Degree in Painting was completed at Brighton University in 1999.
Tell us about your life abroad.
After all that study I went
to live in The Netherlands, basing my studio in Leeuwarden, where I
had friends, from 2000 to 2001. I subsequently
exhibited with Galerie De Roos Van Tudor, the Netherlands, until
2006. I developed a fascination for aqueduct systems, not
surprisingly. It was interesting how water was
controlled there. A piece of water, which was not
transported via an aqueduct, would suddenly stop dead for a road and
start again afterwards. Boats would appear from a
distance to be gliding through the fields. At the same time it made
me yearn for rivers with overgrown banks and old English castles
with crumbling, walls. I loved the order and
formality of the landscape in the Netherlands and at the same time
it made me miss the romance, chaos and character which age and
history bring to buildings and landscapes.
Together with all this I was reading Dante and the combination gave
birth to the Fish Hell series.
Watery Dramas © Steph Goodger
An enjoyment of opposing
forces developed through the Fish Hell series, of the
tension that is built up in order and formality, and a contrasting
release into chaos, has since then been evident within my paintings.
Also, since then, two kinds of image have developed parallel
to each other. One is heavy architectural interiors, reminiscent of
British castles and churches, with a moving watery element or
character of some sort passing through or trapped inside.
The other, conversely, is heavy forms, suspended in a vast
void.
Please tell about your work in France.
In 2004 I moved to the
Bordeaux region of France and created the gallery Salon des
Fables with Julie McDermott and Julian Rowe.
In 2007 Salon des Fables subsequently became the title
of an Association which takes exhibitions to new venues.
We had a great year of experimental exhibitions in our
gallery, doing exactly what we liked with the space.
It was a large stone building in a village called St Emilion,
near Bordeaux. Because it was not in Bordeaux
itself, we had a lot of trouble getting support from the various
local arts organizations or the cultural department of the council.
There were some really helpful, kind people in the Cultural
department, but they could not really offer any practical help.
We received hundreds of visitors through out the summer,
which was great. We had three shows, each
lasting three months: Les
Premières Illuminations, Grand, Mais Petit Aussi
and Le Radeau (The Raft).
Le Radeau was fantastic because we had all
worked extensively on this theme of Gericault’s painting
The Raft of the Medusa, combined with the Official
Enquiry into the shipwreck of the French frigate Medusa,.
I had made of model of the Raft of the Medusa, from a plan
made by a survivor of the ordeal. It is the same
plan that Gericault used to create a model for his famous painting
on the subject. My model was one meter in length
and I suspended it from the ceiling in the gallery, lit from above.
Then I painted a triptych called ‘The Underneath of the Raft’
in the gallery, 250 x 460 cm in dimension. It
really was our play ground and we all felt it had been a great
experience. We are now planning to show together
again in the U.K.
I now work part time at
L’Ecole d’Art Plastique in Libourne, which is a two minute walk from
my studio. The studio is 100m² old disused wine
making chai (cellar), with no natural light, where I can listen to
requiems and make morbid, infernal paintings.
Could you tell more about your art work
and what inspires you?
There are often two kinds of
space in my paintings, to create, as before described, tensions
between opposing forces; The one kind of space is material and
architecturally solid, and the other an ethereal realm with a
fluid quality. The latter is a rather
contradictory substance, rarefied yet thick, sometimes seeming light
like air and then denser than water. It seems to
be generating light, and within it, most importantly, lays the
potential for transformation, as in the Seventeenth Century
definition of the word ether. In contrast,
the heavy, solid structures often have theatrical connotations;
featuring characters and action choreographed around various kinds
of platforms. Beds, altars, monuments, tanks, and
rafts, all serve as stages, creating inner spaces within the
paintings
The ideas of the Renaissance
alchemists inspired The Alchemical Universe of Robert Fludd,
and its counterpart, The Architects of Judgment.
Robert Fludd, a Seventeenth Century English alchemist, created an
elemental universe; all its regions and changes are material. He was
concerned with varying qualities of light, fineness and density of
matter and different kinds of movement. He attempted at length to
describe the quality of ether, and the changing degrees of
rarefaction in the atmospheres of the different levels of heaven.
Basically, how Fludd’s universe operates, as I understand it, is
that matter gets lighter and purer the nearer it is to heaven, and
light, as it descends from heaven, gets denser and less pure, and
that is the fundamental dynamic of the universe. I have tried to
define his descriptions of light, density and movement in The
Alchemical Universe of Robert Fludd.
I am not at all religious;
some people mistakenly think I am because of my interests.
What I love about the alchemists is that they created such
colourful theories, weaving scientific advancements into a
geocentric universe with an inscrutable, biblical godhead; marrying
that which can be observed with that which can only be known through
faith.
What are you currently working on ?
The current works in
progress, The Requiescat and Corpus Mortem
(both 220 x 370 cm) are chimeras, imaginary aquatic beings made up
of appropriated parts of various fish and the whale, to provide the
mammal element. These unnatural monsters,
fabulous leviathans, belong to the same invented family of beings,
yet they are also visually quite opposite. (The
word requiescat, a wish or a prayer for a dead person, relates
of course to requiem, a mass for the repose of the soul of
the dead, both deriving from requies, meaning rest.)
In the paintings, The Requiescat is seen
departing, where as Corpus Mortem is arriving, the insatiable
counterpart with the lean body, stiff like a metal rod, and the
large gaping mouth.
The Requiescat
and Corpus Mortem are imaginary beings which are
denied any precise literary meaning. They exist in their elemental
context with no supporting story. These paintings
have developed in conjunction with a new passion for the Natural
History illustrations of the Nineteenth
Century, especially the work of Charles
Lesueur and Ernst Haeckel. The physicality of the
creatures in my paintings is rendered with a certain rigorous
precision and attention to detail, akin to Natural History
illustrations of specimen creatures. They are
invented creatures, yet rendered as though they were Natural History
specimens under observation. This is intended to
create a sense of authenticity, that they exit somewhere, in their
own world, with a weight of mythology behind them.
There is a sense of belonging to a narrative, even though it
isn’t exactly stated.
It is interesting to note
that Linnaeus, a Natural Historian of the Eighteenth Century,
included the mythical leviathan, The Kraken, as a cephalopod, called
Microcosmus, in his first edition of his, Systema Naturae.
This interplay between science and legend, between what can
be observed and what has been only heard of and apparently seen, is
reminiscent of the alchemists’ interplay between observation and the
visualisations of faith.