Using and twisting medievaleque religious imagery, I hope to laugh at our lives and point to ways that we can value ourselves – despite all the contradictions – and survive.
![a painting with 4 figures, one being burnt at the stake the others looking after eachother](https://www.delphahudsonartist.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/the-adoration-of-self-sacrifice_2020-300x221.jpg)
The Adoration of Self-Sacrifice, 70x50x4cm bitumen and oil paint on canvas
![a colourful painting with 2 figures in the foeground struggling or embracing](https://www.delphahudsonartist.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/a-much-needed-perspective-on-anxiety_70x50cm_2020-300x221.jpg)
A Much Needed Perspective on Anxiety, 70x50xm, oil and bitumen paint on canvas (sanded gesso technique)
I am interested in the ways that the body can evoke shared lived experience. I make art to create new ways of thinking about identity and change cultural narratives that confine and silence women. My obsession with the construction of self, is rooted in my experiences as a woman and mother, escaping a claustrophobic religious upbringing. My work preserves and destroys, hides and reveals, fragments and re-builds to explore questions of value and how to be a woman and be visible and present. Have a look a work for sale.
![painting of a large baby and a monster and lots of small figures rushing around](https://www.delphahudsonartist.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/and-call-the-monster-love-300x223.jpg)
And Call the Monster Love (Shelley), 70x50cm, oil and bitumen paint on canvas (sanded gesso technique)
I often draw on religious and historical iconography in painting, to conjure figures and scenes that are at once joyous and macabre. Multiple figures mix in unsettling ways in colourfully abstracted domestic settings. Painting is a meditation on Subjectivity and multiplicity that uses material metaphor in the use of viscous bitumen.
Shifting between sensual, emotional and aesthetic references, layers of paint create a scar tissue of texture that intimate the body and continuous healing processes; compositions multiply the female body and twist cultural plots which contain and restrain women. I want to create conversations about women as Subjects-in-Process; never complete, formed and re-formed continually in play.
![a painting of 3 small figures hitting pots and pans as a political act](https://www.delphahudsonartist.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/lets-play-pots-and-pans_33x24cm-300x175.jpg)
Let’s Play Pots and Pans, 35x25x5cm, recycled board, bitumen and oil paint (sanded gesso technique)
![](https://www.delphahudsonartist.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/you-remain-in-dreams_30x30cm-150x150.jpg)
You remain in dreams, I imagine you there and then you are gone, 30x30cm, bitumen and mixed media
Women’s lives are split between so many things that make representing their lived everyday reality ambivalent and problematic. Women’s lives are challenged not only by inequalities but impossible choices – split between the self and Other’s lives.
New paintings continue to use historical painting references to reference and make fun of serious political and social issues for women. Contact me for more information about painting.