Steph Goodger in de Folkestone Creative Quarter

Carried on the Wind, an exhibition by Steph Goodger of paintings from 2 new series - Pearls and The Crossing. Both are drawn from fragmented memories, stitched together as constructed collages and reimagined as expressive paintings.

Pearls series was born out of an extensive search of the photographic record of The Somme battlefield, where Goodger’s grandfather was wounded by an artillery shell in August of 1916. Through an extensive and ultimately unsuccessful search, looking for her grandfather’s regiment, she amassed a vast visual archive. Goodger initially made collages from the battlefield photographs. These inspired a group of small oil paintings. The title and the idea for oval paintings came from Ariel’s Song in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Act I, Scene II. Ariel, a wind spirit, lured the shipwrecked Ferdinand into following him with his song, carried on the wind. He delivered the (false) news of the death of Ferdinand’s father.

The Crossing series focuses on a meeting place, created as the railway track and the river, both present in Pearls, intersect and the railway track crosses over. The image of a meeting place also originated from TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men 1925. (IV). ..In this last of meeting places.. Gathered on this beach of the tumid river..Goodger says “These paintings continue to offer a window into the landscape of conflict. There is a feeling of the landscape as an ever mutating, shifting body, breaking apart and coming back together again in new configurations. The cross shape repeats itself, like a kind of stitching, holding the surface together, where the surgical cuts of war have been.”

School Gallery
49a The Old High Street
Folkestone CT20 1RN

read more here