FG WORCESTER
FG WORCESTER - BIOGRAPHY
FG Worcester lives and works in London and France. She comes from a family of writers and artists and has solo and other exhibitions regularly.
Her work, individual in style and characterised by intense, suffused colour, sits within no distinct category and arises from ideas, beliefs, emotions and tribal memory.
She is creating a body of work that draws on philosophy, poetry, music, religion and literature. She has exhibited widely, most recently at Charles Beddington, London and Santorini Biennale.
For FG Worcester the work is less of a process of recording the world directly observed around her, than a philosophical and poetic exercise as a means of decoding the visual information she receives. These instinctive glimpses represent an interpretation of reality or myth in multiple, conflicting spatial configurations.
She is interested in the concept of hidden remembrance and the subconscious recall of past history and experience, embodying this in her work. The process of removing a person, or object, from the comfort of familiarity into an unknown world where anything can happen, she calls “displacerisation”. And in this work she examines the complexity of myth and fable, fluidly intersecting figments of the imagination with the real, both as a statement and an interrogation.
Within this framework are her own personal reflections on the volatility of normalcy, the insecure definition within human identity and the indivisibility of the past in contemporary life. She questions the temporary solidity in belonging and, conversely, the resilience that is formed in dispossession.
Her own immediate family history covers turbulent times, diaspora, communism and war. Her mother was one of two family survivors from the Holocaust. Her father came from China where his parents were artists and she herself has travelled extensively in the same remote areas of China.
The constant threads through this work are meditative, dream-like sequences in intensely suffused colour, accomplished both with controlled brush-work and raw, gestural strokes of paint. The images are spontaneously created on heavily sanded and layered gesso without the aid of preliminary plans or sketches, yet with respect to formal precedents. The layered lines are sometimes scratched from the surface only to appear organically from the depth of paint layers, and every painting documents an expedition into an imaginary world. There are tempestuous sea-storms, undulating mountains, imagined constellations completed in fastidious detail and continually dissolving and reconfiguring waves of movement in chromatic jumps of mood and theme.
Believing art forms to be harmoniously connected, she experiments in conjunction with a composer who creates compelling and complex original music for the pieces. She poses the question, what is it in ourselves that can link the disparity between mediums... the frozen image imposed onto wood or canvas in contrast to the fleeting notes of sound.
She travels widely across the world, inspired by different cultures and fragments of awareness. In her work she draws on her experience of her own recovery from cancer and reconstructive surgery, to question the physicality in female identity and human sexuality. As a result of this, the figures within the landscapes in her work assume a variety of paradigmatic guises, precariously balanced in their surroundings, as if searching for their place in the universe.