Collection: Faye Eleanor Woods

Faye Eleanor Woods sensual paintings act as a love letter to her own experience, full of life’s joy, absurdity, humour, loss and fear. Using raw pigments and acrylic ink she forces rich colour into the grain of the canvas, blurring edges with copious amounts of water or using thin layers of oil to blend the figures with their backgrounds creating an ethereal presence. As Woods says “I try to bring attention to the surreal aspects of life and the way the oddness of experience manifests within individuals and how that manifestation then affects me. In my vulnerability I crave strange moments of intimacy. I imagine drinking straight from the tap of all emotion, drinking so much of it, I take on too much and I’m sick and everything I spew out ends up in my work.”

Inherently influenced by British folklore and folk horror, Woods paintings tell their own tales rooted in corporeal experience which then becomes heightened or exaggerated resulting in a form of magical realism. A spirit of excess runs throughout the scenes that she depicts. Empowered yet vulnerable, the behaviour of paint sensualises her ruby red mouths, flushed cheeks, pert nipples and knees rubbed raw. Dancing, leaping, cavorting figures in various states of consciousness or undress, partake in a bacchanale which defies the hypocrisy of supposed propriety and convention, challenging the stiff upper lip. Eyes shine with ecstatic bewitchment as her animalistic protagonists dance and leap in a debaucherous state which teeters on the fine line edge between calamity and joy. What is conveyed is the relatable oddness that exists between the magical and the mundane.