Stephe Goodger

Angel Field Festival 2023: Carried on the Wind (Exhibition)

Thursday, 9 March 2023 Time:
Overview

This exhibition takes place in The Cornerstone Gallery (Cornerstone Building, Liverpool Hope University, Creative Campus, 17 Shaw Street, Liverpool L6 1HP) from Thursday 9th March until Thursday 20th April.

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Steph Goodger lives and works between Bordeaux, France, and the UK. She was a prize winner in the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize 2020, having previously exhibited in JMPP 2016 and 2004. She was selected for the Brewers Towner International, in 2022, an exhibition and prize at Towner Eastbourne. In the spring of 2023, she has a solo exhibition at De Queeste Art, Belgium.

Goodger has participated in a variety of prizes and awards, such as The Creekside Open, at APT Gallery, London; The London Group Open, at Cello Factory, and Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, London, and the Grand Prix de l’Institut Bernard Magrez, Bordeaux.

Goodger exhibits widely in the UK and internationally.

The exhibition consists of paintings from two series Goodger completed in 2023, Pearls and Valleys.

Pearls:

During an extensive search through the photographic record of The Somme battlefield, Steph Goodger began actively looking for her Grandfather’s World War One regiment, 

Steph eventually started making collages. Concerned with something that she could never really know and somewhere she could never really go to. These re-configured elements became paintings that depicted somewhere new, floating worlds, which attempt to connect the present to the past.

The title, Pearls, comes from Ariel’s Song in Shakespeare’s, The Tempest. Act I, Scene II:

‘Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Steph Goodger states: "Ariel is a wind spirit, so he is invisible. His job is to lure the shipwrecked survivors into following him through his song, carried on the wind. He is delivering the (false) news of the death of the father. I found there to be something deeply poignant about the magical notion of transformation, a sea-change, of bones to coral and eyes to pearls." 

Valleys:

"The Valley series began with collages made from the photographic record of The Somme, which later inspired large, panoramic oil paintings. Through its numerous re-configurations, the landscape of the Somme is still here, yet it has developed into something other, perhaps outside of time, or encompassing different times and transformations. Within these dreamscapes, the Earth absorbs the trauma of the explosion into itself, then expresses it by breaking up, splitting into angular shards, and forming opaque streams or pools. What is lost and destroyed is reclaimed and reconfigured in different ways within each work."

Ticket Details

Free