Overview
Flowers Gallery is pleased to present a retrospective of works by Carole Hodgson. The exhibition surveys her versatile material range and the personal visual vocabulary with which she describes the awareness and sensation of nature.
For over 40 years, Hodgson has drawn upon the landscape as the central source of inspiration for her work. Her distinctive vision of the natural world, expressed with precision and clarity in her sculpture and drawings, reflects a finely tuned sensitivity to her surroundings.
Bringing together two and three-dimensional works from 1970-2014, the exhibition includes several of Hodgson's earliest experimentations with polished aluminium, silver-plated copper and plaster from the 1970s; patinated bronze figures from the 1980s; large-scale explorations of lightweight sculptural materials such as cellulose fibre with iron from the 1990s; and a selection of drawings, which she has continued to develop over the entire course of her artistic career.
Hodgson's lexicon of shapes and motifs derives from the preserved memory of her close, active observations and from discoveries during the process of making. Hodgson's 'shape-consciousness' can be traced back to early fascinations with archaeology and the sculpture of ancient Greece and Rome, however it is through the revelations of making that her personal vision has found its true form.
The notion of discovery is central to her work. Her drawings, produced with graphite on paper, are made up from hundreds of individual marks, a process by which Hodgson 'finds' the drawing without a predetermined image in mind. Similarly, her process of casting from negative moulds in her sculptural works allows the form to reveal itself over time, throughout the long gestational period of its construction, and in the small chance details disclosed in the final unwrapping.
Hodgson's work has been described as being "both of the land and of mankind, of its time and timeless." (Joan Bakewell) Seen during this period in our history, when the environment appears to be constantly under threat, whether through expanding development, environmental change, or natural disaster, Hodgson's work offers quiet reflection on our innate and vital connection to the land, what we have discovered and what we might yet reveal.
"We seek the stillness of remote places to soothe our panic at global combust. We find in the deep reaches of rock and ravine a balm to modern anxieties. Hodgson's work both derives from and pays regard to these present sensibilities."
- Joan Bakewell
