FELICITY WARBRICK

TWO DRAWINGS NOW ON SHOW AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY SUMMER SHOW 2024

SOLO SHOW OF NEW WORK AT THE WOOLWICH CONTEMPORARY PRINT FAIR AUTUMN 2023 AS CONTEMPORARAY PRINTMAKING PRIZE WINNER

Felicity’s latest body of work presents a down-to-earth, pared-back world in which the primitive and the handmade take centre-stage. Many of the objects and scenes she finds to draw – some sourced online, others from favourite books or found photos – relate to a particular culture or time that tell of a more resourceful and less commodified way of life. There is wisdom in the know-how and self-reliance of past generations and in living in reciprocity with nature, or so she seems to be saying.
    Her images strike directly at what it is to be human, stirring in us an instinctual kinship. In this age of complexity in which we find ourselves they help to anchor us and return us to our analogue selves and imaginations, reminding us of the importance not only of using our hands but what is to hand, and of living in cycle with the seasons. A shelter of branches, a head-dress of feathers, a shawl from salvaged scraps of wool: these all speak to us because at base we are all makers in search of a more constant world. They serve as totems, reminding us that another way of living out our lives is possible.
    In a departure from previous work, Felicity makes a woodcut of a quote from an anti-clerical tract by John Milton, which appears hand-painted like some 17th-century activist’s placard or a seditious motto on a tavern wall. She includes it here because, just like the objects she selects, it is able to transcend its historical context and time (which was similarly one of political upheaval), and hold up a mirror to our own time.
    But, as the inclusion of Milton’s words infers, there is also a darker thread here – that of human hubris and our attempts to control and subjugate, both nature and one another. The outsize print (another woodcut) of the Yamaki pine preserves the miraculous story of the 400-year-old bonsai tree that somehow survived the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima. The art of bonsai has its roots in an ancient Chinese horticultural practice which played on the idea that the further a reproduction was in size from the original, the more potent and magical it was. Felicity works with that here, making the bonsai tree deliberately larger-than-life, a testament to a people's remarkable resilience in the face of one of humanity’s most devastating acts of war ever. 
    How we live matters, as does what we choose to remember.

interview about my work in Pressing matters magazine issue 22 Spring 2023