THE RHYTHMS DON'T WALK ALONE: DISCUSSIONS OF POWER AND LOVE
My work looks at human power- what it means, the shapes that power takes and how Love can underpin new understandings of what and who we deem powerful.
This exhibition is a multi-disciplinary gathering of artworks playing with postures of power and its many meanings. The pieces are embodiments of another way of viewing the contemporary Western ideas around what it is to be feminine and therefore masculine, concerned with alternative ways to view ideas of ‘female’ and the spaces and shapes that ‘she’ takes up in the world. They are a move away from contracted and belittling notion of beauty and appearance equalling value and instead present an alternative idea of ‘Woman’, involving an expansive enquiry into representations of shared human qualities such as courage, fear, vulnerability and Love.
Originally born of an active search for alternative figures to inhabit my painted spaces, I developed an immersive grouping of 2d and 3d presences, infused with a deep strength and fierce love. Together they gather as a three-dimensional collage of my life experiences- a container of my history and of that being a female coming of age in the South London of the 80’s and 90’s. As the artist Rob Phillips aka Unett noted in a recent conversation, ‘it seems that the Woman that has emerged is the woman you wanted to be, not what society wanted you to be’.
Through assemblage, painting, collage and drawing and while referencing the aesthetics and systems of Vodou, shamanism, blessing and ritual, my work presents a different form of Power- a space of possibility- that acts as an antidote to our current culture’s shows of strength, that utilise fear, contraction, brute force and suspicion of ‘the other’.
The Rhythms Don’t Walk Alone: Discussion of Power and Love’ presents a way of being and moving through life that is rooted in generosity of spirit, honesty, vulnerability, radical kindness, humour as a tool to connect, fierce love, authenticity, dignity and the adopting of a more creative approach to shared concerns and sticking points. It is a way of freedom, rooted in Love: it is Another Way of Doing Things.
Faye Dobinson 2019
