Channel
Diane Rogan
From 6th - 16th March 2025
PV Wednesday 5th March 6-9pm
Wed/Thu 2 - 6pm, Fri-Sun 12 - 4pm
From urban landscape beginnings, exploring what I felt as ’Wildspace’, understood as sites of resistance to normative power relationships I encountered as I transverse the city, my then investigation of power relationships within the history of visual culture led me on to a new area of inquiry.
Sometimes mythical, idealised, denigrated, often dangerous, seductive, predominantly pious and passive representations of the female body in the Renaissance and the late Rococo, provoked a desire to disrupt. I introduced opposing imagery of contemporary women protesters, twentieth century cartoon imagery of female heroines, and contemporary feminist film characters alongside an ongoing deep dive into feminist philosophy to expand the area of my research.
This new work shown at Both Gallery emerged from these earlier themes and continues to reference art historical depictions of the female body, specifically in proximity to bodies of water.
A calm watery surface invites us to perhaps experience an internal psychological reverie.The watery world can also be a conduit for transmission, incubation, ripening, metamorphosis, spawning as well as stasis. Sometimes terrifying, traumatic, even life threatening, the watery world contains the disturbing creatures of our dreams, legends and myths.
My interest is in finding channels through the process of painting whereby a recognition of mutuality and dependency can be acknowledged and considered. Fluid watery human bodies together with fluid non human watery bodies, engage with contradiction and complexity, coexist in some way, together.
These recent experimental paintings are continuously becoming, their arrival illusive, like the swell of an earlier storm. I struggle to grasp hold of them as I struggle to grasp hold of myself, constantly slipping, leaking, drifting off, draining and pooling. I wade through deep and shallow waters.
Diane Rogan for Both Gallery 2025
