Steph Goodger
Carried on the Wind
13 July to 8 October 2023
Ariel's Song.
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.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
REFRAIN. Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.
From Shakespeare’s, The Tempest, Act I, Scene II.
School Gallery is pleased to present Carried on the Wind, an exhibition by Steph Goodger of paintings from 2 new series - Pearls and The Crossing. Both are drawn from fragmented memories, stitched together as constructed collages and reimagined as expressive paintings. This is School Gallery’s inaugural exhibition in its new permanent premises in Folkestone, Kent.
Pearls series was born out of an extensive search of the photographic record of The Somme battlefield, where Goodger’s grandfather was wounded by an artillery shell in August of 1916. Through an extensive and ultimately unsuccessful search, looking for her grandfather’s regiment, she amassed a vast visual archive.
Goodger initially made collages from the battlefield photographs. These inspired a group of small oil paintings. The title and the idea for oval paintings came from Ariel’s Song in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Act I, Scene II. Ariel, a wind spirit, lured the shipwrecked Ferdinand into following him with his song, carried on the wind. He delivered the (false) news of the death of Ferdinand’s father.
The Crossing series focuses on a meeting place, created as the railway track and the river, both present in Pearls, intersect and the railway track crosses over. The image of a meeting place also originated from TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men 1925. (IV). ..In this last of meeting places.. Gathered on this beach of the tumid river..
Goodger says “These paintings continue to offer a window into the landscape of conflict. There is a feeling of the landscape as an ever mutating, shifting body, breaking apart and coming back together again in new configurations. The cross shape repeats itself, like a kind of stitching, holding the surface together, where the surgical cuts of war have been.”
Steph Goodger lives and works in Bordeaux, France. She was a prize winner in the John Moores Painting Prize 2020, having previously exhibited in John Moores Painting Prize in 2016 and 2004. She was selected for the Brewers Towner International, in 2022, an exhibition and prize at Towner Eastbourne. In 2023, she had a solo exhibition, Lusitania, with De Queeste Art, Belgium, and showed, Carried on the Wind, at Cornerstone Gallery, Liverpool Hope University.
Goodger holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from the University for the Creative Arts, Surrey (1995) and an MA from Brighton University (1999).