The imagery that lives and fully inhabits the painted world of Rosalind Faram is a close-knit community of characters and associates that exist due to, but also in opposition to the world that surrounds them. Their intensity of colour and energy, a way of kicking back at the COVID realities that have accompanied their painting into existence.
‘No More Stuck Inside’ alludes to the courage to truly attempt to live fully, even if it is via the handling of a brush and the wonders that can transpire via the considered application of it. The overt sexuality and otherworldliness that we see, acting as a respite and temporary solution to the masked segregation that we are surrounded by physically and mentally, the creative act, a perfect tool to remain truly alive and responsive to what our imaginations can conjure up and piece together.
Rosalind’s paintings are potent and demanding of the viewer, pulling them in closer so that the enquiring eyes deeply see each addition that builds and surely assembles, the longer you are in the company of each otherworldly manifestation.
The confidence that Rosalind shows in allowing a truly potent and no holds barred expression to be first thought, then slowly and surely manipulated with pigment, gives me hope for the spirit of rebelliousness, honesty and sheer driven confidence in contemporary painting.
Her vivid universe is a space and place that refuses the rules of reality, that truly believes that more and more can be slotted and slid in, until it all explodes out to our receptive gaze. The joyful challenge to take it all in, to become part of the energized scene, a vindication of the power and presence that can be conjured when an enquiring mind discovers an escape and sanitiser for the hard facts of today’s turbulent world.
Enzo Marra 2022
Rosalind Faram is a prizewinning multidisciplinary artist based in the UK. Her work blurs the distinction between the artist and the object of focus, creating heterotopias in which otherness commands identification. Working from the vulnerability of hidden disabilities and biographical trauma, the rupture between public and the private Self is examined using fictional and semi-autobiographical narratives. She employs painting and drawing, photographs and video, poetry, writing, monologues and performed scenarios to demand entitlement, question relationships and challenge female invisibility. She opposes the traditional patriarchal art-culture model by facilitating an expansive, fluid mode of creating; a partitive non-hierarchical aesthetic, embracing alterity.
Faram’s dynamic paintings are informed by wide-ranging research into visual culture. The work is led by a passion for ways of enquiry into painterly representation, conjuring tableaux that seduce and repel in turns, deconstructing her subjects, playing with surface, and creating spaces of uncertain dimensions. Seeing painting as a transition from an activity of mind into the bodily arena, she challenges the status quo with a dark acerbic wit and irreverent humour; delighting in meticulous detail and delicate layering which exists quietly amidst large, loud energy-led areas of rich colour and an almost pre-school simplicity of stuck-on fake jewels, metal foil, glitter, and buttons – resulting in an exuberant and sophisticated power-play across the picture plane. Taking informed risks, Faram confronts patriarchal art history with a playful confidence, reveling in the absurd, the beautiful, the banal and the menacing with the indefatigable curiosity and defiance of a truly contemporary feminist artist.