SARAH LEDERMAN presents her Work-in-Progress at the Centre for Recent Drawing in London, as part of the Residents Artist Programme. Lederman’s paintings and drawings hone in upon the awkwardness and discomfort of adolescence and the conflicting states of innocence and sexual awareness. Delicately layered pencil and paint lends a delicate fragility to the subjects depicted.
Where: Centre for Recent Drawing, Islington, London.
When: 10-14 March, 2010 (12-6pm from Wednesday to Friday)
http://www.c4rd.org.uk/C4RD/Current_Exhibition.html
Lederman is strongly influenced by her childhood and adolescent fantasies; fairytales, castles and the loss of innocence. Fascinated by the ambiguity between our fantasies and our real desires, she tries to capture rare moments where the innocence and awareness of sexuality overlap. The stance of the girls in the works is often awkward, evoking teenagers’ discomfort in their skin, when the pubescent physical growth surpasses the mental growth, a grown up body with the mannerisms of a child.
The paintings are self portraits which begin with observational drawing, using a mirror, directly onto the canvas. The paint sometimes responds to the pencil and sometimes resists the pencil description of the body. The pencil marks are often left to shine through the paint. Sometimes the drawing and the paint are rigid and descriptive and other times it becomes abstract and fragile. For Lederman, the delicacy of paint reflects the frailness of the female; the paleness of skin suggests virginal purity.
“For me paint is a way of building up cells and filth to create a skin like surface. I see the skin as a container of the body and soul. The dripping in the paint allows the boundaries of skin to become uncontainable. The paint is no longer held by the boundary of line, so the bodies are no longer contained. The messiness of the paint allows a sensation of body fluids. The essence of femininity exists in the fluid, women bleed and seep out”.
says Lederman.
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