Another Kind of Life

Four You Gallery and London based artist Dannielle Hodson invite us to experience ‘Another kind of Life,’ an exhibition of oil paintings. Grounded by the humble medium of paint, these works “involve(s) both embellishment and sublimation, creation and destruction” and track the artists “shifting focus, stimuli and emotional state over the gestation period of a given canvas.” The works do in fact grow and change, pregnant with the fluidity of life and emotion. They allow the contents of their own, unique worlds to be free and undefined.

Her figures, those that you can comprehend that is, appear faceless or imprudently grinning: ghosts of previous full-bodied forms. Such characters are symbolic of the susceptibility of humans, we can be pushed and moulded to become something entirely other. This is exactly how Hodson paints, building and collapsing space, finding and folding hierarchies. She uses mark-making to reveal and lose in conjunction.

Notions of human desire appear in the paintings. Dannielle Hodson succumbs to the inevitability of her works being biased, and completely shaped by her experience of being human. She often thinks about what we want as people, and why we want certain things. What motivates us? Hodson believes that the internet has fed a generation of heretics, conspiracy theorists and dogmatists. The result is polarisation, peers adhere exactingly to one fiction or another. Hodson believes in and illustrates a reality in which all beings co-exist somewhere in the middle.

Punctuating Hodson’s chaotic and carnivalesque amalgams are moments of startling clarity. Yet her audience must be willing to work for these revelations and use their imagination, particularly in those more intricate. The artist ultimately hopes that people come to the paintings and enjoy moving around the worlds contained within the canvas’ arena.