Unseen

'Unseen' explores narratives from the present and past. 'We navigate and carve space for women’s voices and intersectional issues surrounding the female experience by using our practice of painting, drawing and film as modes of communication.'

Hughes and Kelly both represent the subject through figurative painting, engaging with the history of painting women and exploring further modes of representing women though the female gaze. ‘Unseen’ shines a spotlight, but also celebrates women’s work, both paid and in the home, work which is often devalued and made invisible as part of an exploration into gender inequalities. These themes are explored in Kelly’s work through her focus on painting and hearing the stories of women in the public sector including NHS workers and teachers. While Hughes paintings scrutinize women experience of marriage or domestic partnerships through the semiotics of ‘veiling’ and ideals of beauty.

Kate Kelly

Kelly graduated with her BA from the University of Brighton and Camberwell School of Art, MA in Fine Art Painting. The foundation of Kelly’s work begins with intersectional feminism, collaboration and biographical experiences. The women and people Kelly represent are active, with voice, and given physical space for their narratives. Kelly explores the female experience through visual and audio representation, integrating elements of subjects' identities and notions around labour and work. Using photography and drawing as a prompt to capture staged and natural moments, Kelly’s paintings are about subjective embodiment, featuring a person as an individual instead of an object. Process and materiality are significant, working with egg tempera, watercolour, and oil. Kelly allows the viewer to see the journey of the painting and the movement of the line’s underneath, leaving some areas 'unfinished' while others are more laboured: creating a space for imagining new feminist possibilities to continue.

Jane Hughes

A graduate of Chelsea and Camberwell school of Art. Hughes practice is contemporary cross- disciplinary and narrative-driven. Reimagining lives through the mediums of paint and film Hughes puts women who have been obscured, made invisible by history, back in the frame. Posing questions about representation, the archive and who holds authority over truth. Hughes’ paintings and films have focused on exploring women’s political experience of marriage or domestic partnerships through the semiotics of ‘veiling’. Both bridal ‘Veil’, with its specific ideas of feminine identity of beauty and the role of ‘make-up’ as a veil which women adopt as a tool of female conformity.
Hughes’ practise searches out ways of telling alternative stories that rely on the traces and
fragments of different historical sources, often beginning with a photograph or film to put the spotlight on the histories we are told and to consider where power resides and who has agency.