Vanessa Baird : If ever there were an end to a story...

8 Jan-28 Feb 2021

Overview

Vanessa Baird: If ever there were an end to a story that had no beginning. Raw, outlandish and utterly individual, Vanessa Baird’s charged works in pastel and watercolour range from room-size murals to intimate self-portraits and draw on a wide range of references from the artist's own lived experiences, as well as Scandinavian folklore. Her extraordinary drawings depict ‘her world’, centred on the house that she grew up in and still inhabits with her three teenage children and elderly mother, for whom she acts as carer. Baird captures the difficult everyday tasks of looking after a family in a kaleidoscope of startling imagery, permeated with exhaustion, boredom, frustration, bodily functions and the chaotic detritus of domestic life. Whilst rooted in the autobiographical, her work equally references wider concerns, from fairy tales and legends, to the international politics of the European refugee crisis and the Oslo bombings of 2011; these all feed into uncompromising images underpinned with a dark, often disturbing humour that is both confidential and confrontational. Vanessa Baird (b. 1963) lives and works in Oslo. This will be the her first solo exhibition in the UK. This exhibition is co-curated by Mary Doyle and Gillian Fox.