Paul Stolper is pleased to announce 'Salon', a group show featuring works by Susannah Baker-Smith, Helen Beard, Lauren Bryden, Sarah Hardacre, Susie Hamilton, Donna McLean, Grace O'Connor and Jemima Stehli. The exhibition spans a period of almost thirty years, focusing on paintings, prints, needlework, and sculptures.
The earliest piece, Jemima Stehli’s 1999 ‘Strip #5, Dealer’, 6 Colour C-type prints, documents the performative nature of her work. Stehli removes her clothes whilst the Dealer, seated and holding the shutter release, determines when each photograph is taken. As Stehli puts it: "It’s the men's self-consciousness that is uncomfortable when you really look at those pictures."
'Who is being exposed here, and who is in control? And who is the photographer – even though I’m the one clicking the shutter?'
Adrian Searle, The Guardian, Mon 15th February 2016
'My interest in images of women is more to do with the language of looking and how powerful that is, which is why it’s never been a for or against, and why I’ve had some problems with the way the ‘Strip’ work has been discussed at times, because it’s not so straightforward. It’s about the power of looking and the power of being looked at.'
Jemima Stehli
In her latest series of sculptures, Sarah Hardacre collages nude imagery from pornographic magazines onto ornate vintage ceramics. Her sculptures address histories of invisible female labour within households, using items affiliated with domesticity.
'What ceramics offer that collage does not, is the object itself: the plate, the vessel, the domestic surface, things made by women, used by women, cleaned by women, and largely unseen. The collage has been its own form of visual research. The ceramics open onto different ground; the wider feminist histories of invisible labour, the 'Wages for Housework' movement, and the domestic interior as a site of unseen work. The medium changes what the work can do. The making itself becomes part of what the work interrogates. The work is also autobiographical: I have worked in chippies and care services, and currently drive HGVs alongside my practice, grafting to sustain the creative life. The new pieces emerging from the studio are born out of the very structures the work investigates.'
Sarah Hardacre
Susie Hamilton's 2026 series of paintings, 'Plumpers', takes its name from a men's magazine of the same title and imagines women in states of ecstasy. "For me the use of mess is an ecstatic method of painting. Just as the ecstatic figure is extended and dissolved in frenzy or delight, this use of mess disrupts, dissolves and overthrows calm and finished images. It suggests liberation and possibility with its joyful riot of defacement".
'Several sources influenced this series: women seen on Berck beach, ‘Plumpers’ in a magazine of that title, Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection, anti-feminist quotes from literature and, lastly, goddesses in mythology. At first my large, single women seemed marooned and abject. However, as I painted more of them they appeared forceful, ecstatic and reminded me of deities like Brigid or Venus. The title ‘Ecstasy’ refers not just to sexual poses but to the kind of painting they inspired. I painted loose expanses of flesh contained by wiry lines and then, in contrast to linear limits, poured veils of diluted acrylic over the boundaries. My ‘ecstatic’ women are ‘going outside themselves’, as in the origin of the word ‘ecstasy’, and the streaming paint destroys contours to suggest liberation and possibility.'
Susie Hamilton
In her new painting and needlework pieces, Helen Beard celebrates erotic experience utilising sinuous brush strokes and wool stitching, inviting intimacy with her pieces, emphasising the importance of "comfort, connection and pleasure".
'I think female pleasure should be celebrated, and it is often ignored or seen as unimportant. I want to express the joy that can be had from knowing your own body, learning to express your desires to a partner, and taking pleasure from something that is a fundamentally part of most humans’ psyche intrinsic to the survival of the species, but also offering comfort, connection and pleasure which are such important aspects that enrich our lives.'
Helen Beard
Susannah Baker-Smith's photographs create tactile and visual dialogues between objects and images. Her new series of works explore what it means "to be naked, free from all conscious factors, confronting fear, beauty, and loss", encouraging viewers "to dive into the fleeting world of the unconscious, a place of flowing reflection".
'Images and layers conceal as much as they reveal … dreams , imagination, and reality are intertwined.. narratives are re-examined, experience relived …creating a space where the viewer too can engage with their own narrative experience. A photograph has the power to take the imagination where it wishes to go, often to that bitter sweet place infused with loss where experience can be lived over in our own way, not as it was but as we wanted it to be, that is not to say what we remember is untrue, rather we remember only what we need, events fall away and the ‘actual’ runs through our fingers. What we are left with is elusive but potent, a touch, a scent, a colour, which fills us with longing.'
Susannah Baker-Smith
'Ways of Dreaming', Lauren Bryden's monoprints, take their inspiration from Scottish folklore, and 'Beira', the Queen of Winter, where figures and the landscape merge and divide. The work explores the enlarging, expanding and opening up of different worlds, confronting this process through the lens of folklore, particularly the mysticism around plants and their association with women healers.
'The works evolved from drawings made during the summer, and as they started to take shape through autumn I took inspiration from Beira, also known as the Queen of Winter, who is said to have created the ragged Scottish mountains and lochs with her magic staff. She rules until springtime when she succumbs as the earth begins to bloom again. The works move between figures devoured by the landscape and those wielding their power through it, but across the series it’s unclear which is dominant, which will prevail; those with power or those devoured'
Lauren Bryden
Donna McLean paints uncanny interior and landscape scenes in subtle tones, creating luminosity in her painting with strong contrasts of darkness and light. In this way, she seeks "to create something appealing that has an unsettling undercurrent that's both seductive and disarming".
'I want polarity and paradox – dark and light, beauty and unease, seduction and aversion.
I’m interested in an aesthetic that isn’t too decorative or easy on the eye so I'm drawn to uneasy imagery I try to imbue with an eerie beauty that simultaneously comforts and disturbs...I hope these tiny acts of transgression help that which is firmly rooted in the representational become less orthodox and nudges them towards something strange, recognised and unfamiliar.'
Donna McLean
'Salon' also brings together a series of the late Grace O'Connor's black and white pencil drawings from 2015. These works delicately intertwine recollections of the American landscape, people, and real life situations, referencing the fictionalisation of memory itself. The works have a surreal atmosphere, with the intention of "taking viewers far away".
