| Dates: | 5 September 2013 to 25 September 2013 |
| Times: | N/A |
| Email: | N/A |
My work focuses on the narrative, with references from history and contemporary western society. I look at someone like Breughel and the characters he creates and place them on an inner city housing estate or focus on icons and tales from the past and provide a contemporary interpretation. People are key; the absurd, the tragic, the humour and irony, the pathos. I have been criticised for portraying many of the elements of society that people don’t wish to have on their walls; a fair observation, but after spending over 30 years working with the more disenfranchised in our society (the homeless, those with mental health issues, drug users, ex offenders, the disabled and others) I would find it impossible to create an image of the world around me that didn’t have some reference to my experiences.
That said I am more than the narrative. I love playing with different textures, materials and colours in my paintings and am trying to work at freeing up my mark making, for after all, and many an artist would agree, that to be able to make a statement in one brush stroke or line of a pencil is a goal worth achieving.
David Ridgway
Daniela Flowerdew graduated from Central/St Martin’s in 1989 and has worked since then in images and in words – exhibiting paintings, creating spoken word sound pieces and performing as a ‘stand up poet’. She is an Art & Design Lecturer at East Kent College and is just completing her MA in Fine Art at Canterbury Christ Church University
She creates large paintings concerned with organic forms and the relationship between text and image; writing and drawing; poetry and painting. The work examines the creative response to a place, an event or an idea and the form this response may take, using visual and verbal language to understand, interpret and communicate.
http://www.daniela-flowerdew.co.uk/