Ita Maude Wooller
Trained in sculpture at Central St Martins and in interior architecture at the RCA, Ita Maude Wooller has focused on the principles of three dimensional application for many years & has recently established a painting practice that translates her 3D thinking into two dimensions alongside her experimental sculpture & site specific installation.
Ita Maude Wooller has spent her life occupied with the complex forces that shape our experience of the spaces we inhabit, their impact on our perspective & how our internal landscape dictates our external reality. This very individual HUMAN experience.
These disciplines are essentially integrated. Whether she is creating a physical, conceptual or two-dimensionally depicted space, Maude Wooller strives to highlight the unseen forces; energy transfer, movement, time, matter, intentions, our own psychological state; these factors have an impact on how we relate to objects in the visual realm, as well as how we interact with and project ourselves into a physical space. Ita Maude Wooller is a Quaker, afflicted with anxiety, captivated by physics, physically limited due to her back injury & an eternal believer in love & optimism. With a deep interest in the subconscious & psychological she also contemplates the limits of human perception of space and time at the most fundamental levels; atoms, for example, which constitute everything we perceive but are mostly empty space.
Nothingness is never nothingness, as Maude Wooller wants to remind us; there are always forces at work, even in the most seemingly static of objects and settings.
In fact, Maude Wooller’s artistic process is as closely related to sculpture as painting. When creating a piece, she diligently builds multiple layers before concealing or obfuscating them, removing them, searching for a form. Each material brings its own properties, symbolism and historical connotations; some literal, some figurative.
Creating predominantly large-scale pieces, she envisages her paintings as rooms or vistas, conceiving them as invitations to fully inhabit each of their interior moments. She uses fenestration as visual devices to frame a shift in the viewers perspective. Working layer upon layer, treating her canvas as a palimpsest, Maude Wooller employs materials such as pencil, traditional oils, inks, plaster, marble dust, acrylics and emulsion house paints to create abstract compositions that vibrate with the energy of their own conception.
Ita Maude Wooller uses layers of various whites for their implications of spirituality and clarity, but mainly to emphasise the contradiction of human’s grasp on reality. White is not a colour, but a result of the simultaneous co-existence of all the frequencies of light within the visible spectrum. Other pieces are intense meditations on the colour blue; considering precisely why it evokes such strength of feeling as well as its art historical resonance. For example, blue sky only appears that way to us because it scatters through the atmosphere more broadly than other colours, while bodies of water filter out all the other colours in the spectrum, leaving only the blue for our eyes to take in.
Recent works have seen Maude Wooller further cultivate her interest in the power of myth making and ancient storytelling, referencing characters from classical & Gaelic mythology in unexpected landscapes. Her paintings seek to harness these stories ability to communicate one person inner experience through signs and symbols that can be universally understood. Maude Wooller is attempting to charge each canvas with the meaning and momentary psychological energy of an individual space, relying on her knowledge of the history of mark making to help her canvases commune with the viewer.
Using the traditionally male-dominated visual language of Abstract Expressionism with influences from Giorgio de Chirico and Joseph Beuys, Ita Maude Wooller is driven by the varied attributes of her anxiety disorder & the human desire for peace, Maude Wooller paints metaphysical spaces that are as powerful as they are profound.