WIP short TEXT

WIP is conceived as a hopeful, all-encompassing work in progress; integrating recent artworks, the space they inhabit and the presence of the artist herself. It is a new environment that’s at once physical, psychological and metaphysical; Lacan’s model making’ in practice.

WIP (‘whip’) is simultaneously a celebration of the universal forces of vitality, renewal, and its complementary counterpart: mortality.

This is a meditation on the interplay between architectural and psychological space; the ways in which a physical environment can powerfully shape inhabitants’ own inner experiences. To this end, she has staged WIP in her family home - a modernist house in the New Forest where she relocated in 2021. This setting has given Wooller far more space and freedom to work, live and create than her London studio, while also inevitably isolating her from the hyper connectedness of city life. A debilitating back injury added to this seclusion, forcing the artist’s creative life onto a different track. Wooller’s house and studio are enveloped by beauty; forests, rivers, and big skies. Her work, however, resists reflecting only on the serenity of her natural surroundings, searching instead for the invisible forces that give these environments their allure & the interior energies that impact them, depicting metaphysical spaces that are as powerful as they are profound.

At her core, Wooller is very much a three dimensional thinker; even her paintings and drawings offer meditations on visceral human experiences of a room, a landscape, a digital environment, and the invisible forces that influence them. 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; factors which 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. She uses colour sparingly; many of the pieces on display are overwhelmingly white, with all its connotations of death and renewal, clarity and purity, the total absence or fusion of all other colours.

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 empty of settings.

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 ‘fenestrations’ (an architectural term to describe the arrangement of windows and doors on the elevation of a building) as visual devices to frame a shift in the viewers’ perspective. Wooller’s series of sculptures are intimately connected to her desire to explore the intensely personal alongside universally understood human experiences. Her three dimensional works expand upon the visual language she has been building for years, while also reflecting all the joys and pitfalls inherent in a new, more secluded living and working environment. Isolation has been instrumental in Wooller’s new smaller pieces which, continuing her deep interest in invisible forces that shape our lives, explores our increasing dependence on screens as theatres to play out relationships, as windows into the wider world. Wooller suggests that digital devices have become another filter through which we perceive reality, a kind of seventh sense. In turn, these perceptions influence how we focus on, process, remember, interpret, understand, synthesise and act on reality. Akin to physical connection, these screens now have the power to influence the very frameworks of our relationships: our sense of acceptance, rejection, possibilities and probabilities; shaping our expectations and thus our interior landscape. Figures and movements from art history also provide a constant conceptual undercurrent, from European Expressionists to the pre-surrealist Giorgio de Chirico and the art world’s preeminent self-mythlogiser, Joseph Beuys. Wooller’s practice talks to a life lived between spaces, to a personal history that forms the foundations of her own ‘interior architecture’ alongside intense moments of joy with the colours of the forest, sky and water, in parallel with the healing love of a young family.

Ita Maude Wooller trained for her BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins & her MFA in Interior Architecture at the Royal College of Art. She currently works between London & Beaulieu, Hampshire.