FAYE ELEANOR WOODS
THE GRASS ARE GREEN, THE FLOWERS IS BROWN AND CRIMSON

Inherently influenced by British folklore and folk horror, Wood’s paintings tell their own tales rooted in corporeal experience which then becomes heightened or exaggerated resulting in a form of magical realism. A spirit of excess runs throughout the scenes that she depicts. Empowered yet vulnerable, the behaviour of paint sensualises her ruby red mouths, flushed cheeks, pert nipples and knees rubbed raw. Dancing, leaping, cavorting figures in various states of consciousness or undress, partake in a bacchanale which defies the hypocrisy of supposed propriety and convention, challenging the stiff upper lip. Eyes shine with ecstatic bewitchment as her animalistic protagonists dance and leap in a debaucherous state which teeters on the fine line edge between calamity and joy. What is conveyed is the relatable oddness that exists between the magical and the mundane. I am reminded of folk horror writer Arthur Machan who once said “Strangeness which is the essence of beauty is the essence of truth, and the essence of the world."

A lot of the works depict a state of ritualistic intoxication, where the prosaic setting of the pub or club acts as a tangible stage for otherly experience. These are places within our society which exist seemingly independently from the outside realm of the humdrum or everyday. They can be wild places where one can get ‘out of their heads’, where what occurs within the walls appears unburdened by the expectations of buttoned up convention. Wood’s states “I often thinks of visiting a ‘local’ in a small town on holiday and how much I like the judgement of the townspeople, the odd traditions, the sense of the history of the place baked into the carpets along with the spilt ales. For the wild and lost it is a place of sanctity, taking on a role once fulfilled in Britain by the church”.

Woods obsession with ritual may stem from long cold church masses spent with her Catholic Grandma as a child, but she was also raised by Pagan parents who she says “spent many sleepless nights still or in motion around bonfires.” This interesting dichotomy has ultimately led to an anxious attachment to the dramatics of worship and the otherworldly. Woods jokes that “It helped that the blood of Christ was often cheap brandy, something which has always had a very visceral appeal!”

These works also depict the natural landscape, away from the civised gaze of society, where field or forest becomes stage for further abandon. Trees twist and flora takes on a sense of sentience. She states her “attempt to recreate the feeling of being both lost and yet found in the wild. It is as though those that can thrive in the wild can become embedded”. These landscapes feel both simultaneously mystical and terrestrial, portraying the unnerving psychogeography of rural Britain.

I hope that these works challenge you by lifting a guarded veil and presenting the messy pleasure and pain of living. For wood’s this exhibition of paintings is a tangilble form of inner catharsis. I am reminded of Charles Bukowsi who once wrote “Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”


Joseph Clarke, 2023