The exhibition is a dance through the instinctive and subconscious world of womanhood, exquisitely traversing the realms of matriarchal storytelling and unapologetic contemporary depictions of the female experience today.
Please join us for the opening night of the exhibition, Thursday, 18th September, from 6:30pm to 8:30pm. All welcome, RSVP essential at [email protected].
Garwood trained as a classical painter in Florence and as a dancer. Both are evident in this exhibition. Delicate layers of coloured oil are outlined by fresco-like hands and feet, unmistakably rooted in the painting of the Italian Renaissance, however, in Garwood’s world these outlines serve to embody very real and very modern women in the throngs of life. They beat and breathe, grab, thrust, pick and slap, delineated by neon strokes of oil and supported by electrifying blocks of solid pigment.
The paintings are alive, vibrant and visceral, they have all of the energy of a rowdy street, a party or even a fight. The cliques of women in the larger paintings surround one and other, enclosing and binding the visual composition and the viewer at once. We are instantly confined and spellbound within a world of Garwood’s making. With physicality at the forefront of these paintings, they tell a story of what lies beneath common speech and action to a deeper level of communication, instinct and understanding.
Moments in the paintings give life to the unseen, the awkward, to memories and imagination. Garwood uses satire and humour to address these leitmotifs but also compassion, great skill and personal experience. Hierarchies play a part in the performance too, hierarchies between the protagonists in some cases but also hierarchies of moments throughout the female experience from childhood to adolescence and beyond. There are props in this subconscious world, lollipops, scissors, cards, objects of tricksters, friends, children and carers. The movements of these women are ambiguous, hazy and undecided, plaiting or pulling hair, laughing or crying, pulling or pushing, we are not sure.
“There is no ‘correct’ ending, or clear morality message; instead each painting establishes a cyclical world without beginning or end, where allegory and narrative become transformed to reveal a continuous story of play and power.”
– Garwood, August 2025
The women are unapologetic, they come in bras and trainers, heels, knickers and tracksuit bottoms. They are unbound by constructs and free, caught in a dream-like dance together and move as one. This is where the seduction lies in these paintings, in freedom and in connection, in friends, mothers, sisters, daughters, in ancestral understanding and new experiences. Garwood speaks to our collective experience as women, our need for female bonds both past and present and the chance to make the future ours.
