Flo Brooks,

Bodies in Space

27 November 2021 — 26 February 2022

MIRROR, Plymouth

Bodies in Space presents work by artists using the figure in painting and drawing to question and understand how we occupy, move through and negotiate the public and private spaces of daily life. The exhibition also reflects how figurative painting and drawing becomes more visible at times of wider social and political change.

This exhibition, itself hugely delayed due to the Covid 19 pandemic, has been adapted to reflect on the impact of social distancing and the wider disruption of social conventions on issues of representation and equality such as Black Lives Matter and debates around queer and trans rights.

Some artists in this show use the figure in allegorical ways while others treat the figure as an apparition emerging from abstraction. In spite of these differences in approaches, the disjunction between the body, space and time is a common thread across works and forms the basis of this exhibition.

"Bodies in Space is an exhibition of paintings and drawings by artists working with the human figure. Not all bodies are treated equally and not all bodies are equally represented, whether politically, legally or pictorially. The exhibition draws out the ways that artists use the figure to reflect on intimacy and relationships as well as wider social and political issues through their work" - Ben Borthwick

Flo Brooks

Flo Brooks is a painter of modern life. Their practice can be considered as a revising of traditional genre painting: at the very centre of each painting is a personal reflection on work, leisure and the in-between. Speaking of their approach, Brooks has said: “It feels fundamental to think critically about the ways we connect with each other, and what this might look like in our own lives. I make sense of things through lived experience, through intimate relationships and the communities I’m part of, whether that’s the rural community I grew up in, queer and trans communities, art networks or my blood family”.

Working with acrylic, either on shaped wooden panels or appliquéd onto found fabric, Brooks’ practice explores trans and gender non-conforming histories. Embedded in the materials of domestic space, which they describe as ‘the first space of dreaming, fantasising, worlding,’ each work originates from fragments of the depicted figure’s lives, gleaned from newspaper clippings, autobiographical descriptions and visits to the places they lived or worked. Collaging together different places, eras and individuals, Brooks’ works resist simplified representations of trans and gender non-conforming lives. Rather they open up a flexible space for the unfolding of multiple perspectives, shifting identities and evolving relationships. They are not historical portraits but dream-like scenarios: fragmented, mutable, incomplete.

In 2023, Brooks opened their celebrated solo show at Spike Island, Harmonycrumb. The exhibition explored speculative entanglements between Brooks’ own life and the experiences of different historical figures, including military leader Joan of Arc (1412-31), ‘female husband’ Charles Hamilton (1721-46), and physician Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka (1915-62). “Brooks’s merging of bodies speaks to strength in numbers, potentiality and polyphonic narratives. The juxtaposition of historical figures with these portrayals grounds Brooks – and, by extension, his contemporaries – within a long lineage of trans and queer ancestry.”

Prior to Spike Island, Brooks presented solo shows at Brighton CCA, Tramway, Glasgow and Cubitt Gallery. In 2023, Studio Voltaire in collaboration with This is Clapham and Lambeth Council, unveiled Brooks’ first public commission, Inner Bark Out. Their work was also included in the acclaimed exhibition Kiss my Genders at the Hayward Art Gallery.

Brooks has opened two solo exhibitions at Project Native Informant: Be tru to your rec, 2022 and Scrubbers, 2018. For Art Basel: Statements 2024, Project Native Informant are presenting a solo booth of Brooks’ new body of works.

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