In the painting Beautiful Shadow Flannigan places a colossal woman constructed from a flow of lava-like paint against a landscape which appears dwarfed by her powerful physical presence. The tension lies between her personal state, the chaos surrounding her and the force of the paint. Is she the destructive force? Or a symbol of the debris? She appears not quite wholly alive, having skeletal arms, but seems eternal, far from dead. Flannigan creates a concrete reality comprising the uncertainties of dream, memory and experience. She draws on reference points such as Kafka’s The Trial. Or she uses newspaper images which become, worked and reworked, independent of their source, as they are transformed by memory and imagination into an alternative but no less truthful reality.

 

Flannigan is represented in numerous public and private collections worldwide including The Aberdeen Art Gallery, The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, The Saatchi Collection, London, The Deutsche Bank, The City Art Collection, Munich, and The NatWest Art Collection, London and in several private collections in the Netherlands.

Moyna Flannigan lives and works in Edinburgh.

 

Julie Roberts' paintings are pervaded by her interest in the intangible and insidious power that seeps down from the Social Body to the individual. There has always been the pressure from society for women to conform, as in Freud's words to 'a potential helper or sexual object'. A series of watercolours and oil paintings on the subject of The Good Wife notate the activities expected of a British housewife in the period from the 1930-1950's.  Inspired by a book handed down to Roberts from her grandmother, she painted scenes which reveal an anthropological glimpse of the subtle dynamics of political power within family life.

 

Roberts is represented in numerous public and private collections worldwide including The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, Indianapolis Art Museum, Indiana, The Tate Gallery, London, The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, The National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, The Moderna Museet, Stockholm and Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Oporto, Portugal and in several private collections in the Netherlands.

Julie Roberts lives and works in Carlisle, England