2B HUMAN EXHIBITION: DENISE WEBBER

DENISE WEBBER : RECENT DRAWINGS

“I hear the vixen in the early hours, crying for a mate. It’s a primeval sound. She has no need of sanction or permission. But when I am drawing the sparrow, I think of the sound of its wingbeats: somewhere between a murmur and a shiver. A bird, being a creature of the air, is like a cipher for the voice or the soul, something fugitive. It can also evoke a message or a missile. Sometimes in my dreams I am bound to a wild animal and feel accountable for it, as if it were a part of myself.” Denise Webber

The female body dominates in Denise Webber’s work. In her drawings she often represents it as nude or with ethereal fragments of fabric or other adornment. Thus freed from cultural or temporal attributes, the woman’s body reveals its complex relationship to beauty, agency and power.

Webber works with a mix of film, photography and drawing. In much of her work, women overcome constraints and barriers to enter into spaces from which they have previously been barred. They partake in pleasurable acts of subversion, or embody the pursuit of artistic creation. 

In her recent drawings, the woman is visited by a wild creature, a vixen, a sparrow, or sometimes a flying fox, a species on the threshold of extinction. Some drawings celebrate the moment of touching an animal. Others suggest guardianship and ideas around shared origins and destinies.

Denise Webber was brought up in Famagusta in Cyprus, where the juxtaposition of hedonism with political violence led eventually to the outbreak of war, shelling and invasion, and her family was evacuated to the UK. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Tate Modern London, Moderna Museet Stockholm and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne. It is represented in the Arts Council Collection and in the Tate archive. She lives and works in London and the South West UK.

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