Estelle Simpson
Degree: BA Fine Art Painting
University: Camberwell College of Art
Graduation Year: 2023
New Blood Art Commentary
In smooth, careful oils, Camberwell College of Art 2023 graduate Estelle Simpson invites you into an uncanny dream world, replete with symbols and tinged with menace. A New Blood Art Emerging Art 2023 nominee, Estelle draws inspiration from the world of the unconscious, illustrating Freudian dreamscapes featuring the motifs of sleeping women, more or less horrifying cats and glimpses of strange semi-natural forms. Whilst ostensibly resting, the unconscious female figures in 'Ease of Ascendancy' and 'Rest On Your Laurels' belie a vulerability that lends a deep unease to these paintings. Engaging with fiction as an 'invisible snapshot into a character, a rare invitation into the human mind which provides multiple narrative interpretations within my work', Simpson engages with a rich history of symbolist and surrealist painting whilst carving out her own unique voice within these paintings. It is just these 'multiple narrative interpretations' which pull the viewer inexorably into the world of Estelle's paintings, as the mind seeks to make connections and form meanings within the shifting, duplicitous dreamscapes.
Artist Statement
Estelle paints her fantasies. Scenes that become an adage between trembling expression and delicate detail. They describe solitary spaces and objects, warped by nostalgia. Longing overshadows what unfolds on the canvas. Human fragility defines her characters, who are frozen in reverie that seems lethal and tragic. Theatrical elements invigorate everyday minutiae, drawing attention to the subtle beauty of nature and the relics of our past. Her practice performs a deep relflection on the trespassings of the exterior world on the interior mind, and visa versa. Room impressions become stages invigorated with thoughts, feelings, struggles and pleasures.
Artist Statement:
Intimating an observation of uncanniness consuming our contemporary condition, pulling back the curtain on the vulnerable, indispensable human need for comfort which the interior fulfils is ruminated on. I explore how subject matter can be culled from theatrical imagery and fed into paintings to produce a scene which destabilises the everyday with a heightened dramatic atmosphere. Painting from personal recollection and memory, often distorted and increasingly malleable over time, overcomes the ambience of equivocal environments that blur the line between fact and fantasy.
I invite audiences in through furnishings, relics, and objects - universal markers of human society. Staged compositions present rhythms enhanced by props, pronounced mannerisms, and augmented body movement. The magic unfolds, layering paint with the harmonious gesture of Doig, as an adage between animated brushwork and tightly rendered details conveys a disparity, inviting further readings into the psyche. Vivid sensations unravel the perpetual present, transforming normality into a dance choreography or soundscape. Charged with the disorientating prose of Davila, paintings invoke the eruption of the chaotic, frightening things that roil beneath the controlled surface of domesticity coupled with psychological meditations on marginalised protagonists.
Investigating theatrics tempts a continuum of the dreamy, creepy, or darkly comical poetry of Bourgeois’ stuffed works. Peculiar in shape, cat dolls populate spaces as lurking incognito subjects that emanate something strange, or even evil lurking under the surface of mundanity. Extending my painting practice through methods of sewing, I bring my own fantastical visions to life. I use the feline form over the figure, searching outside the limitations of human-centricity and making nature the voyeur over us within our homes.
Natural imagery punctuates impressions with a haunting presence, as a “desire to project psychic reality onto the natural world,” akin to Agar who explores a mystical communication between vegetal matter and human sensibility.