Professor Charlotte Hodes

Biography

Charlotte Hodes is a painter, whose practice includes ceramics, glass, papercuts and installation. Charlotte received an ACE grant in 2014, in collaboration with Professor Paul Scott to research the engravings in the Spode Museum Trust Archive resulting in a large tableware installation Spode Trees and Dressed Silhouettes for the British Ceramic Binennial 2015. She was awarded the first prize in the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2006. Recent solo exhibitions include Fragmented Images, The Wallace Collection, London 2007, the culmination of two years as Associate Artist at the Museum supported by ACE 2004 & 2006 & AHRC 2005, Drawing Skirts 2008, University of Northumbria, a collaborative research project  with Professor Cathy Treadaway, UWIC, supported by the AHRC 2008  and Grammar of Ornament, jaggedart, London and New Hall Art Collection, University of Cambridge 2014, an interrogation of the 1856 Owen Jones’ book of the same name. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions including Glasstress Venice Biennale 2009 & 2013;Millesgården Stockholm, Sweden 2011, No.10 Downing St curated by Janice Blackburn OBE 2012, Inscription:Thinking/Drawing/Making Jerwood Space Gallery 2010 and the International Design Biennial Design Museum London 2003. Her work is also held in a number of public collections including British Council, Victoria and Albert Museum, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery and New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge. Charlotte Hodes' research is informed by her experience as a painter and is investigated through large scale intricately hand cut papercuts, as well as ornately worked ceramic vessels, glass and more recently animation. Her iconography is centred on the female figure within a contemporary context depicted as a silhouette juxtaposed with motifs loaded with female associated references such as the vessel and skirt. It questions the position of the female figure as represented in art history, as a decorative motif and as being inextricably linked to the domestic. She draws upon the decorative and applied arts, often using archives and collections as a source for projects. This has included the Wallace Collection, London, the ceramic Spode Museum Trust Archive, V&A textile library and LCF library archive. Through the process of drawing she creates her own archive of usable visual imagery which is mediated by both hand craft and digital processes. Her research addresses how the fragmented and tactile nature of the ‘cut’ and ‘paste’ of collage can embed meaning. At LCF she established the Forum for Drawing to foreground the role of drawing and practice-led research. This was relaunched in 2016 as Visual Arts at LCF. The hub programme invites presentations by research practitioners from within LCF and beyond, and has resulted in a number of research initiatives including the practice-led research collaboration with the National Gallery Flight: Drawing Interpretations. Charlotte is also co-lead of a Communities of Practice Research Group, About Face: Concepts of Portraiture.