Professor Charlotte Hodes

Biography

Charlotte Hodes’ practice-led research is informed by her experience as a painter. She creates ceramic installations, ceramic vessels, papercut, print and animated film. Her iconography centres on women, depicted as silhouettes, juxtaposed with motifs loaded with female associated references such as the vessel, dress and the home. Her artworks question the traditional position of the female figure as represented in art history, as a decorative motif and as being inextricably linked to the domestic.

‘Hodes’ work is about boundaries: the contours of the female nude, generic hierarchies between craft and art, the decorative and the fine arts, the domestic and professional, the body as a singular identity and the multiplicity of selves afforded by technological reproduction’ – Dr. Hannah Westley

Through the process of drawing she creates her own archive of visual imagery. She mediates her work through both hand craft and digital processes. She uses the fragmented and tactile nature of the ‘cut’ and ‘paste’ of collage to embed meaning. The starting point for many of her projects is through primary research into museum collections and archives. This has included projects at:
• The Wallace Collection, London. As Associate Artist, Hodes realised a solo exhibition at the Museum ‘Fragmented Images’
in 2007.
• London College of Fashion Library, archive of pattern templates. ‘Drawing Skirts’, 2008, University of Northumberland,
supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council).
• Spode Museum Trust archive of copper engravings. (‘Dressed in Pattern’, 2014-2016, supported by Arts Council England).
• Victoria Gallery & Museum Special Collections and Archives. (‘The Errant Muse’, 2019, with poet, Deryn Rees-Jones)

Hodes won the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2006. She was a selector for the ING Discerning Eye exhibition 2019. She established the research hub, Fashion Design & Visual Arts Practice at London College of Fashion. The aim of the Hub is to foreground the role of drawing and practice-led research. She conceived and led on Hub projects including;
• a collaboration with the National Gallery ‘Flight: Drawing Interpretations’. https://drawinginterpretations.arts.ac.uk
• a UAL research group, co-led with Professor Eileen Hogan
‘About Face: Concepts of Portraiture’. https://aboutface.arts.ac.uk