Virginia Bodman
BiographyVirginia Bodman, born 1954, graduated with a BA (Hons) in Painting from Birmingham Polytechnic and with an MA in Painting from the R.C.A. She has held a number of prestigious scholarships, fellowships and artists residencies including a Fellowship in Painting at Exeter College of Art, 1977-8; the Abbey Major Scholarship in Painting at the British School at Rome, 1981-3; the first artist's residency at Durham Cathedral, 1993-4; Leverhulme Fellowship in Painting, 1996-7; Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship, 1999-2000 and Rootstein Hopkins Fellowship 2001-2. She has held numerous one-person exhibitions in the UK some of which have toured and has exhibited in many group shows in the UK and internationally, her most recent one-person exhibition, Virginia Bodman Paintings was held at BayArt, Cardiff in 2009. Her work has also been the subject of a number of MPhil and PhD theses and her most recent publications Between: Drawing from the Landscape, (2000) and Home Ground, (2007) are frequently used by researchers. Her work can be seen at www.virginiabodman.com
Research Interests
The `life examined' is the basis of all research. Personal photography and video footage, C19th French and contemporary advertising imagery inform the work, as does a passionate interest in the possibilities, histories, materials and processes of painting.
Between 1998 and 2010 Bodman's research considered the displacement/invisibility of women in relation to the landscape. In the current and ongoing research, (studio-based painting, drawing, and printmaking), a more overt figuration has emerged; the contexts/debates/issues underpinning the work are becoming clearer and includes spatial displacement, elements of narrative (theatrical/distractions), in addition to darker perhaps 'zeitgeist' driven elements, (economic downturn/social fallout).
Research Activities
Research outputs, (paintings, drawing, prints), are usually disseminated via one-person exhibitions.