Charlotte Hodes

Passion Flower

papercut, printed and painted papers
103 x 61 cm

These papercuts were originally made in response to poems by the award-winning poet, Deryn Rees-Jones, as part of Charlotte's collaboration that resulted in a major exhibition, The Errant Muse at the Victoria Gallery and Museum in Liverpool (ended November 2020). These papercuts explore her ongoing imagery which places the female figure at its centre and draws upon the languages of design and the decorative arts.

Charlotte’s highly worked tactile surfaces make visible the often-invisible labour of women. Her signature papercut technique is rooted in traditionally feminine craft practices such as tapestry, stitching, quilting. The cut and paste of collage, with its potential to both destroy and to re-construct, is actually and metaphorically, empowering. This is in contrast with the innate fragility of the delicate paper fragments which suggests a sense of transience and temporality.

Papercut allows Charlotte to engage in intricate compositions while also placing a binary condition of a line or mark being either ‘in’ or ‘out’. Whilst her collage process is essentially simple and direct, Charlotte creates complex layered narratives through fine and intricate hand-cutting.

She has been working in the medium of papercut since the mid-1980’s and in 2006, was awarded the Jerwood Drawing Prize with one of these large works.