Rachel Goodyear

In a remarkably short period of time, Rachael Goodyear has produced a consistent body of work that has attracted a number of international private collectors, some public collections, and consistent critical acclaim. Perhaps what’s most remarkable is that it wasn’t until she was a year out of college – Goodyear completed a BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Leeds Metropolitan University in 2000, where she’s been producing angular, sharp-edged sculpture – that she saw that what was required was a return to drawing. Goodyear who was born in Oldham, Lancashire in 1978 has said:

“I’ve been drawing my whole life but never really showing it to anyone… I actually started as a painter, and used to keep the drawings private. It took me a while to realise that both my heart and head were really in the drawings: they meant the most to me, it was where all the important ideas were coming from”. (Artworld No 6 August/September 2008)

Looking now at the drawings Goodyear has produced over a period of just over seven years the trajectory they present is like falling into an illogical, yet strangely familiar world. The scenes they present are often curious and alien – they seem to take familiar components and fuse them in unfamiliar ways; in stark isolation on the whiteness of the paper, her characters have no context or history, but the fact that they do share common ground is underlined by the fact that when Goodyear presents them in different exhibitions, she re-aligns them in different combinations and relationships.

There is no identifiable narrative at play but like the figures themselves which seem confined paradoxically by the intangible space they occupy, they have freedom to roam but they do not.

There are moments when we think we may know these figures, from somewhere remote, for, like characters in a dim and distant fairy tale we can’t quite pin down, they embody compulsions – curiosity, competitiveness – the ways in which animals populate the imaginations of men and women and how they embody myth as a means to assuage fear through the expression of mystery – but they are not embodiments we immediately recognise. Her drawings are raw and abject, although the viewer is offered relief by the fact that they are frequently darkly funny.

It’s interesting too that the lively critique that has developed around her drawings shares a notable consistency. Different writers, puzzling about her work, have produced responses that convey as underlying trope characterised by a recognition that at the heart of the work lies a binary opposition or contradiction. Writing from New York about a recent exhibition ‘the converging ends were misaligned’ (24 April – 23 May 2009) at her London dealer Pippa Houldsworth, Morgan Falconer describes the drawings as ‘rebuses that lie somewhere between reason and unreason; about the recurring, sexualised girl figure in particular Chris Clarke, on the exhibition ‘The Intertwining Line, Drawing as a Subversive Art’ at Cornerhouse, Manchester, writes of them as lying ‘between the innocent and erotic’; in the exhibition guide to The Drawing Room at Tate Liverpool for the 2008 Biennal, Kyla McDonald says her drawings are ‘trapped between reality and fiction’. In this respect too it’s significant that Goodyear’s drawings made an eloquent contribution to The Unheimlich, again in 2008, an exhibition at Leeds Metropolitan Gallery, which predicated itself on Freud’s 1919 theory of the ‘uncanny’, exploring the simultaneous attraction and repulsion caused by the discovery of unanticipated aspects of the familiar or homely. And perhaps most poetic in this continuing and consistent discourse that seems to expose an ‘aesthetics of anxiety’ is Angela Kingston who, writing (January 2009) on Goodyear’s solo show at ‘The International 3’, Manchester, encapsulates this inherent tension, concisely and eloquently: ‘The sensation I have is of pushing two magnets together, but so that they resist each other, never touching.’

Goodyear’s drawing technique seems to conspire with this compulsion towards the contradictory. Adopting an acute observational approach that would not be out of place in botanical or natural science illustration, she seduces the viewer’s eye, drawing it closer to wonder at the fine detail of the Arran sweater of her insouciant gamine-like heroine of Imaginary Friend, or the blush of red blood suffusing through water in Mermaids. In themselves these are passages, moments, of exquisite detail that arrest the eye, as the mind simultaneously unravels the discomfort, the horror – these are dogfish consuming children. At other times, it’s as if the observational mode collapses inwards: graphite becomes so densely worked, layer upon layer, that a figure’s hair or clothing disappears into darkness, into the void. Often, to view one of Goodyear’s drawings, is as if seeing from the corner of one’s eye, a fly caught in the gossamer of a finely wrought spider’s web. One is drawn in, compelled to watch, fascinated, the final death throes.

But there is more to this discourse that simply seeking to enfold Goodyear in contemporary art’s enduring fascination with the capacity of the visual image to incorporate multiple and contradictory meanings. To see Goodyear’s drawings against the background of the tactics of a slightly earlier generation of British Artists who often elided the shocking with the banal, is to touch on something that makes them quite distinctive. Goodyear, too, does often elide the banal and shocking, as for instance, in Girl with Jellyfish where the calm domesticity of its setting clashes with the repulsion of being a witness to self-wounding. But Goodyear seems to look deeper inside this trope; for her it’s not so much a tactic to engage the viewer’s attention, as a means of investigation through which she compels the viewer to consider the all-pervasive ordinariness of evil and menace. Perhaps it’s here that the cause of her preoccupation with the primal instinct lies – this is the Cave that Coughed (the title that Goodyear gave to her exhibition at). Her drawings might often seem aligned, even misaligned, with fairy-tales and myths – elusive episodes snatched from lost narratives – but it’s also the order of a world as expressed from the first, in the earliest cave-wall drawings, that she frequently inverts. This is not the order of things, she seems to be saying. The threat of inter-species mescegenation is hinted at here; the ultimate taboo. In a year which sees the anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, one of the great acts of ordering our world, Rachael Goodyear’s dreams of a misaligned world writ small and intricate, exercise a powerful pull on the darker side of the imagination.

Rachel Goodyear has exhibited regularly in the UK and abroad; as well as those mentioned above, notable exhibitions included The Aesthetic of Anxiety, Marc de Peuchredon Gallery, Basel; Drawing Links, a touring show curated by The Drawing Room, London, and Artfutures, Bloomberg Space, London.

Rachel Goodyear is represented by The International 3, Manchester and Pippy Houldsworth, London. She lives and works in Manchester.

by Nigel Walsh, Curator of Contemporary Art, Leeds Art Gallery