Stephanie Forrest is an artist working across drawing, painting and print. Rooted in observational drawing, her work responds to the flow and unfolding of the world around her. With a background in Art History, she combines a wide scope of references with an intuitive creative approach. Preferring fluid, unpredictable materials and techniques, Forrest works predominantly with ink and watercolour on handmade papers. Rhythmic and gestural, her recent work explores the body in movement; working both from dance as performance and as a subject throughout art history. She was awarded the ACS Drawing Prize in 2019 and has work in the Royal Collection and Government Art Collection.

Forrest is also a tutor at the Royal Drawing School, where she completed The Drawing Year in 2018-19, going on to develop her painting practice at Turps Banana, London. She also teaches bespoke courses for students at Brockwood Park School, Hampshire.

b.1986 Forrest is based between London and Winchester.

“The drawings, paintings and monoprints of Stephanie Forrest share one essential characteristic. In them you feel the hand and eye and heart are searching, transitive. They are not works in search of stasis, the perfect singular moment, but seem to be a response to the world as it unfolds. And it unfolds in her art with a gorgeous depth of colour and tonality. TJ Clark wrote on Twombly, there is a ‘wish to expose himself to the world as it is’ and in Stephanie’s practice the ever-changing, the mutable have become her subject. She puts herself into landscape to experience how light moves on water, how shadows congregate and disperse second by second, the passage of clouds. For some of this year, Stephanie was in lockdown in the country near a river and it was here that she spent her weeks in all weathers, at all times of the day. This makes sense. The river, the landscape and the body in water are core to her questioning sensibility. She has written that her ‘best work only seems to happen when I’m in deep water. And I guess that’s what much of the work is about; immersion.’ Immersion is where boundaries of the self feel contingent, uncertain. You are not certain where you begin and where you end. Her bathers share this experience of being in the moment with her studies of dancers. She has obsessively worked both from life, drawing a solitary dancer in the studio or on stage, and returned repeatedly to Poussin’s The Golden Calf with that great swirling vortex of bodies, immersed in their Dionysian rapture. And these series of works in the exhibition are deeply affecting. This moment is here and then it passes. Et in Arcadia Ego: we are here for such a short while. Beautiful mutability is a sort of mortality too.” — Edmund de Waal, 2020

For sales, commissions and teaching enquiries, please contact me on: stephaniecforrest@gmail.com / +44(0)7841 832 150

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