Private View Friday 15th September 6-7.30pm, upstairs at The Art Shop

‘Working blind, working in the dark, sifting through sand with eyes shut, working backwards. I sometimes feel lost and feel only that I am compelled to make marks and put images down, I see colours everywhere and take them to the studio with me. they are fragments, snatched from dreams, and I am collecting them and ironing out tangles and hoarding and obsessing, then suddenly it is enough and I can’t see the way forward again. I am exhausted and have used it all up. I rest and the desire to record grows again. Once I am making it becomes a dialogue and a full interior world, complex and mesmerising, part of the world and nature. The privacy of the studio. The solitude. A process of acceptance. Looking around my immediate environment I see how a home, daily work and reputation in housework, a small arrangement of and groups of objects all contribute to painting. They all become part of you, learning through making.’

Cornelia plays with old folklore and poetry, but in a loose and dreamlike way. She draws particularly on tales native to the British Isles, and especially Celtic poetry and myth. Her paintings are flat, stripped of all perspective or realism, their surfaces hazy and meandering like an old tale retold a thousand times. Roughly rendered yet delicately arranged, she creates patterned compositions reminiscent of old tapestries into which she plants naïve pre-Modern motifs.

Cornelia trained at Royal College of Art graduating in 2006. Her work is held in private collections in the U.K. and overseas. She lives and works in London.

Cornelia’s ‘Theatre of Plates’ will be on display upstairs at the Chapel, Market Street, for the whole of the Abergavenny Food Festival weekend 16th-17th September