BODYSCAPES

A graduate of New York’s School of Visual Arts, Alba Hodsoll’s solo exhibitions at the Cob Gallery have included 2017’s PoV and 2018’s Seed. Her work has attracted growing attention for its original, provocative and minimalist depictions of physicality and eroticism, which have often taken pornography as their source material. Operating with a reduced colour palette and investing line and shape with an unforeseen eloquence, Hodsoll’s drawings shift this explicit imagery into a new register, rearticulating her subject matter in an idiosyncratic language of restraint and suggestion.

In BODYSCAPES, Hodsoll presents a series of figurative line drawings based on the female body. Exploring the bare minimum of representation, her precisely weighted lines in these images become ambiguous thresholds between the presence and absence of form: negative and positive space seem to perpetually swap places as bodies resolve and dissolve around them. The eye wanders about a surface that is both figurative and abstract, as if reading a palm or interpreting the map of some unknown continent; tectonic plates that are either converging or diverging. In this way, as well as in its particular attention to the female form, to ‘imperfections’ and unconventional beauty, the work interests itself in the conventions of the ‘nude’ in art, investigating the tension between nakedness and nudity.