‘Stirrings’ will be the first major solo exhibition by Rachel Goodyear in a North-West museum and art gallery. It has been co-commissioned by Grundy Art Gallery and the University of Salford Art Collection and will include new large-scale drawings and a new animation. While the animation shows Goodyear experimenting with structure and sound, the new works on paper see the artist working at a scale larger than ever before.
Over her 20-year career, Goodyear has retained a core commitment to the act of drawing, as well as a commitment to the expansion of drawing as a medium. Throughout her practice, her drawings have found their way onto bus tickets, diary pages and envelopes; as well as onto more conventional sources of paper; while her experiments with drawing as a form, have seen her works take shape as sculpture, animation, performance and installation. For this new exhibition, Goodyear has experimented with scale, making her largest and most detailed drawing to date. With heightened detail, bodies contort, a wolf-pack is tangled into a single entity of snarls and fur and figures explore sensations that hold an ambiguous balance of pleasure and discomfort.
Goodyear often describes her drawings as ‘fragments’ – like glimpses from a half remembered dream or a distorted memory – frozen in a moment. For ‘Stirrings’, alongside new works on paper, Goodyear has also developed a major new installation. With nods to mythological journeys into the Underworld, Dante’s levels of Hell and our continuous scrolling through social media, Goodyear’s animation takes the form of a never-ending descent. With a specially commissioned soundtrack by Matt Wand, Goodyear’s frozen moments are locked in time to be repeated forever.
