Eileen Cooper: Eyes Wide Open

In a series of moonlit scenes women appear in various states of contemplation, their larger-than-life bodies bent into poses that are languid, sensuous, awkward and athletic. One dances on a table on the shores of a sea while another dangles from the branches of a tree to dip her finger into a pool of water. These are the dream-like visions of acclaimed British artist Eileen Cooper who has spent the last five decades exploring different aspects of the female experience by weaving together autobiographical elements with references from mythology, fairy tales and art history. Eyes Wide Open, her first solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Wandsworth, brings together a new series of tender paintings that consider different states of transition, the performance of identity and acts of creation.

 

Cooper first rose to prominence in the 1980s for her unique approach to figuration that combines a simple yet complex graphic style with her own poetic and evolving symbolism. She sees the female character in her paintings as an archetypal figure through whom she is able to channel different emotions often reflecting on women’s work and specifically creative expression. In Quest, for instance, we encounter several versions of Cooper’s character: the artist, the muse and the painted subject. So far so traditional, but this is no ordinary painter’s studio: it is an open-air structure, floating on the sea, a dream space or perhaps, the visual manifestation of a psychological state in which the woman contemplates her fluctuating identity as subject-object. In this moment, she is the painter, her gaze turned outward to confront the viewer, but she is or has also been the naked woman curled up on the chair.

 

In this painting, as in several others in the series, the woman’s connection to the natural world, a latent wildness, is conveyed through the presence of an animal which also serves as a quiet companion or even a guardian. In Quest her fingertips brush the head of a cat, in Moon River a little dog lies against her body as she bathes in the moonlight while in Longing a cat’s dynamic crouched pose contrasts the woman’s inwardness. In Water Tiger the relationship between woman and animal is more mysterious.The tiger is trapped on a wooden rowing boat seemingly unaware of the woman who lies below beneath the surface of the water. They are separate but still connected: the woman’s huge, larger-than-life body almost cradles the boat or serves as a kind of island, a tether.

 

Throughout this body of work, water, like the night sky, is symbolic of a transitional state as well as relating to ideas around the subconscious, but it also serves for the characters as a kind of portal to a different time, place or mode of being. In Ripple, a woman reaches down from the branch of her tree to dip her finger into a pool of water, toying perhaps with the idea of crossing from one state, one life, into another while in Moonstone the central figure is contained within a kind of structure while outside a body (another version of the self?) lies curled up (sleeping or deceased?) on the shores of the beach. In Home, the figure appears to have fled whatever the building is behind her - a house, a studio, a church - onto a wooden pier. She is literally unclothed, clasping a model structure to her chest, the only possession that she is taking with her as she moves into the unknown.

 

Although a sense of longing or even melancholy runs through many of these works, Cooper’s women are not so much lost as undergoing or emerging from a process of self-realisation and maturation. Their wide eyes might be characteristic of Cooper’s figurative style but in this series they also become symbolic of a deep connection to and understanding of self.