Seeing in the night-time

Victoria Brookland who recently displayed her Secret Self exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum is now currently exhibiting a new collection (with plenty of Brontë connections): Seeing in the night-time at the Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate, Yorkshire.

VICTORIA BROOKLAND:

‘Seeing in the night-time’

Victoria Brookland’s paintings are based on her investigations into the lives of Nineteenth century women poets, including Charlotte and Emily Brontë and the American Emily Dickinson.

The title of the exhibition comes from a letter to a friend written by Charlotte Brontë, referring to Charlotte’s propensity to write with her eyes shut, or in the darkness or twilight. Her students accused her of ‘possessing the singular property of seeing in the night-time’. This phrase became central to the study of female creativity in Victoria Brookland’s work.

The doll’s house, which features in many of the paintings, represents the power of the domestic interior as a setting for images of enclosure and escape. The artist also sees parallels between the popular Victorian ‘gentlemanly’ pursuit of collecting and studying cage-birds and canaries, and the treatment of Victorian women. Brookland believes that writers such as Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson found freedom by turning their gaze within in order to find the liberating world of their own creativity and imagination.

Doll Houses, canaries, nightingales and Victorian Dress are the recurring motifs in the artist’s painted literary world. Brookland is fascinated by the character of manuscripts themselves, and to make her art she chooses the materials of writing; pen and ink, used with watercolour. Layers of handwriting, wild blots of ink and obsessive scribbles fill Brookland’s paintings as if they were Bronte manuscripts themselves.

There are over thirty works in the exhibition, all of them for sale, alongside Victoriana from the Harrogate Museums collections.

The exhibition is at the Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate Yorkshire and runs from 28 February to 14 June 2009

We are very grateful to the artist for providing us with these pictures. The painting that lends its name to the exhibition can be seen here.

Categories: Art-Exhibitions