Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm
Ugonna Hosten
8 – 26 June 2022
Artist’s Talk: Sat 18 June, 2:30 pm. All welcome.
A new body of work in which Hosten chronicles a metaphorical journey, a descent to an underworld, explored through drawings and prints. Encompassing dreams, thoughts and constructed myths, the exhibition seeks simultaneously to investigate distant realms and the intimate depths within.
In these monochromatic works on paper, the materials used signal the artist’s intent to connect to an essential and distilled way of expression.
“Working monochromatically offers me a directness, clarity and a type of continuum. It forces me to think carefully about how a mark as opposed to a colour, can be used to describe a place or feeling.”
This new body of charcoal, ink and pencil drawings explores the symbolic resonance of blackening/nigredo – a process in alchemy prior to transformation. Hosten draws from a wide range of sources including mythology, psychology and the spiritual dimension, and is interested in how these worlds converge.
The work of Ugonna Hosten (b. 1982, Lagos, Nigeria) explores the notion of duality (namely earthly and spiritual) as being central to the human experience. Themes of myth as a form of reality and the realm of the unconscious are prevalent in her work. Hosten’s route into fine art was via a BA Honours in Criminology which led into a career in the civil service. Those early explorations into the human mind on her degree program, remain part of a continuum. Her practice is an evolution of a sort, in piecing fragments together and investigating experiences, historically, personally and imagined.
Download an interview by writer and curator George Vasey and Ugonna Hosten HERE.
