There is a sense of contingency, of capturing a very private moment shared between women in the paintings of Jacqueline Utley. These paintings might be described as an exploration of the gendered spaces that women have occupied for living, working and making work. Utley started exploring these spaces in a number of works that she made after her return to art school in order to do an MA after a two decade career hiatus after her BA at Chelsea. She also made a number of small paintings of flowers in vases set against modest, plain backgrounds where the petals of the flowers are a vivid but contained burst of colour against the almost monochrome backgrounds.
Utley has talked about how she started making these works in response to women painters in museum collections who were born around the start of the twentieth century. This has become a key strand of her practice that is rooted in research work. Utley’s own family history of women working in textile mills in the north of England also fed into her interest in researching sources that documented the lives of women workers from the early part of the twentieth century. She also draws on family photographs, art historical sources, magazines and journals that feature women artists and makers and the spaces they worked in. Her paintings wear these references lightly, working on each painting over a long period of time so that they gradually move away from those sources into her own distinctive visual language.
The resultant paintings bring together women in interior spaces that might be their front rooms or parlour. We see women sitting or standing, talking with each other or simply co-inhabiting the same spaces. Sometimes they are working; sewing or making. Sometimes they play instruments. The women in these paintings are absorbed in their own practice but also connected to each other; Utley has stated that she often starts out with an idea of what the conversations between the female figures in her paintings might be. And whilst the women are sited in interior spaces they are not contained by those spaces, with figures sometimes half-in and half-out of the pictorial space suggesting that life goes on beyond the frame. We recognise the space figures in different paintings, linking them in a non-linear, non hierarchical sequence.
The flowers in vases of earlier works re-appear, either in the background of the interiors or in a different way, as large individual leaves that are suddenly unmoored from their vases and which magically float through the spaces of the paintings. By doing so they also break open the interiority of these works not simply to the outside but also to the mythical, magical and imaginative. They are a sudden, rather joyous reminder of the world outside, a reminder that interiority and the world around us can meet at the most surprising of moments.
Jacqueline Utley lives and works in London. She has a BA (Hons) in Painting from Chelsea School of Art (1989) and an MA in Drawing from Camberwell College of Arts (2008). She returned to painting as a practice after bringing up her children. As well as her own practice, Utley engages in collaborative practice-based research projects on work by overlooked women artists. With the artist Hayley Field she works as Obscure Secure, conducting research into women artists in public collections; widening understanding of under-representation and challenging ideas of value and legacy.
