Florence Woolley

SAIC SHOWS 2023 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Graduates

SAIC SHOWS 2023 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Master of Fine Arts in Studio, Film, Video, New Media, and Animation

Florence is an artist and researcher, working between, moving image, installation and performance. Her work is informed by the politics of land not simply as an object, but as an instrument of social and cultural power, this includes the growth of the global economy, the privatization of public space, and the deep legacies of imperialism. By attending to what has been lost or made invisible, in the past and present simultaneously, she hopes she may challenge perception by casting a disobedient gaze.

Toxic Proverbs, 2021. Three Channel Video Installation, Digital and 8mm

Hostile Skopos, 2022. Video Installation and Performance

Florence Woolley - Behind the Looking Glass .. then rave P1

Behind the Looking Glass .. then rave P1, 2023.

Engaging with the Claude Glass as a tool of myth making, Behind the Looking Glass, considers how power is invisibilized in the English Landscape through picturesque aesthetics. The Claude Glass is an optical device, popularized in the 18th century during a period of mass enclosure, that rearranged the natural scene it reflected into what was considered as an orderly picturesque aesthetic that could be immediately comprehended and appreciated. Behind the Looking Glass uses the Claude Glass against itself to re-orient the viewer's gaze toward the landscape as a contested site where mechanisms of control and power are reckoned with, along with questions of what is and isn’t made visible in the frame.

Florence Woolley - Behind the Looking Glass...then rave P2.

Behind the Looking Glass...then rave P2., 2023.

In 1993 between 20,000 – 40,000 ravers occupied Castlemorton common to participate in a free party that lasted for over a week. The negative press response to the rave led to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 that would cramp down on illegal parties and extend trespassing laws against ravers, squatters and unauthorized campers. Gathering was defined by groups of more than 20 people and "music" that included sounds ‘wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’ was made illegal. Meanwhile, military personnel continued to trample across Woolwich common, shooting artillery and charging horses across the field in a reenactment of colonial warfare that continues to be celebrated by the nation. The viewer is invited to press their ear to the metal to listen to the vibrations of the sounds. This kind of haptic encounter considers how a different mode of sensing, one which incorporates a more embodied sense of experience may offer up a new mode of thinking.

Cruel Mall Optimism (2022)

Her current research is concerned with the contradictory ways in which militarism, nationalism and colonial power are embedded in and made invisible through the aesthetics of the rural English landscape. She is curious about how she may use aesthetics which work against power, by creating new material relations to images. Rather than seeking to solve problems or establish wholeness, she finds nuance and particularities to probe at the entangled relationship between people, place, ecology, and time.

She is a member of Siobhan Davies Dance, Next Artist Collective and was a Founder of FFF a political education group that through reading, walking, and cooking engaged with critical pedagogy not as a means to an end but rather as a way to understand and to live life as a process of being and becoming. This is a practice she hopes to return to.

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