CARTOON, COLLAGE AND THE DECORATIVE MOTIF
Stephen Chambers, James Fisher and Charlotte Hodes

1 - 31 March 2006

The Eagle Gallery’s current exhibition brings together three contemporary artists whose work explores intensely worked decorative imagery and layered pictorial references.
The show includes monoprints, collage and mixed media drawings, demonstrating a fluidity between different processes that is a notable element of
contemporary practice.

Charlotte Hodes is currently artist-in-residence at the Wallace Collection and her recent work uses visual references from the porcelain and ceramics as the basis to making large scale digital prints. These dense ‘visual collages’ of patterns and figures are further worked upon, with tiny fragments of the
details cut out and reassembled. The finished image becomes an actual collage, an intricate filigree of line, paper and pattern. A selection of Charlotte
Hodes’s ceramics will be on display at jaggedart, London W1 from 20 March - 8 April (see: info@jaggedart.com) in conjunction with the Eagle Gallery exhibition.

Stephen Chambers shows a large scale monoprint which he made recently at Pauper’s Press, London, together with monoprints from a residency at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venizia in 2005. The semi-figurative images combine elements of letterpress with etching, screen and litho printing, depicting the subject through an amalgamation of drawn form, pattern and latticed, printed grids. Chambers recently held a solo exhibition ‘The Martyrdom of St Ursula’, at Flowers East, London.

James Fisher trained at the Royal College of Art and was a recipient of an Abbey Scholarship at the British School in Rome in 2001. His highly worked images combine references to anthropology,
natural history, folklore and literature, worked into a many layered picture surface.
Fisher often uses a computer to assemble his visual material which he then extends by traditional methods of ‘cartoon’ drawing, pushing tiny dots of paint through a template to form the basis to his paintings and works on paper.