Artists don’t have all the answers. Instead, the best ones pose questions. In the case of British figurative painters Debbie Baird and Brian Wood, who have a joint exhibition ‘Ego: Identity and Power’ at Birmingham’s RBSA Gallery, it’s an important one: must we accept the cards we’re dealt by life?
Hanging from one wall of the show is a small but mighty oil on canvas, ‘Disruption’, by Wood. Within an expressively painted tangle of bodies, a skeletal man kneels over two playing cards strewn on the floor. Tension builds as he’s watched by another male figure, wearing a black bowler hat and a red jacket, who stands somewhat ominously in the background.
Power dynamics are central to the symbolic tableaux of Wood, who had a former career in the city, where he could observe authority structures in action. On canvas, he explores these rituals and their effects on our identity – individual and collective – through archetypal figures who emerge from his mind.
In ‘Ego?’ a crowd of featureless, abstracted bodies are seen from behind, all staring at something unknown in the distance. In turn, anyone looking at this painting is forced to join them in the very same pose. This picture evokes herd mentality, which has been heightened in the age of social media mobs, where individuality can easily dissipate.
In Wood’s paintings, the choices we make are connected to other people. He’s most interested in exploring what he refers to as “the psychological dance of human interaction”, which reaches its climax in a tapestry-like painting, and a highlight of the show, ‘Two Kings’. Across six metres of unstretched canvas unfolds a drama, evoked in gestural brushstrokes, splatters and vivid contrasts of blue, gold, green and red.
This monumental, figurative landscape expresses the theatre, costumes and physicality of power. Crouching anonymous figures are dominated by cloaked, crowned figures whose grasping hands seem greedy for what they believe is owed to them. Stage-like, this scene is one of movement and shifting interactions which evoke the performance of masculinity.
In contrast, as if observing from a wall on the opposite side of the gallery, is a group of children stood still in ‘Brothers’ by Baird. There’s a watchful, brooding manner about these four siblings, huddled together, who seem yet to find their place among one another, as well as in the wider world.
Turning away from the others is the smallest boy, whose head is a layer of oil paint on collage. Instead of hair, he has cut and pasted imagery of domestic interiors, evoking the spaces where we are brought up and belong – or feel that we don’t.
It’s as if Baird is inviting viewers to look inside this young boy’s mind, where visual idioms relate to his identity. In its fragmentary nature, the medium of collage evokes the composite nature of our personalities, formed from childhood. Baird’s was spent in 1970s Northern Ireland, and growing up during the Troubles informed the artist’s belief system. As she has said:
“There was little or no respect paid to alternative lifestyles. It was not until much later in life that I realised my true identity, recognised my sexuality and met my soul mate. It is a relief now to be an artist – able to be myself and to be able to express my feelings and experience in my paintings.”
Resisting repression, Baird works both intuitively and decisively. She tears pictures from magazines, downloads them from the internet, and finds photographs in more personal family albums. To be included in her painted collages they must hold emotional resonance, and they are her starting point for works where fact jostles with fiction.
A collaged pattern of curtains, lampshades and windows intersect with a child’s body in ‘Crouching Girl’. At her feet is a winding staircase, an image that recurs across the series, leading viewers into the sitters’ interior selves. The protagonist also stares directly at the viewer, as do many of Baird’s figures who sit or stand alone, conveying self-confidence through their bold expressions.
Among the most commanding works is ‘Self Portrait’, which Baird describes as “a map of me”. She has painted her own head more than 20 times, in a collision of styles, poses and textures, accompanied by meaningful text. Across the most expressively painted version of Baird, is a single word scrawled in black pen: ‘Autonomy’.
Through her painted collages, Baird evokes the complex layers of self below the surface and expresses her strong belief that, “we have the right to choose our individual identity and to determine who we will become.” Displayed next to her self-portrait is another defined by interiority: ‘Under the skin’ by Wood, whose head is bowed and painted in an intense palette from pink to turquoise. In a world of black and white opinions, this talented duo have created a more nuanced conversation for the viewer to join – about ego, identity and power.
Debbie Baird and Brian Wood, Ego: Identity And Power runs from October 21 – November 1 at Birmingham’s RBSA Gallery