Our current exhibition Collective Care features the work of Professor Charlotte Hodes. Handcrafted papercuts: ‘Conversations en Plein Air’ reflects on craft and the decorative arts as they relate to the female experience and address the tension between individual autonomy and collective action.
The Collective Care exhibition is open to the public from 24 September to 14 December, inviting everyone to reflect on the connections between personal well-being, cultural heritage, and our planet’s health. We spoke to Charlotte to uncover the inspiration behind her work.
My work on display in Collective Care is part of a wider project that I made called Conversations en Plein Air, which grew during the pandemic. I had the idea of making work about being in the open-air and it coincided with the lock-down.
The restrictions that were imposed during the pandemic had a big impact on the way I developed this project. Collective Care includes my sequence of papercuts, 'The Picnic' which runs over seven metres, alongside ready-made tableware using related imagery.
The theme is of the picnic and notions of sharing and community. During the pandemic our access to the outdoors was controlled. We were forced to be inside for longer periods than usual and so the experience of being outside was heightened. At the point when we were able to have picnics in the park with one or two friends, I became very aware of that sort of experience, of how we gather informally scattered in small groups across open spaces.
I am interested in the idea of a community of women, so in this work, you see women together picnicking, who are also reaching out to one another, beyond the picture itself. There are women with megaphones, mobile phones, there's one woman with a paper aeroplane and another holding a carrier pigeon with a letter attached that is ready to be sent off to see whether there's someone out there or not.
Only women are pictured as my feeling is that there is a confederacy amongst women. I'm interested in the way we connect through common ground. My intention is for there to be a sense of equality and a lack of hierarchy in the way they're presented.
There are references in my work to the way in which picnics have historically been represented in painting. These include the eighteenth-century Fête galante paintings by Antoine Watteau and Eduard Manet's Déjeuner sur L'Herbe, created in 1862. My women are depicted as flat silhouettes - they are based on ideas about women, they are not manifestations of embodied women. They refer to fashion, in the sense that the silhouette is such a key element in design practise. At LCF, there's a fabulous library archive of fashion pattern template books and online platforms which have provided me with a research source and inspiration.
My work has been informed by the wider consciousness around the role of craft, hand-making and decoration. These are qualities we embrace at LCF, rather than regarding anything to do with decoration as lacking in rigour and gravitas. My papercuts engage in the process of craft and are meticulously developed over many months. The scalpel blade is my drawing tool of choice, with which I cut, paste and layer often tiny fragments with the resulting work making reference to those skills often associated with female crafts, such as weaving, embroidery and quilting.
The project was first launched in the Ariana Museum in Geneva and subsequently toured to the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery in Scotland. This is the first opportunity to showcase the work in London, in the new LCF gallery, which is wonderful. I'm currently working on a new project that launches at Gallery Oldham in 2026.
It is a pleasure to exhibit alongside colleagues Dr Eve Lin with their mesmerising immersive film, Dr. Mila Burcikova's subtle, coloured textile designs and PhD researcher, Yunpei Li with her volumous and moving performative costume.
I've worked closely with Katelyn Toth-Fejel as one of her PhD supervisors. Her drawings ‘Clothing Cartographies’ maps the deep relationship between east London residents and their clothing, revealing fashion as a powerful medium of collective care within our social and emotional landscapes. I was delighted to see all the actual drawings together. It's easy to forget the value of looking at the real thing.
One important aspect about the show for me, is that it presents work by early career researchers to those, like me, who are further along. It provides exemplars, from different fields of research practice, of how the theme of Collective Care has been interrogated. In addition, I learned so much from working with inspirational curator, Leila Nassereldein, who is one to watch.