MADE in the Pewsey Vale is delighted to present Still Life, a new collection of paintings by Josie Goddard, and our second solo exhibition with the artist.

​

Classically trained in oil painting, Josie finds beauty and intrigue in the everyday. A self-confessed hoarder, forager and collector, she gathers characterful objects from her studio shelves – lemons, pots, pans and ceramic plates – and gives them new life through paint.

​

Inspired in part by William Nicholson’s experimental still lifes, Josie is fascinated by the alchemy of oil paint: its ability to mimic light, reflection and surface, creating an optical illusion that can make an object appear almost alive.

​

Alongside this celebration of beauty is a fascination with its opposite. Her paintings often explore the delicate threshold between beauty and pain, attraction and unease. This is particularly evident in a series of paintings of initially inspired by accidentally breaking a beautiful ceramic plate. What began as a moment of disappointment became an opportunity to explore the tension between the delicate beauty of the painted ceramic and the violent, jagged break that runs through it.

​

In Still Life, Josie invites us to look again at familiar things, finding wonder, surprise and sometimes something slightly unsettling in the objects we might otherwise overlook.