Steph
GOODGER
Steph Goodger lives in Bordeaux, France, and often exhibits her paintings in the UK and internationally. She was a prize winner in the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize 2020, having previously exhibited in JMPP 2016 and 2004. She was selected for the Brewers Towner International, in 2022, an exhibition and prize at Towner Eastbourne.
In 2023, Goodger had her first solo exhibition, Lusitania, with De Queeste Art, Belgium.
Goodger holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from the University for the Creative Arts, Surrey (1995) and an MA from Brighton University (1999).
TART's Open Call Winner. 2023
The Crossing series is a reflection on the more global issue of our ongoing conflict with nature, posing the desperately urgent question of, what we are doing to our world?
The two paintings featured here focus on a meeting place, formed as a railway track and a river intersect. The image of an ultimate meeting place also originated from TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men.
These paintings offer a window into the landscape of conflict. There is a feeling of the landscape as an ever mutating, shifting body, breaking apart and coming back together again in new configurations. The Cross shape is a dynamic force, seeming to tear a fissure in the landscape, creating a chasm. Equally, it can act like a kind of stitching, holding the surface together.
The Dream House series. Arcades are houses or passages having no outside – like the dream.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. 1927
The photographic record of abandoned interiors, provided by aid workers on NGO rescue ships, from organisations such as SOS Mediterranean, was the starting point for both series of paintings.
The paintings in The Dream House series are based on these real yet dream-like interiors. The traces of existence within this precarious dwelling are scattered all around, with the discarded clothes, water bottles and food packaging. The hull is cursorily repaired with odd pieces of timber, all masked over with a unifying layer of bright blue paint. These spaces feel as if they the very breath of every soul who has taken that hazardous journey.
