Irene Godfrey’s compact monochrome paintings come in stark contrast but are no less powerful. She too plays with orientalism and the stylistic movements from the past, but as a means of breaking apart any sense of certainty, to the extent that even at a small scale, her paintings are an exercise in spatial disorientation. Bucolic historical landscapes are twisted and fragmented, cut open with painterly paths that make up down and east west. Blue-and-white Delftware patternings turn crazed and wax hysterical. Irene uses her mark-making to put all safe ideas under scrutiny. In the process she prises her way into the fragility of both memory and of any cosy assumptions about the natural world we live in. Both, in Irene’s work, break down under interrogation.
