Delpha Hudson is an artist who Informed by her experiences of motherhood has developed a painting and performative practice that layers mythology and historical research, hand invites us to consider deeper connections between ecology and care.
Delpha uses a colourful visual language with a lyrical medievalesque vernacular that has a vivid narrative function. Painting creates a unique space to register presence and evoke empathy and understanding. Idealised archetypes are surrounded by surreal landscapes and historical patterns filled with figures and hybrid creatures. They tell stories recognising the significant role that women play in ecologies of care.
Strange fictions create a strong identification with the human condition. Exploring women’s experience through carnivalesque juxtapositions, Delpha satirizes hierarchies that have confined and contained women, and creates conversations about our collective responsibility for the world around us, and our potential for transformation and change.
The painting follows similar themes to my previous painting ‘our human moment’ in that it echoes ideas about manmade vs natural time and human survival, linking women’s lives to natural and frozen forms, making visible their role in the production and sustaining of life with a nod to stasis, women’s time and the myth of women’s equality
Small figures, flora and fauna that have been found in ice; mammoths, tigers, wolf heads appear within the fabricated pattern of ‘ice cubes’ reminiscent of 50s wallpaper designs – like all patterns they come round again and again, culture defrosting and regurgitating the old, containing and restraining re-labelling the past.
Yet there are landscape forms, cryptids and sunshine in this mythical scene that transmit multiple meanings linked to a cosmic texture of latent mythical forms with whom every organism is interweaved.
The title is a play on the word ‘human’, often associated with our better qualities as well as our failures, the use of ‘human’ here also refers to the scale of our miniscule ‘human moment’ in relation to the age of the Earth. However important we think we are, we are just a moment in time. We are so inconsequential that if the world formed say 450 million years ago, we’ve been around – 200,000 years. e.g. if the world started at midnight and the present moment is the next midnight we’ve been around since 11.59.59 = 1 second.
Our best shot at survival is to evolve and focus on our mammalian qualities of looking after our young (mothering), our ability to work together for others, and the common good. Accepting our ‘swarming’ moment’ will naturally come to an end as all epochs do, there is inevitability not hopelessness; looking to what really matters. The strongest marker of our survival tactic for our species is care.
And after all what life attests is its ability (although probably not human) to survive against all the odds despite multiple mass extinctions. Life will continue in some form. Let’s make what we have, while we have it, a meaningful life.
Artwork is available for sale please get in touch via the contact page.
Find out more about current work: news page. installations and projects.
Check out my Instagram : @delphahudson