Pathways: Artist practice sharing with Renée Spierdijk and Judith Weik

The Pathways series has developed as a space to explore artists' thinking and their choices in a friendly group setting. Seeing the display of their work, and joining the discussions can refresh your own ideas and understanding, whether you are also an artist, or simply interested in the communicative power of creativity.

Renée Spierdijk’s paintings are inspired by images of young women and girls originating from found photographs. Renée chooses portraits of children who are posed in formal clothes and settings, frequently holding or surrounded by political or religious artefacts. She is interested in the process of domestication and conditioning which the children seem to be subjected to and in which they appear patient, content, or quietly mutinous as they wait and hope to become themselves.

There is something comically absurd yet uncanny about Judith Weik’s carefully composed images. We are left with questions. Who’s the victim? What’s the crime? And always, “What on earth is going on?” The images offer no resolution to these questions but in the transformations that they often depict, of bodies to things, of the living to the dead and the visible to the invisible, they do point to a motivating experience of change. But perhaps mostly they recognise that the clash of dreams and realities is always uncomfortable, sometimes painful and, occasionally, funny.

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Host or Publisher Cambridge Artspace