Judith Dean

Judith Dean

Judith Dean works across installation, sculpture, performance, video, online projects, and more recently painting to negotiate the pictorial space as site. Experimenting with painting for several years, in 2017 Dean began practising with Chinese brushes and with her non-writing hand started attempting to write the image through painting, addressing singularity, framing and authorship, balancing figuration and abstraction, playing with divergent perspectives, blind alleys, dead ends, shifting horizons.

Dean’s paintings have been exhibited at Tintype, London, 2019, Galeria Cadaqués, Spain, 2019, White Columns Online, New York, 2021, Project 78 Gallery, St. Leonard’s on Sea, 2022. In 2005 she was awarded the Jerwood Sculpture Prize for her work Field; Guide to Powerstock Common was commissioned by Road for the Future, Dorset in 2012; a residency at Beaconsfield, London, 2013, culminated in the solo exhibition Phase 4. She has exhibited internationally, including shows at, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (1997) and Meinblau Gallery, Berlin (2016).

Dear Magical Openings in Transient Space

I know you’re ok, whatever’s going on, whatever state you’re in. Whilst you open things up, you’re also a coming together, constructions from a vast reservoir of possibility / actuality, and the vagaries / vicissitudes of language. Your transformation speaks volumes – still virtual, transient, illusory, speculative, you’re no longer delusional. You can see through anything.

Your diverse origins from the online public domain reveal more and less about you. Dependent on the generosity of strangers, I have your file names but nothing else; other information was always incomplete, not always correct. Sometimes I searched for more – there’s so much of it, my memory fails me. You could potentially still find your histories / herstories / theirstories / whostories online – divorced as these are from the physical world – as long as the sun doesn’t flare too much, the asteroids can be re-directed, mass extinction doesn’t destroy the Internet.

Whilst your transformation could have been more aesthetically appealing, more dexterously done if I’d used my left hand, the one I write with, you wouldn’t have had as much depth or been as strong, and I couldn’t do that to you just for the sake of appearances.

Very glad you like your new home – they all vary, from found to pre-owned-purchased to brand new. Their contents vary too, of course, being both local and global. I know you enjoy hanging at different angles, being in different positions, moving around. Let’s hope this will be possible.

Xx

Image: Raft, acrylic and oil on linen, 70 x 50cm, 2019