Saskia Colwell

Saskia Colwell is a London-based artist whose work explores themes of voyeurism, intimacy and representation. Using charcoal, charcoal powder and chalk on natural calfskin vellum, a traditional support that has been used in art for centuries, she creates a close connection between the body and skin as both subject matter and medium, whereby the vellum, with its natural imperfections, is held in dialogue with the human body depicted. Often intimate in scale, her works offer expansive considerations of female representation and contemporary issues of censorship and agency.

Colwell's works deliberately blur stylistic, visual, and formal lines, as Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou defines in a recent essay: 'Existing at the interstices of the private and the public, the intimate and the distant, the licit and the illicit, the delicate and the crude, the classical and the contemporary, Colwell's drawings profess innocence even when they are ripe with knowing. Bordering on sculpted exactitude when completed in the softest of chalks and charcoal powder, her work delivers one thing, only to dare us to unwrap, to see, to touch, another… She unsettles expectations by making us question what we initially see… and then further probes what we want to know and learn…'