LOUISE BENTON

My work is quite playful, combining more traditional elements of religious artwork with incongruous imagery, for example of sex toys and fetish wear. The starting point for me is usually a stage of reading and drawing, picking out narratives and ideas that strike me as interesting.  Drawing and printmaking run continuously alongside more sculptural processes as a more spontaneous way of working, which I think prevents me from getting too rigid as the concepts unravel.

“Printmaking for me is a really rich opportunity for experimentation and mark-making, and the element of chance inherent in printmaking constantly provokes me to question and reassess the marks I’m making, how I’m handling the paint, how I’m imprinting it onto paper etc. It has great scope to delight and disappoint respectively. The behaviour of the material ends up being as important as my input as an artist, which interests me more than drawing or painting when I have a lot more control.”

Churches are a really rich source of inspiration for me. They are a culmination of architecture, painting and sculpture, sound, smell and scale- I feel like I take something new away with each immersion into the space. My grandmother used to take me into her favourite churches in Valencia, Spain when I was growing up, some of which are particularly striking. That sense of wonder has always stayed with me. I have recently completed two large 1660 x 600 mm stained glass windows, depicting two scenes from the life of Saint Carmine, a fictional patron saint of female pleasure, whose mythology and symbolism I have been compiling over the past six months. This is a new process for me, and research into church and chapel spaces inspired my shift into the medium, which has such strong visual associations with religious art.

One of the things that really fascinates me about churches is the division of heavenly and earthly zones. In the space we would sit, or look around, the colours are dark, there’s wood and marble and paintings of the life of Christ and suffering of saints. Above, particularly in catholic or orthodox churches, there’s a bright, light, heavenscape or dome, with angels, clouds, cherubs. With my cherub prints, I like to think a bit of this heaven-space comes into the spaces we inhabit, be it a gallery or a home. How we interact with art, and how it can transform a space to the extreme of bringing an illusion of the divine, in something I think about a lot. It’s another aspect that drew me to stained glass, where the light shining through can change the colours and patterns of a space.

Louise Benton (b.1995) uses the visual language of catholicism to tell contemporary stories of sexuality and pleasure. Her reference points touch upon personal narratives and memories of growing up within these belief systems and their cathedrals. She holds an MA History of Art from the University of Edinburgh and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art. Benton has shown recently at Studio 1.1, Shoreditch and Greatorex Street, Whitechapel, and has upcoming work showing at Woolwich Print Fair and the Courtauld Institute of Art.