Recently graduated from the renowned Camberwell College of Arts, Brookes is already creating excitement in the art world, attracting considerable interest in her elaborate and complex work. Here she presents a new series of vast pen and ink drawings, which take their inspiration from Flemish Renaissance artists, notably Pieter Brueghel.
The drawings are a response to seemingly small details and stories which have caught the attention of the artist. Brookes takes these details and creates work that contains expansive meaning and symbolism. Within the landscape of the images there are multiple narratives that compose a scatterlogical discourse on the meanings of existentialism.
Brookes’ composition is both confident and intricate - playfully distorted familiar themes such as the eroticized subject matters of life, death, heaven and hell, point to a mythological impression – and is reinforced by her strong line and pen work. Her imagery always promises the chance of a new and subversive discovery, as if navigating oneself through a labyrinth. The narratives and characters at the heart of the work create an overwhelming sense of action and its themes are often on the verge of the primal and grotesque. However, Brookes manages to imbue each piece with humour and one can sense a note of comedic irony through the underlying absurdity.
In ‘Descent of Life’ the essential ideas that have occupied artists throughout history are explored and manipulated to produce a series full of contrast and intrigue. From the sheer scale of the drawings to the minute detail within them, from the morbid to the joyous, this body of work is delightfully provocative and at the same time visually absorbing.
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