Marigold Plunkett, ‘The girl with the yellow hands reads deep into the night and has passion in her heart'

ARTIST STATEMENT:

My recent body of paintings have been evolving and changing in exciting and challenging ways because I am currently enrolled on the Turps Off-Site Painting Programme, based in Hastings. The two paintings of my teenage daughters are a part of this journey. My practice tends to focus on figures in interior spaces as I find the subject ripe with symbolic meaning, particularly as I have my own experience as a mother and artist. It sits in a liminal space between the familiar and domestic, and a kind of uneasy ambiguity. The figures are in quiet contemplation, but their gaze is questioning, turned in upon themselves and at the same time out upon the viewer. At its best, the home is a safe space, somewhere to retreat to in times of stress, or difficulty. However, in my experience there are often tensions in this space because it can be somewhere where women, particularly mothers, feel trapped in a cycle of domestic monotony and frustration. A lot of my work circles around this dialogue between dichotomies. The two paintings have been made by a mother, looking at her daughters, not far off womanhood, wondering what the future holds. They are personal, but also express something universal - the tension between female empowerment and choice and the continued expectation of women to take up the traditional domestic role at home.

BIOGRAPHY:

Marigold Plunkett has an MA in Printmaking from Camberwell College of Arts, UAL and a BA in Social Anthropology. She has won several prizes, most significantly, the Ingram Prize in 2020 with her etching The Light/The Dark. She is a Kent based artist, regularly exhibiting in national and international exhibitions, twice at Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair and the ING Discerning Eye, London. Working from her studio in Kent Marigold teaches etching and as well as editioning a day a week for Artichoke Print Workshop in Brixton, which she has done since graduating in 2020. In 2023 Marigold was awarded an Arts Council Grant to continue to develop her painting practice alongside printmaking and is currently taking part in the inaugural Hastings Turps Off-Site Painting Programme. Last Spring she had the opportunity to attend a residency in Snowdonia, which has been a catalyst for her practice, solidifying the direction she wants to take her work. Marigold regularly returns to figures in interior spaces, usually of close family members. Her figures are often in ambiguous states, underpinned by a concern with the role of the female gaze. In the year ahead Marigold is planning several group shows in London and will be opening her studio to visitors as a part of South East Open Studios in June.