Saskia Colwell: Skin on Skin

‘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’ — Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou

‘She extends the choreographed contortions of her body onto that of the vellum, so that the attitude in which her back bends or arches, her hips twist and her fingers pull and part folds of flesh is exaggerated or isolated from the original.’

‘Orifices appear where they are not and do not appear where they should be. This is Colwell hitting back at the hetero-patriarchal policing built into algorithms, at AI’s pretension to “know” what is risqué from what is actual risk…’

‘Colwell’s artworks create intimacy and proximity, but not necessarily between our body and hers. Instead they draw a relationship between our body and the one we dream of, the one we yearn for, the one we can never, ever, fully possess.’

‘Abstracting the parts from the whole, the personal into the impersonal, Colwell attentively draws attention to the points and folds and zones, erogenous and otherwise, of the body that make us question ourselves and our way of seeing, knowing and grasping the world.’

‘There is the pristine and perfectly symmetrical pairing of feet touching like two hands in prayer… And there is the open groin beneath, a clitoral bud of flesh poking upwards. Darkness frames these two bodily fragments, sublimely abstracting them further into a landscape of dense blacks and polished whites.’

‘What really completes the transformation of messy materiality into near-marbled perfection is the calf’s vellum employed instead of traditional linen, paper or parchment. Skin on skin, as Colwell has described it, this once-living, now dead, organic surface adds additional layers and depths to her works.’

‘Transformations of the obscene into the obliquely erotic, the mundane into the marvellously sensual are achieved precisely because of Colwell’s employment of charcoal. Technically perfect, her drawings perform another spell whereby the assumed messiness, freedom and play that one associates with charcoal is finessed into its opposite: into precision… ’

‘Tension turns to harmony when the natural veins of the vellum emerge across the unclothed back of one of Colwell’s works. Here, what could appear alarmingly visceral reappears as pure and beautiful, the knowledge of two bodies dissolving into one.’

Born in 1999 in London, where she currently lives and works, Saskia Colwell graduated from the Masters Painting Programme at the Royal College of Art in 2023. In 2022 she completed a BA (Hons) in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art and, in 2018, the Foundation Year at the Royal Drawing School.

Her work has been included in several group exhibitions including LEDA and the SWAN: a myth of creation and destruction, curated by Minna Moore Ede and presented by Vortic in collaboration with Victoria Miro, London (2024), VAMPIRE::MOTHER curated by Jasmine Wahi in collaboration with Anat Ebgi Gallery, Los Angeles (2024), Conscious Unconscious at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2023) and Summer Lovin’ curated by Joan Tucker and Henry Relph at Stems Gallery, Paris (2022). Colwell’s work is in a number of private collections.