Writing in the catalogue for Eileen Lawrence's 1992 retrospective at the Usher Art Gallery, Lincoln, critic Sarah Kent noted a change in her art. Lawrence had recently begun to paint in oils (rather than watercolor). She was using more intense color, and, as Kent described, while the images she used were still about 'evocations of place, and ... references to earlier cultures and belief systems ... instead of ranging the elements in rows, she situates them within a visual narrative. Emphasis has shifted from the consideration of nature to a discussion of culture.'
Lawrence trained at the College of Art in Edinburgh, and her work is now in the Scottish National Gallery of Art there. She began her career painting things she saw or found in the highlands, birds, feathers, eggs, reeds, twigs and shells, on paper she made herself. Her work was included in the Scottish Arts Council exhibition Inscape in 1976, which explored poetic meditative responses to the landscape. Lawrence sometimes writes poetry, and her art has been compared to Japanese Haiku verses in its quiet, exquisite precision. Her Prayer Sticks are titled after Tibetan prayer sticks, which are raised on the roofs of houses like spiritual signs. Some were installed in Lincoln Cathedral in 1992.
Like a number of women artists, including Nancy Spero, Lawrence began to work with the symbolism and imagery of ancient goddesses. Her shift to looking at cultures reflects a wider feminist concern with how women have been represented. The symbolic resonance of Lawrence's paintings also ties in with Freud's exploration of the role of myth in the psyche, and Lawrence's use of dream imagery and automatic writing (like Louise Bourgeois and Susan Hiller) can be seen in the light of some feminist readings of Freud, arguing that tapping into the suppressed subconscious is analogous to recovering the suppressed voices of women. |
