Ideas and Emotions: The Art of Judy Southerland
Red Dirt, Fast Cars, acrylic on canvas
Judy Southerland is an artist who works across disciplines, creating figurative and abstract works in two and three dimensions, expressing ideas and emotions from everyday life and translating them into higher experiences. The artist’s recent works combine saturated, monochromatic colour palettes with half-obscured text.
I really enjoy the way Judy uses colour to express deeper concepts in her artwork. Each of the artist’s individual series seems to revolve around a very specific and always distinct colour palette. In Rules and Measures, a pastel palette creates the opportunity for texture and silhouette on a mixed media canvas. Some of Judy’s newest works use deep, earthy tones while borrowing a similar style of composition with text and mixed media details, creating a sense of change over time.
A common theme in Judy’s work is words -- their meanings, and how said meanings can become distorted. In series like Lacking Wings the artist uses images as a way of not only exploring words but of inventing a new, perhaps more reliable visual language to convey similar concepts.
Field of Operation; Stroke/Green with Conveyors and Outliers (installation view)