Arch back, release, submit. Looking at Yoga (2019) by Holly Fewson I’m reminded of the beauty that exists in solitary moments, of the quiet calm that resides in giving yourself the time to just be. Fewson's exhibition ‘Garden Landing’, showing at Jerico Contemporary, features an array of paintings set within a sprawling garden landscape. Each work depicts female figures both individually and in groups posed in various positions and states of mind. The garden is what is referred to as a 'hortus conclusus', or enclosed garden, that harbours the female figures and encourages conversation about the female experience, traversing themes of boundaries, self-awareness, and the space between your own experience and another person’s perception of it. The artist's enclosed garden resists the outside world in order to restore one’s inner world.
In Yoga, a female figure is the central focus point of the canvas. She is pictured in a curved back bend yoga position, her abdomen faced towards the sky, her languid arms outstretched past her lilac yoga mat, hands resting on the grass behind her. A tendril of hair spills over an arm, her expression is one that has arrived at a state of peace. Her naked flesh is painted with deliberate though soft moving brush strokes of cream, yellow, pink, orange and white. The colours aren’t fragmented or competing with one another, rather they give depth, texture, light and shade to the figure’s body. She takes up space and allows herself to do so. In the background, the sun spills its orange light across the ground, as it rises — or maybe sets — behind the garden wall. That may be the only measure of time here, in this dreamlike place.
The work is transportive, it breathes you in as you breathe out; allowing a moment to find that same sacred space within.