Catpeople Collage #4 (2017)

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd is known for her exuberant, inclusive and improvised performances, informed by folk theatre. She is increasingly known for her paintings and collages, such as those illustrating Some Canterbury Tales, which pull together a variety of found images, to create exciting new connections and allusions. Similarly, the Catpeople collages revel in the excitement of linking images, old and new, and discovering the new connotations they create.

Catpeople Collage #2, for example, juxtaposes a cat’s extended paw with a muscular flexed arm. Each is either side of a mysterious yellow gem. Catpeople Collage #4 also uses both a cat and gem stones: here a snarling cat’s face is pasted below an ornate medieval jewel.

Swindon Museum and Art Gallery was immediately drawn to Chetwynd’s collages. Through their use of coloured photocopies, they capture the creative energy involved in their own construction. Behind their humour and almost irreverent approach to cutting and pasting, they show a conviction in the power of images and ideas.

Animals, figures, objects, landscapes: Chetwynd takes the themes that underpin much of Swindon Museum and Art Gallery’s collection and reconfigures them in audacious new ways. Collage #3, with its sweeping winged figure, offers a nod to the works in Swindon’s collections that have embraced or deconstructed classical themes, such as Cecil Collin’s Pastoral (undated), or Maggi Hambling’s Descent of the Bull’s Head (1985). In the past three years, Swindon has actively collected works on paper and has recently been the recipient of a gift of fifty contemporary works on paper given in tribute to the gallerist Meryl Ainslie. Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s collages provide a complement and contrast, offering a more radical sensibility underpinned by an anthropologist’s fascination.

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