Sanctum is an extraordinarily intimate solo exhibition by Joy Wolfenden Brown on floors one and three of Anima Mundi until 17th October.
Joy Wolfenden Brown with her work
Sanctum is Wolfenden Brown’s seventh solo exhibition at Anima Mundi and is imbued with the artist’s renowned sensitivity to absorb the physical and metaphysical world that surrounds and precedes the present moment.
Evocations of fortitude combine with vulnerability, resting beneath an ethereally layered and unmannered, yet luminous oily surface.
The ritualistic painting process flows continuously from the artist’s subconscious, as a visual reflection of deeply felt experience and emotion, simultaneously confronting while offering the viewer comfort through the sharing of a profound and fragile truth.
Figures often appear awkward, perhaps guarded, as if attempting to close the breach created through the wide-eyed protagonist, offering a unique and singular window in to the soul of the subject, the artist and in turn, ourselves.
Joy is a British artist born in Stamford, Lincolnshire in 1961. She currently lives in Bude, North Cornwall. She graduated from Leeds University then completed a post-graduate diploma in art therapy at Hertfordshire College of Art and Design. She worked as an art therapist for ten years before moving to Cornwall in 1999.
Joy has had a number of sell-out solo exhibitions and was the first prize winner in the National Open Art Competition, in 2012. She was awarded the Somerville Gallery painting prize in 2003, was first prize winner at the Sherborne Open in 2007, and won the Evolver Prize at the Royal West of England Academy in 2019. Works were acquired by the Anthony Pettullo Outsider Art Collection in Milwaukee with further works held in collections worldwide.
