Corinna Spencer: SMALL DREAMS (HOUSE)

Take a tour around the imagination of this incredibly gifted and prolific artist, Corinna Spencer!

90 or so original miniature figurative landscape paintings of the artist’s ghostly signature ‘Dreaming Women’ with ‘All the Eyes’ are in this show. Exactly 53 hand-framed tiny reproductions of her ‘real-scale’ works are laid out on the floor of one room in Small House Cottage alone. 12 ‘standing women’ figures extracted from photos of paintings of Spencer’s (often) horizontal ‘landscape dreamers’, are now shown vertically, propped on paper-doll stands.

The ‘All The Eyes’ graphite portraits are exquisite in their detail. All 42 of the ‘A1’ drawings and all (however many) of the ‘A3’ ones. How many sketchbooks – 60? 80? 100? Lots. Every teensy page in every tiny handmade book has been drawn by hand – Every. Single. Page. There’s an artist book by Corinna Spencer in the V&A collection. We’ve got 80 or so tiny ones!

(This exhibition has been curated remotely by Corinna herself, using Eldi’s hands to recreate the carefully planned set-ups in the fully illustrated, highly detailed ‘Installation Guide’ supplied with the work. The Guide is so beautifully put together it is like a show into itself. An absolute treat is in store for you, dear reader/viewer)

The Standing Room

“Seven figures stand together in this room. They seem out of place and out of their own time. And they are, these figures are taken out of existing paintings, removed from their landscapes where they recline, tipped onto their feet and now stand, motionless. They are uncanny in their dream like existence here in the house.”

Studio

The Portrait Room

Small Dreams (House)

#smalldreamshouse

“I started making work for the cottage using an autobiographical approach, which I is why I included an artists studio in the house. Rather than thinking of the cottage as a miniature space I thought of it as a real life space in which I could exhibit and live, it gave me a chance to make really big work, something I used to be able to do in real life. Each room has been dedicated to an ongoing concern within my practice including portraits of imaginary women, Many Worlds, landscape, figure and dreams.

Small Dreams refers to a series of paintings about dreams, but rather than their content, these paintings are about the space they take up (seemingly huge) in relation to the time it takes to dream.”

– Corinna Spencer, 2021

(The artist wishes to thank Vicky Lockwood for technical support in realising this work.)

The Kitchen

“I didn’t repurpose this room, every house needs a kitchen (though, in hindsight, not a bathroom) and so this room is a lived in kitchen and a place for thinking and writing and drawing. By the figure in the doorway is a tea tray and on the tea tray is a book that contains an automatic writing poem I wrote for #smalldreamshouse . The book is so fragile I expect it to disintegrate on first reading.”

The Doubles

“I made this room the most formal exhibition space within the cottage, the walls are lined with paintings (7.5x10cm) of doubles. Sometimes winged and birdlike these were the last paintings I made for the exhibition.”

Small Worlds Room

The Picture Room

“50 of my paintings from the series #unsleepingwoman #ancientwildness and #smalldreamspainting scaled down and reproduced here. Arranged on the floor of the room with space for the visitor to walk among them.”

The Hallways and Landings

“The figures for Hallways And Landings were one of the first images that popped into my mind when is started thinking about this exhibition. It was these in between spaces that I saw the standing figures working best, and although they also appear in other areas of the house. These hallway figures aren’t visitors.”

The Dark Room

“This is one of my favourite rooms in the house. It points to almost all of the things going on in my work at the moment as well as influences.
.
Her light trapped us in a radiance of bliss so
Pure, hours weren’t hours, or minutes, minutes – Dorothea Tanning”

Corinna Spencer is a painter, born in London in 1973, currently living and working in Devon.

c.v

https://www.instagram.com/corinnaspencer/

All works are for sale.

(Please contact the artist for sales enquiries.)

Individual paintings:

Below: ‘Many Worlds’ paintings (15x20cm)

Below: ‘Small Dreams’ paintings (10x15cm)

Below: ‘The Doubles’ paintings (7.5x10cm)

Price List

Drawings

5×3.5cm – £10
7x5cm – £25

Paintings

7.5x10cm – £50
10x15cm – £100
15x20cm – £150

https://www.corinnaspencer.com/archive/a-woman-in-the-landscape-continued/

The Small Dreams book of poetry on the tea tray in the kitchen

Corinna Spencer
Small Dreams House

Future/Past
Yes, the road that forks
Off to the left, the house
At the end of the gravel path
That holds not an inch of the future
Or promises of the past

“From a piece of automatic writing/poetry in the Small Dreams book that can be found on the tea tray in the kitchen of #smalldreamshouse at @small_house_gallery The book holds one word on each page and will, I expect, disintegrate on first reading.“