Annie Woodford MA RCA

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Gaze

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'My work investigates the nature of invisible worlds that exist beyond and between the surface of things and the continuous intertwining of the past with the future, the real with the imagined.' 

Annie Woodford is a multi disciplinary artist who seeks to transform materials into something unexpected, mysterious and ambiguous. The making is always preceded by a period of research, often involving a detailed examination of elements from the natural world or, sometimes, by time spent immersed within a landscape, space or place. Material investigations - executed both intuitively and analytically - occur concurrently with these periods of research, leading to new ways of thinking and making.

 

Working across several disciplines - drawing, object making, printmaking and painting - she seeks to make the unseen, seen and the unreal, real. Woodford's pieces are like objects of otherness from invisible worlds: dreamlike, the enigmatic occupants of strange imagined landscapes, shadowy vistas or unseen places, they seem to float and oscillate between absence and presence, the past and the future, hovering silently in a place between. 

 

Woodford studied at the Royal College of Art, receiving a travel scholarship and graduating with an MA in Ceramics and Glass. Exhibiting nationally and internationally - often with an emphasis on installations and site-specific works - her work is included in public and private collections worldwide. Extensively travelled, she has carried out major research projects in Iceland, the Arctic and New Zealand. In 2008, she won the Bronze Award in the International Ceramics Competition, which was exhibited in The Contemporary Ceramics Museum in Taiwan and her work was included in 'Breaking the Mould: New Approaches to Ceramics', which profiles ceramicists working at the cutting edge of their discipline. Woodford was an invited artist at the International Ceramic Biennale, Korea in 2009, presenting a collection of her work as part of the World Contemporary Ceramics exhibition and in 2011, a collection of her pieces was exhibited as part of Collect at the Saatchi Gallery. In 2013, she was Artist-in-Residence in Philadelphia, undertaking a research project into the nature of diatoms at the Academy of Natural Sciences and recently was a recipient of the Inches Carr Trust Bursary for Material Research and Development. Between 2012-2014 she was a trustee of Craft Scotland, advising on strategy and development. Currently, she is working on a research project in Scotland, investigating the nature of lichens.