Ita Maude Wooller has spent her life occupied with the complex forces that shape our experience of the world and their impact on human perspective & how our internal landscape dictates our external reality.

Trained as a fine artist at Central St Martins and in interior architecture at the RCA, she’s had a successful career in the arts for many years. Having concentrated on the three dimensional application of design principles in the built environment, she has established a painting practice that translates her thinking into two dimensions alongside experimental sculpture & site specific installation.

Both disciplines are essentially integrated. Whether she is creating a physical, conceptual or two-dimensionally depicted space, Maude Wooller strives to highlight the unseen forces; energy transfer, movement, time, dark matter, intentions, our own psychological state; these factors have such an impact on how we relate to objects in the visual realm, as well as how we interact with and project ourselves into a physical space. She also contemplates the limits of human perception of space and time at the most fundamental levels; atoms, for example, which constitute everything we perceive but are mostly empty space. Nothingness is never nothingness, as Maude Wooller wants to remind us; there are always forces at work, even in the most seemingly static of objects and settings.

Creating predominantly large-scale pieces, she envisages her paintings as rooms or vistas, conceiving them as invitations to fully inhabit each of their interior moments. She uses fenestration as visual devices to frame a shift in the viewers perspective. Working layer upon layer, treating her canvas as a palimpsest, Maude Wooller employs materials such as pencil, traditional oils, inks, plaster, marble dust, acrylics and emulsion house paints to create abstract compositions that vibrate with the energy of their own conception. In fact, Maude Wooller’s artistic process is as closely related to sculpture as painting. When creating a piece, she diligently builds multiple layers before concealing or obfuscating them, removing them, searching for a form.

Each material brings its own properties, symbolism and historical connotations; some literal, some figurative. Maude Wooller uses layers of various whites for their implications of spirituality and clarity, but mainly to emphasise the contradiction of human’s grasp on reality. White is not a colour, but a result of the simultaneous co-existence of all the frequencies of light within the visible spectrum. Other pieces are intense meditations on the colour blue; considering precisely why it evokes such strength of feeling as well as its art historical resonance. For example, ‘blue sky only appears that way to us because it scatters through the atmosphere more broadly than other colours, while bodies of water filter out all the other colours in the spectrum, leaving only the blue for our eyes to take in.

Recent works have seen Maude Wooller further cultivate her interest in the power of myth making and ancient storytelling, referencing characters from Gaelic and classical mythology. Her paintings seek to harness these stories ability to communicate one person inner experience through signs and symbols that can be universally understood.

Maude Wooller is attempting to charge each canvas with the meaning and momentary psychological energy of an individual space, relying on her knowledge of the history of mark making to help her canvases commune with the viewer.

Some paintings in this series were painted while Maude Wooller was pregnant and subsequently miscarried; the rudimentary marks allude to cell formation and beautiful alchemy involved in the creation of life in all of it’s forms. Using the traditionally male-dominated visual language of Abstract Expressionism with influences from Giorgio de Chirico and Joseph Beuys. Driven by the varied attributes of anxiety & the human desire for peace, Maude Wooller paints metaphysical spaces that are as powerful as they are profound.

Ita Maude Wooller trained for her BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins & her MFA in Interior Architecture at the Royal College of Art. She currently works between London & Beaulieu, Hampshire.