About the artist - Felicity Warbrick

Felicity Warbrick's latest body of work concentrates on the idea of revealing what civilisations leave behind – the handmade 'traces' of everyday human existence. Focusing on the utilitarian beauty of pre-industrial, indigenous objects, whether they're useful – a pair of shoes, a Scottish creel or woven hurdle – or purely decorative, like the Etruscan heads of Volterra, each object has its own story, and has been made by human hands for a specific purpose.

Where previously Felicity’s drawings have concentrated on the exteriors of vernacular buildings, this new body of work invites the viewers to step inside, entering stage-like spaces in which objects are the protagonists. With a drawing method that is measured and meticulous, Felicity’s work in itself is an homage to the creative process of making the object. Each piece is very labour-intensive, and the concentration required to make the thousands of tiny marks each demands can be seen as an acknowledgement of the ingenuity of craftspeople both past and present.

Felicity’s desire to preserve these relics of our past, a kind of archive of the artisanal, perhaps comes through most revealingly in her woodcuts. This choice of medium is in itself artisanal, involving the painstaking method of cutting into a plywood block. This technique was of course historically much used for producing book illustrations, and the implied narrative is part of its appeal, as if the object's story is embedded in the final image.

Felicity Warbrick studied at Chelsea College of Art. She was long-listed for the John Moores Prize in 2010 and an exhibitor in the 2011 Jerwood Drawing Prize. She has shown with Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh, The Cat Street Gallery in Hong Kong, and Waterhouse & Dodd, London. Having spent her childhood on the edges of the Yorkshire Dales, she now lives and works in rural Shropshire