The show features recent paintings by the artist that explore the prominence of powerful female muses in history and art history

2nd – 30th November 2012 Instone makes paintings concerned with gender and power, frequently depicting influential or well known public figures. Her work draws attention to how we consume images of women and the female archetype, from the dangerous seductress to the alluring innocent. These sexually charged paintings of women express the conviction that painting and making marks on a surface can achieve a sense of reality like no other medium. Offering therapeutic release they are a series of portraits of the artist’s most intimate feelings about the female image.

The title of the exhibition comes from the Yeats poem, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’; the elusive female muse, forever sought by the titular narrator, permeates Instone’s paintings; the line ‘because a fire was in my head’ itself an expression of the creative process. Appropriating historical stories and images Instone creates a totally immersive art that contains a sense of the past and the present. From Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Bronzino’s Venus, this layering of images and meaning is both a conversation with our visual history and an enquiry into the potency of certain images. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, in which a number of prominent contemporary women write about Instone’s paintings. The catalogue provides another facet to the exhibition by showing other women engaging in the conversation that Instone’s work prompts. Contributors include Caitlin Moran, India Knight, Shami Chakrabarti, Laura Bailey, Polly Stenham, Victoria Williams and Baroness Helena Kennedy QC.