Angelahadrill - Angela Hadrill Illustration

ANGELA HADRILL - ILLUSTRATOR - BRIGHTON CREATIVES

I came across Angela Hadrill’s work at the Brighton Illustration Fair. I was drawn to her work for her colour choices and use of watercolour. I believed Jen would be a big fan, and told Angela that if Jen managed to come down, I could bet she’d say something! I bumped into Angela a few days after, found her website and had to ask her some questions. Enjoy! What are your favourite materials to work with? All of my work uses watercolours and a bit of gouache. I’ve only been using them for a couple of years, so I still feel as if I’m learning how to paint which is a lot of fun. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with colour; the transparency of watercolour means that you can get such a lot of colour variation depending on which pigments you use so I get to try out so many different colours. We adore ‘Marseille’ which goes along the poem by Marcus Truin, how did you guys connect? We’ve been a couple for a while and about a year into meeting him I got to read some of his work. He had written an anthology of poems which were fantastic and I really wanted to collaborate with him. …

I did a little interview with Emilie at Brighton Creatives. Have a glance.

Painting my favourite statue. (at Tresco, Isles of Scilly)

by Angela Hadrill

'Medusa' Angela Hadrill [crop]

This piece was created in response to an amazing talk “Women in Power” by Mary Beard in which, among other things, she discusses the origins of the medusa myth and its depictions in modern design.

You can listen to the talk here: https://youtu.be/VGDJIlUCjA0?t=33m23s

"There are many ancient variations on Medusa’s story. One famous version has her as a beautiful woman raped by Poseidon in a temple of Athena, who promptly transformed her, as punishment for the sacrilege, into a monstrous creature with a deadly capacity to turn to stone anyone who looked at her face. (...) This is the classic myth in which the dominance of the male is violently reasserted against the illegitimate power of the woman. And Western literature, culture and art have repeatedly returned to it in those terms. The bleeding head of Medusa is a familiar sight among our own modern masterpieces, often loaded with questions about the power of the artist to represent an object at which no one should look." Beard, 2017

Medusa is constantly being depicted as object rather than subject, as a decapitated head rather than a powerful woman. She is reduced, both literally and figuratively, to a faceless being that can't be looked at and that has had their agency stripped away from them.

The narrative should be changed. She wasn't alone, she had two equally strong sisters. Being transformed was not her curse, it was a representation of her strength. She wasn't a monster, she was powerful and it was that which was feared.

A hand painted mobile showing memories of an island.

Concertina book exploring themes of nature and humankind's relationship and attitude towards it. Nature is no longer natural, it is cultivated and curated by man in such a way that even the oldest, most sublime areas in the natural world only remain because we allow them to. Here, two characters who live in jungle surroundings discover that their forest was never more that a manmade construct.

Selected pages from a book illustrating 'The Circular Ruins' by Jorge Luis Borges.

Cover image for "Heart of Darkness".

Part of a page from an upcoming book I have been illustrating. Copyright © 2014 Angela Hadrill.