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The intimate works of British artist Felicity Powell (1961-2015) are charged with presence and a poetic, surreal beauty. Over the course of a 30-year career, Powell developed a richly associative practice spanning sculpture, drawing, photography and video, through which she explored the interconnected realms of myth, science and belief. Widely recognised for reinvigorating the medallic tradition, Powell also curated several acclaimed exhibitions that broadened critical engagement with the medium.
Born in London in 1961, Powell studied at the Royal Academy Schools, London, between 1983 and 1986. Her early sculptures, made during this period, feature flayed figures and deconstructed forms described with sinuous wire and cable, and conceived as expanded, three-dimensional drawings in space. Awarded a Gulbenkian Scholarship to the British School at Rome in 1986–87, she remained in the city for several years afterwards. Rome proved a formative influence, inspiring Powell through the traces of lives and histories embedded within the city’s architecture. During this period, scale, movement and light became increasingly vital to her practice, along with imagery both ephemeral and intangible: zooplankton, tears and water droplets; skeletal leaves and ripples on water; modelled in wax, etched into glass or accumulated on the surface of patinated bronze. The idiom of an all-seeing eye or a flexed, gesturing hand recur throughout her practice, conceived as symbols that draw connection between the body, spirit and beyond. ‘I’m looking for metaphor, or a kind of poetic way of revealing something…’ (1) she noted about her meticulously crafted art, which synthesises languages of the vernacular, fantastical and classical.
In 2000, Powell won a competition to design the Millennium Medal for the Royal Mint, a project that led her on a new path of exploration. Her winning design featured a dandelion head as a symbol of the cosmos and its scattered spores like a clock: a direct allusion to nature’s fragility and the swift passage of time. Other medal commissions soon followed, including those for the Linnaean Society, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Inspired by intaglios, coins and medals of the past and by the Renaissance reliefs of Pisanello, Donatello and Arnolfo di Cambio, Powell approached medals as small-scale sculptures; as objects with heft and a pleasing, hand-held scale.
This commitment to expanding the possibilities of the medal extended beyond her own practice. In 2009, drawing on a counter-cultural strand within medallic history, Powell organised the landmark exhibition Medals of Dishonour with curator Philip Attwood at the British Museum, inviting prominent contemporary artists to expand on the subversive lineage of this arcane genre. Together with her own commissions, the exhibition helped redefine medals as a form of contemporary artistic expression.
Alongside this string of Powell’s practice was an avid exploration in sculpture and perception. In 2002 she created an acclaimed intervention in the Victoria and Albert Museum's Renaissance Galleries entitled Drawn from the Well (2002-4), an installation of etched mirrors inside the ancient well heads which activated the gallery space and surrounding sculptures in subtle, and entirely transformative, ways. In her smaller-scale wax bas-reliefs, set on the dark backsides of mirrors, Powell focuses on forms that are mutable and transcendent. Worked out intuitively, with subtle modulations of depth and opacity, they feature shape-shifting subjects, hovering in a space between two and three dimensions. Caught mid-metamorphosis, their imagery is unsettling: fish swim from mouths, a head grows roots, or a hand sprouts antlers, summoning the hybrid beings of ancient myth. ‘The great thing about mythology is it is a carte blanche for you to invent’ Powell reflected; ‘to make connections, and take on the idea of transformation – that one thing will turn into another and back again.’ (2)
Powell’s near-magical facility with wax is captured in the stop motion animation Sleight of Hand (2011), in which we see her hands, modelling a miniature relief, from above. In the later, poignant film Scanning (2011), created for an exhibition at the Wellcome Trust, Powell overlays MRI and CT-PET scans of her body, taken during her cancer treatment, with her own illustrations, transforming clinical images into a compelling and evocative visual narrative. A similar perceptual shift occurs in her prolific drawings, which depict figurative elements, loosely arranged within sparse, dreamlike compositions. Across these works, Powell distilled the enduring themes of her practice: myth, metamorphosis and the porous boundary between the visible and invisible, continuing to work until her ultimately death in 2015, aged 53.
Felicity Powell was born in 1961 in London and died in 2015. Her work has been exhibited at State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (2013); The Wellcome Trust, London (2011); British Museum (2009); Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2002-04; 2005); Monnaie de Paris (2002); Norwich Castle Museum, UK; British Museum, London (2001) and Goethe National Museum, Weimar, Germany (2000).
Her selected medal commissions include Department of Coins and Medals, British Museum, London (2010; 2000); Linnaean Society, London (2010; 2007); Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2009; 2001) Mo Ibrahim Foundation (2008; 2007) and the Millennium Medal Competition by The Royal Mint and The British Art Medal Society (2000). In 2009 she won the Chora Prize for originality and merit for the exhibition Medals of Dishonour.
1. Felicity Powell quoted in A Precise Art
2. Felicity Powell interviewed at Alexia Goethe Gallery, London, 2011