I'll Take Your Pain Away (2025)
Produced by Counter Studio, Margate.
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Produced by Counter Studio, Margate.
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Vanessa Raw paints lush, dreamlike worlds that centre on female pleasure, intimacy, and kinship. Her compositions often enclose their subjects within dense natural settings — branches, leaves, and gestural brushstrokes that gather into rounded canopies, creating a sense of sanctuary and privacy.
Creatures are a recurring motif in Raw’s practice, deepening the mythic atmosphere of her scenes. In I'll Take Your Pain Away (2025), two female figures are entwined amid grasses with their hair transforming into the coiling bodies of snakes. Traditionally, snakes have been used in art, history, and the Bible to symbolise the monstrous or the temptress. Raw reclaims this imagery, transforming it into a gesture of empowerment — an embrace of the “monstrous” self as a symbol of strength and self-possession.
In 2022 Raw took a radical new direction with her work, shifting from traditional portraiture tropes to paint imagined, same-sex, intimate scenes of women in confected landscapes. Surrounded by flowers and trees, sometimes accompanied by fauna too, these suspended moments of blissful intense connections show naked, energised bodies part-merged with each other and the landscapes they are in.
Using a heightened palette Raw conveys the intensity of the moment, as well positioning the paintings in the realm of the imaginary. Likewise, the dream-like fluidity of some areas of mark making suggest an altered state of consciousness, a deep human connectivity occurring simultaneously on a physical and spiritual plane. Photographs taken on her daily runs through local nature areas, an activity undertaken with therapeutical escapist intention, are used as source material for her background landscapes binding their confection to meaningful actualities, pulling into the paintings the remembered feeling of oneness with nature.
Raw studied for a BA in Fine Art at Loughborough University. In 2022 Raw was selected for a space at TKE Studios in Margate. Solo exhibitions include On Earth We Weren't Meant to Stay at at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate. In 2024, Raw was invited to be artist-in-residence at the Rubell Museum, Miami.
