Displacement

Painting Galleries

Painting has formed a core part of Boué’s studio practice, often combined with assemblage elements. She is interested in history and material traces, and her approach to painting is process-led, seeking to build an abstract vocabulary for states of exile. Experimental and sensory in nature, Boué has used acrylics, sand and gel mediums to paint on found boards and linen canvases, and employed wax as a medium. A variety of sanding techniques have produced weathered patinas inspired by wooden suitcases and beach furniture remembered from childhood. A concern with texture and line characterises works created in cycles over time, often reworked. Later cycles introduce paper collage elements. A concern to reduce the use of plastics in her work and a period of isolation from her studio during national lockdowns have led Boué to explore new forms and materials, purposefully abandoning all use of acrylic paint.

Contents:
With You In Spirit, 2019
¡Buenos Días, Dictador!, 2018
Uncertain Weather System in Place, 2016
Refuge, 2015
Journeys of Exile, 2014
Lost Landscapes, 2013-14

Paintings

With You In Spirit, 2019

With You in Spirit is a quartet of paintings inspired by the iconic Spanish late Franco era film, The Spirit of the Beehive.

Boué's immersion in the film's soundtrack and film stills at the studio resulted in a quartet of performed and embodied works, centring on key sequences in the film.

The series documents an immersive act of creative empathy.

With You in Spirit 1, Painting with landscape and figures

With You in Spirit 2, Abstract painting with energetic drawing and collage elements

Paintings

¡Buenos Días, Dictador!, 2018

Seven paintings on linen in acrylic and paper collage, steeped in the atmosphere of growing up in the shadow of an unspoken dictatorship. In this series, Boué explores the emotional geography of family exile and seeks to recover aspects of personal and historic memory (memoria histórica), erased from official memory in Spain by political suppression. Here, a previous focus on the narrative histories of the Retirada (the republican retreat from Spain) and the British involvement in the Civil War shifts to her own memory sites - journeys to Spain from England in the 1960s and 1970s.

The paintings form imaginary landscapes and scenarios; collaged figures of small children, adolescents and adults, summon Boué's school days in Birmingham and holidays in Barcelona, where she visited her Spanish grandparents. They offer vignettes through which to examine the fabric of her family's life with new eyes.

“The dictator was everywhere, silently and invisibly setting the preconditions of our lives.”

The spirit of these works is nostalgic yet oddly confrontational. With this juxtaposition of painted and collaged elements, Boué reaches towards the seemingly unspeakable, to tease at the invisibility cloak of Franco’s rule and ask how life carries on in the face of a dictatorship and political exile.

In these works, the dictator is everywhere and yet nowhere to be seen. Cut-out figures from the period are borrowed from sewing pattern illustrations, transplanted to imprecise geographical locations - dreamscapes that conjure a surreal and dissonant atmosphere.

Paintings

Uncertain Weather System in Place, 2016

Uncertain Weather System in Place was a site-specific floor-based work for Dis-locate, a Magdalen Road Studios group exhibition held in April 2016 in an empty Volkswagen showroom on Iffley Road in Oxford with the support of Wadham College and Mid Counties Co-operative.

Boué responded to yards of flooring in the vacant showroom with a floor-based painting for the group show theme of dislocation. Created shortly after receiving an autism diagnosis, the piece treats Boué’s core concerns with identity and displacement.

“The subject of this work – uncertain weather – is a metaphor for so many aspects of my life as an autistic woman. My piece began as an exploration of exile, but I find it works for autism too.”

Paintings

Refuge, a site-specific painting with assemblage elements, 2015

Refuge was created for Unravelling Time, a Magdalen Road Studios group exhibition held at the Abbey Sutton Courtney in October 2015, curated by Les McMinn.

Artists responded in their own ways to the Abbey, a unique building with aspects dating back to the 13th century, and its broader environment. The exhibition featured a wide range of works situated both within the buildings and outside in the grounds, which have a rich and complex history with a unique pattern of ownership. Sutton Courtenay itself has an interesting history through the Astor family and links to particular aspects of the post-war British political scene. In the graveyard of the local church, Eric Blair (George Orwell) is buried.

Boué responded to the history of the Abbey as a refuge and to the burial of George Orwell close by. Orwell’s participation as a volunteer in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War intersects with Boué’s family history.

“Refuge evolved in situ. I hung a painting beneath a vine canopy, and placed a suitcase with twigs and a small mirror beneath it. Reflection felt important in initiating a dialogue between the past and present. This exact location on the threshold to the Abbey’s interior; a kitchen window and a doorway nearby resonated deeply with me. I loved that it was outdoors, yet intimate and sheltered; it seemed to speak of arrival and the sense of welcome emanating from the Abbey. As the suitcase filled with rain, it felt poignant and right.”

Paintings

Lost Landscapes, 2013-14

Lost Landscapes is a series of abstract landscapes and assemblages responding to the Spanish exodus of 1939, known as La Retirada.

Paintings which, in some cases, seek to evoke the textures of the internment camps at the first moments of rupture, and, in others, to locate loss within the actual and psychological state of exile.

Internal geographies, emotional interiors and exteriors imagined and felt within the picture frame.

These paintings represent a return to the painterly roots of Boué's practice but also form 'windows' for her installations and are integral in the move towards stagings and performances around the themes of exile.

Assemblage pieces conjure domestic geographies.

Exillio, Mixed media abstract landscape with typewriter tape

Diptych, Two abstract landscape paintings

Arena y Mar, Abstract textured landscape painting

La Casa del Exilio, Sandbox assemblage with dollhouse furniture

Vigil, Assemblage tealights and sculptural forms in sand and wax

Paintings

Journeys of Exile, 2014

Journeys of Exile is a series of abstract landscapes imagining journeys of exile from Spain to England undertaken by a group of Spanish exiles in 1937 and 1939.

Boué imagines and attempts to embody the psyche in transit and the marks of journeying.

Period suitcases are an inspiration, and the motif of the window emerges.

These embodiments also invoke Boué's journeys between England and Spain between 1962 and 1975, and her childhood spent on the beaches of Barcelona.