Kim Booker: I Want To Live Twice

I Want to Live Twice is a solo exhibition by British artist Kim Booker. Situated in a former Methodist chapel, the exhibition explores an existential theme fitting for its setting: a fear of death and a desire for more time, signifying a more personal shift in Booker’s practice.

Working in acrylic on large canvases, Booker uses colour, gesture and figure to express the psychology of the female experience. Her paintings often feature poses that are suggestive of differing emotional states, created intuitively through a combination of gestural abstraction and layers of drawn imagery.

This new body of work features naked female figures, that appear in a position of surrender or sacrifice, resembling the crucifix. Booker’s expressive and energetic strokes and scrawls, particularly over the mouths and faces, suggest a silencing or a loss of control to a powerful force, internal or external. The paintings are self-portraits and are for Booker a process of self-reflection about how much to reveal and conceal about herself. A transitionary state both spiritual and psychological is clear, and in their confessional and reflective quality, the paintings bare all in such a way that many might relate to.