Le Doelettes
2022, Installation (found objects)
Rooted in dark academia, Le Doelettes was the formal response I had to the final degree show for my BA at Central Saint Martin's school of Art and Design. Existing at the intersection between influences of Fashion, Art and Design: the Doll form is a state I exist in relation to my creations that I wished to communicate back through these pieces.
Culturally Dolls pose as signifiers of relational culture, and so the darkness I am responding is vomited back in the forms of my dancing Doelettes made from the matter of struggle and human hardship with a very simple method.
Here to you I offer children of hell, sprung forth from Persephone and Hades, as the art of my dead innocence.
Rylie Goodchild
Doll Bodies
2020, pencil on paper
Through documenting life practices
that I have maintained for many years
of social conditioning these pieces are
to be seen as playing with the matter
of form and body autonomy. As a
term used to describe a specific
group, to have a doll body is to exist
as a doll at all events and be
engaged with as so.
Rylie Goodchild
The Dolls
2020, installation
Throughout cultures around the world dolls act as signifiers of tradition and history. Within the context, these cursed objects act as documentation of my past selfhoods tangled in the hair and collected matter I engage with.
Channeling spirituality into form
with the goal to master anatomy,
this figurine installation exists in the space between something and nothing: liminality of being. The dolls dance, beautiful yet suspended by invisible wires. The pelt of pervious work hangs above them, as if they've fallen from the practice of my young artistic career.
Rylie Goodchild
They're Home
2020, installation
Progressing from earlier works with knit, this collaborative sculpture mimics a habitat for the safety of young ones. There is a high level of play in the precariousness of how the objects are placed; with the act of installation being an
instrumental part of the process of making.
Rylie Goodchild X Liam Benjamin Bratchford
Les Petit Filous
2020, film stills
Taken from a short fashion film made for an assignment, these stills aim to ask the viewer to see further into superficialities and find the intricacies of intellect at play to facilitate the protective selfhood of beauty.
Rylie Goodchild X Charley Sayers
Safety Blanket
2020, textile
Knitting came to me in the durational struggle felt across 2021, as we all strapped in for the second year of government restrictions. The prolonged activity of repeated loops and hand craft felt as part of an arts and crafts renaissance from the effects of 2020. Like the original movement of the 19th century, with this practice lead approach to creating, I hoped to produce an object that held more integrity and meaning for myself than a mass produced product of the same nature.
The tactility of textiles is an incredible comfort that human's are drawn to in times of extreme healing or adaption. An object then moves beyond its own
materiality and into an ephemeral state that has been given magical status within our emotional
associations.
With the added twigs and chains, I felt this object looks as though made my feral children; a not so incomparable state to our body of students at CSM.
Rylie Goodchild
Telling Stories
2020, video
These videos were made in the spirt of playing with text in a more loose manner than before. There is a provocative nature to the audio, set against the back drop of the comprehension I was trying to make of my surroundings after a national lockdown. I felt like a doe taken by aliens and returned home with a new experience. This state came with a freedom from the surroundings, an adjacency that offered lucidity.
Throughout the ten part series there are themes of love and relationships, toying with the awareness of cliche in a carefree manner towards meaning or functionality.
Rylie Goodchild X Darius Kanuga
Telling Stories
Waywad Young Girls
2020, ink on paper
In response to the events that transported all of us to a strange place during the spring of 2020, I returned to the tradition of drawing. I found myself in my adolescent bedroom, surrounded by paraphernalia of a passing self. The experience was like time travelling: returning to a memory, but with slight perspective to understand the scene from an objective point of view. I was an other in my own life.
This triplet of drawings channel self reflective persecution of personal image and our bodies. The relationship between decay and beauty is seen at opposition in the works, combatting the liminality of being during transitional states.
Rylie Goodchild
The Smol World
2018, photography
With this photo series I was challenging existing
depictions of female adolescence in a playful way.
Alice in wonderland was the reference point for much of the bohemian sleaze movement of the late 2000's, and here I produced the artefact of my personal lens developed during that time. Playing on references to the luxuriously ludicrous culture, this is the reflection of my personal first impression of culture. Wealth and sexuality are at the core of the options offered to girls as we grow up in exchange for our youth, and this Americanised point of view mashed with the location of my childhood articulate me as a Cornish Alice, written not by Carol, but created by other men of the same vein.
The Cornish Alice is represented here as existing with little option for space between a flower pot, or floating her head between the palm trees: a comment maybe on the kept nature of femininity and youth within the anthropological placement of our muse.
Forever holding an autobiographical relationship to the art I create, these works are as much a portrait of my adolescent selfhood as they were of the model.
Rylie Goodchild
Model: Megan Parker
