“I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise...”
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake
'Art's Ugly Right?' Curated by Stephen Lee. Danielle Arnaud Gallery, 2025
“..Visualisations of Dante's ever decreasing spirals of descent into the subterranean architecture of hell, coupled with recent paintings of the flotsam of migrant boats, connects Steph Goodger's work to notions of life as limbo or purgatory. Her current paint, The Doom 2024 aims to disrupt the hierarchical narrative of a 13th Century medieval church painting, the Chaldon Doom which is structured around a purgatorial ladder. Her aim is to disarm the extreme narratives of good and evil. Her interpretive model is Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell where the extremities of the 'life to come' are resolved as interdependent notions that are wedded together. The result is a fabulous vertical codex, where the ladder leads nowhere and ascent and descent have lost their previous meaning...”
Stephen Lee is an artist and writer who has exhibited widely in the US and is now based close to London.