REVIEWS
Gray's School of Art Degree Show 2016: The Review: THE SKINNY, Adam Benmakhlouf, 17 JUN 2016
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"We start with Shirley, who used to be Kim Wilde’s cleaner. “People tell me I look like her,” she says, in The Life of Shirley – a short video on a little screen. They’re wrong, but Shirley’s also Contemporary Art Practice graduate Josie Hudson’s saucy and passive aggressive alter-ego. See her walk down the grassy bit outside Gray’s and complain when a bus driver doesn’t drop her at her front door. With a (Kim) Wildean wig, she’s somewhere between Sasha Fierce and imaginary friend Right Said Fred.
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In a looping two-projector face-off, the bitterness reserved for Kylie Minogue becomes self-deprecation. “You need me,” she tells herself. “If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t know how to cope.” All the acidic half-jokes become ingrown. It’s maybe some acknowledgement of the kind of personae needed to survive a degree show: abstract painter, war artist, personal confessor and post-internet videographer/animator."
http://www.theskinny.co.uk/art/emerging-artists/grays-school-of-art-degree-show-above-the-fray
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Review: The Gray's School of Art Degree Show 2016: The Herald, Jan Patience, 25 Jun 2016
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"Josie Hudson's in-yer-face alter ego Shirley, who bares a passing resemblance to Kim Wilde at the peak of her 1980s fame, made me laugh. In her “uniform” of cropped tweed jacket, blonde wig and heavy make-up, Shirley is seemingly all mouth. There was a serious point behind Shirley's on-screen bravado. How do others see us? It's a perennial theme to which graduating artists return year after year."
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