Normal With Wings, 2016
Brooks self-identifies as a queer transperson, and their own experiences often feed into the scenarios they depict. Trans embodiment, family, care and labour are some of the themes scrutinised and reimagined within Brooks’ paintings.
In recent work they examine the trope of body as home, describing a frenetic and heightened domestic scene where people, practices and objects are engaged in various forms of hygienic bodily and architectural improvement. The work employs irony and satire to mock the ideological lines we often draw between maintenance and modification, authentic and fake, necessary and superfluous, and our relentless efforts to maintain them. Seemingly banal and mundane aspects of everyday life are often used as a backdrop to question entrenched cultural beliefs and foreground marginal narratives. In addition to painting, Brooks also works in collage, publications and social practice, as well as with archives and local communities.
Flo received a BFA from Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford in 2010. Recent exhibitions include:
What Comes To Matter, Plymouth Art Weekender, Plymouth (2018);
Deep Down Body Thirst, Glasgow International, Glasgow (2018);
Is Now a Good Time? , Cubitt Gallery, London (2017). Flo recently launched Outskirts, a collaborative social portrait project and bookwork exploring liminality in relation to trans and gender nonconforming experience.
The artist was in the following exhibition: Survey Links :https://flobrooks.co.uk/