CONVERSATION

Continuing the curatorial exploration of Trudi Dicks’s profound artistic legacy, Conversations, the second exhibition in a two-part series, shifts our attention from the contemplative to the interpersonal. 

If Contemplation was a meditation on nature and abstraction, Conversations invites us into a more social, intimate space where the dynamics between figures, moods, and settings

come into sharp focus.

Opening at The Project Room on Friday, 1 September 2O25, Conversations presents a series of monochromatic works that combine woodcut, linocut, and etching techniques. These prints showcase Dicks’s exceptional command of her medium, particularly her ability to attain spatial depth and rich texture through subtle grading and mark-making. The prints are restrained in palette but expansive in feeling. In this collection, Dicks creates scenes that are both familiar and enigmatic, moments frozen in time that feel like fragments of longer stories.

Conversations curates Dicks’ ability to capture human interaction and figure, exploring themes of connection, disconnection, and social complexity. Her figures seem to appear in confined spaces, seated around tables, tucked into corners, or caught in thought or mid-movement. Their presence at times spilling beyond the frame. Their expressions range from direct and readable to deliberately obscure, inviting the viewer to search for clues in body language, gesture, and negative space.

There is a voyeuristic quality to these works, as if we are watching a private moment unfold from across the room. This echoes the experience of people-watching in public spaces, moments of curiosity, of imagining untold stories. What has just been said? What remains unsaid? Are these figures connected by kinship, tension, silence? Dicks never tells us outright. Instead, she masterfully positions us as observers, invited to lean in, to listen, and to interpret.

What gives these works their staying power is the way Dicks captures the ambiguity of human relationships. She does not reduce her subjects to stereotypes or symbols. Instead, she leaves room for contradiction and complexity. A smile can carry warmth or resignation. A glance might hint at intimacy or defiance. In this way, her work mirrors real life, where clarity is fleeting and meaning is often layered beneath surface appearances.

Technically, Conversations showcases Dicks’ artistic expertise – the interplay of light and shadow, the careful grading of tone, and the dynamic positioning of figures within space all contribute to the immediacy of the scenes. Her command of monochrome is particularly striking, each mark deliberate, each space well thought out.

As an artist shaped by personal adversity and a profound sensitivity to her environment, Dicks’s voice in these works is both compassionate and piercing. She observes, reflects, and invites us to do the same. These prints are not just a reflection on human interaction; they are meditations on presence, absence, and the invisible threads that connect us.

With Conversations, we are reminded that art can speak in murmurs as well as in declarations. It can hold space for nuance, for tension, for the multiplicity of human experience. Trudi Dicks’s legacy lies not only in her technical brilliance but in her unflinching ability to see, to witness, and to translate that witnessing into art that continues to resonate.

The exhibition runs until Saturday 3 October 2O25 at The Project Room.

Catalogue