Naomi Workman

In the studio, Workman developed a series of 28 drawings in pencil on paper, in a spiral-bound sketchbook privately filling the pages inventing a water-shaped human character dubbed ‘Soup’ anthropomorphising the origin of life. This muse-come-alter-ego metamorphoses into a female form, her long straight hair crests and troughs in the shape of waves on the Pacific Ocean.‘Soups’ liquidity aids the evolution of her shape, like a crab finding a new shell; she seeks vessels and watering holes to contain her. In her search, Americana and the distinct characteristics of west-coast Southern California emerge. Here she sprouts legs and assimilates; learning our human behaviours to walk among us. Shapeshifting she seeks a route through the underlying infrastructure of Los Angeles seeking the channelized rivers; the life force of the ‘City of Quartz’, built from the desert.

The scenes are recognizable: the now ghost town below LAX airport. Originally developed in the 1920s and ‘30s of Surfridge Palisades; once an optimistic coastal outcrop sold as an isolated playground for the wealthy. By the ‘70s was condemned; Its residents were no longer able to hear one another over the deafening roar of Jet-Propulsion aircraft engines. Here ‘Soup’ is depicted driving a tractor and flowing from its excavation bucket. The only remaining clue of the settlement’s former life is gridded paths framing unkept scraggly palm trees, bowing under the punishing sun. Their tenders; the residents gone, the houses long removed. Turned over to nature, as the reclaimed habitat of a demure blue butterfly.

In ‘The Migration of Chairs to the Beach’ ‘Soup’ grows legs and strides across the South Bays rolling Strand; a gentle cycle and pedestrianised path. In ‘Red Car’ She drives a Street car, the Urban Rail network which in its heyday boasted the best public transport network in the Country, a relic of a bygone era usurped by “a car-dependent, smog-choked, freeway-bound yet traffic-paralysed dystopia.”(1)

‘Soup’ uses shapeshifting as a means to traverse the futuristic city. From circulating in a water-filled round hole, her teaming likeness of multiplying heads just above the surface of the water. To squeezing into an empty fish tank in a PETCO pet store window on Doheny, West Hollywood. She awkwardly contorts, this vessel is inhospitable, her containment unsettling. Her ability to liquidise leads to comically absurd and surreal evolutions of her shape. Her face appears like painted nails on the artist’s hand, serving as a combined self-portrait; she smiles at her view, unabashedly pleased with herself.

The chronology of the works charts an investigation into the urbanism and futurism of the Los Angeles Landscape. This everyday scenery goes through a personal transformation under the artist’s gaze. The results are surrealist-comedic stories that comment on the absurdity of Los Angeles through a non-Angelinos eye.