Revenants, Monoprints and
Jaali Screens
Lisburn Road Library, Belfast, 1 - 31 March 2023
Jaali Screen Blue/Russet. Acrylics, plaster medium, printer inks. 2023.
In the work on show here, throughout March 2023, the idea of the revenant plays a key role. It refers, playfully, to my return to art making after a long absence. But it also refers to the images that seem to float to the surface of these abstract works that really are not concerned with representing images at all.
Whether I’m building up layer upon layer of grids of paint, or picking up traces of paint on art paper from another, pre-painted surface, the idea is to produce complexity in the finished surface that encourages, in the viewer, the process of pareidolia. That innate capacity and inclination of the brain to identify patterns in the random and abstract. The faces we see in fire, clouds and distant mountains are commonplace examples of this phenomenon.
Another idea at play is contradiction. Wassily Kandinski wrote, ‘abstract art is art that does not attempt to represent an accurate depiction of a visual reality, but instead uses shapes, colours, forms and gestural marks to achieve its effect.’ So the contradiction here is that I try to give the viewer opportunities to see recognizable objects within non-representational abstract work. You may see masked superheroes and glamorous replicants coming back to you from the depths of the painted surfaces.
Sleeper Nebula.
Oil and acrylic pens. 2020
Red Nebula.
Acrylic pens, oil. 2020.
Arachnid Nebula.
Oil, acrylic. 2020.
Grids have always fascinated artists. In the 15th century da Vinci and Durer employed them as aids to accurately draw the proportions of a figure. But, as the writer Alina Cohen points out, ’only in the 20th century, did the grid itself become the subject of artistic study and inquiry. Artists elevated the form from an invisible framework to a feature worthy of the spotlight. The grid’s flatness eliminated a sense of reality and narrative.’
However, the squares of the grids in my work sometimes appear as windows through which we see scenes from lives, frozen in time. Non-linear and non-narrative storyboards. Dot pieces, developed from ventilated pizza pans, create galaxies and nebula. Whilst works with a brown, orange and yellow colour palette frequently evoke archaeological relics and architectural elevations.
I make my art with the aid of machines, processes and apparatus. I’m thinking about objects which are to hand in the kitchen, which can be used to make marks, shapes and colour fields. The French have a term, bricolage, for this ‘making do’. So these repeated processes, with different colour palettes, papers, pressures, gauges of mesh, utensils and surfaces, can, I hope you will agree, have dissimilar, diverse and alluring outcomes.
