Mad with poetry,
I stride like Chikusai
into the wind.
Basho
I stride like Chikusai
into the wind.
Basho
This exhibition brings together a selection of recent works by five artists from Poland, France, the United States and Australia. In these works, keys, plants, bows, fabric, bones, insects, cells, moths, glass heads and architectural details proliferate. Paint reacts with water and wax. Heat fuses glazes and burns away fabric doused in plaster. Textures are mottled and papers are foxed. Forms are ossified, eroded and organic — some, clearly broken. Colours vibrate — sometimes damp, sometimes saturated and radiant. Images emerge in strange, disquieting spaces.
These works are skeleton passages in five minds attempting to make sense of chaos – yet contemplated privately. They highlight a commitment to material experimentation as a means of locating images. Surfaces are wandered over or attacked by hand to capture the first instance of a question or thought. Images are constructed rather than duplicated. In some instances, studies take precedence over the resolved image. Motifs emerge in the search for forms that are both new and in conversation with art of the past. This is work that comes to us in fragments. Time has slowed.
We can peer under these five windows and find hundreds more. Titles are changeable. Answers sail away. The iterating continues, fragile and endless.
Mary MacDougall, 2024
Published to accompany the exhibition Under Five Windows, ReadingRoom, 2024