Feet. Brain. Back Again.
Cass Art Gallery, Manchester, 2022
Solo exhibition (second iteration)
This is the second iteration of the exhibition of my foil paintings. Since their first outing in Galeri, Caernarfon earlier this year, they have been folded up, squeezed into a medium-sized cardboard box, and couriered over to Manchester, with the aim of accepting the limits of my circumstances but to keep pushing the work using the resources this opportunity gives me: ie. space and time to free-play with the paintings in response to the gallery.
While the paintings come from a depressing political awakening of the reasons behind the age we live in, I recognise the empowerment in this process and am determined to hold on to joy as a political act, to keep engaged and active in contemporary politics, using whatever little agency I have to work with many other people to try and forge a more compassionate future.
There is generally a non-deliberate touch of melancholy, maybe even pathos, in my work, but essentially I want these paintings to be upbeat and alive in their moment.
Rutger Bregman’s book Humankind and Ece Temelkuran’s book Together are significant inspirations for me, with their thoughtful words on the late capitalist age in which we live.
In particular, the assertion from Temelkuran that: “…all the insanity of our times is the consequence of the collapse of a system, not the collapse of humankind.”
And from Bregman that “most people are pretty decent” citing many examples of how positive narratives get twisted into negative in order to benefit a ruling class agenda.
Both authors imbue the idea of working together to build up collective strength by revealing the cause, sharing ideas and information, so we have the power to act.
