The Inbetween

Exhibition of 9 paintings, comprising a body of related works made between 2017 - 2022.

Informed by speculative and supernatural fiction, these paintings survey a specifically pictorial, psycho-symbolic realm. Produced over a period spanning the pandemic, the works presented here distil gothic imagery – the haunted mirrors, sinister masks and severed heads of the horror story - into minimal, compressed motifs.

The imploding forms and surfaces of the balloons that appear in many of these recent paintings invoke physical displacement and mutation, teasing out pictorial metaphors for collective mind states of unease or uncertainty. Warped emblems of selfhood emerge as the anachronic medium of painting reflects back the dysmorphic mirrors of the digital realm: operating somewhere between the devotional space of the icon and the expressive register of the emoji, these deflated, defacialized ‘heads’ collapse affect and appearance into one fragile, distorted surface.

The instability or vulnerability of the human body and psyche is a common theme in popular genres like horror and the fantastic: the idea that stable existential constructs might at any moment dissolve into vertiginous indeterminacy or fluid metamorphosis recurs as both promise and threat throughout the history of these shared imaginaries. As the psycho-affective pressures of our era intensify, horror’s metaphorical potentiality is thrown into sharp focus.

• Organisation
• https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/disquiet...