ART ARCADIA: GAIL MAHON / ST. AUGUSTINE’S RESIDENCY /WK3 & 4 AUGUST 2018

Photo credit: Paola Bernardelli

The work generated during this residency – CONTROCHASM was set in motion by the focus of the open space the St. Augustine’s old school house, as a result has also set in motion something within my practice that feels like a new skin that fits a new approach and a new articulation of where my working is heading. I’m still circling a few things chewing them over and walking round edges of topics; bio-politics, social development and human evolution that has been shaped by conditions and at atmospheres of our environment, something that permeates us at the point of contact and makes up part of our personal construction and belief systems. My work in its most recent forms of installation pieces have included ceramics, sound, performance collaboration and found objects, the subject has asked me to step forward and investigate my own understanding this and place myself a test subject in the transformative process. So steps forward a part of myself that has always ran parallel to my art but never made the fit until now; my physical training, movement and dance, a foundation in thinking through the body. By inviting this part of my life into the creative process conceptually has made a resonating connection- a new challenger of my concepts- where the language of both material and visual is playing back and forth in mind and through my feet. The unsettled grounds of thought are now rising to meet beneath me.

     

The latex skin hanging off the wall drapes with ease and each day of the exhibition at St. Augustine’s the sunlight exposure changes its colouring slightly from soft yellow to a subtle flush of strawberry amber slowly encroaching across the surface. The blue-black floor board veins stand proud and impart a system at play; the ordering and lines are soft and pliable and rubbery. This piece has more to say it has only just arrived and is still in development with its inevitable move to my studio will continue more material conversations, exchanges and interactions between us; a surface organ of St Augustine’s architecture now seeking its embodied function and place in its own. We have much to discuss.

Controchasm- a collision of words to make a new territory where my work exists between art, science and culture and nature – here the space of philosophical observation and science collaboration engage art as the lead potential over new social speculation. Since coming into the residency with many circling ideas, three weeks later they have become more settled, together the material process and I have moved through particles and bits of raw material, combined in a sort of dance, now we have slowed and set to still in exhibition and observing each other with what we have made. We move into together this coming week, back at my home studio and it will be over the next few weeks where we will both decide how to proceed in production together.

Have the ground and I grown to become one?

[exit residency space]

@gailfm

Mark making latex- PART 1

Mark making latex- PART 2