Working up until the beginning of this residency, I have...
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Soft CLAY // Hard PLAY
Artist residency: May - June 2023
Exhibition: 16 - 24 June 2023
Gail Mahon
Soft CLAY // Hard PLAY converges micro and macro ecological perspectives to ask as when we stopped mediating big problems and feeding our imaginative inquiry through play actions. Play improvisations that push at the edges of risk, exploration and advances bodily communication offering alternate responses or resiliencies in addressing instabilities of our times.
In this exhibition, Mahon presses upon evolutionary anatomy, bone morphology to weave elements of microscopy and image-capture, to consider the social erasure of somatic and ecological knowledge within our increased sedentary culture. She positions her own body as material within these ecologies, that locates the artist and earth in various states of transformation between gravity and other larger bioactive forces. During her residency at Art Arcadia, Gail tested the edges of strength, malleability and improvisations through process-in-performance using stop motion photography and installation elements. She links to ecofeminism and animism to map multiple positions within industrialism and technology materialism that are found increasingly culpable in the erosion of our tactile kinaesthetic communication and concerns in the decline in our physical and mental health ecology. The transdisciplinary interests in Bioart, finds her work as an active investigation of movement culture which challenges our sense of balance, and our ability to stay present within aging and animacy of the body as material culture. An expanded and socially engaged practice to commune through clay.
Gail Mahon is born and has a studio based in outside Derry/Londonderry and lives along the Causeway Coast, Northern Ireland. She has made many exhibitions and been recipient of selected residencies around Ireland and U.K. including, The Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast; The Galway Arts Centre, Galway and London Thameside Gallery, London and Collaborative Research residency with Aengus Friel Lawrence, at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Co. Leitrim. Gail studied Ceramics at the Royal College of Art and will be continuing research at Ulster University in partnership with Durham University in a creative practice-based Ph.D. commencing later this year. She was awarded a highly competitive funded position through the Northern Bridge Postdoctoral Training Scholarship and Arts Humanities Research Council. This research will advance her interdisciplinary research practice in Bioart and Interactive Design involving departments across Belfast School of Art, Bioengineering and Exercise Science, Ulster University, and Bioarchaeology at Durham University.
This was Gail’s second individual artist residency with Art Arcadia, since August 2018 and sees her present a collection of new research as it progresses with elements of microscopy, locomotive imagery and clay installation works.
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This residency is funded by Derry City & Strabane District Council and Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and is in partnership with St Augustine’s Heritage Site.
