Skewed Logic

About

The objects in this exhibition are all born of tinkering – a strategy to see what happens when materials and production are approached unconventionally. At first sight, the three artists’ practices appear whimsical, like child’s play, for the works are inward-looking and idiosyncratic. The decisions made in their manufacture may be of the irregular, skewed kind, but always reference a sense of painterly or sculptural logic. 

Each artist reformulates established ways of working to suit the requirements of the concerns at hand. Materials are forced against each other, or sometimes wilfully misapplied. When these experiments ‘work’, it is often through happenstance. Happy accidents are to be celebrated and made use of. 

Dominic Beattie’s ‘Stain Paintings’ (2021), build upon the sensory associations of his ‘Ersatz Ceramics’ series from 2014-2020 – painted cardboard and wood offcuts that humorously pose as pottery pieces. These new aerosol-sprayed works on canvas appear to resemble stained-glass windows in abstract pictorial form, yet they also make sense as an economical and bold graphic language that transcends traditional craft techniques.

Laura White’s ‘Pollute Volute Rise 3’ is the outcome of a symbiotic relationship between the artist, her chosen materials and gravity. This new work from her ongoing Pollute Volute series – an unruly sculpture stretching nearly 3m high – has been built from the bottom up using layers of coloured silicone rubber separated by tissue paper. The aim is to build the structure as high as possible without it falling over. It resembles the process of 3D printing while using more traditional craft methods. The material outcome for each layer is determined by the one below – a lean to the left, for example, requires a counter lean to keep the structure upright

Neil Zakiewicz’s paintings on sheet steel, ‘Metal Work’ (2021), continue his interest in stencilling. The steel is folded over to act as a stencil of itself and then sprayed. In this way, the paintings tell the story of their own making, with traces of the perimeter of the sheet apparent in the centre of the work – the outside rendered in. There is a surrealistic pleasure to this sense of the incidental – the unpredictable colour combinations that result.