Talk

Panel Discussion with Anna McNay, Matthew Burrows & Suzanne O’Haire

7th April 22

6-8pm

Hive

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Curators

Anna McNay

Perdita Sinclair

Artists

Matthew Burrows

Alison Goodyear

Suzanne O’Haire

A panel discussion, chaired by co-curator Anna McNay, featuring two of the participating artists and one student, discussing the core themes of the exhibition: how the world has changed since the outbreak of the pandemic, how it will continue to do so, and how creatives have responded to this.

Matthew Burrows’ paintings are reflective, thoughtful, and slow to reveal a complex structural space of marks, shapes, and pigment. He finds his reality in the paradoxes and thresholds of the mystic’s landscape – a wilderness of solitude and temptation, a paradise of emptiness and rage, a country of madness and silence. ‘It is not enough,’ he says, 'to speak of change. Art must furnish and colour our imaginations with the means to make change possible’. Burrows is also the man behind #ArtistSupportPledge, a scheme born early in the pandemic, to encourage a culture of mutual generosity between artists.

Suzanne O’Haire works primarily with domestic-scale, sculptural assemblage. Discarded junk found matter and castings feed into a process. O’Haire reconfigures her acrobatically-stacked, bundled or tentatively-balanced forms until they have something to say. Her assemblages are mostly displayed in groupings, where a system, numerological element or notion of magical thinking plays a consolidating role. She sees this habitual urge to collect and reimagine matter as a way of filtering an externally overstimulated and saturated world, endeavouring to make sense of the chaos.

Finally, student Kanyinsola Adeleye offers a young person’s viewpoint on how that generation, in particular, has been affected by the pandemic.

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