The Hog's Back Presented by Blackbird Rook

Blackbird Rook presents

The Hog’s Back

Donal Moloney   Ross Taylor   Sarah Kate Wilson

19th September - 12th October 12 –6pm (Thursday – Saturday)

What is it that makes the hairs on the back of our necks stand up?

The artists here share an interest in imaging. Sifting, gouging and misting produce hallucinations and daydreams, echoes, sleep states, visions and spells - a limitless succession of universes. 

The surfaces are charged with action - elements emerge to be felt, rather than grasped, by the viewer. The tussle between colours, forms, gestures and materials, makes our tongues itch and seeds goosebumps. We repress a shudder, the imagery sticking to our eyelids like afterburn.

Taylor explains his work “…is concerned with an emergent space; a swilling and churning dual sphere of production and consumption where all that enters is incessantly gnawed, singed and regurgitated”. Wilson’s work is crystallised around subjects; animal mimicry, ancestral knowledge and magical practices, which she expresses by weaving together images, symbols and events found in the natural world - Fibonacci spirals, animal camouflage and atmospheric phenomena. The titles of Moloney’s paintings ‘Shipwreck’, ‘Sailing to the middle’ and ‘Levitating’, coupled with images of hieroglyphics, castles, and children, allude to journeys, confusion, memories and daydreams anchored in the real world. 

In searching for the ineffable, each artist puts painting through its paces. Moloney, working with acrylic and watercolour on canvas, traps images under painterly washes - misty rainbow-coloured veils that momentarily occlude what lies beneath. Taylor loads oil paint on panel which is then scraped and rubbed away. Erasure eventually gives way to overpainting and repair over years. Wilson’s inky, waxy, textured paintings employ sgraffito, frottage, mono-printing and collage. Sometimes panels are replaced with holographic substrates - applying paint, inks and wax to these colour-shifting surfaces means they never settle - always remaining in flux.

These are paintings with echo - we see it, then see it differently, our memory disorts the material world in front of us, and ushers in a space of hallucination - paintings as spells, that cast a lure to draw in the viewer.