They conversed in brief elliptical sentences, as if they had been together for ever.
from ‘A Closed Eye’ by Anita Brookner
Across sculptural arrangements and painting, the works in Pages engender an oneiric ambience. Feeling comes before words; words are an after act, an attempt at an associative branching out. The materials used vary and are reminiscent of light-industry and building; steel mesh, plaster, simple art materials; paint, papier mâché and canvas to the more hand-made and particular; dyed fabric, audio cassette and clothing. The perennial materials in some form of constant circulation, sit alongside the petrified objects and moulded forms that have been stopped in their tracks.
Writing about one of the works in the exhibition, a movement of return, Adam Szymczyk says -
One can imagine the air circulating in the room making the pieces of cloth and tape breathe, move -high up there, almost imperceptibly from the viewer’s position. The title of the piece – a movement of return – might reinforce this invocation of a movement of breathing, or tide (a quoted description of an empty muddied riverbank during the ebb appears elsewhere in Egan’s notes). It might also refer to a movement that is an introspection, a search for a self, a moment of recognition.*
The paintings are inflected by partial images and shapes generated through dreaming, drawing, note-taking and from lived experience. Not any representation but more of an embodied presentation. They seem as if they are underwater, bleary in a sense.
This interplay between lightness and dissolution, solidity and translucency creates atmospheric shifts that feel open-ended, or in a state of flux. This is echoed by the exhibitions’ title Pages, suggesting a continuum, what the writer Lauren Elkin calls ‘an index of infinity’.
The forms and shapes in the exhibition act as traces or shifting responses, tentative articulations of remembered places, interactions between people and everyday moments. What occurs are interior objects where niches and recesses are present, and shapes seem distant. A meandering, sensuous line and sense of fluidity is carried from the sculptures to the paintings, giving form to a sense of openness and mutability.
*(published by Lismore Castle Arts for the exhibition Aleana Egan, Second-hand, St Carthage Hall, Lismore 23 March - 19 May 2024)
