New Work

Michael Hawksworth's current practice explores various conjunctions of image and text, drawing and collage, invention and found material. The artist's creative process is concerned with the invention of new objects that shy away from unambiguous readings or classifications. The interests that drive his work at present are focused around personal conceptions of the esoteric and the hidden.

The specific interests informing the works are: a sense of the past inside the present; distorted recordings and representations; decaying documents and objects; liturgical objects; ontology/hauntology; anachronisms; fakes; 'visionary' documents; spiritualist science; esoteric non-art discourses.

There are always narratives embedded in Hawksworth's images. The fragments of text that appear seek to open up poetic spaces in the relationship of word and image.

Alan Ibell's paintings deal with the search for absolutes in an absurd world, forming narratives that explore the dialogue between religion, spirituality and superstition, and the bearing these ideas have in contemporary society. His solitary figures, related only by their faceless anonymity are situated within sparse, empty settings alluding to a dream space that is beholden only to the realm of human thought. Their ongoing search is met with silence and the hopelessness of their actions is amplified by the harsh emptiness of the surroundings.

This series draws upon the psychoanalytical concept of the double. The double refers to a visual representation of the ego, which appears here in the form of the shadow and explores the duality of a conscious and controlled disposition, and a wild animalistic nature within man.