Anna Barham & Bea McMahon
08 Oct - 19 Nov 2011
ANNA BARHAM & BEA MCMAHON
Warp and Woof
8 October - 19 November, 2011
This autumn CCA presents a new exhibition bringing together two artists, Anna Barham (London) and Bea McMahon (Dublin), for the first time. New commissions and a selection of earlier work reveal the shared affinities in the practice of the artists.
Bea McMahon, who studied mathematics and physics before turning to art, uses video and drawing to explore the complex relationship between our inner lives and the reality of the outside world. She explains this process quoting the physicist Werner Heisenberg who puts forward ‘not a precise language in which one could use the normal logical patterns; it is a language that produces pictures in our mind, but together with them the notion is that the pictures have only a vague connection with reality, that they represent only a tendency toward reality’.
Anna Barham works in a variety of media including sculpture, performance, video and drawing. Her work is built on the fluid possibilities of language and forms, elaborating seemingly limited starting points into a paradoxical freedom. She has had a long running interest in the use of the anagram and has compared the building blocks of cities to the basic units of language, alphabets and words, and their ability to construct new forms.
Both artists are fascinated with systems of representation of thought and reality, recognising and testing the limitations of those systems, creating works that revel in the playfulness of art.
Warp and Woof
8 October - 19 November, 2011
This autumn CCA presents a new exhibition bringing together two artists, Anna Barham (London) and Bea McMahon (Dublin), for the first time. New commissions and a selection of earlier work reveal the shared affinities in the practice of the artists.
Bea McMahon, who studied mathematics and physics before turning to art, uses video and drawing to explore the complex relationship between our inner lives and the reality of the outside world. She explains this process quoting the physicist Werner Heisenberg who puts forward ‘not a precise language in which one could use the normal logical patterns; it is a language that produces pictures in our mind, but together with them the notion is that the pictures have only a vague connection with reality, that they represent only a tendency toward reality’.
Anna Barham works in a variety of media including sculpture, performance, video and drawing. Her work is built on the fluid possibilities of language and forms, elaborating seemingly limited starting points into a paradoxical freedom. She has had a long running interest in the use of the anagram and has compared the building blocks of cities to the basic units of language, alphabets and words, and their ability to construct new forms.
Both artists are fascinated with systems of representation of thought and reality, recognising and testing the limitations of those systems, creating works that revel in the playfulness of art.