Transparent Things comes to Vane gallery in Newcastle

Deb Covell, Leo Fitzmaurice, Lee Machell, Jo McGonigal   18 May – 12 June 2016   ‘Transparent Things’ presents works by Deb Covell, Leo Fitzmaurice, Lee Machell, and Jo McGonigal, four artists whose work is united by a deep interest in exploring materials. Each artist displays a reductive yet playful approach, which they use to create, works that question their chosen materials’ inherent properties and limitations as well as attesting to their vast potential beyond their apparent constraints.   Deb Covell employs an extremely reductive process to create sculptural work through an exploration into the material and conceptual properties of paint. Covell’s Nowt to Summat (2014) embodies the iconography of drapery in classical illusionism but as a sculptural entity: not illusionistic but a real object made entirely in paint.   Leo Fitzmaurice manipulates advertisements, signage, and ephemera in order to reduce the objects to their simple, ubiquitous materials. In Chest (2016), Fitzmaurice covers a cardboard box with parcel tape, the various shades of which create an object that resembles a wooden crate or chest. The object’s visual conceit serves to subvert the viewer’s immediate perception, unsettling the familiar.   Lee Machell situates his practice within a vocabulary of commonplace objects. His main concerns are object-centered sculptural statements and experimentation with matches. In Hanimex (2015), Machell encircles a Hanimex slide carousel with matches; once lit, the smoke captures the object’s impression on paper, and the carousel’s cavities allow the smoke to expose its empty slots.   Jo McGonigal’s work deconstructs the expectations of the medium of painting through a subjective, phenomenological position. The composition, physicality of materials, as well as the space in which they are placed, combine to affect the experience of the viewer. Spatialised Painting (2015) is an installation incorporating materials that resonate with their environment to create a ‘painterly’ composition within a space.   Exhibition preview: Saturday 14 May, 7-11pm. Part of The Late Shows 2016 www.thelateshows.org.uk