Exhibition Date: 14 September 2024 – 18 January 2025
Ailish Treanor is a Barnsley-based artist whose practice comprises of sculpture, painting, and installation. She often creates highly composed displays, which force a flattened perspective and hold various elements and idiosyncratic refences in place, landing somewhere between object and image.
Ulterior Motifs is a body of sculptural works on paper created during a six-month long artist residency undertaken at Barnsley Civic. The focus of the residency was to make work in response to Georgia O’Keeffe’s art and diaristic writings. O’Keeffe’s visual references are clear: flowers, shells, landscapes. Yet what she presents is something more psychological than a simple still life; objects translated through the artist’s lens. O’Keeffe’s intense, multifaceted observational style is what Treanor has interpreted into her own work here.
Treanor’s work is informed by observations from a frenetic variety of sources: ‘Trompe l’oeil’ and other traditional decorative painting techniques; art historical periods such as Ancient Egyptian and Art Nouveau; jewellery shop window displays, and stage set design; consumerism and mass production. The result is a series of works on paper which sit somewhere between the camp and the uncanny, visually referencing undefined yet familiar points in the past, present and future through sculptural forms and motifs which are both of this world and not.
The exhibition examines how we experience art as part of a lineage, rather than singular artistic ideas coming from one artist or ego. It explores a collectivist, non-hierarchical approach to art making, where many methods, materials and styles exist together.
