Top right: Nine parts, Becky Brewis, 2021, ceramic tiles with acrylic and varnish, 40 x 40 cm
Bottom right: Child falling out of an old painting, Becky Brewis, 2021, acrylic on cardboard, 67 x 103 cm
Bottom left: Two arrivals, Becky Brewis, 2021, acrylic on cardboard, 16 x 12 cm and 30 x 16 cm
ARTIST STATEMENT by Becky Brewis
My work for this exhibition explores the material integrity of images in the context of the project theme of revelation. It includes paintings on cut-up cardboard boxes, a textile piece featuring embroidered lettering that can only be read with a mirror, and a set of nine sculpted ceramic tiles. It is part of ongoing attempts to make work that defamiliarises the act of looking in response to the daily experience of using the internet.
As we move across its gleaming surface with search terms and tabs, the internet can feel like a limitless extension of thought. It is a space that can seem to swallow time, and in which images are not objects but digital reproductions, scaled to fit whatever screen we happen to be viewing them on.
To explore this contemporary experience of disembodied looking and sense-making, I was drawn to medieval depictions of space, in particular to the playful representation of physical space in two Sienese paintings showing saintly intervention, from which I’ve borrowed figures and a colour palette. The medieval pictorial device of continuous narrative, which sees chronologically distinct scenes integrated within a single picture, has also been a point of reference.
I wanted to make a long moment; to create an unsequenced narrative, with imagery running across different objects, that slows down the act of looking. Themes, colours, and formal ideas – holes, emergent figures, cut-outs, falling, children, repetition – link the works and, I hope, present meaning-making as an imaginative act requiring physical space and time.
RESEARCH COMMENTARY by Serafina Paladino
Being a part of TheoArtistry was an enlightening experience because through art my group was able to take the abstract concept of revelation and transform it into something tangible. As a researcher, this collaboration between text and image allowed for me to begin a journey of self-discovery where theory was illuminated by creativity. Academia can be a confusing place where subjects like religion may not be welcoming to those without a scholarly background. However, I believe that art speaks to everyone which means that new perspectives on the world and beyond are generated by its influence. My research interests primarily focus on the ways in which ideas disseminate throughout culture from things like sacred texts to video games and I view the final piece of this collaboration as an embodiment of that.
RESEARCH COMMENTARY by Eden O’Brien
As a contributing scholar to the Text & Image Project, I have had the privilege to offer some of the theoretical groundwork for a fascinating set of paintings, textiles, and ceramics. My research considers various intersections between Art and notions of Truth spanning literature, poetry, and popular culture. I am especially interested in the generation of meaning through symbolism and shifting concepts of what it means to be human in the digital age; as such, this project’s incisive engagement with recurring imagery and representations of disembodiment is particularly
compelling. In the ongoing conversation between Theology and the Arts, the place of interpretation, revelation, and elaboration in light of doctrinal considerations is often a foregrounded concern. Yet, interpretation is at the heart of this project. What the pieces uniquely reveal to me as a scholar is that the interplay between religious imagery and the artist’s imagination is the nursery for new and rich meaning.