The work re-thinks the traditions of painting, witnessing canvases in their collapsed state, either on the floor or suspended in space. Within the de-construction of painting, we detect the emergence of sculptural objects that are free from the confines of the frame.

We are delighted to welcome Sian Gourlay back to The North Wall. Sian was one of the selected artists in Fourteen, The North Wall’s exhibition for Photo Oxford 2021. Sian recently graduated from Oxford Brookes University with a BA in Fine Art and for one week only we will be exhibiting her degree show piece Falling.

Sian is a multi-disciplinary artist who explores human emotion and bodily physicality. Bodily physicality is understood through absence, whilst the regenerative cycle of construction and de-construction offers an anthropomorphic quality embedded in the work. The decrepitude of the sculptural forms allow reconfigurations that expose a soft yet harrowing perspective to the ideals of beauty that society so readily seeks. The vulnerability of existence, is mirrored in the muted violence of the sculptural paintings that are born again as disembodied ghosts of the inner world. They become entities of their own, performing in their blissful, imperfect state of destruction.