Overlooking St Mary's Market in St Helens is a hidden haven of activity where up to six artists create their work. The four artists in this exhibition haven't exhibited with Platform before and have all recently been resident in our studios.
Rebecca Ainsworth's paintings are exploring traces and markmaking through painting. The marks and textures of objects are abstracted to a point where they begin to break up, remaining familiar whilst becoming unrecognisable.
Unrecognisable features appear in Paul Reynold's 'Hide and Seek' where the figure's face has been obliterated by white paint. Lily Karen's silhouetted figure is anonymous and unseeing whilst Matty Hodges 'Mask' reveals an evil reptile under the fractured shell. Who are each of these people, does their anonymity give us as the audience space to imagine ourselves in their place?
Symbolic objects feature in both Lily Karen's drawing and in Matty Hodges' representation of Margaret Thatcher. The serpent is a powerful symbol across cultures, positive connotations include fertility, rebirth and guardianship whilst the more common reading can be the negative one of vindictiveness and poison. This use of symbolism allows each of us to bring our own reading to the situation that the artist has laid before us.
