The culmination of a three year-long project, Seep present hundreds of paintings of faces, each contorted, experiencing extremes of emotion – ecstasy, pleasure, torture, grief, terror and joy. My practice is strongly informed by theoretical considerations of beauty, jouissance and the ethical implications of the pursuit of narcissism (heavily influenced by Rococo portraitures of ecstasy). These works are strongly affected by the materiality of the medium in which I work: wet paint, like the ideas of female subjectivity explored in Luce Irigaray’s early philosophy, is fluid, unstable, formless – it seeps, infects, infiltrates, resonates, stains and morphs into part of the object to which it attaches itself.
SEEP contends with snapshots in contemporary attempts to survive, to become significant, to be documented, recorded, to become immortal.
Aine Macken 