PAULNACHE presents three artists that question their medium through process and materiality include abstract paintwork by Peter Adsett, deceiving wood-carved sculptures that masquerade as real by Glen Hayward and intensely emotive, invariably edgy ceramics by Virginia Leonard. 

Paintwork

Peter Adsett does not regard abstraction as inimical to representation. They are equally heirs to a history that has cemented painting’s conventions, sets of binary oppositions that create a fiction of the world: line versus colour, tonal contrast, figure versus ground, and so on. 

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Glen Hayward’s work blends carving, painting and conceptualism to snare the viewer in a standoff around what is real or illusionary, art or not art, profound or absurd. 

His work constantly forces us to look and think again.

urns for unwanted limbs

Virginia Leonard’s ceramics delight in the visceral.

Her large vessel-like structures recall domestic everyday items, yet the familiar shapes of vases, jugs, and urns are abstracted, morphed into melting masses of sticky resin and bulging lumps.