The Sensitive Paintings are a series of site sensitive works that explore perception, indeterminacy, states of change and flux as constants; they work with time, are sensitive to the audience and the space in which they are situated. Within their slowness, they hold the nowness of our contemporary time: containing traces of the realities and narratives from within our turning, unstable and volatile world. Attracting observation, the Sensitive Paintings call into question vision itself and are also situated with paintings discourses with technology.
The first Sensitive Paintings were produced in 1998, in a small cottage in the centre of Ireland and exhibited that year in The Butler Gallery, Kilkenny Ireland and The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin shortly after. In the flow of the boom economy, the work ran counter to the culture of capitalism and excess, sensitive to the challenged and changing landscape and natural ecologies. The observer effect is a proven theory showing that mere observation of a phenomenon can change that phenomenon: The Sensitive Paintings set out to attract vision and to ask what happens next.
Collaborating with agencies and technological specialists outside of creative practice, paintings were developed to incorporate industrial heat sensitive technology into painterly language. The ‘Sensitive Paintings’ contain hidden heating systems, beneath their surfaces, controlled by electrical timers. With warmth, the minimal surfaces change in colour through a cyclical 15-30 minute period, barely perceptible at first, transforming from one colour to another, then to bare or primed canvas, then returning to their original colour upon cooling. The paintings empty themselves inside out so to speak: painting is existent within the limits of non-existence. Multiple images are produced of which the outcomes are indeterminate, affected by the environment in which they are located.
The Sensitive Paintings are in a permanent and constant state of transformation and change, self-erasure and renewal. They speak to paintings history and ideas of risk, invisibility, impossibility and time. They activate the gallery with anticipation and adventure, instigating dialogue between phenomenology and ontology, perception and memory, the visual and physical and the sensing of contemporary temporal and atemporal worlds.
Documentation processed at x16 speed.
145cm x 145cm (x2)
Heat sensitive medium, polymer, acrylic on canvas.
Heating system, flexible 13A cable, timers, relays, fuses.
Detail
Detail
Documentation processed at x16 speed.
176cm x 196cm (x2)
Heat sensitive medium, polymer, acrylic on canvas.
Heating system, flexible 13A cable, timers, relays, fuses.
Documentation processed at x16 speed.
80cm x 80cm (x2)
Heat sensitive medium, polymer, acrylic on canvas.
Heating system, flexible 13A cable, timer.
Documentation processed at x16 speed.
180cm x 180cm (x2)
Heat sensitive medium, polymer, acrylic on canvas.
Heating system, flexible 13A cable, timers, relays, fuses.
Documentation processed at x16 speed.
180cm x 180cm (x2)
Heat sensitive medium, polymer, acrylic on canvas.
Heating system, flexible 13A cable, timers, relays, fuses.
2000
200cm x 200cm (x2)
Heat sensitive medium, polymer, acrylic on canvas.
Heating system, flexible 13A cable, timers.
1999
180cm x 180cm (x2)
Heat sensitive medium, polymer, acrylic on plastic film.
Heating system, 250m copper microbore, water tank, water heater, water pump, plumbing fittings, flexible 13A cable, timer.