The first Sensitive Paintings were produced in 1998, in a small cottage in the centre of Ireland and exhibited shortly after in The Butler Gallery, Kilkenny Ireland and The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin.
During the 90’s, Huxley’s work, such as ‘mushroom series’, ‘orange series’ and ‘ condensation series’, used ephemeral and organic materials turning invisible processes into visible matter; functioning as indexes and catalogues of process and change they did not last. Condensation, heat, moisture and other unstable materials were utilised to present continuously evolving processes and constant transience creating dialogue with time, about time and the present. These temporal works functioned as observatory, framing and enhancing our perception of the phenomenon of change, time and the mysteriousness of the world around us.
Painting here enables a visual field where visibility and invisibility are inseparable, made permanent. Paintings have the ability to change their surroundings; holding sentience somehow. Negating the limitations of the still image in painting, the first Sensitive Paintings were produced 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 escaping mainstream attention. 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.
Sensitive Painting | 2000
200cm x 200cm (x2)
Heat sensitive medium, polymer, acrylic on canvas.
Heating system, flexible 13A cable, timers.
Exhibited: Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
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.
Exhibited: Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
1999
200cm x 183cm
Heat sensitive medium, polymer, acrylic on canvas.
Heating system, flexible 13A cable, timers.
Exhibited: The Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, Ireland