Talk Talk Talk

SOLO EXHIBITION

10 DECEMBER — 09 JANUARY 2022

LA ROTONDE DES ARTS CONTEMPORAINS

ABIDJAN

After graduating from art school (Sydney, 2001) with a textiles major, Peter T. McCarthy has lived in Africa since 2010, but only returned to professional art practice in 2018. His practice crosses the  boundaries between textiles, painting and printmaking. Peter is intrigued by the intersection between faith and lived experience. Using a personal vocabulary of symbols, where colour, pattern, materials and process play an important role, Peter creates bold abstract works that provide the viewer space for meditation. 

In this collection, the works in Strange Encounter (Rencontre Insolite)  go further and plonge the viewer into a universe of paradox and questions. Like our own lives each piece is a mash of opposing elements. The precious meets the mundane. The spiritual touches earth and the divine joins the profane.   

Ironically these surprising combinations create a weirdly beautiful substance which, in turn, undergoes violence. Somehow torture has become beautiful  and herein lies the essence of a remarkably strange encounter.

The complete collection is presented in the Portfolio section: Strange Encounter.

This series, responds to the anticipation of Liminal View. I began to use the silhouettes created by the indigo dyeing techniques as stars. The artist Aïda Muluneh says "to live you must die." The return to my roots in art and design guided my rebirth and helped me emerge from depression and panic disorder. The constant stars are a reminder of God's promises, his goodness and his omnipresence.

Reflecting on the last 20 years of my life and work one theme is constant: upheaval, transition and drastic change. Recently returned to Australia, unpacking and restarting again confronted the artist with artefacts from the disparate places lived, roles performed and even various personas assumed. The silks, linen, and cottons are previous textile artworks, some made 20 years ago. The index cards are notes from doctoral research undertaken in West Africa. The canvases and boards are paintings that enjoyed previous lives here in Australia.

The process involved in making this body of work (cutting, tearing) mimics the violence and evokes the grief involved in such radical transitions as well as re-enacting God’s repeated generosity in creating beauty from destruction. Prescience is impossible except that God will again make something beautiful from the pieces. They are thus also acts of faith, trusting the coming beauty of being made new.

Each of these works carries vestiges of these past experiences as well as a powerful reminder that deconstruction is necessary for re-creation and courage needs clear reminiscence. 

From 2010 until 2018, my work had been among a nomadic pastoralist people who traverse the arid southern edges of the Sahara desert. Many years before had also been spent in preparation for this service. I completed my doctoral research in this context, documenting indigenous teaching and learning and other cultural phenomenon, with the intention that it would inform my future praxis. This process required me to adopt a new identity within a new culture, whilst anticipating a different future role and identity.However, political events have made this impossible. At the time of making this collection, we did not know where this would be.

Cutting up notes from my doctoral research was a cathartic process because I felt, in some ways, that all my previous work for this particular cultural context was for nothing and no longer of worth for the future role I had envisaged.

The triangular pattern used in the main section of Papillon is mostly used in wood carvings in Burkina Faso, and is sometimes called the ‘papillon’ (butterfly) motif. It is used by several ethnic groups who use masks, but not the people among whom I worked. They do not make or use masks at all. They traditionally prefer patterns made of rectangular blocks rather than triangles.

21-31 JANUARY 2022

LE PAVE D'ORSAY

PARIS

Une aporie (du grec ἀπορία / aporia / "sans passage") désigne une difficulté à résoudre un problème, une contradiction insoluble dans un raisonnement. 

Difficulté logique insoluble. [Dictionnaire Le Robert] 

Embarras, difficulté, contradiction insoluble qui apparaît dans un raisonnement. [Dictionnaire Larousse]

L'aporie est la figure de style de l'incertitude dans laquelle l'orateur exprime un doute ou une perplexité réels ou simulés. Dans la rhétorique classique, l'aporie signifie mettre en doute une revendication en développant des arguments des deux côtés d'une question. Dans la terminologie de la déconstruction, l'aporie est une impasse ou un paradoxe final - où le discours sabote manifestement sa propre structure rhétorique, se démantèle ou se déconstruit.

Artists: Rosanne Ahyi, Gwénola Chaudon, Stéphanie Jeannet, Thierry Lemoine, Marie-Salomé Le Guehennec, Peter T McCarthy, Michel Nguie, Sarah Randrianasolo, Jaume Rocamora, Joanna Rylle, Christine Veauvy, Justine Veillard,