BEYOND the BODY

St John on Bethnal Green

3 October - 20 October

In this exhibition, BEYOND the BODY the artists Ali Darke, Suzi Morris and Yaroslaff Soltan, explore what it means to inhabit a body through sculpture, oil painting and installation, sensing the unseen and unveiling the invisible.

Ali Darke’s sculptural installations reveal a liminal hinterland between the mind and body where the unconscious leaves a trace. This residue of lived experience, distorted by the filter of memory, and experienced as unlocatable trauma, haunt the present and trouble the senses. It is through the creative metamorphosis of materiel and domestic debris that these evocative objects allude to psychic fragments.

Inspired by the medical science of our time, Suzi Morris’ bold resplendent paintings testify to an engagement with the inherent and unpredictable qualities of oil paint and the bodily act of painting. Living with the experience of a lifelong medical condition has led Morris to explore the wider concerns over advances in DNA sequencing and regenerative medicine at Imperial College, London. While the works begin with colour, over time the addition and removal of multiple layers of paint and glaze act as tropes of the creative process, leaving behind an uncanny culmination of thoughts on the body at a cellular level.

Yaroslaff Soltan’s works emerge out of a fascination with the similarities between psychotherapy and alchemy in Jungian psychology. He explores the transformation of material and imagination to create his extraordinarily visceral sculptures. Using his own language of organic material, Soltan’s sculptures appear to be cultural artefacts discovered from some parallel civilisation.