David Egan
Table turning 2024
oil on canvas
Courtesy of the artist
Artist statement:
I approach painting as a procedure of ‘colour handling’ and consider the inherent paradox of this term—that colour is a neurological phenomenon which cannot be touched or handled—as fertile ground from which to interrogate conceptual, emotional and spiritual registers of the medium.
Table turning makes reference to the spiritualist practice in which a group of people make séance with spirits by collectively tilting a table. Layered atop a group of dinner settings, a line of cells bounces through a system of pipes. This form might recall a system of plumbing, a digestive tract, or a chain of beads passed through fingers. The ambiguity of this form is suggestive of the potential for bodily cells to take on a multiplicity of roles depending on circumstance, desire, or need.