Lapses

Zaratan Arte Contemporanea, Lisboa

27-28-29 June 2024

Lapses was a three-day public event, a kind of ‘open studio’ presentation of provisional works made during a month-long residency at Zaratan. The installation was also accompanied by a short artist talk, in which I spoke some words and was asked difficult, but engaging, questions.

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press release text:

‘Sorcha McNamara uses painting and its expanded physicality as a conduit to explore the relationship between the felt, embodied materiality of things and more calculated, methodical systems of thought.

During her time at Zaratan, she began a long-term process of reflection, recycling and excavation of her most recent work, while engaging with material encounters - both physical and subtle - in the urban ecosystem of Lisbon. She thought about the verb 'to lapse', which means both to fall from a previous level or standard, as well as to pass gradually or smoothly into something. She thought about the multiplicity of meanings placed on words, and by extension their inevitable meaninglessness, failures, and absurdities.

Entirely by chance, she came across and resonated with the work of Vitor Fortes, a relatively obscure Portuguese post-war painter, whose work has been described in terms of '...algebra music...the most extreme variability of open structures within the greater regularity and continuity of systems.'

For this public event, Sorcha presents a site-specific installation/intervention taking place in the gallery corridor. Working with spontaneity and improvisation allowed her to generate material with a sense of openness and possibility. She responded and adapted to already existing conditions of the space, with the intention of guiding viewers towards a heightened state of consciousness, drawing attention to a sense of presence, absence, gesture, and the motion of making something.’