Adrian Mundy - 3 Steps to Unique
Mundy’s work is the result of living with M.E. and agoraphobia for the last 21 years. Over this time his world got smaller and smaller until even the thought of stepping out the front door was scary. Instead he went travelling with his paintings, architectural perspective views. These were painted with numerous numbered shades of grey to form the 3D effect. Within all these paintings there were always paths which you could go travelling down and often with arches or doors to wonder “What is through there?” It is only in reflection that these tight grey paintings were done when his agoraphobia was at its worst and he wanted to escape down these paths.
Then, while doing a sudoku puzzle, he wondered what would happen if he changed the numbers for his numbered pots of grey paint and thus, his technique ‘predetermined randomness’ was born. Following a number of Sudoku paintings he used crossword and wordsearch puzzles and then literature to dictate the position of subjective colours.
Mundy’s latest work (on show at the gASP Gallery) deals with the themes of loneliness and isolation and can be summed up with a notice on his studio wall.
The more I get out,
The more I do,
The more people I meet,
The lonelier I feel.
Only having had a studio for the last 6 months, the experience of having a dedicated space to work and think in has had a huge transforming effect on his work. He started off planning to use experiences from the past, as themes for paintings, but that changed with the studio and instead used his own feelings from the present. The words for some of these latest paintings come from letters and emails sent to him, while with his most recent work he has had the courage to use his own words, knowing that nobody will be able to work out what he has written. A number of these new works only use selective letters, the rest left blank, creating hidden sections of the grid, to create an even more random pattern.
Mundy uses the process of painting as therapy. With virtually no external stimulus or release mechanisms, over the years thoughts and emotions have continually circled his brain like a washing machine on perpetual spin cycle. However, he is slowly learning to express and lock these away in his work and designs emerge almost fully formed with only minimal tweaking in the full scale drawings. The actual process of applying paint to canvas is also very therapeutic as concentration is needed to create the sharp edges, while the negative feelings slowly fade away.
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Adrian Mundy - Unique
New paintings based on words written by or about people, places and events connected to an agoraphobic as he emerges into the outside world.
gASP Gallery
Art Space Portsmouth
27 Brougham Road
5th - 21st March
Private View: 6th March 6.30-8.30pm
Viewing by appointment only.
E: eschersapprentice@googlemail.com
Tel: 023 9282 5481
Aspex Gallery (ARC Resource Space)
3rd - 29th March
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