Material Matters : Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, 9th December 2023 - 25th February 2024

Three artists and educators - Dr Mike Evans, Dr Alison Goodyear and Michelle Keegan - present an exhibition consisting of Painting, Printmaking, and Virtual Reality. The work exhibited is in monochrome. The exhibition engaged in a collective exploration of ideas and enquiries pertaining to materiality and a diverse array of technological processes within the respective disciplines of painting, printmaking and virtual reality (expanded painting and drawing practice). The works embody the synergy between the mechanical, the digital and the handcrafted. The paintings reference aspects of photography , screen based or moving image and have been made in conjunction with a series of microscope generated videos of paint flows. Whilst finding some of their reference in the disembodied realm of digital images these paintings also suggest the importance of the physical and material. The paintings show how can fruitfully engage in dialogue with technology, while also renewing and extending the possibilities for painting. Printmaking has always had to engage between the hand made and the mechanical process. Painting, since the advent of photography and maybe even more so with the digital has to find its place in this world. There now exists, as in Alison’s work, the possibility for paintings to exist entirely in Virtual Reality. We are all exploring ideas and questions of materiality and varying forms of technological process across our disciplines. We are really interested in the dialogue between these three processes of Painting, Printmaking and Virtual Reality.