Shepherdess : Mahali O’Hare | 6 September - 4 October 2022
Rook Contemporary / Blackbird Rook on Artsy
The vase or container, a central motif in Mahali O'Hare's work over the last three years, has become a meditative space and an arena to reflect on mortality, landscape and loss through a painterly rewilding. The vessels in Mahali’s paintings are imagined landscapes where biography and sensory perception collide.
"I’m looking for a fragility and interiority to recent landscapes, where the ceramic edges echo the human and where figure and landscape can be seen as being embedded in each other."
Mahali O'Hare
The figurative nature of the vases wrapped in the natural world shift between inside and out, landscape and still life, portrait and figure. Through the act of painting the container’s preserve and re-wild territory, they are both personality and psychological state, garden and wilderness.
"We see about these forms the unmistakeable depiction of pastoral scenes in which flora, such as woodland or forestry might dominate. Or we see mark-making that carries with it resonances of denser, entangled undergrowth. At all times though, we as viewers are made aware that the paintings contain stories, possibly even secrets, to which we might only have partial access. As much as we look, as often as we look, there are ways in which these paintings withhold as much as they reveal."
Eddie Chambers
Figure in a landscape, 2019, Oil on linen, 123 × 80 cm
Untitled, 2021, Oil on linen, 60 × 50 cm
Mahali O'Hare was recently shortlisted for the CBP Prize 2022 ( Huddersfield Art Gallery & Thames-Side Studio Gallery, London), A Generous space at Hasting’s Contemporary 2022 and the The Football Art Prize touring 2020 -2023 at Touchstones Rochdale, The Millennium Gallery, Sheffield and Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens. She was previously selected for Discerning Eye, RWA Open, Wells Contemporary Open, Beep Painting Prize and received the Additional Award at Exeter Contemporary Open in 2019. Recent group exhibitions include, Two Doors with Tart Gallery at The House of St Barnabas (London), Your Foot In My Face at Kings Gate Project Space (London) and Goose Summer - an outdoor instagram show curated by Hannah Murgatroyd and Martyn Cross. Solo exhibition’s include We Stood Around, The Plough Arts Centre (Devon) 2021 and Kindling Wood, Spike Island (Bristol) 2017.
