In the Header: Joanna Kidney

Forest, 2016, encaustic on two panels, app. 48 x 64 inches (120 x 162 cm)

Forest is part of my most recent body of work, We are hurtling into the future, which was shown in Galway Arts Centre. This work is a reflection on time and motion. Through painting, a monumental spatial drawing and a collaborative video project with the Irish dancer and choreographer, Liadain Herriott, the work explored repetition, rhythm and structure versus randomness and chance.

With the paintings, one of my intentions was to work a lot larger than I had before. Forest is one of a number of large diptychs and triptychs. The line and the dot was a mechanism to explore repetition. Repetition was a mechanism to explore time. I became aware of my body motion during painting and interested in how the repetitive body movements connected to the muscle memory of everyday actions . . . paint as a means to join and consolidate life.

Ideas of temporality and the interrelationship between all living matter intrigue me. I am seeking to make some sense of life through my work—how brief and tiny our lives are and how vast and infinite the universe is.

—Joanna Kidney

“Joanna Kidney's paintings emerge through rhythmic mark-making with gradual shifts and inflections, like blocks of music. Her way of painting is close to drawing . . . and also to dance in that it is so closely based on repeated movement and variation.”

—Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, 07.03.17

Installation view of Forest in the Galway Arts Centre, Galway, Ireland

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