Artist

Bea McMahon

A significant degree of suasion is required in order to pass on knowledge, which is ultimately a form of belief. It’s hard to explain the significance of ideas except by a series of analogies, which rely on an amount of (ideally shared) experience. Ideas, according to Hume, are things copied from impressions. Bea McMahon’s work, over a range of media, may be likened to a series of nested patterns – analogy within analogy - intended to describe a part of the world of which we are aware, even if we don’t know it. She likes to create paradoxes, devices that assuage the upset of our minds on reaching a limit. Her moving-image works are staged slightly out of time and out of place, and the men featured in them are usually outsiders in society, criminals, geniuses or addicts, half-free or half-mad. Her subject matter ranges from the epic to the romantic to the scientific to the absurd. She makes small scale off-kilter drawings depicting juxtapositions of things at odds with the notion of cause and effect. Her sculptures often deploy diagrams of invisible aspects of the world, derived from her academic background in theoretical physics. Bea’s work alludes to the active force of individual intent in the face of a seemingly impenetrable construction of reality.

• Bea McMahon
• Detail from States of Wonder (2006-08)
• DV projection (silent), 4min 38sec and two works on paper

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