Patrick Hall’s work comes alive in layers. He has built an impressive forty-year practice making stories unpicked from memories. They here create intimate self-portraiture in a visual language that asks, “What remains beyond the wreckage of war? What stories gain gravitas, what stories disappear?”
“I am hoping to be a vector for empathy in a world no longer stable, where global ruins and war remind us of the way lives appear and suddenly disappear, the way a life can be made redundant in the almost imperceptible catch of a breath … all that is left is the shadow.”
Hall’s November exhibition at Despard Gallery, , is of wall-mounted white-on-white sculptural “paintings,” capturing that absent presence. In their distinct crafting he masters the tension of revealing self with the inexorable need to invent as an artist. Their labour intensive collage creates a visual assemblage suggestive of photogrammetry where a three-dimensional world is rendered from a two-dimensional image. The layering functions as metaphor, intensifying the under-pinning narrative that speaks of love being reborn from generation to generation.
