Tidal Ballads Sung Wrong:
City Assembly House
Photo Credit: Lee Welch
Kindly Supported by The Arts Council, Artlinks, Wexford County Council,
& David Skinner Wallpapers
7th April – 16th April 2022
A figure walking with intent, huddled groups of women gathered together under a corner lantern, the potency of archival photography feeds into concerns that are rooted in a local context. Primarily growing out from a series of monotypes, Tidal Ballads Sung Wrong sees Busher engage with a variety of new processes and materials that further investigate bodily concerns. Anchored in utopian notions of a ‘pleasure’ island, part real and imagined he repurposes a man-made island in a gallery context. A built structure is reclaimed by the natural world, sprouting mushrooms signalling its decline, threatening to erase it from our living memory. The redundancy of river life is reframed through a window of brightly coloured ceramic works, dredgers, floating docks, and steamboats are recontextualised as defunct objects that drift by ruin after ruin. Crudely rendered woodcuts hang diametrically on opposite walls, they peer over a silkscreen printed wallpaper of motifs that are upended on tree trunks. Narrative fictions of interior vs exterior space play out, once inhabited dwellings succumbing to the elements.
Charcoal and mixed media drawings act as a point of departure, yet no clear timeline emerges, instead, it seems to meld past, present or future. Hinting at the bittersweet leftovers of conflict, paintings are layered with a web of narratives that often beset each other. The dichotomy of figures rigidly performing drills in unison is opposed in a rendering of a fairground ride. This sparing of content is re-evaluated in the most recent paintings, reoccurring motifs such as cabins or makeshift houses are punctuated with contemporary references. Mini fracas in an ALDI car park, 2021, sees a dark Munchian, looming figure tower over lightly rendered white figures in oil, oil stick and acrylic marker on canvas. Forests are often close by, dense branches filled with brightly coloured hues of pinks, blues or purples. The forester’s lodge makes an appearance, and the necessary infrastructure that aids shipping makes itself known. Once thriving warehouses, docks and bridges appear lost, and sit adjacent to a roulette of image-making.
We Often Forget: The Complex
Photo Credit: Lee Welch
Press: The Visual Artists’ News Sheet Sep / Oct 2020
Kindly Supported by Wexford County Council & Artlinks
24th July - 4th August 2020
Working over a period of 18 months, artist John Busher has often traded back and forth between painting and printmaking. In Shopping (Without Haste), 2019, a barely-there figure appears, shrouded or masked. Working in high-keyed grounds, Busher paints partly recognizable environments, housing estates, shop fronts, lanes, and alleyways. There is a sense of a world in flux, passing through, layered in a palimpsest of marks and gestures revealing additional narratives. The compositions are often charged with unreal distortions, dense pockets of activity; a growing sense of unease abounds. As with previous works, concerns regarding the body are evident. Anchored in particular settings, often left exposed to the elements, they appear to act as a receptor to the world they inhabit. Showing monotypes for the first time, Busher has foregrounded printmaking to echo concerns that are inherent in both mediums.
Relating these paintings and prints to contemporary life is often left ambiguous and open-ended. Accumulation of information is apparent in the works, beginning as acidic grounds, a sparing process of painterly invention makes its way to the surface, often appearing as barriers to our modes of perception. Looking through, whether it be a fence, narrow opening or window frame, is an opportunity to project a mishmash of visual information. Like an open drawer, Busher digs and searches beneath a layer of memory, waiting for something to bite. Monotypes are conceived through the same process, recurring imagery is repeated in small nuances of glowing colour, transparent form or figurative investigation. Filtering through, shaped by intuition, each successive layer acts as a test site, offering a new point of departure. There is a prevailing sense of pace, one that is often mirrored in how the eye and mind sift through an abundance of information in the contemporary age.
Jostle: Pallas Projects
Photo Credit: John Busher
Press: THE GLOSS Magazine | Art Maze Mag
17th August - 26th August 2017
The work presents an ongoing practice that explores a bodily response to social spaces. Investigated via drawing and painting; it considers how paint can articulate the nuance of these experiences. The works were initially conceived on a small scale, with the intention of finding a particular language that examines the notion of a bodily deficit. Reevaluated on a large scale, these condensed renderings are an attempt to discover a more direct form. In certain cases the paint surface takes on the function of a notebook, the jotted down action is inherent to the work.
Floorplan: NAG
Photo Credit: John Busher
24th October - 7th November 2015
Works for this show examined how the body interprets space, and how it acts as a receptor to a particular kind of external stimuli. This took the form of examining specific encounters to environments that related to everyday life. The intention is to extend this research using a methodical approach, with the purpose of drawing on a bodily experience of stimuli in relation to the nuances of perceptual experience. Recent work references photographic sources, it is expected that these sources will be expanded to explore a larger pool of settings.