On Innards: Presentation of Artwork by Amanda Couch, Andrew Hladky and Mindy Lee

Amanda Couch, Andrew Hladky and Mindy Lee explore intestines, entrails, and the digestive process as material, image, and metaphor for the creative process. Our artwork moves between paintings, objects, performance, and between representation and realism, making reference to Gaston Bachelard, who claimed that digestion ‘is the origin of the strongest kind of realism’. We explore mental digestion alongside physical digestion, searching for a sense of self between our cognitive deductions and guttural impulses. Our artwork turns things inside out, disembowelling and destabilising material and imagery to create a gently seductive body horror. Mindy Lee’s plated paintings are served as a cannibalistic smorgasbord of revived images plundered from historical painting. These desirable images are consumed and regurgitated through smearing and scraping the plate. An expulsion of visceral paint oozes and bleeds over the surface. Heavily sculpted, re-concocted bodily remnants absurdly fuse internal and external, to create a beautifully grotesque Frankensteinean union. Amanda Couch’s practice cuts across media. She makes images and experiences that are visceral and narrative, in which the audience/participants are forced to confront a real continual present. Amanda’s current concerns are about the interior body and digestion. Often triggered by the processes and lived experiences of her own body, she employs it as material as well as metaphor to explore a personal and universal sense of self. Andrew Hladky is interested in the inner bodily processes of his paintings. They are places of conflict, between the images we create for ourselves and the lumpen material that forms them. His paintings are made using cocktail sticks to dab spikes of paint in many layers, creating landscapes in which the people portrayed struggle with giant, intestinal paint-worms, squeezed straight from the paint tube. The paintings are images disembowelled, spilling into the gallery space, their innards there for all to see