You are an ooze machine, 2024, watercolour, watercolour pencil and gouache on Fabriano paper, 99.5 x 70 cm.
I am an ooze machine, 2024, watercolour, watercolour pencil and gouache on Fabriano paper, 101 x 66 cm.
We are ooze machines, 2024, watercolour, watercolour pencil and gouache on Fabriano paper, 99.5 x 70 cm.
The Ooze Machines series of watercolour paintings explore how Heaney and others overflow their own boundaries and interact with each other in perhaps unwanted ways.
Heaney sees watercolour as quantum, magically merging and blurring. On wet paper depictions of objects in her paintings gloriously swell, overflowing their own boundaries, merging with other forms, entangling.
Following a process of journaling about personal experiences where boundaries were crossed, Heaney works spontaneously on the paper quickly building up layers related to memories and emotions, reshaping and reworking traumatic events, collapsing past, present and future.
Heaney initially works on wet paper so the water follows it’s own inner sensorium, creating it’s own depitions of objects that she works into the composition. Watercolour has it’s own agency as it creeps across the paper. As the watery surface dries, tide marks form, leaving outlines of new landscapes, new bodies and new entanglement.
Working in collaboration with the watercolour, gradually, Heaney creates a layered multiverse across the page, suggesting a mingling of different realities and perspectives simultaneously.
Fine details, undulating lines, tide lines, text and gentle marks draw the viewer into this im/exploded microcosm of quantum perception, unrealised memories and interior life.
Details from the Ooze Machine series of paintings. Phoenix Art Space x Brighton Festival, May 4-June 30, 2024. Photo credits: Tom Gibbs
Installation view of Ooze Machines, Phoenix Art Space x Brighton Festival, May – June 2024. Photo Bernard G. Mills.