AIDAN McNEILL

Aidan McNeill was born in Toronto, Canada, and lives in London, UK. She is an MA graduate from Central Saint Martins School of Art (2006) and previously completed her BA (Hons) from Sir John Cass School of Art, London Guildhall (2003).

She has exhibited widely, with her first solo exhibition at PayneShurvell gallery in 2011. A selection of her works are included in the publication Nature Morte, published by Thames & Hudson. Photographs from her series Core Crops have been awarded Gold in Prix de la Photographie, Paris, and were exhibited at the Canadian High Commission in London, UK. Her work is included in corporate and private collections and was most recently publically exhibited within the group show Nature Morte at Guildhall Art Gallery, London UK, in 2018.

A selection of works in series are represented below. To make an appointment to view works in the studio or to request further information, email:

info@aidan-mcneill.com

Series in development, working title: PATER MOULDS, 2019-2020

This new series of photographic works are studies of plaster moulds created by my father, a professional sculptor working in clay and bronze. These skillfully constructed, tightly sealed and protected voids, or shells, have always fascinated me; oppressive yet animated in their representation of the productive creative past, that also await a future reproductive process.

Series title: The Wrappings (Works in progress), C-type print, 140cm x 140cm

Wrappings explores identity, environmental manipulation, process and the mediums of photography and sculpture, which have long intersected in complex ways historically, theoretically and aesthetically.

Students, at Central Technical School in Toronto, sculpt portrait busts out of clay. This process carries over for many weeks, and in the intermediary stages the busts are protected with wrappings of damp cloths and plastics to keep the clay from drying out. This stage of the process imbues them with mystery as the clay breathes underneath the formed layers and the resulting condensation drips beneath the underside of the plastics.

Series title: BORDERS BETWEEN, CORE CROPS, 2014, Giclée print, 91.5cm x 91.5cm

Working with the interior core of genetically manipulated roses, the still-life has been inverted to create new landscapes of shadow and light, each ground of the crop a subtle colour sample taken from the orginal source imagery.

Series title: CAST, Revolve I-VI, 2011, C-type print, 85cm x 140cm

Referencing both the Romantic tradition and the romance of the theatre, CAST explores spectacle and artifice within photographic imagery.

Taken during a musical, at the Adelphi Theatre (Love Never Dies by Andrew Lloyd Webber), these images capture the smoke, lighting effects and the performers follow-spot shadows on the foreground of the theatre stage. While the photographs seem to document an ethereal world of shadow and light, with an underlying geometric mapping plane, closer inspection reveals prop tape, scratches and lines of trap doors highlighting the overall mechanics of the whole within this systematic collaboration of production.

An accompanying video work Performance 349 was created from the live feed of the Musical Director conducting the orchestra of this major West End Musical. Contrasting with the Director's impassioned gestures, the film is sound-tracked by a stream of letters and numbers as the Deputy Stage Manager calmly and simultaneously calls into action an intricate pattern of lighting and visual effects carried out by the technical team that recreate the drama on stage.

SOFT ERROR IN THE SOPHIASBURG TRIANGLE & THE DEVIL'S HORSEBACK

This work is inspired by the history and lore of the 1804 sinking of Schooner Speedy off the shore of Lake Ontario, Canada; the geomagnetic explorations by the Canadian radio engineer Wilbert B. Smith and the digital record.

Digital imagery created at the lakeshore of this magnetic anomaly site had key symbols and letters extracted from the source file, re-purposed into a companion sound work, a litany. The files then converted back into image became a re-rendered and disjointed digital record and historical artefact of the event, re-formed into print.

This series contains three companion sets of work; a series of digitally manipulated site-specific photographic landscape works, a sound piece and a series of photographic still-lifes with accompanying prose.