HOLLY MILLS | PETER MEARS | JOHN KELLEHER
Artground Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of works from three UK based artists; Holly Mills, Peter Mears and John Kelleher.
There is a concept elucidated by Philip Guston titled the ‘third hand’, which refers to the pseudo-spiritual force guiding all of creation– a stand-in for the divine, perhaps, or creative intuition. In this sense, the act of art-making comes down to one of faith: a surrender to both the medium itself and the subconscious forces that shape it. Guston described it in his 1982 documentary, A Life Lived, as follows: “You’re painting a shoe; you start painting the sole, and it turns into a moon; you start painting the moon, and it turns into a piece of bread”.
The artists in Internal Landscapes– Holly Mills, John Kelleher, and Peter Mears– operate at the intersection embodied by this concept: the point at which the conscious meets the subconscious. They map interiority through processual complexities, whether through a deep consideration of surface, or a ritualistic approach to art-making. Both Kelleher and Mears work methodically, the former building evocative abstractions through hundreds of oil-painted layers, and the latter developing musically influenced ‘scripts’ that produce constraints and variables for his porcelain vessels. In contrast, Mills utilises a process derived from automatism, immortalising dreamscapes onto the layered histories of book covers or the delicate surface of a gesso board.
In Internal Landscapes, process art folds into an intimate poetry spanning memory, rhythm, and ecologies. Compositional and material technicalities forge a complex language implicating imagination and reality; interiority and universality; individuality and relatedness. Despite their ostensible abstraction, these works are united in their sincerity: their devotion to excavating inner thought through surface experimentation. Lines become marks of immediate sensation; colour palettes turn into atmospheric prompts. It is the presence of the ‘third hand’ which makes these works distinctly human: a site for something both intensely personal and relatable, played out through the physicality of art. Presence is evoked through process.
We look forward to welcoming you to the exhibition next week.
A full list of works will be available from Monday 23 February.
Please contact betty@artground.com for further details.
