In PM/AM’s spring group show, conceptual diversity drives the curation as much as overarching congruity. It offers numerous entry points into a web of investigative pathways, with the potential to meet in the same swirl of reflective thought once they have been explored. The artists’ work as a single expression is a collection of visual stories told along an axial evolution of human experience, spread over eons. This lineage is bisected by the individual viewpoints of the artists, some of which spill between the individuals, applying a sense of connectivity.

Attempting to plot a chronological journey brings us first to Emily Orte. Her ceramic creations seem to be inhabitants of ancient swamps, perhaps a short ancestral distance from the first multicellular forms. Though at their most discomforting they resemble distorted, confused expressions of bilaterian life, what is fascinating about them is the sensation that they are gaining an awareness of themselves. A significant moment in the evolution of life, we are able to witness in Emily’s work the inception point for inward rumination that always ends in the now, with the ever more complicated questions of the present.

A huge leap in time is contrasted by a smaller leap in the development of human curiosity, as Jamie Gray Williams’ present day figures possess a naivety that sits at odds with their contemporary surroundings. Experimenting with their own physical forms, her subjects see their own bodies, and sometimes the bodies of others, as malleable objects whose purpose isn’t quite known. We bear witness to their wild demonstrations of body play as they attempt to understand their corporeality, often appearing with a distinct slapstick humour as their limits are bent and broken. Though they are often clothed and engaged in activities we’d associate with modern civilisation, their distinct estrangement from the conventions we’ve come to associate with our bodies place them somewhere in primitivity.

Katie Hector takes a more cerebral route, tackling the complexities of human emotion when we are faced with the challenges of isolation and dissociation. Marked out through weighty expressions, her paintings draw our eyes to the faces of people we assume to be experiencing significant internal unrest, longing and turmoil. Her palette drifts between surreal, constrained hues and vivid interdimensional opalescence, suggesting to us that our emotions, and our methods to respond to them, can reach points of intensity where our basic senses are overcome and pushed into abstraction.

Ellen Hanson’s figures are often caught in a mysterious, vaporous space that strips their environmental context away, leaving a raw and direct impression of their identities. Though the figure is engaged in sporting activity, there is a strong sense that the real theme here isn’t sport, but wider social and political concepts that one may associate with it; expression, poise and grace run parallel to commodity, obligation and pressure. In this element alone we can detect a snapshot of the artist’s views on the female experience, and how despite the progress waves of feminist action have inspired, in many ways the attitudes of the middle 20th century persevere.

We have always been driven by our questions, shaped by our doubts and guided by the evolutions of these across time. The silent witness to all of this is revealed in the work of Olive Diamond: nature. Nature is the cradle in which all of this is suspended - the slowly moving, patient environment that remains steadfast alongside our dramas. Pitted and scarred by a history of human activity, exploitations and atrocities, nature retains a record of our progress. Olive’s process involves constructing wide geographical backdrops, and over time, building into them details that conclude with those of ourselves. This brings us back to this history, and our more deep rooted story, as she focuses on our migratory paths, those which for better or worse have dispersed us over the globe.

Speaking about her seminal work Meshes of the Afternoon, Maya Deren said that the film ‘...reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.’ This could be seen as a model that, when expanded across vastly elongated time, rings true for the development of the collective brian of humankind. And whilst the individual, in this case, could find such a concept too broad and involved to fully take on board, we’re fortunate enough to live at a time when one of our greatest shared powers –artistic invention– can do a lot of the work for us.

Daniel Mackenzie
March 2025