Late Night Art June // Member Showcase

Between Surface and Shadow by Fionnuala McGowan

Thursday 4th June, 6-8pm.

Between Surface and Shadow is the first installation within Spatial Studies, a long-term project exploring how we perceive, interact with and remember space. The work considers how visual meaning is shaped through fragmentation and shifting conditions of visibility, drawing on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as a framework for thinking about mediated experience; how what we perceive is always shaped by the conditions through which it is filtered.

The installation brings together layered printed surfaces, projection, and suspended material forms to create a spatial environment in which perception is continually interrupted and reconfigured. As viewers move through the space, images appear and dissolve across the suspended surfaces, continually reshaped by position and proximity. Light, shadow, and a subtle ambient soundscape extend this shifting perceptual field.

The work uses imagery derived from screenprints that have been folded, draped, or shaped through movement, projecting this back onto similar surfaces within the installation, dissolving their origins and creating forms that hover between image and object. Screenprinting mesh, normally a tool for producing images, here becomes the surface that receives them, creating a feedback loop in which material, process and image fold into one another.

After the exhibition, fragments of the installation will be preserved alongside photographic documentation, forming the basis of a developing archive for Spatial Studies. Over time, these materials will accumulate into a body of work that can be re-presented in future iterations, extending the installation into a museum-like record shaped by its evolving memory.