Sean Mahan - A Trail of Breadcrumbs

Exhibition opening:
Friday 19 October from 6pm
Opening in conjunction with 'The Witching Hour' by Andy Kehoe.
Exhibition then runs until until Sunday November 4.

Sean is a social realist figurative painter who works with graphite and acrylic washes on wood to depict a sense of wonder about the innate warmth of the human character and its conflict with structures of power and control. 

Artist statement:

This new series of paintings explores the ambiguity of human nature, following a ‘trail of breadcrumbs.’  We seem to be always in between, we are being and becoming.  We are always on our way towards a vanishing horizon, both constrained and constructed by our past experience and yet free to flower in infinite directions.  We’re both endowed with the gifts of millions of years of natural selection and seemingly free to reason against them. We are the ‘rational animal’, a unique subject amidst a universe of objects.  Like the songbird, a repeating symbol in the paintings, we exist in between.  We can both follow a ‘trail of breadcrumbs’ towards something sweet within us and towards something sweet that we create ahead of us.

We recently had a chat with Sean about the formation of his practice, the subjects of his pieces and his connection with objects from the 50s and 60s.