Sinéad O’Donnell | Jayne Parker | Katherine Nolan | Hollie Miller | With text by Angela Halliday

Sinead O’Donnell performance event Saturday 3 December at 2pm

Hold on Tight is a provocative exhibition of corporeal artworks by four artists working in performance and moving image: Sinéad O’Donnell; Katherine Nolan; Jayne Parker; and Hollie Miller. Each of these four female artists works in response to their bodies, questioning the vulnerability of human flesh through lived and sometimes violent experience.

Curated for the Golden Thread Gallery by Peter Richards and Mary Stevens, Hold On Tight presents the different ways in which these artists use materials and how they can be manipulated by, or alongside the body. Uncomfortable tensions underpin the exhibition; abject guts and soft slime contrast to ice and hard porcelain. A visceral exploration into moist, slippery and sticky material gives way to a precariously tall pile of plates teetering on the edge of falling over. Both the artistic concept and the nature of the materials merge. Different aspects of control are important, e.g. what can be made to happen? What do we anticipate? What can we let go?

Performative pieces which take place during the exhibition, leaving traces and ephemera – shattered plates for example – will then become part of the show. The artworks, akin to our bodily experience of life, appear to be at sort of precipice. We are waiting for something to happen.