Exhibition: Mahali O'Hare

An award winner at last year’s Exeter Contemporary show, Mahali O'Hare was also the recipient of The Rootstein Hopkins Artists award - presenting a solo exhibition at Spike Island. She will be showing work that relates to her childhood in Bude.

Paintings take their beginnings from classical still life and grow from its traditional language of decadence, impermanence and mortality. Solitary vases, set against a void like background are overpainted with landscape, drawing on the myths of forest, the English Pastoral, childhood hideaways and the landscape via the lens of art. The figurative nature of the vases engulfed by the natural world act as presence and absence, shifting between still life, portrait, landscape and figure.