Portals, Gallagher and Turner, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2024

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Gallagher & Turner are proud to present ‘Portals’ a collection of paintings, textiles and drawings from artists Christy Burdock, Mani Kambo and Bethany Stead, offering windows into the everyday and the otherworldly.

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The works of Christy Burdock, Mani Kambo and Bethany Stead are rooted in everyday personal narratives and heritage. Through drawings, painting, embroidery, and ceramic, with a dose of magic and the surreal, each artist offers a portal into their individual way of perceiving the world. These portals are to familiar spaces made liminal: mysterious dreamscapes of everyday ritual, routine, and religion.

 

Bethany Stead, based in Newcastle, makes work similarly steeped in personal narrative and historical research. Their drawings and paintings explore what it is like to inhabit a body, weaving together auto-biographic, mythic, and religious iconography to create surrealist scenes and characters. Stead acts as storyteller drawing on psychoanalysis, magical realism, science fiction and folklore to question concepts of time, gender and worship, and to bridge human and non-human realms.

Portals is an exhibition of three distinct personal voices offering three viewpoints on life. However, in each there is a generosity of spirit and time, and a place for us to dwell, identify and lose ourselves.