“Criticism is one artist discerning the secrets of another artist, who understood that something was decided perhaps by the passage of a bird, or a color.” - from Hélène Cixous interview in The Paris Review, Issue 254

The sculptures and paintings in dove passages are initiated by a sense of touch and movement alongside a sense of sight. For Aleana Egan, painting is imagined as an activity of passage and continuum; an internal language that permeates the artist's practice in indirect and associative ways. In this exhibition the compositional power of dreaming is given focus. Its ephemeral nature, the having and then losing of an area of a painting, is akin to the elusive qualities of dreaming: slippages and grasping are integral to both. 

The materials in the exhibition share a porosity and intimation to what they were before: papier-mâché mixed with pigment holds its pulpy quality and absorbs colour within; the inflow and resistance of different types of paint and fabrics give hints and signals about the temporal nature of materials and the various registers that they can hold. 

Occupying the centre of the exhibition is a floor sculpture titled lit-clos – the Bretagne equivalent to an Irish vernacular settle bed. It is part of a trajectory of sleeping sculptures by Egan that began in 2012. These bed-like forms which include pigmented surfaces, moulded shapes and dyed or stained fabrics are haptic assemblages; soft structures that are made from, with and through emotional transmission. They tentatively invite a sensation of what Elizabeth Freeman has called ‘affective histories’: tactile memories of materials and textures; practices of knowing that are physical as well as mental. 

There are no strict divisions in Egan’s creative work – it is a picture of things in flux. The sculptural assemblage home and the world is a composition of dyed fabrics, a refurbished bentwood chair, a light-pink light fixture, and adapted garments. This work has its roots in an accidental sculpture made in the artist’s home, which she photographed and then extrapolated from. The visual facts of the piece seemed to exist fully formed: its various weights, opacities and index of materials coming together to form an enigmatic whole. The title refers to the writer Geetanjali Shree and her resistance to being asked about the idea of the domestic in her work. Regarding the false dichotomy of home in relation to the outside world where important things happen, she says: “The home is a microcosm of what’s happening outside, and they both have an interactive role to play”.