Penny Hallas

My work is largely improvisational, but thematically it tends to revolve around different ways of imagining the human - bearing in mind, in fact relishing, the inbuilt absurdity of such a task - attempting to capture something of the way the world, art and the psyche interact with and modify one another. I'm interested in the various strategies by which human beings reveal and conceal, appropriate and abandon aspects of identity, creating systems and patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour which are continually being broken into by other systems and patterns.

'Self' and 'other', object and subject are in an endless state of flow and interchange and always vulnerable to irruptions (sometimes blindly destructive) of desire and fantasy. The challenge for me is to find ways of depicting these kinds of process, retaining something of the energy and surprise inherent in them.