Highly Emotional and Sensitive

Jacob O’Shannassy

Opening event: Friday the 25th of July | 5.30pm

Opening hours: Monday – Saturday 11am – 4pm | Closed Sundays

The following body of work explores a new trajectory in O’Shannassy’s practice, focusing on how nuanced human experiences and imagination coalesce in the subconscious mind and how they permeate our external and intimate realities.

Utilising the concept of a ‘Paracosm’, complex imaginative worlds maintained by an individual, he funnels his experiences into this world as a form of contemplation and escapism. Surrealist methods of Automatic Drawing have been utilised as a way to tap into and map this space in the subconscious, where these experiences reside. This influences his paintings, which subsequently adopt the automatic approach.

Highly Emotional and Sensitive materialised from experiences of dissociation from the self in moments of human intimacy and sensitivity. Themes of sexuality and false intimacy are entwined within the fluidness and metamorphosis of primordial, bodily, and almost monstrous forms. They remain suspended, isolated, and lost within desolately painted atmospheres. This represents a psychological space within the Paracosm, the gritty, ambiguous and uncertain territory of the mind where our view of our humanity can become altered. Here, the thresholds of self-perception, sexuality, and the body have been breached through intuitive abstraction. The creation of their forms within the paint’s fluid materiality mimics this nature of the subconscious mind.