Unbalanced brings together the work of contemporary artists Scott Chaseling, Cinnamon Lee, Gabrielle Adamik, Mathew Heaney, Mikey Freedom, Cobi Cockburn, Chick Butcher, Phil Spelman and Cesar Cueva. Each artist responds to the concept of imbalance, and collectively they probe its subtleties, spanning visceral unease to material instability. Working in a range of media, they reveal the intricacies and contingencies of balance by reimagining familiar forms, employing distortion and effecting surprise juxtapositions. Their inventive and sometimes-unexpected approaches compel us to question our assumptions and to consider more deeply the tension at the heart of im/balance.

With its inherent supposition of things being off kilter, Unbalanced explores the fragile nature of balance in a world of uncertainty. By challenging conventional notions of stability and harmony, the assembled works provoke viewers to rethink perceptions and to confront the unease that is shaped by personal experience and historical events. These artistic expressions delve into the societal implications of dis/equilibrium, suggesting a need for anchoring and resilience in our topsy-turvy world.

Scott Chaseling’s artwork Falling Backwards is a great example of this. This abstract painting’s deftly rendered meshing of colours and shapes strives to reveal the precarious balance of power. The visually dissonant work challenges the viewer to see through the instability that defines our times, to imaginatively reconfigure the harmony that underwrites balance. It is an artwork that provokes us to consider the need for change.  

Cinnamon Lee’s Suspended Animation is similarly framed by a sense of global precariousness, as much as any imbalance that might reverberate through individual lives. Suspended Animation comprises meticulously arranged three-dimensional, polished-metal pixels on two panels and focuses on the pure materiality of ambient light interacting with metal. Alive with ephemeral effects, the work, Lee has said, ‘seeks to capture the volatility of a moment at the precipice of opposing states, such as truth and perception, concept and reality, destruction and creation, order and chaos’.

Gabrielle Adamik’s delicate glass artwork, too, captures a fine balance of opposites: solid yet amoebic, sensuous yet repellent, happenstance yet constructed. Evoking ‘a waterfall, forever falling’, Adamik’s Waterfall, distils this tension between movement and stillness, ‘the moment of pouring suspended in time’. Waterfall exemplifies a softening of material that invites us to consider the vulnerability of time and balance.

The push and pull of opposing forces are evident in Mathew Heaney’s paintings Children’s Games (night) and Children’s Games (day), which presents two contrasting gestural abstract paintings: one dark, one bright. While the practice of painting is solitary by nature, it is also influenced by others. Inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Children’s Games, Heaney channels chaos and confusion, which resonate in the disarray and discord of modern existence. He embraces the absurdities, intertwining individual madness with larger observations to evoke a deep sense of humanity’s complexity.