Man Digging - Adam Hedley

Man Digging

Exeter Phoenix, Gandy St, Exeter EX4 3LS
July 15th – September 3rd, 2023

MAN DIGGING is a collection of open images by 11 painters. Open in the sense that they have not already been locked into tight narratives or descriptive appearances of truth. They are open too because the motif, or the process, might require of the painter that it be later re-explored or further turned-over.

Is painting like digging? Not really. Although the artist’s studio, like the vegetable patch, requires constant attention, and its activities can be rudimentary or repetitious.

This metaphor of repetitive toil, of digging, or turning-over, or excavating, or unveiling, is what binds the show together. It aims to expose something about the nature and process of being a ‘practicing’ artist, a sense of the necessity of going to the studio regularly and to perform certain basic actions again and again. The process of mixing up paint, pushing a brush, turning a canvas around or leafing through a pile of source material, is perhaps like tending an allotment – or digging trenches for the foundations for a building, or metal detecting – one from which new and surprising things of value and beauty will inevitably emerge