About the Works

Connell’s work investigates the phenomenological feedback between the act of painting and a description of the world, increasingly defined by scientific narratives. More specifically, this entails a focus upon science’s current inquiries into the fields of emergence, self-organizing systems and systems theory, which he takes, literally, to the canvas.

Connell’s work is intentionally loose in relation to aesthetic referents and is better understood to be largely methodological; in a technical sense, there is an emphasis upon methods which actualise an open, ongoing process of engagement and experimentation, and in a more metaphysical sense, in what these methods attempt to encounter: namely, the sublimity of the mechanics of ‘nature’.

Additionally, his work draws reference from various lines of experimentation with non-representation and abstraction, predominantly in the construction of non-Euclidean geometric forms, which evolve on large-scale canvases. The contemplation of these non-Euclidean forms gives rise to auto poetic, (self creating) constructions, encouraged by a systems theoretical approach. This calls the artist’s subjectivity into question, and implicates him, simultaneously, as both painter and viewer, during the evolution of his work.

Artist Statement

Primarily my works are intuited experiences or meditations, which are conducted by situating myself within the nature of experience. A ‘part’ of the greater forces and cycles which are at work at that moment in time.

A syncopation between painter and viewer occurs during the evolution of my works. Each work is a separate exploration or an isolated evolutionary cycle; each work constitutes the gradual development of a living thing. I subject a given, found natural pattern or form to the dynamics of scale, rhythm and repetition – a sculpting of space as it occurs, a mapping of movement and force on the painted surface.

Even though I consider my work to be primarily non-representational, there are references to the familiarity of space and time as a shared platform for all things. This allows the viewing experience to oscillate between micro and macro scales, ease and disease, fight and play.

I bring no intention for an outcome to each canvas … my job is to allow the works to move, and to pay attention to what is ‘happening’ within the event of each work, to intuit its preferred course, and respond.

I am interested in what emerges from the complexity of the initial painted marks I make … to seek the painting’s own sense of ‘being’ and work toward bringing this forward, or out of the work. This is what underpins the primary theory behind my work; ‘emergence’, the process of coming into existence.

The works are rhythms that express themselves through rendered painted marks, which repeat and pulsate – they move incrementally toward micro-resolutions but negate an overall conclusion, rather traversing and mapping courses of affect.

The work’s speak of a timelessness or the ongoing and expanding nature of time.

As such, the works do not suppose a beginning or an end, simply the choice of where one may choose to step in or step out of the painting during the experience of viewing.