Choreographies of the Unseen
A solo exhibition by Greta McMahon
Mezzanine Gallery: 15.10.26 - 26.11.26
Choreographies of the Unseen explores the space between what can be seen and what can be sensed: between inner and outer worlds, movement and stillness, matter and energy, the known and the unknown. Through abstraction, I seek to give form to experiences that resist language—intuition, memory, sensation, rhythm and a felt awareness of our connection to the natural world. Abstraction becomes a way of navigating and tracing what lies at the edges of perception, following what is sensed rather than fully known.
Working beyond representation allows me to engage with the underlying structures of experience. Through layering, mark-making, colour, line and material, the paintings develop through a process of searching rather than illustrating. The act of making becomes a form of attention: following a line, responding to a mark, allowing one element to shift another. Meaning is not predetermined, but gradually emerges through the process.
The idea of murmuration became an important point of departure. The phenomenon of starlings moving in complex, shifting formations offers an image of collective movement and interconnectedness. Each bird responds to those around it, constantly adjusting its position while remaining part of the whole. There is no visible centre of control, yet coherence emerges. For me, murmuration becomes a metaphor for the way individual experience is shaped by relationship to others, to place, to environment, and to forces that remain largely unseen.
Murmuration also carries another resonance: a murmur is a low, continuous sound, an indistinct movement of voices, water or wind. It suggests something present but not entirely articulated—something sensed at the periphery of perception. This connects with the Buddhist idea of citta, the heart-mind, where thought, feeling, intuition, awareness and compassion are not necessarily separate. The work inhabits this territory of fluidity, where apparent opposites can coexist without needing to be resolved.
The natural world offers another form of orientation. Birds move between land, water and sky, inhabiting spaces that are constantly shifting. Their ability to respond to currents, weather, light and distance suggests forms of embodied knowledge that exist beyond rational mapping. The heron, moving between water, earth and sky, becomes a figure of the threshold; the owl, seeing into darkness, suggests another way of perceiving what is not immediately visible. These encounters with the natural world are not illustrations, but points of connection through which I explore my own relationship to place and landscape.
Blue recurs throughout the work as the colour of distance, sky and space—the colour of there experienced from here. It holds a sense of both separation and possibility: a space that cannot be fully reached, yet continually draws us towards it.
Threads, string and other linear elements enter the paintings as traces of connection, pathways and fragments of narrative. They suggest routes between things—relationships that intersect, separate and become entangled. They also evoke the act of weaving: gathering fragments and bringing them into relation. In this sense, painting becomes a form of wayfinding, a means of following what cannot be mapped directly; of tracking the river beneath the river and noticing what exists at the periphery of ordinary attention.
Ultimately, Choreographies of the Unseen is an exploration of how we might inhabit uncertainty without needing to resolve it. The paintings hold movement and stillness, separation and connection, the visible and invisible within the same space. Through the process of making, these apparent polarities can begin to coexist—not as an answer, but as a space of greater spaciousness, connection and rest.
The work invites a slowing down: to pause at the threshold, to look again, and to become attentive to the quiet patterns of connection moving through us, around us and beyond what we can see.
