Patterns 17 and 71

A similar inversion occurs in Gail Hastings’ delicate pop wall-piece Patterns 17 and 71. This work also hails from a larger series, titled Encyclopaedia of broken patterns. Hastings uses a unique rhetoric; fusing modernist art history with contemporary fictions and disguising meaning in clever visual metaphor. Her love of language informs this visual parable, as does her uncanny awareness of habitual human behaviour. Here she reiterates an earlier method of drafting emotions into an architectural floor plan. In attempting to freeze the personal and ephemeral, she casts doubt over those things we regard as permanent. Deliberate ‘mistakes’ reveal her endeavour to demystify art history’s grandiose mausoleum and scale its rooms down to an intimate, fallible, sometimes witty dimension.