We live in a chaotic, crazy world. Random events, sudden surprises, the excitement – or the dismay – of the utterly unexpected: and yet look more deeply and find that underpinning everything it feels as if there must be order. Even a chance meeting has had its beginnings somewhere. There has been the moment that sparked the chain of events, creating an inevitability that carries things forward to what we cherish as the significant moment.

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Patterns matter. In a gridded city, the seething morass of traffic is actually carefully choreographed to the beat of green and red. From frost fractals to the more general weather, we see that even wild storms follow the logic of wind currents and the predictable effects of warm air meeting cold. Order balances chaos, order puts sense onto chaos, and makes life liveable.

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Our own minds and bodies are subject to the same forces too. The regularity of the heart beat and our circulating blood is layered over with the erratic processes of thoughts and dreams. Conscious thinking and the notions of the subconscious mind are in steady, enduring interplay. Perhaps that is why we like stories so much. They present us with fictions of cause and effect, reason and meaning, they underlay the seemingly random with patterns.
This is also why Leah Hewson’s work won’t quite let you go.

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Of course her paintings, sculptural works, and prints are immediately enticing. Bright colours can do that, lure you in. But just as with life, a longer look reveals so much more. One of the most potent mysteries that Hewson’s art taps into is how stories can only bring us so far. Human perception is just a layer on top of the world and the universe around us, a lid on the richer vein that lies beneath. Language is just one of the tools that we use to make sense of what we can see.

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Take maths: Dark Matter proves that the more we discover, the more the sums don’t quite add up (just ask a mathematician about the square root of minus one…). This is also true of language: an ill-fitting lid on the powerful emotions, feelings and impulses that lie behind the words we have at our disposal.
Hewson takes on these thoughts, fuelled by her studies into Jung and Freud’s theories of the unconscious. Through these she makes exciting explorations into how to get behind the layers of words, and ideas of meanings, to find what is more essential at the core.

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The mind likes to find connections with the already known, and Hewson’s work does involve the risky immediacy of street art. It has the bright, exuberant tension of Keith Haring, without the figuration, or the didacticism. Instead there’s a rich allusiveness, all the time underpinned by Hewson’s grids, which provide the holding centre.
Hewson also has a broadness of vision, fed, perhaps, by residencies from the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, the Nars Foundation in Brooklyn New York, SIM in Berlin, and then back to Dublin to take up an award with the Wilton Park Studios. Add further awards and scholarships, and a presence in collections around the world, and it’s clear that her work has found a chord that reaches out to touch beyond language, across cultures and borders.

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