Mura Ma is handing over the gallery space to three Manchester Art School MFA students for a two-week exhibition residency. Matilda Wainwright, Yvonne Noworyta and Eileen Bradbury will each be showing a body of work completed during whilst studying this advanced level of painting at one of the UK’s most prestigious painting schools. 

Although these painters have different practices, what brings them together for this project is their breadth of experience and outlook.   United in a deep engagement with the practice of painting and a willingness to dig deep into their medium to develop their own vision, their work reveals the results of a challenging unpacking and rebuilding of their practices over the past three years.   

Devotion to colour in nature, space, and the materiality of paint underpins Matilda Wainwright’s paintings, within which atmospheric spatial planes might suggest the microscopic at vast scale or immensities at minute scale.  Playful shimmies of colour and teasing veils of form are punctuated with abrupt linear interventions, embracing uncertainty. Paintings as questions, not answers: her open process allows chance to inhabit intention resolving as an evocative newness not a representation of something else.

After several years exploring an interest in decorated cloth Yvonne Noworyta began to respond in paint to pertinent issues in ancestral relationships, work often taking the form of otherworldly scenarios. Now by examining the dream like qualities of memory and exploring the desire to make sense of abstract ideas, work is likened to darkness and life events, both passive and violent at the same time.

Eileen Bradbury’s previous career as a psychologist, treating those who have experienced physical and psychological trauma, meant finding a language and a way of communicating when words are so hard. Now as a painter, she is developing another way of communicating, through the expressive use of colour and texture. Her developing practice moves from pieces that explore our inner physical and psychological selves to those that raise the eye to the ethereal sky.

All three painters live and work in regions surrounding Manchester, discussion revealed a shared desire to explore the contemporary painting scene outside of Manchester city centre where they study and have shown work previously.

Private View:  Friday 11 August from 6-8 pm

Artists Conversation: Thursday 17 August 7 pm with refreshments, booking link below.