Föenander Galleries is proud to present Michael McHugh’s keenly anticipated new ‘Archipelago’ informed by serval research trips to the Pacific islands over the last two years.
Imagine discovering a new world, that perhaps had disappeared for many years, that only folklore and exaggerated tales spoke of, an environment about flora and organic forms that have only recently been discovered and analysed, or have returned from extinction from millions of years past. McHugh’s exhibition Archipelago, could colloquially be referred to as ‘The Lost World’. Since the easement of recent travel restrictions, Michael McHugh has made a concerted efforts to escape to the Pacific Islands, in search of a new plant order; loosing himself among a range of islands and archipelagos. Some trips were well planned while others where more in the vein of ‘let’s just see what happens.’
This show has been some years in the making, and in the spirit of some of the world’s best known, botanists, scientists, artists and researchers, McHugh curates and assembles a range of plantopia from the Pacific Islands, an area he has been traveling too since a child. A seminal trip in this recent project - with his son Henry - saw McHugh visiting the islands of Tahiti, Samoa and Fiji, researching, drawing and photographing local flora, which in many ways was the catalyst to realising there was much to explore around the islands.
Further visits to the Cook Islands and Fiji, cemented the direction for this exhibition after spending time observing the filtered sunlight and how this interacts with the brilliance of local plant forms. It was this extraordinarily combination of colour, form, detail and light, that first struck the artist as he set about capturing this exotic matter with detailed botanical drawings. Sat outside his Bure, McHugh spent most days painting, trying to capture that intense light and the saturated colour.
The resulting paintings use these thoughts and images to create highly personal organic universes, full of vivid colour and form. Often the final images are shaped as much by the artist's personal history and memories of his first views of certain plants as they are by studious botanical drawings. McHugh intends for viewers to experience the paintings in a similar way, as part of the experience. “The viewer has the final say” says McHugh, “They bring their own feelings and emotions through their own personal circumstances when viewing each painting. They will see things I don't, the colour and new forms will promote a different emotion than perhaps what I may have felt while painting