Vivien McDermid's new body of work 'Punching Around the Big Balloon' returns repeatedly to the egg as a primary form: a site of origin, containment and transformation. The egg appears as object and symbol, as shell, yolk and membrane, as both protection and rupture. It holds within it a paradox, the beginning and the end existing simultaneously, a suspended moment of “time before time.” Across these paintings, forms emerge as if from primordial waters, dense, mineral and fluid, where matter has not yet settled into fixed meaning. The works move between the earthly and the cosmic. Baskets of fruit, birds, vessels, shoes and domestic objects sit alongside wild birds clouds and elemental forces. Materials feel bodily and immediate: fleshy fruit, iron, blood, sugar, bone, latex. Surfaces oscillate between the marbled and the washed, the dense and the luminous, suggesting both decay and ascension. Motifs of nesting, laying, holding and hatching recur, positioning creation as both labour and instinct, an act of care as much as emergence.
There is a constant tension between weight and lift. The heaviness of the womb, of stone, of fruit, is countered by balloons, breath, wings and upward motion. Influences from Qigong, particularly the gestures of opening and closing wings, inform a rhythm of expansion and contraction within the work. Energy circulates: rising, retreating, folding back into itself. At times the imagery darkens. Beneath the decorative surface, there is a sense of erosion, of things burning out or collapsing inward. References to explosions, warfare, smoke and storms interrupt softer motifs of candles, flowers and celebration. Figures appear partially obscured, fragmented or absorbed into the environment, suggesting both intimacy and dislocation. Throughout, the paintings resist linear time. They circle instead around cycles: of growth, decay, nourishment and return. The egg becomes a cosmological device, echoing ancient myths in which the universe itself hatches from a single form. Here, artworks emerge in a similar way, as if rising from a void, carrying traces of iron, water, moss and light. Each painting holds a moment of becoming, where nothing is fixed and everything is in the process of forming or falling away.
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