McMahon mostly uses video and small drawings to articulate her ideas which weave a strange and boundless path between an inner reality of thought and the ordinary outside world, a world in which her version of events have a somewhat hallucinogenic feel. Even though her practice does not subscribe to an obvious visual lexicon of science, it does rely on thought process she learnt through the study of mathematics – one which exists in a state of logic and before language. Her work forces little gaps to open up, or makes a life moment to come apart into two distinct things, one of which gives way to the other, whilst retaining the memory of the world as it was before. She has chosen, simply for reasons of aptitude, visual art as a medium to explore this process – a thought process which Werner Heisenberg describes as ‘not a precise language in which one could use the normal logical patterns; it is a language that produces pictures in our mind, but together with them the notion is that the pictures have only a vague connection with reality, that they represent only a tendency toward reality’ . In her work is a withdrawal from the search to expose underlying structure towards a position that the action of thinking and feeling is an active force generating the underlying structure.

Biography

Bea McMahon (b.Ireland 1972) received a Masters in Visual Arts Practice from Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art and Design in 2007. Prior to that, she completed a primary degree in pure mathematics at Trinity College Dublin (1994) and a Masters degree in mathematical physics at University College Dublin (1997).

McMahon mostly uses video and small drawings to articulate her ideas which weave a strange and boundless path between an inner reality of thought and the ordinary outside world, a world in which her version of events have a somewhat hallucinogenic feel. Even though her practice does not subscribe to an obvious visual lexicon of science, it does rely on thought process she learnt through the study of mathematics – one which exists in a state of logic and before language. Her work forces little gaps to open up, or makes a life moment to come apart into two distinct things, one of which gives way to the other, whilst retaining the memory of the world as it was before. She has chosen, simply for reasons of aptitude, visual art as a medium to explore this process – a thought process which Werner Heisenberg describes as ‘not a precise language in which one could use the normal logical patterns; it is a language that produces pictures in our mind, but together with them the notion is that the pictures have only a vague connection with reality, that they represent only a tendency toward reality’ . In her work is a withdrawal from the search to expose underlying structure towards a position that the action of thinking and feeling is an active force generating the underlying structure.

She was awarded a Visual Artist Bursary from the Arts Couyncil of Ireland in 2005 and 2006. In 2007 she was awarded the Curated Visual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Ireland.

She is included in the collection of the Arts Council of Ireland.

More information on Bea's work can be found at the Green on Red Gallery.