We’re delighted to invite you to the opening of Pia Gynell-Jorgensen’s ‘God is the wasp nest under His own silver throne’, opening Friday 16 September, 6–9 PM. Some more from Pia below…

Artists are a mirror to their times; their societies' fears and dreams for the future. Art gives shape to our ethical landscapes and offers sanctuary in times of disarray. Internally, I have used the practice of non-figurative painting as a meditation on unpacking my understanding of the world. Having devoted myself full time to creating this series, each work feels particularly potent with nuanced sentiments of unease, dissolution, and even hope, as I have worked to abstract, inevitably, themes of contemporary society. It is within this context that these compositions could be viewed as tableaus of a disintegrated structure.

The story behind this body of work uses imagery of a time when a hive of European wasps made their nest under a chair on my front verandah. As the nest expanded, the chair decayed. I noticed this as a reflection of the way many people act with respect to each other and the planet. Using God as a symbol for our global leaders who represent us, and the throne to symbolise the social, political and economic structures that we rest upon, I suggest the dilemma that nesting within flawed structures drives us to erode very resources that these structures rely on. Social unrest, climate disaster and political chaos chew away at the fabric of our future, and like some biblical fable we creators will be struck down by forces that we, in our spectacular swarm, have built ourselves. It is within this scene that I continue to make art with a sense of urgency that reflects the pace required to attend to something exponentially chaotic like an expanding wasp nest, or a failing system.

'God is a wasp nest under His own silver throne' will open on Friday 19 September at 6 PM, featuring 16 painted works, accompanied by a complimentary bar.