Gallery of Apparitions – Iona Kewney

An exhibition of large scale figurative landscape works on paper. The artist as medium, drawing beyond the edges of reality into other realms.

This pencil on paper exhibition draws freely from imagination using personal content and theatrical dreamscape settings. 

I am a dancer creating movement formulae with techniques and a wilderness of imagination. My visual art is a similar practise of draughtsmanship and automatic drawing with realism and symbolism. 
‘Gallery of Apparitions’ is the mind of the artist as a dancer, a performer and a painter. The artist as medium, channeling visions and ways of seeing.

Trusting to the truth of line, rhythm, geometries, magnetism, balance and senses on paper to compose pencil drawings with layers of meaning.
This exhibition draws the figurative presence between worlds. The lyrical transitory movement of life. The presence of ghosts, of emotion, time and energies around us.  The source of the work is the body; the body in space and embodying space itself, physical transformation, trance, euphoria, memory, metamorphosis. 

The dance of life and death. 
My physical practise and visual art work examine detail into distortion. I push the limits and the edges of things where change occurs. By training methods of improvisation, physical endurance, extremes and repetition the unexpected may happen, igniting the evolution of an idea or transformation of the self. The point where art or dance begins to move by itself. 

Listening to the instinctive truth of the body and senses. 

Creating from the inside out. 

Dancing and drawing what I cannot see, from learned knowledge and from what I have experienced. 

To draw, of course, is different than to dance. In this exhibition I hope to capture the essence of continual movement around us. To expose theatrical figurative presence and an interest in the unknown. To excite possibility and ideas. To honour time for dreaming. To look beyond daily life and awaken our senses to the interconnected universe.

Iona Kewney (b.1973) is a sports person, visual artist and active dreamer engaged in the practise of detailed techniques, training and continual creation within the arts. For around 18 years, Iona was based living in Europe; Stockholm, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Brussels and Gent.  Iona is now lives between Glasgow and Brussels. She has been continually drawing, painting and writing poetry since childhood. Iona is an internationally renowned performer who has been making her own highly physical idiosyncratic dance pieces since 1998. 

Her company Knights of the Invisible was established in 2009 together with Scottish musician Joseph Quimby. Knights has performed in 22 countries and hundreds of international theatres and venues including Mexico City Theatre Esperanza Iris, London Roundhouse, Paris Theatre de la Cité Internationalé, Guimaraes CCVF Centro Cultural Vila Flor, Riga Dom Cathedral, Toulouse La Grainerie, San Francisco, Helsinki, Tallinn, Prague, Berlin, Lyon, New York, Strasbourg, Rennes, Lapland, Gent, Brussels, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Odense, Laussanne, Fossano and Sigulda. Knights of the Invisible’s latest work ‘Waiting for the Sea Eagle’ is performing around Europe in 2024.

Iona also dances with the Belgian company Ultima Vez / Wim Vandekeybus and is currently in creation and world tour 2023/2024/2025. She teaches at major international performing arts schools/ universities and has toured the world with legendary Belgian directors Alain Platel/ Les Ballets C de La B (2005, 2006, 2007) and Wim Vandekeybus/ Ultima Vez (2000, 2001, 2002). In the arts she collaborates regularly with like minded musicians, film makers, writers and artists throughout Europe presenting work in film, installation, galleries and theatres.