Tess McMillan, a painter working in oil and pastel, explores the rejection of and fascination with chaos, doubt, and decay as viewed through a framework of domesticity and religiosity. Her intimate tableaux are animated with figures and creatures in ambiguous states of distress, haunted by faces that dance in the background, objects morphing into physical manifestations of grief, devotion, humility, or terror.
McMillan’s scenes are rendered across a spectrum of detailed realism to gestural and intuitive brushwork within a single image. In order to explore the human need for pattern and order, as well as the inevitable failure of it, her work slowly dissolves from one area to the next. In the way that our memories begin to decay over time, so does McMillan’s work deal with the materiality of dissolution.
At the forefront of every image is the struggle between control, and the fear that accompanies the inevitable impossibility of control. Grief and loss are mixed into the paint across each canvas, supported by McMillan’s display of contorted figures and disembodied faces.