Patrick Mahon's recent wall-based and floor-dependent printed sculptures extend the artist's longstanding commitment to intersecting art and design, decoration and expression, and the singular with the multiple. Invoking water as both a natural and socially inscribed material, and towers as paradigms of human enterprise, the artist has set about creating works where structure and flow, solids and liquids, interplay to produce provocative new forms. Mahon's materially intense objects, printed on wood in deep hues and with subtle references to the grid, are mounted on plexiglas such that they appear to float off the wall. Other pieces run across the floor in surprising and poetic configurations.

Mahon's interest in describing "a liquid with a line" is longstanding, and the presence of fluid passages and architecture-inspired approaches is not new to the artist. In preparation for this work, Mahon recently travelled in India, where he photographed water towers, often in areas where the 2004 tsunami had devastated the countryside. He was also a participant last year in a residency in Boussan, France, where he installed Château d'eau (Water Tower), a purpose-built, patterned sculpture (see Projects, this site).