Alan Ibell, A Place to Put the Ghosts

Alan Ibell’s painting practice explores narrative and figuration alongside the uncanny and the Antipodean gothic. Borrowing imagery from dreams, memories, personal anxieties and existential musings — and wider sources ranging from classical mythology to pop music — Ibell creates visual allegories of a perilous paradise — tranquil, inescapable, disjointed. Figures exist in surreal landscapes searching for fulfilment, be it spiritual or other, conveying a poetic or abstract visual experience.

In A Place to Put the Ghosts, Ibell experiments with new colours and forms, while returning to familiar themes and images — the house, the figure, the landscape. By resurfacing these motifs, as from the depths of memory, he gestures towards a type of ghost, that of the past self, half-forgotten but never fully erased. With these works Ibell encourages us to consider the nature of our own self-reinventions and place-building. Are we ever in control of where we put our own ghosts?