From the gallery text for ‘Galaxy Ballroom’, solo show at Galeria Fermay, Palma, September 21 – November 15, 2024.



The paintings in Galaxy Ballroom are dystopic vistas inspired by a patterned scarf that belonged to the artist’s mother. McNab has turned the silk folds of its 1950s garden design into sweeps of oil paint that contort her hand shadows as they flow across the fabric. The 1950s of the original silk are gone, and these shadows suggest some of the animals and birds that have gone with them, lost to our new climate reality. There are also floating bodies cut from Aloe Vera leaves, distorted flowers, and stars shining through translucent skins. The living world is here but also our own touch, of silk running through our fingers. These are landscapes of what we feel and have multiple perspectives, cuts, breaks, and absences.

Janice McNab’s oil paintings are known for their silent flowing depths, and for the way the artist transforms the fabric of everyday life—the clothes, food, and overlooked objects of everyday touch. McNab embeds these in surreal combinations that draw out the way sensed life meets the wider social and political field. Her feminist approach is informed by psychoanalysis but her painting also shimmers with art historical references.

For the last twenty-five years, this research-driven practice has also traced growing cultural anxieties tied to overconsumption and ecological decline. McNab has modelled worlds out of single-use plastics, broken aeroplane chairs, figures of melting ice (that are also ice cream) and in this most recent work, fragile landscapes drawn from the folds of an old scarf.