The Thing They Share

Pat McDermott is a Canadian artist whose work inhabits a liminal visual space between concepts like abstraction and figuration. In his Sonnet series, unrecognizable shapes, forms and textures hauntingly allude to the world of nature and recognizable things. 

McDermott earned a BA in Sociology from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, and a Bachelor of Fine Art from York University in Toronto.

He has worked with a range of materials and tools to create bodies of work that exist somewhere between painting, drawing, and sculpture. One series of reliefs was fashioned from bee’s wax on MDF; another was made by applying dozens of layers of gesso over the pieces of children’s puzzles. His Sonnet series is made from acrylic paint applied to plywood or MDF. The painting process results in vibrant colors and almost photorealistic details within the shapes. Though the image is unrepresentative of anything in particular, the hyper attention to detail suggests that it might be an enlarged photograph, perhaps of some microscopic worm, a hair, or maybe a plastic straw. Such details are intended to challenge the viewer, to inspire the viewer to ask questions about why it is so important to use language to describe the content of a work of art.

McDermott is interested in the failure of language to adequately describe the totality of the human condition.
He associates words with representational images in art—both are outgrowths, or perhaps expressions, of the human need to explain and categorize what we experience. Guided by the belief that understanding relies on feelings and instincts that cannot be fully explained or categorized, McDermott sets out to create aesthetic objects that cannot be sensibly deciphered.