Chalant
Ailish Treanor, Jessie Whiteley
23.05.2025–21.06.2025
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Read text by Rosalind Duguid: Strangers →
Slugtown are pleased to present Chalant, a two-person exhibition from Ailish Treanor and Jessie Whiteley. Working across sculpture and painting, both artists share an interest in ideas around presentation and objectification.
Ailish Treanor’s practice comprises sculpture, painting and installation, but it is paper that is central to much of her work. For Chalant, she presents a series of 7 new wall-based paper sculptures. They are cut, sculpted and delicately folded from sheets of paper carefully made by the artist herself. She imbues the colour gradients and speckled flecks of colour into the paper during the process of hand pulping, sifting, and sheet forming. Taking control of this intricate technique is integral to Treanor’s practice and her highly composed works.
Manipulating paper’s inherent flatness, she bends, shapes and warps the handmade sheets into sculptural forms. They fold in, over, through and around themselves – Treanor speaks of imagining the forms as bodies, and she manoeuvres the paper into knots akin to a contortionist. Held down and cajoled into position by delicately placed pins, one feels a tension and resistance and a sense that the works want to spring back to their usual flat state. Their compositions seem uncomfortable and unfathomable in their construction, made all the more so by the inescapable flattened perspective of their form.
Fashion, dress, and ornamentation all heavily influence her work, and Treanor styles these works in a similar way to how one might dress a paper doll, or a fashion designer might pin references to a mood board. Treanor’s interest are in how this process amounts to a kind of objectification, and explores ideas surrounding control and subjectivity.
Adopting a different approach (at least initially), Jessie Whiteley create paintings without any predetermined plan. Approaching the blank canvas, she transmutes imagery that forms part of her daily routine and travels into paintings that are worked and reworked over and over, going through multiple iterations before completion. This process of correction and overpainting is important to the artist formally and conceptually; failed starts often inform what comes next, and the reworking creates a space that feels loaded with histories and negotiation. Similarly, with the objects depicted across her canvases, it is important that they too feel close to the artist. Therefore Whiteley chooses to work with a limited array of imagery across her paintings – meaning that the motifs she does use and return to, begin to form a familiar lexicon for the artist that she can be confident in using, manipulating and metamorphosing into new shapes and forms.
Objects pulled directly from her travels in and across London feature regularly in her canvases; lampposts, street lights, and bus windows. This viewpoint, taken from being in motion, means that figures are often shown walking through and past the frame of vision. Whiteley thinks often about this slightly voyeuristic perspective, and of her teenage memories of both wanting to be seen and not be seen the same time. The confusing swell of feelings of desire and fear, both wrapped up together, at the thought of being the subject of observation.
Authentic and self-conscious styling gestures butting up against each other in order to become an object of attraction – an appropriate metaphor for both artists approach to creation.
Ailish Treanor lives and works in Barnsley. Treanor graduated from Newcastle University in 2018. Recent exhibitions include: Ulterior Motifs, Barnsley Civic, Barnsley, 2025; Bronzers, Slugtown, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2023; Tableau Retro (solo), 87 Gallery, Hull, 2022; Botany of Desire, 36, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2021. She has undertaken residencies at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and The British School at Rome, and has been commissioned by Barnsley Civic and Barnsley Metropolitan Council to produce public sculpture.
Jessie Whiteley lives and works in London. Whiteley graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2015, and completed a Masters at the Royal College of Art in 2023. Recent exhibitions include: Greta Thunder, Special Animal, London, 2024; Nausea, Playground 72, London, 2024; The Amber Room, Reference Point, London, 2023; The Great in the Small, 13 Vitrine, Lausanne, CH, 2022; High Windows, Recent Activity, Birmingham 2022 and Bathing Nervous Limbs, Arusha, Edinburgh, 2021. Whiteley has been shortlisted for the Abbey British School at Rome Scholarship, was artist in residence at Dumfries House, Scotland, and has been awarded the Kirsten Scott Memorial Trust Award.