Bethany Hadfield:Billboards and Talismans

Huxley-Parlour are pleased to present Billboards and Talismans, Bethany Hadfield’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. For this exhibition, the artist has created 7 large-scale works on canvas that continue the artist’s exploration of the porous boundary between the digital and the physical.

Text as motif acts as a fixed position for this new body of work; both the exhibition’s eponymous objects – billboards and talismans – are characterised by a tension between the meaning and visual form of the text they contain. Hadfield considers the way motorway billboards are viewed in motion, how they act as speakers of desire, and the extent to which the visual qualities of their text – shape, colour, line – can take precedence over linguistic meaning in these transitory, fleeting glances.