Art & Talking – Oxfordshire Artweeks

278 Art & Talking

Region: Chipping Norton – North & West

Artform: Painting, Printmaking

Matter and Light
Matter and Light brings together two artists whose practices explore the shifting relationship between perception, material, and image. While their approaches diverge in medium and intent, both engage with the instability of representation – how meaning is formed, dissolved, or held in suspension between what is seen and what is felt.
Through painting, Alison Dalwood explores mutable terrain, where colour, mass, and luminosity unfold as phenomena of transformation. Stephan Hausmeister, through woodcut print and mediated image, examines how pictures circulate within collective consciousness – how symbols acquire gravity and how context alters perception.
What unites these practices is an attention to thresholds: between darkness and illumination, object and image, matter and thought. In each, light acts as both subject and catalyst, drawing form out of obscurity and returning it to flux. The exhibition proposes a shared inquiry into how the visible world, whether painted or reproduced – continually remakes itself in the act of being seen.
Alison Dalwood
Alison Dalwood’s paintings transform mass and space into perceptual events. Each work traces how substance shifts, memory settles, and forms emerge and dissolve. Rather than depicting the world, they propose a process: an elemental field in constant flux, mutable and unresolved, where matter and perception converge and interact.
Stephan Hausmeister
Stephan Hausmeister examines how images shape collective perception. Through woodcuts, paintings, and public interventions, he disrupts the circulation of mass-media imagery, exposing its instability. Iconic figures, suspended moments, and solitary forms are distilled into charged visual encounters that question meaning, memory, and the fragile systems that construct what we see