Gesine Mahoney

Dreamer

End-of-residency exhibition at CMR Project Space

Dreamer marks the conclusion of the artist’s residency at CMR Project Space and brings together a body of recent paintings and drawings centred on clouds as sites of projection, memory, and imagination.

The artist’s engagement with clouds began in early childhood. Raised by parents who were keen walkers, the sky was never a neutral backdrop but something to be actively read. Clouds were indicators — signs that shaped decisions, movement, and behaviour. Weather was understood as a force to be respected rather than ignored. This early attentiveness to the sky was shaped further by formative experiences of displacement and uncertainty. As a child, the artist crossed the border from the Soviet Zone into the British Zone with her father, a moment in which the sky became charged with imagined presences, warnings, and signals. Clouds became a space onto which fear, hope, and belief were projected.

Later research into her family history revealed generations of shepherds, farmers, postilions, and millers — professions that depended on reading weather patterns and understanding cloud formations. This lineage of observation underpins her practice. For her ancestors, cloud-watching was practical and essential; for the artist, it has become poetic and speculative.

As a short-sighted child, the artist experienced the sky as blurred and indistinct. Art books filled with dramatic skies and figures emerging from vapour — from painters such as Michelangelo and Rubens — fuelled her imagination. Clouds became populated with imagined forms, monsters, and figures that hovered between vision and hallucination. Although corrective lenses eventually sharpened her sight, the habit of imagining never left.

In this recent body of work, cloud formations function as emotional and psychological landscapes. Figures emerge and dissolve within them, suspended between presence and absence. In a contemporary context marked by ecological instability and political unease, these paintings reflect a growing disconnect from the natural world, even as the sky itself becomes increasingly charged. The clouds depicted here act as registers of collective mood, suggesting both looming threat and fragile optimism — an atmosphere of uncertainty that nonetheless leaves room for transformation.

Gesine Mahoney (b. 1944, Jemmeritz, Germany) is a visual artist based in Germany whose practice encompasses drawing-based painting and sculpture. Her work is process-led and characterised by slow, layered methods, combining graphite, coloured pencil, and paint on textured surfaces prepared by the artist. She often works on multiple pieces simultaneously, allowing motifs to develop and shift over extended periods of time.

Central to her practice are themes of memory, perception, and the body. She frequently engages with representations of the female body as a site that resists normative gazes and societal expectations, producing figures that appear fragmented, constrained, or exaggerated. Alongside figural imagery, architectural and atmospheric motifs recur in her work, including stairways and cloud formations, which function as psychological and symbolic spaces shaped by early experiences of displacement, imagination, and near-death visions in childhood.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in Berlin, Bremen, London, Bristol, and Cornwall, with exhibitions at venues such as the Bristol Museum, Kunstverein Bremen, and Kunstverein Osterholz-Scharmbeck. Her work is held in public collections including the University of Bremen and the Kunstausleihe Bremen.

Alongside her fine art practice, she has worked across graphic design, illustration, ceramics, and writing. These interdisciplinary experiences continue to inform her visual language. She is currently developing new bodies of work that extend her exploration of atmosphere, memory, and perception.