Jonathan O’Dea: Material – Art
12th June, 2025 – 25th June, 2025
Winns Gallery
Lloyd Park
London, E17 5JW
Jonathan O’Dea: Transforming Waste into Meaning – Sculptural Explorations of Chaos, Cohesion, and the Human Condition
Winns Gallery is delighted to announce Material – Art, an exhibition of 10 new abstract sculptures by Irish artist Jonathan O’Dea MRSS, FRSA, exploring the metaphysics and physical science of making art.
The work for this exhibition began when O’Dea discovered burnt and discarded materials in a local building destroyed by fire. These were later augmented by found household and construction waste materials, including discarded plastic CD covers, building aggregate, and castoff metal from construction sites.
O’Dea’s use of these contrasting found and repurposed materials explores ideas of cohesion—from the physical to the metaphysical—and how the chemical composition of different materials can determine the outcome of an individual work. Even under intense heat and pressure, the materials do not form a uniform bond: one may heat up while another burns or cracks. They may stick together but never become a resolved or solid mass.
This juxtaposition, O’Dea explains, also serves as a metaphor for the human condition. “Through these sculptures,” he says, “I am exploring the relationship between abstract art and science and how humans try to create order from ‘chaos’ to make sense of the world around us. This might involve stretching the cognitive processes to think outside the box to find answers—but also accepting that truth and reality cannot always be easily understood.”
The four vertical, totemic works—standing just over human height—create a curious tension in the viewer, evoking both the destruction involved in their making and the broader history and current reality of human conflict around the world.
Art historian Dr Julian Freeman, of the Courtauld Gallery, notes that “the combination of fierce heat and natural and man-made materials, sourced from unknown locations, can make these works disturbing,” and adds that “in their pillar-like presences they can easily resonate with eras, or epochs, that are more in keeping with the classical world than with the twenty-first century.”
These sculptures also serve as a commentary on our wasteful society, transforming discarded ‘trash’ into works that are dynamic and imbued with an urban aesthetic—at once raw, beautiful, and thought-provoking.
Jonathan O’Dea: Material – Art opens on the 12th of June, 2025 until the 25th of June, 2025 at Winns Gallery
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