Situating the viewer as an intruder to the privacy of domestic space, ‘Empty Places/With Suspicion’ challenges personal reliance on the secrecy of intimate thought and activity. For the exhibition the gallery becomes the site of a derelict home; the decaying qualities and eerie ambience of which impart a sense of hopelessness and existential belittlement.

Jarrod Van Der Ryken’s practice is concerned with ideas of unspoken experience. His work attempts to draw relations to wider phenomenologies of thought and language, including the difficulties of translating experience coherently into language.

This occurs in the abstraction of texts, forming works of incomprehensible writing, and also in experimentation with the introverted presence of body in performance, installation and video. His work articulates these ideologies through a passivity that is insinuated by the visual subtleties and ephemeral nature of the materials and processes being utilised.