Sensations Worth the World – Xan Anderson exhibition

‘Sensations Worth the World’ – an exhibition of works by Xan Anderson will be on display at Karamel from 14 February to 24 March 2024.

Artist Statement: “Born in London, I’m inspired by the variety of life. How different one person is from the next and how rich and beautiful the variables can be.

As a person with Synaesthesia (a cross wiring in the brain that causes unusual associations between colour and the other senses) my childhood was full of idiosyncratic sensory experience. For me, numbers and shapes have always had colours, certain sounds or smells are accompanied by vivid patterns and textures and a person or place can appear to me as a collage of all these visual, physical, and emotional occurrences.

This intermingling of the senses is a fundamental of how I perceive an environment and it was strange to learn that not everyone experiences things in quite the same way. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to cherish my synesthetic experiences and the peculiar lens they give me into this world.

Painting provides a language for the kaleidoscope of colours and forms that accompany my daily experience. There is something pure and magnetising about collecting visual inspiration like treasures, depriving context, and creating new landscapes from fragments of the mundane.

I collect inspiration in the form of photographs, written dreams, stories, literature, and poetry along with personal drawings, paint studies and collages, creating a web of experience in tactile guise.

I’m fascinated by themes of vulnerability and power in unassuming forms. Silhouettes of figures in motion or intimate scenes, peeling paint on forgotten walls, family, religion, sexuality, and identity. All the normalities that make us beautiful and complicated.”

Sensations Worth the World exhibition by Xan Anderson.

From 14 February ’til 24 March.

Karamel, 4 Coburg Road, London N22 6UJ.

Thursdays 5.30pm-10.30pm, Saturdays 10am-5pm*, Sundays 1pm-5pm.

*From 2 March, Saturdays 1pm-10pm.