The True Believer (2020)
The True Believer exhibition that took place at Laikku Culture House in Tampere in August 2020 featured paintings that depict fragments of social history. Through the process of reproducing found images into paintings, Hughes distorts meanings in many ways: certain objects are omitted; backgrounds mutate; colours are invented; features are removed from faces, erasing markers of individual identity. Her work depicts a range of subjects such as olympic competitors in strange contexts; an ice skater, without the youthful glamour, beaten yet still smiling, out of the ice rink or a masked wrestler, looking more vulnerable than heroic. Hughes’ personal selection of images doesn’t necessarily follow any defined logic of history, place or time; the selecting is intuitive and the series develops its own visual narrative. The exhibition was kindly supported by VISEK, Taike, and Embassy of Ireland, Finland.