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‘Head & Whole 2: Talking Heads’ was a group exhibition of work by contemporary artists including Devane. It is the second in a series curated by Linda Ingham. The exhibition included contemporary visual artworks with historic works with a focus on the human form. In addition to the inclusion of two paintings, Devane also presented a lecture ‘Competence, craft and crisis in representational art’ and a related workshop on ‘The Practice of painting: A transformational approach’, as part of the Gallery events programme. The exhibition was open from 3 September – 13 October 2012, the workshop held 5 October 2012 and the lecture delivered 6 October 2012.

The contribution to this exhibition of the combination of art work, workshop and lecture enabled Devane to give a new articulation to his primary concern with aspects of human form and imagery within his practice. The works exhibited included ‘Call of Duty’ from his ‘Good & Bad Government’ series, which depicts a soldier in an ambiguous space which alludes to the notion of a threshold or portal. This painting was shown alongside a 19th Century painting by George Monck (School of Peter Lely), also a picture depicting a military figure. The lecture and workshop both dealt with the relationship between painting and photography and posed questions about the nature of accomplishment and skill in relation to a contemporary discourse. This topic was further developed in his paper ‘Competence, craft and crisis in representational art’ for The Representational Art Conference 2012 (TRAC 2012). The Head and Whole paper focussed particularly on the use of photographic material, notions of chance and the serendipitous connections that are achieved through approaching the act of painting as a method of orchestrating a sequence of layers. The workshop, with 20 participants, was a three hour masterclass in which strategies for developing painting were explored in the context of Devane’s oeuvre. The combination of the three elements enabled the roles of practice, reflection on practice and scholarly contextualisation to be realised within one event.