Heidi Gentle Burrell’s 2023 exhibition ADHD Hyper Fixation and Why It Looks Like I Love Pedro Pascal used repeated images of one actor to explore attention, obsession and neurodivergent creativity.
Presented at Rhodes Gallery in Margate, the exhibition included painting, mirrored imagery and digitally manipulated portraits.
A face studied through repetition
Burrell described herself as having self-diagnosed ADHD and used art to make her periods of intense concentration visible.
Her earlier subjects had included Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street and the cast of the television series Ghosts.
Pedro Pascal became a sustained subject because the artist found his face visually distinctive, including asymmetries in his beard, eyebrows and nose.
Rather than producing one definitive portrait, she repeated and transformed the image through several media.
Celebrity imagery redirected toward neurodivergence
The exhibition attracted widespread attention after Pascal, accompanied by Russell Tovey and Robert Diament, visited the gallery while it was closed.
That incident dominated much of the original media coverage, but it was secondary to Burrell’s stated purpose.
She wanted the exhibition to encourage discussion of neurodivergence and the creative force of hyperfixation.
The gallery had invited her after seeing the paintings online and gave her space to develop the theme without disguising its unusual intensity.
ADHD Hyper Fixation showed how fan imagery can become more than celebrity portraiture.
Through repetition, the exhibition documented a pattern of attention and asked whether an interest considered excessive or embarrassing could also generate technical experimentation, humour and an honest account of how one mind works.