May 29th - June 23rd 2010 Exhibitions

The Material Consequence
Felicity Clear, Cliona Harmey, Helen Hughes, Isabel Nolan
29th May – 23rd June 2010
Curated by Cliodhna Shaffrey

This exhibition explores a constant searching strongly evident in the artists’ work offering different perspectives and shifts in tone from the intimate and personal to the distant and observational. Central to these artists’ practices, is a commitment to on-going exploration of materials, media and ideas, through intuitive process and experimentation as well as and in intellectual ways, so that the works they make – across a range of media - are aesthetically intriguing offering a space for reflection and further thinking on things, on art, on life and the world around us.

Cliona Harmey works across a variety of media including video, photography sound and the internet. Much of her work is about the process of recording. Current areas of inspiration and research are in the early histories of technology – with particular interest in photography, technology of transmission, and image capture. She is also interested in the link between photography and Romantism. Recent work has explored changing light using live camera feeds.

Felicity Clear practice is predominately in drawing and painting. Her current interest is in social and architectural space. In this work she has explored, housing schemes, new building developments, roads, bridges of the once thriving economy. Often rendered incomplete and sometimes almost slightly fictionalised, using bright colours she achieves a pictorial aesthetic where her drawings and paintings posses an uncanny feel. In her current research she is exploring the idea of ‘unbuilding’ It was something that she came across on an architectural tour of Dublin Docklands. “I was drawn to the term”, she writes, “because of its politeness…unbuilding not DEMOLITION. It sounds more considered less destructive, as though unbuilding might in fact be building in another form.

Isabel Nolan’s practice encompasses drawings, paintings, animation, mixed media and fibreglass sculptures and most recently, embroidery and fabric wall-hangings. The work exudes a quiet confidence and clearly attests to the pleasure she takes in using a variety of materials, in drawing and making objects. Though there are frequent shifts in tone, between coldness, bemusement, melancholia and yearning, a point of entry common to much of Nolan’s work is its recognition of our seemingly implacable need to define our situation and our relationships with others. The work both acknowledges and reprises the role of subjectivity, and the ways in which language, desire, and the want of knowledge, affect understanding and the designation of meaning.

Helen Hughes’ make sculpture and site specific installations in a practice where materials play a central role. Selected from the abundant produce of ready-made culture she employs industrial products transforming or reassembling them to make something new. The materials she selects often lend themselves to easy manipulation through simple everyday techniques (cutting, carving, glueing together, wrapping, etc..), so that the application of basic human skills might be seen as an expansion of the industrial process.. In her interest in the concept of ‘making do’ and the hidden aspect of everyday activities as evidence of resistance in the blind spots of systems, she finds a personal language within the vast prevailing systems of production.

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