The Eye Of The Beholder
by Brian Bourke
Bluewall gallery Saturday September 24th to Saturday October 29th
Opening reception Friday night as part of Culture Night Friday 23rd September 7.30pm to 9pm. Followed by Artist's talk 9pm to 10pm
Bourke’s mark: Seamus Heaney
There is a characteristic signature to all that Brian Bourke has painted, drawn and sculpted. He has made a mark and imposed it upon us. How such an imposition is effected constitutes a central question in the consideration of any artistic achievement. What is the relation between the artist’s intentions and the work’s own necessities? Do skill and strategy overbear impulse? Is impulse sufficiently followed through and brought across into the otherness of the medium itself? Has the work of art been done? (The work of art, after all, is like any other work, scientifically conceived: it involves moving a certain force through a certain distance.) So, has personal force been moved through aesthetic distance?
Bourke’s work sets out almost deliberately to prompt these questions. There is a strong impulse towards confrontation, a readiness to unnerve, amuse and taunt. It can almost seem as if this artist is more bent upon engaging the audience than he is absorbed in the image. The animation of the self-portraits, the mixture of roguery and pathos in the mas- querade involving Don Quixote and Mad Sweeney, this whole histrionic side of Bourke’s artistic make-up could prompt us into differently mistaken responses. It might suggest, for example, that his enterprise is primarily concerned with a self-lacerating exposure of the autobiographical. Or, alternatively, it might incline us to see a knowing, “literary” relation between his iconography and his autobiography. What it all goes to prove, though, is that Brian Bourke is helplessly and intelligently alive to the problems of serious artistic creation in a context that is post-Freudian, post-Marxist and post-modern.
He would clearly assent, on the one hand, to Van Gogh’s desire to paint “so that anyone who has eyes could understand my work.” The evidence is everywhere, from the forthright relish of colour in landscapes to the unmediated presence of the best portraiture. On the other hand, eyes are not everything: there is consciousness, convention, the artistic tradition and the whole prevailing sense of belatedness which hampers our uncomplicated trust in the efficacy of innocent vision. That Brian Bourke is susceptible to this self-awareness becomes evident in the ventriloquism of the Sweeney and Don Quixote motifs, and in his general avoidance of work that dwells too complacently within its own skilfulness and “finish”. Ezra Pound once praised T.S.Eliot for having “modernized himself on his own.” The phrase came back to me when Brian Bourke invited me to contribute to this book, for I would want to salute him in much the same terms. What we have here is the work of an Irish painter who, by the intensity of committed vocation and by a boldness of endeavor, has made marks that are representative, immediate and salutary.
The Road to Marovany
- The Art and Craft of Paddy Bush
Bluewall gallery Saturday August 13th to Saturday September 10th
Opening reception - Saturday August 13th 3pm – 5pm
Marovany is not a place but the name of a musical instrument from the island of Madagascar. The road to Marovany is a biographic musical journey that follows Paddy Bush in his search for a musical instrument that is as controversial as it is endangered.
Starting in the 1970's as a student of musical instrument technology when he first heard the music of Madagascar from the ethnomusicologist Jean Jenkins, through his recording career with his sister Kate Bush, from the pyramid of Glastonbury to the lakelands of County Cavan and eventually to the mysterious world of Madagascar's music and magic.
A unique exhibition of photographs, musical instruments and lampworked glass.
Black Church at Bluewall
Print Exhibition
Bluewall gallery Saturday July 16th to Saturday August 6th
Opening reception - Saturday July 16th 3pm – 5pm
This exhibition of Fine Art Print brings together five accomplished and established print makers, Cora Cummins, Stephen Vaughan, Sinead O’Reilly, Colin Martin and Vincent Sheridan, all members of the Black Church Print Studio, Dublin. An overriding concern with nature and contemporary society emanates from their collected works.
The landscapes and environments presented to the viewer are familiar yet strangely dislocated, imbued with a seeping sense of foreboding perhaps. Obscured or undisclosed narratives leave the viewer unsure of the safety or threat of these spaces, are they stepping into places of calm control or of underlying chaos?
Through images of vacant sites, Cummins’ explores the ‘aesthetic and psychological appeal of contemporary and man-made spaces’ such as golf-courses, industrial sites, huts and shacks. It is unclear if these spaces are tamed ‘havens to escape to’ or exposed, detached 'places to flee from'.
Martin’s contemporary environments such as holiday towns and camping grounds are equally devoid of human presence. These images explore the ‘values that underpin and form communal space’. We may be observing peaceful, quietly inhabited constructs that are in harmony with their surrounding environment or symbols of a dislocated, individualistic society that is at odds with the natural world.
Through heavily worked plates depicting abstracted landscapes, Vaughan’s work expresses the struggle of man and nature more directly. Architectural forms represent the way in which ‘humanity has imposed itself on the natural world’. More organic and apparently chaotic elements suggest 'nature as adversary to human enterprise'.
Sheridan’s dark and windswept landscapes inhabited by gatherings of birds are concerned with ‘social behaviour, modes of communication and group dynamics’. Crows and Starlings seemingly circumvent in adverse conditions, waiting, watching, conspiring. The sense is of impending danger, over which the viewer has neither knowledge nor control.
The real and the mythical are combined in a more narrative fashion in O’Reilly’s imagery. We are presented with scenarios in which what has happened or is about to happen seems a mystery both to the viewer and to the characters portrayed. Equally O’Reilly is questioning our relationship with nature. With dark fairytale humor she keeps us wondering exactly how much in control we might be!
Vincent Sheridan
Sheridan studied at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin and the Dublin Institute of Technology. He has been working as a full-time artist since 1981. From 1989 to 1998 Sheridan lived and worked as an artist in Toronto and Vancouver, Canada. He returned to Dublin in 1999. In 2007 he graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art, specialising in Video. He joined the Black Church Print Studio in 2000 and is currently a Director of the Board.
Birds (especially crows and starlings) continue to feature largely in Sheridan's work. He is concerned with the social behaviour, flight dynamics and subliminal 'brushstroke' patterns of birds in flight. His images often mirror human group dynamics, modes of communication and social interactions.
Residencies include West Baffin Eskimo Printshop, Arctic Canada; St Michael's Print Shop, Newfoundland; Cill Rialaig Art Centre, Kerry and Annaghmakerrig, Tyrone Guthrie Centre. Awards include First Prize (graphics), Claremorris International Exhibition (1989); Best Graphics Award, RHA Exhibition (1992); Ernst & Young Purchase Award (1992) and Image Now Award, Best Use of Multimedia in Fine Art (2007). Sheridan has had solo and group exhibitions in Ireland and Canada.
Cora Cummins
Cummins' works focus on the consideration of various contained sites places one might want to either escape to or flee from.Specifically, Cora's recent work has explored the aesthetic and psychological appeal of various spaces and topologies industrial sites; golf courses; lighthouses; island retreats; huts and shacks; grassy roadside verges and reservations; as well as the slick digital spaces of computer games.
Solo exhibitions have included–'Means of Escape' (April 2008) The Lab, Dublin; 'A Thousand Islands in the Sea', The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon (July 2006); 'Someplace Somewhere' (2004); 'Halved Hill' (2002); 'Various Fields' (2000) Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin.
Graduated from DIT in 1995. MA Fine Art NCAD 2003. IMMA Work Programme Studio Residency 2002. Co-founder of Workroom Elsewhere with Alison Pilkington. Curation projects include 'Elsewhere from Here' (2004) Workroom, Dublin; 'All Yesterday's Parties' (2005) along with the Workroom Elsewhere publication project The Fold (2007). Her work is in many private and public collections including the O.P.W. AXA, DIT, Northern Bank, National Council for Vocational Awards, Bausch & Lombe and AIB.
Sinead O'Reilly
Sinéad O’Reilly graduated in Fine Art Printmaking from NCAD in 1999 and recieved a Higher Diploma in Art and Design Teaching from LCAD in 2000.
She has been a member of the Black Church Print Studio in Temple Bar, Dublin, since 2001. She has exhibited throughout Ireland and in 2006 completed a residency in Mumbai, India, where she studied printmaking techniques under Professor Kashinath Salve.
She is a founding member of Jeco Sword, a Dublin based collective which includes O’Reilly and artists Clodagh Emoe, Janine Davidson and Orla Whelan.
Recent exhibitions include, Milestones, celebrating 25 years of the Black Church Print Studio at the OPW and Trapezium with Jeco Sword at the Lab in 2008. She is currently working on privately commissioned etchings.
Stephen Vaughan
Stephen Vaughan was born in Kilkenny in 1970. He attended Grennan Mill Craft School in 1989 and then went on to further study at Crawford College of Art and Design. There he received a Diploma In Fine Art in 1993 and a BA in printmaking with Honours in 1994. In little over ten years Vaughan has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Europe and the United States.
Solo exhibitions include; two at Michael Gold Gallery in New York (1998 and 1999), Galeri Helle Knudsen, Stockholm (2001) and at the Original Print Gallery in Dublin (2004). In 2009 he exhibited in a two-person show with Killian Schurmann at Dalkey Arts. He works from his studio in Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny and at the Black Church Print Studio in Dublin.
Colin Martin
Martin graduated from DIT in 1994 and is currently completing his MFA in NCAD. He has held solo exhibitions at Temple Bar Gallery 1999, West Cork Arts Centre, Ashford Gallery RHA 2006 and the Fenton Gallery 2009.
Recent Group exhibitions include’ Camera Obscura’, Light House Cinema 2009 ‘Thirty Thousand Years Later’ Pallas Contemporary Projects and ’Returning’ Highlanes Gallery. Recent Awards include The Arts Council Bursary 2007–2004, Thomas Dammann Award 2008, Hennessy Craig Scolarship 2004 and Golden Fleece Merit Award 2004.
Red Flowers In Blue
Red Flowers In Blueby Pauline Halton
Bluewall gallery Saturday June 11th to Saturday July 9th
Opening reception - Saturday June 11th 3pm – 5pm
Pauline Halton's paintings present a world of magic realism. She paints what's close to hand. The 'beauty' she finds in her backyard, at her cottage door, up roads and laneways in Lisduff, where she lives - what she describes as all the beauty that surrounds her.
Her earlier work, painted in the 1990's is of interiors, her neighbours homes – Uncle Mickey's John Brady's Jimmy Reilly's and Aunt Anne's. In these domestic scenes, nobody is at home and Pauline permits herself to be our guide. These intimate spaces – a bedroom, kitchen or palour – are revelaed to us through doors and windows opened wide. Inside these rooms all seems alive. Energy stirs as patterns of wallpaper, tiles and curtains collide and the sun's shadow casts its light across the room. Furniture, chairs, sinks cookers tilt forward, nothing is still or stable. Far from evoking a feeling of strangeness or unease, the private world of her neighbours exeudes a warmth, and sensations of unconstraint gayness are released as the artist celebrates the spaces of everyday living. Magical elements combine to create a more heightened sense of reality. It is a sort "marvelous real" where marvelous might not necessarily mean beautiful and pleasant, but extraordinary, strange and excellent. If magic realism is said to give us a deeper understanding of reality, then the reality presented here seems to have something to do with Pauline's neighbours (who are not at home). It is as if their homes –through Pauline's eyes - take on their owner's persona. Her regular visiting unfolds in a deep-rooted closeness. The neigbour's homes and the neighbours themselves become inseparable, as if these interior scenes are her neighbours personified, and, Pauline is painting their portraits.
Colour has always been a dominant force in Pauline Halton's work. It's usually high and bright and there is almost an exclusive use of primary colours – red, yellow, orange, blue, green – which is applied straight from the tube. Recently she abandoned the paintbrush and uses a palette knife. Its much faster, she says, and I have less control and I like to have less control that way the paint does the work. Sitting at her easel – out in the open air – she focuses on what is around her, as far as her own gateway, and here in the grass, weeds and hedgerows there is a world to explore. The paintings have become much denser with layers of paint and with the perspectives of her interior now gone, all is pushed to the surface. Its as if she wants to clutch the long grass and pluck it from the earth and put it on the page and capture it just as it is, just at that very instant when the wind makes it move a certain way, or when bird suddenly lands and eats seeds. So to do this, Pauline must be very quick and the paintings have this swiftness with a great sense of immediacy. Like the earlier works, these paintings of grass, lilies, trees, cows, hens convey the dynamic of a moment - fleeting yet potent. The transience of life, perhaps, and yet, the idea that within the transience there is also a continuum – grass is always growing, It is perhaps in this continuum that we might find a level of security in the simple and consistent cycles of a changing world, and in Pauline’s paintings this emphasis on the ordinary and in living things around her is expressed with joy.
Like her interiors, the recent works are concerned with the dynamic between movement, pattern and colour. And colour is always the starting point. "I always begin with red. I begin in the middle of the canvas with vermillion red or cadium red, from there I add other colours, red is my starting point" The layers of unearthly bright colours create an intensity and exuberance. Afterwards scraping into the thick paint, she emphasizes surface and texture. These are loose and spontaneous paintings and its hard not to think of Matisse or Van Gogh. Only in her watercolour paintings does the tone become softer, the colours more subtle and this is where she produces her lightest work – the Crows in Conversation on a Fence, or Crover, Lough Sheelin - while maintaining a rhythmic pattern, have a delicate feel.
Pauline Halton’s work reminds me of the feeling you get from laughter. Hers is the kind of work that brings on a smile. She herself has the greatest of laughs – unconstrained, generous. She is as the woman in the Paul Durcan poem who gave herself over to her own laughter, to such an exuberant extent that she was entirely inside it. Pauline Halton, inside Lisduff, gives herself over to all that surrounds her and she presents to us her world as both magic and real.
At Sea
At Sea by Gary Coyle
Bluewall gallery Saturday May 7th to Saturday June 4th
Opening reception - Saturday May7th 3pm – 5pm
Gary Coyle has been visiting the well know 40 Ft swimming spot for the last decade. The 40 Foot is a promontory on the southern tip of Dublin Bay at Sandycove, where people have swum in the Irish Sea all year round for some 250 years. In former times it was kept solely as a gentlemen’s bathing place and the gentlemen's swimming club was established to help conserve the area. Due to its isolation and gender-specific nature it became a popular spot for nudists, but in the 1970s during the women's liberation movement, a group of female equal-rights activists plunged into the waters, now it is open to women and children as well. The gentlemen's swimming club still exists and is open to both genders. The Forty Foot also featured in the novels Ulysses by James Joyce, At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien and At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill.
In the course of making this work he has bottled the water, recorded each experience in a diary, taken photographs of the coastline and has worked on large-scale drawing of the sea. To submerge yourself in “At Sea” is to submerge yourself in the experience of the daily swimmer. View the brooding skies, the crashing waves and occasionally the expanse of calm water as many of the photographs were taken while Coyle was in the water. The result of this investigation is
At Sea The Daily Practise Of Swimming.
Coyle (b.1965) lives and works in London. He studied in NCAD, Dublin and completed an MA at the Royal College of Art, London. Coyle has had a number of solo exhibitions at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin, Fenton Gallery, Cork and has performed at Dublin Fringe Theatre Festival,, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Kilkenny Arts Festival and the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris. Group exhibitions include Close to Hand & Terror and the Sublime, Crawford Gallery, Cork, Paper Work, Pallas Contemporary Projects, Dublin, Something Else, Kilkenny Arts Festival and 10,000 into 50 at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. He was also elected a Member of Aosdana in 2009. Coyle’s work can be found in the collections of IMMA, The Arts Council, The Irish Contemporary Art Society, Dublin, Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Mayo and AXA Insurance, Dublin. There have been 5 publications of his work dating from 1999 to 2009.
Severance
Severance by Rita Duffy opens at Bluewall gallery Saturday April 2nd and runs until Saturday April 30th
Opening reception - Saturday April 2nd 3pm – 5pm
Severance is a collection of paintings by Rita Duffy inspired by a short residency in Tromso, Norway.
The imagery travels into the space of dark fairy tales, psychological territory, laden with strange narratives. Her sustained interest in myths and legends was nourished by the spell in Norway and she has been invited back to do a longer residency in the Nordic Artists Centre in Dalsasen. She is fascinated by the similarities in Nordic and Irish stories and revels in the human dramas of fear and courage.
Rita Duffy’s work has evolved out of a Belfast context heavily inscribed by the visual components of social, political and national affiliations where meaning is not neutral. Duffy’s work renegotiates aspects of language, local narratives, and symbols to produce the possibility for new meaning. She has continued to place work in situations where physical and human geographies overlap. The work has been evolved for contexts where space is encountered not only as a physical but also as a psychological condition.
Rita Duffy was born in 1959 in Belfast. She received her BA at the Art and Design Centre and her MA in Fine Art at the University of Ulster. She is one of Northern Ireland's groundbreaking artists who began her work concentrating primarily on the figurative/narrative tradition. Her art is often autobiographical, including themes and images of Irish identity, history and politics. Duffy’s work has grown and evolved but remains intensely personal with overtones of the surreal. Homage is paid to the language of magic realism and always there is exquisite crafting of materials. She has initiated several major collaborative art projects and was made an Honorary Member of the RSUA for her developmental work within the built environment. Her work is increasingly shown in solo and group exhibitions around the world. She is an associate at Goldsmiths College, London and worked on an artistic exchange between Argentina and N.Ireland, looking at the role art has in post conflict societies. Her Belfast studio practice continues to develop and her public art projects are increasingly preoccupied with international themes.
Duffy’s work is being increasingly collected at home and abroad with work in numerous public and private collections. Currently she holds a Leverhulme Fellowship with the Transitional Justice Institute, developing an art project with marginalized young people in Northern Ireland.
Seeing and Being in the Landscape
Bluewall gallery Saturday Feb 26th to Saturday March 26th.
Opening reception Saturday Feb 26th 3pm to 5pm
Seeing and Being in the Landscape is an exhibition bringing together 14 artists with a concern for the local environment, as well as the post industrial landscapes between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and how these can be visualised and defined.
The exhibiting artists - Olivia Johnson Murphy, Kim Doherty, Celia Richard, J.Keith Donnelly, Carmel O'Callaghan, Yvonne Cullivan, Christine Mackey, Tom Hyde, Sylvia Grace Borda, Harriet Browne, Gerard O’Reilly, Sally O’Dowd, Siobhan Harton, and Bernard McCabe, explore how physical and imagined landscapes can alter our notions of what is seen and experienced. These artists strategically place us before familiar events making us spectators and inviting us to do a double take in experiencing transitional environments, where urban and nature and/or past and present histories come together simultaneously.
For many of the exhibiting artists their work illustrates a sense of freedom to recite and use local histories as subjects, thereby creating new vocabularies with an impetus towards innovation in the form of the content, methodology and media application. The artists have used video, performance art, photography, drawing and bookmaking to address complex cultural and artistic issues in an attempt to transform our understanding of visual culture and being. In this process the artists are addressing cultural hybridization as a personal, political and cultural issue with a special emphasis on place. Ultimately the artists in Seeing and Being in the Landscape have placed an emphasis on the culture-scape and cultural identity, they transverse on a daily basis. Rather than inviting viewers to experience the works as a daily log, the artists akin to John Berger’s ideas hope that the rationalisation of the work will arise through ‘Seeing (which) comes before words’
Seeing and Being in the Landscape is set in the Bluewall Gallery on the historic landscape of Lough Oughter where figures such as Eoin Roe O’Neill and Bishop Bidell once loomed large. Today Lough Oughter and Bluewall Gallery are situated within the North-South Geo Park, a land so rich in histories that it is honoured with UNESCO s
Yvonne Cullivan
Yvonne Cullivan is a visual artist working in the areas of drawing, printmaking, photography and digital media, involving elements of public participation in the process. She holds a Diploma in Fine Art from Galway/Mayo Institute of Technology (1998), a Degree in Fine Art Printmaking from Crawford College of Art (1999) and graduated with an M.Sc. in Multimedia from Dublin City University (2001). Yvonne has exhibited nationally and internationally, including Iontas, Claremorris Open, Galway Arts Centre, The Dock, The Graphics Studio, 411 Galleries China and Galerie du Faouedic France and has undertaken residencies and public art projects in association with Craigavon Borough Council, The Ark Cultural Centre for Children, Kid’s Own Publishing Partnership and Leitrim, Cavan and Roscommon County Councils.
Christine Mackey
Christine Mackey is an artist and researcher based in Leitrim who has travelled and exhibited extensively in the last number of years, participating on a range of international and national residency programmes in Portugal, Croatia, Poland, Argentina, Costa Rica amongst others. Forthcoming projects include a solo exhibition at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny (2011) funded by a Visual Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. She has also received a public art commission from the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and Fingal County Council to work with their bio-diversity department. This work will consist of a set of drawings, for publication, that explore the vulnerability of ecological systems.
Harriet Browne
My practice is developing through a desire to explore materials and drawing, and I am drawn to layers, textures and finding different ways of joining things together. My research is this process of making, documenting and collecting. My work for this show does not require expensive materials, as I use the things I have collected. I am interested in the book works of Ed Ruscha, his Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963 in particular, and Dieter Roth’s Daily Mirror Book, 1961. I am inspired by the work of contemporary artists including the journeys of Richard Long, and Kathy Prendergast’s map works, the work of Antoni Tapies, the assemblage of Robert Rauschenberg and Daniel Spoerri, amongst others.
Keith Donnelly
Keith Donnelly is an artist, as well as, visual and public arts consultant. He studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, University of Dundee. He won a Saltire Society Highly Commended Award in Scotland for his visual art commission with the Blackness Public Art Programme. He is also known for several key commissions for the Dundee Public Art Programme, and East Kilbride Environmental Arts Programme.Keith’s career with public art, arts development and consultation emerged in the 1990s working for regional, non-profit and government bodies, including East Kilbride Development Corporation and District Council, South Lanarkshire Council, and House for an Art Lover (Art Park Glasgow) to name a few over the last decade. Keith has been on the board of directors for Glasgow Sculpture Studios (1998 to 2000), served as an associate group member to PAR+RS – Public Art Scotland and Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University – On the Edge Public Art series (2007-08), and was artist in residence at the Centre for Excellence in Teaching at Queen’s University Belfast (2008-09).
Carmel O’Callaghan
Carmel O'Callaghan is a visual artist who creates abstract landscapes, still life studies across mixed media. She has been accepted on a number of occasions by RHA and her work is in private and corporate collections both in Ireland and abroad. This past year has seen her work exhibited at Sol Art Gallery and Bad Art Gallery, Dublin and in Ardee, Co Louth as part of their "Turfman Festival". She has also recently lectured on her work in the Irish embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Gerard Reilly
Gerard Reilly is a visual artist who works in a variety of media including photography, performance, installation and sculpture. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Gerard holds an M.A. in Fine Art Media from N.C.A.D and is currently completing an MSc. in Trinity College Dublin.
Celia Richard
Celia has been working for 15 years as a self-taught artist, undertaking commissions and teaching in the community. Informed by a practice of art therapy, DIY and journaling, Celia allows materials, objects and words to untangle memories, thereby opening a new process of how to see and experience that can be shared with other
Kim Doherty
Kim Doherty is a Visual Communication Graduate (BA Hons DIT 2004), who has taught art at second level and remains in the field of education as a full-time development officer. While pursuing art on a part-time basis Kim has facilitated workshops using mixed media with a preference for clay. Working with educators and therapists alike, her workshop content focuses on expression, breakthrough and empowerment through art.
Bernard McCabe
Ben is an architect and artist. Educated at the Dublin School of Architecture, DIT, the LTH, Sweden and Central St. Martins College of Fine Art, London. He has trained under Glenn Murcutt, CJ Lim & Sir Peter Cook and has been employed at various architectural practices and institutions. He has exhibited at Farmleigh, Bond Street New York, the Architecture Association, The Festival of World Cultures. He is currently studying at the University of Ulster, is the Irish Editor for the World Architecture Community and is involved with various heritage education programs.
Sylvia Grace Borda
Sylvia Grace Borda is a visual artist and academic working across photography, film and installation. She has been engaged in delivering ‘Seeing Across Boundaries’ a visual arts mentor ship programme for artists. This work is leading towards the building of a gateway feature, a full scale camera obscura sculpture, to be located between at Altachuillon, Cavan. Sylvia holds an M.FA. in Fine Art from the University of British Columbia, Canada. She was Cultural Capital of Canada Artist in combination with Cultural Olympiad project status for the Winter Olympics between 2008-2010.
Sally O'Dowd
A performance and visual artist, Sally O’Dowd is experienced in realising public art projects and private commissions in any scale. She is a skilled fabricator, producing artwork for Damien Hirst, and as arts facilitator for a variety of community projects. In the development of her professional practice as an artist, she places great emphasis on drawing and participatory live art, and is always interested in new methods of making and experiencing art. She holds a foundation diploma from Ledri School of Art and Design in Cyprus, and a BA (Honours) from Middlesex University, London. She is currently based in county Cavan.
Olivia Johnson Murphy
Artist Olivia Johnson Murphy is Irish and lives and practices in Clones Co Monaghan. Her practices are primarily Installation based Fine Art, currently using mediums of performance, film, sound and imagery. Olivia studied Art and Design and History of Art at The Galway Mayo Institute of Technology and Fine Art at Dublin Institute of Technology graduating from both course with Honours. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions over the last 10 years. Her current artwork uses film and performance to address the social and economic national and international climate. Olivia is also currently working on a 'Landscape and Technology' commission by The Northern Ireland Art Council through Sliabh Beagh Arts Co Fermanagh. Her future projects involve her live art performance band that fuses specific sound with vocals, movement and live large scale photography. ojohnsonmurphy@gmail.com
Tom Hyde
After a career in Human Resource management which culminated in four 'Redundancies' in a decade, he decided there was more to life than finding another similar job; after the death of his second wife, he came to live in west Breifne - in County Cavan but with a postal address of Co. Leitrim, where he had no family, friends or history - and fell in love with the lakes. landscape and people and their vibrant traditions. With his camera, this work is a 'Thank you' for the life-giving result of his move to the locality.
Siobhan Harton
Siobhan is an artist/designer working in the field of Interior architecture, product and graphics design. The last decade has seen her art and designs in several high-profile bars restaurants and hotels both in Ireland, Northern Ireland and the USA. She has over 10 years design experience both in college and professional practice. Her designs have led her to win an ID award, work with award winning architecture practices, lecture in Dublin Institute of Technology on physiology of design, and be an external examiner of design for Portobello College (Dublin). Siobhan, graduate from IT Sligo Diploma in Industrial Design (2002) continued her studies achieving honors degree in Interior Furniture Design, Dublin Institute of Technology (2006) finishing her Studies with a Honors Masters Degree in Professional Design practice (2010) At present Siobhan is working on bring art to the community. Her mission is to help break the barriers of viewing art. In doing this she is bringing art to the greater community where there is high traffic flow.
UNFRAMED
UNFRAMED opens at Bluewall gallery on Saturday 27th November and runs until Wednesday 22nd December
Opening reception – Saturday 27th November 3pm – 5pm
Unframed is a group exhibition involving 31 artists across a wide range of disciplines, from artists' books to video installations. The commonality lies in the lack of finishing or ‘framing’ devices in the collected works. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1893-1955) stated; “a picture without a frame has the air about it of a naked, despoiled man. Its contents seem to spill out over the four sides of the canvas and dissolve into the atmosphere.” In this spirit, a collection of artists’ mindful and manual meanderings are unveiled. Un-harnessed by finality or by elaborate presentation techniques, the works breathe with possibility and in the unconfined spaces between inhale and exhale, the viewer is allowed to wander, undirected, through responses and reflections. The works may be in-progress, preliminary adventures, unresolved quandaries, bearers of greater unseen fruits or simple honest truths. With this playful approach the Bluewall Gallery draws to a close its first exciting year in operation and perhaps releases that inaugural Breath!
Aideen Barry - (Video)
Michelle Boyle - (Paint)
John Brady - (Paint)
Joey Burns - (Sculpture)
Louise Butler - (Paint)
Mildred Cullivan - (Textiles)
Yvonne Cullivan - (Print)
Seamus Dunbar - (Sculpture)
Gabhann Dunne - (Paint)
Killian Dunne – (Paint – mixed media)
Peter Erikson - (Photography)
Caroline Fay - (Paint)
Pauline Halton - (Paint)
Cliona Harmey - (Sculpture)
Annette Hennessey - (Sculpture)
Sean Hillen - (Photography)
Alison Kay - (Ceramic)
David Keane - (Paint)
Christy Keeney – (Ceramic)
Edwin Lynch - (Paint)
Mermaid Turbulance - (Books)
Ruth McDonnell - (Paint)
Patricia McKenna - (Paint)
Clodagh Murphy - (Ceramic)
Joanne Murray - (Sculpture)
Geraldine O'Reilly - (Paint)
Fifi Smith - (Sculpture)
Cara Thorpe - (Paint)
Rikki van den Breg - (Paint)
Vanya Lambrecth Ward - (Paint)
Freda Young - (Paint)
Nexus
Nexus opens at Bluewall gallery on Saturday 30th October and runs until Wednesday 24th November
Opening reception – Saturday 30th October 3pm – 5pm
NEXUS
An exhibition of subtle yet powerful contemporary ceramic works by artists Frances Lambe, Andrew Livingstone, Michelle Maher, Isobel Egan, Neil Read and Ross Cochrane.
The works in this show reflect the inner mechanisms of life. They pause on and bring to attention the intrinsic links, complex equations and tensions of push and pull that form the constants within this state of flux. The intimacy of their expression and intricacy of their production render them almost microscopic in context. Yet their attention is to the very details of more universal forces at play - the balance of order and chaos, the weight of history, the fragility of human nature, the potential instability of systems, the prevailing turn of the earth, the struggle for survival, infinity. These works communicate the fine connections that hold us together, the fabric of existence, so familiar and so fundamental as to be almost invisible.
Frances Lambe
Lambe’s work springs from visual research into disparate areas of interest including geography, biology, marine biology, botany and astronomy. This research is informed by my involvement in scuba diving. She is interested the visual ‘inter-relatedness’ of life on our planet. Life forms that exist underwater mimic those on land. Her work contains the counterpoint of opposites; smooth / textured, minimal / intricate, single / multiple, convex / concave, still / moving, microscopic / vast, surface / interior, vertical / horizontal.
Observed effects of weathering on surfaces influences the formand texture of the work. The sphere, the oval and undulating forms underpin her visual language. The form of each piece is of prime focus. The constructed walls form a taut ‘membrane’ between the inner and exterior space. Holes punctuate the surface and link exterior to interior.
Her abstract sculptural work seeks to explore concepts of stillness, structure, balance and implied movement. On a deeper level her work reflects on our perception of time as it is defined by the movement of the earth, sun, moon the tides and erosion.
Andrew Livingstone
Livingstone's work uses a range of media which acknowledges the interface between both traditional practice and new media. Recent exploration aims to challenge and expand contemporary locations in respect of the traditional positioning of ceramics. The integration of digital media and new technologies has become central to his practice where new media is often positioned and juxtaposed with more traditional elements.
Investigation focuses on interpretation and reaction to situations both as a result of direct and indirect experience. The challenge to material structures and familiarity are positioned centrally as is the search for innovative outcomes that explore both process and visual significance. This often includes elements and situations that represent both micro and macro visual perspectives which in turn explore frameworks within both local and global culture.
The notion of visual complacency is a recurring event where the reading of the ‘familiar’ presents strategies for investigation. Using installation and new media, familiarity with material, artistic process, and the hand of the maker, are continually exposed and reconstructed to offer new interpretations. The position and relocation of familiarity can be evidenced in several works including ‘The Deconstruction of Trade’ 2005 and ‘Tacit’ 2006 where the duality of new media with traditional practice presents an extended vocabulary for both visual and cerebral inquiry. These notions are expanded in more recent works such as 'The English Scene' 2008.
Michelle Maher
Michelle Maher is a Ceramic Artist who lives and works in Dublin. In 2003, she embarked on a dramatic change of career having worked as a Director for a multi-national retailer for a number of years.
Michelle received a Sculpture in Context Award at The National Botanic Gardens in 2004 for her large-scale sculpture The Age of Christ and in 2008, she was awarded a Public Award for her water-based ceramic installation Pollen Hotspot at Brigit’s Gardens, Galway.
Recent exhibitions include Bloom in the Phoenix Park (2007-10) & Castle Yard, Kilkenny (2009); Sculpture in Context at The National Botanic Gardens (2004-10) and Outside: Insight (2008-10) at Brigit’s Garden Co. Galway. Michelle has also exhibited in locations such as Farmleigh House, Ardgillan Castle, Rathfarnham Castle, Airfield House, Draiocht, The Kilkenny Shop, The Claremorris Open and The Millcove Gallery.
She has made a number of TV appearances in recent years and in 2009 completed work on a large-scale Public Art Project funded by The Department of Education and Science. In 2010, she has been working on another collaborative art project in Dublin 15, as well as exhibiting in numerous exhibitions around the country.
Isobel Egan
Born and educated in Ireland. Her delicate structures, in exquisitely crafted porcelain, explore issues of fragility, personal space and memory. Using shards of material so thin, they could almost be slips of paper, Egan constructs miniscule environments—abstracted rooms, cities and houses. Citing the writings of Phyllis Richardson on architecture, Peter Gray on psychology and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space as inspirations for her work, Egan’s delicate structures explore the fragility of life, personal space and memory.
The little box rooms of her sculptures recall the cardboard box houses and other fantastical environments of childhood, the flimsy structures made robust by force of imagination. They also suggest trinket boxes and secret compartments where items of personal value are stored, or taking this one step further, the places where we hide our memories. They question the stability and durability of our homes and our environments, the reality of the walls that we construct around us. These references invite the viewer to contemplate their own experiences of space, childhood and memory. In her own words: “The box structures are like micro works of architecture. They represent environments for the nurturing of imagination…. The walls in these pieces, although somewhat malleable, represent the essential boundaries that define personal integrity.”
Egan is drawn to the pallor and delicacy of porcelain, which she enforces by mixing fibres into the porcelain slip. Many of the structures are balanced on retrained copper shelves, the worn green of the copper contrasting and complementing the white porcelain.
Neil Read
Neil Read is a ceramic artist and craftsman with an international profile. He graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1976 and has taught at the National College of Art and Design since 1982 where he served as Head of Department of Ceramics, Glass and Metals from 1987 to 2010.
Read’s work is represented in private collections in Europe, the USA, China and Australia and is held in the Royal Museum of Scotland, The National Museum of Ireland, The Irish State Collection and the Chinese National Porcelain Museum in Jingdezhen.
Drawing his inspiration from historic, geometric and archaeological sources he produces predominantly hand built, ‘Raku’, wall mounted pieces that capture a sense of space and infinity. Since 2003 visits to and residencies in China have influenced his work. He returns to China in 2011 as part of a selected group of ceramic artists who will be working at Fuping to produce a collection for the Irish Pavillion to be built there that year.
He has exhibited internationally since 1976 and in 2007 was selected for ’Seventeen Prime Makers’ at Farmleigh Gallery, Phoenix Park, Dublin and the Aberystwyth Arts Centre. His work has also featured in contemporary Irish art auctions at Adam’s, Dublin and the Royal Hibernian Academy.
Read is Chair and a founding member of Irish Contemporary Ceramics (ICC) which has organised three major touring exhibitions since 1997.
Ross Cochrane
Concerned with human experience, the form and elements of the artwork, the method, processes and the use of the material; all reflect a personal history of memory as defined by actual events. A continuous thread which lies between the past, present and future.
There is a particular emphasis placed on language during the physical act of making; linking to a poetic tradition, consistent within the border regions. The process of throwing, utilising physical lines to create composition, holds and maintains a relationship to a ritual of repetition and labour-intensive tasks. Meaning is thus best understood through both simple and suggestive language, and the process of making itself.
Where There Is Hair There Is Happiness
Where There Is Hair There Is Happiness by Vanessa Donoso López opens at Bluewall gallery on Saturday 2nd October and runs until Wednesday 27th October
Opening reception – Saturday 2nd October 3pm – 5pm
Vanessa Donoso López creates scenarios with endless imagery and references where unusual, animated constructions of hybrid worlds and separate disciplines coexist. She collects and creates objects, images, scientific experiments, paper sculptures, videos, toys and mechanisms that are used to develop, through her personal experience, new interpretations of contemporary making.
As a Spanish artist living abroad for the last seven years, Donoso López is almost obsessed with placing her self in locations, cultures and landscapes previously unknown to her. She lives purposefully removed, often semi-isolated and struggling with language and cultural barriers. Perhaps due to this fact, her work explores concepts of memory and identity, expressed through playful, ‘objecthood’ making in what she considers to be her science experimentation laboratory. Scientific experimentation is a process that Donoso López uses to gain greater understanding of her concepts through engagement with materials.
Her working process is a response to the ‘desire’ an object poses to her - the need to recreate a memory of the shocking impact the subjects of the work have had on her. The almost impulsive, physical making of these domestic-looking objects allows her to keep something of this powerful experience and enables her to create scenarios, installations and spaces that fight against the uncanny and potentially appease the yearning for home, whatever the distance from real home is.
This technique evokes in the artist the processes of reflection, memory, loss and the yearning for another time; as the connotations of conscious thought disperse, giving way to unconscious states of familiarity and recognition. This might give a false sense of familiarity and security, but through a subversion of the mundane, there is always something more disturbing present. Something unquantifiable about the forms she collects and makes, move and captivate her. Objects and their contexts are explored and manipulated to create what appears to be ambiguous works, seemingly caught in a domestic third-space, transforming empty, white cubes into fantastical narrative, generating a dialogue between psychological and physical space.
The child, childhood, is both inside and outside us. It is a personal point of reference, close and direct, present both in the real sphere and in the symbolic sphere. Play, making and learning are fluidly integrated in contemporary visual art like in many other cultural, creative fields. Donoso López explores taboos and fantasies, presented as children’s games, revealing how most fetishist behaviors spring from childhood impressions. Her practice demands the right of the child that we all carry inside, to go out and walk around in over-intellectualized galleries, museums and art spaces, turning them into places visually and conceptually a little bit more democratic.
Vanessa Donoso López
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Observations
Observations opens at Bluewall gallery on Saturday 4th September and runs until Wednesday 29th September
Opening reception – Saturday 4th September 3pm – 5pm
Observations gathers together the work of three painters, Priscilla Gorman, Margot Quinn and Derek Cummins, each of whose practice is concerned with being and seeing. Through the act of painting, these artists attempt to communicate experiences of living, within the body, within the world. Looking at their work, one can sense the invisible film that separates each of us, from each other and from our surroundings. Presented with observed scenes, from unusual angles and with varying degrees of proximity, we are required to view through the artists’ eyes, metaphorically inhabit their bodies as they watch, somewhat removed, and to sense the stillness, the isolation, the breath in their observations.
Margot Quinn
Margot Quinn was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1958 and is a native of Longford town. She works full-time as a Visual Artist and divides her time between Clones Co
Monaghan and London. She describes her work as a sideways look at ordinary life the content of which is influenced by her immediate environment both physically and
emotionally.
She studied fine art as a mature student at The Cass School of Art, London Metropolitan University and was awarded a BA(Hons) degree in fine art in 1995.
She has exhibited in many group shows both in Ireland and England including Ice Art – Irish Contemporary exhibition of Art at Bankside Gallery London in 2009. Iontas(2005,2003,2001,1998,1996) Iontas award winners exhibition, Sligo Art Gallery 2004, Model Arts Centre Sligo 2003,Ampersand City Arts Centre Dublin(1996) Small works Elmwood Gallery Belfast 1997, Banquet Exhibition RHA Dublin
1998,Art Aid London (1995,1996) Brent Artists Registry London (1993,1994,2003) She has also taken part in the Affordable Art fair in Battersea Park London in 2008 and Captain Butty’s Cocktail Lounge, A unique art event at the Tain Theatre Dundalk earlier that year. She has had nine solo exhibitions, most recently in The Maverik Showrooms, Shoreditch, London.
Awards include Iontas Sculpture Award in 2001, Owen Rowley Student Award in 1995, Monaghan Artist in Residence 2002. Public Collections include OPW, Longford Library, Monaghan VEC. Works represented in many private collections in Ireland England France and USA
Derek Cummins
Derek Cummins was born in Dublin in 1979, he graduated from NCAD in 2002 with an Honours Degree in Fine Art/Painting.
He has had four solo exhibitions in Dublin, Bray. Derry and Waterford. All featured multimedia installations which the viewer could interact with while his NCAD Degree show, “The Cathouse” exhibition in Bray and the “Life On Mars” exhibition in Waterford all featured structures one could walk into.
His work ranges from traditional realism to surreal avant-garde oddness and includes realistic portraits and landscapes. A combination of confusion, realism, irony and humor is at the core of his work.
Priscilla Gorman
Priscilla Gorman is a native of Sligo. She studied art at Sligo IT and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.
Her work originates in the physical environment. The painting itself becomes the subject, as the physicality of the paint on the picture plane attempts to make visible something of the experience, through colour, texture and space.
Tales From The Road
Opening reception Sat 7th Aug 3pm to 5pm
Tales from the Road is a rich and well-crafted collection of printed works by six members of Cork Printmakers. A wide range of printmaking techniques reveals imagery that is collectively suffused with broad notions of journeying, environment and culture. This show offers an abundance of contextual material for navigation, akin to voyaging uncharted territory, bridging real and virtual worlds, testing undefined narratives, reconsidering the familiar. The works relate to the human condition, offer a sense of the known in the abstract and are immediately accessible, yet curiously fascinating.
Cork Printmakers is a specialist support organisation enabling the development of professional artistic practice through fine art printmaking while actively promoting public appreciation and experience of printmaking through innovative education programmes.
Heike Heilig
In her current work Heilig has dealt with aspects of depicting the suspense and dramatisation of anxiety leading the viewer into a world of an internal quest.
The consumerism of our outward self is in sharp contrast with this monochrome
Representation of a lonesome inner reality that is hidden away from view at all cost.
The images use of the silent movie genre is tapping into their heightened sense of emotion to remind us that we must deal with our secret inner world to survive.
Like in fairytales we seek release and have to believe in the magic of the quest to achieve it.
Wendy Dison
Born in Liverpool in 1948, Wendy Dison studied at Liverpool School of Art and Bristol Polytechnic between 1969 and 1974.
She has travelled extensively, usually alone and usually off the beaten track. Wendy lived in Spain, Mexico and England before settling in West Cork in 1999. She now lives, and has a studio, in a traditional farmhouse on the slopes of Shehy Mountain. Wendy’s work starts with sketches. She often uses graphite in her work and drawing and line are important even in non-representational work.
She is a printmaker as well as a painter and likes to combine disciplines and use mixed media.
Wendy has had solo exhibitions of paintings In County Cork, in Dublin, and in Liverpool.
Wendy is a member of Cork Printmakers and of Visual Artists Ireland.
Debbie Godsell
Debbie Godsell works fulltime as both an Artist and a teacher. She has lived in Macroom, Co. Cork for the past three years.
Debbie studied both at the Limerick college of Art and Design and the Crawford college of Art, where she graduated with a masters in printmaking in 2002. She has had two solo exhibitions to date ‘Savage’ at the Triskel Arts Centre 2002 and ‘Tide’ in 2005. In Ireland she has shown in The Lemon Street Gallery, Templebar Galleries, The Fenton Gallery, Belltable and South Tipperary arts Centres and the Crawford Art Gallery.Her work is collected by the OPW, the Ulster bank, Bank of Ireland, Allied Irish bank, National bank of Paris and Cork and Dublin Universities, to name a few. Awards include, C.I.T research bursary, Arts council travel award, Cork City Arts award and Cork Printmakers bursary. Since 2005 she has exhibited in C2 at the Crawford gallery, ‘Celebrating Cork 2005’ in the European parliament, Brussels and the Halsinglands museum, Stockholm, ‘Death and desire’ at the Sirius Arts Centre and ‘Time and place’ Macroom, Co Cork. Debbie also created a permanent commission piece for the Port of Cork Maritime Exhibition in 2005.
Peter McMorris
Born in Tullamore, Co.Offaly in 1978, he graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Crawford College of Art and Design in 2005 and curently lives and works in Cork.
Within his work he encompasses the use of various mediums including printmaking, sculpture, light, film and sound resulting in his work taking many different forms.
He have exhibited throughout Ireland and Europe and his work is held in a number of public and private collections.
EimearJean McCormack
The subject of McCormack's practice has primarily centered on the poignancy of abandoned spaces, documenting the architecture and remaining contents employing techniques such photography, print, mixed media and sculpture.
Previous projects have focused on New Church road flats in London, Dean Rock flats in Cork, and Ballinasloe Psychiatric Hospital in Co. Galway.
Resulting work has been selected for exhibitions in Ireland, London, France, China and New York
Paul La Rocque
Paul La Rocque is a Canadian born artist living and working in Cork. Paul's work deals with icons and superheroes.
The idea of the guardian angel was investigated intensely during Paul’s time at the University of Ulster during his Masters Degree. Over time he began to look again at this subject matter but from other possible angles – from the view of popular culture, aka the “super hero”, who, like guardian angels, possess super powers and do battle between good and evil.
His work is collected by the Permanent and Portrait Collection Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Portrait Collection, and Office of Public Works, Dublin, and University College Cork.
Exhibitions - 24 July – 4 August
Opening reception Sat 24th July 3pm to 5pm
Immersed is an exciting exhibition showcasing the works of four young Cavan-born artists, a combination of recent graduates and MA students in the formative stage of their careers. Spanning a diversity of media, from live-art to painting, these four artists are immersed in their work, dedicated to the development of their respective practices. In curating this exhibition, the Bluewall Gallery is providing a rare platform for the consideration of individual projects that are in-progression, offering the artists an opportunity for reflection and feedback while allowing the audience insight into the research, developments, directional adjustments, additions and subtractions which ultimately shape a final piece of work.
Immersed
Sally O'Dowd -Multi-media
The universal themes of O'Dowd's work are biography, nature, and the body. Her arts practice thus far includes sculpture, painting, print, film based performance and more recently, live art. Within a multi-media practice, of which drawing and performance is key, she supports and advances her ideas through engagement with contemporary art and literary practices, reading, and most of all getting stuck in.
In 2007 Sally was awarded the Thomas McLoughlin Memorial Award for her work as a young Visual Artist. She has lived and worked in Cyprus and the UK, working in arts education and assisting in the studios of Damien Hirst, among others.
In 2009 she returned to her native Ireland to develop her professional practice as artist and facilitator.
Laura O'Connor - Video
In her work O’ Connor focuses on image and identity in media and contemporary culture. She uses advertising and cinema as the basis of her research while also exploring the daily rituals and routines women undergo to achieve unrealistic levels of “beauty”.
“This notion of beauty and perfection is a myth created by advertising companies and contemporary media. My aim is to cross the boundary between public and private space, exposing this ‘act’ or ‘ritual’ performed by women.”
O’ Connor uses video as her main medium, combining it with sculpture and performance she explore the acts, rituals and routines common to this notion of achieving perfection.
The results of this exploration are obscure, voyeuristic video pieces that reference the ‘femme fatale’ of cinema or the model we see on billboards or in beauty adverts.
Annie O'Reilly - Installation/sound
Cavan born Anne Maria O Reilly is a recent Fine Art graduate from Dublin Institiute of Technology.
Her current works focus on extracting and forming rhythmic patterns from different elements but her most recent work is based on research, texts and theories behind musical composition. O' Reilly's work is produced from research and she is constantly developing it.
Colour and line appears in a lot of her installations as it is something that has and is being explored and developed in area of visualising sound/ music.
Harriet Browne - Mixed-media
Browne uses ink, paint, collage and stitch to make work, in a generative practice where the focus is on drawing.
She creates work based on the concepts of mind journey and the documentation of thought.
Almost plantlike ‘species’ in appearance, these mappings have real and personal stories to tell. They appear an overlapping linear disarray, sprawling off the page edge, and clambering back on again… intersecting and traversing what has already passed.
Significant/ insignificant text, unusual signage, chance objects and sometimes-unlikely detritus of my day is drawn and layered into and over other work. She is also interested in how these drawings translate into the pliable medium of wire.
‘In an organic fashion I allow my imaginary world to grow through happy freedom and recklessness of stitch and collage.’
Browne graduated from NCAD in June 2007 with honours. She has completed mural work commissions in Scarlet Row, Temple Bar, Dublin; HotelBloom, Brussels, and at Sculpture in Context 2009
http://sarahandharrietssuitcase.blogspot.com
Assisted by Cavan County Council Arts Awards
Exhibitions - Sat 26th June - Wed 21st July
FORM an exhibition by three members of the Leitrim Sculpture Centre opens at Bluewall gallery on Sat 26th June and runs until Wed 21st July.
Opening reception Sat 26th June 3pm to 5pm
This exhibition brings together the work of three artists based on the North-West coast of Ireland and linked more directly through their membership of Leitrim Sculpture Center. The artists' works are commonly infused with a consideration of space and time and driven by integrity of questioning - considering the engagement and interaction of the individual with the wider world, whether this is social, environmental or political in context. Each practice reveals a dedication to technical or material processes. Whether exploring, often in convergence, the boundaries of sculpture, glass, painting or photography, there is an evident curiosity and a palpable intimacy inthe approach to making
Form
Niall Walsh – Sculptor
Niall Walsh lives and works in the north west of Ireland, on the very edge of Europe. Niall has chosen to live in this location for the quality of the natural environment which exists there. Walsh’s work is concerned with space and time, politics, social ethics and a fusion of strong fundamental issues regarding the environment.
Niall Walsh has exhibited widely,recent exhibitions include Haltestelle! Kunst 2007 in Nurenburg in Germany in June, the solo exhibition Black shown at the Dock in Carrick–on–Shannon in jan07, and at the clinton centre in Enniskellen in Nothern Ireland in dec 06. Model & Niland gallery Sligo, IRL. (2004), Jardin de las Esculplures, Xalapa Veracruz Mexico(2003) and Kauno Gallery Kanus Lithuania (1999).
His work was included in contemporary art from Ireland at the European central Bank, Frankfurt, as well as in group exhibitions in India, Korea, Netherlands, Poland, U.S.A. Walsh’s Sculptures have been commissioned widely and can be seen in various public locations through-out Ireland. His work is also held in private collections worldwide. Niall is currently working on public works for Leitrim County Council and Craigavon District Council, which will be completed later this year.
Vanya Lambrecht-Ward – Paint/Photography
Born in The Hague, Netherlands, Vanya Lambrecht-Ward is resident in Ireland since 1996. She began her career in Theatre design and went on to study Fine art at IT Sligo. She is at present undertaking a Masters – Art in the contemporary world – at NCAD.
In Lambrecht-Ward's practice the gathering of imagery and materials plays a large part in the process, the size and scale of the work is often prompted by the objects and the photographic foundlings and is fed by the underlying concern about wastage and consumption.
In describing her practice she says:
‘The innate urge to collect which has been an underlying source of curiosity has brought me to gather and photograph dwellings including their left remnants. It is not however the sentimentality of these spaces or the things we lived with, but how we relate to our spaces and the objects that inhabit them that I am interested in.Through deconstruction and rediscovery of these environments it leads me to assemble new spaces, new perspectives with new possibilities and stories.
Using photography in a very direct manner and working both three and two dimensionally also allows me to question and re-examine the picture plane, the object itself. ‘
Louise Rice - Glass
Having completed her degree in glass and painting in Edinburgh Rice went on to do a post grad in glass followed by a diploma in Amsterdam. She has exhibited widely throughout Europe and her work is in Museum collections. She helped set up the glass department in the Leitrim Sculpture Centre in Manorhamilton where she is now based.
For Rice, the physical challenges of working with glass are an integral part of the creative thought process: ideas must go through an energetic ‘rite of passage’; they both shape and are shaped by the material. She was drawn to glass originally for its versatility as a sculptural material: earthy and ethereal, angular and amorphous, it offers a huge breadth of expressive possibilities. Rice tries to approach the material sensitively and intuitively, in a way that allows her to explore themes that are personally resonant and often straightforwardly autobiographical. She is motivated by a desire to produce thoughtful and visually exciting artworks, and in doing so disclose themes that are common to all and that touch all deeply.
Her early work focused on memory and how we interpret our past. In more recent work, familiar objects from the domestic interior – folded blankets, pin cushions, etc. – are transformed by being recreated in glass. She is currently making a large series of works exploring the complexities of close personal relationships. Conflict, love, envy, communication (or lack of), crisis and harmony, are delved into. Much of this work consists of pairs of objects where glass and another material such as bronze or felt are used to help create a dynamic tension between the objects.
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.
Material Consequence
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.
Assisted by Cavan County Council Arts Awards
May 1st - May 26th Take Hold
Take Hold
by Patricia McKenna from Saturday 1st May to Wednesday 26th May
Take Hold is a site specific new work by Patricia McKenna for Bluewall Gallery.
Patricia is an installation artist whose work is generally process and time based and often takes place in site-specific, non-art spaces.
Her work includes Marking the Land,which included the Grey House (Cavan, 1993-1994), Soil (Cavan and Dun Laoghaire, 1996-7) and True North (West Cork Arts Centre, 2005).
She has also exhibited in group shows in Europe and the US and received a number of public art commissions.
Her current work includes Between the Lines (thisisnotashop, Dublin, 2007, Seachange (Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown Commission 2008) and Curious Sound Garden (Cavan, 2008).
She has been awarded a number of Arts Council Awards and travel grants, and also participated in residencies such as the Artist Work Programme at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1997, Art Boundaries Unlimited, Tallahassee, Florida (2004) and been a Rockefeller scholar in Bellagio, Italy 2003. She was short listed for the IMMA/Glen Dimplex award in 1994.
Assisted by Cavan County Council Arts Awards
Take Hold
March 27th - April 27th 2010 Photomontage
by Seán Hillen opens at Bluewall Gallery Cavan on the afternoon of Saturday 27th of March and runs until Tuesday the 27th of April.
Gallery open Tue - Sat 10am to 6pm -- Sun 2pm to 6pm
A large review, including a selection of never-before seen original works from the private collection of the important Irish artist Seán Hillen will be shown in the Bluewall Gallery Cavan.
From his earliest, made in the throes of the Northern 'Troubles', through the IRELANTIS works of the 1990's which Medb Ruane in the Sunday Times described as: "bigger than anything the Department of Arts & Culture could invent", to his latest where he brings his lively visual intelligence to bear on contested myths in the post-9/11 global community, Hillen's collage and photomontage artworks are among the most iconic of recent decades.
Born in Newry, Co. Down in 1961, and having studied at the prestigious Slade School, Hillen has become well known for works which often bring dizzying and dazzling visuals as well as cutting humor to difficult and complex subjects. Quoting Marcel Duchamp who said he "made art to amuse himself, primarily, and then trusted to posterity", he has a fundamental belief in the value of art as an agent of communication and insight and hopefully, thereby, change. He likes to make work that is immediately arresting, highly accessible and at the same time complex and rich in allusion.
In the 1990's his much-admired 'IRELANTIS' series seemed to catch the imagination of the nation and have since themselves become part of the culture, appearing on almost 20 book covers and hanging in the high offices of state. Seamus Heaney opened the first exhibition and Fintan O'Toole wrote the introductory text for the first book, now itself a sought-after collector's item.
He has also executed public sculpture and other commissions, from video for the Super Furry Animals & Sony Music to title graphics for the BBC, and from Stage Design to his design for the Omagh Bomb Memorial which has received popular and critical acclaim.
Last year his work was seen in China, Poland, Lithuania and the US, and this year will be a significant one in Hillen's career with six exhibitions planned, a new book by an eminent British publisher in the pipeline and interest in acquiring from major US Museums.
Several of his early photomontages based on his own documentary photos from the 'Troubles' have recently been acquired for permanent exhibition by three UK Museum collections and further abroad they are becoming more widely known, and studied internationally as 'masterworks' of the medium.
The Bluewall Gallery is pleased and excited to host this exhibition showcasing a new definitive edition of affordable but archival-quality prints, as well as the previously-unseen works, which will be simultaneously unveiled on the artist's and Bluewall websites.
Opening reception at Bluewall gallery Saturday the 27th of March 3pm – 5pm
Alison Kay
ceramics
Brian Connolly
performance
Eileen McDonagh
sculpture
Marianne Keating
print
Michael Fortune
photography & film
Seán Hillen