PULSE at Limerick City Gallery of Art

Though it seems ages away now, on the way home from The Burren (which I blogged about here) at the end of August, we took the route that would lead us to Limerick as I especially wanted to see the PULSE exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art. This was organised as a covid response to the fact that recent graduates (2017-2021) of art colleges had missed out on opportunities for end-of-year exhibitions and/or other exhibiting opportunities that normally follow graduation. There were 16 artists in total, most getting space to show a few pieces of their work.

The artists are: Paul Cashin, Paddy Critchley, Judy Foley, Shane Hynan, Aisling Jelinski, Grace Loughlin, Day Magee, Sinéad McKillican, Katie Moore, Daniel Murray, Andrew Neville, Jonathan O'Grady, Bara Palcik, Sorcha Frances Ryder, Niamh Schmidtke and Nicola Sheehan. *Apologies to any artist whose work is in my pictures below - justice has definitely not been done - my pictures are simply to give an idea of the scope of the exhibition.

The exhibition took up most rooms on the ground floor of the gallery. After entering the gallery, where work was visible the foyer walls, taking a right turn I ended up in two adjoining smaller spaces. In this picture the main entrance is visible with some of the photos from the foyer as well as work of Grace Loughlin in this small room.

Judy Foley's two wall-mounted icon pieces and the tableaux installation to mend an aorta (which won an Irish Research Council Award) were also in this gallery. 

In an adjoining area of this room was Kate Moore's Entropy, an installation of dried gypsophilia flowers.

Several artists with large works were located in a large gallery space. 

I realise I lost the sheet that connected the artists names with their work. There were also several video artists represented in the exhibition, but I could not photograph a screen to give any sense of the work. 

Another large gallery contained the work of two artists, each having space to present mini bodies of work.

These are paintings by Paddy Critchley.

I think the show seemed like a graduate group show, but there was a high level of competence. It was exciting to see most art forms being represented: sculpture, painting, photography, video and installation art. The artists were chosen by Patrick T Murphy (Director, RHA) and artist Aideen Barry.

Cora Cummins and Saoirse Higgins at The LexIcon Gallery

 A couple of weeks ago I realised that I was running out of time to see an exhibition that had been on my radar for a few months! With the way these past two years have gone, at least I can forgive myself for losing track of time. But at least I got to see the exhibition at The LexIcon Gallery prior to its close. On Steady Ground/Unsteady Ground was a 2-person exhibition by Cora Cummins and Saoirse Higgins. While there was some collaboration in process discovery and prior to exhibiting work (as indicated in an artist talk by Cummins) the exhibition itself is not of collaborative work, rather work by two very individual artists.

Entering the gallery from the adjacent library, the viewer is brought face to face with a number of prints by Cora Cummins and the variation in scale - from tiny mezzotints to the multi-panel etching - is immediately apparent.

The common denominator between the works by the two artists seemed to be landscape and a concern for the environment. However, this is only a surface reading of the works as both artists are really addressing issues of isolation and responses to the pandemic seem to seep out of the works.

As I knew something of Cora Cummins prior to listening to her artist talk (via Zoom the week before I saw the exhibition) I was not surprised to find out that Cummins was also finding creativity from insurmountable grief (her husband died, far too young, several years ago). 

Even had I not known this, I would have looked at the fractured image in the multi-panelled print Monument as something more meaningful than simply the image of a mountain. Because of the artist talk I was aware that this labour-intensive piece subverted the whole point of printmaking itself - it was a unique piece and would always remain so:

Cummins, after printing those unique panels, used the copper plates to form the sculpture Fallen. Together the two works complement each other in a heartbreaking expression of sorrow and survival.

The space around each work allowed that necessary room to hold the emotionsal impact.

I thought, at first, that this wall hanging was another of Cummins's works, but the creator was Saoirse Higgins. It was a good bridging piece between her and Cummins's pieces. The central image had that feeling of landscape but its actuality could not be placed. Perhaps it was a detail? Within the larger cloth it took on several aspects of appearance and connotation: a shroud, a blanket and a screen. So any emotional reading was confused by a multiplicity of meaning.

And then one is drawn to the flickering video in the small room at the back of the gallery where the changing shoreline and racing clouds of timelapse are mesmerising. I was unable to attend Higgins's artist talk but from hints Cummins gave in her talk, I surmised that the landscape filme was of a remote island in the Orkneys where Higgins spent much time in isolation during the worst days of the pandemic.

At some point the video/film becomes multi-split-screen and, aside from the saturated blues of sea and sky, one is aware of the propellor movement from a small aircraft. Both Higgins's and Cummins's work deal with the passage of time and leave the viewer with a melancholic hope. I was glad I had the chance to view the work in this incarnation, at this venue.

 

Bassam Al-Sabah at The LAB

A few weeks ago, I made my way into Dublin's The LAB gallery in order to see an exhibition by Basam Al-Sabah, Illusions of Love Dyed by Sunset. I first came across Al-Sabah when he was an art student at IADT a few years ago, and I was curious to find out how his work was developing.

I did a double-take at the entrance: in previous exhibitions at The LAB, the small square space gallery was used to exhibit a different artist than the main space, but here was an introduction to Al-Sabah's work. The colourful drapery beautifully printed with spaceships and rockets could have been from a child's bedroom (curtains or bedclothes).

In the corner of the space, there were roughly made, unglazed clay forms, which despite their organic shape seemed distinctly ominous and malevolent to me.

The main room displayed a number of individual works in a variety of media, but one could tell that a story was unfolding and further examination would be enlightening.

I am not sure whether it was from a direct conversation I had had with Bassam Al-Sabah or a written accompaniment to his work at some point, but I remember being struck by him recounting that he thought their had been musical drumming at night when he was a child in Iraq - only later understanding that this was the sound of his city being bombed. As one might expect, such a strong memory informs the Al-Sabah's work: innocence, loss, melancholy, a certain sadness and fear feature poignantly in images of family and the remnants of anime cartoons that Al-Sabah watched when he was a child.

While not hugely au fait with the world of anime myself, I could recognise a circling hero figure seeming very confused in a video tower piece.

This same hero figure was portrayed as broken on a nearby table, hero body parts intermingled with human body parts. The broken pieces for me displayed a shattered innocence, a child's identification with the hero, both fictional hero and human child reduced to "doll" parts.

Against the furthest wall, at mantle level, were several shelves containing images obviously painted from family photographs encased in resin, almost as an attempt to preserve the images. The simplicity of this group display was given a huge amount of power after watching the longer video behind the wall, in a separate room.

An almost architecturally sterile cgi video of a house walk-through with a difference. There were a few personal pointers within the rooms: a paper bag on the floor in the kitchen, a fridge magnet of a family photo, Persian designs on furniture upholstery. Ominously though, something was intruding from the outside world -- via radio and tv -- forms and shapes were enveloping the architecture. Most of the soundtrack to the video walk-through is droning and eerie, but then towards the end there is voice-over and subtitles translating the speech of Al-Sabah's Grandmother. Full of sorrow for her dispersed family, as her children and their families leave the dangers of Iraq for various countries, she burns all family photos. Home is no longer home.

Illusions of Love Dyed by Sunset is a powerful exhibiton and I think personally momentous work for Bassam Al-Sabah that allows me to empathise with experiences so far removed from the safety of my own.

Painting!

James edited together the film from the plantcam in the studio to create this video of me painting the egg -- 10 days of work tuned down to 2 and a half minutes.  Some feat of magic I'd say!