Flowerfield Angie and Cheryl in Portstewart are chatty and helpful. They provide me with information on how I might approach the Flowerfield Centre for an exhibition. We talk about the new (ish) borough of ‘Causeway Coast & Glens’ and none of us can quite agree on...
The “Sense of Place” that Jonathan Brennan invites us to share in this his latest collection of Belfast landscapes (and beyond) is a dislocated one. It’s a sense that’s far removed from the comforting notion of “home” that such a title usually invites. Brennan brings...
Exhibition 'No Filter' featuring the work of Esther O'Kelly and NOTPOP took place at Canvas Galleries in May 2023. Discussing the work of two artists in one text generates its own particular challenges. Making comparisons and identifying points of contrast is...
First published in the VAN (Visual Artist's News Sheet) 10 May 2023. ‘Fix Your Pony!’ is the fifth iteration of the Naughton Gallery’s ongoing sports exhibition series, featuring works that, according to the gallery literature, tackle “race, gender, politics,...
First published in the VAN (Visual Artists News Sheet) 15 March 2023. Ann McVeigh and Ken Bartley, the team behind ArtisAnn Gallery, are no strangers to the NI Science Festival or indeed science for that matter – Ken has a degree in physics. Every February sees...
Somebody turned to me and said: “It’s like when you see a gallery opening in an American film; it looks a bit like this.” We were three floors up, not quite a New York loft, rather a high-spec office block, with metallic flooring, industrial lighting, and whitewashed...
First published in the VAN (Visual Artists News Sheet) 9 September 2022. Back in late-nineties Belfast, a loose agreement was formed between several like-minded artists in the east of the city to organise a group exhibition in a local venue. Said venue cancelled...
First published in the VAN (Visual Artists News Sheet) 21 November 2022. Viewing Ron Mueck’s current show at The MAC (29 July – 5 November) I find myself grasping for reference points. Firstly, from art history: from seventeenth-century Spanish polychrome sculpture to...
‘OXYgen’ at Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, is an exhibition of recent work by Dublin-based artist, Aoife Shanahan. Lining the gallery’s Project Space, 14 monochrome silver gelatin prints are organised as a pair, two groups of three and a larger sequence of...
First published in the VAN (Visual Artists News Sheet) 18 March 2022. Ronnie Hughes’s solo show, ‘Isobar’, comprises 21 works on canvas, linen and plywood (from 2020 and 2021) as well as a series of 11 works on paper (from 2015). The former range considerably in...
In a past which now feels distant (but was in fact was only weeks ago) when the term ‘social distancing’ had only just been coined and the concept of having to self-isolate was inconceivable, there was a symposium organised in Belfast focusing on what seems the very...
First published in the VAN (Visual Artists News Sheet), 27 June 2019. ‘A Harlot’s Progress’ refers to William Hogarth’s series of the same name – a moral tale of the short life of one Moll Hackabout, who travels from the countryside to London, falls into...
• grouping again• recapping again.
• grouping• recapping
• repeating the experiments of day 25 with a new piece.
• experimenting with movement.
Thinking about: • getting an image out of my head onto paper - how does one compare with the other? • quantifying nature • animating.
Thinking about:• exposition vs obfuscation• knowing when something is finished / when to stop.
Thinking about:• Audience• Philip Taaffe.The quote above reads:Taaffe recognizes that his art is caught in the tension between the public and the private, the accessible and the inaccessible. As he tells Brakhage:‘I often find myself poised between two poles of...
Finished folding piece from Day XI/XII.
• drawing again• honing in on a theme e.g. day XVI• feeling confused — should everything coalesce? or should each piece tell its own little story in a greater narrative or theme• persevering.
• folding again• adding adhesive• finding another nature-grid.
Back to drawing for a bit.
Thinking about:• folding and unfolding again (same piece as yesterday)• palimpsests and memory.
Thinking about:• variation• lighting.
Thinking about:• leaving the 2D space• into the ‘unframeable’• into meatspace.
Thinking about:• imposing structures on nature• all those “wastelands”.
Thinking about: • structure • line • Brancusi!
Thinking about:• translucency• texture
Thinking about:• working intuitively• working obsessively