Staff Research Profiles

Exhibition

Crawford Art Centre, University of St Andrews, Scotland

A solo, touring exhibition of paintings and installation, curated by Nathalie Weadick for the Butler Gallery. Exhibited thereafter at Solvberget, Stavanger Kulturhus, Norway; Orchard Gallery, Derry; Crawford Arts Centre, University of St Andrews. Catalogue essay by Francis McKee (ISBN: 0 9530898 5 1). This substantial body of work can be considered as a series of inter-related visual essays emanating from direct observation of the landscape. Research began with prolonged periods of study in Iceland, Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland. Much of the work was made whilst I was artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The significance of the outputs presented in the exhibition is in the formalisation within the work of the cultural and humanistic presence that landscape as a traditional subject for art has always carried. The works combine to articulate an understanding that perception is not simply seeing but 'seeing as'. In this respect the body of works presented can be seen as elements in my ongoing research into the representation of landscape. To this the reductive aesthetic of Gaelic culture and platonic rationalisation are key components in my visual essays in defining place. The exhibition Fields led to an invitation to present further works in this research area in another solo exhibition, Lines & Planes, at the Model and Niland Art Gallery in Sligo, Ireland in 2003. One work, Dark Field, was purchased by the Scottish Executive for the First Minister's Office in St Andrews House, Edinburgh. As a result of the exhibition in Stavanger I was the invited artist at the North Norwegian Triennial of Contemporary Art, Gallerei Nord-Norge, Harstad, Norway in 2004.

11/05/2001

01/07/2001

Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, Ireland; Solvberget, Stravanger Kulturhus, Norway; Orchard Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland

Media coverage: favourable reviews in both 'The Irish Times' and 'Circa', the Irish magazine of Contemporary Art by the acclaimed Irish critic, Aiden Dunne.