Why did I do it
Group exhibition: 19 November - 16 December 2016
Anna Marie Savage
Robert Moriarty
Simon Fennessy Corcoran
Aiofe Ward
Nikkita Morgan
This group exhibition present five artists from the island of Ireland, selected from open call as part of our Materials Messages and Meaning series. Now in its fifth year, these exhibitions explore artists’ different approaches to materials, methods of production and messages within their work.
The artists address issues of relationship to place, culture, self and others. Through challenges to the physical qualities and values associated with their chosen materials, each explores and expresses an area of personal interest. Using textiles, chipboard, steel, bone, and ceramics they collectively push expected boundaries and perceptions. Our relationship with the materials themselves is brought into question as plasma cutting meets embroidery; turf meets papermaking; animation meets body parts.
Aiofa Ward, Body Parts
About the artists:
Anna Marie Savage explores issues of cultural and national identity. She works with paint, sound, photography and drawing. The works bring together a range of practices that explore and probe the fundamentals of form and space. Whilst investigating the properties of material, structure, mass and scale by challenging ideas about current painting dialogue, it questions and blurs the boundaries between drawing, painting and installation. Central to the work is an investigation into the allegiance of two dimensional visuals within a three -dimensional space and how they respond to that space and to each other; observed from a more traditional single perspective or being encountered from multiple points of view.
Robert Moriarty’s practice is situated between sculpture and installation and involves exploring materials of the everyday landscape. Often mass produced, these are of interest for the spatial potential they possess, but also for their manufactured qualities. He is intrigued by the idea of re-evaluating something that is fixed in the world and is also concerned with the dialectic of presence and absence as a sculptural problem. When making, he attempts to realise the most minimal intervention in the world of objects.
Simon Fennessy Corcoran is a curator and visual artist who specialises in sculpture and combined media. He is engaged with an internal discussion about the apparently flippant nature of our shifting viewpoints of “popular” materials. Like anything else things are driven forward by money and industry in today’s society and so too is our landscapes of understanding which change and alter as we develop new viewpoints and new ways of looking and understanding the world around us.
Aoife Ward uses a mixture of installation, animation and printed digital drawings to depict a universe of suffering and humour. An exploration of her own experience of mental illness, she uses her practice to address feelings of alienation and self-criticism through the use of symbolic clay constructions.
Nikkita Morgan is a textile-based artist who fuses art, design and craft approaches to communicate Ireland’s troubling environment through figurative visual narratives. She uses a range of textile and non-textile materials, processes and techniques including fabric, steel, slate, wood, digital projections, embroidery, plasma cutting, drawing, laser cutting, screen/mono-printing and fabric manipulation: juxtaposing traditional craft with technology, and consequently introducing new ways of thinking about materials and textiles.