A Soft Rupture
An exhibition featuring Joe Fogarty, Padraic Barrett, Aoife Claffey, Catarina Araújo, Deirdre Breen, Ida Mitrani, Inguna Mainule, Kate McElroy & Seán Daly.
GOMA gallery is delighted to invite you to our upcoming exhibition titled a soft rupture, featuring a selection of work by nine very talented artists.
Selected artists are recent graduates of the 2020 MA:AP programme MTU Crawford College of Art & Design. Artists included in this exhibition are our very own studio artist Joe Fogarty, GOAM’S 2019 graduate awardee Padraic Barrett, Aoife Claffey, Catarina Araújo, Deirdre Breen, Ida Mitrani, Inguna Mainule, Kate McElroy & Seán Daly. This exhibition showcasing an array of creativity and ingenuity across multiple artistic disciplines.
Inguna
With inherent irony and sharpness along with a carefully cultivated facade through structured order and aesthetics the embodiment of the work seeks to give form to verity, encouraging society to recognise the essence and substance of human cognition and collective inter reliance. The significance of materiality and sensuality in the body of work Human Ethos forms the artistic expression providing a provocative twist on assumptions and sensations. This layered installation Human Ethos includes sculpture, sound and food processing technique.
Ida
“My artistic concerns and interests are influenced by concepts and theories of plant culture in the current environmental crisis. This includes plant blindness, post-naturalism and hybrid material. The creative process explores the relationship and interaction between humans, plants, and technology. It also looks at the function and meaning of weeds in today’s society.
“By bringing the viewer’s focus to the vegetal world in an evocative, thoughtful way, I examine the symbiosis and conflict between man and nature while making the familiar more visible. My aim is to capture a memory of the present era using an environment of textures that reflects the diversity and adaptability of life. It contemplates a new understanding of a ‘clean landscape’, where plastic is incorporated in nature.”
Sean Daly
My practice explores a connection to place, specifically the area of woodland surrounding my family home in the Waterford countryside. As a concept, place is far more than the geographical space as represented on a map, it is a space that is actively lived in, has a history and cultural context that mediates our actions within it. By engaging in a deep-mapping study through photography, sculpture and cartography, I aim to better understand and represent the multifacetedness of place and personal ties to the land.
Disconnected from home as a result of the restrictions on movement within the current health crisis, I find myself searching for a connection to home. Songs, poems and objects holding a semblance of home become items for introspection.
Sand, stone and soil were extracted from the very surface of the land and delivered to me by my father just before lockdown. These humble materials are permeated with memory and meaning giving the connection to home a tactile, physical form.
Aoife
My work explores human sensory perception and encompasses notions of unpredictability, fragility and movement. My work is influenced by my interest in material culture and the physical exploration of space. Physiological and psychological tensions between chaos and order are encouraged both during the making, and within the work, to evoke an uncanny effect or altered cognitive states.
Using translucent layers of imagery, video and sound, I aim to provide an ambiguous space for the viewer to recall the peripheral, a space that’s in the midst of a constant, perpetual transformation; a non-space. Reflective work may recede into the distance, disappear into the ground or distort the space around the viewer
Kate McElroy
A layering of space and time, my work interplays found elements and photography. Traces of places, remnants of spaces
A sense of flux, capturing an environment that is in transit and transformation is contrasted by a sense of presence and slow observation. I am interested in the intermingling invisible forces that affects our environments and actions.
I capture elements on the edge of abstraction, stretching the usual register of perception. I present an ambiguity, so the viewer has space to recreate and move beyond the visible. The work often implements an optical oscillation, through this it subtly suggests a malleable, unfixed reality.
My work captures a place in process, simultaneously constructing and deconstructing. It highlights a betweenness, a binary; blending, where definitive boundaries dissolve . . .
Through correlating photographic processes and re-presenting materials often discarded and overlooked, I prise open a gap. An opening, to consider an alternative
Instagram: kate_mecelroy_
Deirdre
My practice raises questions about our place as embodied humans in the world and the ways we produce, reproduce and consume our material environment. I am exploring the presupposed meanings that we ascribe to matter, and the underlying perceptual structures that support these meanings.
The work interrogates the idea of an assumed hierarchy of materials, looking at what is disposable and what is venerable, questioning the value of the mundane. In dialogue with disposable culture and commodity fetishism, the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary. Colours reference trends and conventions of contemporary visual culture.
The work suggests a vitality inherent in objects we consider inanimate; industrial and domestic materials are manipulated and redeployed to subvert our associations to their familiar qualities, confronting our understanding of our material reality. A gestural language emanates from the artworks; forms demonstrate object attributes and emulate personality but lack obvious functionality, existing for their illusionary qualities rather than a perceived use. A lively aesthetic speculates on the agentive power of ‘things’ so that a material imagination might unfold.
Padraig
My work is a response to the imperceptible forces of surveillance capitalism and its role in the gradual deterioration of the human condition. By placing the naked male figure in a suspended and simulated space in time I allude to the activation of a state of heterotopia.
I have merged performance, film and installation to focus on the impact of a bewildering and constantly changing political theatre. The inscriptive capitalist ideals that are scripted onto the body, as well as the various ways in which strategies of power are stage-crafted, signify a ceaseless search for the threshold between reflection and transformation. Explorations of technological dispositifs and cognitive processes are probed to convey oppositional forces through a transcendent narrative that initiates a dialogue between sacrifice and rebirth, virtual and natural, the weighted and the invisible. Identification with shamanistic ritual gives me the scope to take on the role of the performer as avatar and facilitates an investigation into the possibility of rebalancing the place of human beings within the natural world.
Catarina
My art practice explores personal trauma, repressed memories, and behavioural patterns. The work develops an introspective connection between the body and past experiences that are accumulated beyond the mind and incorporated into bodily sensations, reactions and the perception of things.
Through engagement with film, printmaking and sculpture, I present fragments of a performative body in a frantic and intimate way, to extrapolate what is hidden within and what has been lost to oblivion. The obsessive repetition of the triangular form is drawn by an intrinsic desire to uncover new structures and to achieve equilibrium within them.
The work aims to stimulate dialogue and present art practice as an appropriate way to address psychological trauma through non-verbal self-expression and sensory knowledge.
Joe
My work is an exploration of our relationship to objects. I am exploring this relationship in the context of a self-perpetuating consumerism that is one of the hallmarks of neo-liberalist economies. Our consumption of goods is facilitated through the promotion of brand and identity and is at best a manipulated choice that is creating what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (2011) calls ‘mass individualism’.
We are involved in a constant quest for completeness where the corporeal and the physical are used as substitutes for the psychological and the spiritual. It is the transient in pursuit of the intangible.
The work focuses on the cycle of consumption that epitomises our unfulfilling entanglement with the world of materiality. There is a transition from the state of expectancy and the potential of the acquisition of a new object to the mundanity of its everyday use-value. This is symbolised by the stripping away of the carefully designed and engineered packaging.
Using materials associated with the presentation and the transportation of goods I am exploring this change in status. By manipulating and altering the state of the materials I draw a parallel between the expectations we have as individuals and our expectations as a society.