Artist Talk|
Thursday 18th August 6pm
Guests arriving at GOMA to view de/Construction Site will be greeted by a pile of materials – recycled wood, paper, paintings – to which they are invited to add*. These are the materials that artists Julie Cusack & Clare Scott aka The Assemblage of Two, will use in their creation of a site-specific artwork or artworks to be completed during the first two weeks of August. Visitors are invited to stop by the gallery during regular opening hours between July 29th and August 20th to witness the various stages of this project and watch the artists at work. The (probably) finished work will be on display during the last few days of the experiment.
The purpose of approaching the gallery space this way is threefold. Firstly it is for the artists to explore their respective practices – which encompass painting and installation – and how they might meet or diverge. Secondly it is to open up the process of creating an artwork to the public and, lastly, it queries the dominance of the role of exhibiting over work in the artist’s practice.
*Wood, paper, cardboard and other flat surfaces are preferable but other items will be considered.
Julie Cusack
Julie studied
Visual Education at Waterford Institute of Technology and subsequently
earned a diploma in Painting from Galway Mayo Institute of Technology.
She has been practicing and teaching drawing and painting for 15 years
in a wide variety of contexts.
Julie’s
abstracted landscapes are vibrant, layered and have always been rooted
in drawing. Working on paper, wood and canvas she combines paint with
drawn elements as drawing for her is not only a way to represent object
or place, but is also a way to engage in the intuitive physicality of
making marks on a surface.
She has recently
relocated to Waterford City. She has exhibited extensively within
Ireland and abroad including the RHA, Eigse Carlow and The Irish
Cultural Centre in London. Her work is represented in the OPW State
collection as well as well as many private collections including Druids
Glen gold resort and The Marylebone Hotel, London.
Clare Scott
Having been an exhibiting painter, as well as having experience in stage and film design, Clare returned to college to reframe her practice and to address conflicts between making art and the art market. With a degree in Visual Art from WIT and an MA in Art & Process from CIT, she turned to exploring materials and media through temporary, large-scale works as a way of avoiding creating ‘products’ while maintaining a painterly sensibility.
“My work focuses on the way of working, peculiar to the individual, which gives the work its quality. In the embodiment of process – through creating on-site artworks – successive, knock-on decisions are exposed often resulting in a blackly comic effect which is amplified by utilising diverse media and processes. For example, time-restricted and material-restricted building on site, use of random and/or recycled materials and artworks, traditional painting, projection and film or any combination of the above. This flexible, reactive involvement with space, materials and media has the potential to be even more connected to the world than either traditional art forms or structured ideas of social engagement and exploring this connection through collaboration will be a part of the next phase of my practice.”