SHOUTY SNOW ECHO 2022
(i) Cascade
(ii) Adrift
(iii) Dormant
(i) Cascade
(ii) Adrift
(iii) Dormant
Exhibition included a large gallery drawing installation in three sections made with paper, newsprint, paint, pins, watercolour, wood, graphite, pvc, picture cord, d-rings, and hinges. A separate experimental animation screening space also formed part of the exhibition.
Gallery dimensions: 14m x 6.2m x 2.55m (45ft x 20ft x 8ft)
Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Co Wicklow, Ireland
Photography by Paul McCarthy
A text by artist/writer JAMES MERRIGAN (smallnight.org) was commissioned by Mermaid Arts Centre to accompany the exhibition and is available here.
Gallery dimensions: 14m x 6.2m x 2.55m (45ft x 20ft x 8ft)
Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Co Wicklow, Ireland
Photography by Paul McCarthy
A text by artist/writer JAMES MERRIGAN (smallnight.org) was commissioned by Mermaid Arts Centre to accompany the exhibition and is available here.
Please click below for slide show of images.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
In SHOUTY SNOW ECHO, I used an experimental approach to drawing to evoke imaginary snow-covered, transient and speculative landscapes. Assemblages of materials were gathered together in a large drawing installation which combined both abstract and representational elements. Aspects of the pictorial landscape tradition – for example the horizon line, vignettes, panoramas and vistas - featured in work that alluded to snow-cover and its role in creating ambiguity in our perception of a landscape.
It was the culmination of research in expansive snow-covered landscapes during Winter Residency Awards at the Banff Centre, Canada (2016) and Vermont Studio Center, USA (2018).
A number of elements came into play in the exhibition: a drifting point of view; shifts in scale from large to small, near and far; the use of ephemeral materials; a fragile sense of attachment; and drawing that crosses two spatial systems – the wall surface and the surface of objects attached to the wall.
It was an invitation to viewers to reconsider the experience of landscape as something elusive and uncontainable in which framing was discarded. In contrast to our world of digital devices and their rectangular viewing formats, my work ruptures the conventional way of looking and spills beyond any attempt at proposing boundaries in much the same way that Nature defies containment. I used fragments of fluorescent colour to allude to both human intrusion in the wilderness as well as visual perceptual processes in expansive landscapes - a hierarchy of seeing that prioritises colour, form and motion in that order.
The exhibition also included a series of short experimental animations exploring transience and perceptual ambiguity. Made using a hand-drawn aesthetic, they sought to defy immediate comprehension of place and offered no fixed point of view. Focus was placed on each frame as well as on overall sequences. In an animation context, using each individual frame rather than the shot as a fundamental building block allows a consideration of the relationship between the single frame and moving image as a way of working within both pictorial and cinematic approaches. More broadly, working on each frame in this way allows options open to pictorial artists such as the use of drawing and painting tools to explore the transformation of lines and brushwork.
