Sarah Devereux
Category: Project Space Artists
Joanna Hopkins
Joanna Hopkins
Bio
Joanna Hopkins is an Irish artist b.1984. She currently lives and works in Belfast, UK. She has exhibited widely across Ireland and Northern Ireland and was the 2012/2013 recipient of the Visual Artists Ireland and Digital Art Studios Belfast Residency Award. She works predominantly in video and installation, with a focus on interactive exhibits and audience participation. Her work explores the themes of augmented reality and digital technologies, and the changing ways in which we perceive both ourselves and others through these mediums.
Statement
Polarising filters are used in most LCD screens, forming how we view and use the majority of our computer devices. In these screens, there are two polarizing filters placed at opposing angles to reveal the image that is created using liquid crystal display. In this installation, the polarizing filters are revealed, and hang between the two images on each wall, instead of technically, on each side of one image.
This project space is used to explore the basic uses of polarizing filters in digital technology, from seeing stress patterns in plastics to enabling us to view the content on our computer devices. Presenting four portrayals of attitudes of thought at their most basic manifestations, positive, negative, questioning and indifference, the videos in this installation explore the multiple and overlapping ways in which we live out our lives, on line and in physical space. What is presented in an online personality may often be different to the real world version.
Peter Donnellan and Daniel Tuomey
Peter Donnellan and Daniel Tuomey
Statement
Peter Donnellan and Daniel Tuomey have previously collaborated on making work for a party in the back garden of a house in Dublin. There they built platforms and installed lights which did not quite suit the purposes of a party in a largely successful attempt to create an uncertain situation in which people would feel uncomfortable. Their current routine in Catalyst Arts Centre’s project space sees them continue to try and manufacture uncanny spaces which will force thought and consideration in situations which closely resemble ones that might usually be taken for granted, but since the road from Dublin is long and wearying they are bringing jokes rather than platforms. Audiences should be forewarned that they can expect to laugh very little, if at all.
Aodan McCardle
‘Níl Abair’
‘Níl’ ‘abair’ by Aodán McCardle for the Project Space at Catalyst Arts is a consideration of re-performance as an investigation through improvisation and temporal accretion. While using projection and sound atmospheres it takes PerformanceWriting as a central mode of action with the body as both the instrument and ground of meaning. This transition will anticipate the audience as instigator of performance.
Marie Flaherty
Marie Flaherty
…a space for activity and contemplation, a transitory space symbolising the notion of impermanence. Each person who enters has the choice of leaving his or her mark behind through the use of text, manipulating the arrangement of objects, lighting a flame or creating music.
Throughout the duration of the exhibition the space will change and evolve. Each day the artist will introduce new materials into the space for the viewer to interact with.
On the opening night the space will light up as those who enter, light a flame in the ceramic bowls laid out on the floor of the project space.
Throughout the week these bowls will be filled with different materials and visitors can make their own artworks within the parameter of the circular installation piece. Visitors will be allowed to write messages or draw on the bowls with pencils.
For the closing night Marie has invited percussionists Michael Speers and Dave Stockard to conduct an instrumental performance using the objects within the space. There will be an opportunity for those who attend the event to participate in this musical performance also. It will then be followed by a fire ceremony during which Marie will invite people to place the ceramic bowls into the fire to be transformed.
As suggested by the Buddhists, nothing is lasting, even in the moment everything is undergoing change. All is fleeting, the beauty of a flower, the sunset, the leaves on the trees are in a continuous state of change. The closing ceremony is a celebration of this change and of the endless connections that exist in and around us.
Monument For Blue
‘Monument for Blue’
http://
http://www.thorgerdurolafsdottir.net/
The exhibition ‘Monument for Blue’ in Catalyst Arts, Project Space is the first collaboration between the Icelandic artists Eva Ísleifsdóttir and Þorgerður Ólafsdóttir aka Cherish the Moment . The artists have been researching and looking at repetition and recollection of certain moments in history that has shaped the story of the color Blue.The research has resulted in the installation Monument for Blue that will be open for preview on Thursday 6th September. Cherish the Moment is supported by the Association of the Icelandic Visual Artists, Center of Icelandic Art Center and the Icelandic Visual Art Copyright Association.
Eva Ísleifsdóttir
b.1982 in Reykjavík Iceland
Currently living and working in Iceland and Scotland
Eva Isleifsdottir was born in 1982, Reykjavik Iceland. She studied at the Art Academy of Iceland where she graduated with Bachlor Degree in Fine Art in 2008. In 2010 she graduated with a MFA degree in Sculpture from Edinburgh College of Art. Since 2008 Eva has exhibited her work internationally and co-created artist projects and residencies. Eva´s recent group exhibition are Endemis Ósýn Gerðar Museum in Iceland, The Ugly clean up at the Embassy Gallery in Edinburgh Scotland 2011, The Return of the Losers at the Kalmar Art Museum in Sweden 2010, Following people and drinking milk at the Art Museum in Hafnarfjörður Iceland 2010.
Þorgerður Ólafsdóttir
b. 1985 in Reykjavík, Iceland, lives in Glasgow, Scotland.
Þorgerður graduated with a BA-degree in Fine Arts from the Iceland Academy of the Arts in 2009. She has exhibited her work in various places in Iceland and internationally as well as establishing projects and exhibition spaces. Her most recent solo- and group exhibitions include Happy Endings, salur Myndlistarfélagsins, Akureyri, Without Destination, Reykjavik Art Museum, The End of it All, Joshua Baskin Gallery, Glasgow. Somewhere Along Those Lines in Reykjanes Art Museum and My Friend the Foreigner The Old Ambulance Depot, Edinburgh.
Claire Muckian
Claire Muckian
Claire Muckian’s work centres on process-led modes of production in contemporary ceramic sculpture. Her work is concerned with how materiality and process drive work forward to achieve structure and form, whilst also taking into account sculpture’s formal vernacular. Both spatial and temporal, these structures occupy space in strange and unusual ways to offer the viewer curious and extraordinary confrontations. They call attention to function rather than meaning. Multi-referencing, abstract, yet familiar, this work appeals to the archaic content of the mind where the viewer might approach some form of recognition.
Laura Ni Fhlaibhin
‘The wonder of ice never left him’ is a series of new work that reflect the artist’s present concerns; the exploration of a world that has been altered and transformed by an unknown occurrence. The return to a moment of impact/trauma/breakdown in an attempt to come to terms with the happening is important.
Laura Ni Fhlaibhin is interested in exploring what is left behind in a post-apocalyptic space, after the ending. She has placed her work in the context of a fictional maker; imagining the work as having been created by a witness to the perceived trauma who now inhabits the aftermath, the transformed place in a post-apocalyptic ruin. The maker, as witness, remembers disjointed moments and broken narratives.
Everyday materials, debris from the ending, are metamorphosed into pieces that both look towards a new place, the post-apocalyptic site, but also look back to the ‘other place.’ The sculptures are imagined as shrines, as the witness attempts to come to terms with a perceived traumatic occurence. In a state of both fear and reverence to the impact and aftermath, the witness adulates the force of transformation.
Laura Ni Fhlaibhin is currently completing her undergraduate studies at N.C.A.D.
Nuala Gregory
Nuala Gregory
Or Things With Colours Like These was an installation of new work by Nuala Gregory, exhibited at the Project Space in June/July 2012. It consisted of of six gouache-painted chine collés on rice paper. The work focussed on Gregory’s investigations into the contemporary condition of painting. It advanced the proposition that art can produce effects that challenge familiar forms of representation by operating instead at the level of bodily sensation.
For the past 25 years, Nuala Gregory has maintained a profile as an exhibiting artist at an international level. Through solo and group exhibitions, she has published significant original artwork that engages with the contemporary meaning of painting. “My work consists in a ‘return’ to the possibilities of colour and surface, in order to renew the force of the material and the visible, against predominantly discursive or conceptual approaches.” As Rhoda Fowler comments (Art New Zealand Number 135 / 2010) her work is not simply a “celebration of painting” but “an extended play upon its means, and an enquiry into the myriad of things it may yet accomplish”. She has also engaged in a second strand to her practice in the form of writings on her own artwork and that of other artists. She has contributed to the visual arts environment generally through curation, artistic collaborations, and enhancement of programmes and infrastructure at tertiary institutions. She began part-time PhD study in January 2007 at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her PhD work brings together her creative practice with her writing practice. In 2012 is on leave in Ireland to complete her PhD. See: http://www.
Shelby Woods
Shelby Woods
They Had to Trap It (because it looked delicious) is a multi-part installation in the Catalyst Arts Project Space by US artist Shelby Woods. The installation consists of sculpture and sound and explores fragility, containment and vulnerability. Woods is currently finishing her MFA at the University of Ulster, Belfast.
Sharlene Bamboat & Alexis Mitchell
‘Border Sounds’ was created out of a desire to explore the troubling policies
entrenched in national and territorial borders, as well as to question access and
mobility within those borders. These are themes weʼve both explored in our
individual art practices and together we continue to engage with some of these
complexities. By employing a variety of media we intend to reconstruct some of
the discourse surrounding notions of territorial sovereignty. While the audience
participates in the silent disco, they experience an engagement with borders,
mobility, and nationalism.
Border Sounds seeks to interrogate and complicate current notions of
national sovereignty by outlining the contradictions set in place by these strict
national borders. By drawing attention to the arbitrary nature of state borders,
while complicating this with a reflection of current national sovereignty struggles,
we have created an environment that explores complications rather than
prescriptive ideas.
Sharlene Bamboat
www.sharlenebamboat.com
Alexis Mitchell
www.alexismitchell.com
Gary Watson & Rob Hilken
