WORLD

9 Dec - Mar 2022

World is an exhibition of new work by gallery artists and, for the first time in the gallery, new work by Laura Ní Fhlaibhín.

The work of each of these artists deals with the world in which we live today in very particular ways, some humourous, some deadly serious. With ever-accelerating developments in technology, in communications and in transmissions, the world in which we live today is shrinking. Suddenly, small events in far off places can impact on us profoundly as individuals, as communities, as nations. We are forced into a new mapping and a new reckoning on a scale that can seem impossible or overwhelming.

Each artist in this exhibition continues to make work in response to or in spite of the environment in which they find themselves as artists, as citizens, as human beings, as members of a household. Already remarkable.

Exhibition Curator: Jerome O’Drisceoil

The Artists

Kirstin Arndt Alan Butler
Mary FitzGerald Damien Flood
Mark Joyce Caroline McCarthy
Fergus Martin Laura Ní Fhlaibhín
Nigel Rolfe Aoife Shananhan

Fergus Martin

*Right: Transfer 2021*
Digital Archival Print on 300g Canson Etching Edition Paper
120 x 85 x 4cm
Below: *Untitled I & Untitled II*
*World* is the title of a recent series of large hand-painted dry pigment on paper paintings by **Fergus Martin**. In the two *Untitled* ( 2021 ) burnt umber paintings on paper in this show, two perfect circles of different sizes on cream white paper quietly explode. They could be cells or they could be planets. Their placement and measurement centrally in the rectangular page in a dark frame couldn't be simpler. Neither could it be more emphatic or convincing

Mary FitzGerald

In two paintings by **Mary FitzGerald** that continue her *Fragile* series a pair of small ultramarine blue and turquoise canvases are held in a violent embrace by barbed wire. The paintings face each other, one turning its back on the viewer and turning the experience of the oil on canvas inside out. Perhaps what is beneath or behind the surface is what is most significant, if we are brutally honest with each other.

Left: Fragile 4

Oil Pigment, barbed wire, canvas 30 x 30 x 10cm

Right: Fragile 5

Below: Fragile

Canvas, Charcoal 40 x 40 x 4.5cms

Caroline McCarthy

Makes new paintings completely with acrylic on wooden panel. Recycled paper scraps that form a jumbled diary of a day are recreated with extraordinary precision and care using a variety of painting techniques. These site-specific paintings, you could say, record the consumables and the waste from a day inside and outside the studio making the fleeting permanent and the inconsequential essential. They are monuments to survival. We immediately recognise the graphic detritus, the eye-catching brands, the routine post-it habits that are part and parcel of existence.
*Work on Paper I*
Acrylic on wooden panel
33 x 27 x 3.5cm

Below: Caroline McCarthy: Acrylic ink and gouache on paper, 39.5 x 39.5cms

Left: Together Forever #30 (2021)

Center: Together Forever #31 (2021) 62 x 62 x 4cms

Right: Together Forever #33 (2021)

Below: Caroline McCarthy: Painting (Zebra)

Oil on Canvas5.3 x 3.8 x 1.7cms

Alan Butler

“By abstracting the origin of the image and reenacting a painterly tradition, Alan Butler’s *Deskscapes* not only reveal the perpetuation of (art-) historically anchored, colonial motifs by Western technology corporations and their capitalist exploitation, but also the complicity of users, who often unconsciously reproduce these hegemonic structures with each new update of their operating system”. - Mona Schubert
*High Sierra.jpg (v1)*
Lightfast acrylic paint on 100% cotton archival rag paper cold mounted on dibond
230 x 130cm

In Butler's virtual botany a stem with almost symmetrical leaves floats on a sea of deep cyan blue - whence the word blueprint. This is pure technology - as suggested by the digital-file title - and the artist's pure analogue photographic invention. Butler reimagines early photography and repurposes video gaming in his velvety taxonomy of gaming vegetation at different stages of its evolution since 1980s early computing.

Below: Alan Butler's unique cyanotype 2DIMAGE30838 ( 2018 ).

*2DIMAGE30838* (2021)
Unique Cyanotype in powder coated wooden tray frame
94.5 x 65 x 4cms

Aoife Shanahan

**Aoife Shanahan** continues to push the photographic medium and cameraless photography, in particular, to new limits. In her *OXYgen* ( 2019 ) series of *Folded Cascade* unique photograms the artist used a central crease to capture and disperse the ' sublime ' oxycontin imagery. In the current *Scratched Silver* unique photograms the crease is the image. Nothing is added to the photographic page. If anything is caught in the ' image ' it is more by accident and it is a dance of reflections. She continues to redefine the medium in relation to her background as a scientist and artist. By a process of *subtraction*, a grid operates within a grid, not capturing the world but simply and literally reflecting it.

Above: Scratched Silver #1 (2021)

Silver gelatin print Unique 31.5 x 31.5cms

Laura Ní Fhlaibhín

‘Spirits and those newly dead and those very near dead becoming-Spirits from the near passings, carbonising still, and lubricating and licking and sucking their own holes and stretching to touch their own peaks and entering their own wet folds.’
Engraved mirrored stainless steel panel, stainless steel wall mounts.
150mx 53cm x 6.5cms

Below: Bathbalm (2021)

Stainless steel. 8 castor wheels, oil of hedera helix, warmed Dublin water, hot plates, black plastic gloves, mark clay, dug from her uncle’s garden in North Wexford, then kiln fired, stainless steel engraved medical surgical bucket. Dimensions variable.

*Above: Squirrels Licks Friends (2021)*
Latex sheet, copper wire salt, vinegar ink graphite pencil, stainless steel, magnets
112 x 140 x 15cms

Mark Joyce

The rawness of the exposed linen with the blocks of colour or figures that stop and start - often short of each other - add to the naive, primitive feeling of these small new paintings on linen by **Mark Joyce**. Like a late Malevich, the acrylic is flat, bold and unmodelled, except where it is sanded back to expose the rough linen ground underneath. *Haunted by a Freak* ( 2021 ) has the simplicity of a woodblock, except where we find crayon outlines and the acrylic soaking into the flax-coloured support. Verticals and diagonals stand out from a distance as do the bold yellows, reds, greens and silhouettes. Up close your eye is drawn deep into the forest of lines and markings.
*Haunted by a Freak* (2021)
Acrylic on linen 41 x 35 x 3cm

Damien Flood

In both of **Flood**'s flower paintings the ceramic pot containers ooze with more life than the plants which they parade, such is the impasto and complex application of paint and disregard for traditional rules of painting. In learning to look at Flood's recent paintings we are faced with descriptive and non objective colour, multiple or non-linear perspectives, breaks in the flow of imagery and passages of painting that obey their own independent and sumptuous logic. *Shadowing Dream* is a painting of two competing halves with forms unfixed, floating, indoor and outdoor, figurative and abstract.
*Shadowing Dream* (2021)
Oil on canvas 106 x 87 x 5cm

Below: Paint Brush Cup Flowers (2021)

Oil on canvas 76 x 66 x 5cm