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Art-Making

After Difference

Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland

9 April 2020

Unpacking two ceramic works by Soji Hamada and Bernard Leach from the Oregon Craft Museum as a material departure points, this lecture performance unpicks the complexity of these artist-craftsmen’s renowned “East-West” dialogue, provoking reflections on sanctioned “difference” in the creation of artistic value. Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland, OR.

Cancelled due to Covid-19 pandemic.

Art-Making

My current work engages with (disappearing, diasporic, and minor) languages and their landscapes as intertwined topographies, using the Irish language (Gaeilge) as a departure point. Related drawings and prints explore orality and the resonance of language. A further video work in progress uses language to enter Irish immigrant history, the complexities of identity, and my experiences in present-day US. These works are unfolding in parallel with my hybrid book in progress, Between Language– A Love Song.

In recent years, I have worked on an experimental play, engaging with cultural belief systems and the limits of knowledge, and two lecture performances that challenge hierarchies in perceived cultural value in art. A further series of multi-media works on paper has engaged with cultural silences, withholding and expression in tandem with my cross-genre book, The Shape of Silence.

My artistic practice has encompassed installation, video, photography, performance, printmaking, and artist’s books, with solo and group exhibitions and performances in Ireland, the UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the US. Venues include Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin; Aachener Kunstverein, Germany; 1430 Contemporary, Portland, US, Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland; The Globe Gallery, Newcastle, UK; Mehrwert e.v., Aachen, Germany; Wexford Arts Center, Wexford, Ireland; Basement Gallery, Dundalk, Ireland; Art Hive, Cork, Ireland; Bilderhaus Bornemann Galerie, Germany; Outpost Venice, Italy; Lavitt’s Quay Gallery, Cork; and the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland, US. My artist’s books are held in the New York Public Library art collection.

Selected Recent Work

Artmaking is an exercise in precision and ambiguity. Each closer examination reveals another hidden gesture, a play between withholding and expressing. Sometimes I think that everything I have ever made is a collage. An oscillation between materiality and metaphor, an attempt to open up cracks between surfaces.