Limerick School of Art And Design Exhibition, ‘Recollect’ From Thursday 25th April – 2nd May

moray mair | Art and design | April 20, 2013

I got an email from one of the 3rd year printmaking students of Limerick College of Art and Design this week about an exhibition they’re kicking off next week called ‘Recollect’. I was delighted to receive it. For three reasons. The first is that I studied sculpture there. Many years ago. So I got all nostalgic. I had a great time and learnt much. The second, that it took initiative to get in touch and I always admire get up and go. And thirdly it illustrated the difference between now and then. When I went to art college there was no email, people still used dial phones and wrote letters. It was all so different. Utterly and completely.

So to the point. Limerick School of Art and design’s third year printmaking students are showcasing their hard work over the last year in an exhibition ‘Recollect.’ The event takes place in Raggle Taggle Studio, 7 Sarsfield street, Limerick on Thursday 25th April @ 8pm and runs until 2nd May. The curator Caelan Bristow has selected a wide variety of work, ranging from traditional printmaking to photography and video to installation exploring an assortment of themes and concepts.

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Chiharu Shiota’s Installations Are Monumental Creations

moray mair | Art and design | November 23, 2012

Chiharu Shiota‘s installations are monumental creations that take over every room in which they are created. Despite that they’re incredibly delicate and poetic evocations of the past, childhood, remembrance and dealing with our anxieties when encountering such memories.

Shiota visual expresses these subjects by building immense installations made of black thread which often enclose ordinary household and personal objects that relate in someway to her personal life, her childhood, her emotional being: a burnt-out piano, a wedding dress, shoes, windows from disused buildings and sometimes indeed herself.

They are a magnificent statement, a bold mark, that grew out of the artists mentorship under the great performance artist Marina Abramović.

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Antonio Paucar’s Morbid Installation Is Made With 1000s Of Dead Flies

moray mair | Art and design | November 9, 2012

Antonio Paucar‘s installation ‘Shoes That Break The Silence’ is made with shoes and yes, that’s right, you’re not imagining it, dead flies. Flies are revolting little things, associated with disease, death and decay, and must be awfully strange and difficult to work with. Think about how long it would take to actually make the work, to attach each fly, by hand, to a nylon string and hang it, along with a few thousand others to create a moving, ephemeral figure. It’s an interesting concept; a figure made up of dead flies. Perhaps we’re looking at the past, the memory of a person long since gone? Hmm. It’s quite a haunting image. Disgusting too. And fascinating to look at.

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Fred Eerdeken’s Shadow Art Installations Are Playful Illusions

moray mair | Art and design | October 26, 2012

Fred Eerdeken‘s shadow art installations are quite extraordinary. His playful use of light and shadow using a variety of materials — from plants to wire to cereal boxes — to spell out words is not dissimilar to the work of Tim Noble and Sue Webster who also use shadow and light to create illusions out of everyday objects. It is no easy feat – to conceptualize and structure these puzzles – to create work that only works when you, the viewer, hit the right spot for everything to make sense.

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Romy Bluemel’s Illustrations Are Truly Original

moray mair | Art and design | October 23, 2012

Romy Bluemel‘s illustrations are truly original. She has a real eye for mixing a number of techniques, textures, patterns and very strong colour blocks as well as being a fine draftsman. There’s alot going on in her illustrations – an almost painterly process in her highly graphic images – which if not handled properly can lead to overkill.

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Tim Noble And Sue Webster’s Nihilistic Optimistic Installation Is Currently On Show In London

moray mair | Art and design | October 13, 2012

Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s ‘Nihilistic Optimistic’ installation is currently on show in London and features six large works – a continuation of their investigation into self-portraiture – that further deconstruct the relationship between materiality and form.

Each piece, which the artists call a ‘street composition’, is made from old discarded wood and other materials, debris that looks, for all intents and purposes, like piles of rubbish they collected in their studio and put into a clean formal gallery space. However when illuminated, the chaos, the piles of debris, cast beautiful shadow portraits – of the artists as individuals and together – onto the walls of the galley.

Here’s what Tim Noble has to say about the work:

There was a kind of deliberate choice not to use such recognisable objects any more, and to start fracturing things up – splintering things. So the mind has to wander in a different way, like you’re giving and taking, and it’s as much about the gaps and holes in between.

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Laura Gee Illustrations Make My Heart Melt

moray mair | Art and design | October 12, 2012

I accidentally came across Laura Gee‘s illustrations today and my heart melted. They’re so sweet, emotive, fragile and would make great cards to send to someone you loved or missed.

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Henrique Oliveira Installations And Sculptures Are Extraordinary And Otherworldly

moray mair | Art and design | September 21, 2012

Henrique Oliveira‘s installations and sculptures are extraordinary, labyrinthine. Disruptions made out of wood, fluid organic forms built out of the most unlikely of materials, bark. His latest piece, ‘ursulinens prolapse’ is a wonderful example of his work as it uses both bark and foam to create a highly textured, almost living and breathing environment, one you can walk around and walk into. It’s looks like something out of a Star Wars set.

Oliveira’s exposure to his fathers woodwork studio has undoubtably informed his art making as has his upbringing in São Paulo – a place that is, by all accounts, awash with thin pieces of wood that fall off, detach themselves, from the thousands of fences that criss cross the city.

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Slinkachu’s Global Model Village Street Art Is A Gigantic Miniature Project

moray mair | Art and design | September 21, 2012

Slinkachu‘s ‘Global Model Village’ series is a continuation of his ‘Little People Project’ which has been ongoing since 2006. These days his work is famous. His miniature street art scenes, the tiny dioramas that he situates in everyday places are known throughout the World. His work replicates the everyday activity people undertake in the city such as the school run, going to church, a brothel, looking for food, eating and so on. Each installation depicting the vagaries of life, what it means to be human, to live, to suffer, to be part of society.

Like his previous series the installations are built, photographed and abandoned, left to look after themselves. The document of his work is then exhibited in the hope that we gain a new perspective on our own isolation and melancholy which often seems part and parcel of the modern condition. These projects are always done with a sense of hunour and that is precisely the reason they have succeeded in capturing the imagination of people all over the world. It’s a great idea. A simple conceit and a very effective means to tell the story of us.

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Anne Lindberg Thread Installations And Drawings Are Beautiful And Ephemeral

moray mair | Art and design | September 19, 2012

Anne Lindberg creates beautiful and ephemeral thread installations and drawings that blur the line between traditional media. Her work is meditative, a study in formal abstraction, a questioning of our perception of objects. She uses very simple materials. Her thread drawings are created using strings of colourful rayon thread, strung vertically to make meditative linear works while her optical installations involve thousands of strings of Egyptian cotton attached to the architecture of the space by staples to create a mind blowing celebration of colour.

The installations are really quite extraordinary as they are made specifically for each space – each piece designed to maximise the space and its light. This use of light and the luminous quality of the material mean that her work changes depending on the time of day. Lindberg explains that she:

discovered an optical and spatial phenomenon that spans the outer reaches of our peripheral vision. The work also references physiological systems—such as heartbeat, respiration, neural paths, equilibrium—and psychological states.

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Hiroshi Fuji’s Central Kaeru Station Installation Is A Fantastic Example Of Collaborative Art

moray mair | Art and design | September 13, 2012

Hiroshi Fuji is fundamentally a collaborative artist who has spent the last 30 years ‘transforming existences that are not valued by society into special existences’ – his work always dealing with society, the community and environmental issues. What drew me to Fuji in particular was his inclusion of children in his actions as well as his wonderful toy exchange, called ‘Kaekko’ – a project offers a space for children to trade toys with each other and for creating new pieces based on the collected toys – that he’s been runing for over 13 years and which has produced over 5,000 citizen led events in 1,000 locations all over Japan and around the World.

In his latest show called ‘Central Kaeru Station – Where have all these toys come from?’ Fuji brought over 50,000 toys – which he had collected over the years in the Kaekko project – and created an art installation and hosted a series of workshops for the community.

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Ryota Kuwakubo’s Multi Media Installation, The Tenth Sentiment, Creates Remarkable Shadow Landscapes

moray mair | Art and design | September 13, 2012

Ryota Kuwakubo‘s ‘The Tenth Sentiment’ is a remarkable kinetic installation that creates it’s own landscape out of moving shadows. Kuwakubo, a Japaenses multi media artist, has been creating work for over 10 years based on the themes of relationships formed across various boundaries such as analog and digital, humans and machines and information transmitters and receivers. His work generally involves creating devices that are designed not only for providing experiences but also as tools for establishing communications between the people who experience them. It is a style that has come to be known as Device Art.

In ‘The Tenth Sentiment’ viewers walk around a room as a model train with an LED light maneuvers along a set a of tracks, focusing a light at commonplace objects on the ground which subsequently cast large shadows on the walls of the room.

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Jason Jägel Paintings And Drawings Are Drawn From His love Of Music

moray mair | Art and design | September 8, 2012

Jason Jägel‘s paintings and drawings spring out of his love of music, comics and stories. As well as his paintings and drawings Jägel designs album covers, sculptures and installations. His work is busy, hectic and stylized and unlike many artists who plan out their work in advance Jägel lets the story reveal itself as he’s working on it – an emotional response rather than a rational decision to create a predetermined picture. Here’s what he says about the process;

A story is something I discover rather than diagram. The process of loading a brush with paint or picking up a marking tool is a physical act that is connected to, but separate from, visualizing things in my head. I need to submit to the physical act, “go with the flow,” in order to let head and hand best collaborate. They do work together, but trying to make my hand subservient to images in my head is not effective. There are a thousand themes and stories I want to visualize, but I won’t get the desired fluid, unexpected results by seeking predetermination. I may start out wanting to make one thing only to have it’s execution take a nose-dive. Yet the process usually reveals something else, unforeseen, that is less contrived than what I wanted. To me, non-linearity has a greater connect to reality.

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Noemie Goudal’s Photography Lies Between Our Dreams And Our Reality

moray mair | Photography | September 3, 2012

Noemie Goudal‘s photographs have been described as ‘site-specific sculptural installations’ – her work intentionally unclear as to whether it’s the location, installation, or image that is the artwork itself. This process allows her to play between the boundaries of dreams and reality, a parallel universe of make believe. Using large scale paper backdrops of idyllic landscapes and juxtaposing them with dilapidated spaces extenuates the perfection we dream of and thus makes the image more compelling.

Her work is nostalgic, reminds me of playing as a child, a make believe world constructed out of everyday objects and materials. As Goudal herself says:

I wish to offer through my photographs escapes into alternative landscapes where the reconstruction of new lands is made possible. the journey inside the image will invite the viewer to enter the space as well as entering the narrative of a ‘make-believe’, bringing him into the game between fiction and reality in which one can identify the fragility of one’s own desires.

On her process she has this to say:

The picture is made from a constructed set, which is made from ‘real’ elements, I leave all the details that show this construction on the picture, which I hope can help the viewer ‘recognise’ a familiar place and familiar objects. Because of this, I believe that it is easier for the viewer to build their own narrative.

You can see her latest work at the Edel Assanti Gallery, 272-274 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, UK from 13th September – 14th October 2012

Via Because I’m Addicted

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Mary Temple’s Light Installations Series Questions The Viewers Preconceptions

moray mair | Art and design | September 1, 2012

Mary Temple‘s Light Installations series are not quite what they seem. What you’re looking at is not a shadow - on the wall and floor – rather it is the redefinition of a space. What Temple does is create silhouettes of natural landscapes, plants, and trees in a space which not only give a realistic rendition of light flowing in from a window but fill the indoor environment with outdoor elements. This process gives the impression of a shadow being cast from a window and forces viewers to question what they’re actually looking at.

Here’s what she says about her Light Installation series:

In the site-specific series Light Installations, light and shadow from nearby windows seem to be raking the walls of the gallery. The illusion, however, is a hand-painted trompe l’oeil shard, often situated in rooms with little or no natural light. In this work I rely on the viewers knowledge and memory of light intersecting space to raise questions of belief and doubt. These pieces are meant to give the viewer time to enjoy not-knowing, and to privilege questions over answers. By puzzling the physical senses (setting up the viewer to fail at identifying something as elemental as light), these paintings celebrate the pleasure of trying to understand those things just outside the grasp of physical intelligence.

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