'Merging 3', an Exhibition of Sculptures and Paintings.

Madeleine Smyth - Mary Foudy O'Halloran - Marianne Potterton

‘Merging 3’ is the title of the exhibition by three artists from the North Clare area in the Courthouse Gallery in Ennistymon. To be opened by Madeleine Taylor Quinn on Friday 14th Aug at 7pm.

The exhibition runs from 13th August - 13th September 2009. Admission Free.

Madeleine Irene Smyth / Sculptures: ‘I work in bronze and plaster. Depending on my mood my work is figurative or semi-figurative. The bronze casting technique defined my piece “Pilgrim”. The piece “In The Dock” could be Christ resolute before Pilate or someone on death row’. The pieces for the exhibition were cast by Seamus Connolly of the Kilbaha Art Foundry, Kilrush, Co. Clare.

Marianne Potterton / Paintings: This particular series was partly inspired by the Buddhist concept of there being seven veils of illusion. ‘I am fascinated by the idea that the material world, the earth we live in, is much less concrete than we like to imagine; that things change and metamorphose, and that in the process the spiritual and the physical worlds are always merging’.

Mary Foudy O’Halloran / Paintings: Transience, layers, traces and the everyday are the major concerns of the work of artist Mary Foudy O'Halloran. Her work is a dialogue between the figurative and the abstract. Using mixed media, she builds up layers, making marks and balancing tones to find the personal in the ordinary. She believes that it is in the process that the painting is found.

Vanessa Daws 'Escapade' Mixed Media Exhibition

Launch on Friday 17th July at 8.00pm and exhibition runs from 15th July – 7th August 2009

Vanessa’s work is an eclectic mix of brightly coloured paintings, sculpture, drawing and animation. She is inspired by art where the viewer can discover aspects of the work that they can manipulate, manoeuvre or peer into.

As children we look at the world differently, creating our own stories and mythology parallel to the ordinary world; as we grow older this world gets put to one side. Vanessa’s art work explores possibilities of access to these parallel worlds and allows the viewer to temporarily escape the mundane.

Interactive art and participation plays a major role in her own work, this comes from years of working in community arts and having the desire to make art accessible for everyone to share, respond to and enjoy.

Since moving to Ireland in 1997 Vanessa has been working in community arts starting out as a volunteer to designing for art groups such as Macnas in Galway and St Patrick’s Day Festival, Dublin. Since 2007 she has been concentrating on pursuing her own visual art practice.

For further information, please contact Ennistymon Courthouse Gallery on 065 707 1630 or ennistymoncourthousegallery@gmail.com.

Gallery opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12pm – 5pm.

No admission fee!

Free lunchtime traditional music concert

Courthouse Gallery Ennistymon

presents

A free lunchtime traditional music concert
as part of the Riches of Clare 2009 series.

Friday 3rd July @ 1pm


The concert will take place this Friday, 3rd July 2009 at 1pm in the gallery.
Performers include Conor Crimmins, Caitlín Nic Gabhann & Damien O’Mhuiris.
Admission is free and all are welcome!

Friday 3rd July Time: 1pm – 2pm
Admission Free

For more information please see http://www.richesofclare.com/

Stop Motion Animation Workshops with Vanessa Daws

August 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th 2009 - for teenagers and adults!

Courthouse Gallery Ennistymon presents a series of stop motion animation workshops in August 2009.

During the workshop participants will use different stop motion animation techniques such as sand animation, bringing drawings to life, claymation and making objects appear to move by themselves. In groups, the participants will develop storyboards, build characters and sets, use sound and take lots of photos. When these photos are played at 12 frames per second the characters created will magically come to life!

All the animations will be edited together with music and all participants will receive a copy of their animation on DVD.

The workshops are open to teenagers and adults and will run daily from 12pm to 4pm. Participants can take part for one day, two days, three days, or even do all four days...the more workshops you do, the more you will get out of it! If possible, participants will need to bring their own digital camera.

Workshops cost €20 per day.

Booking is essential as places are limited.

To book a place, please contact Courthouse Gallery Ennistymon on 065 707 1630 or email ennistymoncourthousegallery@gmail.com.

August 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th
12pm - 4pm
€20 per day

'Dolphin Address' by JAN PLOEG

Photography and Video exhibition

Launch 19th June at 8pm - exhibition runs until July 12th
The official opening takes place on the 19th June by Dr. Simon Berrow, founder of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group and Project officer of the Shannon Dolphin and Wildlife Foundation
The exhibition of the Dutch sculptor and photography artist Jan Ploeg shows 26 large mounted photographs of the dolphin Dusty, taken just under the waters' surface, where the sunlight is still strong, making her appear as being clad in a golden shroud. In addition, three computers will be set up where visitors will be able to view hundreds of photographs and underwater videos or logon to the artist's website www.janploeg.nl

What makes Jan's work so unique is his passion and dedication to nature, the sea and dolphins in particular. During his first visit to Ireland in 1992, he started to swim with 'Fungi the Dolphin' and later in 2002 with 'Dusty'. In order to understand and sculpt these wonderful animals better, he developed 'WaterWing', which he is still using to swim with the dolphin.
It can best be described as a fusion of the pectoral fins, which are tilted into an up and down movement in which the water is pushed backwards. This 'WaterWing', as well as Jan's swimming gear and monofin will be shown at the launch of the exhibition.

In his own words, Jan describes his work as follows: "As a sculptor I am interested in matching properties of wood, like the shape, colour or grain with an image from Nature. The image, whether in three-dimensional wood, in expressive language or in visual capture is my major inspiration". He goes on to say: "I always start from reality, attempt to share its beauty, explore its manifestations or demonstrate hidden dimensions. I like to coin this approach 'Poetic Reality' as an encouraging counterpart to the harshness generally ascribed to it".

Jan made three books: 'Dolphin Address', 'Dusty' and 'Waterscapes'. These books and the photographs in A4 format by on-the-spot printing will be on sale in the Gallery during the exhibition.In addition, he has made a DVD, named 'Dolphin Address' containing underwater videos, an anthology of the 'Dolphin Address' website articles, a 30 chapter story about his teenage adventure and more short stories will be available as well.

Examples and details of his work can be found on www.janploeg.nl

'Impressions of Place' by ROBIN GRACE

Photography Launch 19th June at 8 pm exhibition runs until 25th July

This exhibition documents the many people and places Robin has encountered throughout the World, looking at countries such as Mongolia, China, India and Uganda. 'Impressions of Place' tells the story of people and how they live, their culture and spirituality.
His affinity for documentary led him to work for press agencies in both Limerick and London. Robin is now based in Dublin, working as a freelance photographer.
Born in Ireland, he studied Photography and Digital Imaging at Reading College and School of Art and Design.

Art Exhibition by the 2009 FETAC students, Ennistymon Vocational School

June 5th at 8pm
Officially opened by George O'Callaghan



The exhibition runs until June 12th

The students are studying Art FETAC level 5 course. This year the students have covered various disciplines including Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, Photography, Ceramics, Combined Materials, Printmaking, Printed Textiles, Work Experience and Communications.
The course draws applicants from a wide variety of backgrounds, ages and educational experience. This lively mixture of people benefits staff and students and promotes a positive open-minded environment for learning to take place. The art produced is reflective of this diversity.
info on the FETAC level 5 Art course 2009/2010 please contact Bairbre Geraghty on 087 6595250

NEEDS Life Performance by Fergus Cronin

16th May at 6pm

Launch of exhibition and Life Performance by Fergus Cronin

Fergus Cronin, is a performance artist, who uses his body as a platform, with a tendency towards making a public show of himself; his street interventions are simple and powerful and mostly involve holding A4 signs in public spaces. The signs, such as 'I need attention' and 'I need touch', express a vulnerability he chooses to reveal on that day, to communicate ideas and get people to ask questions of him and about themselves. His work seeks to explore the nature and connecting qualities of basic human needs.

"Inside out - outside in"

Niall McCormack

May 6th - May 30th
Launch 16th May - 6 pm
paintings and installation



Superficially, Niall McCormack's recent work deals in a familiar visual currency of the most tangible feature of the now-fading Celtic Tiger years: the burgeoning property market and the proliferation of housing 'units' that has become a ubiquitous subtext to the contemporary Irish landscape. McCormack, it seems is presenting as an appositely familiar artistic metaphor.
His meticulously rendered structures evoke architectural accuracy, and are effected with painstaking attention to detail. And yet these uniformly windowed housing units and agglomerations lack doors or chimneys - features that would render the structures practical and habitable. Thus the buildings enter the realm of the surreal, ciphers that reflect the artist's own concerns.
The faceless uniformity of McCormack's houses creates a sense of disquiet and foreboding, of soullessness. It speaks of isolation and the contradictions of living together but being apart - a house not as the cliched home but rather as an instrument of separation, of incarceration, even. The long, hard shadows cast hint at the melancholic urban landscapes of de Chirico or Sironi. The houses are located within an amorphous landscape
of contours and horizons devoid of many features that would impart a sense of authentic, gritty reality: even the silhouettes of Croagh Patrick and Clew Bay (the geography of the artist's own experience) exist as schematic notes: context uncontextualised.
The buildings are cold and precisely delineated, and the only warmth to be found in a uniformly cool palette is in the ironic pastel shades that adorn the walls of the buildings - hues that aspire to a received perception of 'niceness' but are all the more jarring and unsettling for the apparent disingenuousness of thatintention.
The larger instutional agglomerations of McCormack's architectural phylum are clearly created from smaller individuals units, a metaphorical as well as visual allusion to the hierarchical nature of societal structure. The resultant configurations - angular and uncomprimising - seem particularly at odds with their pale mix-and-match plumage, presenting as a disquieting kind of 'pastel gothic'. They suggest echoes of institutional settings, with their own associative disquiets within the contemporary consciousness. McCormack's paintings are not proposed designs for living. Rather, they quietly but effectively offer warnings: of the consequences of isolationism both externally and internally imposed; of faceless institutional unaccountability; and of the dehumanising and aesthetically bereft tendencies of unregulated commodification.
Ian Wieczorek, artist

THE BAHH BAND at the Courthouse Gallery

THE BAHH BAND

Thursday 9th April
8 PM
8 euro

Classical Indian, with a difference...

The music has roots in the Classical Indian tradition but bridges the gap between such diverse influences as Ravi Shankar, Jimi Hendrix and Robert Johnson. The core members are Mattu on the sarode (a 25 stringed Indian Lute), Ciro on tabla (the famous Indian hand drums), Tom Portman on dobro (slide guitar) and vocals, Pauly Smalls on double bass and Brian Fleming on bodhran and percussion.

website: www.myspace.com/bahhband

"Bahh" is a Bengali word to express the inexpressible: literally means..."What words?"