Jackie Askew -Liscannor Suite, an exhibition of drawing, painting and photography in the RED COUCH SPACE

Opening 10th April at 5pm

Liscannor Suite-

In this exhibition the artist connects with her immediate environment of the beach and the objects washed up on it. Through the process of drawing and painting she explores these objects and engages with the materiality of what has been uprooted and given by the sea.

Jackie Askew lives in Liscannor Co. Clare and has exhibited regularly over the last twenty years with solo exhibitions at The Mermaid Arts Centre, Dunamaise Arts Centre, The Riverbank Arts Centre, County Hall Kilkenny and has been selected for many group exhibitions in Ireland and England.

The Rua Red Arts Centre In Tallaght will be hosting a solo exhibition of her work in August this year This exhibition has been curated by Tallaght Alternative Arts and Entertainment .

As well as private collections her work is in the collection of Limerick City Council and Meath County Council.

This exhibition is supported by Clare County Council Arts Office.

Contact no: 087 9440850 

KELLY POWER – WITH HEAVEN’S HELP exhibition of Paintings, in the SMALL ROOM

Official opening 10th April @ 5pm by Hazel Walker

KELLY POWER – WITH HEAVEN’S HELP

Kelly Power is a painter who resides in Waterford. She finished her degree in Limerick College of Art in 2009, and since then has won the 'Freyer Award' at the RDS Art Awards, has held a successful solo exhibition in the Museum of National Treasures in Waterford, and has several exhibitions throughout the country this summer. Kelly also has just recently won the merit award in 'The Golden Fleece Awards'. This award commemorates excellence in traditional craft and aids the artists professional practice. Kelly's work is concerned with the notion of unsettling and unease within figurative work.

UNFIXING, recent works by IAN WIECZOREK. Official opening by Hazel Walker, artist & art lecturer on Saturday 10th April @ 5 pm

Ian Wieczorek - UNFIXING
“Our eyes continually move even while we fix our gaze on an object. If fixational eye movements are counteracted, our visual perception fades completely. So, our visual system has a built-in paradox - we must fix our gaze to inspect the minute details of our world, but if we were to fixate perfectly, the entire world would fade from view.”
         - Susana Martinez-Conde, Stephen L.Macknik, David H.Hubel ¹ 
UNFIXING is a visual exploration that engages with the experiential nature of painting, as work completed by the viewer: how paintings are ‘read’, and the relationship between artist-mediated surface and perceived spatial presence. Thematically based on research exploring the physicality of the human condition, the works establish visual ambiguities to create tensions and confluences, uncertainties, juxtapositions and dislocations. The results attempt to invoke an ‘in-between space’ mediated by the viewer, posing questions about perception and visual understanding: how we look and what we actually ‘see’.
Ian Wieczorek was born in England in 1958, and his educational background was initially in Science (Microbiology). He moved to Co. Mayo in 1992. Since that time he has been a freelance arts commentator/reviewer, and was founder/editor of Arts West (an independent independent arts magazine for the West of Ireland from 1994-2000). He has a BA in Art & Design (Painting) from GMIT, Castlebar, Co. Mayo, and has been a practising artist since 2003.
Currently based in the Custom House Studios in Westport, Co. Mayo, Ian has exhibited widely in group/selected shows (Ireland, Northern Ireland, Germany, China), including IONTAS and COE. This is his fifth solo show. For further information, check out www.ianwieczorek.com

exhibition ends 6th May

At the Launch of multi media exhibition BOG by Trudi van der Elsen, officially opened by Siobhan Cuffe on March 6th at 5 pm. Chai, punch and a turf fire outside the Gallery kept us warm!

At the Launch of Antoinette Spillane's exhibition : DAUGHTERS OF INAGH

RICK of TURF

A Rick of Turf was made by Packy Curtin as part of the exhibition BOG by Trudi van der Elsen in the Courthouse Gallery

BOG a multimedia exhibition by Trudi van der Elsen

 

BOG

TRUDI VAN DER ELSEN

Trudi van der Elsen, is a visual artist born in a bog-land area in the south of Holland known as "the Peel". She visited Ireland on a cycling tour of West of Ireland bogs in the '90s. She has since made her home in Co.Clare where she has built a solid reputation as an artist and art teacher over several years. Bog-lands are a major inspiration for her. Much of her artwork - painting, drawing and photography - resulted from research into bog-lands and the people who live in such areas.

This fascination, which continues with new research on the bog-lands of Ireland, was triggered in 1973 by a newspaper review of The Bog People, a book by P.V. Glob centering on the Tollund Man. The strange story of Tollund Man, and the Danish bog in which his remarkably preserved 2,000 year old body was found, made a profound impression on the young artist, although the photographs of the Tollund Man's body in Glob's book gave her the impression that the body was that of a woman! The atmosphere in those bog-lands and the tale of the mysterious Tollund man were the inspiration for a remarkable and highly acclaimed photographic series. She explains:

"I was curious about what the bog people had experienced. I wanted to gain a better understanding of what Tollund Man and such people, killed and buried in bogs at that time, felt, heard and smelled when they disappeared in the bogs. So, as part of my research, I tried to reproduce the experience of being consigned to a bog, and documented the process. I followed a geological line of bog-lands through Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark, making black and white still-shots which resemble freeze frames from an interrupted motion film. For me, the results were profound. The process had many remarkable resonances, and there were numerous connections with powerful, primal symbols which are fundamental to western culture. I was reminded of legends such as Narcissus and Ophelia and of symbols which have entered the western canon: the four elements (earth, water, fire and air), the four temperaments (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic). All these informed or found expression in the images generated by my research".

An academic analysis and appreciation of van der Elsen's images of 'bog people' was published in December 2009 in the University of Chicago Press book Bodies In The Bog and the Archaelogical Imagination written by Karin Sanders, professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of California, Berkely.

As well as the photographic series, the Bog exhibition also includes examples of some of the artist's varied and eclectic painting styles. These include a remarkable new work portraying the artist herself painting an abstract inspired by Clare's Burren area.

The exhibition runs until April 1st.

"Daughters of Inagh" by Antoinette Spillane in the Red Couch Space

 

DAUGHTERS OF INAGH

Antoinette Spillane

An exhibition of work created at the mouth of the River Inagh

(From a collection called Motherline)

Family names are carried along the father's line, but our blood comes down through the mother's line like rivers through the landscape, bringing the mother's accent and ways of seeing things. Mother's wit, mother's tongue, mother's music; all come from the mother's way of beeing.

The same way as the local river carries the essence of all that grows along her banks, and the music of all the lives and that were formed and sustained by her waters.

Making shapes on the river beach, of mother and daughter, of grandmothers. Seeing the bodies crack, change and dissolve. Thinking of her capacity to give birth, of the woman's mouth, her kiss, her voice, her presence, her dress....

Then looking at the play of the water and light around a form that changes every moment, seems to shift perception towards the feeling or spirit of what's happening inside, rather than the form things take outside.

The name Inagh comes from Eidhneach which means Ivy. According to the ogham alphabet of the Druids, the Ivy tree embodies the intertwining qualities of love of the heart.

This work is in honour of my mother Inagh McNicholas

And in honour of the river Inagh and all her sons and daughters.

Winner of our Christmas Draw!

We are delighted to announce that Claire Waters is the winner
of Frank Golden's painting "Object Dots".
Frank generously donated this piece for a raffle to raise money for the Gallery.

The Courthouse Gallery

presents 

The North Clare Historical Society

Holy Wells

and

Hooleys

by Fr. Denis Crosby

Monday 22^nd February 2010 at 8pm 

Admission €5