Tick Tock

After doing a lot of research into painting animations and completing the storyboard of my original concept, i haven't been left with much time to actually get the animations done. I'm continuing to work on that at the moment but I've also been experimenting with watercolour trees which i painted two weeks ago. Scanning them into photoshop then manipulating them into a repeat pattern design.

William Kentridge

     "Disintergration then regathering" 
 
      After investigating the issue of emigration for some time now, it started to take it's toll on me, such a depressing issue. So Ive decided to continue to look at emigration but thinking and approaching it in a more positive and optimistic light. Ive focused on the issue as a temporary separation, and that being reunited is a the "happy ending."
         Looking at the migration of birds for the cold, harsh time of winter and their return in the prosperous spring as a metaphor for the issue of emigration. Another metaphor I'm using is the hibernation of animals like bears for the harsh winter. When looking at the possibility i also thought of the annual-cycle of trees. They appear dead in the winter but life springs from them in spring.
         At this point in time I'm working on a black and white animation, using white watercolour on a blackbird, and I'm also working on painting's of the trees.  The inspiration for my animations came from the artist's Yui Kugimiya and William Kentridge.

Still image from animation : Linda Byrne

Poster Campaign

 

Using the imagery from 1940's American propaganda poster's, i created these images using slogan that i had taken from extract of Irish graduate emigrates, who had to leave the country over the past year due to job shortages. They had sent letters to the Irish Times complaining against the Tanaiste Mary Coughlans remarks towards young Irish people declaring them "entitled to emigrate to enjoy themselves" Most of these emigrates have no choice but to leave the country to find work and resent the Tanaiste's remark. When i printed these pictures out i hung them around various college campuses to see the reaction from future graduates.

Student Fee's Protest : A Revolution!?

On the 3rd November 2010, the students of Ireland took to the streets of Dublin protesting against the governments contemplation to double 2011's registration fee's. The students were also protesting for the government to introduce internship schemes for graduates, to try and reduce the graduate emigration rate's which have soared over the last two years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACrhqXChP_Y

Watch Out For The Canaries In The Coal Mine

AIDAN DUNNE                                                                                 The Irish Times June 2010

The work of Dublin’s fine-art and photography graduates gauges the national mood. So what has been preoccupying them?
THINK OF THE country’s fine-art graduates as the canaries in the coal mine, their exhibitions a means of gauging the national mood. The graduates have come through long training in articulating the issues and concerns closest to their hearts and minds. There are lots of pressures on them, but they have also been in a relatively privileged position. For the moment their task is basically to express themselves in whatever way they think best. It’s a tough world out there, and many of them may not get that chance again.
They have experienced boom and bust, seen the institutions of church and state thrown into disrepute, seen their own futures mortgaged. So what, judging by the work they’ve chosen to exhibit, has preoccupied them most? Some have certainly been thinking about the property-price bubble and the nature and implications of the development that took place. Questions of corporate and personal responsibility have been explored. There was some focus on environmental issues.
At Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Brian Brady’s photographic documentation of Dublin’s docklands captured the sense of incompleteness that attends the project, the new juxtaposed with the old, the half-finished blocks and the looming, inactive cranes. Katie Togher at Dublin Institute of Technology used photography effectively as well, to look at rural depopulation and renewal. Also at DIT, in her staged video work, Laura Smith very ambitiously sets about exploring the parallels between personal and public life and relationships in Ireland, from kitchen to boardroom. In their adjacent installations at the National College of Art Design, Niamh Moriarty and Isabelle Crowe looked at personal, proactive approaches to questions of environmental sustainability.
Crime, social and personal space, institutional and architectonic spaces – with a particular interest in “non-spaces” such as car parks and motorways – all featured. Elina Pajo, at IADT, looked at the car park as a class of place in itself. NCAD’s Grace McEvoy considered our relationship to the transitional non-spaces of our growing motorway network. Neil Carroll, also at NCAD, encouraged a more analytical interaction with architecture, and Derek Birmingham, at IADT, documented the scenes of gangland killings. At DIT Róisín O’Brien’s evocation of a threatening space was genuinely unsettling, while Grace Campion at NCAD displayed real feeling for shaping and manipulating space with her subtle installation.
Domestic space, a subject approached in various ways, including Julianne Knowles’s inventive anatomisation of a house at IADT, deserves a separate mention. Heather Gray, also at IADT, came up with a brilliant variation on this with her installation composed of a network of connected kitchen appliances running riot.
Relational aesthetics, within which the artwork hinges on social interactions rather than any resultant record or documentation, made up a sizeable segment of activity. Bláithín Quinn at IADT is clearly already involved in this area with TransColonia.
Some concerns persist every year. These include an autobiographical fascination with childhood, family, growing up, motherhood and identity. Christina Ebel at DIT offered a particularly fine, thoughtful example. Gender roles and interpersonal relationships also featured, as ever, and consideration was given to the state of the feminist movement in Emma Jane Geraghty’s conversational record at DIT. There was also an interest in the realities of illness and ageing, as in the work of Holy Maura Foley at IADT and Hadassa Indio Molnár at DIT. Obsessiveness is a recurrent subject, and it was much in evidence this year, from obsessive-compulsive disorders to an intriguing interest in loners and recluses, evident in some striking installation pieces at IADT.
Critical theory is always with us, and several, mostly French, theorists and philosophers were name-checked very inventively in Aoibheann Greenan’s NCAD installation, which set out to visualise Jean Baudrillard’s notion of hyper-reality. There were high production values but also a dry archness to Lisa Marie Johnston’s NCAD dissertation on the ownership and availability of cultural meaning.
As with Johnston’s video, a certain amount of deconstruction is usually in evidence, and this year several graduates have set about deconstructing the process of making a painting – with limited success, on the whole. Indeed, with a few notable exceptions, one felt that the actual business of making a painting, or a drawing, was taken too much for granted. The same doesn’t hold true for photography or video, where it’s accepted that you have to know, technically, what you’re doing.
At the moment the dominant view of artistic expression holds that pretty much all meaning is socially constructed and all artistic expression should be socially relevant – or is, otherwise, largely irrelevant. There are, it must be said, both academic professionals and aspiring artists who don’t necessarily go along with this view, and, on the evidence of pretty much every degree show, that’s a good thing.
There was work that was hard to categorise in all three graduate shows, and some of this was the best. Two NCAD MAs, for example, revisit minimalism. Kohei Nakata’s paintings, with their calm, radiant surfaces (they are about ambiguity, he notes), and Tom O’Dea’s wall-mounted sculptural pieces, made with a wide variety of materials but with a consistently precise sensibility, would stand out in any context.
Ruth Clinton, an NCAD BA graduate, showed remarkable videos, one introducing us to the surreal landscape of the inside of a church organ. She has a striking imagination and is surely one to watch.
George Warren, at DIT, wasn’t alone in immersing himself in a moody, inward-looking, hermetic mode of painting, somewhere between Patrick Hall and Tjibbe Hooghiemstra, perhaps, but his work was compelling and not averse to taking risks. At IADT, Ailing Connolly’s impossibly intricate drawings were flawlessly well made, while Lucy Murphy’s beautiful mixed-media pieces merged human with natural forms and textures.

Drawing Inspiration From Kiki Smith

 I'm a big fan of Kiki Smith's work. She uses images from nature,

which represent different meanings, in her art. Im also

 drawn to her use of  ink and paper, she shows the power of the

simple medium of drawing. Perfect!

Another One Bites The Dust

End Of Year Exhibition 2010

The end of my Interface project and time for the end of year exhibition. For my interface project i focused on superstitions and the power influence they have over some peoples lives. Ireland is full of superstitions and every family has their own interpretation of them so it was extremely intertesting to investigate this. Some people take them a bit too serious though!!