High Grade Art From This Year’s Graduate Crop

The Irish Times, written by Adian Dunne.

Inventive, ambitious, engaged and curious, art students from various colleges have produced work as diverse as it is excellent

There are terrific things to see, and on occasion hear, at this year’s art-school graduate exhibitions. You never know what to expect.

At Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, for example, Declan Grahamushered visitors into a school counsellor’s office and into the mind of an imagined, troubled boy, David Crow. The walls were embellished with clusters of Crow’s densely worked drawings, in which he tries to make sense of inner and outer worlds that seem equally strange and disturbing to his mind. The counsellor’s notes lay on the desk. Graham’s bravura installation vividly conveyed the complexity and perplexity of mental life and the strategies used in attempts to understand and cope with it.

At Cork Institute of Technology’s Crawford College of Art and Design, Mark Buckeridge’s tremendous performance piece is a rich musical meditation on suicidal thoughts. Historically, many musicians have art-school backgrounds, and one can see Buckeridge heading that way, but at the same time he likes the license that the fine-art context allows, mingling composition, performance, audience involvement and theatrical spectacle without being pinned down as any one thing.

Crossing boundaries
Also crossing boundaries, at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT), Janna Kemperman devised and filmed a powerful piece of physical dance theatre, Performer, about how identities are fashioned to fit social structures and conventions. Conversely, Michael Dignam’s compelling performative video installation at the National College of Art and Design features individuals exercising quirky personal, expressive skills in fairly brutalist urban, architectonic spaces.

Another NCAD sculpture graduate, Eva Richardson McCrea, ambitiously films sections of Incident at Antioch, a play by the French philosopher and theorist Alain Badiou. Badiou is a darling of cultural theorists, in the mould of Michel Foucault or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Not so much a drama as an extremely solemn political dialectic, his play explores the possibility of generating a new political reality through revolution.

Drawing on the theoretical framework laid out in his best-known philosophical work,Being and Event, he has very specific ideas about what is possible politically, and how, and why. Richardson McCrea’s stylised treatment, with high production values, and implying links to Ireland’s recent history, inescapably recalls Gerard Byrne’s elaborate filmed re-enactments of cultural texts, while not being overshadowed by them.

It has become almost customary to berate graduate artists for not dealing with contemporary political or cultural events, or indeed with whatever else anyone feels they should be dealing with. This year it would be hard to make any particular charge stick. US military flights feeding through Shannon, the ban on cutting blanket bogs, surveillance technologies and practices, the legacy of the Magdalene laundries, global unrest: all are tackled very well, most of them repeatedly.

Identity, from every point of view, is perennially popular with young artists, in ways that range from the playful (Melissa Breen’s Cosplay photographs at IADT) to the historical (Deirdre McGing’s account of an Anglo-Irish family, at Dublin Institute of Technology) to the deadly earnest (Robert McCormack’s consideration of the African migrants who sell newspapers at traffic intersections, at DIT; Matthew Ashe at IADT; and Anna Dudek at CIT).

Less predictably, this year there is a resurgence of interest in optical phenomena, almost a return to op art. Rather than reflecting an infatuation with new technology, this has to do with an interest in the mechanics of perception, and it plays out in lively and inventive ways: in the work of Colm Eccles at IADT and of Helen MacMahon and Mark Reynolds, both at DIT, for example.

Comparably, there’s an interest in materials, and in materials not being what they seem. Sarah Doherty’s sculptures, sede vacante, at DIT are a particularly good example: she is acutely attentive to the historical and cultural meanings of the forms and illusions she creates. Marilyn Gaffney’s collages, in two and three dimensions, at Moxie Studios, are also very impressive.

It’s encouraging to see young artists asking us to question the basics of looking and seeing rather than being carried away on the tidal wave of image production that has swept through contemporary culture.

Photography at both DIT and IADT has been reliably strong in recent years, and that remains broadly true, even if there’s a slight dip at IADT, with several underwhelming projects – though Lisa Burke, Heber Hanly, Karena Hutton, John Jordan and work already mentioned maintain the standard.

Certainly at DIT there are a number of terrific projects. As well as those referred to, Maciej Pastka’s documentation of a marginal urban community in north Poland is memorable, as are Neil Dorgan’s War Games, Kasia Kaminska’s exploration of the Gaeltacht civil-rights movement that sprang up in Connemara in the late 1960s, Patricia Klich, Treasa O’Hanlon’s Lolita and Irene Siragusa’s look at nighttime violence in Dublin.

Graduate: Hannah Moore’s NGC 2289, Heavenly Body Nebula installation

Most accomplished
It’s hardly surprising that the most accomplished exhibition overall is NCAD’s master-of-fine-arts show at Moxie Studios. If you’re going to see just one graduate show, make it this one. Highlights include Christine Lanney’s hypnotic performance videos, Gwen Wilkinson’s images of evanescence, Hannah Moore’s tent installation, printmakers Niall Naessens and Lilian Ingram, and Jane Giffney’s intricate works with human hair.

At Moxie you’ll also find a number of very good painters making up something close to a movement or school, a notional grouping that would include such more established figures as Paul Doran, Mark Swords and Fergus Feehily. They don’t all make the same kind of work, but what comes across is a sympathy in outlook and attitude. At Moxie are Eveleen Murphy, Natasha Conway and George Warren, and one could add two impressive BAs to that list, Andrew Simpson and Daniel Jackman.

Add Diarmaid O’Sullivan and Susan O’Leary at CIT as convincing painters and it might seem perverse to suggest there is a crisis in painting.

The crisis is that painting appears be used as a default option by students and staff who are not fundamentally engaged with it and don’t ask the most obvious questions about ability and intention.

"Trisected" Exhibition

Maeve O' Flaherty



Oisin Vink

Sarah Fitzpatrick

Magda Jaroszewicz

Tommie Sorro

Barbra Larkin

Bridie Farrell

Kate Stitt

"Stimuli" Exhibition

DIT Portland Row is proud to present ‘Stimuli’, the second in a series of mini exhibitions by students of 4th year Fine Art. Incorporating the work of students Jennifer Quigley, Steph Gallagher, Emma Blake, Thomas Moran, Stephen Fagan, Nicola Carragher, Aisling Ní Chlaonadh and Margaret White, this exhibition endeavours to encourage awareness and discussion of dilemmas facing the individual in contemporary society. Through a diverse collection of practices which include painting, video, photography and sculpture the artists involved seek to engage with the viewer through visual, emotional and conceptual stimulation. Each artist featured attempts to compliment the other, their contrasting practices bound by the common theme of stimuli. By focusing on different aspects of contemporary life and how both artists and audience alike react to the world around them, this show aims to explore the relationship between the individual and the culture they are subject to.

The exhibition will be held in the Fine Art building at Portland Row, Dublin 1.
Exhibition runs from 13th- 16th February.

Thomas Moran

Jennifer Quigley

Emma Blake

Nicola Carragher

Stephanie Gallagher

Margaret White

Tara Fox

Aisling Ní Chlaonadh

"Step III" Exhibition

                     The "Step III" exhibition took place in Block T, Smithfield Dublin in April 2011. It was a collaborative exhibition of work from myself and some fellow colleagues of mine in 3rd year Fine Art at DIT. The piece which i displayed in the exhibition was my "Echoed Vacancy" piece which i spoke about earlier. The exhibition was truly successful and a wonderful experience. Hopefully we will have more exhibitions to follow!

Emma Brown

Doug Barrett

Claire Mc Cluskey

Carmel Mannion

Mason McMillon

Maeve O'Flaherty

Thomas Moran

Bridie Farrell

Emma Brown & Linda Byrne

3rd Yr DIT 2011 - "Step III"

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.