Reclaiming a Space: Building-Wide Visual Arts Exhibition

Our spring visual arts exhibition features four women artists from Ireland and the diaspora whose work explores notions of home, place and displacement, and identity through different media and styles within the practices of abstract art. Representing both the hard-edged and the lyrical, and ranging from oil painting to sculpture, their work shines a light on the genre’s reclamation of physical and cultural spaces that historically have been occupied by more traditional forms within the canon.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

This exhibition aims to shine a light on current practices in abstract art through the work of four women artists, Irish or of Irish origin, and who are in direct dialogue with New York—the fertile ground of cross-pollination between cultures is very much in evidence here. These artists are distinct in their practice and approach: working in a range of media, stylistically speaking, they run the full gamut from hard-edge abstraction to the lyrical. Yet there are common themes—explorations around a sense of place, translations of the musical world to the physical—that might constitute the beginning of a key to a sense of cultural identity. 

Painting and sculpture provide the opportunity for a reclaiming of space, for the physical translation of a psychological reconstruction. All these artists, with their close experience of displacement, engage with that: Helen O’Leary’s sculptural wooden constructions constitute a literal building and rebuilding, in reference to her young life in rural Wexford and the very real concern of rebuilding the family home after natural disaster and tragedy. Dannielle Tegeder’s paintings also refer to the architectonic, refracted through a constructivist approach, and with a focus on the role of architecture, urban spaces, and utopian thinking. Diana Copperwhite, whose work cites both Irish modernism and the New York School, seeks to recreate a sense of the refraction of light reminiscent of her childhood years on the west coast of Ireland. The paintings are portals for journeying through time and space, multiplying through her online travelings. Erin Lawlor, a child of the diaspora, evokes the notion of home as a psychological construct; she uses painting as an ideal place of liminality, of projection and synthesis, under the twin prisms of the European and New York painting traditions. 

Musical references abound here, too: O’Leary has evoked the importance of the old Irish laments, or sean nós, with regard to her work, and there is an evident lyricism in the paintings of both Copperwhite and Lawlor. Tegeder has even developed collaborations and direct dialogues between abstraction and music. 

Abstract art has traditionally been less immediately visible in Ireland, and yet, beyond more recent, specific dialogues with modernist movements, there is a rich tradition of abstraction in the country’s visual vernacular that is almost all-pervasive, and subversively political. This exhibition attempts the beginning of a recognition of that tradition and its extensions; a reclaiming of place, and space, within the art-historical canon. 

Visit Reclaiming a Space through Sunday, June 23. Walk ins welcome, or register for galley hours here.