These exhibitions are now closed. Please contact the gallery prior to purchasing art from the exhibitions to confirm availability.

Unheard Music

Jonathan Hunter

Mar 6th, 2014 To Mar 29th, 2014

Rather than reproducing the appearance of a particular place, my intention is to use landscape painting as a medium with which to draw the viewer into a connection with memory. - Jonathan Hunter 2014

Rilke Hymn Boxes + Black Elk Drawings

Marie Foley

Apr 3rd, 2014 To Apr 26th, 2014

Born in Cork in 1959, she studied Sculpture at the Crawford College of Art in Cork, Goldsmiths College in London and Cardiff College of Art. Awarded an MA and a National Diploma in Art with Distinction. Her sculptures comprises elements which are carved in wood, modelled in porcelain and with additional hand-worked or salvaged elements in metal, stone and glass. Her language is one of symbolic form, form which becomes a vehicle for the spiritual in nature. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Ireland, England, Wales, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Holland, Hungary, Poland, Finland, Canada, USA and Japan. She was the first Irish artist to have a solo Exhibition in the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Public commissions include Kilkenny Castle, The Office of Public Works at 51 St Stephen’s Green, a sculpture for National Universities of Ireland presentation to President Mary Robinson, Cothú Awards and Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. She has received various Arts Council awards. Other awards include an International Ceramic Award, a Canada Council award and The New Horizons Award from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

Be Still, Life.

Trudie Mooney

May 1st, 2014 To May 31st, 2014

‘I have always tried to convey a sense of tranquillity in my paintings using simple jugs, bowls, stoneware and sponge ware of varying shapes and sizes. Through the careful arrangement of objects, draped fabrics a somewhat muted palette, I have sought subtlety and balance. While these aspects are still my primary concern, in the last year I have found myself leaning towards a wider colour range, more detailed designs and patterns and wanting to give a lighter atmosphere to some of the paintings. In others I hope to impart an air of solemnity and quiet acceptance. Above all, I aim for calm, balance and serenity, to be still, life.’ - Trudie Mooney

Hurrah for the flowers of Spring

James McCreary
 

Jun 5th, 2014 To Aug 9th, 2014

"Hurrah for the flowers of spring... " From the poem Imitated from the Japanese
(page 309, Augustine Martin’s collected poems of W.B. Yeats)

" I've always liked the idea that my images have a certain restlessness about them, a stubborn resistance to pigeon-holing and definition. They exist on the shadowy threshold of things – always on the point of emerging from – or else returning to – the darkness that gives them life. It‘s this quality of tentatively approaching definition, of keeping my work open to multiple interpretations, that gives me the greatest satisfaction and simulates, I hope, a powerful imaginative response. Because that’s what I’m after – art with an immediacy that reaches out to its audience, and only really completes itself in their visceral responses to it. That’s the hope." - James McCreary

Confluence; a merging

Janet Pierce

Jun 5th, 2014 To Aug 9th, 2014

"Trying to connect Ireland and India has been a major concern in my work, as I have lived in both countries for the last 7 yrs. My concerns are to do with spirituality and landscape. I have collaborated with traditional Irish musicians, in the past, and was delighted to know that Sean O’Riada, the Irish composer, said that the way to understand both Irish and Indian music was the same - through the heart. 

Poetry has been a major concern of mine and I have collaborated with the Indian poet Sudeep Sen. Again it was the spirituality and sensuousness in his work that attracted me to work with him. Now I turn my attention to the link between Yeats’s poetry and Vedic spirituality. I am seeking harmony through my work and both Yeats and the ancient Vedas sought peace.

'And I shall have some peace there,
for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a-glimmer,
and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.'
Yeats

The light in my paintings cannot be grasped, their substance is spiritual light. I feel in Yeats’s poetry there are gaps between description where he leaves only light. A lot of Yeats’s poetry came from the heart, in Indian spirituality is is the heart chakra. Even his romantic poetry has a spiritual, sensousness yearning in it 

'HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.'
Yeats

That is coming from the heart chakra and my paintings and my spiritual light thresholds attempt to be doors into that same heart centre., where all is light." - Janet Pierce

A Natural Selection (Sample Archive)

Graphic Studio Dublin / 100 Invited Artists

Jun 14th, 2014 To Aug 30th, 2014

The National Botanic Gardens were founded in 1795 in a golden age of exploration and scientific discovery. This was a romantic era of plant-hunters who journeyed all over the globe in search of botanical specimens to carry
home for study and cultivation. The naturalist Charles Darwin was one such explorer whose famous voyage on the HMS Beagle led to the publication of On the Origin of Species, a work which radically changed our perception of
the natural world. The term ‘Natural Selection’ was coined by Darwin to describe how natural forms evolve differently in different locations, to suit their specific environments. 

There has always been an important link between botany and the visual arts. From Minoan palaces to 18th Century French Chateaux, the desire to capture botanic images is rooted in antiquity. For over three hundred years printmaking has been an integral part of botanical research and discovery, and vice versa. 

“A Natural Selection” features 100 original fine art prints by 100 artists. This ambitious project has brought together artists from Ireland – North and South, alongside artists from Europe, The Middle East, Far East and the Antipodes. The participating artists considered all aspects of the National Botanic Gardens: the 17,000 different species of cultivated forms within the collection, the natural beauty of the Gardens at Glasnevin and Kilmacurragh, their renowned architectural features such as the spectacular Curvilinear Range of Glasshouses and the Palm House, and their continuing scientific and botanical research work. 

In their different and individual ways the artists have been inspired by and have paid tribute to the richness and diversity of the natural world and to the work of a great institution, one which is filled with treasure, and is a treasure in itself, the National Botanic Gardens.

Wandering Shades (Offsite @ The Factory Performance Space)

Kate MacDonagh

Jul 29th, 2014 To Aug 8th, 2014  

"The work in this exhibition is inspired by the 'dance plays' of W.B. Yeats. These plays were influenced by Japanese Noh Theatre which uses masks, dance and chorus."Yeats used masks to evoke a sense of 'otherness' and to create a more profound connection between the play and the audience. The 'characters' of the masks are ephemeral, they emerge purely out of the process of making them, from the dance with the materials."- Kate MacDonagh

Ground

Helen O Toole
 

Aug 11th, 2014 To Aug 30th, 2014

"Painting has become a vehicle to begin to articulate the memories of growing up in an unforgiving limestone landscape, and the layers of longing and bittersweet histories. The paintings are built slowly, made in layers, with a similar measure to working the soil, revealing the strata of the bog, negotiating clumsy, crusty limestone fields at a deliberate pace, with the belief that life continues and the work will get done. The nature of my painting is as if reclaiming one of my father’s fields, by stripping it of its limestone heritage, to later cover it with soil, concealing what was, with the optimism of progress and a better future. Through insistent layers of paint that are scraped, pulled, touched, rubbed and felt, I approach a sense of the abyss that is again and again covered up, as if even memory too needs to be evaded, like reality and its representation. Each layer of paint is potent and becomes a means to question what is real and what is not. For me painting has parallels with the literal layers found in nature but more importantly the layers of the rural. The slowness in painting is crucial in order to arrive at a “pitch” or threshold in my work, a prolonged moment, where the vast space of the painting starts to evoke an image with depth and resonance. Unlocking and arriving at a pitch, something perhaps unnamable within the painting and within the self relies on an awareness of how the process and ideas behind the work materialize to form a whole.The process is ruminant like the rural landscape." - Helen O'Toole

Bad flowers, glass birds and other ideas.

Graham Gingles

Sep 4th, 2014 To Sep 27th, 2014

"This exhibition includes paintings, drawings and constructions. The constructions are usually wall hanging boxes for which I am better known. The title of the exhibition reflects my concerns and interests at the moment. Of course the other ideas in the title is a way of keeping my options open to develop, explore and experiment serendipitous ideas that might occur during the making of the work." - Graham Gingles

Sublimation

Stephen Lawlor

Oct 2nd, 2014 To Nov 1st, 2014

Although these paintings have their origin in European painting from 1300 onwards, the artist approaches such influence from a contemporary perspective. Over many years Stephen Lawlor has explored, dissected and absorbed works by almost all European painters up to the present time and this exhibition is the culmination of many years of intimate engagement with the past. He engages with iconic and also not so well known works. They incorporate and fuse memories but more importantly emotions felt at particular moments that are subtle, indirect, accidental and at times disassociated. They reflect an intangible quality that fuses the physical and emotional act of painting into a distilled moment that passes through time to represent the essence of the emotional impact of the subjects that inspired them.

Hibernoid - selected works

Dermot Seymour

Nov 6th, 2014 To Nov 29th, 2014

"The work is a trip across the forehead of the daft, the absurd, the paradoxical, the sinister and the abandoned." - Dermot Seymour

Invited Artists 2014

Alan Ardiff, Clive Bright, Conor Gallagher, Seamus Gill, Annie Harrison, Vivien Murray, Kate MacDonagh, Brian McDonagh, Leonora Neary, Cormac O’Leary,Michael Wann

Dec 11th, 2014 To Jan 31st, 2015