Oil, Gas + Cars is a solo exhibition by photographer Tung Walsh at the Horse Gallery in Dublin from 12th – 27th June. Assembling a selection from Walsh’s personal archive, these images trace life across the world: Azerbaijan to Harlem; Morocco to Cuba; Cairo and beyond. Unaffordably large tubs of luscious caviar on a plastic … Read more
For Marie Moroni, the caves of her region offer a sensitive narrative, as a place of refuge, and bearer of memory and heritage.
A reliable source, who happens to be representing him, now informs me that Banksy is to be prosecuted over his RCJ mural. This form of artistic censorship, leads me to consider the important role that art has played in terms of political commentary, and how some of the masterpieces in this genre resonate with contemporary … Read more
Sé Merry Doyle’s latest documentary, Theocracy – the Emigrant’s Artist, serves as an excellent introduction to the stirring painting of Bernard Canavan. It offers an intimate portrait of a man whose distressing backstory has yielded extraordinary works of art that amplify our understanding of an appalling system that held sway for so long in Ireland. … Read more
‘There are only so many times you can be expected to look at the Sagrada Família,’ said my uncle. He was visiting me in Barcelona, where I had returned for a few weeks. He said he wanted to take me to see the Colònia Güell, a lesser-known Gaudí site. ‘You mean the Park Güell?’ I … Read more
I was en route to Leitrim for a second time in a month when ‘Zooropa,’ the U2 song from the album of the same name, came on the stereo (a consequence of Spotify’s predictive algorithm). I hadn’t heard the song in thirty years, the year the album came out and I was a student working … Read more
As a child I was drawn to draw figures. I watched my mother paint and listened to my father tell stories. As my study and practice of art and anatomy have progressed in depth and complexity so too has my choice of models. As we all grow, live, love and age we acquire scars, stretchmarks, … Read more
My relationship with making art began aged twenty-one as a means to bolster my ego and be cool. I chose photography, mainly because I can’t draw. Also my mum and her brothers were into photography in their twenties, so there were a few nice old cameras around my house when I was growing up. Maybe … Read more
So, it’s Thursday night in Dublin, I’ve found some Poitin, and am thinking of Shane MacGowan. How very sad it is that he’s gone. ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’ playing on the radio. I had a funny connection with Shane. His wife Victoria gave me a photo of her and Shane for an auction, to … Read more
I spent four years teaching English in Changchun, a city of six million people in Jilin Province in the far north-east of China, about nine hundred kilometres south of China’s border with southern Siberia. Changchun literally means ‘long spring’, a misnomer. The months from November to April are a long cold winter, when daytime temperatures … Read more
Over the last seven years, I have been reshaping my practice from being primarily hermetic, manual and materially fixated into a more fugitive, performative state. Around 2015, I had a rising feeling that my drawings, prints and collages no longer had the capacity to hold the kinds of storytelling and speculation that I needed to … Read more
Just off Nassau Street, a cavernous concrete passageway leads into the modernist Arts Building at Trinity College Dublin. The Douglas Hyde Gallery tucked neatly into its side is the current site of Family Lines, a major solo exhibition by Irish/Sierra Leonean artist Alice Rekab. Within, they present a rich and resounding body of work that … Read more
How would you define yourself as an artist? In fact I feel more like a researcher trying to find the truth about herself, her uniqueness and her art fingerprint. For me art is a kind of meditation where I reach the inner self. Each painting is not only a scene. It’s a journey through my … Read more
Oscar Wilde said that the tragedy of being old is that one is still young. I am eighty-six, going on nineteen. Is this a record? I’ve been pruning and wood carving with my chainsaw for years. There is no shortage of wood from the trees that I planted thirty years ago. The resultant grotesque heads … Read more
My work begins with a consideration of how one begins to look – an exercise of empathy with you, dear reader. When a work of art is placed in front of me, I have a whole range of responses as a viewer and I remember this when I start to make a new piece. I … Read more
What do I want from you? Why do I write this text? Is it because I want to share something, or because I was told to? In considering how ‘you’ will read it, (‘you’ hopefully being someone other than ‘me,’) I would like to share some things relating to the development of viewership and audience … Read more
The adventure, the great adventure is every day to see something new emerge in the same face, and this is greater than any journey around the world Alberto Giacometti Finishing a piece is complicated. The decision is sometimes based on whether there are enough lines and shades on the page; everything is balanced. This generally … Read more
Marc di Saverio hails from Hamilton, Canada. His poems and translations have appeared internationally. In Issue 92 of Canadian Notes and Queries Magazine, di Saverio’s Sanatorium Songs (2013) was hailed as “the greatest poetry debut from the past 25 years.” In 2016 he received the City of Hamilton Arts Award for Best Emerging Writer. In … Read more
I have always been a creative person. When I was a child I loved to draw and cut paper, my kindergarten teacher was ever so impressed by my straight cutting lines! My grandfather painted in oil and made sculptures out of wood he found in nature. He told me that there is no tree in … Read more
Growing up in a small rural town in Israel, Pardes Hanna, has shaped me into who I am today. My grandparents were part of the hundreds of thousand people who fled Europe prior to the Holocaust and settled the land of Israel in the 1930s. It was important to them that we were raised as … Read more
