Fergal Dunne Where did you say he was from?'

Title: 'Where did you say he was from?'
Medium: acrylic on gesso prepared chipboard, 110 x 125 cm

I am for the language of painting; the expressive potential of colour, gesture and composition.

Mark Rothko once stated that a painting 'lives by companionship'. I have come to understand of this companionship as the dialogue between the potential and the limits of both the material and the artist's identity as a living, conscious, and sensitive being. A painted surface becomes significant with the application of the painter's mind; an imbuing of immaterial spirituality into physical, primary, lived experience. All that is sacred to the painter, the person, all those things that that define living, are poured onto the surface into a documentation, a report if you like, on the joy and the anger, the conquests and the defeats, the salutes and the insults.

Tension, I have found, creeps, seeps and floods into my work time and time again. Never comfortable in a definition, I pull characteristics from all ends of a concept, lay it out, and allow the conflicts to breathe amongst themselves. In this work I have taken an innocent question, 'where did you say he was from?', put into a context with a seated, barefoot figure, and tied that to a reference to the peacekeepers of our nation, and played all three together in a cocktail of associations, which bring up questions of security, corruption, racism and liberty, to name but a few, and applied these ideas to expression through the integrity of paint's communicative materiality. Paintings, for me, should shout, whimper, retract, whisper, collapse and boil, like an open, hesitant mind engaged with this world with which its interacts.

Heather Gray A Bastion of Bone and Black

I have been surrounded by the natural environment all my life and it's processes and structures have always fascinated me. decaying matter, bones, leaves, living creatures have kept me captivated. i have been collecting bones and skulls and working with them over the past years. i am using natural materials and engaging with the environment in the aim of raising questions concerning the basis of humanity and our relationship with other living things.

In 'A Bastion of Bone and Black', mammal skulls and bone are amalgamated with black modeling wax. The wax is formed by hand into a human-esque face and shaped onto the animal skull. This creates a hybrid creature, a fusion of form from the realm of possibility; it asks what if evolution were on a different path?

Stella Thonett

The work is to do with the random meanings we can assume if given the right prompting. Everything we see has to do with the context we see it in, so to manipulate ones understanding of an object, we need only play with its surroundings. Surroundings to an object are like language to ourselves. It is how they communicate.

The limits of your language are the limits of your world

-Wittgenstein

The reason for using screwdrivers was to narrow in on one particular object. The more intimate I became with the concept, the more I realised that, if I wanted to keep the meaning readable and succinct, I cold not continue using any random objects. So I chose the screwdriver.

The screwdriver is primarily a useful object. If one takes away its function, one takes everything. The object becomes totally malleable to whatever meaning I want to bestow on it, and, without a function, it is glad to take it.

Jacinta Jardine Treasure Hunt

Title: Treasure Hunt

Medium: printed drawing, photography and installations using various materials

“Art’s true effort is to open to us dimensions of the spirit and of the self that normally lie smothered under the weight of living”

Jeanette Winterson

The weight of living has been a universal burden in recent years. Modern society has suffered mass disillusionment and art has diminished into the dense realm of sobriety; heavy with the strain of the world.

In my opinion this is an immense tragedy because art undeniably has the power to relieve this strain; it has the power to reinstate our faith in beauty and in life and in our world.

Through my work I endeavour to bring the concepts of beauty, magic, play and pleasure back into art; to create joyful experiences for the viewer which help to reassure them that despite all of life’s adversities, beauty still abounds.
With this “treasure hunt” piece the viewers use the special maps on their invitations or flyers to locate the gallery; but along the way there are little hidden scenes for them to discover; turning this normally mundane task into an adventure and showing that enchantment can be found even where it is least expected.

My intent is that the exploration induces a sense of childlike excitement and that the viewer’s imagination is stimulated so that they will go on to envisage their own little hidden worlds, and become more aware of beauty in their daily lives.

Aaron Lowry Untitled

6 untitled drawings
Mixed Media
12x14cm

‘There are a large number of different physical structures which form spontaneously as their components try to meet certain energetic requirements. These components may be constrained, for example, to seek a point of minimal free energy, like a soap bubble, which acquires its spherical form by minimizing surface tension…'

- Manuel DeLanda (Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy

I am interested in capturing the unfolding of form in physical structures. I have chosen the bubble because of its spherical form and because its playfulness is contrasted with the cold sterile aesthetic of the Scientific experiment. I have used both sequence and the grid to heighten a sense of narrative in the changing line, shape and form of the bubble untill it reaches its final shape, a sphere.

Deborah Smith 'Flicker Flicker'

Still images of Flicker

Projection on wall (8x12)



The idea of this piece came from the unawareness of the flickering of light that occurs in the corner of your eye, like when you pass a fence on a sunny day or the light in your eye after a flash of a camera.

With this basic thought and the basic materials, I am challenging the notions of display and enhaning that which is usually taken for granted, this piece delicately reintroduces the elements of the everyday and allows a moment of reflection.

Ann Minehane

Paul Klee said ‘art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible’.

As a visual artist I am drawn to the fractal geometry within the landscape. Aesthetics, I believe is at the core of a biological even Palaeolithic draw to organic life. Fractal geometry pervades from macro to microscopic movement in the topography, divisions in tree branches, river tributaries, icicles mountain ranges and the juxtaposition of human anatomy in blood vessels and airways and cell structure. The common link is division and subdivision, yet each fractionation is unique. My third year practice continues along these lines.

‘Inscapes’ was a phrase originally coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins. He described inscapes as being dynamic, with each organic thing having an inherent and unique quality. Hopkins language evoked pure image through language.

Ordered and disordered patterns which will persist and develop beyond the scope of human existence.

Lucy Murphy

2 A4 Screen prints on copper plates.

In my practice i first start by expermentation with materials and techniques and then later a concept develops.  I have created a series of works that reflect a virtual reality, one that is familiar only to myself as it is a reflection of my thoughts and imagination.

Ciara Murphy Untitled, sound installation piece

Object: Piano parts

Sound Piece: 2 minutes 9 seconds. (Recorded, edited and mixed by Robert Mullen, Piano strings played by Ciara Murphy. Music written by Ciara Murphy)

The project is about memory and how people tend to remember things in fragments.  Many things from everyday life can trigger memories from the past.  The piano is filled with memories of my grandparents, particularly my Nana as she was the one who played the piano most.  I have also recorded a sound piece using the strings of the piano and a fully working keyboard.  This plays beside the piece reinforcing the fact that the piano keys no longer function as they did when the piano was whole.  They do move and can be played but no sound emanates from them anymore.  

Aisling Bolger Trace

Title: Trace

Medium: Video

I have always held an interest in new media technology and the technical aspects of creation. I work primarily through the medium of video. However, my recent work has opened a new door for me and taken on the form of stop motion animation videos. Stop motion animation combines the hands on experience that can often be lacking in new media artworks and my love of the mediums of video and photography.

Fascinated by movement and drawn towards architecture, perspective and repetition. These areas of interest lay down the thematic foundations for most of my work.

Sinead Devitt Untitled

Title: Untitled

Medium: Photography

I have always been struck by how serious and frequently melancholy many artworks can be, the world is at times a harsh or indifferent place, why should art cement this fact so often? We have the capabilities and resources to create spectacularly fun and exciting places not only in reality but in our imaginations also, an ability always encouraged in childhood but something that fades as we get older, with the many difficult things we come across as adults surely escapism is a natural way to deal with them. Using techniques, materials and aesthetics more at home in a children's art class, I have constructed little fantasy worlds, brightly coloured, stylized and completely fictional places to escape to and photographed them to give only a glimpse of what the imagination is capable of.

Marjolein Wouters Self

Medium: mixed media: print, found objects, thread, wool, ink on paper.
Title: Self
Self explores the personal interests which influence my art practice. Taking extracts from a selection of the literature I have read, I am highlighting the domestic craft activities detailed within the extracts. These activities are traditional artistic work carried out primarily by women, including knitting, needlework and drawing. By illustrating the extracts through print and craft techniques, I'm emphasising the artistic abilities achieved by women while they were commonly excluded from the patriarchal world of art in the past. Each extract forms the page of a book and the book can be read in an alcove that provides the audience with an area to immerse themselves into the book.

Duane Dalton - Untitled 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4

Untitled 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4

6mm MDF, Acrylic, Gesso

6ft x 4ft

My work at the moment is directly developed from my drawing work from the beginning of the year. My drawing work is mainly processed based and the same technique has been applied to my work now. I wanted to experiment with working in large scale, particularly with paint. My work is painted directly onto sheets of MDF. I have chosen to leave some of the wood exposed. I have used this to my advantage so that the wood in the painting would be just as important as the applied paint. The titles of the paintings originated from happenings or conversations around the time the paintings were created. Artist I have been researching during this time include Bridget Riley, Sol LeWitt, Victor Vasarely and Eamon O’ Kane.

For the future I want to increase the scale of the paintings and expand on techniques on how to display the work. I would like to incorporated more recognisable forms into the paintings.