Constallations
Hyde Bridge Gallery
4th Nov – 18th Nov 2023
CONSTALLATIONS solo show by artist Rebecca Massey opens next Saturday November 4th at 5pm.
All welcome.
4th Nov – 18th Nov 2023
CONSTALLATIONS solo show by artist Rebecca Massey opens next Saturday November 4th at 5pm.
All welcome.
Exhibition opening Saturday Oct 7th 2023 12noon Closing Oct 28th
Two Person exhibition by Celeen Mahé & Sarah Ellen Lundy.
A collection of artwork created during the Primary Colours Art Education Residency 2023.
The exhibition is supported and funded by Sligo County Council Arts Service
Artist Bio/Statement
Lundy is an experimental cross disciplinary artist working primarily in visual media with parallel practices in sound, performance & film & essentially preoccupied with the natural world; her pedagogical work endeavors to generate environmental empathy through creative engagement whilst her expanded studio practice explores the esoteric elements of ecology through a feminist lens; she operates from the Furr Factory Studio in her native South County Sligo, a space she has established in the same building her father once founded in order to run his Taxidermy craft.
Exhibition statement:
This body of work continues Lundys aesthetic of the macabre in minimalist muted or mono tones; a seasonal nod to Samhain, it explores life cycles & mortality in a non-morbid manner.
Lundys works operate through setting up a series of metaphors & prompts on the cyclical nature of existence & the formalistic similarities throughout the natural world, demonstrating inherent interconnectivity.
The use of natural materials in the exhibition echoes the preserved flora and fauna specimens the artist used in her school residency to inspire creative responses through weekly introductions to native taxidermy & herbarium pieces presented in the classroom.
Celeen Mahé is a visual artist based in Sligo. She was awarded a six-month studio residency from the Sligo Arts Service, at The Model Sligo in 2023. Most recent exhibitions include a group show Materiality, Collaboration, and Agency at Exhibition Laboratory Helsinki, and solo show The Shape of a Pocket at SIC Gallery, Helsinki. In 2022 she was awarded an Agility award from the Irish Arts Council. She received a Visual Arts Bursary from the Irish arts Council in 2020. She holds an MA Fine Arts from University of the Arts Helsinki, and a BA (hons) in Fine Art Sculpture from Limerick School of Art and Design.
Artist Statement
Celeen Mahé works within the mediums of sculpture, painting, collage, textiles, and printmaking. Engaging intuitively with materials, the abstract qualities of surface, texture, color, and form aim to create work that is poetic and open ended.
Her process is a place for slowing down, rebuilding, and dreaming, where one can move past definition towards something personal and fragile, a place where thoughts and feelings meet. This exhibition presents a selection of her most recent works on paper. Her experiments with collage are born from a desire to make meaning emerge from a fragmented present.
The Drawing Journal
Opens 5th August 1pm –Runs to 26th August
The Drawing Journal is a collective of seven artists who investigate the potential of drawing through collaborative projects: Tamzin Ashcroft, Niamh Clarke, Hannah Clegg, Daniel Coleman, Shauna McDonald, Sharon McKeown and Doris Rohr.
The artists are inviting the public to share our responses and interpretations of selected poems by W.B.Yeats. This exhibition explores the relationship between text, image and drawing, and the possibility to translate one through the other. The intention is to find personal and contemporary dimensions in Yeats’ poetry, thereby relocating language through images. Metaphors dissolve in visual description, infusing writing and drawing.
The pictures were taken at times when I found people being their most honest self. Moments of vulnerability where I felt people allowed me to look at who they really were. Be that the innocence and the sensitivity of a child caring for a fly, a nervous artist about to address a crowd or those trying to self destruct through alcohol.
This event is part of the Hereditas programme www.cairdefestival.com
Artist Nina Fern will be showcasing a selection of her works at a solo show Otherworldly Echoes from June 10th-24th, with an opening event on Saturday 10th from 1pm-3pm.
We are delighted to be showing a special screening of The Everness (2023), a short film by Chris Sparks and Nina Fern. Please come along at 1pm.
Nina Fern (she/her) is a visual artist. She grew up to German-Turkish parents in Germany, where Nina studied Fashion and specialised in Costume Design. Her award-winning costumes were exhibited in museums internationally and are held in private collections.
In 2012, Nina made her home on the wild, northwest coast of Ireland. Since moving to Ireland she has tutored design and worked on feature films. In 2022 Nina graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from the Atlantic Technological University, Sligo. Currently, Nina is undertaking practice-led research with focus on virtual performance and storytelling. Her multidisciplinary practice employs a variety of media, including extended realities (XR), moving image, and sculpture.
Nina has been the recipient of the Ballinglen Arts Foundation annual Emerging Artist Award 2022, and was longlisted for the RDS Visual Art Awards 2022. Recently, Nina was awarded with the Agility Award 2023 by the Arts Council.
6th – 27th May 2023
“Ailbhe Barrett has the rare ability to capture the ephemeral upon her canvasses and plates. Hailing from Co. Limerick, her practice is as anchored to place as it is to time. Her landscapes, generally unpeopled, are studies of light and form, stillness and movement. They seem to depict an inbetween-ness, a time between day and night or night and day, a journey not a destination. Since time immemorial humans have attempted to capture, whether in image or prose, the Sublime. Barrett returns time and again to the landscape, but in ever-evolving incarnations. Part pilgrimage, part personal exploration, these revisitations document a relationship in flux: person and place.
For her second solo show Contemporaneity and the Elusive, the scale and ambition of her printed works have grown expansively, pushing the medium to its limits. The results are a true testament to the artist’s commitment to her subject matter. The works range from the finely worked to the boldly gestural, shots of pure pigment sitting atop matte forestation, drypoint incisions deeply gouged into spitbite washes. Her fluidity between media is at once instinctive and measured as Barrett faithfully returns to the task at hand, the near impossible task of grasping the elusive, attempting to make permanent what is already passing.
These works invite the viewer to immerse themselves in a moment, a moment that is at once familiar and yet very much the artist’s own.”
Ailbhe Barrett is an award winning artist, mastering both printmaking and painting. Ailbhe is a self-taught artist who was home schooled in her native county Limerick until she was eighteen. From there Ailbhe took up painting full time, under guidance from artists and art professionals. As a landscape painter working mainly in oils, she developed a liking for the scope of the large canvas from a young age. At a later stage she studied printmaking in Limerick Printmakers and Graphic Studio Dublin and continues creating work in both paint and print, constantly exploring the relationship between both.
Aideen Connolly was born in Donegal and now lives with her family on the border of Sligo and Leitrim. After graduating in 1986 from DLAD, she has worked as an art director, designer & illustrator both in Ireland and abroad. Her commercial work has brought her back to drawing, printing & mark making.
‘My ‘Realm’ journey is a linear map in a way, starting in my own townland of Cloonty (meaning meadow in Irish) through Edencullentragh /Holyfield where St Aidan’s NS is located and up through the Gleniff Horseshoe Valley. The road through the valley passes through 7 townlands – Shancrock, Clogh, Moodoge, Oughtagory, Gleniff, Gotnadrung and Keelogues. Each townland once supported many families. Not even stones remain to mark each home. The flowers they planted fado fado do appear year after year though. I chose to forage at different times and places along the road for flowers, native and otherwise. Using cyanotype (an early form of photography) and eco print techniques on paper, wool and silk, I have created work that gently echoes the ephemeral nature of its past.’
Jo Lewis has worked in many fields from truck driving in Africa to curating the architectural festival Green Door. The diversity and complexity of her career to date shows a passion and curiosity for human connections as well as for the environment.
Highlighting the importance of creativity has been a common thread for her from her research in Botswana [which had as one of its aims the understanding of a female aesthetic running throughout the multi-disciplinary areas of practice from weaving and painting, to ceramics and home building] through to her teaching in schools throughout Leitrim and Sligo and on the early childcare course in ATU – [instilling the importance of creativity for both child and teacher in early childcare].
Jo currently works for an environmental assessment company where she is surrounded by ecologists, ecology equipment, reports and field data. This has led to a deeper understanding of her own environment from mammals to vegetation, bats and birds. This work informs both her creative practice teaching in schools as well as her own artistic practice.
“My current practice is literally rooted in in my life in Leitrim. I have been gardening since moving here however more recently this has led to an interest in the underland and how it connects to the upper world. How it could be used to help understand more complex connections and to demonstrate and be used as a metaphor for elements of contemporary living.
My work and Inspiration often comes from the material first, harnessing the energy that the material already has; in this case roots that I uncovered whilst gardening and the discarded wood and furniture I found lying around. The roots come with all the potential they had to produce flowers and fruit and the furniture and wood comes with its own embedded history.”
We are now starting to understand a little of what happens underground, how trees and plants might communicate with each other and the mycorrhizal network. But what does that actually look like, it is hard to visualise. Through printmaking and plaster casting I have been looking at natural materials from different angles, abstracted and out of context: inside out/ outside in underground/overground in an attempt to imagine. Juxtaposing, mirroring and flipping, repeating prints in order to see them in a different light, from another perspective and right up close.
I grew some of the roots and gathered others and spent a long time washing and drying them and enjoyed taking time to examine their intricacies.
The common bramble/briar has many connotations, both as a protective as well as an aggressive plant. It’s seen as something that prickles and scratches and overtakes areas of land – however it also produces a wonderful berry, protects shrubs from grazers and small birds from larger ones. It also has its place in myths, fairy-tales, lotions and potions. I love is duality and celebrate it here through its roots and thorns!
The Hyde Bridge gallery is delighted to announce the opening of the solo exhibition An Dáil Cleite / The Feather Assembly by Matthew Gammon Artist opening 1pm next Saturday 10th September.
The exhibition will be launched by well-known photo-journalist, Brian Farrell.
“The exhibition An Dáil Cleite / The Feather Assembly consists of 30 prints created over the last year and represent my recent studies of the beauty and character of our most commonplace neighbours, the members of the crow family (specifically Rooks and Jackdaws) found in counties Roscommon and Sligo. Core to my artistic vision is my desire to bring to the forefront the often ignored beauty of the most commonplace things that surround our everyday lives.
For this project I have stepped away from my usual subject matter of architecture and landscapes to focus on the domestic wildlife that we live beside all our lives. Like many other people the Covid lockdowns and restrictions provided me with the opportunity to explore my locale, and with fewer people and much less traffic my awareness and appreciation of the wildlife that lives on our very doorsteps was awakened.”
The inspiration for the project came from a commission that Gammon undertook for the vocal group, M’ANAM in 2019 to create an image for their debut album. With the deeply spiritual nature of the music, he decided that the work needed an image of an animal both mystical and everyday to reflect this aspect of the music. Following many days of photographing the crows of Strandhill, the piece Hrafnaguõ was created, and Gammon’s creative interest in crows was ignited.
The title of the exhibition is taken from the Seán Mac Fheorais poem, Cága.
The exhibited works will be accompanied by a piece written by arts writer, Marian Lovett.
“Plate Finds” is an exhibition by Sligo artist Alison Hunter. These new works are a continuation of Alison’s explorations of found broken tableware. Works are of cultural significance which displays respect for our heritage. Everything is interlaced and related by materials used, form, and/or story. Life has been reinstilled into old broken tableware by creating a new function for the piece as art. Felted wool is used to replace the missing parts. Working with wool felt the pieces are given a softness and contrast well with the coolness and smooth texture of the original plate. The old and new parts are easily distinguishable.
“If something is broken or damaged I don’t think its life is over, maybe its original function can not be used anymore but a new purpose as an art piece to be admired can be achieved. In this way, old memories are preserved and it lives on to create new memories.”
Pattern elements have been taken out of context, exaggerated, and displayed in new ways. Early Delft style tiles featuring Irish fauna have been reimagined in wool felt. Alison has used broken plate fragments/chaneys which she has found in ploughed fields and arranged these in a way in which together is more. The exhibition also explores popular pattern designs and allows us to pause and look while we remember memories and people through plates and ceramics.
You can find Alison on Facebook Instagram Website
This Exhibition is supported by the Sligo Artist’s Network with funding by Creative Ireland programe (Sligo) 2018-2022
The Returning exhibition at the Hyde Bridge Gallery will be reopening next Wednesday Dec 9th 11am – 3pm and will run until Saturday 19th.
‘Returning’ is a four person exhibition by artists Laura Gallagher, Maura Gilligan, Dorothee Kölle and Stephen Rennicks as part of the Arts&Health Programme 2020.
Delivered by Sligo Arts County Council Arts Service and curated by Catherine Fanning. Funded by Sligo County Council, HSE West and The Arts Council of Ireland.
Tel: +353 7191 42693
Email: info@yeatssociety.com
Yeats Building
Hyde Bridge
Sligo, F91 DVY4
Ireland
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