Judgement Day

Another year over in a flash.

Here's a look at my space all ready for assessment ...

PrintEd Here

I almost forgot about this exhibition, held in the Church Gallery at LSAD which featured prints from students and staff of colleges from Ireland, Turkey and America.  We all had to make an edition of 12 prints which were then exchanged with our student counterparts in Illinois.  This is the website for the show 
                                           http://www.printed.ie/
and below are some images showing the sorting of the Irish and American student prints for the folio of prints that we all got.  The print that I started last semester, featuring the silage bales idea, made it into this show.

The images below show prints by the Turkish print lecturers which were my favourites.  Most of them are etchings - I wish I could achieve such wonderful textures, tones and colours.

This is my favourite print of the whole show

This is my favourite American print

Ormston does it again

I personally believe that Ormston House in Limerick puts on some of the best shows in Ireland, if not further afield (says she who hasn't seen a show outside these shores in a good few years).

Their latest show commemorated, to the day, the first appearance of an elephant in Limerick, which took place at Ormston House 200 years ago, on May 4, 1813 to be exact.  The show is called The Founding Phant and called upon artists to submit proposals for a spectacle as great as that of 200 years ago must have been.  The show was curated by Paul Quast and Joan Stack, who put a tremendous amount of work into it, but as you'll see from the photos below it was well worth it.

I like this show because it was diverse, thought-provoking and made me smile at the same time.

Seven Tales from Twenty Acres

 

When I decided to do Printmaking way back in first year I was slightly put out to learn that video was one of the disciplines we would learn in subsequent years.  This was ignorance on my part together with a lack of appreciation of the power of film to communicate.  Since the start of third year, I've been borrowing the college video camera to film the Twenty Acres around me and have realised what a powerful medium it is, not only for recording beauty (it's like having e new pair of eyes) but also for establishing a narrative and then being able to play around with it.  I'm probably not expressing this very well - what I really mean is I really like making videos.  Or are they films?

So late last semester I made a little film narrating the  names of all the 60 or so plants that were to be found in the fields around me.  This semester I have really gone for it with a 13 minute film with narration by my landlord.  It's called Seven Tales from Twenty Acres and will hopefully be available on Vimeo if I can work out how to upload it.

Update:  this is the link for Vimeo!

http://vimeo.com/71056481

My first professionally published book ...

This is the cover of a book I published myself through Blurb.

It has 20 pages of black and white, mainly analogue, photographs.

It's the first book I have published like this and was very easy to make.  It's not perfect but all the mistakes in there are my own.  Except for the dust jacket.  I thought I'd treat myself to a dust jacket as it's extra money but the jacket itself is printed on nasty, shiny paper that makes the book look like it should have a red sticker saying 'Special Offer' on it.

It's up on the Blurb site and you can flick through all the pages - here's the link

http://www.blurb.com/books/4218869-twenty-acres

Shadows

These are photographs I've been taking regularly of my shadow as I walk in the fields.  I isolated the shadow part in Photoshop and pasted them onto a new canvas.  My shadow becomes me again but this time composed of the land over which I've walked.

I've made these into a very small (9cm x 9 cm) book which I still have to sew together this weekend.

recollect

recollect was the title of our 3rd year print exhibition which was curated by Caelan Bristow and held at Raggle Taggle Studios, now ex Raggle Taggle Studios as our show was the last ever print show to be held there. The building that houses the studio has been let and there will be a cafe inside that wonderful space on the corner in the future.

Here are some images of my work and my fellow students. I was in a bit of a daze all the time the show was on and really ought to have more images of work but somehow this was all that ended up on the camera. 

Emily Robards

Eva Byrne

Barry Mullins

My photos and 3D collaboration with Hazel Egan

Hazel Egan

Hazel Egan and I

Aoife Cooley

Hazel Egan aka crazy moth girl

Caelan, our curator, did a superb job to fit 26 people in this space and still give everybody enough room to show off their work.  It was a great experience, everyone helped each other out - 26 egos in the place, we all stayed friends.

The Gathering

This was my poster for The Gathering project at Shannon Airport, which was a series of posters placed in the departure and arrival areas.

All of third year fine arts took part and the images were printed A1 size, laminated and hung from the ceiling.  They made a great display, especially for the departures area which is a very depressing spot normally.

My idea came solely from wanting to get a photogrpah of my old dog, Bob, into Shannon Airport.  I made a fake newspaper report about him having werewolf DNA and then grafittied over the newspaper as if someone had been doodling on it.

He really does sound like he's saying 'Aroooooo' when he howls.

All a bit of a blur

We are counting down to the last 2 weeks of third year and I thought it was time this blog was updated even though everything is a blur and I feel mentally dead.

I can't remember what work I've done or in what order and trying to gather together my semester-worth of thoughts, ideas and influences together in order to make a coherent Powerpoint presentation for the assessment seems beyond me at the moment.

Anyhoo, I'll give it a go ...