The FIND artists also have opportunities to be mentored and supported by highly experienced artists Alice Maher and Aideen Barry in the development and realisation of their ideas. Alice’s mid career retrospective at IMMA finished last year and she has vast experience in working in installation, site-specific and temporal art. Aideen Barry has a multi versatile practice, which spans a range of art forms and approaches, including sculpture, performance, drawing, and animation. Aideen also acts and an advocate for visual artists based in the west of Ireland in her role as Western Representative for Visual Artists Ireland. She teaches at the Limerick School of Art and Design as a Lecturer in Sculpture and Combined Media. Both Alice and Aideen will attend the launch of FIND.
The Overlooked.
“How shall you know”?
Consult your eye!
Emily Dickinson
Castlebar is a well established town with a long recorded history. But some of that history has fallen out of memory. Time has the unusual ability to erode certainty. Things that were definite, that were permanent; stone structures, heaving behemoths of industry, spaces of social exchange, artistic production and dissemination can be dissolved and erased as if they never existed. For memory is a moveable feast. But for an artist, memory is always a rich and fertile ground, an ever-changing multi layered landscape. Our hidden, our ignored, our overlooked once reimagined can uncover gems of knowledge and emotional archeology. In the Looking we have the Finding. All the artists participating in this project have undertaken a journey of excavation, jumped into the cracks of time and come out with a memory-map of unusual complexity. Some of them re-enact or re-stage memory. Some re-awaken space memory. Some play with word memory, some bathe us in colour memory or stir up sound memory. Not only have the artefacts of past peoples, past communities, past rituals, past industries been exposed to our contemporary lens but so too have the banal and the redundant been reborn and re-imagined. By their sensitive investigations and their research but most of all by their each adding their own individual visions, the artists of FIND have really reawakened the memory of a town and illuminated the shadows of its history. Their forays into the hidden and the overlooked have born much fruit, not just for these venturers but indeed for the people and community of Castlebar, for truth and beauty, past and present certainties, are waiting to be questioned and uncovered. All you have to do is Find them.
Alice Maher and Aideen Barry
The Overlooked.
“How shall you know”?
Consult your eye!
Emily Dickinson
Castlebar is a well established town with a long recorded history. But some of that history has fallen out of memory. Time has the unusual ability to erode certainty. Things that were definite, that were permanent; stone structures, heaving behemoths of industry, spaces of social exchange, artistic production and dissemination can be dissolved and erased as if they never existed. For memory is a moveable feast. But for an artist, memory is always a rich and fertile ground, an ever-changing multi layered landscape. Our hidden, our ignored, our overlooked once reimagined can uncover gems of knowledge and emotional archeology. In the Looking we have the Finding. All the artists participating in this project have undertaken a journey of excavation, jumped into the cracks of time and come out with a memory-map of unusual complexity. Some of them re-enact or re-stage memory. Some re-awaken space memory. Some play with word memory, some bathe us in colour memory or stir up sound memory. Not only have the artefacts of past peoples, past communities, past rituals, past industries been exposed to our contemporary lens but so too have the banal and the redundant been reborn and re-imagined. By their sensitive investigations and their research but most of all by their each adding their own individual visions, the artists of FIND have really reawakened the memory of a town and illuminated the shadows of its history. Their forays into the hidden and the overlooked have born much fruit, not just for these venturers but indeed for the people and community of Castlebar, for truth and beauty, past and present certainties, are waiting to be questioned and uncovered. All you have to do is Find them.
Alice Maher and Aideen Barry
