The Micro Gallery
2 - 20 December 2024
In Condition
2nd Year Painting Micro-Exhibition
This curation of work explores the ways in which we interact and relate to our environments. It takes a look at how we adapt and fill space, embrace or reject modernity, and perceive the world we experience everyday. What is our space in this world? What are we preparing for? Where are we going? Our collection of work aims to challenge the viewer to think about their place in the world, and where the people around them are spaced.
Featuring: Leanne Byrne, Abigail Connell, Marla Costello, Keith Duffy, Roxie Gillespie, Nicole Go, Christopher Holmes, Jack Kavanagh, James Kennedy and Isabelle Murphy.
November 2024
FORAGING MEDIA: Eco-Materialist Media Practices in a Digital Era
Foraging Media is a symposium, screening and workshop bringing together artists and researchers to discuss ecology, materialism and media. The event responds to an emergent field of artists’ practice and media theory: that is, practitioners working with finite or perceived to be ‘obsolete’ media that have to be ‘foraged’ and maintained within small-scale DIY, community-based cultures of repair and recycling. Foraging is associated with analogue photochemical 16mm film practices but also includes media practitioners working with DIY approaches to digital media such as open source coding and ‘green hacking’. Foraging and frugal media practices value slower, sustainable cultures based in community and environment in contrast to neo-liberal capitalist cultures of consumerism and built in obsolescence. These ecologically minded practices emphasise the specificity of the artwork’s location and encounters with audiences in smaller localities and communities as opposed to large-scale streaming platforms.
Keynote speakers are Dr Kim Knowles author of Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices, 2020, Dr Abelardo Gil-Fournier, co author with Jussi Parikka of Living Surfaces: Images, Plants and Environments of Media ( 2024) and artist and filmmaker Dr Karel Doing author of Ruins and Resilience: the Longevity of Experimental Film (2024). In addition to screening a selection of his 16mm films, Dr Karel Doing will lead a phytography workshop on Tuesday 5th November. Phytography is a technique that combines plant chemistry with photography: ‘human and non-human media collide and combine within phytographic practice, opening up a shared space between people and plants’. Foraging Media is supported by the NUI, NCAD Research and the Media Department, School of Fine Art, NCAD and convened by Sarah Durcan, Cliona Harmey, Chloe Brenan and Claire Nidecker.
An exhibition to accompany this symposium, 'Frugal Filmmaking & Alchemy: A record, a resouce and how to zine!', took place in the Micro Gallery.
October - November 2024
Text/Textile //////////////////////////////////
“Imagine someone”, writes Roland Barthes in his 1973 Pleasure of the Text, “who mixes every language, even those said to be incompatible”. This mixer of “incompatible” languages is the reader at the moment of pleasure in reading—the specific pleasure of realization that the text itself is heterogenous and lacks a single origin. Instead, it comes from everywhere. It contradicts itself, and relies on its own impurity for meaning.
Incompatible languages: we mix the language of the tongue with the language of the hand. Our text/textile may be woven of words, as in the poems in Simon Cutts’ petits-airs, or of wool, as some of the works by the local collective the Liberties Weavers are, or it may be woven of found tarpaulin and electrical tape, as Áine Byrne’s Double Yellow is. The works included in this exhibition invoke text and textile as form, source, image, reference, and method. (Etymologically, our words “text” and “textile” come from the Latin verb that means “weave”.)
Barthes reminds us that texts are composed of crossings of all kinds, that meaning comes into the work from outside the work. Like Barthes' reader, we hope you'll find among these works the pleasure generated by places where unlike things touch, and where we are reminded of how all of life—its ordinary works, places, people, and images—are the rich ground of the shared work of thinking that weaves itself in language, on a loom, or across borders of “incompatibility”.
Organisers:
Éireann Lorsung
Chloe Brenan
Cliona Harmey
Participating artists:
Éireann Lorsung
Chloe Brenan
Cliona Harmey
Ian Davidson
Simon Cutts
India Johnson
Sarah Edmondson
Hazel Egan
Siobhan Lynam
Mallory Frye
Lena Willryd
Karen Browett
Claire McCluskey
Sara Baume
Leah Hilliard
Olivia Normile
Eric O'Reilly
Helen Mc Allister
Áine Byrne
September 2024
'More than Words' is an exhibition of small works by Edward Murphy Library and NIVAL staff, running through September 2024. Many of the staff in the library are NCAD graduates, and now combine work in the EML & NIVAL with their art and research practice. The work on display includes art historical research, writing, painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, textile and mixed media.
If you would like to exhibit in the Micro Gallery, contact Lena Willryd by email willrydl@staff.ncad.ie
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9-22 April 2024
'Shapes of Self'
Group show: Laura Aughney, Aisling Coughlan, Grace Duffy, Bianca Gegea, Phoenix Jennings-Barr, Julia Mysiakowska.
This micro-exposition aims to explore personality psycology and the diversity of personality types, while also fostering conversation. Based on the results of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), each of us was left with four semi-geometric shapes with slight variations, which strongly influence our lives. As a way of taking ownership of the results, we retained the form but also reflected our individual traits shaped by a wide varity of backgrounds.
By better understanding human nature and out strengths and weaknesses, we can enhance cooperation and function more effecitvely as collectives in society, allowing each individual to play their most authentic roles. The collective piece was an exercise in challenging our introspection through collaboration, and it proved to be much more successful than our previsou attempts at working together.
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12-22 March 2024
Moving to a new country can be both exciting and challenging. It means adapting to a new environment and being a stranger in an unfamiliar place. Moreover, it involves meeting people and learning about different cultures. Joining the English Language Support Group led by Denis Kehoe at NCAD in September 2022 meant connecting with people going through the same process I was. The weekly meetings became a safe space where dialogue, discussion and creativity were encouraged and where a sense of community was established.This exhibition emerged out of this group’s shared interest in Dublin, as well as our unique, individual relationships with the city and county. The starting point was the poem Dublin by Louis MacNeice, and each individual was asked to submit work they felt resonated with the following lines:
“This never was my town, I was not born or bred / Nor schooled here and she will not /
Have me alive or dead / But yet she holds my mind.”
Dublin, the capital of Ireland, is a dynamic urban space of glass and stone that serves as a major global business hub. Nevertheless, it is also a city, and county, imbued with the natural, and it is nature that reoccurs in the works submitted by the different artists in the group.
Through various mediums, including photography, painting and textiles, this engagement with the natural world emerges in a variety of forms; from the scenic landscape at Baldoyle, where Esther Raquel Minsky welcomes and honours the goddess Brigid/Saint Brigid in early February, to Bianca Gegea’s work influenced by moss (a non-flowering plant) that is characterised by abstraction and texture, to Scott Pan’s delicate hand-sewn flowers inspired by the Botanic Gardens, and finally to Irina McAuley’s painting that explores the historical significance of horses in Dublin, particularly in The Liberties.
Every piece in the show is unique, yet they all harmonise with each other as they portray the natural world. The pieces highlight the beauty and serenity found in Dublin and reveal details that are all around us but which we may not observe in our everyday lives. Some works, such as those by Bianca Gegea and Scott Pan, symbolise the progress of healing and adapting to new surroundings, underlining the place of nature in these processes. Nature can bring comfort and inspiration, and it has played a significant role in making Dublin a place called home for all of the artists in this exhibition and myself. What better place, then, to show this work than the NCAD Library; another home from home for so many students and staff at NCAD.
Filippa Voigt
26 Feb - 11 March 2024
Conor O'Connell
'Machallaí'
These works explore the deep sense of connectedness I experience with my local landscape, hailing from a semi-rural background in the west of Ireland. I am fascinated by the echoes of our distant past which call to us as features in this landscape; a residual energy which manifests itself, in my case, as this deep-rooted intimacy. The paintings in this series are fundamentally tethered to the area by having been painted en plein air, thus capturing the very essence of the place, not just aesthetically but also in a deeper sense as objects themselves. This creates a particularly intimate dimension to the work: each brushstroke is the end result of a chain reaction of sorts- a snap decision in response to a particular feeling or sensation informed by a place in time. In this way the work reflects the energy of the location which cannot be obtained by any other means.
The setting for these works is Lough Gara in County Sligo, where in the early 1950s a drainage scheme which lowered the lake water level exposed the remains of dozens of crannógs, i.e. prehistoric man-made islands. The lake was found to have as many as 300 crannóg sites- the highest concentration of crannógs in Ireland. Silence has long since fallen on the lake shores which lie charged with that heavy stillness of a once occupied place; an almost tangible link to a distant, elusive past. Having had family in the area for generations, I also explore themes of self-identity and community identity through these works as well as the notion of perceptions of time and our interactions with our environment.
6-24 February 2024
Irina Mc Auley
'Locus'
Irina Mc Auley is a painter based in Clogherhead, Ireland. Her work primarily revolves around the concept of places and how they shape our identities. Through her use of colour and texture, she explores the intricacies of place attachment and the sense of belonging. Using oil paint, she creates vivid and thought-provoking images that reflect the complex relationships we have with the spaces we inhabit. As an artist, Mc Auley delves into the emotional and psychological effects of displacement, exposing the fragile nature of our connections to both physical and emotional landscapes. Her work is a reflection of her own personal journey, as she grapples with feelings of belonging and displacement. With each brushstroke, Mc Auley invites us to journey with her, to explore the depths of our own emotions and memories. Her pieces are a visual representation of the human experience, a celebration of both the beauty and complexities of the world around us.
Nov-Dec 2023
Lena Willryd
'I only went out for a walk'
This body of work was inspired by a specific forest area near my hometown in Sweden and is an amalgamation of impressions, emotions and sensory experiences I felt there. The title relates to a quote by John Muir, a Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher and botanist who is considered to be “The Father of America’s National Parks”. The quote indicates the meditative and spiritual experiences evoked by walks in nature.
“I only went out for a walk, but decided to stay until sundown, for going out was in fact going in” (John Muir)
About the Micro Gallery
The Micro Gallery is located in the Edward Murphy Library's Chill Space/Printer Area. It’s open for all students and staff at NCAD to book for exhibiting work. It’s a perfect space for showing your work outside the studio, either as an individual or a group.
Specifications
Exhibition duration: 2 weeks per individual/group
Set up: Mondays 5-8pm
Take down: Mondays 1-3pm
Available space:
5 spaces, 80x80 cm each (soft wall, only light pieces)
1 space beside reading desk at the back of the room
1 ceiling space for hanging objects
Pillar space available for exhibition poster and information.
Top of cabinet for small works and documents: small (5) and mini (3) easels are available for display.
Guidelines
Exhibited objects can be 2D works, small 3D works (that can be hung on the walls, or the ceiling space) and printed material. Free-standing sculptural works might be considered if we can accommodate them in the space.
Pieces must not be too heavy as most wall spaces have a soft surface. Hanging is made with small screws or drawing pins (provided).
Poster, text and/or statement to be provided by the student or group but can be printed by Lena (max 20 A4 and 5 A3 posters).
Image/s and text can be emailed to Lena for promotion on the library Instagram page.
Queries
If you have any questions or need more information, contact Lena, willrydl@staff.ncad.ie
