AIMSITHE (discovered)
AKIN - Leonie King, Margaret Irwin West, Dolores Lyne, Jay Murphy and Sioban Piercy.
OCAP (Oughterard Courthouse Arts Programme) is delighted to present AIMSITHE (discovered) which features the work of Co Galway Artists Collective AKIN including Jay Murphy, Dolores Lyne, Leonie King, Margaret Irwin West and Sioban Piercy.
The Exhibition Programme had originally been planned as part of the SET IN STONE project which was selected for Galway 2020 Small Towns Big Ideas programme. This Exhibition is in response to the research of local archaeologist and historian Bill Daly, who has traced the history of Oughterard back to neolithic times.
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AIMSITHE will open in Oughterard Courthouse on Friday 30th July 2021 and continue to Sunday 8th August. Opening hours on Friday 30th July 4.30-7.30pm, Monday to Saturday 10am -5pm and Sundays 12-5pm.
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Face masks are mandatory in the Gallery and numbers in the Gallery will be restricted to ensure the comfort of all.
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Click on images to view
Artist: Leonie King
Title: Heavenly Remonstrations
Medium: 4/25 Carborundum Print
Dimensions: 85cm x 72cm
Price: €600
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Leonie King
Leonie king lives and has worked on the west coast of Ireland for many years. She was a lecturer in Printmaking in GMIT. She has been an organizer of many shows including Impressions during the Galway International Arts Festival. Leonie has exhibited nationally and internationally Including the Royal Academy Summer Show.
Artist's Statement:
The power, the glitter and vibrant spirituality that lies beneath our level earth inspired me to respond emotionally to fragments and remnants of our underground past.
Evolved methodology deposited in underground spaces giving tiny insights into the BEFORE.
Neolithic /Megalithic survival inventors berry dyed cloth
So much surmised from fragments exposing our pre-history existence.
Margaret Irwin West
Born in India of Irish parents, Margaret Irwin West is a Printmaker and Painter, with roots in Roscommon, who has been living and working in Connemara since 1991. She trained in Dublin and Paris. Her work is held in both public and private collections.
Much of Margaret’s imagery is drawn from the Prehistoric and Medieval sites in Connemara including a body of work sourced on High Island. Inishbofin Island and Inishlacken also figure among her observational studied and Etching Prints.
Margaret's Awards include election to Aosdana in 2019 and an earlier Lifetime Achievement Award from Galway County Arts Office.
Artist: Dolores Lyne
Title: Ritual Stone with Mild Green Steel Raha
Medium: Oil on Board
Dimensions: 41.5cm x 36cm
Price: €490
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Artist: Dolores Lyne
Title: Ritual Stone Soaked in Sun
Medium: Oil on Board
Dimensions: 27cm x 23cm
Price: €250
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Artist: Dolores Lyne
Title: Portal to the Underworld
Medium: Oil on Board
Dimensions: 27cm x 23cm
Price: €250
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Artist: Dolores Lyne
Title: Famine Pot & Briars
Medium: Oil on Board
Dimensions: 23cm x 27cm
Price: €250
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Dolores Lyne:
Dolores Lyne moved to Galway from Kerry after graduating in Fine Art from Waterford. This current work reflects her huge interest in the ritual rural landscape of the west of Ireland and its islands having previously worked as artist in residence with an archeological team on Inishbofin lsland as part of the Inishlyon project, she has works in several public collections, inc OPW, NUI Galway ,The Arts Council of Ireland,Bank of Ireland , Irish Writers Centre, & National Museum of Ireland Collins Barracks. She is also an award winning theatre designer winning an Irish Times /ESB award for best set in 1999.
Artist's Statement:
​Dolores's artworks are inspired by the Field Monuments identified by archaeologist Bill Daly. In getting to know the landscape l found these modest stone structures intriguing: they have survived the ravages of time; easily overlooked they sit in what must have been a sacred landscape. One painting is the result of looking over the wrong wall and discovering a cow drinking out of a famine pot. Walking along what must have been an ancient route one encounters still an atmosphere of ritual that surrounds these lesser known sites. It has been intriguing, wondering what they have witnessed and l look forward to further investigations into their past.
Artist: Jay Murphy
Title: Peaks of Rusheeney 1
Medium: Oil on Drypoint Etching with Chine-collé
Dimensions: 26cm x 22cm
Price: €250 (Mounted)
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Artist: Jay Murphy
Title: Peaks of Rusheeney 4
Medium: Oil on Drypoint Etching with Chine-collé
Dimensions: 15cm x 14cm
Price: €250 (Framed)
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Jay Murphy:
Jay Murphy studied in Dunlaoghaire School of Art 1970-1974 followed by a printing course in Central School, London. She has been a full time artist ever since and has exhibited widely. She has had over twenty solo exhibitions, including two with the Galway Arts Festival, the second of which ‘Hydro’ was selected by Irish Times critic Aidan Dunne as one of the highlights of that year. Her most recent one person show ‘Leaving Shadows’ was in Taylor Galleries, Dublin, 2019. Jay works in series, producing up to thirty paintings on a particular theme. She exhibits regularly with
Hamilton Gallery Sligo, Green Fuse Gallery Westport and Claremorris Gallery Co. Mayo. She was a founder member of Western Artists and AKIN and has participated in many group exhibitions in Ireland
and abroad. Collections include the Arts Council, Galway County Council, Dublin Corporation, Uadaras, Galway City Council, Alliance Francaise, Irish Embassy to United Nations, New York, and Irish Embassies in Beijing,
The Hague, Madrid and Oslo.
Artist's Statement:
Historian and Archaeologist Bill Daly kindly provided us with a comprehensive guide to the places of archaeological interest around Oughterard. I was particularly interested in the wedge tomb ‘The Druid’s Altar’, and the standing stones, but most of all the Peaks of Rusheeney. These mountains vaguely resemble woman’s breasts and were reputed to have been symbols of fertility. I connected this with a young woman of today (my own daughter) breastfeeding her child - two constants throughout time, the longstanding mountains and the mother nurturing her child. Sometimes I have placed her alongside the The Druid’s Altar, or the large stones and elsewhere she and the child are incorporated into the dry stone wall, as is the standing stone. These are all Drypoint Etchings, which is an age old technique, but also using modern laser prints which I have superimposed with the Etching technique Chine-collé. The idea is to combine the ancient and the modern- not just in subject matter but also in technique. I have also used oil paint to transform them into small paintings.
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Sioban Piercy:
Sioban Piercy lives in Athenry in County Galway. She studied at the Royal College of Art, London and the British School at Rome, Italy. She has received numerous awards including ‘EV+A’, Limerick. the International Print Triennial in Cracow, Poland; the Printmakers Council of Britain, London; Her work is in the collections of the Arts Council of Ireland, the Ashmolean, Oxford; the Instituto Nationale Per la Grafica, Rome; Churchill College, Cambridge among others. She was elected associate of the Royal Society of Printmakers (RE) in 2017 and was winner of the society’s residency at the Scuola di Grafica in Venice last year.
Recent exhibitions include ‘Objects Lessons’ at CAYSC, Santander, Spain as part of the ‘Impact’ International printmaking Conference, 2018 and the Summer shows at the Royal Academy. London (2018, 2019).
Artist’s statement 'Restless Objects’
It fascinates me that at various times, and occasionally simultaneously, the same object can be a commodity, a utensil, a fetish, a prop, a relic, an art object. Particularly in our contemporary consumerist society, a thing can transform from a desirable possession to a discarded piece of rubbish within minutes often with little or no alteration to its actual
physical form. What changes is not the object itself but how we configure ourselves around it: our relationship to it. We name objects not so much to define them but to define where we are with them. We use them as kind of orientation points to plot our actions, needs and
desires. By charting our acts, they also map our explanations and interpretations. Objects, it might be argued, are our tools for making meaning or as Bill Brown puts it in his essay ‘Thing Theory’- ‘we use things to mark and manage uncertainty’ * . Last year when this exhibition was proposed, Bill Daly kindly showed us the collection of
facsimiles of Mesolithic tools at OCAP. With these curious structures of string, stone, wood in mind and Brown’s quote above I have made my own set of constructions…
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www.siobanpiercy.co.uk
https://youtu.be/qHb008AgRhM
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* Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1–22. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1344258. Accessed 3 July 2020.