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We Speak Through Worlds (detail), Emily Waszak, 2023

Thresholds to the Unseen

Fiona Kerbey, Christopher McMullan, Joanne Reid, Katherine Sankey, and Emily Waszak

Curated by Brenda McParland 

7 September - 1 November 2024 

 

Opening Reception: Sat 7 September | 2:30pm | All are welcome, no booking required 

Join us in the gallery for the opening of Thresholds to the Unseen and hear the exhibiting artists reflect on their experiences of engagement with materials and form, and how this influences their individual artistic practices. 

 

Thresholds to the Unseen is a group exhibition featuring sculptural works by five inspiring Irish based artists – Fiona Kerbey, Christopher McMullan, Joanne Reid, Katherine Sankey and Emily Waszak.  Showcasing new and recent sculpture, sculptural assemblages, and installation works, most of the works will be exhibited at Solstice Arts Centre for the first time. Each of the artists are emerging and mid-career in their artistic practice, having all exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Ireland, and some internationally. 

Works in the exhibition converge and interconnect as the artists speculate and explore themes such as landscape and memory, still life, mourning, loss and ritual, thresholds to the unseen, otherworldliness, cultural heritage, perceptions of situation, the passing and capturing of time, archives, environmental issues, radical ecologies such as rewilding, cultivation and carbon sequestration.  Among the materials used are those from the built environment such as building sites and streets, industrial waste products, found and salvaged objects, domestic units and agricultural implements, textiles, as well as natural matter from the Irish landscape such as field clay, wild clay, seaweed, twigs, branches, bee detritus and distilled aromas.  The title of the exhibition is inspired by Emily Waszak’s installation We Speak Through Worlds which she describes as a Threshold to the Unseen. 

Artists

Fiona Kerbey exhibits a new body of sculpture comprised of natural materials such as locally sourced field clay and found domestic and agricultural implements, responding to her local environment and often finding inspiration from poetry, research, ritual and history.  Kerbey is based in Co. Meath.

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Christopher McMullan explores non-retinal perception of visual art in his interactive sculpture ‘Perfumer’s Organ’.  For this work, Mc Mullan explored aroma as a material of resonating communication, crafting sixteen blends of distillates, extracts, and infusions from materials found in Ireland, such as jasmine from Glasnevin, cedar from Sligo, fruit gums from a newsagents, and slurry from Meath - each chemically related to the aromas found in Chanel No5. The title, ‘Perfumer's Organ’, is a reference to the multi-tiered library of aromas at a perfumer's disposal. Viewers are invited to walk upon the apparatus, activating bellows below the parquet which diffuse aromas into the space. A scentscape is formed by the participants' movements across the zones. McMullan is from Texas, USA, and is based in Temple Bar Studios, Dublin.

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Joanne Reid’s most recent sculptures play with a merging of the natural and the built world. Her sculpture has references to art history, construction and labour, consumption and the environment. The work alludes to the human desire to copy and remake the natural world around us, exploring ideas of art and utility objects. Reid is based in Co. Meath.

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Katherine Sankey’s material, hand-making art practice embodies the construction of semi-organic apparatuses that wrestle with the absurdity, humour and horror of our relationship with and perception of our planet. Sankey exhibits a new sculptural installation, ceramic sculptures from 'Coral-lations' series and video works. Sankey is Irish Australian, and lives and works in Dublin.

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Emily Waszak creates sculptural assemblage and installation works that involve the working and reworking of powerful object forms.  Her large and powerful sculptural installation ‘We Speak Through Worlds’ is a threshold to the unseen.  The installation consists of a large woven threshold made from textile waste – ruin, which is reworked in service to ritual; a tea bowl made of wild Irish clay and a brass plate etched by seaweed from the Irish sea.  The installation functions as a butsudan (Buddist altar) informed by Japanese culture. Waszak is an artist of Japanese descent, and lives and works in Donegal.

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