With his insightful political awareness in his work Clarke shows a captivation with the consequential and apparently inconsequential, and the interstices between the two. Turning to history, he intertwines personal subjectivities and actions with grand narratives and the edifices of power, which can never be entirely separate. It is the remnants of the past within the present and an assertion of the haphazard nature and incompatibility of hindsight, which are referenced in his work.
RA DI MARTINO
Italian video artist Ra di Martino’s work moves in between theatre and direct video art, using characters, the environment where the work is filmed and archival material to compose her contexts. In her work ‘In between’, an older work shown in work.in.space, she uses the environment of a housing project ‘The Dream’ and the camera’s movement directs two characters and their emotional interaction on a empty street in Rome. Di Martino touches on notions of inner space and outer space and how people might get lost in between them.
www.radimartino.com
LEE WELCH
Welch’s practice is born of a desire for exploration and discovery. He produces drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos and installations. These works are often accompanied by soundtracks, which draw on aspects of theatre, history, literature and music.
A sense of uncertainty develops as the viewer navigates his installations; multiple references unfold gradually over time ensuring that meaning is perpetually evolving and mutating. Welch uses this area of confusion to investigate the complex, shifting and often contradictory relationships between people and their environments and the links between nature, culture and the commodified world.
A sense of uncertainty develops as the viewer navigates his installations; multiple references unfold gradually over time ensuring that meaning is perpetually evolving and mutating. Welch uses this area of confusion to investigate the complex, shifting and often contradictory relationships between people and their environments and the links between nature, culture and the commodified world.
ALEANA EGAN
Aleana Egan’s works are based on precise observations of her immediate surroundings, which may be the landscape of her hometown of Dun Laoghaire near Dublin or the specific situation of an exhibition venue. Relying on intuitive processes, she translates these observations into abstract sculptures, relief works, collages and drawings with the aid of manual techniques such as modelling, bricolage and dyeing. She frequently uses fragmented sentences from literary texts as the titles of her works, for example ended casually in the water (2008), a phrase borrowed from the writer Iris Murdoch. This use of literature and its relation to abstract forms reflects the artist’s keen interest in the non-linguistic description of experience. Egan’s works could be called compressed images of memory: they refer to re-imagined moods of individual moments of experience without claiming to represent these exactly and show them as independent artistic forms.
MIGUEL MITLAG
Mitlag works with spatial recording of rooms in both 3d and 1d work. The ¨New Models¨ series of photos (2006), his interest was placed in the way real estate agents produce standard showrooms to sell apartments, and by doing this they reshape a lifestyle showing the clients the most banal aspects of daily life. He took this idea and elaborated with the subjects he placed in these made up rooms. Keeping the recorded photograph as the artwork.
Mitlag has expanded on this representation of a fictional physical space, and re-elaborated the way space is presented in the image to the way space is experienced in the real, as built objects and installations.
LINDA QUINLAN
In her work she rapidly travels back and forth considering the mundane to the marvelous: exploring; gathering; avidly pursuing lines of enquiry beyond the everyday world. This investigation is driven by a curiosity that delves into a variety of subjects from Max Kaemper’s motives for cave exploration to Eileen Gray’s position on architecture, and thenceforth to Joseph Conrad’s, Heart of Darkness. Living and haunted by these subjects, points of connection begin to emerge allowing the narrative to take shape and direction.
Often drawn to the hidden, overlooked and undefined, Quinlan’s work harbors exemplary accounts of individuals, brave enough to seize time, hold it and fill it with responsibility.
RHONA BYRNE
Byrne makes objects; site-specific, gallery and context-based installations; films; publications and collaborative event-based projects. These projects focus on the interplay between people and their surroundings at both macro and micro levels. Byrne's work explores and engages with the multilayered surfaces and workings of the built environment and navigates intangible and transient layers of physical, mental and social space.
