Fetter by Helen Farrell
Studio 12 exhibition/projects space, First Floor Backwater Artists Group, Wandesford Quay, Cork T12 E26D
15 October – 12 November 2021. Opens 14 October 6pm
In association with Drawbridge at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design
Fetter features new drawings and paintings by Helen Farrell, co-founder of Drawbridge. This recent work has evolved out of a desire to create a creaturely realm that references actual living things but that also makes an allusion to forms of life that have become mutated and fragmented by the process of their making. These processes are linked by recurring formal concerns and by responding to previous paintings and drawings to progress the work across a series.
A unifying factor is recognition of the human need for myths and legends, gods and monsters while frustrating that need using the familiarity of painting to unsettle and question what is real. By toying with our eternal desire to be entertained by narratives that combine the mundane with the gory these mutations instead appeal to our multidimensional interconnected experience of the world.
These paintings bring together the linear qualities of drawing to sustain a fluidity and looseness that plays out across the works keeping the image and it’s meaning hovering between emergence and disintegration, containment and release.
Helen Farrell is a visual artist based in Cork City working primarily within the disciplines of drawing, painting and printmaking. She was a member Cork Artists Collective for ten years and was also one of the Founding Directors of Cork Film Centre. She has taught in MTU Crawford College of Art and Design since 1996 teaching across departments on the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. In 2016 she graduated with a Doctorate in Philosophy from University College Cork, which was funded by a Research Council Scholarship.
Image by: Helen Farrell
Untitled, 50x50cm, Oil on Linen