MAAP 2020

Aoife Claffey

In today’s world, rapid developments in transportation, communication and media are seen as progressive. However, they also exacerbate the fracturing and destabilisation of society. Societal structures appear to dissolve through the acceleration of technologies. My work examines this through Irish transportation sites and systems. Using associated materials and media, I explore increasingly tenuous relationships between humans and objects. Objects are redeployed and their status reduced to arouse pure sensory stimulation or hallucination on identity.

Using translucent layers of imagery and sound, I create immersive environments that transform unexpectedly each time the work is encountered. By manipulating these properties, I aim to provide an ambiguous space for the viewer to recall the peripheral, a space that’s in the midst of a constant, perpetual transformation; a non-space.

During the process of making, I often allow activity to go beyond my control. Physiological and psychological tensions between chaos and order are encouraged both during the making, and within the work, to evoke uncanny effects or altered cognitive states. Using projection, found objects, motors and surround sound as agents for political and social change, my practice aims to critique these systems. Focusing on the reality of turbulently existing on the cusp of global self-induced crisis, my work encompasses notions of unpredictability, fragility and movement.

MV ALTA, 2020
Quadraphonic sound, projection film onto water and found objects installation

MV ALTA, 2020
Quadraphonic sound, projection film onto water and found objects installation

MV ALTA, 2020
Quadraphonic sound, projection film onto water and found objects installation

MV ALTA, 2020
Quadraphonic sound, projection film onto water and found objects installation

MV ALTA, 2020
Quadraphonic sound, projection film onto water and found objects installation

Contact Details

Instagram: @aoifeclaffeyart

www.aoifeclaffeyart.com

Catarina Araújo

My art practice explores personal trauma, repressed memories, and behavioural patterns. The work develops an introspective connection between the body and past experiences that are accumulated beyond the mind and incorporated into bodily sensations, reactions and the perception of things.

Through engagement with film, printmaking and sculpture, I present fragments of a performative body in a frantic and intimate way, to extrapolate what is hidden within and what has been lost to oblivion. The obsessive repetition of the triangular form is drawn by an intrinsic desire to uncover new structures and to achieve equilibrium within them.

The work aims to stimulate dialogue and present art practice as an appropriate way to address psychological trauma through non-verbal self-expression and sensory knowledge.

Quântica - Two1, 2020
Paper sculpture and glue

Quântica - One+Two+Three+Four=Ten, 2020
Paper sculpture, glue and nails

Left to right: Quântica – Four; Quântica - One2; Quântica - Three1, 2020
Film; Photo intaglio; Film

Left to right: Quântica - One1 and Quântica - Three2, 2020
Photo intaglio; Film

Left to right: Quântica - Two2 and Quântica - Three2, 2020
Paper sculpture and glue; film

Contact Details

Instagram: @az_catarina

Deirdre Breen

My practice raises questions about our place as embodied humans in the world and the ways we produce, reproduce and consume our material environment. I am exploring the presupposed meanings that we ascribe to matter, and the underlying perceptual structures that support these meanings. 

The work interrogates the idea of an assumed hierarchy of materials, looking at what is disposable and what is venerable, questioning the value of the mundane. In dialogue with disposable culture and commodity fetishism, the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary. Colours reference trends and conventions of contemporary visual culture. 

The work suggests a vitality inherent in objects we consider inanimate; industrial and domestic materials are manipulated and redeployed to subvert our associations to their familiar qualities, confronting our understanding of our material reality. A gestural language emanates from the artworks; forms demonstrate object attributes and emulate personality but lack obvious functionality, existing for their illusionary qualities rather than a perceived use. A lively aesthetic speculates on the agentive power of ‘things’ so that a material imagination might unfold.

Clung, 2020
8mm steel bar, acrylic spray paint, jesmonite

Clung (detail), 2020
8mm steel bar, acrylic spray paint, jesmonite

Sprout, 2020
Jesmonite; 8mm steel bar, acrylic spray paint, jesmonite

Left to right: Sporut, Bulge, 2020
Jesmonite; 8mm steel bar, acrylic spray paint, jesmonite, installation view

Bulge, 2020
Jesmonite

Contact Details

Instagram: @deirdrebreen

www.deirdre-breen.com

Ida Mitrani

My artistic concerns and interests are influenced by concepts and theories of plant culture in the current environmental crisis, including plant blindness, post-naturalism and hybrid materials. The creative process explores the relationship and the interaction between humans, plants and technology, looking at the function and meaning of weeds in today’s society.

By bringing the viewer’s focus to the vegetal world in an evocative and thoughtful way, I examine the symbiosis and conflict between man and nature while making the familiar more visible. Using an environment of textures, my aim is to capture a memory of the present era that reflects the diversity and adaptability of life, and contemplates a vision of a possible new understanding of a ‘clean landscape’ where plastic is incorporated in nature.

The work is comprised of large and small drawing installations together with three-dimensional objects; mixed materials combined with plant-life forms; and layered digitised images. Their positioning in unexpected places evokes the idea of reproduction, sprawl, growth and transformation within the natural world in contrast with the stasis of non-degradable materials.

x hominumplasticus IV, 2020
Digitised image

humanplanteosmosis, 2020
Large drawing wall installation & floor installation, (digitised images, watercolour & mixed media on Japanese rice paper, chicken wire, recycled materials, organic life forms, plastic, collage, stitches)

humanplanteosmosis, 2020
large drawing wall installation & floor installation, (digitised images, watercolour & mixed media on Japanese rice paper, chicken wire, recycled materials, organic life forms, plastic, collage, stitches)

x hominumplasticus I, II, III, 2020
Digitised images

pliable growth, 2020
Watercolour & mixed media on Japanese rice paper (graphite pencil, recycled materials, organic life forms, plastic, collage, stitches)

Contact Details

Instagram: @idamitraniart

Inguna Mainule

The Non-Objective World

Human nature craves conformity, structures, order; yet my body of work interrogates the deception of our perceived reality which brings the comforting and familiar into an uncomfortable setting.

This work, collectively, creates a warped surrounding. Familiar objects are portrayed as strange, absurd and illogical. This manipulation of the reliable, the ordered yet on closer inspection chaotic, challenges the viewer in a social context. Material properties exploit the oppressive and obsessive, allowing for a provocative twist on assumptions and sensations. Materiality plays out in a variety of media, including installation, film, motion, food processing techniques and the more traditional disciplines of painting and sculpture.

The balance between the established and the unknown challenges society’s transparency and questions the untruth. The installation creates an authentic space to contemplate our personal and internal revolutions.

Left to right: H.A.L.T. (Homeless, Angry, Lonely, Tired); Pink Chair; Mint Condition; Four Stools; The Non-Objective World; By the Light of the Moon a Worm is Quietly Nibbling; Comma; Relational Aesthetics; 48 %, 2020
Vacuum bags and fabric; pink upholstery foam; pink upholstery foam; iron frame, pink upholstery foam, vacuum bags; bin liners, board, pink upholstery foam, 7”display (1024 x 600) film with sound; oil on stretched canvas; black ink on paper mache; bin liners, band rings; leather, board, upholstery foam, fabric.

Left to right: Selfportrait; Pink Chair; Mint Condition; Four Stools; The Non-Objective World; By the Light of the Moon a Worm is Quietly Nibbling, 2020
Framed pink icing; pink upholstery foam; oil on canvas with pendulum; iron frame, vacuum bags; oil on stretched canvas; bin liners, board, pink upholstery foam, 7”display (1024 x 600) film with sound.

By the Light of the Moon a Worm is Quietly Nibbling, 2020
Bin liners, board, pink upholstery foam, 7”display (1024 x 600) film with sound

Left to right: By the Light of the Moon a Worm is Quietly Nibbling; Order; Comma; Relational Aesthetics; 48 %, 2020
Bin liners, board, pink upholstery foam, 7”display (1024 x 600) film with sound; projection dimensions variable; black ink on paper mache; band rings; leather, board, upholstery foam, fabric.

Bread of Life and Living Water, 2020
Bread and fabric

Contact Details

Instagram: @mainuleinguna

Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqd7Mot8BR5_tVVyK-TucPQ

Joseph Fogarty

My work is an exploration of our relationship to objects. I am exploring this relationship in the context of a self-perpetuating consumerism that is one of the hallmarks of neo-liberalist economies. Our consumption of goods is facilitated through the promotion of brand and identity and is at best a manipulated choice that is creating what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (2011) calls ‘mass individualism’.

We are involved in a constant quest for completeness where the corporeal and the physical are used as substitutes for the psychological and the spiritual. It is the transient in pursuit of the intangible.

The work focuses on the cycle of consumption that epitomises our unfulfilling entanglement with the world of materiality. There is a transition from the state of expectancy and the potential of the acquisition of a new object to the mundanity of its everyday use-value. This is symbolised by the stripping away of the carefully designed and engineered packaging.

Using materials associated with the presentation and the transportation of goods I am exploring this change in status. By manipulating and altering the state of the materials I draw a parallel between the expectations we have as individuals and our expectations as a society.

All that we are? ( II ), 2020
Plaster, wood, woodscrews, mirror, perspex, castors, paint

All that we are? ( II ), 2020
Plaster, wood, woodscrews, mirror, perspex, castors, paint

All that we are? ( II ), 2020
Plaster, wood, woodscrews, mirror, perspex, castors, paint

All that we are? ( I ), 2020
Styrofoam, plaster, stainless steel nuts & bolts, MDF, castors, paint.

All that we are? ( I ), 2020
Styrofoam, plaster, stainless steel nuts & bolts, MDF, castors, paint

Contact Details

Instagram: @fogarty_art

Kate McElroy

A layering of space and time, my work interplays found elements and photography. Traces of places,

remnants

of

spaces___

A sense of flux, capturing an environment that is in transit and transformation contrasted by a sense of presence and slow observation. I am interested in the intermingling invisible forces that shape our environments and actions.

I capture elements on the edge of abstraction, stretching the usual register of perception. I present an ambiguity, so the viewer has space to recreate and move beyond the visible. The work often implements an optical oscillation, subtly suggesting a reality that is not fixed, but malleable.

My work captures a place in process, simultaneously constructing and deconstructing. It highlights a betweenness, a binary, where definitive boundaries dissolve . . .

. . ,

Through correlating photographic processes and re-presenting materials often discarded and overlooked, I prise open a gap.

An opening, to consider an alternative___

Sensation, Inflection, 2020
Found glass, aluminium and threaded bars

An Unfurling Unknown, 2020
Photograph on Hahnemühle rice paper

An Unfurling Unknown; Reflect, Affect; In_between, 2020
Photograph on Hahnemühle rice paper; found object; glass, aluminium, threaded bars

An Unfurling Unknown, 2020
Installation view

In_between, 2020
Glass, aluminium, threaded bars

Contact Details

Instagram: @kate_mcelroy_

www.katemcelroy.com

Padraic Barrett

My work is a response to the imperceptible forces of surveillance capitalism and its role in the gradual deterioration of the human condition. By placing the naked male figure in a suspended and simulated space in time I allude to the activation of a state of heterotopia. 

I have merged performance, film and installation to focus on the impact of a bewildering and constantly changing political theatre. The inscriptive capitalist ideals that are scripted onto the body, as well as the various ways in which strategies of power are stage-crafted, signify a ceaseless search for the threshold between reflection and transformation.

Explorations of technological dispositifs and cognitive processes are probed to convey oppositional forces through a transcendent narrative that initiates a dialogue between sacrifice and rebirth, virtual and natural, the weighted and the invisible. Identification with shamanistic ritual gives me the scope to take on the role of the performer as avatar and facilitates an investigation into the possibility of rebalancing the place of human beings within the natural world.