The main show was called 'The Untold Want' and included work by Robert Gober, Vija Celmins, Ana Mendieta,,Felix Gonzalez Torres, Andrew Vickery, William McKeown but there was a smaller exhibition of still lives by Joe Dunne which I found to be very attractive with strong echoes of Giorgio Morandi:
They are deceptively simple but as in most things that appear simple, difficult to do well.
while enjoying the main show particularly Robert Gober's sculpture:
I heard this voice calling me by name - Hazel Egan - who qualified last year and whose work, deeply coincidentally concerned itself with skin!!?!A very long conversation ensued rudely interrupted at times by people who wanted to know things about the exhibition (Hazel is a volunteer invigilator) but she alerted me to a very interesting book on skin art (Skin: An Artistic Atlas) on sale in the foyer (duly acquired)
I continued my perambulations to Taylor Gallery in Kildare street and they had two shows - Lacuna 3 was the one that interested me, particularly for one artist :
Regretfully the reproduction here is not great but these interested me deeply because they are very close to the skin photoetches which I am planning;I would also be very interested in the photogravure technique which I have read a bit about -as you can see this was one of a set of five and I was very taken with them.
This piece particularly interested me because of the support on which the screenprint was placed - oxidised (rusted, to you and me) steel. I have mentioned steel and the rust on its surface elsewhere (several times) because there is a great similarity with the degeneration of the skin surface with age and weather. I think that I will seriously consider looking for a piece of rusted steel on which to screen 'skin shreds' as I am planning do with the very large digital prints:
Here was a test run of screen printing on Oyster paper (on which the above are printed) to check that I would receive the ink - seems good but I will have to do a CMYK test before going on to the big prints.
This is courtesy of Fiona in Y2 whose drawing skills are wonderful - I should stress that this is just a strip from a much bigger image - Thanks Fiona.
I have been less than dutiful in photographing my work of late - a bit too wrapped up in it to think of the photographsbut there have been a number of interesting developments centring around etching in one form or another ; soap ground is proving excellent but I lefet the last steel plate in the acid over night unintentionally and while the result was intriguing it wasn't what I wanted and the consequent prints where rather uninspiring ; also the plate is so ragged that it is difficult to wipe enough oil out of the depths to achieve definition. I will use the soap with zinc-a number of runs through he acid - then aquatint it and hopefully do some more spit-biting. to get a range of tones.
The Third Year Project was handed in last Monday with a great sense of relief. Final title was "Crust : Skin and Landscape " and I hope that it will be reasonably well-received - in the end I could say that I enjoyed it and it seems more and more likely that I will pursue the subject of skin past the surface next year. I have mentioned this as a possibility and staff seem to think that there is much more here to explore - particularly the trope of 21st century obsession with surface often to the point of deep superficiality ( now there's a phrase to play with......)
Speaking of surface here is a Ground Art image acquired recently in Dublin:
This is very much in the whole concept of surface -more later.
Here are two photos of the same scene taken about eleven hours apart - evening and morning:
With that little bit of lyricism to surprise you I shall fade for a while.
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