BOW is a celebration of the individual pursuit of ideas. The exhibition is interested in how art resonates, soothes, and chimes with our common experience of life and living.
The show includes Limerick native, and award-winning artist Stephanie Deady. Cork based Sarah O’Brien, who works from her studio near Kinsale. Dublin based Richard Proffitt with a studio in Balbriggan, and Fionna Murray who lives and works in Galway City.
BOW follows the threads of places and meaning. Looking at what we make, find, and collect and how this points to memories and interests. At the simple daily measures which bring us pleasure such as parks, books, art and dreams. The works allude to images of deep familiarity, for example, a friend’s rented flat, bathed in harsh overhead lights, a home but not home. The curve of discarded plywood, weathered and repurposed for art, yet still inhabiting the cities surface. And ghost references to beloved childhood books. The exhibition builds its meaning in repair and assemblages, layers, collages, and little vignettes.
The bow is a descriptor of many things. A holder of several meanings; a tie, a bind, a knot, and a restrainer. It is a deferential greeting, a cupid's lip, an accessory, a beautifier, a package, and a gift. The bow is tensioned strings, an activator, the holder of energy, and an arc of seven colours. The bow is capricious and binding. Simple and urbane, innocent and alluring, it’s ubiquitous and ambiguous.
In the exhibition, we see direct references to Limerick City Gallery of Art park-side location in Fionna Murray's work. For example, we see her interests in landscapes designed for pleasure, and the signifiers such as paths, flower beds, and playgrounds.
Sarah O’Brien makes works that are mended or bound with paint. She layers canvas strips, like gauze, and uses materials of painting beyond the frame itself so they take on a near corporeal vibration.
Richard Proffitt’s works are imbued with recurring themes of memory, time, and transience, coded motifs, and symbolism. And are suggestive of an intermingling universe of esoteric religions, the bedrooms of teenage loners, and the remote dwellings of psychedelic cults. Stephanie Deady often works from scenes of her studio and domestic life. She chooses familiar environments and charges them with a degree of uncertainty, reflecting the fallibility of memory and the precarity of our lives.
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Limerick City Gallery of Art, Carnegie Building, Pery Square, Limerick
