Painting Installation, Evan's Lodge
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2021
This work, from 2021, followed a period of making small landscapes directly from life. As an antidote I wanted to make bigger work in the studio. I focused on questions that arose around 'scaling up', with less detail and bigger brush strokes.’
The paintings that emerged were partly inspired by a scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film ‘Blow Up’, where a photographer developing his photos of people in a park, thinks he sees something in the bushes behind. The more he enlarges the photo, the more he loses definition, leading to a questioning of perception and subjectivity. Adapting this idea to painting, the focus becomes one of visual intrigue and the differences between photography and painting. The small rooms of the Evan’s Lodge next to the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny, provided an opportunity to observe the effect the paintings have on the space around them
A printed reproduction of one of the paintings on view ‘Something in the Bushes, Maryon Park I’ , was also exhibited in billboard form in Gorey, Co Wexford during the summer as part of www.threebillboardsoutside.ie curated by James Merrigan of Periphery Space, Gorey
Installation view, In the Garden at Moeurs II, oil on canvas, 150 x 150 cm, 2021
