Using art to shed light on the world around us
An exhibition in Macroom unites three artists with an affinity for the landscape, writes .
The exhibition is entitled ‘Visions of Half-Light’. It is the brainchild of Debbie Godsell, the exhibition’s curator and one of the contributing artists.
It centres around the transitional state at dawn or dusk. As the light changes, images appear distorted or disrupted.
Supported by Cork County Council arts office, the other artists are Fiona Kelly and Sarah O’Flaherty. As Kelly says: “Debbie came up with the theme and chose us, because the three of us are very much in tune with the landscape.
"Not so much traditional depictions of the landscape, but more the contemporary sense of displacement and our new, defined responsibilities for the world we’re making.”
Kelly’s contribution includes print and sculpture. She also uses dust to explore humanity’s interaction with the built environment and the natural world.
Kelly, like O’Flaherty, is a collector of debris. Kelly, who holds an MA from the Crawford College of Art in Cork, likes the idea of “creating stories about places and makeshift things, composed of the world’s debris”, as articulated by the critic and scholar, Michel de Certeau.
His interest lies in the influence the environment has on our behaviour.
Kelly owes part of her practice to a Westmeath-based waste reconstitution plant in Kilbeggan, her native village. ince 2014, Kelly has been working with this company, Gannon ECO.
They reconstitute waste from demolition sites. They crush the material down in big machines and use them as stones. So, it’s all recycled and they build again with them.
For the Macroom exhibition, Kelly is using a pile of reconstituted glass, which came from the windscreens of cars. (Gannon ECO uses this material for their concrete production, water-filtration systems, and other constructs.)
“I’m making something different from the debris. I’m more interested in the urban side of things, whereas Debbie and Sarah are more into natural landscapes.”
On a residency, last year, at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre in Manorhamilton, Kelly was interested in a machine that has a water well and which is used for traditional stone carving. It collects dust in the air.
“The water drags the dust into the machine. I started to use the dust at the bottom of it, to make drawings and text, that would work on gallery walls.
“Traditional stone carving is quite monumental and should last forever. I’m using the off-cuts of that. I’ll be putting it onto the wall (in the Town Hall Gallery in Macroom).
"It’s limestone dust that I’m using. I’m going to do a botanical drawing of an oak sapling.
“It will float over an outline of a factory space. I like using that kind of debris. It’s also good from an environmental point of view.”
“As object makers, artists make more things to go into the world. It takes me a long time to create something, because I want it to have a reason. So I create fables and stories with a moral code.
"I like to push myself to use things that have been thrown away and, in that way, reduce my carbon footprint and make my practice more sustainable.
“A lot of artistic processes are damaging to the environment, such as mountings on acetate and using acrylic for photography.”
At the Town Hall Gallery, Kelly will draw on-site with dust, onto one of the walls, using PVA glue. She has created a stencil of her sapling. It measures 195cms.
For the exhibition, Kelly is creating “ephemeral work out of debris. They are works that won’t last that long. It’s like a cycle.”
She adds that she tries to avoid the biblical term, ‘ashes to ashes’. “I’m more interested in the human interaction with the land.”
