FÁILTE | WELCOME

Fáilte and welcome to the Carrickahowley Gallery’s Imbolc / St. Brigid's Day Exhibition. This show features the work of Leila Anglade, Breslin Bell, Elsie Nolan, Daryne Rockett, and Catherine Ryan. We hope you enjoy the work of these fine artists.

Leila Anglade

Breslin Bell

Elsie Nolan

Daryne Rockett

Catherine Ryan

Savage | Curator's Notes

Since ancient Greek patriarchy the West has continuously crafted a role for women as “pollution” that must be contained, as poet Anne Carson has commented in a now famous essay entitled “Dirt and Desire: The Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Classical Antiquity.” Patriarchy, like other forms of Mastery (race, class, colonial), depict women traditionally as Others who must therefore be bound by society and kept cordoned off, separate and controlled. As Carson states, what we would call feminist art has attempted to unravel those bindings and free women from those roles since perhaps Sappho’s poetry.

This second annual exhibition of our St. Brigid’s/Imbolc show at Carrickahowley Gallery presents five artists who, each in their own mode and approach, create art across boundaries, in between binaries, and in the interstice of form and content. In each, the idea of the boundary becomes challenged, whether it is the boundary between “healing and injury,” or the boundary between the “inside” and the “outside,” or the boundary between silence and sound, or further still, the boundary between genders, identities, ourselves and each other, the State and our bodies. In this way, the work presented here is feminist and radical, for it calls us to question these boundaries and our subscriptions to the binaries that distort our perception, that hinder our vision, and that cloud our relations. In each artist, a “third path” through such boundaries is proposed, whether it is the boundaries of bodies and their environments, or bodies and ourselves, or the boundaries that silence and erase certain voices, seeking to contain the energies that generate our possibilities. In this way, the ancient assumptions of patriarchy and “mastery” toward such containment are transgressed and challenged, and the resistance to such notions of the formless and threatening power of Otherness is unleashed.

To do so, the viewer might note that each artist focuses specifically upon the Body, upon the materiality of their work and themselves, and upon the process of “making” itself, and these three areas of focus are the three defining concepts in decolonizing global contemporary art. In each, the very idea of “materiality” takes on new meanings and is expressed in ingenious and provocative ways, asking us all to reflect upon the boundaries themselves as false. In each, the “process” of creating art represents the very meaning of the work itself, and “making” becomes more powerful than “mastering.” And, in each, Irish and Irish American visual art is connected to global contemporary art.

Such profound implications in each artist demand our attention, our critical gaze, and our respect, and so this exhibit asks each of you—the viewers—to move beyond our learned searches for “beauty” and find instead a visual poetry of reinvention, one that takes place inside and outside, here and there, and between us all as we build new worlds together.

Robin Savage
Carrickahowley Gallery

Leila Anglade

Anglade | Artist Statement

Laila Anglade is a visual artist living and working in Dublin. Her practice includes drawing and painting as well as installation, performance and research.

In this series of works, she wanted to translate landscapes into simplified, colourful, semi-abstract or abstract paintings, using a variety of materials such as oils, acrylics and watercolours.

leilaanglade.com

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Breslin Bell

Bell | Artist Statement

Being an artist inhabiting a feminized body implies residing within a space of political, social, or economic marginality. Feminized differs from female and is not restricted to ‘women’. My practice operates across intersections, those fractured and those mended, of feminisms. I aim at de-telling by way of drip, sap, mar, bleed, drain, smudge, and obscure. My process acts as an echo narrative searching for legibility. A task is repeated, patterned, and laborious. In making, I favor color and matter over line and form. Color being sensorial and matter being evocative—both imagined “feminine” by scholars in favor of the ‘masculine’ and ‘controlled’ line and form. This engaged making is rooted by enriching my practice with text, poetics, and language. My making considers reproductive rights, body autonomy, public health, and gender-based aggression and violence—recently traversing the non-linear relationship / kinship between transfeminism and reproductive choice i.e. concerns around estrogen-related pills and surgeries. My work often explores environmental issues, womxn’s rights, and the intersections between—unpacking how the environmental crisis and feminism movements often face shared aggressors. I’m interested in the complexities of a ‘mother earth,’ ‘eco-feminism,’ and ‘land / body art’ lens on feminized making. My practice investigates interiority, both bodily and spatial, as it relates to surface, access, and space-making.

Breslin Bell (b. 1995) is an interdisciplinary visual artist working primarily in print, sculpture, text, and installation informed by feminisms and feminized rights. Additionally, Bell is an educator and museum professional. In 2021 Bell co-curated the thirty-artist group exhibition Feminized with colleague Mariana Ramos Ortiz at Gelman Gallery, RISD Museum. She has exhibited widely since 2016 in a number of group exhibitions in London, Edinburgh, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, and Japan. Highlights include, Tomorrow 2021 at White Cube London and Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair 2021 at Woolwich Works. Her work has been featured in Artsthread’s Global Design Graduate Show 2021 in collaboration with GUCCI “Judges Favorites,” Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair “Panelist Picks,” and RISD News, among other publications. Breslin Bell is a recipient of the American Cities Internship Program Award with Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. In Spring 2022 Bell will attend the MASS MoCA Artist-in-Residence program. Bell earned her MFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design, and her BA in Art History and Studio Art from Wellesley College.

breslinsheastudio.com

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Elsie Nolan

Nolan | Artist Statement

Elsie Nolan is an Irish artist, painting land and seascapes in various media. She studied at Limerick School of Art and Design Elsie’s art reflects the human experience, revealing the elemental, ethereal and nostalgic; not only the yellow harvested field but the heat coming off it and more, the ghost of a long gone summer day. Painting what she sees but also what she imbibes, Elsie believes her art is a response to what affects her spirit; a piece of music, a person crying, a kindness, an injustice. The process becomes meditative and she trusts some deeper sense to release itself into the work, unlocking the truth and seeing more.

elsienolan.com

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Daryne Rockett

Rockett | Artist Statement

My paintings are a means of healing my brain, my relationships, and my heart. The meditative process of repeating patterns becomes the foundation of each piece, providing depth while reflecting the multiplicity of my connections to and understanding of each subject. Each work is an expression of gratitude for community, belonging, and vitality. Often my pieces reflect the dynamics of vulnerability, protection, power, and self-determination. Prior to sustaining a brain injury in 2014, I was regularly involved in the performing arts as a harper, songwriter, and singer with an undergraduate degree in theater, but with very little experience in visual art. In the first eighteen months after the accident, it was too difficult to make music or be in the settings where I used to play. During the period away from my work as a clinical social worker with combat veterans, brain rest prevented me from engaging in most of my previous, meaningful activities. Longing for a way to pass the time that would help facilitate rather than prevent my healing, I began “doodling” small mandalas on 3-½” square pieces of paper in ink, then coloring the tiny works with magic markers. The symmetry and repetition of patterns was a balm to my foggy brain. As my healing progressed I found enjoyment in larger formats and other mediums. Large canvases allowed me to use my entire body to move the brush and watch what would emerge. My own recovery journey provided insight into the many ways that we are all engaged in healing from suffering, and my work is often representative of the duality of injury and recovery. While I have been able to fully return to my work as a clinician, my new life as a professional artist has become a parallel source of expression, vitality, and meaning. I often have the great privilege of initiating clients into the process of making art to connect with spirit, self, and community. It is my hope that viewers can connect with their own sense of balance and relationship to others through these paintings and/or find the inspiration to create something meaningful of their own.

@doodlerexartist

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“I am Fierce Compassion, the strength to love in the face of hate.
I wonder where I will find my next meal.
I hear the vitriol of those in fear.
I see that they speak that way because they are suffering.
I want to tell them they are worthy of love.
I pretend to have sharp claws and teeth so they will not dismiss me before they can be seen and heard.
I feel grief for the source of their pain, for their loss of connection, for their fear of rejection.
I touch their wounds when they permit.
I cry with them when they release their fear.

I am Fierce Compassion.
I understand the courage that change requires and provides.
I say we all deserve acceptance and know it is a cop-out to only give grace when it is easy.
I dream of the day when we will all know our true, loving nature.
I try to be patient until then.
I hope for others until they can hope for themselves.

I am Fierce Compassion.”

Catherine Ryan

Ryan | Artist Statement

My work processes 21st century urban life through bright colours, organised chaos and the power of satire. Humour allows the deconstruction of highly sensitive subjects. For example “Horror: We Need Women” expresses my reaction to the dehumanisation of women perpetrated by the Church and State during my lifetime. In the aftermath of the abortion referendum in Ireland (2018) I made a slow clap in my mind because I had finally been granted some sense of body autonomy. I use large text in this piece, to billboard the feminist message. My materials of choice are “found” on the street and collected from different environments in daily life. These readymade materials add an immediacy and energy to the work. They are immediate because they directly express ideas and shapes when they are transplanted onto the painting surface. Using found objects also reflects the folk belief that such objects carry the psychic energies of the places where they were discovered. There is something poignant about a discarded, lost or broken item; it carries a story. The six pieces chosen for this exhibition celebrate femininity and female specific experiences, using found objects and found words. Deeper interpretation is often opened up with viewer participation.

catherineryanart.com

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