Group Exhibition curated by Catherine Hammond – Mythos
Humans tell stories. It’s in our DNA. We tell stories to explain, to entertain, to probe, to understand and to define ourselves. Our everyday events turn into conversations that are filled with stories as are our night-time dreams. Some stories come from our culture, some we invent ourselves. As they are repeated, they gain power even if we don’t entirely understand them.
The artists here all deal at some level with stories, with implied personal narratives or broadly shared mythologies. Unlike illustration, their images are less explicit and intuitively very powerful. This approach gives an added depth to their work as we try to tease out the narrative puzzles that might be obvious but more likely are hidden or mysteriously subjective and open to personal interpretation.
Jonathan Hunter creates colourful imaginary settings for people and animals to occupy. His dream-like images are deeply personal and broadly universal, like myths. While much of his work is landscape-based, they are places that evolve from the act of painting, and as the space takes shape, it often becomes populated in a way that contains an implied narrative.
Hunter is based in Dublin and shows with the Hillsboro Gallery there. Born in England in 1966, Jonathan is an MA graduate of the National College of Art and Design and has been living and working in Ireland since 1999. He has been an invited Resident Artist at the prestigious Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation in the US. His work is in many important private and public collections in Ireland.
Serena Caulfield links images of her Wexford childhood with the compositions of old masters’ paintings. Her paintings look somehow familiar, even if we cannot place the original source, reminding us of something we might of heard of or seen before. With Caulfield, memories morph into tall tales, transforming old to new, past to present, absence to presence.
Caulfield earned an MA in Fine Art from Norwich University of the Arts and a BA in Fine Art from the Wexford Campus School of Art & Design. She has shown at the Solomon Gallery in Dublin and her work is in numerous private collections throughout Ireland, the UK, Europe and the USA.
Tim Millen, based in Belfast, creatively explores nature from a psychological perspective. His places are imaginary and sometimes distorted and strange, yet somehow believable, just as fairy tales feel believable. His invented scenes or scenarios explore ecology, mythology and place in order to convey emotion or psychological states.
Millen has shown at Queen Street Studios Gallery in Belfast and the Claremorris Gallery in the Republic. He earned an MFA at the University of Ulster, Belfast. The recipient of the RHA’s Hennessey Craig Scholarship, he has also received awards from the Freelands Foundation and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
Cormac Boydell has created new work for this show that explores different episodes from ancient Greece’s Odyssey. This epic is a fundamental cornerstone of European culture, enshrining values of heroism, nobility, perserverance , and what constitutes a good life that continue to influence our culture today. In making his work, Boydell uses no tools, relishing instead the direct contact between hands and the clay. He uses a terracotta clay chosen because of the beauty of its colour which is the perfect colours he works with. His understanding of glazes can be described as an alchemy of bright, brillian colours which, along with his extraordinary drawing, have become representative of his work.
Boydell worked as a geologist in Australia and Libya before moving to Allihies in West Cork in 1972. He has been working full-time in ceramics since 1983 and is considered to be one of Ireland’s most important practitioners. His work is represented in important public collections, including the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin and the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.