Alison Pilkington’s show Between One Thing and Another brings together work from the first year of her practice based PhD at National College Art and Design Dublin. The exhibition will run until June 13 at the Custom House studio. Her work is centred around how imagery in painting can be presented in such a way that viewers must reconstruct it themselves in order for it to make sense. The suspended moment before this process takes place she identifies as “the uncanny moment” that exists in certain artworks. Leading on from this she examines the various forms of artifice that an artist may employ in order to bring about a genuine emotional response. One that may jolt us from our constant distracted complacency, surrounded as we are by a rapid bombardment of imagery. She hopes that painting has unique qualities that require slow, routine, and ‘active’ looking that lead to an appreciation that has been ‘learned’ from the painting rather than merely ‘seen’.
An echo of yesterday
An exhibition of photographs, The Ball Alleys of Connacht, by Andrew Hebden is also currently on display in the Custom House Studio.
The Ball Alleys of Connacht is a photographic project documenting the handball alleys in the countryside, villages and towns in the West of Ireland. Handball’s history in the west of Ireland is well documented but the ball alleys in Connacht’s rural countryside have become such a part of the landscape that they are now almost invisible to the communities within which they stand. The images examine romanticism, institutional power, political history, ruin and identity and juxtapose references to modernism in a number of close-up studies of the ball alleys themselves.
