This article is from page 36 of the 2007-07-24 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 36 JPG
THE urban/rural divide and the posi- tion of the west of Ireland as a central driving force in forming the identity of the modern Ireland are two of the main themes of Wild Honey, the fourth Burren Annual Exhibition, which comes to the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan next month.
The annual exhibition, which this year will be curated by Michael Dempsey, features the work of nine Irish and international artists who have at some stage based their work outside of “The Pale’.
The exhibition will be opened on August 18 by Mike Fitzpatrick, cura- tor of the Limerick City Art Gallery and Ireland’s Commissioner for the
Venice Biennale 2007, and will run until September 29.
“Wild Honey offers the viewer the possibility of studying the relation- ship between reality and visual cli- chés of working outside The Pale,’ said Michael Dempsey.
“The selected works reflect and interpret the cultural and political changes that Ireland has undergone since the 1990s. They investigate the collective imagination of a genera- tion of artists living in a ‘new’ soci- ety caught in its own past, but none- theless looking to the future.”
Each year the Burren College of Art invites a prominent art world fig- ure to curate a number of artists of his or her own choice for an exhibi- tion of national significance.
Based in Galway, Dempsey has in- troduced many prominent artists to a west of Ireland audience. As found- ing curator of the “Tulca’ season of visual art in Galway, he developed new hybrid ways of approaching cultural production within commu- nities.
‘Naturally, the sources for each artist’s work include real places and personal imagery, as well as images created by the media, popular culture and even urban/rural myths. Like the avant-garde artists of the 1960s and ‘70s, they respond with skepticism or downright rejection to the idea of visual representation of a reality of ever more elusive complexity. Their survival strategies involve navigat- ing real and imagined territories –
geographic, political, economic and social.”
The exhibition will include work from Stephen Brandes, Dorothy Cross, Blaise Drummond, Patrick Hall, Ronnie Hughes, Fergus Mar- tin, William McKeown, Isabel Nolan and Niamh O’ Malley.
‘““Michael’s idea for this exhibition expresses one of the central interests of the Burren College of Art; how the seemingly peripheral west is in fact central to Irish identity,” said Timo- thy Emlyn Jones, dean of Burren Solero wa uae
‘We are deeply indebted to the Arts Office of Clare County Council for its invaluable support of this exhibi- tion, without which the exhibition could not have taken place.”