Kerri McEvoy graduated from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2006 with a degree in printed textiles. The development of the work involves photography, sketching and painting, digitally combining the processes to produce vivid imagery on silk. Kerri creates contemporary applied textile art pieces touching on the emotive subject of memory, loss and isolation. Looking at the intricacies of human life, mapping, cocooning and tracing a path throughout, she is inspired by close friends, family and the delicacy of butterflies. The work is contemporary portraiture that conveys a certain essence of being. Influences throughout McEvoy’s practice include Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Cornelia Parker, Richard Hamilton, Peter Doig and Do Ho Suh.
Kamile Matulaityte studied at the Kaunas School of Photographic Art, Lithuania from 2001 – 2004 and from 2007 to 2011 she completed a BA (Hons.) degree in Photography at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dún Laoghaire, Dublin. “Using self-portraiture I began my photographic analysis of the representation of the female body in popular media. My interest in semiotics led me to the exploration of the feminine attributes associated with a feline: what is the relation between a furry four-legged animal and a beddable sinister femme fatale? Later my project took a more personal turn: I focused on the message implied by flirtation. I treated it as a language articulating various emotional thirsts: from a natural interest in people, sharing warmth and showing attention to primitive carnal desires. I have discovered that the system of reading these signs is inclined to be reduced: the more obscure they are the more bluntly they will be interpreted. In other words, “the death of the author” is taking part in everyday situations. My way to appeal to the male gaze was to suggest that things already exist in the social mind. The intangibility of the subject in the project was my silent manifesto to the visual commodity culture. Jacques Lacan defines a scopic desire as impossible to satisfy because it does not serve any of the physical instincts. Therefore, a voyeur is caught in his own circle of tease and discontent because he fails to appreciate and enjoy the visual without desire to possess it.”
Rachel Likely graduated from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin with a BA Fine Art in 2011. In her work she explores the notion of seeking shelter as a place of comfort and refuge. Her playful work fuses organic and inorganic materials that form objects relating to this notion. Combining a sense of mischief and vulnerability, she has recently started to incorporate elements of the real, drawing the audience in by bringing the print to life. By drawing the audience in to her quirky and playful scenes she mirrors the subject matter creating a place of sanctuary and giving added depth and meaning to the seemingly light-hearted work. Influences include the work of play theorists Johan Huizinga, Brian Sutton-Smith and Stuart Brown.
Emma Hogan graduated from Dublin Institute of Technology with a BA Fine Art in 2011. Her practice is based on personal photographic images, their inherent functions and failures and their translation into painting. The failed outcomes that often occur in old personal photos (underexposure, light leaks etc.) serve as a reminder that memories are not always as ideal as they are imagined to be; memories are glossed over in our minds, details omitted, scenarios altered, and a new internal narrative is created - similar to the constructed scenarios these photos often feature. These errors jerk the viewer out of the reverie of nostalgia and places them mentally back into the present. Hogan explores this emotional journey from present to past and present again and the internal editing of past events. Using oil paint she deliberately uses typically faulty methods, over blending and blurring the surface to create a ghost image, a trace of what was once present.
Martin Kinlough graduated in 2008 with a BA Honours in Fine and Applied art from the University of Ulster, where he recently completed a Masters in Fine Art Painting. His work has been exhibited in The RDS Student awards show in Dublin 2010 and is included in the University of Ulster’s permanent works collection. Kinlough makes highly ornamental and layered paintings, fusing abstract mark-making with imagery from various historical and pop-culture sources. Kinlough’s approach to composition and image selection is doggedly intuitive. This may be a comment on the senseless daily saturation of media images, or on the impossibility of an objective history. Each symbol becomes flattened and swallowed by the multitude layers of oil, resin, spray paint, thread stitching and stencilling. The dense all over compositions are made up from a melee of patterns both geometric and organic and the gestural markings that are intertwined throughout the paintings are often made with the maximum overload of colour. Kinlough’s work most specifically references computer gaming culture, art history and popular culture and is greatly influenced by German contemporary painting, Neo Rauch and his own personal interest in historical imagery and German nostalgic visual culture. The titles of the pieces here refer to a Japanese word meaning ‘floating world’.
