Elsewhere From Here Exhibition

Elsewhere from Here
Curated by Cora Cummins
The Workroom December 2004

Elsewhere from Here briought together artists who articulate imaginary spaces and zones in response to the realities of living the city.

The Exhibition was curated by Cora Cummins, an artist whose practice is concerned to highlight how our environment is simultaneously the residue of natural processes (growth, erosion, decay, and seasonal cycles) and human activity and imaginings (construction, excavation, agriculture, development, pollution, landscape design).

Elsewhere from Here presented a selection of artists who the curator feels address these and other issues in exemplary ways,

8 Artists in the show were based in studios in Inner City Dublin.

Jonathan Hunter’s iconic images of burning trees, appropriately enough rendered as charcoal drawings, are set in tantalisingly non-specific Arcadian or Mediterranean landscapes.

Fiona McDonalds works in drafting ink, meticulously composed of mesh-like marks, are derived from the patterns of bird flight, suggesting a migration from a ‘here’ to ‘there’.

Alison Pilkington's paintings evoke imaginary landscapes of another order, spanning the micro and macro, symutanously bring to mind weather patterns, geological surveys, microbes and molecular structures.

Fiona McDonalds electrolytic tanks, containing copper sulphate solutions and wired up to transformers and electrodes, collect furry accretions of stalactite like metal oxide deposits that build miniature mountain-scapes.

Liam Sharkey's works are based on the premise of ‘zones of resistance’, his floor based sculptures incorporating a self-regulating energy loops of electro conductive heating elements.

Cora Cummins video piece ‘Sky Field’ records and animates an ‘elsewhere’ existing in the city – a paradoxical meadow of grasses growing on a disused building in the centre of the city.

Alan Keane's works using depleted commercial computer printer ink cartridges, deploy happenstances of flow and bleed, to create images suggestive of natural phenomena.

Living and working in South London, Marcus Oakley’s works present a comprehensive alternative universe to the depersonalised urban realm, that amongst its many facets champions a home made craft aesthetic, provincial village life, back woods Americana, 1970’s country rock, cups of tea, sewing, Skateboarding and the Beach Boys.

Making work in East London and Dublin Joy Gerrard's print works, derived from digital imaging processes, present overlooked incidental objects such as screws and needles hint at other ways of seeing, contrasting the macro view with the micro, subverting the application of technology to simply assert the beauty in small things.

Roisin Lewis