Studio Viewing Room : Setting Suns | Close Horizons

About

Studio Viewing Room | An online only exhibition of drawings

setting suns | close horizons

I often make series of works on paper to nurture my own energetic relationship with painting, experimental tangents for their own sake. In normal times, when planned exhibitions occupy me, these works fill up storage draws and are rarely, if ever seen. Responding to the existential impact of Covid 19 in the context of cancellations and indefinite delays to real world projects at home and abroad, I began to have the urge to open those draws and see could that work have a life in the world. With restrictions in place, the choice to do it on my own website in a DIY Studio Viewing Room is an attempt to adapt to the current limitations and see if I could find my own way to exhibit and communicate more directly from the life I inhabit as a painter on the outer coastal edge of Europe in the North west of Ireland.

Social media & instagram work for many artists, but, despite their usefulness in connecting widely in the world, they also can breed anxiety, alongside a platform dominance and behaviour that does not always appeal. At the risk of furthering obscurity, I prefer to try present work as cohesively as possible in a personal digital space, in the same way I would attempt to imagine a show for a physical gallery.

I decided to open the Studio Viewing Room with – setting suns | close horizons – partly because I like the way that smaller ink drawings reproduce online, and because it seemed appropriate to show some works from the recent months of the pandemic that has affected us all. The setting sun connecting with the deeper rhythms of time and our place in the world, while the horizon calls us to reach out, dream and imagine.