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Excavate

Venue: Cork Public Museum, Fitzgerald Park, Mardyke, Cork City

Date: Opening 6pm, Thursday 14 October 2010, the exhibition continues until January 2011

Untitled, 2010 by Eimearjean McCormack

Curated by Breda Lynch for Cork Printmakers and Cork Public Museum, this exhibition presents twelve projects especially created by thirteen artists. The selected artists were given the opportunity to delve into the archives of the museum to discover and research artefacts which inspired them to make new work.

The work of Marianne Keating and Eileen Kennedy explore the Irish Famine, both artists taking radically different approaches. The collaborative work of Catherine Hehir and Noelle Noonan was inspired by the Cork International Exhibition of 1902 -1903, especially the Helter Skelter that was erected for this ambitious industrial exhibition. A number of artists’ work centred on key figures of Ireland’s history; Peter Cleary’s work was stimulated by a photograph of Roger Casement as an inmate of Pentonville Prison in England. Eimearjean McCormack’s work focuses on the hunger strikers Terence McSwiney, Michael Fitzgerald and Joseph Murphy. Brian Barry investigates the story of how a dwarf’s shoe became part of the collection in Cork Public Museum. This has lead to a part folklore part fiction memoir of Count Joseph Boruwlaski. For Ben Reilly the opportunity to caste an Enfield rifle was too great to miss. Through the casting process the rifle has written its worn scarr! ed state into the re-made object. Paul La Rocque presents his triptych ‘Insurrection’, which is derived from his engagement with the Easter Proclamation document in the museum collection. Debbie Godsell takes her influence from the presentation of objects and images in the ‘big houses’ of the days of O’Connell and creates a montaged collection of residual elements from Irish life during the period of famine, liberation and repeal. Aoife Layton’s finely executed mezzotints are meditations on presence, absence, and memory. Through their work, Jo Kelley and Sylvia Taylor contemplate the notion of the ‘museum collection’ itself.

Curator
Breda Lynch is a visual artist living and working in Limerick. She has mounted solo shows in Ireland and Northern Ireland and participated in group shows in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, England, Italy, Turkey, Thailand and China, most notably of these shows were the BEFF – Bangkok Experimental Film Festival 2008 and the Irish Pavilion at World Expo, Shanghai 2010. She was a recipient of the Arts Council Artists Bursary Award and Limerick City Council Artist Bursary Award and was a prizewinner at Iontas in 2007. She has also curated exhibitions, most notably ‘Darkness Visible’ with Ann Mulrooney at the Galway Arts Centre for the Galway Arts Festival in 2008 and ‘A Poem of Friendship’ at Occupy Space, Limerick 2010.
Breda Lynch is Course Director of Fine Art Printmaking Department at Limerick School of Art and Design.

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