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Frog Auditorium, 4 x 7m, wood and steel

With the Symposium’s theme “Back to the River” in mind, I observed the formation of ripples on water. I wanted to freeze the ripples in a hard material to give the viewer time to reflect on the qualities and formations of water. I chose wood for this because of the natural rings on its surface. I cut different sized logs into slices, and then cut a few of these slices into crescent shapes and slotted them together. The central pieces are held in place with steel rods, while the outer pieces are attached by wire or are free floating, so that the composition is always changing.

Guest Artists, 30 x 13cm, egg tempera on found wallpaper installed on wood.

This series of portraits is connected with interviews I carried out with the international guest artists for the Symposium’s catalogue. I used wallpaper I found at the art centre (a former boarding school) as my surface and made paint from natural clay.

Duppini Art Group: https://duppiniart.group

Abstract landscapes

Portraits

Disturbance (2021)
This series of paintings is based on photographs taken at night. The camera’s settings are not adjusted to the dark, so at first the image appears black. I then open it in editing software and increase its brightness, pulling forms from the shadow. Ian Burn’s Xerox Book (1968) — a series of recursive photocopies exposing the faults of machine reproduction — was an important influence for my work.
Some information in the photographs cannot be retrieved through editing: being shot in low light, it is lost in a mist of digital noise. In dealing with a personal loss in 2021, I became interested in the fragility and fraudulence of memory. The faults in the photographs undermine photography’s veracity as a medium and brings it closer to memory.

Wander explores the relationship between lines — their moments of divergence and convergence.

I photographed cracks on the pavement and, like jigsaw pieces, arranged them to form a picture. Although in this case the composition was not predetermined, rather it grew naturally from the direction the lines tended towards.

The meaning of a drawing is changed when it is made from cracks instead of pencil. Pencil lines are pure and self-contained, whereas a photograph is a capture of some physical object existing elsewhere. Pencil is therefore continuous, but a drawing composed of photographs contains “cracks” of distance and time, seen in the variation of lighting conditions and gravel textures.

Another difference lies in the intention of the line. Pencil is a productive instrument, willfully one drags it across a surface to create a mark. Cracks, on the other hand, are destructive; they signal a deterioration. This occurs gradually as the cement contracts and expands with the changing seasons. In this way cracks are a marker of the passage of time.

Just as cracks form with time, so too do wrinkles grow across our bodies, deepening and multiplying with age. By presenting photographs of skin and cracks side by side I hope to draw attention to this relationship.

In the process of documentation I noticed a repetition of formations, most striking were those that resembled letters — A’s, Y’s and X’s. I began to imagine the cracks as a language, but its meaning is unintelligible, like the codes of nature that we can never fully grasp.

Over five weeks, Jessica Daly led workshops at Mullingar Youth Project exploring colour, pattern, and abstraction. The aim of the project was to equip a group of young people with a new mode of self-expression and instill them with confidence in their ability to create art.

Workshops

Repeat patterns

Exhibition

The project was kindly supported by Westmeath County Council and Creative Ireland.