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Deirdre Hayden, Beth O’Halloran, Monica Flynn, Isabel Young, Todd Kelly and Emer Roberts

Curated by Cleo Fagan

‘The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful’
Henry David Thoreau, from the novel Walden.

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What the natural world holds and means for us has been debated widely and at length throughout time. Whilst ancient cultures believed that ‘existence to the slightest detail was a conscious expression of eternity, the landscape itself a shrine’, Jean-Paul Sartre, exisentialist philosopher and thinker from a more urban time, saw nature not as a site of meaning but of chaos. He expressed in his 1938 novel Nausea a profound fear of the waiting growth of vegetation that lay at the gates of the city. ‘ I am afraid of cities. But you mustn't leave them. If you go too far you come up against the vegetation belt. Vegetation has crawled for miles towards the cities. It is waiting…’

Today the anthropocentric view we hold of the world has arguably brought us to the point where natural resources are fast depleting, the earth’s surface is polluted and more than 3,000 species of plants and animals become extinct each year as a result of the ‘human footprint’. For urban dwellers living in man-made environments ‘nature’ can seem an abstract entity but current debate on the fragile ‘environment’ brings its presence closer perhaps to our consciousness than in more recent decades.

The exploration of this complex relationship has a long history in the visual arts and artists of more recent times as diverse as Richard Long, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Simon Starling have participated in this inquiry. The artists included here too make this exploration in their individual ways.

Referencing constructed cultural values through systems of classification within the Natural History museum and engaging with notions of superiority, Emer Roberts creates 3d hybrid creatures mostly animal but with a pronounced human aspect. Likewise, the human dominated animal world is explored in Isabel Young’s painting. Young’s work is generated through close observations of wildlife, often in zoological environments, and of elaborate purpose built "sets" constructed in the studio using collected objects, artefacts and fabrics, as well as organic material, fruit, vegetation and animals such as fish and octopus.

Using sound, video and installation Monica Flynn explores in ‘Fairy Field’ what it means to be immersed in a landscape as opposed to being a distant observer and how belief, superstition and local narratives are all intrinsic to a connection with place and the natural and perhaps supernatural worlds.

The romantics of the eighteenth century saw the opportunity for expansion of the soul and the emotions when in the presence of the great expanse of nature. Further in to the same century came the art of the picturesque and a desire to tame and make order in that great but terrible and wild expanse of the landscape which partially expressed itself in the art of landscape painting: ‘making flux into form, infinity into frame’. It is these kind of idealised picturesque landscapes that Todd Kelly references in his elaborate collages and which framed in graffiti like 'asterisk' markings raise questions about the universal human drive to mark or claim space.

The source material for Beth O’Halloran’s most recent paintings are a series of photographs of ice-fishing huts based in the rural North-Eastern U.S coast. These are places which hint at a contingency of experience from the vantage point of the recluse...an unseen fisherman, his hut the only human presence in a bleached scene of nature at its quietest.

Also in the medium of paint Deirdre Hayden creates small portraits of the inner world as projected onto the landscape. Her evocative paintings suggest moments in time before or after an encounter or realisation, a backdrop to unfolding dramatisation of the subconscious mind, creating a collective space that is intimately personal.

Thoreau, Henry, David, Walden, (Everyman, New York, 1992) 34
2 Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, (Fontana Press, London, 1993) 168
3 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Nausea, (New Directions, New York 1964), 29
4 Meyer, Stephen M., The End of the Wild, (The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2006) 4
5 Stewart, Susan, On Longing, (Duke Universtiy Press, London, 1993) 74 - 75

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Ardbia Gallery,
4 William Street West, Galway, Ireland.

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t : 00353 87 2368648 / 00353 91 516630
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w: www.ardbia.com

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gallery opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm