Preview: 4 pm, Saturday, 15th of February | Runs: 16th February – 21st of March 2020

, opening on Saturday the 15th of February at 4 pm. Following on from Slade’s exhibition, The White Cottage, 2016, in the Sailor’s Home Limerick which combined painting, drawing, sculpture, video and poetry. Slade has continued to use various media to investigate through literal and visual images, similar themes. The work Slade has created for this show titled, Nostos or Homecoming, brings together painting, sculpture and text. 

Slade has used hard and soft materials: plaster, cement, steel, wood, felt, leather, oil paint and found materials to explore ideas around the journey home and of identity and dislocation. Materials that echo movement and flux, that imply a quest, or journey. Slade is interested to transform through art, universal questions that impact on us all – questions of existence, identity and meaning. The work challenges what ‘home’ means. Is it a longed-for place, a psychological space? ‘Home’ can be our birthplace, or a country or city we adopt and settle in. ‘Home’ may be the self, or silence, or both. Each one’s journey home will be different, some may arrive in places they didn’t intend to be, others may never experience Nostos, which can be interpreted as: safe landing, escaping death, returning home.

Biography

Jo Slade is a poet and painter living and working in Limerick. A graduate in the seventies of the Limerick School of Art and Design she continued her studies at the National College of Art and Design. Jo has had several one-woman shows in Ireland and France. Her work has been included in open submission and group shows in Ireland. Her paintings are in public and private collections in Ireland, England and France. Her exhibition/installation, The White Cottage, took place in The Sailor’s Home November 2016. 

Her poetry collection, The Painter’s House published by (Salmon Poetry in 2013) was joint winner of the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award. She has recently published her sixth book of poetry, Cycles and Lost Monkeys, Salmon Poetry 2019.