‘Silent Land’ New paintings by Cassandra Dorer and Loy Lee

 From 11 September – 1 October.

Official opening Friday 11 September at 8 pm.

On the surface the landscape can seem to be one of quiet and solitude evoking different responses and memories for us all. Sometimes a place to escape to and a place of harmony and balance where we can connect to our inner emotions.

Yet, the landscape is not a backdrop to human presence but is formed and re-formed by nature, people and conflict. Underneath the surface the land is constantly evolving, renewing and in a state of flux. The West of Ireland is a place steeped in history, conflict and spirituality and Silent Land is an expression of this by two local painters

My work is an emotional response to the landscape, which, although it is not a particular place, it is a synthesis of many thus creating a sense of place. My inspiration is drawn from the West of Ireland.

Initially, I either make sketches in the landscape or I take photographs, but a lot of time is spent walking through a particular landscape absorbing the feeling of a place. I then work in my studio, painting intuitively recalling the memories and feelings thus creating an emotional response to the landscape.

I work with oil on canvas which places my work within historical context but my main interest is in the seductive nature of oil paint, the depth of colour and the sensuality of the paint. Sometimes I work with layers of paint evoking the elements of sky, sea and land and other times I work with gestures on the canvas asserting the materiality of oil paint. It is through the language of paint that places and emotions merge, allowing the painting to be an entity in its own right and creating a personal interpretation for the viewer.

Cassandra Dorer has a Master of Fine Art degree specializing in paint.

 Loy Lee makes gestural paintings often linked to his research in architecture and landscape. His paintings are built up through layers of paint on canvas, overlaid with mark making by using unconventional tools such as plaster trowel, scraper and hard edge. Lee’s painting technique is to emulate scares marked or ‘open wound’ in Irish landscape either created by social, political events, agricultural crop marks, field pattern, peat and turf cutting, human or animal activities.

Lee’s bogland painting comprises of layers of visual incident in topography through different events where the landscape become fluid, flatten and compressed in time. Many layers of ‘landscape graffiti' were transcribed and inscribed into his rich canvases to capture the spirit of the place yet allow the palimpsest to exist quietly through time to reveal a ‘window on a past landscape’. In his artistic idiom, inscribing is to write, erasing is to conceal, scratching is to dematerialize, coercive silencing is for sake of quietude, stitching together is to collocate and fuse the fragile hidden features of Irish landscape. Through his technique of mutual erasures of different events, bridging the gap between spaces of palimpsest is to preserve and to interrupt one flow for sake of listening to other.

Loy Lee work also used historical references from history, art, literature, poem and images of bogland to create new imaginative ground as narrative of no location to signifying cultural, social and political agency as well as suggesting the underlying event structure of bog formation. His corrugated ground almost seems like ‘pleated landscape that cannot be smoothed out’ is to unfold the invisible to become visible, to evoke the fragile hidden features to reappear which was once disappeared. Through this cacophony of marks, seeing them as picture in between imagination and actual reality, his work seems to represent the poetic and lyrical gesture of bogland.

Loy Lee was born in Malaysia, now naturalized Irish citizen. He was educated, lived and worked in United States. Lee earned his Diploma of civil engineering from Federal Institute of Technology in Malaysia, Bachelor Science of Architecture from UTA, Texas. He further completed his Master degree in Architecture from Columbia University in New York. He is a licensed architect in the States of New York and works as a lecturer in the school of architecture in Waterford Institute of Technology, Waterford, Ireland. He had exhibited architectural drawings and models in Texas and in New York. This is his first painting exhibition in Ireland.

'Harbour' 

An exhibition of experimental landscape paintings

in mixed media by Christine Porter  

Opening reception on Friday 11^th September 2015 at 8.00pm 

The exhibition will run until Thursday 1^st. October 2015

Harbours hold happy childhood memories for North Clare based artist, Christine Porter. A harbour symbolises a place of safety within the vast outside world; a place of departure and arrival; a place to be grounded and held fast; a place where earth, sky and water meet. And the paraphernalia of ropes, ladders, lobster pots and floats conjure up ambiguous feelings of freedom and restraint.

In this exhibition, the forms and moods of the harbour environment are interpreted through a visual language of marks, colours and textures to create compositions that stand for the place, and which are expressions of the feelings that harbours evoke.

These abstract landscape paintings have a luminous quality in their expression of the vast space, and the watery depths, that can be experienced at harbours. Created using thin layers of watercolour, gouache and acrylic paints, on paper or mdf panel, the artist has exploited the full gamut of colour from succulent rich saturated pigment to the most subtle tints tones and shades. This translucent quality is balanced by opaque layering with the added excitement of textural effects.

The small scale of these paintings invites close-up viewing where intimacy can develop between the world of the painting and the world of the viewer.