Visual Art Commission 2020 & 2021
The Visual Art Commissions have been awarded to Gary Coyle (2020) and Cora Cummins/Saoirse Higgins (2021). These commissions are funded by the Arts Council and supported by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. Each selected commission is awarded €10,000.
2020 - Gary Coyle
Since 1999, Gary Coyle has gone swimming on a daily basis in the 40 foot in Sandycove. Now living in Dublin 7 , most days he still makes the trip out on the train to swim in the sea. And it is this journey, gliding along the coast between city & town, land & the sea, home & exile which will form the basis of his exhibition of drawings for the Municipal Gallery, dlr LexIcon. Some will be in charcoal, others influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e block prints and more specifically Hiroshige ‘s One Hundred Views of Edo, will be in colour, which is a new departure for the artist - they will made digitally using photoshop and a drawing tablet .
2021 - Cora Cummins & Saoirse Higgins
On Steady Ground/Unsteady Ground is a collaborative exhibition, which will connect the parallel research interests of the two artists in the ideas around landscape change, loss of what seemed to be permanent and how this affects us, and our fragile relationship with the anthropogenic world. How do we articulate the changes and move with it in real time? Through printmaking, video, audio and sculpture, this exhibition will explore this question in the context of their position as live in artists in the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown landscape. The focus will be on tracing points of interest from Dalkey Quarry (geology and deep time) down through the former route of the Atmospheric Railway towards the Pier and the Sea beyond, where the weather affecting the landscape in real time and geological time can be viewed and recorded. They will draw on the ghosts of former residents who carried out pioneering work in engineering, science and literature along this route. Pioneers such as - Samuel Beckett’s walk on the East pier, Physics pioneer George Fitzgerald's radio collaboration with Marconi and the crater on the far side of the moon named after him, Dame Margaret Lindsay Huggins & William Huggins Atlas of Representative Stellar Spectra, Sir Howard Grubbs Periscope and William Dargans Atmospheric Railway.
Gallery
