TOM CLIMENT OUTLINES THE EVOLUTION OF HIS PAINTING PRACTICE AND HIS RECENT EXHIBITION AT CCI PARIS.

After I left secondary school in 1987, I studied engineering for a few years. At the same time, I was doing night classes in painting at Crawford College of Art and Design with the late Jo Allen, who encouraged me greatly. I later studied at Crawford full-time and qualified with a Fine Art degree in 1995. I’ve been working as an artist since then, later returning to college and completing a Masters by Research in 2011. 

Ten years ago, Solomon Fine Art in Dublin took me on as one of their artists. I’ve since had regular solo exhibitions, the most recent being ‘Pilgrim’ in May 2024. Exhibiting with Solomon has been a huge support to my practice, which has given me the sense of a commercial outlet for my work. As an artist, I probably started out making work for myself, but it’s important that it also goes out into the world and reaches people.

My recent exhibition at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, called ‘Wilding/État Sauvage’ (1 February – 13 April), presented a selection of paintings made over the last few years. A new book, published by Gandon Editions, was launched at the exhibition opening, with subsequent launches in Solomon Fine Art and Lavit Gallery, Cork. The 120-page hardback monograph documents my work over the last decade or so. It contains 128 illustrations and an essay by Cristín Leach, with additional texts by Mark Ewart, Carissa Farrell, Mary McCarthy, and Michael Waldron (gandoneditions.com).

For me, painting is trying to find a balance between being unselfconscious, allowing the work to be formed, and also making critical judgements. It’s a process of making the work and then reflecting on why I feel certain paintings are more successful than others. These paintings then become almost like signposts in the road ahead – reference points for the work as it progresses.

I tend to work in isolation; I don’t share a studio space, and, over the years, the work has become quite internal in nature. When I start on a new series, it’s quite a natural undertaking, and it comes to an end quite naturally too, when I feel I shouldn’t make any more of them. I don’t draw or sketch. I start each piece with a rough, almost hazy, image in my head. I want the work to reveal itself to me; through painting, things become clearer. Over time, the work takes on a life of its own and moves forward under its own weight.

What has always fascinated me about painting is the ability to make a flat, two-dimensional surface seem three-dimensional. This idea of creating space has been the cornerstone of my practice. From the early gestural paintings to my more structured work of the present, creating space that the viewer can enter is an enduring interest. The abstract structures and shapes in the paintings are mechanisms that invite the viewer to a threshold. The paintings merge references to architecture and landscape to generate contemplations on shelter, ritual and hopefulness. 

The surfaces of the paintings are also quite important to the experience of the work. When I start a piece, I first paint the whole surface one colour; as in music, this becomes the keynote of the painting. I use plaster and sand, building up the surfaces. I try to allow the history of the painting to be visible in the finished works; I want it to tell a story.

With my work over the last ten years or so, I’ve been using abstract geometric shapes and structures, almost like grids, to provide a foundation for the paint. I then start to shape them into something more recognisable; I don’t think the work I do is wholly abstract. I want there to be some way into them – some element or narrative that the viewer can relate to. I think all the work I’ve done has existed on this border between abstraction and representation. 

My most recent work, which was exhibited in CCI Paris, has more natural forms in reaction to the more hard-edged geometric shapes I had previously been using. Flowers, plants and trees are all suggested in this new series. Some are quite recognisable, while others are imbued within landscape to become abstracted shapes and natural forms. 

I’m currently developing a new series of paintings for my next exhibition at Solomon Fine Art in 2026. I don’t plan or think too much at this stage; I just allow the work to be made. As the exhibition gets closer, I’ll see what I have in the studio and start selecting work that has some overall connection and narrative.

Tom Climent is a painter based in Cork City. 

tomcliment.com

Source

JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS DAPHNE WRIGHT AHEAD OF HER SOLO EXHIBITION AT THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM.

Joanne Laws: We both studied in Sligo RTC (now Atlantic Technological University). I studied Fine Art in the late-90s, during an inspiring period for female Irish sculptors. Was there a sense of optimism at this time, or did momentum happen against the odds?

Daphne Wright: Well, everybody left in the 80s – the recession was brutal. I left Ireland in 1989. In the 90s, I just remember going from fellowship to fellowship and residency to residency, in order to sustain my practice. I was a fellow in Cheltenham, a Henry Moore fellow in Manchester, and spent a year in the British School at Rome. During my education in Sligo in the early 80s, really strong women sculptors were constantly being pointed out to us; I was learning all the time through talking and conversation. The teaching staff in Sligo at the time included Seán Larkin, Seán McSweeney, Fred Conlon, Con Lynch, Nuala Maloney, Ruairí Ó Cuív, Seán O’Reilly, and John O’Leary. There was also Robert Stewart and Peter Charney – he was Australian and came with a completely different viewpoint. I studied sculpture and ceramics, but we were such a small year group that we were all friendly with each other. 

JL: Now that you’re back in Dublin, do you have a studio?

DW: I’ve made two rooms of my house into one space, and that’s where I normally work. I’m very grateful for that because renting a studio is just so expensive. That’s how I’ve had to do it, ever since I had children; it has become a particular kind of process, and I love the routine. When I’m fabricating a large sculpture, I temporarily rent the workshop of a cabinet maker in the northwest of Ireland. 

JL: What does your day-to-day studio routine look like?

DW: I would spend a lot of time testing, exploring, and making things. I’m not just testing the materials; I also read, research, and feed my brain at the same time. Once I start to understand what I’m doing, then I make – which is often the nicest part. On occasion, I would work up to a really large piece, which is not just about making, but also about raising the money to fund it.

JL: The life-size figures of your two sons have previously featured in your work. Were they made through casting processes?

DW: When the boys were smaller, I made Kitchen Table (2014) in hand-painted Jesmonite, which involved casting each of them separately in smaller pieces. This was while they were just emerging from being children and going into adolescence. Over ten years later, I’ve gotten consensus to cast them again, now that they are on the cusp of manhood, for a new work called Sons and Couch (2025) which will be exhibited for the first time this summer. 

The figures are complete casts and are hollow. They were fabricated using the old-fashioned life cast skill, and that’s really important. It’s not computer-generated or 3D printed; it’s a very labour intensive, traditional process. It’s also quite an undertaking for the person being cast, because the body is completely encased, albeit at different times. You use the plaster to take a mould of the body, as if trapping a moment in time. 

When the casts are assembled as a complete sculpture, everything is then painted in a subdued kind of colour – one that has the essence of memory. It isn’t real colour but how one might remember colour. The figures are then assembled into an installation or sculptural scene. That’s what I’m grappling with at the moment, because I sometimes have more elements than I need. It can be a painful process, editing down to just what is necessary and what functions. 

JL: The domestic seems to be a reoccurring subject matter within your sculptural arrangements, which includes figures, personal items, plants, and household appliances. Why is that?

DW: Well, there are a couple of things that make this kind of complicated. Firstly, you go to museums and discover that there are very few women artists represented in collections. There’s something really interesting about the casts and the trapping of time that monumentalise the domestic, while placing motherhood and the feminine at the heart of the museum. In addition, I often wonder why there are certain objects within our museums that are mute or silent. They become stagnant, I suppose, and their sense of being an artwork actually disappears. For me, that’s a central concern. When an artwork has a presence and a soul of its own, then the other things just become props.  

Aside from Sons and Couch, there will be other objects in the show, including Fridge Still Life (2021) – an open refrigerator made from unfired clay, containing the usual things on the shelves, such as a chicken, ready for the oven. On top of the fridge, there’s a large vase of tulips in the process of decay. So, in many ways, it’s a contemporary still life, evoking questions at the centre of domestic life: who fills the fridge, who empties the fridge, and who are we cooking for? 

JL: A solo exhibition of your work will be presented at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford this summer. It will feature new work, developed in response to sculptures in the Ashmolean Cast Gallery. What can you tell us about this show?

DW: The exhibition title, ‘Deep Rooted Things’, is taken from a line in the Yeats poem, The Municipal Gallery Revisited (1939): “My children may find here Deep-rooted things.” The Ashmolean Cast Gallery is quite amazing. It contains ancient Greek and Roman casts that are almost complete. There’s a fascinating collection of athletes that really do still hold the qualities of young men. I took the children to the Ashmolean a lot when they were small, so in a way, it forms part of their upbringing and their learning. One’s fascination, as a mother and as an artist, looking at objects, imbues them, in turn, with fascination. 

The exhibition also responds to the Hugh Lane Gallery Collection, looking specifically at the still life painting tradition. The collection contains flower paintings by some of the very first Irish women to have gone to university or art college, many of them studying in the UK or France. Their flower paintings are quite beautiful and quietly radical. There are also some very poignant portraits, including a beautiful one of W.B. Yeats as a boy reading a book, painted by his father, John Butler Yeats, in c.1886. 

These artworks will be reproduced in an accompanying publication, alongside  writing by Emily LaBarge and from Ashmolean Museum Director, Alexander Sturgis, and Hugh Lane Gallery Director, Barbara Dawson. The show is about combining those institutions and looking at the differences in their collection: one is a world class collection of antiquity; while the other is a more modern national collection containing contemporary works. They employ different languages, but for me, it’s all museology, permeated by the domestic.  

JL: There seems to be the recurring theme of young men, portrayed throughout the ages? 

DW: That’s true – young men at a pivotal point in their lives, whether the young athletes in the Ashmolean collection, or my own sons on the cusp of adulthood. Arguably, there were similar pressures for young men in both the classical and contemporary eras. A lot of this subtext is not verbal; however, we know it instinctively. I think that is largely where my work exists – at these kind of thresholds that are universally understood.

‘Ashmolean Now, Daphne Wright: Deep-Rooted Things’ will be presented at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from 13 June 2025 to 8 February 2026. The making of new works for this exhibition has been supported by a Visual Art Project Award from The Arts Council of Ireland.

ashmolean.org

Source

KATHRYN MAGUIRE OUTLINES HER LATEST RESIDENCY AND RECENT DEVELOPMENTS WITHIN HER PRACTICE.

I am a visual artist and educator whose practice incorporates socially engaged projects, environmental awareness projects, and public art projects. I create sculptural installations and interventions to explore ideas with communities and within the gallery space. A recurrent theme in my work focuses on voices of the silenced and the non-human, exploring how they might have agency in memory and history.

Exploring geology, the history of materials, and the circular economy, my current work concentrates on lithics, minerals, and mining. I examine rocks and minerals from various international locations, through a situated, land-based practice. Increasingly, my work engages processes of making, informed by my earlier training as a jewellery-maker and sculptor. I create artworks that convey the complexities of deep time, visible in materials. 

I want to reveal fundamental and invisible forces and energies, explored by scientists and experts alike; these concepts are central to my practice. Works such as Microns 1 & 2 (2024) have used scientific technology to reveal the geomythologies we inhabit and host. Taking the form of large, printed banners, these works feature electron micrographs of river clay samples, depicting metal pollution. Geologist Dr Tim Newman sourced clay samples and other geological strata for me, from the site of the River Thames Tideway project, where the Super Sewer construction is situated. I then took these samples to Innes Clatworthy, Electron Microscopist in the Imaging and Analysis Core Research Laboratories in The Natural History Museum in London, and we used an electron microscope to create the Electron Micrographs, with the spherules of iron oxide silicates pushing out of the clay. The banners were exhibited in ‘When We Cease to Understand the World’, curated by Marysia Więckiewicz-Carroll at Interface in Connemara (14 – 28 July 2024). 

Another work exploring scientific analysis was Mountain Mapping (2024), exhibited in my solo show ‘To the Mountain’ at Leitrim Sculpture Centre (30 August – 21 September 2024). Three local mountains (Benbo, Slieve League, and Iron) were 3D-printed from digital contour maps and mounted on surveyor’s tripods, painted gold for tuning and communing with the earth’s magnetism. The work incorporates geological specimens from each of the mountains: Iron Nodule, Paragneiss and Quartzite. The suspended rocks demonstrate a simple geological experiment to determine ‘specific gravity’. 

‘To the Mountain’ exhibition was the outcome of my three-month residency at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, exploring the mapping of mountains. The mapping of Ireland was developed by the early Ordnance Survey (OS) in 1824 to facilitate taxation and the ‘underground potential’ of geological and material value. The mapping was done by creating a series of primary triangles; sightings were taken between stations using theodolites on top of selected mountains. This, and my question, ‘Do Mountains commune with us?’ inspired the fabrication of artworks in the show. Many of these works were informed by my research into magnetism, Earth Sciences and measurement, geological phenomena, and experiments in the field. The exhibition asked: How can we shift away from over-mining and endless extraction of the Earth’s minerals towards a circular economy?

The work, Mount Ida (2024), conjures the magical and mythical, whilst attempting to comprehend the mystery of magnetism and its name-origin. A pair of traditional Greek shoes, known as tsarouchi, are cast in iron and attached to a strong welding magnet. This work was inspired by the myth of Magnes, associated with a shepherd, reputedly the first to notice magnetism, when his shoes got stuck to lodestone/ magnetite on the ground at Mount Ida. It was also informed by time spent exploring the magnetic cores of Iceland. I visited a geological drill core archive in East Iceland and documented the magnetic power of the cores with very strong magnets (neodymium).

I am intrigued by alchemical changes in metals, minerals, and spirituality. Materials and matter have an ancient importance as Prima Materia. Using metal and stone supports these interests, because the materials are always changing and breathing. This is important to my understanding of deep time. Cast in Jesmonite with black stone-shungite pigments, my snake sculpture, The Keeper (2021), holds the secrets of stones and guards the thresholds. It was exhibited in ‘Hivernal’, curated by Eamonn Maxwell at Roscommon Arts Centre (1 November – 21 December 2024). 

Cast in pigmented Jesmonite with gold, shungite and iron oxide, the work Mineral Mountain (2024) was an attempt to commune with the sacred elements within mountains and rocks. The mountain sculptures are inspired by geodata forms of the Iron Mountain in Leitrim. Rocks, metals and plants are ground up to become homoeopathic and offer healing: shungite (for protection), gold (representing the sun, and a vital element in balancing energies) and dragon blood powder (to neutralise negative energies). 

My solo exhibition ‘To the Mountain’ at Leitrim Sculpture Centre (30 August – 21 September 2024) considered how we commune with the Earth, its divinity, scientific knowledge, and colonial histories to explore alchemical traits and forms. I was subsequently awarded a six-month Artist Studios Residency (from August 2025 to January 2026) at The Model in Sligo. My forthcoming show, ‘Material Acts’, will run from 11 to 27 September at Pallas Projects/Studios, as part of the Artist-Initiated Projects programme for 2025. ‘Material Acts’ will present a sculptural investigation relating to geology, alchemical changes, and environmental colonialism.

Kathryn Maguire is an artist based in Sligo.

kathrynmaguire.net

Source