Large and small-scale video installations by Shelagh Honan will be exhibited in the Courthouse Gallery in Ennistymon from this weekend.
Aperture – Where The Light Gets In, was opened by Maria Finucane of Limerick School of Art and Design. The exhibition will run until November 12.
Shelagh’s body of work is rooted in time, history and place and brought to life through the media of video installation. The show by the Ennis-based artist was conceived especially for the Courthouse Gallery and features visual imagery, as well as the video installations.
The inspiration for the exhibition is drawn from a range of contrasting sites, stories, histories and objects that have found their way in to Shelagh’s studio.
Places like Ennistymon and Coole Park and their associated narratives are intertwined and woven to create a series of short video pieces that hover between the realms of fact and fiction.
In Wood From The Trees, a video from the woodlands in Coole Park is projected onto a bowler hat, which rests inside a display cabinet, reminding us of the unfathomable histories of the woods, the house and those that inhabited these places.
Two video projections occupy the main gallery space, suspended on to large canvas backdrops. These feature a young woman, who appears to float timelessly through the rooms of a large Georgian house, while, on a separate canvas, we see her plunge deep into uncertain waters, before drifting out to sea.
This story is continued through another prism, within two copper domes, fixed to the wall. Here we see yet another aspect to the story, as she now appears to drift across old lace christening gowns.
Shelagh Honan is a graduate of Limerick School of Art and Design, where she completed her undergraduate degree in sculpture, while she completed a masters degree in interactive media at the University of Limerick. The exhibition has been tailored and designed specifically with the Courthouse space in mind.
Shelagh has been a full-time practicing artist for 20 years and is also a part-time lecturer at Limerick School of Art and Design. She recently curated a series of multimedia exhibitions and has also recently shown in The Fulbright Centre in Philadelphia. Her practice is based at the Tulla Stables Studios.
In the Courthouse at the same time, Judy O’Sullivan will exhibit drawings, prints and mixed media work on paper, canvas and wood in the Red Couch Space.
Focusing on the interior of what used to be her family home, a small townhouse now standing empty, Judy explores the Japanese idea, ‘mono no aware’, literally ‘the pathos of things’, the awareness of their impermanence and transience and the wistfulness of their passing. Through a process of photographic documentation, followed by a combination of drawing, painting and print, she explores familiar, often overlooked spaces of everyday life.
A native of Ennis, Colin McGann has been editor of The Clare Champion since August 2020. Former editor of The Clare People, he is a journalism and communications graduate of Dublin Institute of Technology.