Emerging talent in the limelight at Gallery 126

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Gallery 126 in Galway City is currently hosting a four-person exhibition with the quirky title of Geological Cake. It’s a joint show between 126 and the Burren College of Art and Design – the four artists spent a month in the Burren College in Ballyvaughan, Co Clare, last year as part of an ‘Emerging Irish Artist Residency Award’.

The four respond to the landscapes and buildings around them and to the rubbish that’s part of human life, but they do so in very different ways.

Alex Holzinger takes objects that have had a previous function and re-purposes them purely for their form.

And so, a discarded railway sleeper gets a new lease of life as it’s transformed into a totem pole. A bicycle tube is fused timber and a black bow to create an elegant, if sombre wall-hanging.

“By stripping an object of its intended function, I make it useless, but by re-purposing waste I give the object a new sense of worth, a new use; I give it value,” he explains.

“The objects I use are transformed to a point, yet still identifiable.  They sit somewhere between the quotidian and the abnormal.”

Alex encourages the viewer to question if he has enhanced the original objects or diminished them. Maybe it’s a bit of both, he suggests.

Fiona Kelly specialises in wasteland and abandoned spaces, going so far as to create art on discarded cardboard boxes. Her work depicts man-made landscapes, debris and junk, sometimes against a natural landscape to explore the process of decay and regeneration.

Wicklow artist 1iing Heaney responds to her environment by creating work in new media. One of her installations for the 126 exhibition is an animation film that changes depending on the available daylight. Close by is another, larger, screen showing a fixed animation; it’s almost as if they are in dialogue. And there’s an audio piece too, a looped version of the song, Fadó, Fadó in Éireann.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.