The Last Wilderness at Galway Arts Centre

The Last Wilderness, a solo exhibition by Swedish artist Cecilia Danell, will open in Galway Arts Centre this Friday evening March 10, and will run until April 19 in the city gallery at Dominick Street.

Danell now lives in Galway and the starting point for this show was a residency she was awarded to the Nordic Artists’ Centre in the Norwegian village of Dale in early 2016.

By experiencing and documenting the Scandinavian landscape on foot, she examines ideas about wilderness and solitude and how the desire for an authentic life may be no more than a construct.

Danell is influenced by Jungian psychology, existentialism and Utopian/dystopian science fiction. For this show, she set out to explore that “in a post-nature future, the human mind will be the last wilderness”. Landscape is a metaphor as she explores the human psyche.

Painting is Danell’s main medium but she also uses experimental film, installation and photography.

She documents and selects imagery based on the story she wants to tell and the resulting paintings are a hybrid of photographic semblance and abstraction.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.