My Newsletter

The MART Gallery announced the 2019 winners of our annual MART Exhibition Award: Èanna Heavey and Sarah Diviney from the 2018 CIT Crawford College of Art & Design Fine Art Graduate exhibition and Emma McKeagney from Fire Station Artists’ Studios 2018 Sculpture Bursary Award. The aim of this award is to provide a showcase and supported exhibition opportunity to emerging artists whose work is both engaging and experimental.

The artwork presented is a selection of sculptural forms, video work and live performance. Emma McKeagney’s beautiful sculptural objects are presented alongside new video work that further explores the materiality of natural and designed forms. Sarah Diviney’s moving performative work reflects Ireland’s state institutional treatment of women, many of whose fate was sealed due to the woeful lack of sexual education in Irish society as referenced in Èanna Heavey’s powerful and unsettling video piece ‘I’m sorry I was not here..’.

The exhibition is kindly supported by CIT Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork and Fire Station Artists’ Studios (FSAS), Dublin, the Arts Council Ireland, The MART Gallery & Studios, and Dublin City Council.

About the Artists

Emma McKeagney is a Visual Artist based in Dublin. After graduating in 2017 from Dun Laoghaire IADT she completed a year-long residency at Talbot Studios after winning their Most Promising Graduate Award 2017. During this residency she fabricated work supported by the Sculpture Bursary Award at Fire Station Artists’ Studios.

McKeagney’s practice involves working closely with material processes to create bodies of work which incorporate the idea that a process is made up of not only the artist but the material they use and the impending idea of exhibiting. Reading and discussing various topics related to New Materialism, her interest starts with collapsing any hierarchy which puts humans ahead of all other materiality.

McKeagney had her first solo-show in June entitled Unstable Categories as part of Pallas Projects and Studios’ Artist Initiated Programme. Work selected from her solo-show is presented in this exhibition and developed further through new video works is a second phase of the project.

This work aims to blur the lines between the designed and natural worlds and question the emphasis we have on dividing these categories. What is human, is a malleable category which bends and stretches depending on the objects and minerals we are oriented between.

www.emmamckeagney.com

Èanna Heavey graduated from CIT Crawford College of Art & Design with a BA in Fine Art in June 2018. “I’m Sorry I was Not Here…” explores the distorted development of self through false education, institutional structures and the ideologies of Western culture.

Interwoven into this narrative is the idea of sexuality as a core element of the human experience. The work touches on the issue of insufficient sex education within Ireland. There are some uncomfortable undertones; suggesting at what has been unsaid, unseen or unheard.The unravelling of self is an important element of the work. There is a sense of fragility; a fragile strength longing for the return to innocence, searching for freedom.

Sarah Diviney graduated from CIT Crawford College of Art & Design with a BA(hons) in Fine Art. The work in this exhibition ‘I, X’ comprises of an installation consisting of a performance piece and a video work. It investigates the authority of the Church and State within the private realm, documenting the intimacy of the domestic sphere and the position of Irish women in society.

The work explored the dangerous axis of the female body as object, amplifying this through the chosen mediums of performance and video, with the performance space acting as a developing installation. Simultaneously, the work occupies the body as a moving sculpture due to the spectator relationship  between the audience and the work. The perturbed body licenses the unsettles tempo of the performance which transitions from meditative stillness to frantic action, disturbing the perceived tranquillity within the space and in turn, abruptly presenting the dystopia.

The work is an accumulation of influences by Sarah’s extensive research into the history of Irish women which generated the need for a confrontation medium to be used. The performance projects the concept into the present echoing the histories of Irish women.

www.sarahdivineyartist.wordpress.com

*Lectus – Latin word meaning selected, chosen, choice, good, exquisite