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Art-Making

After Difference

Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland

9 April 2020

Unpacking two ceramic works by Soji Hamada and Bernard Leach from the Oregon Craft Museum as a material departure points, this lecture performance unpicks the complexity of these artist-craftsmen’s renowned “East-West” dialogue, provoking reflections on sanctioned “difference” in the creation of artistic value. Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland, OR.

Cancelled due to Covid-19 pandemic.

Art-Making

My artistic practice has encompassed sculpture, installation, photography, video, collage, and artist’s books. Following a hiatus during which I focused solely on curating, writing and educating, my recent projects include an experimental play entitled The Entangled Museum, a lecture performance, a series of collages, and a cross-genre book entitled The Shape of Silence. I am currently working on cloch: 42 words for stone [working title], a body of mixed media and video work engaging with language and landscape as intertwined postcolonial topographies. In parallel, I am writing a related cross-genre book entitled Between Language [working title].

I have exhibited and performed my work in solo and group exhibitions in Ireland, the UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the US at venues including Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin; Aachener Kunstverein, Germany; Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, The Globe Gallery, Newcastle, UK; Mehrwert e.v., Aachen; Wexford Arts Center, Wexford; Basement Gallery, Dundalk, Ireland; Art Hive, Cork, Bilderhaus Bornemann Galerie, Germany; Outpost Venice, Italy; Lavitt’s Quay Gallery, Cork; 1430 Contemporary, Portland, and the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland. Recent residencies include Camp Colton, Oregon (2024) and the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, California (2023). My artist’s books are held in the New York Public Library art collection.

Current Work

Selected Recent Work

Artmaking is an exercise in precision and ambiguity. Each closer examination reveals another hidden gesture, a repetition foregrounding difference, a play between withholding and expressing. Sometimes I think that everything I have ever made is a collage. An attempt to open up cracks between surfaces, an oscillation between materiality and metaphor. An incessant dialogue that never stops preceding and extending itself beyond itself