Dona FitzSymons exhibit – Torque – continues at Garter Lane until September 20.
Situated outside the entrance of Garter Lane Theatre, Torque is a circular, dry-wall construction of overlapped natural peat blocks with freshly planted grass on the inside. Torque, could be seen as a metaphor containing our history as a species from the beginning of modern people, up to today and into the future. The old protects the young, nurtures its own future, ’til the new shoots take off and begin the cycle anew. torque has resonance with history, politics, relationships, the economy, and can be understood in a myriad of ways.
Donna FitzSymons practice involves the pairing of the political with the organic. Originally from Belfast, Donna moved to the north coast of Ireland five years ago. She graduated with a Master of Fine Art degree from the University of Ulster in 2012.
Olivia Hassett’s exhibition Anamorph continues in Garter Lane until September 20.
The main objective in Olivia’s practice is to create phenomenological environments and experiences for the viewer. Through these experiences it is proposed to question understandings of what is means to be human, viscerally alive and if only for a brief time outside the constraints imposed by society. Hassetts practice has always been a hybrid one between art and human biology. More recently it has expanded to include the medical world, how the human body is examined, labeled and depicted.
The body has the ability to “extend the frameworks which attempt to contain them, to seep beyond their domains of control…its refusal to respect the boundaries separating public and private.” (Elizabeth Grotz, 1994, PXI)
Through various artistic mediums such as installation, performance, sound and video Olivia Hassett continues to explore the human body’s potential to be simultaneously grotesque and sublime.