Disconnect is a group exhibition of installation and painting by Bernadette Cotter, John Doherty, and Sue Crellin McCarthy

Bernadette Cotter is known for her visually beautiful and deeply moving work. She manipulates materials to the point of transformation and the resulting intense accumulation of materials, involving hundreds of hours of stitching and pinning, are exhibited in deliberately configured installations. Skin to Air is concerned with thoughts about the one and the many – the individual connected to others while at the same time remaining separate from them. Names of people known to the artist are stitched onto squares of white organza that are folded into a pouch like configuration. There is an air of stillness and fragility about the installation, a feeling of lightness and transparency. Bernadette says ‘the piece is as if a skin has lifted into the air, a skin threaded with memories’

John Doherty is based in west Cork, and the subject matter of much of his work is familiar scenes from provincial towns, old family premises, the corner shop, pub, local garage, now redundant, neglected and forlorn, creating a sense of a changing environment. His realism is immediately attractive, painting layer upon layer, subtly pointing towards the human stories that exist behind the facades of places and things inhabited and used by many different hands over the years. There is an atmosphere, a stillness in these paintings that leads to thinking about what has gone on before and what has yet to come.

Sue Crellin McCarthy’s drive as an artist lies in a personal, open enquiry into the metaphysical and intangible elements of existence. Her work could be seen as documentation that explores being, meaning, thought, emotion, essence, and ethereal reality. Her installation Apocalypse of Thought examines a personal realisation that we only find true freedom through abandoning everything we hold as truth.