Following a very well received showing at the Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda and Butler Gallery, Kilkenny a selection of works from Janet Mullarney ARHA’s exhibition, My Minds I, will be on exhibit in the RHA Foyer, from this September to December.
Mullarney’s installation piece, standing, still standing offers a delicate installation presented alongside drawings placed against a simple backdrop. The lighting scheme creates disparate shadows, allowing mysterious theatrical scenes to unfold.
Irish Times art critic, Aidan Dunne’s five-star review remarked “enter Mullarney’s world and you fall through an imaginative trapdoor into another realm of fables and fairy tales, where animal characters stand in for humans and meaning is cut loose from the bounds of convention. Her acrobats and performers evoke the heady, heightened space of the circus ring.”
Aidan Dunne, the Irish Times, February 2015.
“Her sculptures are a little like Angela Carter’s novels, where the everyday and the ordinary can suddenly plummet into the surreal and the mythic. Tables and stairs, trolleys and mattresses are the props that carry extraordinary characters. Subjects mined from the natural world and anthropomorphised to play out human joy and human tragedy.” Patrick T. Murphy.
Born in Dublin, sculptor Janet Mullarney ARHA has spent a great deal of time working in Italy. She has exhibited extensively in both Ireland and abroad and has held solo exhibitions at venues including the RHA, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Crawford Art Gallery, Limerick City Gallery, Museo de Arte Contemporanea, Oaxaca, Mexico, Casa Masaccio Arte Contemporanea, San Giovanni Valdarno, Group exhibitions include Views from an Island, Irish Contemporary Art from the Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Millennium Art Museum, Beijing and Shanghai Art Museum, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, Palazzo Mediceo di Seravezza, Italy. Mullarney’s sculpture is part of the collections of Arts Council, Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Of ce of Public Work and Allied Irish Banks. Work in public workspaces that can be singled out would be Gröningen, Waagstraat Project, architect Adolfo Natalini, Holland, Royal Victoria Hospitals, Belfast, St. Ultans, Cherry Orchard Primary School, architects O’Donnell+Tuomey, Ballyfermot, Dublin.
She has been awarded with the RUA Perpetual Silver Medal, Prize 2009, RHA Sculpture Award 2008, Irish American Cultural Institute’s O’Malley Award 2005, The Pollock Krasner Award 1998. Dept. of Foreign Affairs 2008 Awards 2003/2001/2000/1991/1989. Janet Mullarney is a member of Aosdana and was elected an Associate Member of the RHA in 2013. She is represented by the Taylor Galleries, Dublin.