Heffernan’s work deals with created spaces asthey relate to the environment of the studio and is influenced by Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopic space as outlined in his 1967 talk Of other space. Heterotopic spaces he suggests are spaces that create an imaginary order and reason, which serve to stress their in existence elsewhere. These Heterotopia’s include certain social, institutional and discursive spaces that are somehow ‘different’ such as ships, psychiatric hospitals, Turkish baths or Gardens. He further argues that space, unlike time, has not yet completed its process of secularization and that there is still a degree of sanctity to the way in which we divide space.

The work explores this idea through the lens of the studio as a sort of Heterotopia, creating a cryptic narrative, which incorporates elements of science fiction, commedia dell’arte and classical mythology in a deceptively simple visual world. There is a theatrical dimension to this world, which is purposefully staged and ambiguous.

The characters in this world appear to be obsessed with a strange compulsion towards repetition that is playful yet also sinister, melancholic and contradictory. They seem to be driven by a sort of esoteric knowledge, which is used to explore themes of identity, alienation and absurdity while also being a meditation on the ritualistic nature of painting. In this sense the protagonists are all involved in a sort of psychodrama or speculative journey where the central issue is their role as invented objects.

His current body of work There were strange gatherings has begun to take a more suggestive and fragmented look at the internal mechanisms of the studio allowing the pieces to inform and gestate themselves and thus develop an order and reason of their own much like Foucault’s Heterotopias. It is then up to the viewer to constitute an imaginary world based upon these selected fragments.

Joseph Heffernan, born 1987, is an Irish artist based in Cork. He received his BA in Fine Art from the Crawford College of Art and Design in 2009 and later went on to study Painting as a Masters student at NCAD Dublin, which he completed in 2016. He was a member of Sample Studios, Cork when it opened in 2011 and has exhibited widely in Ireland. Recent group shows include the 189th and 188th Annual Exhibition, RHA, Dublin, 2019/18, Borderland/Memento, Garter Lane Arts Centre, Waterford, 2018, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, Mayfield Arts Centre, Cork, 2017 and The End, SOMA Contemporary, Waterford, 2016. He is currently a member of Sample Studios, Cork.

www.josephheffernanartist.com