Opening Reception Thursday 19 February at 7pm

Born in Sri Lanka, Michella Perera is an Irish artist currently practising in Cork. After graduating from Limerick School of Art and Design (BA) in 2014, she received the National Sculpture Factory Graduate Award (2014). Her three-month residency was completed in January 2015, which culminated with the work developed for the current exhibition.

The theatre set-like installations, Michella Perera create are a response to place, in which urban narratives of her surrounding environment are exposed, contested and opened to debate. The installation references the site and other similar sites of crisis where social, political and economic relationships of the surrounding environment converge and produce an image of our current situation. Through certain inversions and re-assimilations of this information and these co-dependencies, Perera endeavours to form a dialogue between the artwork and these locales. In doing so, she produces heterotopic [As formulated by Michel Foucault in Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, published in October 1984 in the journal Architecture/Movement/Continuité, a heterotopia is “something like counter sites (…) in which real sites (…) are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted.” Their physical location is perhaps known, but they lie outside of all places.] counter sites that create a new critical space in which dominant narratives can be re-imagined and contested.

Her recent exhibitions include ‘First Light,’ Limerick School of Art and Design 2014, ‘Conversations | Reconstructed,’ The Culture Box, Temple bar 2014, ‘Liminal,’ Boat House, Limerick 2013,‘Nineteen,’ Davis Street, Limerick 2013,‘The Gathering,’ Shannon Airport 2013.

Kindly supported by the National Sculpture Factory