In 2019 Paul Moore received the ACNI Artist Career Enhancement Scheme award to work with Golden Thread Gallery culminating in an exhibition in the Project Space in 2021. Over the course of 2020, when the routine of our daily lives changed so dramatically, Moore began to develop work which is informed by Virtual Reality technology and also the 2020 phenomenon of endurance exercise. Moore is particularly intrigued by the body and landscape, nature and machine, and internal and external experience.

Virtual reality or ‘VR’ was the starting point from which a body of work emerged questioning a space that doesn’t exist but is still restricted by real world physical barriers. Endurance exercise became a personal escape for the artist throughout 2020 during the national lockdown imposed by the coronavirus pandemic. The action of cold water swimming became a place to exist, similar to the ‘VR’ experience, both in the present body and the absent mind. The sheer physical endurance required by the body to swim in the Irish Sea is necessary to achieve the natural escape that this endurance gives to the mind.

Within the exhibition, Moore looks to these experiences almost meditatively, creating a cathartic release during difficult times. This continuing struggle with the present and the search for both extreme reality and out of body experience marks a change in Moore’s practice towards a more contemplative question about how we as a society are equipped to deal with adversity.

Paul Moore is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. After graduating with an MA in Art Research and Collaboration from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology he has gone on to have successful exhibitions both locally and internationally. Selected shows include: Unsettlement, Platform Arts Gallery, Belfast 2017. G R O U P S H O W, Golden Thread Gallery Belfast, 2016. Statəcraft, Irish Museum of Modern Art Project Space, Dublin, 2016. lorem ipsum, ADF Gallery Belfast, 2015. Palace Revolution, Galveston Arts Centre, Texas. U.S.A. 2014.