Book Launch: Thursday 5 April 2018, 6pm with Siobhán McDonald + art writer / curator Catherine Marshall in conversation

Crystalline: Disappearing Worlds features new paintings that deal with the human instinct of continual exploration and human endurance in extreme circumstances. This series, Disappearing Worlds, is based on photographic plates recovered from various Arctic expeditions (c.late 1800s / early 1900s). The images that survived in cameras used on these grand voyages, trapped in the glaciers with the glass plates preserved within them, provide the paintings with their subject matter.

Crystalline is an ongoing body of work by Dublin-based visual artist Siobhan McDonald. Comprised of a series of inquiries into environmental change, it addresses the complexities of the delicate balance of nature and the impact of human activity upon it. The artist has brought together several strands of work ranging from photograms, seeds, smoked carbon drawings, appropriated imagery to oil paintings on board.

Inevitably the little expedition paintings evoke Caspar David Friedrich’s figures gazing over the cliffs at Rugen. But no matter how terrible Friedrich’s sublime is, his well-dressed protagonists retain a sense of agency over the landscape. It is clear from McDonald’s paintings that the blizzards of ice that already sweep her human inhabitants away from each other deny such power. In this, McDonald’s paintings are closer to those of Turner, speaking of vulnerability, refusing the comfort of a church spire, however distant.
-Catherine Marshall, February 2018

A full colour catalogue with texts by Helen Carey and Catherine Marshall designed by Oonagh Young accompanies the exhibition and will be launched on Thursday 5 April 2018 at 6pm. All welcome, no booking required.