A DESIRE FOR CLOSENESS
AN EXHIBITION OF WORK BY NICOLA ANTHONY
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH FIRST FORTNIGHT
AND WEXFORD ARTS CENTRE
10TH JANUARY – 25TH JANUARY 2020
The Presentation Arts Centre in conjunction with First Fortnight was proud to host an exhibition of work by Nicola Anthony.
Anthony’s artwork transforms human stories into art. Working internationally as a text artist, she makes public sculptures and drawings using words: “A story becomes my canvas, and a sentence becomes my pencil line.”
For this exhibition the artist gathered life stories from isolated communities in Enniscorthy and the wider county. The exhibition takes an abstract look into the many ways that loneliness is experienced: It may not be the person who looks most alone who is experiencing the most paralysing isolation.
On her journeys to Enniscorthy the artist observed murmurations of starlings performing their mesmerising dance of togetherness over the River Slaney. This phenomenon is called emergent behaviour: Their apparently choreographed coordination is caused by thousands of individual movements and actions - such as simple instincts to stay close, or respond to air currents. Emergence also occurs in water molecules, resulting in their behaviour together as a liquid - flowing, eddying, tidal.
There are parallels with how humans behave in a crowd or as part of a society. This observation inspired the central bird sculpture in the exhibition, Murmuration. Each starling is made of words, kindly loaned by Louis De Paor, from his poem Fáilte Uí Dhonnchú which portrays crowds of people walking past a homeless Romanian woman. She is surrounded yet still incredibly alone. The original Irish of De Paor’s poem becomes sculpture - the poem itself displaced, migrating, reassembled.
Developing the idea of water as a metaphor for society, the artist collected river water from across Ireland to make the ink drawings and the sculpture Effusion: observing how the water droplets have a desire to gravitate towards each other, like dew on a leaf, like people to one another.
“Being made of 60% water ourselves, this metaphor for society enchants me: Everyone is connected, part of Ireland, part of the world... but the river splits and divides; it crosses borders, emerging as streams, loughs and puddles; becoming gentrified and compartmentalised, purged and evaporated... it forgets that each droplet is part of the whole.”
There’s currently a national call-out for stories at humanarchiveproject.com, where you anonymously add your story, which will be published in a book after the exhibition.
About the artist:
Nicola Anthony (b.1984) is a visual artist based in Dublin, and an elected member of the Royal Society of Sculptors. She has been invited all over the world to work with NGOs, art institutions, and architects to create art which expresses the human experience of isolation, displacement, disconnection or disenfranchisement.
Anthony’s artwork transforms human stories into art. Working internationally as a text artist, she makes public sculptures and drawings using words: “A story becomes my canvas, and a sentence becomes my pencil line.”
For this exhibition the artist gathered life stories from isolated communities in Enniscorthy and the wider county. The exhibition takes an abstract look into the many ways that loneliness is experienced: It may not be the person who looks most alone who is experiencing the most paralysing isolation.
On her journeys to Enniscorthy the artist observed murmurations of starlings performing their mesmerising dance of togetherness over the River Slaney. This phenomenon is called emergent behaviour: Their apparently choreographed coordination is caused by thousands of individual movements and actions - such as simple instincts to stay close, or respond to air currents. Emergence also occurs in water molecules, resulting in their behaviour together as a liquid - flowing, eddying, tidal.
There are parallels with how humans behave in a crowd or as part of a society. This observation inspired the central bird sculpture in the exhibition, Murmuration. Each starling is made of words, kindly loaned by Louis De Paor, from his poem Fáilte Uí Dhonnchú which portrays crowds of people walking past a homeless Romanian woman. She is surrounded yet still incredibly alone. The original Irish of De Paor’s poem becomes sculpture - the poem itself displaced, migrating, reassembled.
Developing the idea of water as a metaphor for society, the artist collected river water from across Ireland to make the ink drawings and the sculpture Effusion: observing how the water droplets have a desire to gravitate towards each other, like dew on a leaf, like people to one another.
“Being made of 60% water ourselves, this metaphor for society enchants me: Everyone is connected, part of Ireland, part of the world... but the river splits and divides; it crosses borders, emerging as streams, loughs and puddles; becoming gentrified and compartmentalised, purged and evaporated... it forgets that each droplet is part of the whole.”
There’s currently a national call-out for stories at humanarchiveproject.com, where you anonymously add your story, which will be published in a book after the exhibition.
About the artist:
Nicola Anthony (b.1984) is a visual artist based in Dublin, and an elected member of the Royal Society of Sculptors. She has been invited all over the world to work with NGOs, art institutions, and architects to create art which expresses the human experience of isolation, displacement, disconnection or disenfranchisement.
