Engineering Reading Room, Earlsfort Terrace
Engineering Reading Room, Earlsfort Terrace,
Oil and Digital Print Transfer on Traditional Gesso Panel
My practice is informed by architectural space, with the former UCD Medical School at Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin, providing source material for my current body of work. Although I studied there in the past, my recent visits to the building were not prompted by nostalgia, but rather by a curiosity as to how the spaces had reinvented themselves during the intervening years. The incongruity of a dissection room becoming a rehearsal space for a musical score entitled ‘cohesion’, becomes the subject of one painting in the series. Others use layers of oil paint to undermine the photographic elements of the paintings, and perspective is skewed to allude to how memory alters our sense of place.
Between 1981 and 2007, the worlds of the National Concert Hall, and UCD medical school, coexisted at Earlsfort Terrace. Students in the library were treated to, or distracted by, muffled classical music through the walls, and concertgoers were confused by the librarian’s bell-ringing to indicate that the library was closing. Former students such as Olivia O’Leary have related stories that illustrate that UCD’s past is indeed a foreign country. She tells of a time when women were not allowed to wear trousers in UCD and of this ban being lifted in 1968 when all female students turned up in jeans in protest at the ban. Other graduates recall a time when files of silent Clerical students were not required to queue for their lunches in the canteen as other students did.
In examining the discord between the abandoned spaces at Earlsfort Terrace and their rich social history, I choose a visual language that works with the tension between the fixity of torn digital prints, and the chance movement of fluid oil paint.
Oil and Digital Print Transfer on Traditional Gesso Panel
My practice is informed by architectural space, with the former UCD Medical School at Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin, providing source material for my current body of work. Although I studied there in the past, my recent visits to the building were not prompted by nostalgia, but rather by a curiosity as to how the spaces had reinvented themselves during the intervening years. The incongruity of a dissection room becoming a rehearsal space for a musical score entitled ‘cohesion’, becomes the subject of one painting in the series. Others use layers of oil paint to undermine the photographic elements of the paintings, and perspective is skewed to allude to how memory alters our sense of place.
Between 1981 and 2007, the worlds of the National Concert Hall, and UCD medical school, coexisted at Earlsfort Terrace. Students in the library were treated to, or distracted by, muffled classical music through the walls, and concertgoers were confused by the librarian’s bell-ringing to indicate that the library was closing. Former students such as Olivia O’Leary have related stories that illustrate that UCD’s past is indeed a foreign country. She tells of a time when women were not allowed to wear trousers in UCD and of this ban being lifted in 1968 when all female students turned up in jeans in protest at the ban. Other graduates recall a time when files of silent Clerical students were not required to queue for their lunches in the canteen as other students did.
In examining the discord between the abandoned spaces at Earlsfort Terrace and their rich social history, I choose a visual language that works with the tension between the fixity of torn digital prints, and the chance movement of fluid oil paint.
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