FOUR | Artists

Xylor Jane

Xylor's work draws on mathematical algorithms to make intricate and staggering installations. Deriving her patterns from often basic arthimetic exercises (such as the Fibonacci Series or prime numbers), she deals in both complexity and simplicity, finding hidden curiosities and subtle patterns amidst swarms of numbers. Her rigourous execution highlights the personal touch and commitment she brings to each piece.

Robert Carr

Robert's work to date has involved making objects from elemental building blocks, structured by a geometrical logic. He has focused his work on the use of visual rhythms, patterns and symmetries, on the effects of scale on perception, and on methods of deconstruction and reconstruction.

Paul McKinley

Paul’s new work is about perception and the complexity of cultural memory. He is interested in the idea of the landscape being a product of culture before it registers as nature and how ones sense of the landscape comes from, and is informed by, memories, myths, folklore, songs, poetry and painting.

Sujfan Stevens

A musician who plays over twenty instruments and also a fiction writer, Stevens’ guitar-based folk rock places him squarely and firmly in the category of indie pop/progressive folk/indie rock/singer-songwriter/chamber pop/lo-fi.  Within the wide range of his interests and subject matter, Stevens’ music is tightly focused, intimate and melodic. 

Isabel Nolan

Nolan’s works, which include drawings, paintings, sculpture and animation, describe a certain anxiety about understanding (or attempting to understand) life as ‘meaningful’, and the difficulty of formalising and describing experiences and ideas.

Declan Clarke

Clarke contrasts Luxemburg's beliefs with his own encounters with her life and work, and furthermore attempts to directly introduce these into his past romantic relationships.

Neil Bickerton

Neil Bickerton works with a complex variety of media including acrylic paint, chewing gum, masking tape, digital animation and sound composition. Recent works have explored interconnected human and spacial relationships.

Lorna Macintyre

Lorna Macintyre's work incorporates structural devices common to fantastic literature. Borges once claimed that the basic devices of all fantastic literature are only four in number; the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time and the double. Recent works incorporate the method of display as an essential part of the work and evolve intuitively using materials that include natural found objects, wood and enamel paint. 

Sue Tompkins

Sue Tompkins work has been described as "strung-out exercises in associative free thought: performance poetry that moves from the page to the voice, from speech to song, from song to signal, from signal to pure sound." Her work encompasses the real space of the gallery, taking the form of typewritten text, collage and painting and the temporal space of live performance, shifting between the two forms and creating a dialogue between them.

Gregor Wright

Gregor Wright is interested in the concept of information and the ways that it is transmitted. His work is an attempt to understand visual information and the language that carries it in terms of their relationship to the increasingly abstract forms (data) that exist in wider contemporary culture. His approach can be seen as an attempt to strike a balance between an additive and a subtractive process. Through the constant acquisition and subsequent stripping out of information, both visual and conceptual, the work becomes an investigation into how meaning constructs itself. Formally the work exists in the gap between figuration and abstraction, focusing on the incongruent, the banal and the darkly surreal.

Saoirse Higgins

Saoirse Higgins is an interactive media artist whose work actively implicates the viewer in referencing part of the divisive elements of the technology that delivers the ideas. Having spent periods of research in Location One in New York and The Banff Centre in Canada, Higgins is now part of the research team at the new research centre, Interface, in Belfast. Her recent work examines issues associated with the representation war and its re-telling through the eye of the lens.

Enda O'Donoghue

Enda O'Donoghue is a twenty-first century version of a process painter. His artwork distills the essence of digital communication in images that reflect the transfer of information along the information chain. Working from his studio in Berlin, O’Donoghue seeks out images in the public domain that are then treated to a labour-intensive series of manipulations – each of which being encoded into his visual image that slowly becomes the final painting.

Martin Shannon

Martin Shannon is an artist who subverts the use of urban symbols as well as art world iconography in his photographs and prints. His work cleverly exploits that which is bland and familiar to uncloak undercurrents of social disharmony with unadulterated mischief. As well as lecturing in Fine Art, Shannon is a full-time printer and photographer based in Limerick.

Ciaran Walsh

Walsh's work plays with imagined geographies and popular culture references to explore notions of escapism, confinement and the sense that perfection is always elsewhere.

Mandla Reuter

Reuter contextual installations thus systematically undercut the static character of institutional set-ups without calling those set-ups as such into question. On the contrary, interventions varying from the subtle to the provocative and shifts of conventional use query how (a) space is perceived, restructuring it and proposing alternative courses of action and viewpoints. Many of these installational works give rise to variable classification codes, which the viewer, as user, must define, for himself.

Gavin Murphy

Gavin Murphy's concerns with the human tendency toward leaving ‘heavy markers’ - recording lives and achievements - versus the ‘lightness’ of actual existence, asking the question: which is better – lightness or weight?

Andrew Vickery

Andrew Vickery's paintings are never what they seem. Their deceptively simple approach to depiction invites the viewer into a world that is cloaked in melodrama.