Cavanacor Gallery

 

‘Mindscape’ – Group Exhibition at Cavanacor Gallery

Painting, Print and Sculpture

Eamon O’Kane, Anita Taylor, Felim Egan, Joanna O’Kane, Brian Ballard, Jim Savage, Bernadette Madden and Eddie O’Kane

Nov 11^th 2001 – Jan 30^th 2002

 ‘Mindscape’ is open to multivalent interpretation.  The familiar combinational form of ‘scape’ denotes a specified type of scene and is derived from ‘landscape,’ a term coined in the late sixteenth century from Middle Dutch ‘lantscap’ which describes a picture of natural scenery.  Mindscape suggests each artist’s empiricism where the creative result is inspired by the impact of observation on the senses.  It can be chimerical or plausible depending on individual interpretation.  It also indicates the persistence of memory and the fact that the artist selects from a storehouse of imagery within the vaults of the imagination so that providence plays a part.  There is also a fanciful, almost wishful quality to the mindset where the individual creator is entitled to present material in any manner he/she chooses.

This group exhibition at Cavanacor sees each practitioner responding to their imagination in different ways.  Eamon O’Kane combines painted lists of names and objects with memories from his own mindscape to provide an individual statement.  Anita Taylor’s investigation of psyche issues a series of realist bodyscapes with a unique figurative expression.  Felim Egan welcomes the empirical process and consequently provides a sensual abstraction primarily inspired by sound and music.  Joanna O’Kane, like Egan, incorporates impressions of myth and music left in her recollection and allows these to act as a point of departure that finds expression in the flow of her sculptural materials.  Brian Ballard’s introspection results in protracted observation becoming a unique interpretation of light and colour.  Jim Savage interrogates aspects of the landscape through his creative mindscape and his monochromatic drawings reflect the process in their ethereal realism.  Bernadette Madden applies her vision to interpret familiar landscape through the medium of batik.  Eddie O’Kane examines his everyday environment and his paintings act as testimony to the fleeting, ephemeral moment. His intimate landscapes have a luminescence and mystery akin to Rousseau.

Anita Taylor was born in Cheshire.  She studied Fine Art at Gloucestershire College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London.  She was artist in Residence at Durham Cathedral 1987-8 and is Head of School of Fine Art in Cheltenham & Gloucester College of Higher Education. Among her many awards are the First Prize in the Hunting Art Prizes, Royal College of Art, London and the Cheltenham Open Drawing Exhibition Major Award. She has exhibited extensively.

Born in Manchester, Jim Savage studied at the Manchester School of Art and the Slade School of Art, London.  He is currently lecturing at Limerick School of Art & Design.  Savage has exhibited widely at the Vanguard Gallery Cork, the Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick, the Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff and internationally in Holland, Belgium and Russia.  

Felim Egan was born in Strabane and studied painting at The Slade School of Art, London.  Egan’s work has been shown extensively at the Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Douglas Hyde, and the Kerlin, Dublin, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.  He won the Premier UNESCO Prize for the Arts in Paris in 1993.  He is represented in many private and corporate collections including IMMA, Deutsche Bank, OPW and the European Parliament.

Brian Ballard was born in Belfast and attended the Belfast College of Art and the Liverpool College of Art.  He has exhibited in the Solomon Gallery, London, the Tom Caldwell, Belfast, the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Trist Ann’s Gallery, Dundalk.  He spends long periods of time on the island of Inishfree.

His work is included in a number of collections; Arts Council of Northern Ireland, PJ Carroll & Co, Ulster Museum and the Cork Municipal Art Gallery, AIB, and the National Trust.

Bernadette Madden studied at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. To date she has had over thirty four solo exhibitions and has taken part in notable group exhibitions. She has been the recipient of the MacAuley Fellowship in Painting and the Department of Education Scholarship to Paris. Her batik work is housed in many corporate collections including: Aer Rianta, the Office of Public Works, Bank of Ireland, ESB, Aer Lingus, Anglo-Irish Bank, AXA Insurance, Citibank and the Arts Council.

Joanna O’Kane studied sculpture in Belfast at the College of Art.  Her figures are delicate and graceful.  Just as Kandinsky focused on the movement and controlled force of music to create his compositions, so O’Kane uses this impetus to manipulate and direct the flow of her clay and glass fibre.  It is this emotion and energy generated by the music that she transfers to the three-dimensional. Joanna has exhibited in The Royal Ulster Academy, the Bienale at Faenza and Paris and the Oireachtas.

Eddie O’Kane studied Fine Art in the College of Art in Belfast and is a Lecturer in Letterkenny Institute of Technology.  Although to date he has worked primarily in watercolour, his recent work has been in acrylic.  His work shows an affinity with nature and his familiar surroundings.  The use of colour is powerful and vibrant creating a luminosity and mystery in his work.  Eddie has exhibited in the Oireachtas, the Royal Ulster Academy and has works in numerous collections including the Royal Apartments at Hillsborough, the Office of Public Works and the Donegal County Council Art Collection.

Eamon O’Kane recently completed a Fulbright Scholarship at Parson’s School of Art & Design, New York.  Much of his work comes from a mixture of sources inspired by Franz Kafka’s book ‘America.’  Kafka never visited the USA but wrote his text from secondary source material and so Eamon also plays with the notion of appearance and reality.  In a similar fashion some of these works are painted from photographs taken by Eamon while in the States, others from images in books and the internet.  It is left up to the viewer to decide on the historical origin of the painted image. Eamon has exhibited extensively with 15 solo shows in Ireland, Sweden, Denmark and the U.S.A.

He won the Tony O’Mally travel award and the Taylor Art and has represented Ireland in the Florence Biennale and Sothebys ‘Artlink’ in Chicago and Tel Aviv.