12/4/2007
Aoife Desmond
Four, Dublin
A new site-specific garden piece, contemplative nature. It consists of a real garden displaced indoors; the garden consists of white scented flowers ranging in scale from snowdrops to apple trees.
Temporary Refuge
13th April - 26th May 2007
Preview Friday 6th April 6-8pm
For ‘Temporary Refuge’ in Four this April, Aoife Desmond will create a new site-specific garden piece. It will consist of a real garden displaced indoors; the garden will consist of white scented flowers ranging in scale from snowdrops to apple trees. A contemplative space of nature – reminiscent of a nursery or an ordinary back garden - is created. There are also connotations of Eden or Persian depictions of heaven. The title ‘Temporary Refuge’ refers to the temporal nature of the installation. There is a temporary coming together of elements, the garden, the drawings, and sculptural objects to form a fleeting feeling of place and belonging. The space is intended as a refuge and yet subtly highlights the place of nature in the city and how peripheralised it can be. There is a relationship between the interior and the exterior through outside elements such as bird tables and baths. There is an afterlife for the garden as it will be moved and replanted at an abandoned garden site close to the city center. This piece links to earlier pieces and is part of a larger body of work.
Her art practice includes drawing, research, gardening, performance, installation and site specific works. She shifts continuously between interior and exterior works. Through diverse working methods, she examines particularities of place and human interdependence with nature. In her work over the last two years she has been focusing on plants as indicators and signifiers of place. Alongside works on paper and interior wall drawings she has done several exterior drawing projects, drawing directly onto the surfaces of derelict buildings the weeds growing beside them. Recently she has used the forest as site both drawing directly onto the trees and rocks and in the studio creating a distant and imagined relationship to the forest through drawings.
She sees drawing as an extension of the performative nature of her practice; she uses it to record momentary observations and relationships. Her art practice hinges on the inter-relationships between different aspects, the live plants, the onsite drawings, the research, these parts together added up give a sense of the absent human presence which has formed them. Subtle tracings of inter-relationships in nature including human involvement become revealed and emphasised through this live working process.
Aoife Desmond received an honours degree in fine art and printmaking from Crawford College of Art and Design in 1996. Subsequently she has returned to college to do the Masters in Visual arts Practices through the Institute of Art and Design Dun Laoighaire. This masters combines three pathways; criticism, curation and art making. She specialised in art making and graduated with first class honours in 2005. She has exhibited and performed widely in Ireland and abroad. In the development of her performance work she has trained in Butoh with Tinaka Min of The Body Weather Laboratory in Japan and with numerous other dance and performance practitioners in Ireland and France.
In 1999/2000 she did a Pepineire residency In Paris for 8 months. She has received several grants from the Arts Council to travel and research in Asia. She has traveled to India, Nepal, China, Japan, Mongolia and Tibet. Her research interests were in nomadology, ritual and shamanism. Currently she is interested in the urban environment, the ecology of abandoned sites and relationships of the body to space and place. She currently lectures in visual culture studies in IADT to 2nd year animation students. The course is based on the city as metaphor.
For further details please contact Lee Welch on +353 (0) 86 365 1256
Four
11 Burgh Quay - Dublin