These Days are Persistent and Changeable
Curated by Peter Richards; featuring artistis: Martin Boyle; and Lorraine Burrell
The juxtaposition of the real with the imaginary has been of constant interest to Golden Thread Gallery and has led to the realisation of this exhibition, These Days are Persistent and Changeable.
Considering the sculptural potential of the everyday, the practices of Martin Boyle and Lorraine Burrell root themselves within the small, incidental moments in life that we sometimes neglect. Developed in strands and through disparate sources, the indeterminate, in-progress objects they produce appear to hover, bound together only at the point of exhibition.
Martin Boyle will present a video installation of a work made on a recent residency in Japan. There will also be a selection of photographic works where Boyle uses the “real” to highlight the “surreal” in a variety of situations. Martin Boyle makes connections between images by identifying sequences in banal everyday subject matter, dissolving notions of originality and ownership; instead projecting an absurd sense of order onto the visual chaos of daily life.
Lorraine Burrell’s work explores the challenges of photographic self-portraiture: how much to reveal about one’s identity and how much to hide? Burrell suggests that the use of constructed props made from everyday materials that drape, hang or enclose the body enable her to play with the contradictory notions of revealing/disguising, private/public: these handmade props themselves becoming a way of transforming and transcending herself, a way of finding something ‘other’. This new work, made for the Golden Thread Gallery, consists of a series of discarded vinyl billboards collected over several months. These billboards are all image and surface: conveyors of aspirations, from the fast, expensive car to the beautiful jewel-adorned woman.
Concurrently encouraging the viewer to re-examine their own observational principles whilst dissolving any initial reading, the works presented as part of These Days are Persistent and Changeable balance humour with introspection.
About the artists:
Martin Boyle assembles images and objects in a playful and performative manner. This direct method of working, poaching already existing objects, is presented through photography, installation and sculptural pieces of irrelevant things that go unnoticed.
The concept of the work often ties into the process of the encounter, with the potential for things to be read in other ways; or be revealed differently under different conditions. Through absurd conceptual interventions, he assigns meaning which comments on human behaviour in society.
Martin Boyle(b.1982, Donegal, Ireland) lives and works in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He completed a Masters of Fine Art in 2008 at the University Of Ulster, Belfast, and a BA Honours from the Limerick School of Art and Design.
Recent Work include Snap, Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda, Ireland (2016); Human body’ accident, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (2015); Existence of flamethrowers in your street, G126, Galway, Ireland (2015); Everyting’s Connected, Art Centre Ongoing, Tokyo, Japan (2014); Genuine Replica, Ulster Museum, Belfast (2013); Scope Art Fair, New York (2013); Instances of Agreement, Kao Yuan Arts Centre, Taiwan (2012).
Lorraine Burrell. My practice is concerned with documenting the (my) female body in a variety of spaces, including my home, garden, and studio. Using photography and video as a documentation tool, I record the body as a conveyor and site for ideas relating to physical and psychological space. Through the act of trying to describe, and the process of stripping back visual information within the image, I try to create a space to be filled with something else.
Photographing myself has always been challenging in the context of revealing my identity. As a consequence of this tug between what to expose and what to hide, I began to construct props that I wore to cover myself. This ploy allows me to convey contradictory notions of revealing/disguising, private/public.
The work has two intertwining themes: one is my relationship to photography and how and why I choose to photograph myself; and the other is the idea of a buffer or defence against something both physical and emotional.
Burrell is from Belfast where she lives and works. She completed an MFA at the University of Ulster in 2005. Burrell has exhibited both nationally and internationally most recently in To Camera, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, 2015 Little Kingdoms, Catalyst Arts, 2014, Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art, Golden Thread Gallery,2013, EverydaySelves, Belfast Exposed, 2012, This little bag of dreams, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, 2011, Mostyn Open, Oriel Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno, Wales 2011, and Studies, Third Space Gallery, Belfast 2010.
Supported by Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Belfast City Council