Perhaps Our Awakening Is Our Deeper Dream by Thomas Brezing is an exploration of human mortality, made in the wake of the death of the artist’s mother.
While the exhibition’s run in our Project Space was unfortunately cut short by the latest Covid-19 restrictions, Thomas has used the documentation photographs by Simon Mills to create this new short film tour of the artworks, with unique insight into its creation and his inspirations.
About the Exhibition
The exhibition consisted of works on paper – incorporating drawing, painting, print, poetic texts and collage – as well as four large artist books and an installation which quietly address fundamental existential questions: the transience, impermanence and fragile nature of our lives (and selves). The range of media and of modes of presentation reflects the artist’s interest in investigating different kinds of image-making and different ways of representing self, other, and the ties that bind us and which are loosed by death. This formal exploration mirrors the philosophical preoccupations captured in the exhibition’s title: the nature of consciousness, of reality itself.
The title image presents a central motif of the exhibition in which birds – creatures of both earth and sky – are emblems of grounded transcendence.
About the Artist:
Thomas Brezing is a Dublin based multi-disciplinary artist. His choice and use of materials is often intuitive, the product of experiment and improvisation. He enjoys allowing the work evolve on its own terms so that over time it finds its own form and determines its finished state. Time, loss, memory, absence are abiding concerns, as is his investigation of the nature of identity and, for him, the umbilical connections between his ‘German past’ and his ‘Irish present’.
About the Curator:
Sharon Murphy is an artist and curator based in Dublin. She has commissioned public art in a range of contexts and been curator-in-residence at Draíocht Art Centre since 2017. Murphy has curated and produced large and small-scale visual art projects and exhibitions in both gallery and public art contexts since 2009. Her work as a curator at Draíocht has been committed to the practice of emerging and mid-career artists and has focused on interdisciplinary practice, visual culture/new technologies, performance and work for children and young people.
