digital collage; 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Intentional Selection Collage Festival
at Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar, Co. Mayo, Ireland
8 June-7 September 2024
Curated by Anthony D. Kelly, Silvio Severino, and Una Gildea.
Collage is truly a medium for our time, allowing a practitioner to move through a process of destruction and fragmentation, into an embodied practice of reconstruction, of meaning making and repair. It is a physical enactment of making sense of the world around us, of grounding ourselves through our hands and our eyes into a present moment creative process.
Collage by its very nature is a medium that is easy to pick up and satisfying to explore. This quality alongside ease of access to necessary materials and a supportive culture of experimentation and improvisation has allowed the medium to flourish into a democratic and global artistic movement.
From their intentional selection of materials, through their intuitive choices, right on to a finished piece, the Collagist uses techniques of juxtaposition, disjunction, recontextualization, humour and surprise to transform varied source materials into something new and dynamic. Collage works weave images, text and underlying meanings together to reflect on society and politics, personal or familial history, or to convey some other new understanding about the world.
This versatility of process allows a Collagist to engage with a vast range of materials such as advertising and newspaper ephemera, historical and familial archives, scientific illustrations, fragments of textiles, wood and ceramics or anything else at hand.
To honour the versatility of this medium the Intentional Selection Festival has no unifying theme, but instead offers the audience an introduction to the range and possibility of collage as it is being practiced in Ireland today.
This festival features an exhibition of over 30 of the best collage artists practicing in Ireland today; a series of workshops catering to a wide variety of audiences; a screening of collage animation; a panel discussion and regular monthly meetings of the Connacht Collage Collective hosted at the Linenhall Arts Centre.
(text adapted from material provided by the curators)
INFORMATION
The Linenhall Arts Centre
Linenhall Street, Knockthomas
Castlebar, Co. Mayo F23 AN24 Ireland
+353 (0) 94 902 3733
Hours:
Tuesday-Friday, 10AM-5PM
Saturday, 11AM-4PM