Events

Dave West was born in Penclawdd, South Wales and grew up in Swansea City. He graduated from the Carmarthenshire College of Art & Design and is now settled in Balbriggan, North County Dublin. This new body of work has been in progress for the past three years and has progressed to an investigation into the relationships between place, atmosphere, light and the moods or feelings they can evoke.

Dave has held nine solo shows to date including two with the Blue Leaf Gallery. He has exhibited with Eigse Arts Festival, the Royal Hibernian Academy, the Royal Ulster Academy, and in the U.K. with the Royal Society of Marine Artists and the New English Art Club. His work is featured in numerous private and public collections including the Office of Public Works, Texaco Corp. and BP. In 2007 Fingal County Council purchased a series of seven paintings for display in their newly refurbished Balbriggan Library. He is also currently studying towards a BA (hons) in the History of Art.

DAVE WEST IN CONVERSATION
Dave will discuss the exhibition and his art practice with Ian Fleming - artist, lecturer at University of Ulster, and Director of Creative Exchange Studios, on 10 March 2012 at 2.30pm. This is a free event and all are welcome.


View Exhibition Video here ... 

Born in London, Cathy Henderson grew up in Northern Ireland before moving to Paris and then to Dublin to study at NCAD from where she graduated with a Masters of Fine Art in 1993. She has since exhibited in the UK, Ireland, France and Canada.

This current body of work was made over the last two or three years all around the Irish coast. “The most dynamic and resilient influence on my landscape work is the place where land meets the sea. My aim with these pictures is to capture the transience of the coastal view, the sense of shifting skies and the constantly fluctuating mood of weather.” Cathy Henderson

In addition to her continued fascination with landscape, Cathy also focuses much time on portraiture and figurative work. In 2007 she worked as Artist in Residence in Dublin City Council and in 2009 at St James’s Hospital, Dublin. These residencies resulted in two large scale bodies of work which documented cleansing, maintenance and technical support personnel. In 2010 she joined the Blackchurch Print Studio and in the same year she received an Arts Council Artist in the Community award to fund a visual art project with a group of long-term prisoners. She was recently awarded a commission, jointly with Robert Ballagh, to design a commemorative artwork to celebrate the centenary of the 1913 Lockout and the establishment of the ITGWU. Her work is in numerous private and public collections including the Ulster Museum, ESB and Queens University Belfast.

View Exhibition Video here ... 

These tours are intended to facilitate the understanding of what your students can see in the gallery and encourage students to explore and to voice their opinions about what the artist is doing, or issues raised by the artists work. If you would like your class to visit please contact Sarah on 01 8852622 to arrange a short tour. Tours are free and where possible can include a tour of the whole building. Class numbers are restricted to 25 students with accompanying teacher.

Join Fil Campbell for this nostalgic and affectionate tribute to the Irish folk songs that generations of Irish grew up with, a mix of popular Irish songs and stories from the 30s and 40s that were recorded by women like Delia Murphy, Bridie Gallagher and Mary O’Hara. The songs from Fil’s most recent CD, Songbirds Part Two: Farewell to Cold Winter as well as from her earlier recordings are guaranteed to have you singing along in chorus on songs like the Old Maid in the Garrett and The Spinning Wheel, Love’s Old Sweet Song, Let Him Go Let Him Tarry and many more old favourites. Fil is joined by Brendan Emmett on guitar and mandolin and by Tom McFarland on vocals and percussion, for this her first appearance at Draíocht.

 Early Bird: €9 (book before 31 Mar 2012)

Bealtaine Price: €9

This is a Hip Hop Dance Show for all the family to enjoy. Fit Kids and Fit Teens Dance Schools have been running in Blanchardstown for 26 years and have performed in Draiocht many times. This end of term show gives the children a chance to showcase all their hard work as they dance to some of our favourite tunes from the past, including tracks by Michael Jackson, Will Smith and Run DMC.

Friday 1 June / 7pm
Saturday 2 June / 2pm & 7pm

Join the cast of Starkids as they take you on exciting journey. The first half of their show will be packed full of Musical numbers and extracts from the Wizard of OZ, Charlie and the Chocolate factory and Alice in Wonderland. During the second half they will cover show dances and songs from Las Vegas with numbers from Dream Girls, Marlin Monroe and Elvis Presley to mention but a few. This will be a fast paced, show stopping production, one for all the family. 

Celebrated Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda directs this Oscar-nominated drama detailing the harrowing events surrounding the 1940 massacre of captured Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest. A unique blend of conventional narrative and documentary-style filmmaking, Katyn opens in the spring of 1940, just as the Soviet Secret police execute a group of Polish officers. Flash forward to January 18, 1945: Cracow is liberated by the Red Army, and propagandist newsreels from the Soviet Union blame German forces for the massacre at Katyn. It is at that point that the fine line between collaboration and resistance is blurred. As the details surrounding the massacre gradually begin to emerge, Wajda reveals precisely how this horrifying massacre unfolded.

After The Great Scaldwood developed out of a yearlong residency at Draίocht.

Central to Byrne’s work is an exploration of the past in terms of former histories of current sites. Byrne has focussed on two sites in particular, the Blanchardstown centre where Draίocht is located and the Dunsink Observatory, 5 kilometres away.  Through research and site visits, Byrne uncovered aspects of the location’s history in the 17th century which revealed The Great Scaldwood. This ancient forest stretched from the river Tolka to beyond Coolmine and was inhabited by wild boar and wolves until an extensive wolf cull made the wolf population in Ireland extinct.

Byrne links the past with the present in drawings such as Trace and Trail and The Great Scaldwood and in the Wolfcull series of paintings. In Trace and Trail, we can see faint apparitions of wolves passing in front of the entrance to the Blanchardstown centre. The Great Scaldwood refers to the ancient forest, but here we see trees from the immediate urban area and a sign for the forest created using type from a selection of shop fronts.

The Moonrock series of drawings depicts a story that emerged from research into the Dunsink Observatory. After the Apollo11 expedition to the moon, two pieces of lunar rock were presented to Ireland, one of which was kept at the Observatory. A fire at the Observatory in 1977 led to debris from the building being dumped in the adjacent landfill. It is thought that the lunar rock is buried somewhere within the landfill.

The drawings are made with fine line drawing pens and Indian ink on Polyart paper. Byrne experiments with the materials, allowing the ink to flow across the paper and under masking tape which is removed and drawn over when dry. Layers of ink and water are applied in a succession of drips, sprays and splashes. Similarly the paintings are made up of layers of paint which are sanded back and repainted a number of times.

Byrne graduated with first class honours from NCAD in Fine Art Painting in 2003 and a Postgraduate Diploma in Art and Design Education in 2011. Previous exhibitions include Town and Country Monster Truck Gallery and Studios (2009), Amharc Fhine Gall – It's All in the Detail, curated by Caroline Cowley, Draíocht (2008), Winter Salon, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios (2008), Hi-Vis Across The Way (2008). Other Residency awards include the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Monaghan and SÍM, Reykjavík, Iceland. 

Web: www.deirdrebyrne.com

Read Des Kenny's chat with Deirdre here ...

Poised, elegant and sophisticated; Keehan’s depiction of the nude harmonises the academic tradition with gentle intimacy. Through the medium of Indian ink on paper, she gives a fluid lightness to the subject. Controlled and deliberate brush marks are juxtaposed beside happy instances of drips and bleeds, with watermarks giving life and movement to the subjects. The drawings are taken beyond the study of the human form and the models expression and identity come to life. Life drawing is seen as one of the enduring and most difficult themes in visual arts. Keehan’s approach is both expressive and considered, a complimentary extension of Keehan’s other work in oil paint. 

Born in Limerick in 1978. Keehan graduated from Byam Shaw School of Art (University of the Arts London) in 2004 with a MA in Fine Art, after completing a BA(Hons) Fine Art Painting in 2002 from Limerick School of Art and Design. Keehan has exhibited widely including London, Berlin and extensively through Ireland, including solo shows ‘Shimmeriing Synthetic Appearances; I Want To Put You Back In’ at Queen Street Studios Gallery, Belfast in January 2012 and ‘Lookie Likie; Mimetic Protagonist’ at The Molesworth Gallery in 2011. Keehan won the Merit Award in The Golden Fleece Award 2012. She is exhibiting in this years RHA Annual, and in January 2012 she started a six month residency in the RHA Studios. In 2010 Keehan undertook a residency in Takt Berlin. She now lives and works in Dublin.

This is a unique opportunity to see two of Irelands finest stand up’s performing live together in one explosive show. As well as starring in the ‘The Savage Eye’ John Colleary is a writer and performer of TODAY FM comedy slot ‘Last Orders’. Colleary’s credits also include ‘Stand And Deliver’, ‘Naked Camera, Project Ha-Ha.(RTE2) and popular BBC comedy show ‘One Night Stand’.

Quick Vid ... 

Patrick McDonnell seems to have been involved in all that has been good about Irish Television comedy in the last decade. As well as ‘The Savage Eye’, Patrick has created memorable characters in ‘Naked Camera’, ‘Val Falvey TD’, Stew’ and of course ‘Father Ted’, when he brought to life the wonderful Eoin McLove.

Quick Vid ...