PLATFORM 2021 - Worlds of Their Own

PLATFORM 2021, now in its third year, is an exhibition and a series of associated performance events showcasing the work of early career artists who engage with the Gallery as a playful, experimental and creative space.

PLATFORM 2021, Worlds of Their Own presents the work of four emerging Irish artists, Susan Buttner, Ellen Duffy, John Rainey and Katherine Sankey whose installations, though conceived out of different circumstances, contexts and ideas are united in the scale of their distinctive ambitions. Their shared practice is encompassed in the term 'installation art' which involves the configuration of objects in a space often described as theatrical, experiential, immersive and which invites the viewer to step inside.

Susan Buttner works with sculpture, painting, performance, film and in collaborative contexts, to engage with bodily experiences of knowledge and power, alienation and difference. Appealing to her own sensibility, choice materials are wide-ranging, integrating industrially manufactured with crafted objects, revealing juxtapositions and co-existences. Her work is currently focused on the medical and health impacts of mesh surgery on the individual and collective body and considers the politics of female subjectivity.

Ellen Duffy describes her work as falling somewhere between expanded painting, assemblage and installation. She explores the vitality an object/material possesses once it is introduced to the network of an assemblage. She uses found/discarded materials and through her haptic process creates a dialogue between one another. Her work attempts to look at the world as existing in perpetually changing assemblages that create infinite networks. Her work speaks to the inter-reliance between objects, space and viewer.

John Rainey works with sculpture, 3D print technologies and ceramics. Through a series of classical references and using manual and digital processes, his works consider how digital cultures, advancing technologies and photographic practices can suggest new pathways for representing the body. With the aid of emerging 3D print technologies as a source for rethinking approaches to sculptural practice, his work explores recent changes to our cultural, personal and social ways of living and communicating.

Katherine Sankey employs sculpture, video, drawing and painting in her installations. Her practice explores ideas about the tendency of living things to reach into and take over an area, colonising, adapting and mutating, as a means to survive. Working with trees, roots and plumbing pipeage, as well as medical, electrical and crustacean parts, she re-shapes these conduits of flow to question our perception about the relation between bodies (human and otherwise) and ideas of ‘the natural’.