Curated by Sharon Murphy
Worlds of Their Own is the third in Draíocht Gallery’s PLATFORM series of exhibitions which showcases the work of early career artists and emergent practices. This exhibition presents the work of four 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, performance, film and in collaborative contexts. Her artistic practice is a delicate evaluation of power relations, revealing tensions and forces by combining static elements, while highlighting the borderless, transgressive aspect of institutional critique. Working with a group of women, sharing experiences of vulnerability and suffering, Chewing gum in my hair, addresses Mesh Implant Surgery, the on-going complications, often life limiting, the impact on the individual and collective body and the politics of female subjectivity. Buttner is from Fingal and was Draíocht’s Studio Artist in Residence 2020/21.
Ellen Duffy works across sculptural assemblage, installation and more recently through mixed media works on paper. Her work playfully explores the vitality an object/material possesses once it is introduced to the network of an assemblage. Duffy looks at the world as existing in perpetually changing assemblages that create infinite networks. She enters into a dialogue between the work, the space and the viewer and it is here she seeks to find the tension between these inter-reliant components. Duffy is from Tyrrelstown, Dublin 15 and will be Draíocht’s Studio Artist in Residence 2022.
John Rainey works with sculpture and installation. He makes reinterpretations and remakes of familiar forms using both old and new methods of object making; a combination of traditional casting processes in materials like porcelain, with digital fabrication technologies such as 3D printing. His sculptures, emerging from periods of working back and forth between physical and digital worlds, explore how digital cultures and advancing technologies shape new approaches for representing the body. Rainey is a Belfast based artist where he is a member of Flax Art Studios.
Katherine Sankey employs sculpture, video, drawing, painting and sound. Her sculpture uses living plant tissue and human supply lines to engage in the geo-feminist conversation about what we gouge and suck out of the planet. It examines mutation and the human extractive machine of supply and power in a multi species context. Sankey’s new site-specific work for Draíocht entitled Moduscopic, is also about how we humans engage with the utility aspects of our buildings/habitats. Sankey is a Dublin based artist and is currently Draíocht’s Studio Artist
in Residence (June 2021 – Jan 2022).
The exhibition is accompanied by a series of short films each featuring the four exhibiting artists and the curator. These were created by filmmakers, Joe Lee and Tom Lee and commissioned by Draíocht and will be released over the course of the exhibition.