To launch the 2024 artistic season The Gallery Café, Gort will host their first exhibition by Artists Leonie King and Sioban Piercy.
The exhibition will officially open on Sunday, February 18 at 7pm. The two local artist, who are living in Oranmore and Athenry, have both lectured in the Art and Design Department at ATU as well as exhibiting together as members of the AKIN Artist Collective.
The two initiated the imPRESSions Original Print Biennial together which was a regular feature of the Galway International Arts Festival.
Since college Leonie King has travelled extensively, having spent time in South America, India, and Morocco.
Foreign images and colours are brought home and blended with those of the Irish landscape: its patterns and textures and mists.
An awareness of the past transparently overlaid on the present is part of the underlying notion of her work and pertains to the sense of eternity, stretching both backwards and forwards.
Her work is an endless balancing of dynamics, of coloured texture over variant coloured texture. Her inspiration comes from an interaction of the emotional with reflections of the surrounding area, both present and past.
The effervescent colour changes of the sea and land transpose themselves into multi-layered prints that are responses to a communing with soil, rock, and that which ekes out an existence on it, and underneath the surface of the earth.
Leonie has exhibited nationally and internationally Including the Royal Academy Summer Show.
Sioban Piercy makes sculptures that she refers to as ‘books’ and her work is an enquiry into the construction we call ‘a book’. She is intrigued by this object that we use to tell stories to ourselves about ourselves.
She draws our attention to the book as a physical thing made of unassuming materials such as paper and ink, but at the same time how both can be used to manifest something other than they are.
Sioban’s work goes to where these assemblages of modest bits and pieces become contraptions of our meaning-making and are transmuted into structures of imagination and self-explanation.
For this exhibition she is showing a series of drawings which are studies for a new set of books she is presently working on.
In these, she plays with our perceptions by making marks that suggest writing or a handwritten text but in fact are documenting the world – in this case seascapes- in quite a different way. In so doing toys with our ‘reading’ of the drawing and the book.
The exhibition runs for two months from 18 February at The Gallery Café, The Square, Gort, Co. Galway and is open during restaurant hours. See www.thegallerycafegort.com for more information.
