Meet the artists!
The Collision Project 2024
Hello, lovely subscribers and happy April to you all!
Our twelve-week collaboration project, The Collision Project*, has been up and running for several weeks now, with our participating pairs engaging fruitfully with their remote collaborations.
* The Collision Project is an initiative that facilitates collaborative pairings between early career artists, celebrating the open-ended, playful and process-driven experimentation of artists working in tandem. A panel of four creative practitioners carefully peer-curated two pairs from an open-call participation pool. Pairs were matched based on thoughtful commonalities and exciting divergences.
We will be facilitating an online exhibition of collaboration outcomes from May 6th, and an in-person event at Unit 44 in Dublin on May 16th, save the date!
Today I am sharing information about the wonderful participating artists, alongside curatorial notes as to why these matches were made…should be of interest to those who enjoy thinking about how varied practices can fuse.
Holly Pickering + Djuna O’Neill
Holly Pickering is a visual artist from Waterford based in Dublin. Her practice moves between the mediums of film, sound, and sculptural installations which are often oriented around experimental texts and fictional narratives. Her practice explores feelings of desire and defeat which arise in our attempts to express the weight of individual experience via language.
Recent work includes, There is no backdoor to your character, Dublin Art Book Fair (2023), forefinger;pointer;guiding principle Muine Bheag Arts, Carlow (2023), and solo show Amanuensis at Ormond Art Studios, Dublin (2022). Recent awards include the Ormond Art Studios Recent Graduate Award (2022) and the Garter Lane Film Artist Residency Award (2022).
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Djuna O’Neill is an Irish, London - based artist who works across text, digital mediums and mixed media sculpture. Her current work draws on themes of Irish folklore, concepts of world building found in gaming environments and science fiction, and the hauntological as a tool for exhuming untold stories and building future imaginaries. Djuna was awarded the warden’s prize at the Goldsmiths MA degree show, exhibiting with the inaugural year of the MA Art and Ecology in 2022. Since then she has been commissioned to create a body of work for a solo exhibition at Flatland Projects, Bexhill-on-Sea, with curator Fran Painter Fleming and supported by the De La Warr Pavilion. During the development of this commission Djuna received support from the Discovery Programme, Centre for Archaeology and Innovation Ireland, to repurpose archeological 3D lidar scan data. Djuna’s practice conveys an archeology of mediums of storytelling; following threads of folklore which have continued from one intangible form to another.
Curatorial notes on this match:
Djuna and Holly are both reflective of communication and shared knowledge. They have a source material focus, and literary, filmic, mixed-material and folkloric interests. Gesture, touch, connection and distance. Both are looking at language and narrative in various ways. How we exist and communicate/way-find through the physical and digital world. How we translate and exchange information, be that in the online space, through handwritten text or folklore and storytelling. Both are concerned with comparing the failures and successes of both new and old methods of communication, and the distances that exist within each method. The chosen making methods of each artist also pair well, with both artists taking their work to and from the physical and digital realms. Both reflecting on past skills/ideas, refreshing their current thinking by revisiting old works. Potential for an exciting collision here, reflective thinking and forward momentum, we can see that they are meeting each other halfway already.
Leda Scully + Lily O’Shea
Leda Scully is an artist based in Dublin and a recent graduate of the Art in the Contemporary World MFA, NCAD (2023). Her multidisciplinary and collaborative practice is weighted toward painting but incorporates writing and installation. Her work explores the ways in which we experience the world and how we translate these impressions to ourselves in private, divergent ways. Drawing on a personal lexicon of imagery, she examines the relationships between memory, affect, and association, and the gaps or slippages between them. Recent projects include Pallas for Palestine, The Bank, Dublin (2024), Intangible Atmospheres at the Solstice Arts Centre, Navan and Flower Burial, MFA show at the Annex, Dublin (2023), Caesura, Unit44 (2022). Her work is held in public and private collections.
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Lily O’Shea is a multidisciplinary artist based between Galway and Cork. Her practice interrogates political questions surrounding labour, home and productivity. Through sculpture and text, her work delves into the anxieties caused by the impossibility of situating oneself anywhere in Ireland. She explores parallels between housing and creativity, honing in on the lack of stable space which conflicts with the demand for artistic productivity. As an artist based in Ireland, this research has come about within the greater context of the housing crisis, this has been unavoidable in the production of all work whether conscious or not. The research draws from reality tv, fiction and unfinished artworks to gather potential strategies against burnout and uncertainty. Lily received her BA from Crawford College of Art and Design in 2020 and has since participated in residencies and exhibitions in Ireland. She is currently a co-director at 126 Artist-run Gallery, Galway.
Curatorial notes on this match:
Memory, space, place, feeling. Humour when dealing with heavier subjects, grief, housing crisis, loneliness, nostalgia through fictional characters, films, writing. Personal world building and character creation. I feel as though I can “read” Leda’s work similarly to reading Lily’s works. They are both distilling larger existential universal experiences into personal spaces. I can see a similar line of inquiry in terms of subject matter with both artists exploring a period of instability or change in one’s life. Both Lily and Leda draw on personal anecdotes or experience in order to express feeling of emptiness and longing while also looking to fiction and nostalgia for inspiration. I am excited by both artists' fresh approach to artmaking with both having some traditional art making techniques against some very unconventional making methods. To speak playfully, Leda’s practice gives a beautiful sense that you could hold it in your hand, solid and round, delicate and weighted. Lily’s practice gives the sense that you could spread it out across a table, various shapes, exciting, multimodal, and dynamic. Both artists blending ideas from the head and the heart. Writing is where they might begin.
Information is also on our site: https://www.screenservice.ie
In other news, we will be announcing some really exciting online workshops soon, (sign-ups will be available here first!)
Until then!!
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