below explanation (clocks stop at 3pm and existence continues)
A solo exhibition by Teresa Gillespie
Emerging Visual Artist Award Recipient 2013
In association with Wexford County Council and the Arts Council
Monday 12th January – Saturday 7th Feburary, 2015
Opening Reception: Saturday 17th January at 2pm
Artist Teresa Gillespie in conversation with curator Catherine Bowe
Followed by a wine reception
Wexford Arts Centre is delighted to present below explanation (clocks stop at 3pm and existence continues), an exhibition of new work by Dublin-based contemporary artist and recipient of the Emerging Visual Artist Award 2013, Teresa Gillespie. As a joint initiative between the Arts Council, Wexford County Council and Wexford Arts Centre, the aim of the Emerging Visual Artist Award is to recognise and support the development of promising and committed visual artists in Ireland.
Gillespie’s exhibition of new work continues her exploration of the tension between containment and continuity. Prompted by her extended exploration of film critic Vivian Sobchack’s paper The Passion of the Material, the work has emerged alongside re-reading the modernist novel Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre. Of particular interest to Gillespie is the protagonist’s attempt to restrain and petrify ‘irrational existence’ through temporal, lexical and perceptual categories. The work has also been influenced by the novel’s prevalent metamorphoses of bodies and things into creaturely matter that stirs between the animate and inanimate, the ‘flabby’ and the encased.
The installation, incorporating primarily sculpture and video, plays with an ambiguity between attraction and repulsion, and the process of enfolding and unfolding. Marked by a studio limitation; reducing incoming material to work with the excess already accumulated and reducing outgoing material through reincorporation; the sculptural work has included the stripping, ripping and wrapping of previous works into new works. While punctuated by performed actions, the video work employs a blind or haptic camera. Bumping into and fumbling along surfaces, the camera struggles to frame things and locate itself, as it becomes absorbed in the recesses of the environments it moves through. Continuing her manner of navigating space and crossing surfaces, the components expand and withdraw into the exhibition space drawing the viewer through a layered environment.
Teresa Gillespie has enjoyed solo exhibitions in her home town of Dublin and internationally. Recent exhibitions include return to the borderland bends, John Jones Project Space in Finsbury Park, London, 2014; rogue occupation, for Art Lot, 2013, inside an outside (tracing the shadows of a strange attractor), 2013, Residencia Corazon, Buenos Aires; among objects, 2012, The Joinery, Dublin; and along the borderland bends, 2011, The Return Gallery, Dublin. She has been the recipient of many prestigious awards aside from the Wexford Arts Centre Emerging Artist Award, 2013, including the Arts Council Ireland Visual Arts Bursary Award, 2012, The RCA Society and Thames and Hudson Prize, 2006, and Scottish Arts Council Lottery Grant, 2002. Gillespie graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2001 and received her Master of Arts from the Royal College of Art in London in 2006.
For further information on the artist or the Emerging Visual Art Award please contact Catherine Bowe, Visual Arts Manager, Wexford Arts Centre, Cornmarket, Wexford on +353 (0)53 91 23764 or email catherine@wexfordartscentre.ie.
