Join us on Tuesday 16th October at 7pm for an evening of talks by shortlisted artists from our Graduate Award, Ashling Smith and Emma Hopkins, alongside Graduate Award Recipient, Olivia Normile. This is a free event.
Ashling Smith is an emerging Digital Media Artist and Creative Designer whose practice encompasses video, photography, sound and sculpture. She graduated in 2018 with an Honours Degree in Creative Digital Media from the Institute of Technology, Blanchardstown. Her degree show ‘Vision’ attracted particular attention and won her Draíocht’s inaugural ‘Creative Digital Media Award’ which will lead to a solo exhibition as part of ‘Platform 2019′ in Draiocht. Primarily concerned with a combination of digital media and large-scale sculpture, Ashling’s practice incorporates still and moving imagery, sound, and vocal testimony, She is interested in gathering personal narratives that explore the boundary of the real and the imagined in relation to specific communities and places. Interviews and conversations with people working in various professions become a catalyst for developing digital installations that explore the relationship between time and memory, place and identity. Her work is immersive and meditative.
Olivia Normile graduated with a BA in Visual Arts from IADT in 2018. She was longlisted for the RDS Visual Arts Awards and is the recipient of the Ormond Studios Graduate Award 2018. Olivia’s work explores the space and boundaries between image, object and idea. Surface tensions recur in her work evident through a rough, agitated quality to edges and appearances. Through combining handmade objects with animated forms of themselves, she attempts to expose an unseen tension and quiet dialogue between the definite and unseen. By capturing the motions of making and transforming them into solid ‘stills’, she reveals lone moments within a process. In turn, private environments and passageways form for these animated moments to exist and survive. Developing an affinity for unassuming yet prevailing characters in various narratives, she is drawn to the influences they have on their surroundings. Somewhat lowly, humble creatures who contain traces of divinity, existing on the threshold between reality and unknown depths. This dialogue between the physical and the fleeting is revealed through repetitious mark-making, extracted to become singular and static.
Emma Hopkins’ work explores the everyday spaces we inhabit and the spatial practices we produce in them. It arises from her interest in how architects and planners think about space in three dimensions. This has lead to the creation of installations that adapt and change in scale depending upon the interior architecture of a particular place. Emma also use photography to document different spaces, domestic and industrial. This is an aid for the structures she creates which use the language of painting to communicate elements of interior and exterior spaces. The idea of ‘construction-deconstruction-reconstruction’ is an important part of her work as each society is producing and reproducing space to meet new needs and functions. Therefore, she is interested in how language is used to describe specific spaces and spatial practices. Language also allows us to imagine the body in a space. As there is already a mental image associated to the word ‘kitchen’, for example, there is an expectation of how such a space is used: how our bodies move around that space, the specific objects and structures inhabiting this space. Emma sees all of these elements as contributions to what she calls “performing space”.
Ormond Art Studios 