folly and reverie
14 april - 1 may, 2010
Folly and Reverie marks the culmination of Lucy Irvine’s Master of Fine Art research and the further development of a conceptual and sculptural vocabulary in her practice.
Irvine’s studies have led her to an understanding of the modernist dichotomies that have historically defined the Western relationship to landscape; and the way this relationship, set by distinctions of nature and culture, detached observer and subject, comes to shape a knowledge of the world in which we live. “As an artist, a migrant, self -conscious of being a figure in the landscape, this opportunity of research necessitated a reprisal of what I saw and how I saw, and to question what knowing is. “
“In this regard weaving both instructs and interrogates my perception of landscape and my sense of place within it, as I seek to envisage the complex interrelations of making artwork and inhabiting an environment. “
Irvine’s intention is not to represent landscape, but to craft visual metaphors for the ever shifting awareness and intuition that forms our knowledge of landscape and the landscapes of our knowledge. At the same time it is important not to view these works as explanatory models of thinking, because weaving is a form of knowledge in itself, not simply a means of illustrating preformed ideas.
This group of woven and bronze cast sculptures, videos and photographs mark the journey towards a non-dualistic creative knowledge not of landscape but situated within it.
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