Artists: John Behan, Katherine Beug, Basil Blackshaw, Patrick Collins, Barrie Cooke, Jill Dennis, Billy Foley, Martin Gale, Albert Irvin, Brian Lalor, Anne Madden, Charlie Tyrell, and Nancy Wynne-Jones
Curated by Fiona Kearney
Ireland is divided into fields. Our countryside is a patchwork landscape of lush green grass and wet brown bog, thorny hedgerow and stony ground. Ireland’s artists and writers have long engaged with the land as a creative subject. Taking its title from a poem by Seamus Heaney, this exhibition of work from the University College Cork Art Collection presents a selection of paintings and sculpture that invite you to “see deeper into the country than you expected”.
The imaginative power of art can make surprising even the most ordinary of fields, and Heaney’s poem celebrates these moments of vision, and the quiet education of looking. It is an invitation to view the world from an artists’ perspective and find out for yourself the power of careful observation. The verdant scenery and contested boundary lines of the Irish landscape are part of our island’s visual heritage.
Field of Vision explores the different ways in which artists in the UCC Art Collection have interpreted the rural countryside and coastal geographies of Ireland. Some artists concentrate on the detail of every blade of grass and slate grey rock, while others take a bird’s eye view of a terrain where shapes and colours merge in a bright mosaic of far more than forty shades of green. The world we see in these works of art is both remembered and imagined, connecting the experience of nature with a poetic response. Imagery of the land is central to the Irish cultural imagination. Narratives of the field are a constant theme in our literary and dramatic arts, and the physical presence of Seamus Heaney’s text in the space will remind viewers of the point of contact between visual and verbal communication, and how words continuously shape our own looking.
Information on the exhibition Schooldays also on show in the gallery can be found here.
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