Galway International Arts Festival | 2019

For the 2019 edition of Galway International Arts Festival, 126 Artist-run Gallery presents “Reforming” a duo exhibition by acclaimed Irish artist Diana Copperwhite and emerging Irish artist Ciara Barker. Reforming presents an exhibition infused with colour which explores notions of reality, abstraction and our sense of space, while placing two artists at different stages of career together. Admission is free and all are welcome.

“Copperwhite’s work focuses on how the human psyche processes information, and looks at the mechanisms of how we formulate what is real. With her work, she is fully aware that such realities may only hold validity for an instant, and that we are constantly processing and changing what we logically hold as experience and memory. Layering fragmented sources that range from personal memory to science, from media and internet to personal memory, Copperwhite’s canvases become worlds in which the real is unreal and this unreality is in a constant state of reforming.”-Noel Kelly, Director of Visual Artist Ireland, (2011)

The wall print (Anatomy of time 3) is made using footage from mobile phone cameras sent by anonymous individuals and some friends in Galway. Taking 30 seconds as my only que, I looked and responded to the short films by quickly drawing the contours and shapes of fleeting images seen to create a composite of abstract pattern. This pattern was then taken, photographed and blown up to creat a 21 foot long x12 foot tall digital print. Essentially taking the tradition of mural painting and bringing its epic proportions back down to the mobile phone.

Diana Copperwhite (b. 1969, Ireland) lives and works in Dublin and New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Driven by Distraction, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2016), Depend on the Morning Sun, Thomas Jaeckal Gallery, New York (2016) and A Million and One Things Under the Sun, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2015). Selected group exhibitions include Last Picture Show w/Mary Heilmann, Chris Ofili, Danny Rolph, Vanessa Jackson, Elio Rodriguez, Jill Levine, Rebecca Smith, Thomas Jaeckel Gallery, New York (2017) and Virtú, inc. Picasso, Giacometti, Henry Moore, Elizabeth Magill and Sean Scully at the Hunt Museum, Limerick, Ireland (2017). Copperwhite’s work is held in numerous public and private collections including: the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Arts Council of Ireland, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Office of Public Works, Contemporary Irish Art Society, Highlanes Municipal Art Gallery, Mariehamn Stadbiblioteque, Aland (Finland), Dublin Institute of Technology and The President of Ireland.