PERIPHERY SPACE is an artist-led art space in Gorey, Co. Wexford. It is an environment where new ideas, discourses, and processes in contemporary art, film and photography will be fostered and formed.
Through workshops and training, this space will support innovation in contemporary art as well as promote public engagement and exchange.
Patrick Redmond is Gorey School of Art’s Paul Funge Resident Artist for 2017/18: a residency that awards an individual or small group/collective 24/7 access to a studio space, mentorship, an exhibition, and access during normal opening times to facilities such as a print studio, computer room, library, fabrication room and photography studio.
Patrick’s solo exhibition ‘All Possible Worlds’ is the culmination of nine months of what American painter Milton Resnick coined “soul-beating”... to describe the method and difficulties of an artist changing his or her work”. While turning himself inside out during the residency, Pat has turned his painting practice inside out, finding resolution in mistakes and processes that partly take him out of the equation to challenge and redefine his own taste. Where once mainly oil paint composed his painted worlds, now paint, collage, plaster, soot, mirrors and dish scrubbers compose these current worlds where painting is not defined by style and consistency but possibility.
And ‘possibility’ is the defining difference between the medium and message of Patrick’s earlier and current work. “During those earlier times I was more interested in trying to make the hand of the artist less visible in the work. It was quite a tight realism or naturalism in those days, working mostly from photographs I’d taken. When I look at them now they aren't as tightly painted as I thought, but then the hand always lets the imagination down.”
Beyond painting method, Patrick’s subject matter has also changed, from the ‘silent theatricality’ of his earlier paintings, where vulnerable subjects were left forlorn in uncanny settings but protected in their psychic detachment, to these current utopian landscapes that sojourn possibility from source imagery collected from second-hand procured National Geographic Magazines to holiday brochures with weirdly balanced symmetries.
Although Patrick's work has changed dramatically in subject and substance during the residency, you could even call it a rupture in how it ‘looks’ now and how it ‘looked’ before, he still seems conscious of his own hand in the work, in the same way American painter Frank Stella attempted and failed to “free [painting] of human touch”. Before, Patrick worked dutifully from photographs, the photograph dictating the terms of his touch; today Patrick has relinquished the control of the photograph to leave chance and process to choose what remains on the canvas, the mirror, the paper, the plaster. Patrick has gone from laboriously building a planned illusion of a painted reality on canvas to relying now on experience and intuition to produce unknown but energetic and new possibilities.
SATURDAY 16TH JUNE AT 3PM.
ARTIST PATRICK REDMOND IN CONVERSATION WITH ART CRITIC JAMES MERRIGAN ON THE OCCASION OF PATRICK'S SOLO EXHIBITION 'ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS' AT GOREY SCHOOL OF ART.
“...as I see it, a kind of painting that repudiates its supposed essence will always be preferable to one that keeps within its allotted boundaries and its unbroken faith in itself.” -- From Isabelle Graw's The Love of Painting, 2018.
On one of many coffee breaks over the course of the residency Patrick posited: “You can’t think your way out of a painting” – I laughed while penning it down. Patrick thinks! But his encyclopedic knowledge and passion for painting has found solace and agency in the statement "Painting doesn’t matter!" Patrick and I will discuss this statement and others in relation to Patrick's new work, and explore why painting does matter, to him, to us, to you.
