The Dock invites you to our Autumn Exhibitions by Banbha McCann, Fionna Murray, and Andy Parsons. Each artist presents a suite of paintings reflecting on intimacy, memory, and joy in remembered, imagined, and constructed spaces. Admission is free and all are welcome.
Banbha McCann
The Picture Show series explores the cinematic depiction of intimacy. Taking imagery from the film ‘To Catch a Thief’, where, to avoid censorship, Hitchock cuts away from a romantic embrace between Cary Grant and Grace Kelly to a firework display. The fireworks, while signifying a chemical reaction/attraction, also hint at a more intimate private act. The broader narrative of the film centres on the looming theft of Frances Stevens’ (Gracy Kelly) family jewels; the threatened jewels can be read as an analogue for the character’s virginity. Banbha McCann’s paintings repeat these motifs, exploring our emotive response to imagery and symbolism, and unravelling the real from the staged.
Banbha McCann is an artist, architect, and researcher living and working in Dublin. Her practice explores questions of material reality, the emotional charge of spaces and things, and how these concerns overlap and combine in our environment. Her approach to painting is thus a combination of a record and way of examining emotional resonance and the legacies of experience. Banbha is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Creative Ireland, and Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council. Her works are in private and public collections including the OPW and the Arts Council of Ireland.
Fionna Murray
Fionna Murray’s recent paintings make reference to the park as an in-between place of respite within the wider complexity of the city. Using loosely connected images to create a fragmentary world, she associates the idea of the park as an open space of play and spontaneity with that of the painting as a parallel arena of artifice and possibility. Addressing past and present, intimacy and distance, the canvas becomes a site on which to negotiate materiality, make-believe, and the difference between what is real and what is painted.
Imagery drawn from observation and memory as well as sources from film, books, and music inform her work in an attempt to make visible the experience of shifting sequences of lived time and lived places. Repeated framing motifs point to a way of holding worlds within worlds, and allowing separate narratives to exist simultaneously. Like two-way mirrors, they hang between urban and rural notions of home. With humour and a little melancholy, these paintings suppose more than explain, giving rise to speculation about how the activity of painting might also address the notion of an unlimited space in which to practice freedom.
Fionna Murray was born and grew up in London. She studied at Chelsea College of Art before moving to Ireland and graduating with an MFA at the University of Ulster in 1997. She now lives and works in Galway and has exhibited widely throughout Ireland, the UK, and Europe. Recent exhibitions include: Metropolitan Pastoral, The Hyde Bridge Gallery, Sligo; Nothing Has Changed, Everything Has Changed, Beep Biennial, Swansea, Wales; Night Walking, The Eagle Gallery, London; Cairde Visual, The Model, Sligo. Her work is held in a number of public and private collections in Ireland and abroad. She is a member of Artspace Studios, Galway and lectures in Painting at the School of Design and Creative Arts, Atlantic Technological University, Galway.
Andy Parsons
I am interested in dance as an egalitarian space where people are free to express themselves. My current work, The Dancers, explores the universality of music and dance, and the idea of joy. The imagery is based on nightclubbing and the Northern Soul scene. Northern Soul is music from the 1960s that didn’t enjoy commercial success at the time, but became popular with DJs and dancers as part of an underground scene in the 1970s and 80s, and has subsequently become a worldwide phenomenon.
As an authentically working-class movement, it has much in common with the rave scene of the late 80s and early 90s. On the dancefloor at Northern Soul nights, it is common to see dancers in their 70s alongside teenagers. Music and dance are often central to the stories people tell about their lives and are recounted as moments of pure joy. The sense that music and dancing will change in their specifics but retain their universal importance as part of our emotional lives and identity is an area I am researching and exploring in my work.
Andy Parsons practice combines working in community contexts with making drawing, sculpture, and painting. Projects have focused on people and places, and on activities where people work together and help each other. Andy has worked in many different community settings, including youth projects, community care settings for older people, mental health settings, and a community boat-building project in the Sligo docks.
Recent projects include Conversations in Portrait, a virtual portrait project with older people across Ireland, and a two-year residency at Sligo University Hospital for The Model Home of The Niland Collection, which culminated in a major solo exhibition at The Model in Autumn 2021 titled Patience. Parsons has received several significant awards including the Pollock Krasner Foundation Award, and has exhibited internationally including solo exhibitions at the Standpoint Gallery, London; APT Gallery, London; and S.I.B. Gallery, Tokyo.
