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The Gardener Digs

Laura McMorrow

19 October 2024 — 18 January 2025
Laura McMorrow, <em>Granny in the Garden</em>, 2022.
Laura McMorrow, Granny in the Garden, 2022.
  • Date 19 October 2024 — 18 January 2025
  • Opening Hours

    Tuesday to Saturday, 10am—5pm
    Closed Bank Holidays
     

About the Artist(s)

Laura McMorrow is a visual artist from Leitrim. She holds a Masters in Fine Art from the University of Ulster in Belfast (2012) and she graduated with a degree in painting from Limerick School of Art and Design (2008). Her practice incorporates painting, video installation, animation, sculpture and collage. Her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions including a solo exhibition at Leitrim Sculpture Centre. Her work is held in the National Drawing Collection of Ireland.

Laura recently participated in a Youth Arts Residency at The Dock. Past community projects include a collaborative animation project with teenagers funded by Creative Ireland and a sensory mapping project with Leitrim Cycling Festival. Laura is part of the collective ^ who run an artist-led studio and experimental space in Manorhamilton where she also has her studio. In 2023, the collective worked together on a collaborative project called Waking the Land that considered environmental grief, supported by the Irish Hospice Foundation.

Laura McMorrow presents a series of small-scale paintings based on her research into gardens. The paintings draw on found imagery of figures working in the garden, altered landscapes (topiary and hedging), plants, and people enjoying gardens and green spaces. Join us for the opening reception on Friday 18 October, 6—8pm.

Laura learned everything she knows about gardening from her mother Gillian. An avid gardener and obsessive weeder, Gillian tended to her garden in North Leitrim by making decisions about which plants belong and deserve to self-seed and which become a nuisance. Her approach to gardening was naturalistic and looked effortless, but she was extremely dedicated to her craft.

Out in the garden, in all weather until dusk, it became a form of therapy for her as she suffered with a chronic and fatal illness. The garden became a sanctuary for Gillian and a source of inspiration for Laura who began researching and making work about gardens in her studio practice. Poet and gardener Ross Gay describes time spent gardening as “an exercise in supreme attentiveness”, a trait it shares with painting.

A stop motion animation created using a paint on glass technique is exhibited alongside the paintings. Each frame is hand painted, giving it a painterly and expressive aesthetic. The animation illustrates a quote by the filmmaker Derek Jarman in the book Modern Nature, a journal of his time spent gardening in Dungeness shortly after he discovered he was HIV positive.

"The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time — the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer."

Laura is interested in a personal exploration of the garden as a sanctuary and a space of refuge. However, she is also questioning the complexity of gardening in a time of climate emergency and the futile act of attempting to control and tame nature. The transition to a more ecologically friendly approach to gardening, for example growing a wildflower meadow instead of a lawn. Laura embraces this duality of gardening as a form of therapy and its disposition in the greater context of our time.

Laura McMorrow, <em>Anemone</em> (2024) and <em>Trellis</em> (2024). Photo by Ros Kavanagh.
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Laura McMorrow, Anemone (2024) and Trellis (2024). Photo by Ros Kavanagh.
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Explore More

Archived Exhibition
Invited Guests 1

Invited Guests

Kian Benson Bailes | Orla McHardy | Anna Spearman

19 October 2024 — 18 January 2025
Commission 
Laura McMorrow, detail of <em>Lake Louise</em> (2023). Photo by Ros Kavanagh.

The Gardener Digs: Laura McMorrow’s contemplative approach to nature and time

Text by Aoife Donnellan

2 January 2025

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071 965 0828
Address
The Dock
St. George’s Terrace
Carrick-on-Shannon
County Leitrim, Ireland
N41T2X2
Building opening hours

Monday to Saturday, 10am—6pm Closed Bank Holidays

Gallery opening hours

Tuesday to Saturday, 10am—5pm
Closed Bank Holidays
 

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