Represented Artist:
Ciarán Walsh
19.06-19.07. 2021
Between a tenth and a fifteenth
by Ciarán Walsh
This exhibition, consisting of five artworks - two sculptures, two video works, a photograph - and a piece of creative writing, invokes deep rooted cultural memories. Walsh weaves formal imagery with poetic allegory, moving to elaborate an understanding of the German national psyche, with a contemporary post-colonial eye. Here we confront the questions posed for 150 years - who is accepted within the borders, and who is considered other; we ask which ideas change, and which remain the same.
The German Romantic tradition acts as a mirror to the recent past, and Walsh constructs a vernacular through which to pose explicit questions about identity, mythology, and shared dreams. between a tenth and a fifteenth takes us down a quiet country road, to consider what has been destroyed in traumatic fires of the last century, and what remains burnt as an afterimage in the mind. Walsh asks the question of how to approach what has been relegated to the past, and yet persists. We stand beside the stump of a tree to consider the body of a dead wolf. We watch a haunting, gothic film carved out from the narrative of a much longer classic. Placed firmly between factual reportage and folklore, each of these works are not of the past. They are current, contemporary artifacts that require a deeper cultural exploration.