PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
Exhibition Title: One Day: Borderlines of Memory
Eamon O’Kane
Venue: Ballina Arts Centre
Dates: August 17th to October 5th
Opening reception August 17th at 6.30pm
Artist talk: Thursday 29th August time TBC.
Ballina Arts Centre is delighted to present "One Day: Borderlines of Memory," an evocative exhibition by the artist Eamon O’Kane (b. 1974). This exhibition delves into personal history, focusing on the recent past, and showcases O’Kane's research and development of artworks based on childhood memories of growing up near the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a new installation featuring drawings that excavate these childhood memories. Derived from photographs taken by his parents in 1976, these drawings capture a young family in the garden of the historic Cavanacor house, which they moved into the year O’Kane was born.
O’Kane reflects on how growing up in the house and surrounding grounds and being close to his parents’ artworks have influenced his own creative practice. The video works draw on images, memories and interviews with family and friends as well as documentary footage and involve an investigation of what it is like to study art and live in a conflict zone as both his parents’ studied art in Belfast in the late sixties and taught art in Strabane in the 70s.
The exhibition acknowledges the profound influence of the house and surrounding area where the artist grew up, as well as his parents’ artworks, which he observed during his childhood.
Having drawn trees since childhood, O’Kane has spent the past decade exploring how these drawings might relate to human psychology and his own psychological state. The exhibition includes a series of silkscreen works on paper inspired by the 'Baum Test' or 'Tree Test,' developed by Swiss psychologist Charles Koch in 1952. In this test, still used today, patients draw a broad-leaved tree on a blank sheet of paper. A psychologist evaluates the drawing, along with the individual's behavior and comments during the test, to analyze personality and emotional history. O’Kane's detailed pen and ink tree drawings are transformed by the artst into silkscreen prints, mirrored to evoke an eerie element reminiscent of the Rorschach inkblot test. These silkscreens were printed during a residency in Norway, where O’Kane processed the grief of losing his father the previous summer.
O’Kane pushes the process of screen printing further in an installation of prints where he has purposefully broken the rules of the process and flooded the screen, thereby forcing errors and creating actual tree inkblots which distort the original drawing of a tree outside his house in Denmark.
The exhibition also explores various borders and borderlines of memory related to the artist’s childhood. It addresses geographical borders established through military conflict and conquest, with sculptures inspired by the military surveillance towers from O’Kane's childhood at the border in Strabane. It also examines the perceived border between humanity and nature and the disastrous consequences of that separation. O’Kane's new series of sculptures, a development of his double portrait series, features human heads concealed under cloth with tree-like supports from the 3D printing process intertwining with the obscured human forms. These sculptures draw inspiration from art history and his mother's fiberglass and ceramic figure sculptures. Another piece in the exhibition is an animation of a charcoal wall drawing of a sycamore tree that stood on the front lawn of O’Kane's family home. This tree, over 300 years old, was felled by a storm in 1999. It had provided a canopy for a meal in 1689 when King James II stopped at the house after the siege of Derry.
For press inquiries, images, or further information, please contact:
Ballina Arts Centre
Barrett St,
Carrowcushlaun West,
Ballina, Co. Mayo
Tel: 096 73593
Email: info@ballinaartscentre.com
https://ballinaartscentre.com/exhibitions/
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Artist Talk: Thursday 29th August time TBC.
Exhibition Dates: August 17th to October 5th
Ballina Arts Centre Gallery Opening Hours
Tuesday to Saturday from 10 am – 6 pm
Admission Free