Double Take

Artists: Amanda Coogan, Martin Healy, Fiona Kelly, Alice Maher, Suzanne Mooney, Brian O’Doherty, Garrett Phelan, The Project Twins, Sonia Shiel 

Curated by Chris Clarke and Fiona Kearney

Over the past 14 years, the Glucksman has been privileged to show ambitious site-specific works by Irish contemporary artists. Double Take looks back to some of these innovative moments within our exhibition history. From dramatic gallery interventions to intimate architectural responses, past installations are reproduced and presented alongside the artist’s work from the University College Cork Art Collection. 

In 2012, The Project Twins created three large-scale paintings as part of the exhibition Living/Loss: the experience of illness in art. Their bold graphic designs explore the relationship of illness to self-esteem and depression with wit and empathy, and this sensibility is evident in their screenprints in the UCC art collection. As part of the 2008 exhibition Getting Even, Garrett Phelan invited 26 individuals to read excerpts from a prepared script. As the audio recordings reverberate through the gallery, his dark black painting casts an improbable shadow on the wall. The Hide Suite feature Phelan’s detailed drawings of birds recorded at a site in Fingal where the artist has built a permanent, functional monument in the form of an observation point to view birds at the local estuary. In Suzanne Mooney’s photographs, previously exhibited in Everything Must Go: art and the market, the artist depicts stands, platforms, backdrops and arrangements used in commercial displays yet without the clutter of the actual items for sale. Devoid of their luxury goods, the emphasis is directed towards empty spaces that resemble abstract, formal compositions of light and colour. 

Double Take features a large wall drawing by Brian O’Doherty. Using rope to create a three-dimensional drawing, O’Doherty first created one of these site-specific works for the Glucksman in 2009 and his work here similarly invites visitors to walk in and around the artwork to experience its subtleties from different angles. O’Doherty’s ongoing interest in language, text and writing is also represented through a series of intaglio prints from the UCC Art Collection. Martin Healy’s neon work Fata Morgana represents the coordinates to a land mass sighted during an expedition to the Arctic in 1906. Believed to be an undiscovered continent, an expedition was dispatched to map the region, where it was subsequently discovered to be a “fata morgana,” a form of mirage. In his photographic work in the UCC art collection, Healy explores the mind’s eye of a child. A young boy holds aloft a toy gun as an imagined scenario plays out in his head. Alice Maher’s video animation continues the artist’s interest in metamorphosis. Through a process of drawing, erasure, and overdrawing on the same sheet of paper, Maher creates a world where the boundaries of the human body are constantly shifting and evolving with other bodies, animals and objects. 

Amanda Coogan’s triptych of photographs first exhibited in the exhibition 2116 capture one of her performance-based artworks: the artist’s head (with miner’s headlamp attached) breaches a sheet of taut, blue fabric, ploughing a path through the material to explore her new and unfamiliar environment. In Fiona Kelly’s Dust Breeding, an image of strewn rubble and cluttered refuse has been printed in tar on plywood as part of a large, free-standing billboard structure created for I Went to the Woods: the artist as wanderer. As with many of the restaged works in Double Take, it is presented in the same space as its original exhibition location. Sonia Shiel’s Mise en Abyme was commissioned in 2014 by the Glucksman as part of the Fieldworks exhibition. The sculpture suggests an anxiety about environmental pollution and its impact on natural habitats. Her paintings too have a dark romanticism, often framing the vulnerability of both humans and nature.

Double Take is funded by University College Cork, the Arts Council of Ireland, and private philanthropy through Cork University Foundation.