Hinterland is a multi-disciplinary collaboration* involving over 50 artists from a wide range of disciplines coming together from Dun Laoghaire–Rathdown. The project began with an open call to artists active in the DLR area. Over 50 artists applied and were matched into pairs and trios.

For 2019 the project theme is Dun Laoghaire–Rathdown and its environs, hence the title Hinterland.  However, all creatives have their own inner hinterland too – as such, the title can be interpreted in the broadest sense.

Hinterland aims to stimulate interdisciplinary conversations among members of different practices and in so doing, produce new hybrid works which will be stimulating, informative and educational for the wider community of DLR. The proposed project will culminate with an exhibition of over 25 new works including moving image, spoken word, installation, time based, performance, visual arts, theatre and more.

For example. A poet with a performance artist produces a poetic film/filmic poem; homeopathic plant remedies growing in the hinterland are incorporated into an artwork communicating “a civilized wilderness”; two photographers document a change in the landscape at Cherrywood, located at the foot of the Dublin Mountains; the voices of women in the hinterland are articulated in a site specific performance on the night of the opening of exhibition: three monologues of forgotten women’s stories — drawn from places such as the former Magdalene laundry, the soup kitchen and the immigrant’s hostel.

The works will be the result of unique creative collaborations between more than 50 Artnetdlr members of different disciplinary practices. The curated, free access exhibition is booked in for Eblana House, Eblana Avenue, in Dun Laoghaire from 9th-19th May 2019.

* The first ArtNetdlr members collaborative exhibition, Interaction, took place at Eblana House, Dún Laoghaire in May 2016 to great acclaim.

The Hinterland committee

Tuesday 11 September, 10 – 11 am

dlr LexIcon, 5 floor, room 3

Saturday 10 November 2018, 10:00 – 12:00

dlr LexIcon, meeting room 2, 5th floor

book tickets here

This event is now SOLD OUT.

Artist Gwen O’Dowd will share her influences, fascination by the sea and her approach to shift from traditional landscape to metaphoric and haunting composition. Gwen is one of Ireland’s foremost contemporary artists; she has received many awards and prizes and is a member of Aosdana.

Waterbased II, Carborundum, 77 x 62 cm

“Her formal concerns have always been rooted deeply in the tradition of landscape painting, yet the specific locales from which she has drawn inspiration, the modes of addressing them, and the metaphoric import of the resulting series of paintings have varied considerably over the years. Among the aspects of the landscape O’Dowd has registered over the past decade are the ecological devastation of the Gulf War, the epic grandeur of the Grand Canyon and, most recently, the mythically sexualised landscape of rural Ireland.”  (Irish Museum of Modern Art)

Writing of O’Dowd’s paintings, critic Medb Ruane notes: “O’Dowd creates her visual encounters by working through surface details from a series of structural planes which both organise the composition and toughen up the two-dimensional limits of the canvas. She sections these planes like an architectural anatomist, sometimes making transverse slices, sometimes cutting downwards from sky to bedrock. …Close up, her use of mediums with oil, textures the surfaces so that they have both a craggy feel and a pointed sense of a landscape where nothing is ever still.”

Tonn VI, oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm

O’Dowd’s work is found in important private and public collections including Irish Museum of Modern Art, Aer Lingus, Allied Irish Bank, Trinity College, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Smurfit Collection, Arts Council of Ireland, Ulster Investment Bank, Kilkenny Arts Society, Contemporary Irish Art Society, Office of Public Works, Aer Rianta and many others.

This exhibition showcased original works across the disciplines of the visual arts