Daphne Wright  - At a Time

Limerick City Gallery of Art: 16th July – 28th August

Daphne Wright is known for her poignant sculptural installations, which use a variety of techniques and materials including photography, plaster, tinfoil, sound, voice and video. Her art is the result of a relentless curiosity into the way in which a range of languages and materials can create an involvement with often unspoken human preoccupations.

In this exhibition many of the works deal with the subject of children and childhood, both from the adult and the child’s point of view.  Clay Heads, is a collection of 11 busts in unfired clay. This work developed from looking at children’s self-portraits and also references tribal masks and early modernism. It evokes different personalities with the sparest of means.   

Sons is a poignant double portrait of the artist’s children. The upper bodies are cast from life in Jesmonite giving them a strange truncated quality,  the piece is delicately painted imparting an unsettling presence to the two casts 

Two video works, If you broke me and I am the beginning,  show two solitary boys speaking in riddles to the camera. In each piece the child’s face is painted; as a tiger in If you broke me and with a beard in I am the Beginning. Here these popular riddles are made strange, the monotony of each boy’s voice and their unblinking stare creates a heightened tension, and the riddles take on a different significance beyond that of simple childhood rhymes and logic puzzles.

 A video projection entitled I know what it’s like is a haunting and at times uncomfortable evocation of memory, heartache and isolation. In it an elderly woman gives a startling performance of six disrupted statements to camera, exploring social taboos such as breastfeeding, sexuality, ageing and parental coldness.

LCGA would like to thank the Artist and Frith Street Gallery, London, & Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre, Co. Cork.

For further information please contact  artgallery@limerick.ie OR www.gallery.limerick.ie