Coalescence | Stephen Brandes, Don Cronin, Sarah Iremonger, Julia Pallone

An exhibition featuring work by four artists whose individual practices bring together disparate elements, components or motifs through the mediums of painting, drawing, collage and sculpture.
 
Stephen Brandes' art practice is informed by research, observation and invention, and through a conflicting juxtaposition of material, image and text he creates his own composite scenes and landscapes. His many disparate outputs include painting, sculpture, installation, collage and large sprawling drawings on flooring vinyl, yet there are recurring motifs drawing from the natural world, history, architecture and early modernist design along with a varied cast of absurdist characters.
 
Don Cronin is a sculptor who has created iconic figurative public art pieces in bronze, yet his personal work is entirely abstract, drawing instead on technology and engineering to inform both its aesthetic and making. The finished pieces are a collage of forms, materials and finishes that are somewhat familiar yet alien when seen in composite form. Under some scrutiny one might identify elements from aeronautical engineering, ship building, automotive design and motorcycles, but in truth all of the forms are imagined by the artist. The resulting modernist sculptures are static and monumental but imbued with the potential for movement.
 
Sarah Iremonger is a visual artist whose practice as a whole is “an exploration of the conscious being in an image-saturated world, the complexity of meaning this induces and how it affects thinking”. This enquiry is made using is a variety of media and tools including photography, murals, painting, drawing, found images, video, neon, digital technology and participatory practice. Early oil paintings gave way to later site-specific installations but a return to painting since 2014 has focused on the adaptation of found images, using them to create complex multilayered abstract images where visual signifiers become hidden. A second series of paintings uses Venn diagrams as guides for a self-directed systematic approach to making paintings. New developments in digital art allow for drawings from her Horizons project to be transformed into virtual 3-D landscapes.
 
Julia Palone has a drawing-based practice which often leads the way to other mediums with each new project influencing the materials she uses. She develops new skills and to face new technical challenges. The artist’s interest lies in the possible occurrences of metamorphosis. She likes to explore the fantastic in everyday life, not as an intrusion in the real world, but as an inherent part of it.
 
All four artists are based in the Kinsale/Innishannon area of County Cork and are brought together to illustrate some commonalities in approach across their highly individual practices. In each case there is a coalescence of elements to create a whole, albeit for quite distinct reasons and outcomes.
 
Stephen Brandes (born Wolverhampton, UK 1966) lives and works in Kinsale, Co. Cork after moving to Ireland in 1993. He represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2005 as part of Ireland at Venice, and has shown in numerous exhibitions both in Ireland and internationally. Brandes has also worked on several curatorial projects, most notably Superbia, commissioned by Breaking Ground in Ballymun, Dublin, 2003 and Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland at Visual, Carlow, 2013. With artists Mick O’Shea and Irene Murphy, he formed the absurdist culinary performance group, the Domestic Godless. Most recently, his work has been acquired for the National Collection at the Crawford Gallery.
 
Don Cronin (born Cork 1969), “initially took a foundation course in art at the Crawford College of Art, before switching to University College Cork, where he was awarded a Degree in Philosophy in 1991. He then returned to study sculpture at the Crawford College, graduating three years later. In 1995 his work was included in the ‘Cire Perdue’ exhibition at the Lavit Gallery and the following year he was artist in residence at the National Sculpture Factory. Since his graduation, Cronin has completed many public commissions, one of his earliest being a life-size bronze female figure, commissioned in 1995 by Michael Mortell, for UCC. This was followed by a semi-abstract Seeds I, II and III, produced for the foyer of the FÁS building on Rossa Avenue, a version of which was shown at the RHA in 1998. Around the same time, for Cork airport terminal building, he made Crows, representing a flock of birds, set against a wall of green veined marble. The theme of aviation is echoed in more recent commissions, such as Tumbling Helicopters, sited at St Colman’s school in Macroom. A celebration of Irish fauna, Cronin’s robust modelling of Crows is similar to his life-size bronze bull Big Sur, sited in Macroom and commissioned in 1997 by Cork County Council.” Peter Murray, Irish Arts Review, Autumn 2015, Volume 32. No. 3. Read more…
 
Sarah Iremonger (born Dublin 1965) lives and works as a visual artist in Kinsale Co. Cork, Ireland; is a Board Member of the Lavit Gallery in Cork; a founder of the Sirius Arts Centre Cobh, Co. Cork in 1984 volunteering there until 1999 and working as visual arts curator and artists liaison from 1999-2015. She studied pre-diploma and fine art at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin 1983-85; fine art printmaking and photography at the Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork 1985-87; completing an MA in European Fine Art at the Winchester School of Art Southampton University, UK 1998. Recent projects include Cantos, a text-based artwork, which uses notebooks collected over thirty years as found text and organised in the style of an epic non-rhyming stream-of-consciousness concrete prose poem and was funded by an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland 2022; Vessels a solo exhibition of paintings at Oliver Sears Gallery in Dublin 2022 was supported by a Cork County Council Creative Artists Bursary 2022; Build Your Own Horizon/BYOA was a public participation project with Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre Skibbereen, Bealtaine Artist in Residence and Cork County Council 2022 and was exhibited as part of ‘Re:Group – Fragments in Constellation’ a collaborative project with Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre and Skibbereen Arts Festival 2022; The Hunting Box Party was exhibited as part of ‘Change Hunters Hide’ group exhibition at Emmanuel Walderdorff Galerie Hofgut Molsberg, Westerwald, Germany 2021.
 
Julia Pallone was born in the Loire Valley in France. She moved to Ireland in 2006 and now lives and works in Kinsale, County Cork. In 2002, she graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from The Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, France, and simultaneously, earned a Master in Italian Humanities from Nantes University. She has also studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Venice and at the Sorbonne in Paris. Amongst others, Julia has shown work at the Glucksman Gallery, Uillinn Art Centre, The Crawford Gallery, and Galway Art Centre. She was awarded several art residencies In Ireland and Europe and received several bursaries from the Arts Council and Cork County Council. Julia has a drawing-based practice which often leads the way to other mediums: every new project influences the materials she uses. She likes to develop new skills and to face new technical challenges. Julia Pallone’s interest lies in the possible occurrences of metamorphosis. She likes to explore the fantastic in everyday life, not as an intrusion in the real world, but as an inherent part of it.
 
Brian Mac Domhnaill has held the position of Director of Lavit Gallery since June 2022. He is an arts professional with ten years’ experience in the programming, planning, production and marketing of over seventy visual art exhibitions and associated events. Building on fifteen years’ experience working in the heritage sector Brian has gone on to hold numerous part-time arts roles and contracted positions such as Programme and Operations Manager at Sirius Arts Centre (2015-2022), Studio Coordinator/Research Assistant at Backwater Artists Group (2015-2021), Project Manager for Cork City Culture Night (2013, 2015) and Project Manager for special events for the Cork French Film Festival (2013, 2016). Also between 2013 and 2019 Brian provided freelance services as a volunteer coordinator, gallery technician, sales team member and photographer to other Cork arts organisations and individual artists. He holds an MA in Art + Process from MTU Crawford College of Art & Design (2014), an MSc in Palaeoecology from Queens University Belfast (2002) and a BA in Archaeology and Celtic Civilisation from University College Cork (1997).