Peer Residency 2019
Elaine Grainger & Susan Buttner
Elaine Grainger
Elaine Grainger’s work attempts to interpret memory situated in space, often manipulated, reconstructed and borrowed. Through the work Grainger seeks to transmit visually and symbolically a given moment in time, situated in light and colour whilst engaging intuitively with scale, materials and the process of making. She creates an environment of tension between what may seem fixed with what is temporary. Assemblages are caught in the moment of being and not being, of becoming and collapsing.
These assembled objects slowly evolve out of a working method that begins with the collection and selection of materials. A combination of ready-made materials and appropriated objects are transformed through a process of making and placing, arranging and rearranging. The work hovers; it pushes forward by looking back but seems to never remain fixed. Questioning the value in the friction between attraction to change and the aversion to it, permits the work to appear partially assembled and also to remain unresolved.
Susan Buttner
Susan Buttner’s MFA work engaged with the relationship of art to architecture, with spaces of interaction, and with ‘everyday power’. Desiring to change the way we perceive art, Susan’s crated art objects, installed against a backdrop of video and sound, drew our attention away from art objects and directed us towards the action of their formation. Using a variety of media including sculpture, video, performance and painting, Susan’s self-directed project began collaboratively with the Inchicore College of Further Education, where she sourced her formalist and social reflections on dance with the 2ndYear dance students, and with the architecture of the college (by architect Andrew Devane, influenced by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright). Drawing on these architectural conditions and surrounds, Susan explored the body as object and subject, awkward, and difficult. Providing the space in which the value of art could be explored is an integral part of this work.
Main page image: Susan Buttner, Untitled, wood, foam, plastic, rubber, ratchet, bricks, tiles, gaffer tape, filler, spray paint, 170x110x100cm, 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.
Image 2: Elaine Grainger, Afterglow II, Traditional gesso on board with gouache and birch ply, 33cm x 30cm , 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.
Previous Recipients
2015 – Gum Collective
2016 – Mary Ruth Walsh & Tracy Staunton
2017 – Conor O’Sullivan, Cara Farnan, Eve Rogers & Chloe Nagle
2017 – Eve O’Callaghan & Christopher Kearney
2018 – Monika Bogyos & Claire Tobin-Dunne
2019 – Ella Bertilsson & Ulla Juske