Artist

Caoimhe Kilfeather

Title of Exhibition: 'Items of kind'

About the Exhibition:

Caoimhe Kilfeather makes sculptural work that investigates the relationships and tensions between functionalism and formalism in everyday objects/materials and their use. Whilst engaging intuitively with ideas of scale, material and the processes of making Kilfeather is also drawn to the idea of ‘legacy’: legacies of form, materials, systems and methods of production and of how these things comprise our experience of normality and familiarity in the world.

For the Leitrim Sculpture Centre/Fred Conlon Award exhibition she has produced a new body of work that brings together interests in ornamentation, the hand-made and mass-produced object, and the qualities inherent in particular industrial materials.

Access to facilities such as glass casting at the Sculpture Centre played a role in the resolution of work allowing an engagement with process to influence and inform its development. Surface, weight and texture and the relationships that are formed between these different elements and the viewers’ physical experience constitute the works meaning.

Though not explicitly site specific; the placement of the works within the exhibition and their relationships to each other, as well as the scale at which they are developed, is largely determined while working within the space of the exhibition.

Exhibition Images

Artist Statement

Notions of the time in which we identify and experience things is implicated in this enquiry; what is a foreseeable or attainable period of time and how do the cultural tropes of any period structure this experience and knowledge? My work stems from a revisiting of aspects of our known world. Subjects such as the ancient and extinct forests of the carboniferous period whose produce has been central to the development of industrialization and is itself now in a state of immanent disappearance, televisions’ futuristic incarnations of the early ‘80s whose reach is now eclipsed, methods of production which have been restricted to particular areas of craft or popular culture are reconfigured into in a series of sculptural suggestions which may act as alternatives to the range of givens which have settled down in our experience of the world or as reminders of what has only recently faded from memory. Refreshing our ability to perceive and consider; these objects and images appear in many ways familiar but have lost or gained a function, been reincarnated in some way.

I work across a wide variety of media – the use of specific materials is associated with the conceptual development of the work – as is a link between these materials and the processes and methods used to manipulate them.

Biography

Caoimhe Kilfeather studied at NCAD, Dublin (BA) and the Slade School of Fine Art, London (MA). Recent exhibitions include Swimming in the field, Goethe Institute, Dublin, Holding Together, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, Spilth, 126, Galway, ev+a, Limerick (all 2010), Faydun Bites, Agency Gallery London (2009) and Broadcast Here, Dublin (2008). She is the recipient of numerous Arts Council Awards: Bursary (2009, 2010), Travel and Training (2005, 2006, 2007), Projects Award (2006); an AHRC Research Scholarship (2007) and a UCL Scholarship (2005).
She teaches in the Sculpture and Combined Media Department at the Limerick School of Art and Design.