2023
Exhibition Residencies
01/05/2022 - 28/07/2022
Joey O’Gorman’s multi-media practice explores different ways of understanding ecology, both in terms of conceptual forms and felt reality. Multiple media – text, drawing, sculpture, audio, video and installation – and a range of descriptive, reflexive and improvisational processes are deployed in order to interrogate how ecologies may be represented and experientially engaged with. His practice looks to reveal the experiences in which we are ecologically enmeshed, and calls for renewed understanding of how individuals, communities and power relations dynamically interrelate.
Looking to early twentieth-century Pragmatist philosophies, which decentre the human within a conflux of interconnecting processes, experience is taken as relationality between things and a means of orientation within an eco-spatial view. Personal experience is taken to transcend representational abstractions, providing a unique insight into the world’s relational nature. Agricultural practice is explored in order to locate human experience within a broader ecological ground of interactions between organisms, energy and matter flux, and the organic circuits of social fields. These relations are traced and reimagined, expressed in abstracted forms, and appended to scientific data and the performance of lived experience. This ongoing enquiry ask questions about the obscured relationships which connect everyday lives to environmental degradation and the systems of power that resist transformative, eco-social change.
For the Platform Arts graduate award studio residency materials were gathered and sculptures developed to populate an installation for exhibition. Found and made objects, wall drawings, an architectural structure, furniture, a cassette player, a library of popular culture books and academic texts, flyers, and Borax on glass were used as a means to consider how people extend into and co-create the word.
The Lorenz attractor is an iconic mathematical model which demonstrates key elements of chaotic behaviour. Three two-dimensional projections of this three-dimensional form were drawn onto the floor and two walls. A wall text explored how attractors like this could be read as a ‘hyperobject,’ as described by the theorist Timothy Morton.
Ink drawings and text trace the rhythms and transformations of complex, evolutionary systems.
Joey O’Gorman
Joey O’Gorman was a molecular biology postdoctoral researcher at Oxford University before moving to London in 2012 to focus on his art practice. There, as a Research Associate of Central Saint Martins’ new MA Art and Science programme, he explored the history and philosophy of science, collaborating with museums to develop experimental workshops. In 2015, he moved to Belfast where he undertook an MFA in Fine Art at the Belfast School of Art, and worked as a Co-Director of Catalyst Arts. He won graduate awards from Artist Moving Image Northern Ireland (AMINI), the Digital Arts Studio (DAS) and Platform Arts. In 2019, he won DfE funding for an art practice-based PhD at the Belfast School of Art, under the supervision of Dan Shipsides and Aisling O’Beirn, researching ecology from a spatial perspective.
Past Residencies
2023
Landscape, Ecology & Environment Research Residencies
