Presented by The Courthouse Gallery, Ennistymon, Co Clare.
Opening night: 7:30pm on Friday 1st of March
Duration: 2nd March – 27th April
All very welcome.
Please join us for the opening of ‘An Image in my Head’ hosted by the Courthouse Gallery and curated by artist/curator Dominic Thorpe.
Murphy’s art practice spans creative writing, ceramics and print, where the apparent ordinariness of everyday life comes into question through the richness his imagery. Here, text, print and figures in clay, who are either foxes behaving as humans or humans behaving as foxes (or both), populate clay streetscapes and other scenarios, as the world and our interactions in it are imagined in new ways.
This series of works was produced from 2018 and 2019 as part of a joint creative writing/ceramics project supported by Clare Arts Office under its Embrace Programme and the Dulick Centre, where Murphy has been honing his skills and developing a unique style since 2016. A visit to the KCAT Arts Centre in Kilkenny led to a meeting with KCAT’s co-founder, artist Andrew Pike, and a subsequent invitation to Pike to share this exhibition.
The portraiture of Andrew Pike also proposes new ways of looking at the face and the facades of the everyday. A well-established artist working across a variety of media including painting and animation, his work has been shown extensively in Ireland and internationally. Though best known for his paintings, Andrew has award-winning animations to his credit and co-designed the MACNAS Big River Parade as part of Galway Arts Festival 2006. Most recently Andrew’s self-portrait (2018) has been acquired by the National Portrait Collection of Ireland at the University of Limerick.