OUTCOMES, Ranelagh Arts 12-26 April 2024
Exhibition text by Monika Crowley
‘Being an artist in the lifeworld can be a lonely prospect. This group of artists, whom I worked with alongside Colin Martin and a host of visiting artists over the span of a year, have come together, on the back of the RHA Correspondence of 2023, to make an exhibition. I speak for all who gave their undivided attention and energy to the process, we couldn’t have wished for a better outcome: an artists-led exhibition’, James Merrigan
Outcomes is an exhibition of new work by the 2023 alumni of the RHA’s ‘Critical Correspondence Course’. The Critical Correspondence Course is a process we signed up for because each of us knew, regardless of what stage our artistic careers were at or the kind of practice we were engaged in, that something needed shaking up: a change in approach, subject matter or medium; a need to share new work on which we wanted feedback from our peers and other critical voices; a time to plumb the depths of our art making and ask ‘why?’, ‘for whom’ and ‘what if’…
We knew it wasn’t going to be easy, and we didn’t want to be easy. We made new work responding to periodic in-person and written feedback sessions throughout the year (both one-to-one and in plenary) and presented it back to our group, a visiting artist, and art critic/artist James Merrigan. Then the cycle repeated.
For the current show, we committed to showing not only works we consider finished, but also works that represent avenues of exploration that are still ‘in progress’, and even those that seemed to reach interesting dead ends that became jumping-off points for other work. Every piece in the current show was created in the last 12 months and emerged out of, and in response/reaction to, the Critical Correspondence Course. What you see today are the Outcomes.
Exhibiting Artists: Aisling Conroy, Anna Boyle, Ann Marie Webb, Bonnie Kavanagh, Darina Meagher, Gearoid O’Dea, Jonathan Brennan, Lauren Conway, Lucy Peters, Noelle Gallagher, Michelene Huggard, Monika Crowley, Shane Hynan, Siobhan O'Callaghan,
