Talking about art and landscape
A series of talks on landscape and the environment will be presented as part of Terra Nostra, an exhibition featuring the work of six renowned artists alongside key paintings from the County Council Art Collection .
The art show will be officially opened by Cllr. John Hegarty in Council Buildings in Carricklawn on Friday, March 9 at 6pm, with members of the public invited to attend. (The opening was postponed from last week due to the weather).
The featured artists in the new show are Fank Abruzzese, Karl Burke, Paul Gaffney, Laura Fitzgerald, Hanneke van Ryswyl and Gerda Teljeur while highlights from the art collection include work by Robert Armstrong, Cecilia Dannell, Phoebe Donovan, Martin Gale, Eithne Jordan, Paddy Lennon, Alice Maher, Hugh O’Connor, Blaise Smith, Mary Swanzy and Keith Wilson.
Terra Nostra, Latin for ‘Our Earth’ reflects on the ways in which we determine what a landscape is and how artists have used landscape to pose questions, from formal problems of technique and composition to ideas about perception, experience and representation, about global systems and the effects of capitalism and climate change.
The curator is Karla Sanchez-Zepeda O’Connell, a native of Mexico living in Wexford. Commenting on the exhibition, Karla said: ‘ This is a great opportunity for visitors to see work that offers many different sides and pespectives of landscape, from the traditional to the unexpected.’
‘Hopefully they will ask questions about why something is a landscape or why it isn’t, and what a landscape is supposed to look like and why. We can all have the chance to reflect on our own relationship to land and nature, whatever that may be’, she said.
To complement the exhibition a series of free talks will take place in Council Council Offices in Carricklawn and Wexford Library on the subjects of land, landscape and the environment with the speakers including ecologist Pádraic Fogarty and landscape architect Brendan McGrath on Thursday, March 8 at 5.30 pm; nature expert Jim Hurley with reformed garden designer and nature activist Mary Reynolds on Thursday, March 15 at 5.30 pm; journalist Tom Mooney on Thursday, April 5 at 7pm and NCAD lecturer and author Professor Brendan Long on Thursday, April 19 at 5.30pm.
Terra Nostra will continue at Wexford County Council Buildings until Friday, April 27, opening Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm each day.
The Wexford County Council Art Collection started soon after the establishment of the County Arts Department in 1994.
The Collection has been extensively developed over the years by the Friends of Wexford County Council Art Collection, spearheaded by the late Mairead Furlong. The collection now consists of almost 200 pieces of purchased, donated and loaned works.