Wexford artists going to China and Australia
The Kilrane-based painter Paddy Lennon and the Enniscorthy-born musician Wallis Bird are included in a Culture Ireland list of Irish artists who are receiving funding to present their work abroad during 2017 and 2018.
Singer/songwriter Wallis has been awarded a grant of €8,000 for a tour of Australia and a performance in Japan from November 5 to December 4 this year, taking in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Wauchope, Bellingen, Grafton, Lennox Head, Mullumbimby, Katoomba, Sheffield, Cygnet, Hobart, Halls Gap and Melbourne.
The energetic and distinctive performer who is now based in Berlin, has released five studio albums, the most recent being Home in September 2016. She also has a live album Yeah! featuring recordings from her extensive European tours. She was voted Best Irish Female Artist at the Meteor Ireland Music Awards in 2010.
Dublin born Paddy Lennon who has lived for many years with his wife Jo Kimmins at the Old Mill in Kilrane has been awarded €3,000 for an exhibition of new works entitled ‘From Wexford to Wuxi’ at an art gallery in China in December of this year.
Paddy, one of Ireland’s leading contemporary artists, will be showing new paintings and drawings at the 1 Art Gallery, a re-designed cotton mill with a striking sculptural extension in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai in eastern China on the banks of Taihu Lake.
The paintings will be shipped to China ahead of the solo exhibition and the artist will be spending three weeks in Wuxi during the event, thanks to the financial support from Culture Ireland.
Paddy who has exhibited throughout Ireland and in Hong Kong, Spain, Switzerland and Abu Dhabi, spent seven months in China last year on an artistic residency in Xiamen and Dawang at the invitation of the Chinese European Art Centre and Dawang Cultural Highlands.
While there, he took an ink painting course and was inspired by contemporary Chinese ink painters. The forthcoming Wuxi show will feature abstract paintings based on work that he developed there and which will be shown at various art venues around Ireland in the future after they have been transported back from Wuxi.
Meanwhile, two large-scale works that Paddy painted in China during the residency and had shipped to Ireland on his return, will go on public display in Greenacres Gallery in Selskar later this week. ‘It is one of the few places that is big enough to show them,’ said the award-winning artist who found his Chinese audience to be appreciative and attentive viewers of art.
‘I’ve always felt my work was more international than Irish,’ said Paddy who developed an interest in Asian art as a student at the London City and Guilds Art School. His abstract works inspired by landscape,light and nature are concerned with sensation and atmosphere and provoke an instinctive reaction in the viewer.
Paddy has said his paintings express the inexplicable, demanding an emotional response in the way music would to the ear.
Some of his figurative paintings have come from his love of horses and his fascination with the equine form. A few years ago, he and his wife, a retired Kilrane riding centre owner, trekked 1000km along the Camino de Plata in Spain on horseback to raise money for the Irish Horse Welfare Trust.
Paddy’s work is featured in many private, civic and corporate collections including the Wexford County Council Art Collection.