FIONA CURRAN: MAP OF DUSK
JUNE 6 - JULY 18, 2024
Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary…
Louise Gluck
Map of Dusk is an exhibition about sunlight and screen-light. It presents a recent body of work evoking Curran’s encounters with her garden at the end of the day and draws on longstanding themes within her practice around landscape, memory, embodied experience and modes of attention.
Curran uses processes of painted collage, quilting and woven tapestry, piecing and patching fragments together to form wholes through constellations of colour and material. She speaks of the pleasures of mixing colour, of the “accidental abstractions” that emerge through the flux of arranging and rearranging materials. Curran’s works orientate towards the touched and the felt through densely layered fields of stitched canvas and fabric. They have a weight to them, a gravitational pull that reflects the physicality of their construction and an immersion in processes of making – painting, weaving, tearing, stitching.
Dusk marks a threshold, a space and time between day and night where subtle shifts in perception take place, where our eyes adjust to falling light levels and our senses are heightened. Colours briefly glow, detail and definition start to fade. We are called upon to pay closer attention to our surroundings, becoming more attuned to sensory experience and to the many other worlds at work within, behind and passing through our own. The garden offers a space of encounter with the realms of plants, animals, insects, earth and atmosphere; a fragment of a wider universe of belonging. Curran’s use of collage and the importance of the studio as a space where she “moves things around” are also mirrored in the practice of gardening - digging, sowing, planting, thinning - in the accidental relationships that form between the placed and the self-seeded plant, the unplanned interventions of animals and weather.
Fading sunlight also contrasts with the persistent light of the screen and the ever-glowing distractions that increasingly consume our attention. Perpetual illumination undermines our connection to the diurnal and seasonal rhythms once used to orientate ourselves in space and time; the transitions between day and night, light and dark, action and rest, waking and dreaming. Screen-light numbs us to the quiet beauty of the world, to the vibrational energies that flow through all living things. The works included in Map of Dusk mark such moments of noticing and the consolations of the ordinary.
