Aideen Barry applied for a Golden Fleece Award to facilitate the expansion of a recent body of work, 'The Monachopsis Drawings'. Initiated as a response to COVID-19 and informed by artists and writers whose work was inspired by other seismic pandemics, it began as an “a drawing a day” project shared on her social media feeds. She has now evolved these drawings into moving image works using customised viewing apparatus, and the Award has allowed her to invest in the time needed to develop and realise this project.
Monochopsis which means a persistent feeling of being out of place in the world and to her it is a world becoming even more destabilising and unhinged. Barry will also construct new “wearable furniture” to experience her 320 degree animations works. These new architecturally considered wearables are designed for an audience of one. The viewer will temporarily give over their presence to the object becoming a part of this unusual cabinet, forcing you to self distance, purely from its curve and shape, from other visitors in the gallery. This exchange will permit the viewer to experience a newly constructed animated world which will be created and housed in these almost cylindrical structures employing cutting edge technologies that Barry is known to weave into her works. The animated films themselves are created from the surreal drawings that the artist made during her “confinement”, to use another gothic trope. During the lockdown the artist created numerous digital drawings of surreal, grotesque and humorous nature. Some will feature as a salon hang of printed works and others have become a part of the new moving image experiential wearables.
Installation view of the Monochopsis series displayed in the exhibtion By Slight Ligaments at The Limerick Coty Gallery of Art. Photo by Lou Wallace.
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