Curated by Austin McQuinn
3 April – 28 June 2020
Preview Thursday 2 April, 5-7pm
This is a time of crisis. Our relationships with other living beings are incendiary and fragile. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘Inversnaid’ provides the optimistic title for this exhibition as a celebration of life, but he could not have predicted the sudden catastrophic era we have now entered. Consequently in the first two decades of the twenty-first century many artists have boldly re-imagined our past and future relationships with non-human animals. As Kingfishers Catch Fire brings together a remarkable collection of artists and artworks in order to examine the politics of human-animal proximities, the openness to otherness and our own inherent animalities.
Curated by artist and writer Austin McQuinn, this exhibition addresses ideas of familiarity, strangeness, timelessness, reproduction, fantasy and mortality. In a total take-over of all spaces in Limerick City Gallery of Art, the exhibition asks how can we engage, culturally, as conscious planetary creatures, with the condition of being alive together now.
Artists exhibiting new and existing works feature: Steve Baker, Michael Beirne, Jennifer Brady, El Gato Chimney, Marcus Coates, Dorothy Cross, Anselmo Fox, Charles Freger, Martin Healy, Patricia Looby, Alice Maher, Maria McKinney, Dermot Seymour, Rebecca Stevenson and Katie Watchorn.
Austin McQuinn is a visual artist with a longstanding interest in human-animal relations and cultural politics. His forthcoming book, Acoustic Creatures: Sounding Animality in Performance will be published in 2020 by Penn State University Press (USA).
Exhibition information sheet: As Kingfishers Catch Fire Animals & Imagination info sheet (261 Kb)
Further information please contact artgallery@limerick.ie
The exhibition will consist of loans from artist studios, both public & private collections
