Joseph Heffernan is a Cork-based visual artist, primarily a painter but also working in sculpture and assemblage. His work explores the ephemeral nature of memory, identity and fantasy and how these things are intertwined to form augmented fictions. It can best be understood as a mapping of interior mental spaces as well as an attempt to reconcile the real exterior world with those spaces. The work takes the philosopher Gaston Bachelardʼs seminal text ‘The Poetics of Space’ as a model through which to explore the ability of objects to act as totems of personal meaning. In 2023, he received an individual artist bursary from Cork City Council and presented a solo show “A Thousand Years” in Studio 12 Gallery, Backwater Artist Studio. He has exhibited extensively, including in the Lavit Gallery, RUA RED and RHA.

This residency will offer Joseph the opportunity to consolidate a new body of work in a new context and develop further solo exhibition opportunities, at a critical juncture in his career.

EXHIBITION

The Dolls House

Saturday 28 September – Sunday 6 October 2024

“Theatre takes place all the time – wherever one is – and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case“ – John Cage

Joseph Heffernan’s exhibition The Dolls House presents a series of assemblages and objects, made during his residency in the Triskel/Sample Project Space which further develop his recent ventures into the field of expanded painting. These objects are a continuation of his pre-occupations with memory, fantasy and identity and look at childhood forms of ‘meaning making’ such as fairytales and games and considers how these are not simply abandoned but are used as models for organising and poeticising memory in later life. The philosopher Johan Hunzinga’s seminal text Homo Ludens: The play element in Culture is a key influence on the work. Throughout his text Hunzinga argues that much of the same rules that apply to childhood play also apply to sacred rituals and that formally speaking there is no difference whatever between marking out a space for a sacred act and marking out a playground for play. Heffernan’s work extends this idea into the gallery space allowing the work to focus on the staging of rituals and performances utilising an elaborate world of private signs and symbols. Through his use of found objects and referencing of domestic settings memory is presented as something which is performed with a continuous dynamic process linking performative behaviour to the ways in which people think and organise their lives.

Triskel Sample Project Space is a new partnership between Triskel and Sample-Studios that will provide a visual arts project space for artists, especially emerging and mid-career artists, to test ideas and to develop new work that can be seen by the public. This offers tangible career development and audience engagement opportunities to artists on their ‘home turf’ where they have a safe space to develop new ideas, within which risk-taking is possible.

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