[...] Finally the simples means are bread, a camera, and time. In the land art project Feeder by Beata Daly. We see that the artist has made a large circle from breadcrumbs on the cricket ground in Trinity. We see the circle, the seagulls who come to eat it, and a feather that has been left behind...

The circle is reminiscent of works by Richard Long, but for me the relation to the story of Hansel and Gretel is telling. Having no food to eat – a wood cutters wife convinces her husband to take their children into the forest and leave there. The children overhear them so leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find their way home – but the birds of the forest find them and eat them leaving the children lost.
I suppose it is interesting that the artist has made a circle – not a line. A line implies a destination – a circle a journey – in the context of a university - of course it is the journey which matters – the destination is usually unknown – most of you are still on a quest for knowledge without knowing where you are going, and this work for me distils some of this anxiety perfectly.

Excerpt from opening speech by Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham (IMMA) Sean Kissane. Oisin Gallery, 12/11, Dublin, Ireland.

 


 

Beata Piekarska-Daly expresses her environmental engagement through a series of arras realised en plein air to be hung on wall or ceiling or, scrolling on the floor as river, a piece of flowing of nature. Thus, her artistic practice demonstrates her ability to sense and respond to the deep tellurian forces of monumental geological change inflecting daily life. This is an invite to approach her work with a palpable sense of the power, scale, and dynamism of geological forces, which precede and exceed our human agency.

As it was for the American minimalistic artist, Donald Judd, a painting is a rectangular volume on a wall, a wall is a folded plane in a room, and a room is a volume nested in a building. The Juddian notion of specificity allows one to depart from any standard representationalist account of a disjunctive relation between space and reason and opens us to a concept of site as the formalisation of their possible continuity. Similarly, Piekarska-Daly prefers not-framed canvas in her last Arrasseries for their flexible surface, not stretched and able to be adaptable to all kind of space. It better suits the spacial interacting with the bystander, who can walk around the art object not meeting any spacial obstacle or limit. 

Quoting Judd anew, he wrote: “emotion or feeling is simply a quick summation of experience, some of which is thought, necessarily quick so that we can act quickly”. Beata indeed acts quickly splashing on the canvas her entire experience, her “fast thinking” and action. The experience of continuity, especially in artist’s large-scale painting installations, is not “revealed” or “given” by the work but inferentially and materially constructed through a navigation within the work. Experience is a rational process through and through.

[...] Beata Piekarska-Daly’s environmental works are a pure representation of memories tied at that terrain, that landscapes and its introspective mining. Her fluid painterly approach is close to the "way of thinking" the flux of emotions, thoughts and life. Beata Daly paints the ephemeral, what is evanescent in everyday life. This is very important, especially now, because we live in a digital age where everything is temporary. This loss of time, space and pathos, according to Walter Benjamin and his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, is gained again by her abstract art which fixes this freedom flux to a painted surface. Her body of work so establishes an associative interplay with the space, the history, the beholder and her imagination.

Valeria Ceregini, Curator and Art Historian. Over Nature, exhibition catalogue, Ireland, 2019 (pp. 10, 20-23)

 


 


Tonight I’m thinking of the war again,
its shatter and spin of eyes and limbs
on the rooftops, bridges, sun-bare hills;


and thinking of the song it shreds
in wheatfields, cities; and the breath it steals
from quiet streets, to scatter as death


on the burning farms – death, which I see
has time, tonight, to pause here, too,


to pluck a lemon from the hanging bough,
which quivered in the wind, as the sun withdrew.

***

It’s time to fashion songs
the world might share,

as if to sing were knowing
knowledge impotent
on the seas we all go under, in the end.


Or as if the key we needed
was the one we lack, and every lock a whimper
in the blood and brain.


So sing, you songsters! Though no beam
of light can thud the earth
but the lines evaporate, or fade…


What is it words say, after all?
And what the water, from the fluent rock?

***

These days death
goes on, and life abides.


And our part, too,
is partly death:


to die, but
to die building


our paths across the sea.

 

Ciaran O'Rourke, The Exile Diaries
(Variations on poems by Antonio Machado, 1875-1939) 

Ciaran O'Rourke' poetry was part of PainThING installation at the Rathfarnham Castle Dublin, May/June 2022 and the poem: These Days Death is featured in the artistic publication PainThING.

 

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