Reverie

Solo Exhibition
Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin, 14th September to 19th October 2024

An exhibition of new prints and paintings, opened on 19th September by Dr. Angela Griffith, Trinity College Dublin

“Ailbhe Barrett’s extensive levels of physical engagement with making, or ‘sculpting’ the copperplate according to her will, alongside her complete absorption in the process, results in work of transcendent emotional intensity.

Ailbhe’s work is as complex as it is beautiful. It is delicate and intense, both physically and emotionally. It does not tell a story but offers the beginnings of one. It does not shout, but it persuades.”

Dr Angela Griffith, Irish Arts Review, Autumn Issue, 2024

“Reverie is a new body of work by painter and printmaker Ailbhe Barrett. These large scale paintings and carborundum prints explore the tensions between the ephemeral and the permanent, the remembered and the revisited. Through landscape, Barrett meditates on the memories held in the land, and human concepts of ownership and boundaries.

Using glazes, dense carborundum, subtle tonal blends and assertive drypoint incisions, Barrett deftly balances form and light. Her engagement with process and materials sees trees, roads and fields estranged from their origins. A roof in silhouette, power lines engulfed by overgrowth, hints of habitation embedded in the landscape. Human and natural entanglement are woven into the essence of Barrett’s practice. New openings and undulations appear, as layers of translucency and texture are applied, worked and re-worked into the surfaces, tracing memories across the works themselves.

The sheer physicality and scale of these new works speaks to the physical engagement and labour of creation. We shape the land, just as the land shapes us. Our presence in the world etches new terrain upon the psyche, mediated topographies, mementos of reverie.’
- Ria Czerniak LeBov

View the online gallery at GraphicStudioDublin.com