Remnants-Rhythms-Rituals

Image: Elizabeth Comerford, Paradise, 2023,
Woodblock Print, Print Size: 47cmx75cm.
Courtesy of the artist.

Ardgillan Gallery are delighted to present this exhibition of artwork by Dave West, Tiffani Love and Elizabeth Comerford. Remnants-Rhythms-Rituals examines the deep synergy that exists in the environments we occupy, the artifacts we create and the ripples that spread from our movements. This work creates a dialogue between the spaces that we inhabit, both natural and designed, and the reflective meaning that flows from our interactions with them. Remnants-Rhythms-Rituals is a study of touch, of memory and of experience. It asks questions about the landscapes that surround us and the effect these places have on us as humans. These works ask us to consider the relationship we create with our environment, how we respond to the trinkets of varying size that we surround ourselves with.  

Remnants-Rhythms-Rituals uses a multidisciplinary platform to create an intersectional dialogue around the transfer of energy, vibrant and historical, that occurs when we dwell in a space. These works suggest an interconnectedness between environment, object, and individual. They ask that we consider the life force of everything and the transactional relationships that take place between them.

West, Love and Comerford’s work creates balance and texture. It explores line, shape and tone to transition from a position of confusion to something altogether less definable, shifting and pivoting to eventually rest in a place of connection and comfort. Human experience and the traditions, values, and responses it prompts, is somehow both universal and resolutely personal. We exist in a sort of singularity, where the historical and the modern are in a constant state of flux, and where buildings and trees speak with the remains of everything that has come before it. Our nature, physical and personal, is one of uncertainty. Remnants-Rhythms-Rituals is an analysis of this.

Dave West

Dave West was born and raised in South Wales and is now settled in Balbriggan, North County Dublin. He works across the areas of Fine Art, Art Tuition, Public and Community Arts.  He has had over 20 solo exhibitions to date in both private Galleries and Art Centres including Draiocht in Blanchardstown and Iontas Arts Centre in Castleblaney. Dave has exhibited widely in group exhibitions including many of the most prestigious societies and academies in Ireland and the UK. He has been a regular exhibitor during the past decade at both the Royal Hibernian and Royal Ulster Academies. In the UK he has shown with the Royal Society of Oil Painters, The Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Society of Marine Artists, The New English Art Club and the Royal West of England Academy.

Tiffani Love

Tiffani Love is an artist from northern New York, now based in the west of Ireland and working at Barton Studios in Galway. Love has exhibited both nationally and internationally, with recent shows including her solo exhibition Hushing (2023) at Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich in Belfast and the two-person exhibition Conversations with the Landscape (2023) at the Laneway Gallery in Cork. She received her BFA in 2017 from SUNY Plattsburgh and her MFA in 2022 from the Burren College of Art and NUI Galway. Love was awarded the Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland and an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2022.

Elizabeth Comerford

Elizabeth Comerford was born in Dublin in the 50s, studied fine art in NCAD in the 70s and after a 10 year stay in Lauragh Co. Kerry on the Beara Penninsula returned to Co. Dublin and settled in Balbriggan where she reared her family and continued to develop her art practice.  Her work is drawing based. She was made a member of the UKs Pastel Society in the 90s.  She was awarded a month long residency in Graphic Print Studio from Fingal Co. Council and since then printmaking and particularly woodblock printing has played an important part in her work.  A recent interest in handmade books, journals and portfolios has provided her witha new way of using and presenting prints.