Time and Other Theves, by Dick Richards
Opening Friday 31 May at 5.00pm with a Q & A with the artist. Running until Sat 22nd June.
An Exhibition of New Works by Dick Richards opens on Fri 31 May featuring evocative and moving mixed media images of emigration, movement, memory and a sort of sense of loss.
Many of my paintings start with photographs taken inside abandoned houses in west Cork as I find a particular resonance in these locations. The majority of the work for this show was made in the last year and engages with those inspirations with reference to time, change and history and the way that place can evoke a personal story that is also universal. The technique I use to transfer the images into the paintings introduces the possibility of imperfections; an element of chance which adds richness to my process. It also lends itself to duplication and the repetition of motifs and I have exploited this in recent series.
“There is also some slightly older work here which seems to fit thematically and from which the newer paintings are a logical progression. I started to make the work in the Fragments series during the very restrictive lockdowns of 2020. The circle on the map that defined our 5km radius became an important reference point, as did the tracing of every route we walked within that circle. Our lives became dissociated, splintered and precarious but at the same time simplified and potentially uneventful. The concentrated exploration of our limited horizons kept us in touch with a sense of the new, of discovery, as we got to know parts of our locality that previously were blanks. We were constantly presented with fragments of the past and the deep history of the landscape and this is what these paintings engage with. Walls and boundaries are a recurrent theme, as are windows which I conceive as a metaphor for seeing into the past or looking from one reality to another.
Through the juxtaposition of images and the manipulation of paint, the piece develops an individual character. Sometimes a simple evocation of memory or time, sometimes a complex web of relationships.”
The show runs until Sat 22nd of June.