Press

Sharon Murphy: Mise en abyme

From 8 November to 20 December 2024
Opening night on Thursday 7 November from 6:30pm to 9pm, admission free

Sharon Murphy’s new body of work focuses on Parisian carousels and theatrical décor during their moments of stillness and silence. It stems from what the artist describes as a ‘longstanding interest in staged spaces and the performative in photography’. Inhabited by inanimate painted horses, decorative frontispieces and drapery, these scenes become the point of departure for a wider exploration of fictive realism, the tension between hidden and revealed, negative and positive, illusion and disillusion. A mise en abyme of the practice of photography - itself a constructed fiction - and a delving into Freud’s notion of the uncanny, this exhibition at the Centre Culturel Irlandais evokes both enchantment and a pang of unease.

A bright and brilliant ‘rentrée’ celebrates 25 years of artist Joseph Walsh’s virtuosic studio practice, in a collaborative exhibition with acclaimed ceramicist Sara Flynn, before we embrace the dark season. On Halloween night, author Niamh Boyce calls us to remember Petronella the first woman in Ireland and Britain burned at the stake for heresy 700 years ago; jazz singer Sue Rynhart brings the Gothic to the emblematic Sunset-Sunside Jazz Club in November, and Michael Keegan-Dolan whips up a frenzy at Théâtre de la Ville in December with his masterpiece ‘Mám’. Enjoy the merry-go-round!