Humbly Through The Dust is a unique exhibition curated especially forCountyFermanagh by artist and resident Dr. Helen Sharp, who lives and works on Inisherk island (population 4) on the Crom Estate.

The title of the exhibition is taken from the novel Ring O’Rushes written by Shan Fadh Bullock, born on Inisherk in 1865. Both fictitious and autobiographical, Bullock’s writing borrows from fact and from imagination to weave tales of rural life and so too does Humbly Through The Dust. 

The exhibition gleans from the curious notion of how the autobiographical is manifest within a rural landscape or outland, and has at its heart, the curator’s response to the experience of living in County Fermanagh and her witness to man’s bond with nature, the land and in particular to its animals.

The exhibition also echoes Sharp's experience of growing up on theislandofVatersay(population 48) and the truths that unfold within small communities.

For this remarkable exhibition, Sharp was offered the privilege of working with The British Council and to choose from its extensive collection. The exhibition includes work by Grayson Perry, Tracey Emin, Henry Moore, Mark Wallinger, Sean Gooden and Maggi Hambling amongst many others, and has been curated in a such a way that these internationally recognised artists hang alongside work by some of the most exciting contemporary artists living and working on the island of Ireland (population 5.4 million). These include work by Ursula Burke, Deirdre McKenna, Megs Morley and Tom Flanagan, Seamus Harahan, Duncan Ross, Sean Lynch, Anne Quail, Annie-June Callaghan, Julie Bacon, Nicholas Keogh and Catherine Roberts.

 http://www.flive.org.uk

 

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.