Last Thursday (13 June) was the final day of Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology’s Graduate Exhibition. The art on display was of such extraordinary quality that several of the works captured the attention of Irish Times reviewer Aidan Dunne, who described the students’ work in today’s paper as ‘Inventive, ambitious, engaged and curious’.
You would be hard pressed to find an artist who would not wholeheartedly embrace so glowing a tribute to their work. The piece lavished particular praise and admiration on a select group of exhibitors.
One beneficiary was IADT’s Declan Graham, whose art installation (titled ‘David Crow’) invited the viewer to enter an imaginatively constructed school counsellor’s office where they could observe the working of the mind of a troubled child through inspecting the doodles, drawings and scrawls embellishing the walls. As the fictional counsellor’s notes lay on his desk, viewers were allowed to enter not just one mind, but two. They could see and interpret the child’s work for themselves; but they could read and interpret the counsellor’s interpretation of it too. In his review, Dunne referred to Graham’s ‘bravura installation [that] vividly conveyed the complexity and perplexity of mental life and the strategies used in attempts to understand and cope with it’.
Further plaudits were furnished on Janna Kemperman for her ‘powerful piece of physical dance theatre’, Performer; the ‘lively and inventive’ optical art of Colm Eccles and the ‘playful’ imagery of Melissa Breen’s photographic exhibit, Cosplay.
Such sophistication and success is heartening. It shows that our college’s are capable of developing the artistic talent of students to a point where they leave college with a level of sophistication that will allow them to reflect on and creatively examine the permanent flux of the world around us.
Those interested in IADT’s programmes may avail of their CAO change of mind forms. For more, click on the IADT skycraper advert on the gotocollege.ie website, or visit IADT’s homepage.
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