From Here to There refers to transitions, shifts in points of view, and ways to belong. Each of the artists engages with forms of displacement; David Lunney’s movable sculptures that frame and re-frame his camera’s point of view, Áine McBride’s focus on the built environment and what is unaccounted for in-between; and Katie Watchorn’s translations of structures and materials found in rural farming.

With a background in print-making, David Lunney works across sculpture, photography, painting and drawing. The starting point for what he describes as his “protracted art processes” are portable sculptural frames in which his phone is inset. Brought to locations such as the Dublin Mountains, he captures photographs through these frames filtered by layers of decoration and disruption. The digitally captured images are then rendered anew through watercolour and colouring pencil and set behind glass in frames elaborately woven with wool and ribbons. In his words, the artworks present a “feast of detail”, with no place for the eye to rest, layered to a point where abstraction and realism coalesce.

Áine McBride’s sculptural and photographic works take a close look at familiar, often overlooked, aspects of our surroundings, particularly urban and domestic built environments. In their sculptural works, functional materials such as concrete, steel, tiles and plywood are separated from their purpose and public spaces become private, even personal. As writer Rebecca O’Dwyer has stated “What McBride’s sculptures do is […] to create space for the re-assessment of quotidian materials like wood, steel, concrete and tile. They become, again, just as weird as they really are: as unwieldy, material solutions to particularly intangible, human problems or desires.”[1] McBride’s complex and beguiling works question consensus, of place, of space, in thinking and acting, and imply to us that things could be otherwise.

Katie Watchorn’s practice is rooted in the rhythms of rural Ireland particularly in relation to agriculture. Primarily working in sculpture, she often employs fickle, agriculturally specific materials, such as aggregates, fats, plastics, in combination with familiar vessels like troughs, trailers, and buckets. At times, her references are abstracted and remade using alternative materials; plastic feeders cast into clay, animal feed cast in sugar, and ribbon rosettes fashioned from sage suede leather. A dialogue around ideas of permanence, decay and display emerges. Watchorn’s sculptural works often mobilise a scale suited to animals, displacing our human-centric point of view. In these acts of translation there is a politics at play in questioning the accepted  order of things, animal vs. human, rural vs. urban, and the present cycles that exist.

David Lunney graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 2010. Recent exhibitions include; These Past Three Months, The Courthouse Gallery, Co. Clare (2020), Bedeck, collaboration w/ Eleanor McCaughey at Platform Arts, Belfast (2019), and solo exhibitions; Skrot fra Rambu, Galleri Elgin, Tynset, Norway; Things Twice (multiple times), MART Gallery, Dublin, and Chrome Dreams, Pallas Projects, Dublin (all 2018), Glencree Interventions, The Lab gallery, Dublin (2015). He has received Arts Council Awards including a Bursary Award (2020) and Project Award, with Jane Fogarty, (2012). He has completed residencies at Tynset Grafikkverkstad, Norway (2018), Alps Arts Academy: Land Art Workshop at Safiental, Switzerland (2016) and the RHA/Black Church Print Studio Graduate Award 1 year Residency Award (2014).

Áine McBride graduated from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, in 2016. They were one of the artists selected for the Platform Commissions programme for the 39th EVA International, Limerick (2020). Recent two-person and solo exhibitions include; UNCANNY, with Nicolas Bourthoumieux at 10N, Brussels (2021), ~ set,  at mother’s tankstation, London, and Habitat HQ, a site-specific project in Trinity College’s Arts Building, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2017). Recent group exhibitions include; …and the days run away like wild horses over the hills…, Scoil Lorcáin, Dublin (2019): and Periodical Review, Pallas Projects, Dublin, NEU-GEN 2017: Towards Both the Parts, NCAD Gallery, Dublin (all 2017). McBride is the recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Next Generation Award 2017, Visual Arts Bursary Award (2019, 2020), and has been selected for residencies at FLACC, Genk in Belgium (2019) and Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin (2018 – 2022).

Katie Watchorn graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include; Zero-Grazing at Studio Pavilion at House for an Art Lover, as part of Glasgow International, 2021, A Calf Remembered, Wexford Arts Centre, BalehomeBalehome at VISUAL Carlow, supported through the Arts Council Ireland, both 2018. Group exhibitions include: Guest, curated by Marysia Wieckiewicz Carroll, Newbridge House, Donabate, Dublin, Muine Bheag, Co. Carlow (both 2021); PAST/URES, The Library Project, Dublin, 2020, Periodical Review #9, Pallas Projects, Dublin, 2019, and Please Touch, Glucksman Gallery Cork, 2018. She was the Overall Winner in the Visual Arts Category of the 2014 Irish Undergraduate Awards, received the Hotron Recent Graduate Award 2016, selected by Annie Fletcher, and has been the recipient of a number of Arts Council Bursaries, including the Next Generation Award (2018) which supports emerging artists of promise at a pivotal stage in their career. She was a resident at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2019 as part of their 1000 programme and is currently an artist-in-residence at Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin. She splits her time between Dublin and her family farm in rural Co. Carlow.

Feature | ‘No Secrets for the Artists Working in Public in the Douglas Hyde Gallery’, by Claudia Dalby, Dublin Inquirer, 20 October 2021.

Feature | ‘Redefining the Art Gallery Experience in the Douglas Hyde’, by Emily Pena, The University Times, 22 November 2021.

Review | ‘Artsdesk: From Here to There – Blurred Boundaries’, by Tom Lordan, Totally Dublin, December 21 2021.