Artist Statement 2020

I use photographs to create a relationship between image, memory and reimaging. Digital collages are constructed as a starting point for the paintings. Through the interplay of already read images and the corporeality of the canvas and paper, I acknowledge that a work’s meaning emerges as much from the reading as the making. This use of existing images, to address my concerns, is influenced by the process of translating photographic images, to look at the codes of two types of realism and to open up contradictory and multiple readings of representation.

Biography

Gabrielle Flynn was born in County Fermanagh in 1957. She has worked for thirty-one years as a professional Librarian in County Leitrim. She studied Philosophy, Psychology and History at Trinity College, Dublin. Throughout her life she has maintained an interest in fine art and returned to education graduating with a BA in Fine Art from Sligo Institute of Technology in 2018. She has been awarded both the President's prize for highest grades and the Graduate Purchase Award in her third and fourth years at Sligo Institute of Technology. She has recently completed an Artist in Residence Award at The Dock, Carrick on Shannon, County Leitrim. In addition she has completed a two week residency in 2019 at Ballinaglen Arts Foundation, Ballycastle, County Mayo, with a solo show to follow in September 2020.

Gabrielle’s work addresses a number of themes. Her most recent paintings examine what she sees as disintegration in the global world. This is a world where migrant children are separated from parents and the additional threat to young adults, of being returned to their home country, sometimes results in psychological trauma medically known as Resignation Syndrome. She uses press photographs to create a relationship between read images and the viewer. She is asking the viewer to look again. Digital collages created by her, are a starting point for paintings. Between the interplay of the already read images and the corporeality of the canvas, Gabrielle acknowledges that the work’s meaning emerges as much from the reading as in the making. Her art has developed from being purely representational to expressive, gestural and conceptual. The influence of contemporary artists such as Peter Doig, Adrien Ghenie and Brian Maguire is evident in her mark making and in the use of abstracted elements, in her paintings.