Making Ground

Making ground... Opening Friday August 11th at 7PM. Exhibition runs from August 11th to August 20th.

Featuring work by Jade Butler, Mary Butler, Graham Carew, Eamon Colman, Niamh Curry, Mary Doyle Burke, Bernadette Kiely, Kate McMeekin, Vicki O’Donoghue and Ross Stewart.

To celebrate the launch of our new gallery space, An Chéad Tine is excited to invite you to the opening of Making ground on Friday the 11th of August at 7pm. Curated by Shannon Carroll, Making ground presents work by ten exciting Kilkenny based artists all inspired by the natural world. It conveys each artists’ unique approach to engaging with their local surroundings.

Featuring a diverse range of artworks by local contemporary artists, it is an exhibition exploring the relationship we have to our environment. Whether it be our local everyday environments, the natural world around us or the materials we encounter. Comprising of a series of abstracted landscapes, mixed media paintings and works inspired by found objects and gathered materials, in these layered and textured works, the artists tell a story of our interactions with the world.

Using different methods such as drawing, painting, walking, collecting, comparing, exploring, and documenting as artistic processes, these artists reveal to us their intimate encounters with the landscape of Kilkenny today. Exploring what they see, feel and find in these interactions, their work conveys the significant role artists can play in visualising our relationship with this landscape. They ask us to question our relationship with the environment and the impacts that our actions can have going forward in the world.

Making ground is both a celebration of the world of nature and of the artistic processes of local artists in Kilkenny who are engaging with the land. The artworks evoke a sense of respect, a deep engagement with and an affinity for the environments that surround us. They reveal a current of environmental consciousness underpinning much of contemporary art in Kilkenny today.

Their work offers a moment of reprieve in which we can reflect on the tensions that we experience everyday, between the natural and the man-made; ourselves and our surroundings; and society and the environment overall.

Established in July 2022 due to a unique need for supportive workspaces for local artists, An Chéad Tine is a new not for profit organisation, dedicated to the visual arts ecology and cultural landscape of Kilkenny. Harnessing the creativity and essence of artists and artworks from around the county and wider community, its new gallery aims to bring this to the city and showcase the talent and the beauty that is out there.

An Chéad Tine is run voluntarily by a Board of Directors and member artists.