Monday to Sunday 10:30am to 5:30pm (last entry 4:30pm)

Natasha Pike: And Almost I Am Back Again

Lismore Castle Arts is presented a solo exhibition by Natasha Pike, recipient of our 2020 graduate award.

Moving to an online award for 2020, the exhibition presents a new body of work by Natasha Pike, graduate of the 2019 Crawford College of Art MA Programme.

Natasha Pike’s paintings and sculptures blur the boundaries of each other – paintings sweep off the wall, almost eager to reach the sculpture on the floor below, canvasses are often unstretched, their torn edges keeping their own physical boundaries in flux. The sculptures are different shapes, some strict rectangular shapes, others rough acorn like shapes, cut clinically in half, colours soft as sherbet reflected in the minimal tones of the paintings above. It is a conversation between themselves, so successfully here it is as if the artist is no longer in charge, and the works arenow leading a private interplay.

Downloadable catalogue with text by Ciara Healy-Musson (pdf)

Words are important to Natasha, in earlier works written across the painted surfaces in distant reference to Basquiat or Twombley, but in more recent work disappearing off the surface and resting in the titles alone. And Almost I am Back Again, Sad Ring, Pink Pond Milk Pond are humorous references to the everyday, hinting at the multitude of references, ideas, notes and observations which inform an artist’s thinking, to finally rest in the considered, reductive work on display here.

The titles act as a poetic framework for the physicality of the works to seek meaning in one another. Natasha Pike is an Irish artist with an MA in Art & Process from Crawford College of Art and Design, IRL (2019), a BA in Fine Art from Falmouth University, UK (2007) and a Foundation Diploma from Manchester Metropolitan, UK (2002).

With residencies at The Cill Rialaig Project and The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland, as well as in Barcelona, Buenos Aires and Berlin (assisted by the Irish Arts Council Travel and Training award 2014), Natasha worked in Berlin for several years before returning to base herself in Ireland, working in abstract painting, made object, and drawing.