Aleana Egan

Aleana Egan

Second-hand

Lismore Castle Arts: St Carthage Hall Lismore, Co. Waterford P51 WV96, Ireland

23 March – 19 May 2024

Working primarily with sculpture, painting and occasionally film, Aleana Egan engenders psychological states and memories through enigmatic arrangements of objects and forms. Feeling comes before words; words are an after act, an attempt at an associative branching out. Her sculptural works are concerned with interiority, our relationship to the built environment and interpersonal events. The materials used vary and are reminiscent of light industry and building; steel mesh, plaster, simple art materials; paint, papier mâché and canvas to the more hand-made and particular; dyed fabric and clothing.

“The paintings are started from partial images and shapes from my mind’s eye generated through dreaming, drawing, note-taking and from life outside my own body. Not any representation but more of an embodied presentation. They seem to me as if they are under water, bleary in a sense. Nothing grandiose about this – it’s fragmentary, moment to moment.”

Her forms and shapes act as traces or shifting responses, tentative articulations of remembered places or everyday moments. What occurs are interior objects where niches and recesses are present, and shapes seem distant. A meandering, sensuous line and sense of fluidity is carried from her sculptures into her film and painting, giving form to a sense of flux, openness and mutability.

Image: Aleana Egan, Exhibition title: Second-hand. This work: a movement of return 2024. Galvanised steel mesh, mild steel, fabric, tape, 450 cms x 200 cms x 80cms (floor), 450 x 200 x 30 cms (canopy). Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery Dublin. Install image by Jed Niezgoda.