Anne McAlarney
Anne McAlarney a multidisciplinary artist, is currently pursuing an MFA from Ulster University. Her practice explores tensions between the lost and found. She graduated from University of Ulster in 2013. Since then she has continued to practice as an artist, exhibiting her work throughout Ireland. Writing particularly poetry is central to her practice. A critical review of her work by Dr John Brown suggests “I look and feel the word, listeth, something felt like the wind but inexplicable, incomprehensible, but known, tangibly there”
Change ceaselessly alters the world. It is an integral part of the method of enquiry, central to the experienced sensation of making art, the process. Change is the recurrent theme in my work, an irresistible constant. The inbetweenness, the liminal, the light, the dark to which I am constantly drawn. The liminal state, characterised by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy, is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behaviour are relaxed, a situation which may lead to new perspectives. People, places, and things may not complete a transition and thus may remain permanently liminal. Excavations of the foundations of my longterm interest in liminality are evolving and developing, with new structures are being built from previous work. In these new constructions, I explore interconnection, particularly the interconnection between landscape and personal/collective memory, the chimerical, the illusory. Consequently, ethereal phenomena and ideas are traversed fusing sculpture, photography, word play, painting and more recently video. I intersperse abstraction with reflective analytical thoughts, using my own voice to discuss these issues. I use voice sounds as language (sense and non-sense) but also an anti-language, using proximity of voice and image to construct a new language, in which I am trying to make sense, a glimpse into another knowledge or type of knowledge.
