reviews

Hegarty's artistic background has seen him represent Ireland as a member of the Irish Snow & Sandsculpture team, and these elemental extremes have found their way into this show. The works are full of tensions; tensions between man and nature, art and nature, the real and the imagined, now and the future, now and the past. The landscape of the mind leeching into the cold territories outside. The use of felt here is reminiscent of Beuys and his intimations of survival in a world tha takes no prisoners.

Open Book is a series of small works, little vignettes in a story of shapes and space. Windows and arches, layers, gaps and doors. Yet the tableau tell of closure; it is after the fire and after the freeze, everybody has either left town or boarded themselves up for a long seige. The surfaces are layered, scratched, torn and rent. Image Six in the series shows a way in, but you don't really know if you want to go there. Yet the images are fascinating, the textures and layers simultaneously drawing you into their world, and then shutting you out with the terminations of blank closures, the dead ends that spell the end for the fugitive on the run.

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