From Tuesday 9th December to Sunday 21st December 2008

Signal Arts Centre is pleased to present a collection of landscape paintings by Marianne Cullen.  Marianne is a native of Wexford and has exhibited her work in various solo and group exhibitions.  Her work features in public and private collections.  She graduated from the School of Art, Gorey with a BA in Fine Art.

The work for this exhibition is influenced by themes of childhood and memory and is drawn from the landscape that served as a backdrop to most of her childhood experiences.  This landscape holds echoes of her past, echoes of farming activities that she would have witnessed growing up on a farm.  She is using a series of photographs taken while on a short walk near her childhood home as a source for this work.  These photographs capture objects and scenes, which suggest prior events.  We see only the image that has been recorded but we can imagine the history.  She says, 'I feel that translating these photographs into painting helps to delay the reading process and that it allows for more reflective visual attention'.

She hopes to encourage viewers not to take her work at face value but to seek more imaginative interpretations and to provide their own narratives.  Rather than aiming to recreate photo-real images she uses paint to enliven the composition with stronger emotional impact.  She tries to achieve this through the use of light and shade, complementary colours and by tweaking the composition slightly.

Aidan Dunne comments on Marianne’s end of year Degree work, 'Marianne Cullen inventively combined painted and photographic animation in her recollection of past events in a strikingly evoked rural setting'. (The Irish Times, 2006)

Opening Reception: Friday 12th December 7-9pm