Statement to read Sue Saxon

Your name

1996
flour, kosher salt, 5m x 5m 

your name references a landscape of desert and ocean; passage across continents (my parents’ migration from Europe to Australia), the water’s edge (the beach, yearned for in New York where the work was created). Kosher salt is considered to be ‘purer’ than ordinary salt and is used in the process of purifying (koshering) meat, and also in ordinary cooking. I chose salt and flour for their colour, texture, domestic and symbolic properties. After all, cooking and eating play paramount roles in Jewish culture, expressions of love often channelled through food.

The ridges, resembling sand dunes or waves were created by pressing my fingertips into the flour, the symbols which appear to be at the mercy of the tide’s ebb and flow are taken from Eastern European tombstones. Some define the interred by their profession (the scissors representing a tailor), or inherited status (the hands in a pose of benediction indicate that the person descended from Aaron, the high priest).

The Hebrew word ‘shimecha’ –‘ש מ ך’ means ‘your name’, and can be understood on many levels. Your name goes forward into the world representing you and remains behind after you; when you imagine a loved one, you might say their name to draw their presence closer. your name also addresses the Jewish God, whose name it is forbidden to utter, in and for whose name, so many have died. your name is question, meditation and accusation, expressing my own uncertainty about God’s existence.

Enda O’Donoghue statement

Enda O’Donoghue’s work presents a forensic interest into the construction, the language and the mediated world of digital images together with an ongoing dialogue with the medium and process of painting. Hovering between the realms of abstraction and representation, between the mathematical encoded and the organic, O’Donoghue’s paintings are the result of a process which is highly analytical and methodical and yet inviting of errors, misalignments and glitches. The imagery comes almost exclusively from found photographs sourced from the Internet, where he plays with random throw-away moments of everyday life, merging them together in various interconnected themes. In O’Donoghue’s work, the painterliness of his technique works with the disposable nature of his subjects to make the work sometimes poignant and melancholic, or alternatively brittle and harsh. His work is deeply influenced by the digital high speed reality we now live in and he transports these seemingly meaningless sound-bite images from a place of apparent futility to one that questions and searches for meaning through the transformative act of painting.

Enda O’Donoghue was born in Ireland in 1973 and has been living and working in Berlin since 2002. He completed a degree in painting at the Limerick School of Art and Design followed by a Masters in Interactive Media at the University of Limerick.

O’Donoghue has taken part in numerous international group exhibitions, including shows at Liebkranz Galerie, Berlin (2012), Meter Room, Coventry (2012), The Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2011), Expo in Shanghai (2010), Universal Cube, Leipzig (2008), Four Gallery, Dublin (2006), Overgaden, Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2006) and a number of solo shows in Berlin, Ireland and in 2009 a solo exhibition in New York. In 2012 his work was presented in a major solo exhibition at the Limerick City Gallery of Art, Ireland and he has recently been awarded a residency at the Golden Foundation in New York state. He has also curated a number of group exhibitions, most recently an exhibition presenting a selection of Berlin based Irish artists at Grimmmuseum in Berlin which toured to the Galway Arts Centre, Ireland in 2013.
http://www.endaodonoghue.com/about