West Cork Arts Centre, North St, Skibbereen, Co Cork Until Nov 21 028-22090
The idea of the journey underlies numerous mythological narratives. The hero sets off in search of something, undergoes trials and tribulations, and is changed by the experience. One finds not something remote and exotic but oneself, along with edges, limitations and mortality.
Artist Anita Groener was prompted to consider the idea of journey after the annual ritual of visits to her family and birthplace in the Netherlands. Her June exhibition in the Rubicon Gallery offered a distinctively personal take on the 4,000-year-old epic of Gilgamesh (the King of Uruk who travels in grief to the edge of the world on a futile quest for immortality), as well as a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, in which two warriors are situated against a dark, forbidding wood. Groener addressed this material in a language of virtual abstraction.
Mesh, her new work, develops these concerns with an animated drawing that considers the plight of another "lone warrior" who happens to be Groener's own father, as he faces up to the forbidding darkness of the forest of the mind that is Alzheimer's.
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Mick O'Dea Selects,Lavit Gallery, Dublin
