Between Things
Harry Walsh Foreman, Min-young Kim, Johanna Nulty, Marijn Ottenhof
Catalyst Arts Student and Recent Graduate Show 2018
28 August – 6 September 2018
BETWEEN THINGS builds on Catalyst’s reputation for showcasing the very best of work from UK and Ireland based recent graduates and final year students within this annual exhibition. Catalyst are delighted to be offering critical support and exposure at a formative stage in the artists’ development.
Harry Walsh Foreman was born in Dublin where for the most part he has been based since either making art, teaching art or sometimes both. Having recently graduated from the MFA in Fine Art Paint in the National College of Art & Design (NCAD) in Dublin, he has exhibited extensively through Ireland in numerous group shows where he has honed his particular approach which celebrates the human and the marks we make on the world from the architecture of a skyline to the tagging on a storefront. It is made in celebration of the local, the small-scale, the eccentric and the down-right ordinary. It is a search for the moments which contain a multitude of possibilities for examining the humour of the everyday.
Employing a various form of digital media, from CGI to game simulation, the work of Korean artist Min-young Kim reflects and discusses our relationship (and dependence) on digital technology and screen-based platforms and the use and deployment of software technologies within the realm of the social and biomedicine. Technical skills and scientific metaphors used in her work are therefore highly anchored in contemporary technosphere whereby smart devices, tracking-capturing systems and algorithmic computer processing alter our perception of the natural or the humanistic. Min-young Kim graduated with a MA in Contemporary Art Practices from the Royal College of Art, London in 2018 and with a BFA in Fashion Design from Ewha Womans University, South Korea in 2010.
Johanna Nulty is a visual artist based in Belfast. She studied Fine Art BA in Sligo Institute and is currently completing her MFA at Ulster University. The main components in Nulty’s practice are sculpture, video and installation. Nulty is interested in exploring sound from mass produced materials. Amalgamating the different sounds, creating visual and audio videos. Interested in ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) which is a term used for an experience characterised by static like or tingling sensation on the skin and how it affects the viewer physically and emotionally. Nulty is more interested in the materials themselves, the sound they make, how to capture it and the idea of materials creating a rhythm or pattern sound. She is also interested by the idea of ‘chance’, things that happen not so intended or forced but still having a structure to compose. Chance actions differ from erroneously carried out actions only in that they disdain the support of a conscious intention and really need no pretext. Creating sounds from the materials used, unaware of the effect such simple actions would present or allow.
In her work, Marijn Ottenhof investigates social and political systems and the human need for rules and logic. In staged situations, language and sculptural elements are used to draw audiences into performative moments. Existing texts are integrated into scripts and by the removal from their original context, are rendered more abstract and poetical. In the same way, surreal decors form an abstraction of known situations as a backdrop. Ottenhof studied at the Royal College of Art in The Hague and is now based in London, where she is currently enrolled in an MA at the Royal College of Art.