Platform Arts is an artist-led studio group and contemporary art gallery based in Belfast’s city centre. Our role is to actively promote creative expression, presentation, and access to contemporary art practice through our Exhibition, Education and Studio Programmes.
Platform has a number of studio spaces that are rented to our member artists in order to support their professional development as practising artists.
Platform Arts is committed to widening access to contemporary art in Northern Ireland.
RECENT EXHIBITION
FIND US
From Dust
13 - 20 March
Opening reception: 13 March 5.30 - 8.30
Cian Handschuh, Anna Heisterkamp, Fíne Holohan, and Shane Malone-Murphy
Curated by Samar Nezamabad and Sinéad Gaughran
From Dust unites four artists — Cian Handschuh, Anna Heisterkamp, Fíne Holohan, and Shane Malone-Murphy — in their mutual respect of material and land. The artists approach sustainability in practice with a contemporary mindset, thoughtfully collecting, selecting, and creating each material they use. Their meticulous choice of mediums imbues each artwork with significant meaning, and results in a much slower process of creation in today’s pre-packaged, ready-made world. The exhibition celebrates the beauty derived from attentiveness to the natural world and considers the question of how artists can create without the simultaneous act of destruction.
In the absence of plastics, chemicals, and synthetic material, the artists unearth a non-destructive act of creation that is surprisingly rare to find. Their work is man-made in the most literal sense of the term – made entirely by their human hands in intimate communication with the source of their materials. The different bodies of work complement each other through their innovative practices while also following their individual styles, working intuitively with their excavated matter.
Holohan’s expanded painting practice is, quite literally, made from dust. She collects, crushes, and binds all the pigments seen on her canvases herself, sourcing every mark made on her materials in their most pure, unadulterated form. Through the conscientious selection of his material for his sculptural practice, Malone-Murphy retraces the landscape of his childhood. Casts of rocks from the Wicklow mountains in the cardboard from his moving boxes containers for the artist’s conflicting feelings of home and non-belonging, symbolising a landscape that has been transformed through loss. Handschuh uses sculptural installation to explore questions of dwelling, nationality, and heritage. Scavenged material from the Irish coast is given new life in his practice and enhanced by his video work. In Heisterkamp’s filmmaking practice, they examine humanity’s cycles of destruction and reconstruction through their intent observations.
Curated by Samar Nezamabad and Sinéad Gaughran, From Dust is configured as a collaborative space fostering reflection and conversation among the audience on their own relationship to the materials and practices on display. The exhibition grounds viewers back to nature in the synthetic, manufactured society we find ourselves in, while also serving as an inspiring showcase of how the creation of art can be environmentally friendly.
Connswater Shopping Centre,
Unit 17-18,
Bloomfield Avenue,
Belfast, BT5 5LP