Platform is delighted to present ‘all that was once felt’, an exhibition by three graduating students from the Fine Art BA programme at Belfast School of Art. Opens 6pm 2nd July runs until 30th July.

Nina Oltarzewska, Sionnain Rafferty and Maria del Pilar Morales Caamaño were selected as the recipients of the Platform graduate award 2021. 

They will show selected pieces from the work developed for their degree show which due to Covid19 restrictions, was unable to open to the public this year. Works will include sculpture, video, performance, drawing and painting.

Nina Oltarzewska is a multi-media artist whose work focuses on the complex feelings that arise as a result of existing as an embodied being. Ranging from performance to casting, metal-working to sound, her work creates sensory experiences that create a feeling on the verge of either panic or safety.

Within Sionnain Rafferty’s practice, her artwork acts as an emotional response to subjective experiences surrounding mortality and her own process with grief. As a conceptual painter, her work strives to evoke feelings of vulnerability, along with complex and obscure imagery that reflect on her own subconscious renditions of the human experience, and the longevity of human life. Important within her practice, her subject matter is sourced from spontaneous and vivid mental imagery that often appears through moments of thought and lucid dreams. Her paintings tend to juxtapose between energetic and expressive gestures with structured and rigid forms. Within her work, there are recurring geometric structures throughout; these prevalent forms often represent human presence, by which the artist questions their state of existence in the afterlife. She includes figurative aspects alongside geometric and loose, energetic shapes to reinforce the essence of human presence, and allude to a sense of uncanny that is open to the interpretation of the audience. Her paintings often challenge perspective, as they comment on the stages of human life, even in the afterlife. Colour theory is a significant element within her practice, whereby she tends to work within a controlled and minimal palette of neutral, earthy tones. She believes this element is vital for her work, as it helps convey particular emotions to the audience and can transform the perception of a space. 

Maria del Pilar Morales Caamaño is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the relationships of memory and the human condition with materiality, specially textiles and fibre. Her practice is driven by states of being one or the other and feelings of belonging and not belonging. She is interested in the questioning of cultural interactions and representations.