A group exhibition exploring home, the domestic, and the everyday in contemporary painting, photography and photographic installation by Chris Finnegan, Colette Cronin and Síomha Callanan.
The Grammar of Home presents moments of domesticity and maps the idea of home, universally held, but the meaning of which is unique to each of us. Home is the space each of us carves out for ourselves – it is in the objects we select, the family we share, and the street we walk everyday. The familiarity of home is both mundane and sublime.
In the wake of the pandemic when confined to home, our collective focus on home, the everyday, and our immediate surroundings was heightened. It was through this time that Chris, Colette, and Síomha each began their exploration of what constitutes home, and what transforms a building or neighbourhood into home. Through Chris’ photography and interactive work we see a family’s life played out, within familiar games and domestic snap-shots, while Colette’s miniature paintings of nostalgic furniture, often found on daft.ie deep-dives, long for both the familiarity of granny’s house and the hope to buy somewhere to create a home. In contrast, Síomha’s intimate documentary photography captures the nuanced textures and perspectives of her daily explorations throughout spring 2020.
Though often shared and negotiated, home should be a space of sanctuary, of return and comfort. This exhibition is poignant in our current times of war, mass-migration, and the Irish housing crisis when so many are without a home and striving for its security and embrace. This exhibition recognises varied realities of home life, including that of striving towards future home security.
This exhibition includes interactive games suitable for early-years and family audiences.
About the artists
Colette Cronin is a Cork-based painter. She holds a BA Hons in Fine Art from Crawford College of Art and Design and a Postgraduate Diploma from Goldsmiths University London. By incorporating three dimensional elements in her traditional painting techniques and physically building the scene behind the stretched canvas, her work is an experimental look at the spaces we occupy, snapshots of domesticity, carved from memory, experience, and dreams. Glimpses of rooms and places, past and present, clamour for remembrance. They are fragmented pieces, placed on canvas and built outward, crookedly recreating a story as dreamlike structures, intuitively formed without pretension.
Síomha Callanan is a visual artist based in Cork working in the medium of analogue photography. She holds a BA (hons) in Fine Art Photography & Lens Based Media from Limerick School of Art and Design (2016) and an MA in Art & Process from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design (2021). The act of walking is an intrinsic element of Callanan’s work which focuses on her surrounding environment, the everyday world, place, psychogeography and the figure of the flâneur/flâneuse. Site specific to the city of Cork, the images exhibited here are a selection from a larger body of work created in 2020. During a time when a 2km travel limit was in place Callanan undertook an in depth investigation of her immediate surroundings visually documenting her findings. Her work invites us to slow down and engage in this exercise in observation.
Chris Finnegan is a Cork City-based visual artist and arts educator with a Masters in Photography from Falmouth University (2023). Recently moved back to Ireland after a decade in the UK, his practice centres on the home and suburbia; critically exploring ideas of home-making, childhood and the domestic sublime. His work takes a playful approach to the photographic medium, often experimenting with the boundaries between images and objects. House Rules, a project in collaboration with his young sons, was published by PhotoIreland in 2023 and a solo exhibition of this work was shown in Cork City as part of PhotoIreland Festival 2022. He is one of five Irish photographers who represented Ireland in Futures 2024. For The Grammar of Home his work will be presented as an interactive playscape, with young audiences in mind.