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Petrina Shortt

About the member

My practice takes the form of drawing, print, painting and sculpture. It is concerned with looking at ways in which we can uncover and know a specific place, while at the same time asking broader questions about belonging and ecological guardianship.

The work explores visible and eroded histories that exist deep within the landscape, using environmental geography and the interplay of elements as a guide. It is a layering of temporal experiences; tidal, seasonal, geological and human. Gathering moments of time in one place.

Examples of this work were exhibited in my recent MA show. It consisted of paintings, drawings and sculptures responding to the marine and geological environments around a small area of Dunmanus Bay, West Cork.  I am particularly interested in geological deep time and how knowledge of this can influence how we make long-time decisions concerning global ecology.

Education
  • 2022 MTU Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork, MA Fine Art – 1st class honours
  • 2005 National College of Art and Design, Dublin
    HDip in Art Education – 2.1 honours
  • 1999 National College of Art and Design, Dublin
    BA Fine Art – 1st class honours
Exhibitions
  • May/June 2023 – Solo Exhibition, MTU Gallery, Grand Parade. Cork
  • May/June 2023 – Cork Printmakers exhibition Lavit Gallery, Cork
  • 2023 Blue House Gallery, Schull. Co. Cork.
  • 2023 Inception Exhibition, West End Art Studios, Mallow. Co. Cork.
  • 2023 Tonta/(Waves) Exhibition, Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen. Cork.
  • 2022 Know That I Am Also At Sea, MA:AP exhibition, MTU Gallery and studios, 46 Grand Parade, Cork
  • 2022 Counter/Parts Exhibition, collaborative exhibition with MA in Creative Writing students from UCC. Studio 12 Gallery, Backwater Artists Group, Cork.
  • 2012 Sculpture in Context, Botanic Gardens. Dublin

Petrina
Shortt

“In Petrina Shortt’s work the monumentality of the environmental landscape, and the human and non-human memories embedded within, are brought to the fore in order to produce seemingly contrasting perspectives on place. The presence of the sea is felt most intensely here, as in Shortt’s drawings, prints, and sculptures the layered histories of a coastal site emphatically rub up against the limitations of our present models of representation. Emily Eliza Scott has noted how the current ecological crisis “poses profound representational dilemmas”, with the edgeless and near-infinite interactions between various environmental processes being impossible to fathom. The sheer scale and multiplicity of these systems eviscerate any dream of a simplistic and naïve form of representation that would seek to depart from the
logic of resemblance. Shortt’s aesthetic shells, as diagrammatic imagery and sculptural contortions, therefore seek to verbalise the essence of a place mapped through abstract experience. “

Laurence Counihan, in ‘Fluid Dynamics’, catalogue essay, MA:AP Show 2022

Petrina Shortt
Petrina Shortt
Petrina Shortt