Jason Turner’s father kept racing pigeons and, with Jason confined to home through illness, the birds offered a fascinating source of stimulation for him, writes Catherine Marshall
The sight of a white owl, dramatically contained between front and rear upper-storey windows in Uillinn, the West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, in 2019, led passers by to slow down and step inside. They were met by the calculating gaze of a stuffed owl, poised on the top of a moist, fetid tree-fern trunk from a West Cork garden. Both tree and owl were dead, but they drew attention to nature through the smell of damp earth, unexpected in an art gallery, and the hard stare of the bird, emerging from heartbreakingly soft white plumage. The artwork was the result of a relationship between Jason Turner from the Kilkenny Collective for Arts Talent (KCAT) Studios in Callan, Co Kilkenny and West Cork artist Rachel Parry, and was a cornerstone of the Engagement Project’s touring exhibition in that year. It was a dramatic interjection into a group exhibition of mainly paintings and some sculptures, but it was not Turner’s first artwork dealing with birds.
Dorothy Cross’ new work feels explicitly relevant to the times we are living in, writes Francis Halsall
Róisín Kennedy speaks with this year’s winner of the Ireland–U.S. Council and Irish Arts Review Portraiture Award at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Daniel Nelis
Cristín Leach finds that the exhibition ‘A Matter of Time’ at the Crawford Art Gallery moves from the political to the personal, and the local to the global, without skipping a beat
