Martina Corry’s futuristic abstractions in black and white at the Context Gallery, Derry, utilise a technique discovered in the 18th century; Brian McAvera explains the artist’s method
Martina Corry’s work may look like photography, but there the resemblance ends. A camera will ‘capture’ a pre-existing image almost instantaneously, but Corry, who doesn’t use a camera, utilises elements of the photographic idiom in a time-consuming process. Just as a wheelwright or a playwright will craft and make their respective objects over a period of time, so Corry, the photo-wright, so to speak, crafts in the darkroom, generating images by creasing, crumpling, cutting, folding, or drawing with fibre optics — literally drawing with light — thus engaging with the basics of the photographic process: the play of light upon photosensitive paper
Nicola Gordon Bowe discusses Harry Clarke’s exquisitely detailed interpretation of Synge’s Queens, an ode to history’s most memorable female characters
