Death and the Compass

dublin | arts and media | press release Saturday March 18, 2006 16:07 by Lee Welch - Four leewelch at gmail dot com 11 burgh quay 086 3651256

Neil Bickerton, Lorna Macintyre, Sue Tompkins & Gregor Wright

Four is pleased to present Death and the Compass which brings together the work of four artists living and working in Glasgow. Neil Bickerton, Lorna Macintyre, Sue Tompkins and Gregor Wright all have diverse practices, but their work is linked by a proximity between form and content and an honesty in use of materials.

with support from The British Council

Sue Tompkins, Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute, Glasgow.

Preview 6th April 6-8pm
6th April - 22nd May 2006

Neil Bickerton works with a complex variety of media including acrylic paint, chewing gum, masking tape, digital animation and sound composition. Recent works have explored interconnected human and spacial relationships. Neil Bickerton was born in Glasgow in 1976 and graduated from Glasgow School of Art (Environmental Art) in 1999.

Lorna Macintyre’s work incorporates structural devices common to fantastic literature. Borges once claimed that the basic devices of all fantastic literature are only four in number; the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time and the double. Recent works incorporate the method of display as an essential part of the work and evolve intuitively using materials that include natural found objects, wood and enamel paint. Lorna Macintyre was born in Glasgow in 1977 and graduated from Glasgow School of Art (Environmental Art) in 1999.

Sue Tompkins work has been described as ”strung-out exercises in associative free thought: performance poetry that moves from the page to the voice, from speech to song, from song to signal, from signal to pure sound.” Her work encompasses the real space of the gallery, taking the form of typewritten text, collage and painting and the temporal space of live performance, shifting between the two forms and creating a dialogue between them. Born in Leighton Buzzard, England in 1971, Tompkins studied Painting at Glasgow School of Art (1990-1994)

Gregor Wright is interested in the concept of information and the ways that it is transmitted. His work is an attempt to understand visual information and the language that carries it in terms of their relationship to the increasingly abstract forms (data) that exist in wider contemporary culture. His approach can be seen as an attempt to strike a balance between an additive and a subtractive process. Through the constant acquisition and subsequent stripping out of information, both visual and conceptual, the work becomes an investigation into how meaning constructs itself. Formally the work exists in the gap between figuration and abstraction, focusing on the incongruent, the banal and the darkly surreal. Gregor Wright was born in Kilmarnock in 1975 and graduated from Glasgow School of Art (Painting) in 2001.

with support from The British Council

Forthcoming exhibition: Better Than the Real Thing?, Saoirse Higgins, Enda O’Donoghue and Martin Shannon, Curated by Regina Gleeson. May 29th 2006.

Gallery hours are: Saturday 1pm–6pm.
For further details please contact Lee Welch on +353 (0) 86 365 1256