Mike MacGabhann

Over the past two years Mike has been working in the mediums of painting and printmaking, predominately working with portraiture, utilising its ability to entice a level of empathy from the viewer. Mike is fascinated by the narrative intrigue that takes place between sometimes unrelated images, tempting the viewer into making story lines around seemingly autonomous images and themes.

He has also worked with film stills to explore the organisation of personal memory and history via an association with cinematic plots. Another concern is the ability of the grotesque to blur the line between the real and the unreal, expressing elements of duality and combining tragedy and comedy, central to its power to convey the condition of being human.

Mike plans to use his time as artist in residence to continue exploring his twin concerns of portraiture and narrative, looking at the way we categorise ourselves, and the contradictions inherent in our notions of our physical selves. By overlaying self portraits with various mythical and cultural images and icons, he will explore the implications for changing self image.

Mike will be setting up a temporary print studio within the space allocated within the Gallery. Here he will concentrate on working with low-tech printing techniques such as acrylic based mono-printing and silkscreen.