Humble Remains

The Ashford Gallery at the RHA presents a selection of drawings by Michael Wann entitled Humble Remains. Born in Dublin in 1969, Wann lives and works in Co. Sligo, gaining his BA in Fine Art from Sligo Institute of Technology. He has held solo exhibitions at the Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar (2005), and Sligo Art Gallery (1999, 2002,2005, 2009), where he won an Iontas Drawing Award in 2000. He has been selected for the RHA’s Annual Exhibition since 2004, where in 2006 he was awarded the AXA Insurance Drawing Prize. Other group exhibitions include Boyle Arts Festival, Claremorris Open, Wexford Opera Festival, and Molesworth Gallery, Dublin.
Wann’s work is specifically drawing-based, and this current exhibition includes large-scale compositions completed while on residency at the Cill Riallaig Project, Co. Kerry, and the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Co. Mayo, during the summer of 2008. The drawings are taken from the immediate locale of north Sligo, and juxtapose arbitrary or transient images of cleared landscape, with more thought provoking depictions of the dereliction of habitation. They are as much about a process of mark-making as they are about representing a seemingly neglected landscape. A tonal richness challenges the viewer to look beyond the immediate surface image. Within the chosen mediums of charcoal, water and pencil there exists a wide and versatile imperfection of process. It is in the smudge and drip and simple dirt of the medium that there exists both vital and flawed elements of mark-making, where the spontaneous and accidental become of equal importance to that of the rational and intentional. Process here can be interpreted as the search for where these varying marks converge in the making of a landscape.