Boxed print (featured image) & book set
Signed and numbered
Contributions from Patrick T. Murphy, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes and Maeve Connolly
“He was struck by the nakedness and ritual of his fellow swimmers likening it to the components of many of the (art) performances he had seen as a student. For Coyle both the swimmer and the performance artist ‘placed their bodies in very testing and physically demanding environments and frequently in the nude, though to my mind the swimmer was a ‘primitive’ artist…a primitive performance artist” extract from ad marginem catalogue, Kevin Kavanagh gallery, Dublin 2000. A probing of the issues arising from admitting the possibility of Performance Art being a legitimate form of art for Coyle.
What and how will all this activity add up? That is truly the intriguing question that surrounds this work. For the moment, it is too close, Coyle presses our faces against the window and we are too contorted by the teeming wonder of his vision to catch sight of what it all might mean. Perhaps this is the artist’s intention to so obsessively and diversely present information both documentary and aesthetic that we are balanced, our reason thrown into the sea alongside him and we bob and float with all of the beauty of the risk and danger of swimming with our own mortality.”
Patrick T Murphy, RHA Director, extract from catalogue essay