Custom House Studios + Gallery

ALT Exhibition continues until Sunday 17 August, 2025. Image: Overtly Head - Acrylic Ink on Canvas - 80 x 60 cm - 2025

ALT Image: Custom House Studios + Gallery Exterior, Day Photo: Conor Mc Keown

ALT Simmer Dim| Blawnin Clancy| Exhibiting Artists Margaret Adams | Uri Blayer | Dietrich Blodau | Tom Brawn | Sheelyn Browne | Breda Burns | Louise Butler | Deirdre Byrne| Ellen Cafferkey | Blawnin Clancy | Frances Crowe | Mags Duffy | Eileen Fitzgerald | Ita Freeney | Áine Gallagher | Betty Gannon PaulineGaravan | Ralph Gelbert | Brian Gerard Duffy | Angela Gilmour | Mary Hession | Jennifer Hickey | Joanna Hopkins | Una Kearns | Sarah Kelly |Trish Kelly | Birgit Knoechi | Daniel Lipstein | Anna Rose Lowry | Máire Maguire | Selma Makela | Caroline Masterson | Bruce Mathieson |Maggie Morrisson | Mary Nagle | Rosie Norton | Mick O’Dea | Geraldine O’Malley | Gerry O’Malley | Gráinne O’Reilly | Owen Piffaretti |Christine Prescott | Susie Quinn | Ann-Marie Reeve | Elsa Jenny Rochford | Noah Rose | Aisling Smyth | Betsy Stirratt | Benita Stoney | EmmaStroude | Angela Walsh | Ian Wieczorek | Sarah Wren Wilson

ALT Mid-air: a place of movement, release and expansion; a place of weight and weightlessness; a place without connection and boundary; a place of joy and fear, chaos and focus; a place of possibility. Middle ground: a place of vulnerability and bravery; a place of reconciliation; a place of resolution; a place of compromise and acceptance; a place from where we may find a way forward; a place of potential. Emma Stroude’s figurative works explore themes of performance, embodiment and our ability to embrace uncertainty. They invite the viewer to consider the experience of inhabiting their own bodies not just in a physical way but also in an emotional and cerebral way. Her compositions are carefully selected moments of performance chosen for their connection to her own personal experiences and feelings of empathy towards the roles played by the figures. The investigative process of rendering them in paint imbues each piece with the artist’s own story.

ALT Image: The Old Quarry – colour pencil, promarkers, gesson on wood panel, 40 x 60cm. Byrne, who is based between Wexford and Seville, focuses on themes of environmental psychology and our identity and connection to our natural and built environments. Byrne intends to depict a certain atmosphere in these drawings, in an attempt to capture a sense of place from each landscape encountered. There are several scenes taken from the edge-lands of Doñana National Park, Spain, a major passing place for migratory birds, as well as other sites from the South of Spain, perhaps offering ordinary alternatives to the more popular tourist sites. The artist tries to portray these places, not as a landmarks in their prime, but as interesting views that we find in our path at random.

ALT Image: A game of chess between an artist and a gardener. Acrylic on canvas, 90 x 90cm. ‘This body of work is a conversation on the societal challenges of retaining one’s tradition, identity, and ancestral roots in the face of adversity, colonialism, nature, A.I. and capitalism. The concept of taking sides is considered while exploring abstraction through transitions of games’ - Bryan Gerard Duffy Custom House Studios + Gallery is delighted to present a substantial new body of work and solo exhibition by Mayo artist, Bryan Gerard Duffy. 'Idle Walls' takes its title from the wall to the fore of the gallery, where seafaring workers would historically have ‘idled’, awaiting the promise of work on the boats in Westport Quay. This vital and topical work is largely comprised of four moveable walls and a moveable wooden ‘well’. The fixtures, which can be wheeled and moved within the space by the audience, are composed of a wooden frame and are un-rendered, making them see-through.

ALT 'We might have been alone on Earth', Oil on Birch ply, 50x50cm. Custom House Studios + Gallery are pleased to host Portals and Pilgrims by Blawnin Clancy. Exhibition runs from Friday 5th April – Sunday 28th April 2024. There is a profound sense of something amorphous yet intensely felt in the work of Blawnin Clancy. Her show at the Custom House Studios and Gallery in Westport was originally called ‘The Shipwreck’ before she updated the title to ‘Pilgrims and Portals’, filling the quayside exhibition space with softly glowing, shadowy figures in cold, exotic landscapes. Inspired by ideas about voyages and discovery, but with a lurking edge of discomfort, not least around the legacy of colonisation, her thoughts coalesced during a residency in Iceland and a studio stay at Lismore Castle Arts in Waterford in 2022. The painted, sanded and reworked layers and silhouette forms that populate this show have been completed in the two and a half years since.

ALT Summer - Oil on Canvas, 80x100cm. The works in this exhibition are mostly based on where I live in Donegal, and many of them express a metaphysical idea or a personal experience, or both. Some works are inspired by other places in Ireland including Dublin and County Kildare, and some works are imaginary landscapes amalgamated from an atmospheric feel of different places. Imaginary or real, each painting and etching expresses intimacy. Either of a connection to a place or of an idea, which the place serves in my effort to express the idea visually. I usually emphasise the surfaces of the work as cohesive fields of energy, abstract expressionist in style. I strive to achieve unity between my subject matter and the layering of pigments and brushstrokes. The fish for example is a creature that appears in many of my compositions. I suppose this is because of the antiquity of this species. The fish contains much of the universal data of the prehistorical, the undocumented and the unknown.

ALT Fork and Three Coins.

ALT Irish Coast, 35x47.7cm. I have been painting landscapes ever since I remember. My professional adventure began in the Negev Desert where I worked and lived for several years. After studying art in NY under the guidance of late Prof Lennart Anderson I moved to Hawaii in order to challenge myself with its unique landforms and seascapes. Since then I have travelled extensively to remote locations in search of inspiration and new experiences in painting. Each location means a fresh look at things. I paint from observation only, and must face the elements over a long period of time until I feel something from the essence of the place, then I translate it into visual language. I always start and finish a painting outdoors, even if it means carrying a large canvas along with my supplies, easel and palette, to a remote location day after day, sometimes week after week, returning to the same site at the same time of day until the painting is done.

ALT Slipway, Oil on Linen 76x56cm Water’s Edge by Ita Freeney This exhibition builds on a series of paintings - Water’s Edge that the artist has been working on over the last 3-4 years. Mood, form and light are the main concerns of the artist in these works. These paintings play with abstraction and representation - finding and emphasising abstract forms in the landscape, while also observing nuances of colour and tone to evoke mood/atmosphere The artist’s focus lies with horizontals, distance, direction, and echoes. The boundaries between land and sea – headlands, piers, slipways and approaches to the water are explored. The lightness, airiness and openness of sea and sky is emphasised by the contrast with the land/ built environment. Familiarity and building relationships with the places that inspire, has become a very important element in the work. Many return visits to inspirations in Mayo (with thanks to the Ballinglen Arts Foundation) and closer to home -East Cork into Waterford

ALT Opening Reception: Thursday 28th September 6pm – 8pm. The artist will be present and will present an informal talk with John McHugh. In By the same sea O’Leary takes a single theme - light and shadow on the small homes of suburban Long Island, New York where she lives and works - as the basis for formal experimentation with paint. With an eye towards fauvism, O’Leary’s paintings retain the spatial organization provided by light while introducing experiments with garish color and loose brushstrokes that depart from naturalism.

ALT Matters of Matter Inspiration for this current body of work stems from the materials & processes used to make the work. The work derives from the act of painting itself and all the uncertainties & revelations that painting can reveal. Avoidance of preconceived ideas or narratives is a tactic within this current method of working, a tactic through which the work can be discovered. Any illusionistic elements within the paintings can be viewed as bi-products of interactions between materials used while making the work. The paintings were made during and after the pandemic. The paintings and the process of their making echo the repetitive, precarious messiness of everyday living which seemed to amplify when the world grew quiet; the mixing, the pouring, the scraping, the scrubbing, the scrolling, the swiping, the pulling, the pushing, the waiting. Working on several paintings at once means that the paintings become part of an interactive series of work, each piece influencing the other

ALT Unseen Lanscape No. 3, 120 x 120cm, oil on canvas, 2023

ALT Leaf, oil on canvas, 50 x 50, 2022. Understory Helena Gorey's home is a cottage situated in pastoral landscape close to where she grew up, with a view to a field with an almost perfect horizon line. One of her earliest memories is picking blackcurrants in this field planted by her father. The experience of growing up and living in this place and its surrounding nature has influenced much of her work. Hers is not a desire to represent but to distill the essence of this place. Her approach is intuitive and her paintings are developed slowly over time. Her desire is to make works that have a sense of depth but may appear effortless. Paintings are sometimes bisected by a subtle horizontal line suggesting a possible land or seascape and conjure the atmosphere and wonder of nature through a veil of – light, mist, fog and rain. When a sense of completeness is not achieved on first touch a process of layering from light to dark and dark to light is developed in order to arrive home.

ALT Waypoint statue, mixed media, 60cm x 40cm. ‘Inverts on the castle wall, Perverts in the tall grass below’, is a body of work and culmination of investigations into rural Ireland, aesthetic language associated with rural and regional art spaces and queer communities. Using historical canon to construct alternative narratives around queerness and more specifically rural Irish queerness, the title of the exhibition frames language, and Anglicisation of queer academia and asks how this written and documented theory manifests and is engaged in Irish culture in its pre and post-colonial history. When explicitly archived theory and queer / art canon exists for an urban anglicised society, the question is posed, “how do rural Irish queers reckon with this establishment in context of its own complicated colonial history?”

ALT Making and materiality are foundational in my predominantly sculptural practice which takes influence from mass produced commodities and the fetishistic surfaces of retail. Manipulating industrially manufactured elements, I probe the homogeneity prevalent in consumerist society to participate and engage with capitalist concepts and constructs differently. Honing and developing my own improvised, markedly physical processes, and utilising materials that are wilful and difficult to control (eg, balloons, fast-cast resins) my practice is rooted in the body and its ways of understanding. My intention counters increasingly virtual ways of navigating the world and a growing remove from materiality. Material elements are reworked through removal, addition and recasting to disguise or reveal appearances and to mimic each other and other things.