Áine O'Dwyer: Crests Break, A Few White Horses

Opening reception: Wedesday, September 27, 6–8pm

Áine O’Dwyer was trained in both visual art and music, graduating from the Limerick School of Art and Design in Limerick, Ireland, in 2006 and the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2011. Her art education and study of instrumental performance intermingle with her interests in folklore, choreography, and ritual to inform her open-ended musical ethos, variously influenced by musique d’ameublement and Fluxus, and her drawings and watercolors, whose personal Surrealist vocabulary is redolent of Hans Bellmer’s etchings and Leonara Carrington’s dreamworlds. “Crests Break, A Few White Horses,” a new collection of wry and occasionally harrowing pieces made between 2017 and 2023, showcases O’Dwyer’s myriad and disparate interests: arcadian vistas, body-horror contortions, Blakeian tableaus of mankind versus nature, and pagan visual culture, all presented with an acute attention to spatial detail.

Áine O’Dwyer is a performer of her own works for harp, pipe organ, and voice, best known for her experimental performances and recordings that draw freely from the idioms of liturgical music, folk song, the avant-garde, and sound art. Hailing from the village of Pallasgreen in midwest Ireland, O’Dwyer grew up studying Gaelic music, tin whistle, and flute, immersed in the pastoral allure of Limerick county that would later influence her expansive sound and picaresque watercolor. Although her musical work is well-established—her contemplative and threnodic performances, which often make use of dramatic lighting and found spaces, and her acclaimed tapes and records such as Music for Church Cleaners (2012–2013) and Locusts (2017)—O’Dwyer’s drawings and paintings have never been shown in a gallery context.

Organized by Lawrence Kumpf and Tyler Maxin.

For more information, contact tyler@blankforms.org.