A fresh look at ageing

Nobody photographs me anymore...

West Cork Arts Centre, North St, Skibbereen Mon-Sat 10am-6pm, Until Oct 3 028-23237

Kate Byrne’s work addresses our attitudes towards ageing and femininity in diverse and determined ways. As Dr Slavka Sverkova writes of her, she “confronts western celebrity culture by using in large photos the scale and display typically afforded the fit, the young and the famous, for images of the insecurities of old age. She centres the viewer’s attention on ‘how it is’ by ignoring all the available techniques of altering the lens-based image.”

A series of striking portrait images, in which each of the sitters is identically dressed, is juxtaposed with a two-screen video in which the process of applying make-up features for two disparate subjects, a 15-year-old girl and Marie, an 80-year-old widow. Image and identity are variously constructed, she implies, and taken for granted. A series of nude drawings, A Thought in a Line, continues this theme, subverting notions of type in spare, “intimate revelations” that, Sverkova suggests, both renew familiar forms of depiction and invite us to question and reconsider them.

Can't see that? Catch this

Experiments in the Persistence of VisionRiverbank Arts Centre, Main St, Newbridge Until Sep 30 045-448309