FLESH FUR FUNGUS FEATHER

EXPANDED COLLAGE:

Ink, lino print, dry point etching, Fabriano paper, acrylic paint, clay.

2022

Flesh Fur Fungus Feather is a collage of interlocking cyclic systems, where humans and non-humans generate new and queer connections. Creatures and forms of flesh, fur, fungus and feather mingle and merge and begin to exhibit peculiar actions, establish unusual habits and develop some intimate symbiotic relationships.

In an earlier Irish imaginary world, the ontological and conceptual boundaries that separate us from nature and other entities were not so separate and fixed, but porous and blurred. Irish folklore is scattered with myths and beliefs about metamorphosis in nature. Niamh has used examples of these taken from UCD’s national folklore collection as a starting point to generate imagery of an interworking system where dichotomies are broken, queered and made into new and absurd cyclic networks. These absurd systems of symbiosis will offer an invitation to imagine divergent ways of being by breaking with the logic of human exceptionalism and anthropomorphism and considering new ways of interacting and existing within the larger matrix of nature.

Niamh Coffey is a Dublin-based artist from Laois. Working through drawing, print and sculpture, Niamh Coffey’s work creates new narratives, myths and hyperboles surrounding queer subjects and relationships.

Niamh graduated from NCAD in 2016 with an honours degree in Sculpture and Expanded Practices and a highly commended thesis titled ‘Through the telescope, under the microscope: Sarah Sze’. Recent exhibitions her work has featured in include: Halftone at the Library Project, Locale #3 at A4 Sounds and Awkward Interjection at Pallas Projects/Studios. Most recently she has made work for the theatre show ‘Looking Through My Telescope at Another Telescope (Infinite Telescope Loop)’, supported by Laois County Council.