James Ireland
1 November - 17 January 2003

f a projects is pleased to announce James Ireland’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

James Ireland fabricates sculptural objects and installations using everyday items of household furniture and hardware, juxtaposed with landscape images culled from magazines, picture books and tourist guides. At times this combination creates an allusive and wistful scene which seems to offer escape to the faraway through the familiar, at times it frustrates this promise with an awareness of the fragility of its own illusion. His work draws as much on historical modes of landscape painting and the sublime as it engages contemporary sculptural practice and appropriation.

‘Succinct, beautifully simple, moving, evocative, Ireland’s installations are filled with pathos and a knowing poignancy which belie his youth. Light from a fluorescent tube shines from behind two bin bags and a tank of coloured water. At first sight that’s all you get. But look at the tiny mirror placed on the floor two feet away and, like some Victorian magic lantern show, there appears a beautifully luminescent Highland landscape, light sinking between a cleft in the mountains. It’s an ingenious use for found objects, creating beauty out of the apparently ugly and everyday.’ (Iain Gale).

For this exhibition Ireland will make a series of distinct installations and sculptural objects, which together articulate the gallery space and reveal the scope of his practice. While some new works continue his interest in contrived and choreographed illusion, others refer to similar visual sleights of hand through more direct manipulations.

Since graduating from the Ruskin School of Art in 1999, Ireland has exhibited in New Contemporaries (2000), in A Square of Ground at the Jerwood Gallery, in Double Take, at Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth with Layla Curtis Helen Maurer and Elizabeth Wright, Ormeau Baths, Belfast, Arte e Personae, Florence, and in Viewfinder at the Arnolfini, Bristol. He is currently completing a residency at La Friche, Marseilles, and in autumn 2002 will have a solo exhibition at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool.