Console Debut Exhibition

Console grapples with the complex act of consolement: the courage it takes to offer it and the vulnerability involved in letting it happen.

Catherine Ding

Catherine Ding was born in Hong Kong in 2000 and grew up there. She is now based in Dublin, studying English Literature and Film. She curated and took part in an exhibition when she was 18, showcasing a selection of oil and acrylic dreamscapes and installations. Inspired by photographer Carrie Mae Weems’s photography, which is located in the scopophilic female and the challenges of self-representation – Catherine’s artwork invokes private, sacred moments of intimacy and female subjectivity. She has recently worked on a short film that won the award for Third Annual Yale in Hollywood 2022 Best Experimental Short, a feature film and a docu-series about emigration and national identities of expats in Hong Kong.

Catherine’s work is a triptych of tender moments between two figures uniting and embracing, set in a contained space which borders on being claustrophobic and undesirable. It concentrates on two lovers’ consoling each other through physical touch; the pure, unfettered expression of love balanced with nihilistic despair. How much are we able to console ourselves by surrendering our bodies to someone else, and what gets left behind in the process?

Eve Smith

Eve Smith is a portrait artist from the East of England who studied classical life drawing at the Barcelona Academy of Art in 2019 before moving to Dublin to study languages. There she has been involved in illustrating and designing for Trinity News and Trinity Film Review. She has been selected to exhibit in The Tate Britain through the Tate Collective, as well as Babylon Gallery, and The Whitworth in Manchester. She has a particular interest in using colour to express the inexpressible.

For her, Console explores the gap between loss, and feeling understood, which she experienced recovering from a major injury. The figures are alienated from their surroundings, and her use of bright colours highlights grief’s ability to act as both a weight you carry with you everywhere, but also a force whose intensity on an individual level can’t be seen.

Scarlet Short

Scarlet Short is a film student at Trinity College Dublin, as well as this she is both a freelance photographer and filmmaker. She has worked closely with Dublin based musicians creating collaborative content under the label GANZY, this year she will be releasing a documentary that she has filmed and edited for the collective. While working in America in 2022, Scarlet supervised a multimedia team as they created both videographic and photographic content for the company’s website and social media platforms. Scarlet’s photography has exhibited twice with Dublin University Photography Association.

Console, will be her first joint exhibition she has curated alongside Ding and Smith. Photography has offered Scarlet a lens with which she can control the narrative, for Scarlet the act of creating has been a consistent and comforting process in her life. To be consoled is to find these moments of peace, with someone or within yourself, Scarlet finds this in artistry. The content she is exhibiting goes beyond this individual awareness of the artist, as she captures moments of refuge found from places and people.

For each artist Console offers a new perspective; The loss of control one feels when negotiating intimate relationships, the twofold nature of consolation: to console and to be consoled, as well as its complexities and the soothing of oneself and others by capturing moments and experiencing these moments again through an altered perception.