Caoineadh na Maighdine
Smyth’s practice deals with identity or, more precisely, the way in which identity arises, the events that shape us and make us who we are. His work blends together memory, archival photography, filmic references, art historical and artifactual imagery, distorting and collaging them together to create musings, propositions and reflections.
In this new work Smyth takes the Pieta as a reference point, re-contextualising and reframing this classical motif within an Irish context, shifting the perspective to present a tender reflection of loss.
Utilising the medium of digital sculpture allows him to place the camera within, looking back out. This fragments the sculpture and provides this distinctly unique perspective, freeing the body of marble, the moment, the loss, held weightless.
The title of the work perpetuates and complicates this further in its translation from Gaeigle, primarily the word Caoineadh, which is held in between keening, lamentation and crying.
The work seeks to embody this act of keening in its visual form, its loops, rhythm and recognisable fragments. In mimicking the form the intention is for the image to hold the óchón with meaning to be found in its tender silence.
Aaron Smyth is based in Glasgow, Scotland..
Aaron Alexander Smyth is an Irish contemporary artist working between Dublin and Glasgow.
He graduated from The National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2015. Since then he has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally and has been awarded Artist-in-Residence positions in The National Gallery of Ireland, The Royal Hibernian Academy and Black Church Printmakers.
In 2013 he co-founded the Irish artist collective GUM, acted as a representative of the National College of Art and Design in The MasterApprentice Programme, Kunstpodium T in 2015 and held the position of Artist Curator of The Creative Campus Programme in RUA RED in 2017.