Members Show 2021

For this year’s Artlink members show, curator Kaitlynn Webster asked members to respond to the theme ‘Turas’, meaning journey.
The journeys we’ve taken in the last year are almost certainly not the ones we envisioned for ourselves – we trekked from bed to desk, couch to kitchen, up and down the same routes in a 5km radius. We relied on screens to transport us to concerts, classes, gallery openings, family gatherings. Stay-cations replaced holidays abroad. Faced with varying degrees of isolation, we had time to think – a blessing and a curse. Perhaps the most significant journeys have occurred in the surveying of our own minds.

“When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging… In a sense this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life. It is not narcissistic, for as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to open outwards to the world.”
JOHN O’DONOHUE

Kaitlynn Webster is an interdisciplinary artist and curator from California, now based in the west of Ireland. After completing her MFA in 2019 she joined the board of directors at 126 Artist-Run Gallery in Galway. Her practice looks at the way we create meaning through ritual and storytelling, and her curatorial research focuses on interrogating hierarchies within the arts.

“It’s been a delight to see how Artlink artists have responded to the ‘Turas’ theme and reflected on their journeys, both in person and in the mind, over the past year. We’ve all become more intimately acquainted with our immediate five kilometre radius, and with our own minds. The artworks speak those journeys – the meaning we’ve crafted while confined within our locales, perhaps while longing to be somewhere else, and always in the company of ourselves.”
Kaitlynn Webster, Guest Curator