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murmurART

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Review Sep 11 2008 « | »
Oliver Rafferty With the current trend of 'ready made' sculptures sweeping across the capital in a suffocating flood of blandness it......

James Honey

With the current trend of 'ready made' sculptures sweeping across the capital in a suffocating flood of blandness it is becoming increasingly difficult to decide what I find engaging and thought provoking.

Oliver Rafferty however is an exception to this predicament of mine. He does unremarkable things with unremarkable objects and yet somehow transmits a riddle of queries up and out of the work. It seems his artworks are a life unknown to even their creator. In the reflection of their banal and sometimes meaningless nature I see my very existence and anything that manages to remind me of my own absurdity is splendid.

Weight and balance play an integral role in his works. A tower of bathroom scales rise up from the floor, a cup full of paint balances precariously upon the toe of a door stop and a stairway of paper descends with the colour streaming down along it in a perfectly harmonised collaboration between gravitational tug (natures arm) and the artists hand.

Happenstance is also essential to the art works creation. Using what catches his eye, or whatever is to hand, in order to make his work gives birth to far more curious and exciting outcomes.

Oliver Rafferty aims to place his work directly into the awkward no mans land that lies somewhere between normality and abnormality. He parachutes them in simply by drawing attention to the function and meaning of objects. He asks the viewer to question their relationship to the mundane objects they take for granted in everyday life.

He will be exhibiting his work in 'Artisit?' in Ireland from the 2nd to 18th October. It promises to be a splendid show. Hopefully soon his work will be on show a little nearer to home.

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