Temple Bar Gallery + Studios presents chased losses, the first exhibition in Ireland by Sean Edwards.
Forgetting and remembering, inheritance, dependency, and moving away, are all experiences unpinned with care and duty throughout Sean Edwards’ practice. Using intricate and labour-intensive forms of sculpture, collage and (most recently for this exhibition) digital modelling, his work is detailed, focusing on small moments of the everyday, and expressing value in repetition and routine.
Edwards draws on recollections of his family and childhood growing up on a large public housing estate in Wales in the 1980s. His multi-disciplinary practice compiles allusions to his autobiography with shared social narratives. He poetically conveys the atmosphere, texture and sensibility of neglected people and places, with a subtle political imagination that suggests paths out of an endless cycle of suppressed opportunity.
In his new works, Edwards specifically references a moment from his youth, during which treasured family artefacts were discarded. These works consider inherited absences and subtleties passed down through generations, whether through genetic or psychological disposition. chased losses, as a title and exhibition, is a testimony to gambling and chance as well as a wider observation of unfulfilled betterment.
Edwards’ re-inscription and memorialisation of a working-class experience exposes failures in social structures and an underhanded cultural amnesia that continues to haunt the present day. His works are often composed of fragments or slices of imagery with indeterminate beginnings or endings. Beyond affirming his specific personal history, these frameworks, that both withhold and extend, respond to the artefacts of behaviour and memory we try to leave behind.
Sean Edwards (born in Cardiff, 1980) represented Wales at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019) with the exhibition, UNDO THINGS DONE, which toured to Ty Pawb, Cardiff; The Bluecoat, Liverpool in 2020, and the Senedd, National Assembly for Wales in 2021. He is Programme Director for Fine Art & Photography at Cardiff School of Art and Design. Edwards’ recent solo exhibitions include distant borrowing, Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2021); Drawn in Cursive (parts 1, 2 and 3) at Chapter, Cardiff, Network, Aalst, and Mostyn, Llandudno (2014); Putting Right, Limoncello, London (2014); Resting Through, Kunstverein Frieburg (2012); Maelfa, Spike Island, Bristol (2011). He is included in British Art Show 9, Hayward Gallery Touring (2021-2022), was awarded a Turner Bursary in 2020, and has recently been shortlisted for the David and Yuko Juda Art Foundation award (2022). He has been commissioned by The Common Guild to make a public artwork that addresses libraries in Glasgow later in 2022/23.
Sean Edwards’ chased losses is supported by Arts Council of Wales, Cardiff Metropolitan University, Cardiff School of Art & Design.
Temple Bar Gallery
5-9 Temple Bar, Dublin 2, D02 AC84, Ireland
