2022
Michelle Malone
Michelle Malone’s multidisciplinary practice seeks to give material voice to working-class histories from the perspective of lived experience.
Laura Fitzgerald is a visual artist from a small mountain farm in Kerry. She completed a BA in Fine Art (Painting) at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin in 2007 and an MFA at the Royal College of Art, London in 2013. Her work encompasses drawing, painting, text and video, focusing on the rapid changes she and others are experiencing in the modern world.
Her work frames these experiences from the viewpoint of a stone. A stone can be submerged, half-submerged, it can rocket through the air like a scud missile or a meteorite. She is trying to tell stories from these different vantage points, trying to make herself as stone-like as possible. Influenced by writers such as Lydia Davis and Donald Bartelme, her work is trying to be useful. And while she is worried that making art is – in fact – useless, she seeks solace in the notion it can be so radically useless that it can resist the profit-driven impetus of modern life. In a sense the work is sincerely absurdist in its own endeavours. While looking at ideas relating to the neoliberal turn, she concentrates on using humour as a tool; an antidepressant and a coping strategy to our everyday lived experience.
Laura Fitzgerald applied for a Golden Fleece Award to help finance a new studio at home in Inch, Co. Kerry. In October 2020 her three-year residency at Fire Station Artists’ Studios will come to an end, and she plans to establish herself remotely and sustain her practice in a rural context while continuing to experiment with process and materials.
