Richard Malone

Richard Malone lives and works in Co. Wexford. An artist and designer, he studied Sculpture in Carmarthen, Wales before moving to study Fashion at Central Saint Martins, London, graduating in 2014. His artistic practice includes garment making, drawing, writing, textiles, weaving and performance. It experiments with exaggerated forms and seeks to explore human truths and performed falsities.

Richard uses gendered labour practices and fabrications to test the limitations of language, gesture and symbolism in constructing meaning and identity. His practice centres on experiences of queerness, class, place and otherness. His sculptures and installations suggest an internal dialogue, movement and theatre – some appearing alive or captured in communicative postures and suspended emotion. The work intentionally crosses disciplines, questioning the nature of defined labour and the expected societal gender or class roles that they are given. He is interested in folklore, ritual and ancient Irish language that communicates connections to a pre-colonised, connected way of existing; accepting a multitude of truths within an object or persons existence. His sculptures, mobiles, figures and performances are created on or in relation to the human form, confronting the viewer with our need for semantic and mimetic readings, and exploring the unique conditions of otherness and the performance of “being”.

Richard Malone applied for a Golden Fleece Award to purchase specialist welding and woodworking equipment that would allow him to refine the physicality of his sculptural and performance pieces, and to continue his research into Irish folklore and queer histories using archival collections at University College Dublin and the National Library.