The Artist Gary Farrelly at Pickering Forest
Gary Farrelly has installed his Kunstbureau (studio) in his native Ireland for the first time in half a decade. Until recently, Farrelly was producing and proliferating his work from Dallas, Texas. Prior to that the artist was based in the French capital, Paris from where he conducted his ventures and campaigns. After an unbroken period in urban quarters , Farrelly has decided to isolate himself in the countryside for a defined period of six months. The artist will use this ’splendid isolation’ to research, produce and experiment with new directions in his work, unmolested by unnecessary distractions.
Farrelly’s friend Marina Guinness was enthusiastic about his intention to go “off grid”, generously offering him room, board and a studio at her Pickering Forest country compound. It is a profoundly rural setting and Farrelly commutes on foot through thirty minutes of dense forest from his sleeping quarters to his studio. The idyllic isolation is punctuated when artist friends and collaborators from Dublin, mainland Europe the U.S visit for short periods of ‘holding court’. The hospitality of the Pickering Kunstbureau is legendary. Farrelly’s main aim at Pickering is to complete his masterpiece in progress since March 2010. The enormous map is of an auto-generated city-state called Neustern. Farrelly also calls the work ”Neustern - A portrait of the artist as an autonomous coastal city-state”. The map of the fictional metropolis is rendered in
mixed media/drawing and measures 3 meters x 2 meters. Neustern contains 1044 streets, a river, a cemetery, avenues, plazas, a port, an airport and a Gary Farrelly (1983-2077) square.
New Obsessive, Dublin
