Following on from the Hotel Series, Meagher concluded that what makes each room unique is the occupant, the baggage we bring.
Meagher set about gathering images, using Google and playfully searching for the top ten emotions in the top ten cities in the world. Viewing modern life through the internet is a jarred system of research, endless images are thrown up. Every painting has a new subject, odd things emerge, unfamiliar and often unreadable.
SEE THE FUTURE A written response by ACW alumni Barry Kehoe
Submitted by Jennie on July 8, 2014 – 11:24 am
Darina Meagher 2014
The paintings of Darina Meagher on the other hand are looking for ways of making that do not emerge from previous histories of painting. Turning toward the internet as a point of origin she seeks to make images inspired by non-painting sources, attempting to counter what she sees as the perfection of the technological image by reproducing an essence of these images through the imperfection of the brush stroke made by the human hand. She uses the idea of the internet search engine to explore the apparently endless streams of image and text that the internet provides. She terms this endless stream of image and data as the “debris of other peoples’ lives.” It is possible to imagine that a search for the top 10 emotions in the top 10 cities of the world would produce an endless stream of ideas, experiences, stories and locations but curiously, it returns a result that is a lot more limited than expected. The internet is a very flawed viewer onto the world and has an exceptionally limited scope and variety. The blue of distance, the spatial and temporal horizon that fuels longing, desire and imagination is flattened on an LCD screen with limited perspective. Statistically the largest amount of internet media content is generated in specific centres of the western world and so the stories and locations tend to be quite limited. Also the internet search engines work off algorithms that for various contingencies limit the search results. It is far from being a free system and is certainly less random than might be believed. The paintings that result from these internet explorations have the possibility of breaking that limitation of the search image by distilling it through a more intimate human experience that stems from the reality of an unbounded human consciousness frustrated with the view of the world through the tiny aperture provided by the internet.
6