C110 review

Belfast: Willie McKeown at Golden Thread

Willie McKeown: The Bright World, installation shot; courtesy Golden Thread Gallery

The Bright World is a new installation created for the Golden Thread Gallery that proves to be Willie McKeown's most ambitious project to date. The exhibition incorporates painting and drawing with construction, and develops the artist's concerns about painting and place.

At first sight, a large plasterboard structure dominates the gallery and denies the viewer access. Then moving through the space you discover a door, which leads you into a room where a lightbulb illuminates a single blue painting on a two-tone ochre-and-brown wall.

An internal corridor then takes you from the first space to a dimly lit room. Here wooden slats prevent the viewer continuing any further, but allow us to glimpse a drawing of a flower, illuminated by a brass lamp, above a floor of soil.

It may be inferred that the movement of the viewer through the space and the subsequent denial of access reflect McKeown's concerns towards painting - in which, painting becomes, to quote the artist, "a window out of structure."

Ian Charlesworth is an artist based in Belfast.

Willie McKeown, The Bright World, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, September - November 2004

Article reproduced from CIRCA 110, Winter 2004, pp.74
Back to top of page

Do you have an opinion on this article? If so, please click here for our comments form.

No reader feedback so far - awaiting your input!