UNFURL - NCAD SHOW - Mary Noonan

Unfurl is a self-organised group exhibition of postgraduate students currently on NCAD's Master of Fine Arts and Art in the Contemporary World courses. Eschewing any attempt to categorize, while avoiding the simple dictates of a survey show, Unfurl intends to open out to the viewer a succession of art practices in progress.

By taking these paintings, sculptures, installations, filmic works and concepts from the studio at various points along the path to completion, we are gazing into a point of mobility within the artistic process. The viewer is invited to survey the potentiality for introspection, and the outward investigation of art, its discourse that intensive masters-level research allows. At the same time the artists' practice is allowed a moment out of this process to, in a sense, survey the viewer.

The curated group exhibition in its contemporary form is in part the visual enactment and generator of discursive practices. Artworks are chosen, and positioned in a way as to develop inherent, and create new meaning, through difference as much as points of commonality. In coming together with an invited curator for this exhibition the artists are presenting a collaborative hybrid of a contemporary curatorial paradigm, offering a readymade selection of divergent practice.

The Fine Art MFA research program encourages postgraduate students to develop their professional knowledge of contemporary art practice and debate in conjunction with their own practice in media, painting, print, sculpture, community/public art, installation, and interdisciplinary art forms. The MA ACW (Art in the Contemporary World) examines the critical, theoretical, historical and philosophical contexts of contemporary art practice and bridges the relationship between theory and practice, providing pathways for both practitioners and theorists.