Clúdach: Cover

This issue continues our presentation of contemporary prints from Dublin's Graphic Studio Gallery in with Tent, an etching by Colin Martin. Born in Dublin in 1973, Colin Martin studied painting and printmaking at the College of Marketing and Design, and has won a number of honors, including an Arts Council Visual Arts Bursary in 2004 and both a Hennessey Craig Scholarship and a Ballinglen Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2005. He has exhibited in numerous Irish galleries, as well as in such international venues as the 22d International Biennale of Graphic Art in Slovenia.

Measuring 39 cm. x 59 cm., Tent was issued in 2006 in an edition of fifty. Like the other images that will appear on this year's covers, this work employs an Irish field as a central element. In this case, the artist turns his eye on a nameless field in which campers have pitched a modern nylon tent and set up portable furniture nearby; Martin's work frequently examines scenes of recreation and leisure in which protagonists are absent. The lighting and composition display Martin's characteristically cinematic approach, and the implicit invitation to the viewer to fill in the missing details of this scene exemplifies his preference for oblique, even fragmentary narrative. Though Martin renders the camping gear almost photographically, this detail contrasts with the broad manner in which he treats the site itself and its surrounding landscape. By monumentalizing the simple structure, he in effect ironizes it: the most ephemeral parts of the image—the tent and the collapsible furniture—are precisely the parts that receive attention. It may be, too, that lurking in this composition is an even more ironic visual quotation of the mountains and haystacks of Paul Henry's definitive genre paintings of the Irish West.

We thank Colin Martin for kind permission to present this image to the readers of New Hibernia Review, and also thank Catherine O'Riordain, gallery manager at Graphic Studio Gallery, for her generous assistance. We encourage our readers who may be visiting Dublin to visit the gallery, which is located in the heart of Dublin's "Cultural Quarter," Temple Bar. An attractive web site that features many works created by the more than 150 artists associated with the Graphic Studio Gallery can be viewed at http://www.graphicstudiodublin .com/index.html.