Stephen Doyle & Peter Bradley - Evening Masterclass Workshop

Wednesday 6th November

7.30pm-9.00pm

Join artists Stephen Doyle and Peter Bradley for a workshop exploring identity through collage.

Participants will be invited to create a portrait using found materials as well as incorporating their own drawing and mark making techniques to discuss issues around sexuality and gender.

The artists will demonstrate how they incorporate collage into their practice and the use of its versatility for planning an artwork or as a way to explore a concept.

Peter Bradley and Stephen Doyle will be presenting a two person exhibition at Highlanes Gallery in Summer 2025.

Booking required, numbers are limited and places are €20 per person.

All materials supplied and Prosecco, tea & coffee are served.

ABOUT

Identity is the overarching theme in Peter Bradley’s large scale mixed media figurative works which are an exploration of how we as a society interact with one another. Having had an obsession with Identity and gender from a young age, Bradley’s investigation is driven by the artifice of social constructionism and is inspired by those individuals who do not feel constrained by outdated ideas of what is acceptable or expected of them. His paintings are an analysis of identity presentation between and beyond the gender binary and a celebration of self-expression.

Particular attention is paid to the ever evolving realisation that gender, sex, and sexuality all exist on a spectrum.

Peter is presenting a solo exhibition for this years Galway International Arts Festival 2024.

Stephen Doyle is a member of Backwater Studios and graduate of Crawford College of Art and Design (2017). The artist is exploring the issues of queer identity through the relationship between figuration and the politics of representation. Doyle makes figurative depictions of LGBTQIA+ people, and can include objects in the paintings, a gesture of 'othering' the art that mirrors the subject matter it investigates.

Painting, and portraiture in particular, is associated with the iconography of power (for example politicians and religious figures), and consequently with mainstream worldviews, of which queer identity and c ulture have always been excluded.

By invoking them, Doyle makes an ironic comment on the subalternisation of the existence of the LGBTQIA+ community, and simultaneously does their part to illuminate it. Recently their work has incorporated subjects of adversity through community based projects and psychoanalytic approaches of traumatic events relative to growing u p queer in Ireland. This is an attempt to create public discourse around shared struggles and to evoke a sense of solidarity amongst the queer community within a national narrative.

Host or Publisher Highlanes Gallery