Rayleen Clancy LAX-SNN

By Liam Murphy. Published on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 2:52 pm

Rayleen Clancy's new exhibition LAX-SNN is a set of paintings mostly watercolour that are very much transitional work that at face value trace a journey from her American youth in Los Angeles LAX to her later settling in Ireland via Shannon SNN and the implication of those formative journeys when her late father Tom Clancy traversed this landscape as well.

It is about new directions, rites of passage, childhood images, some transcribed in a childlike way that is a mixture of Google Earth and digital fractals. You get the palm tree contemporary architecture of LA the soul-less trudge with luggage through clinical departure zones, the man made salt pans of Salt Lake City, Great Basin National Park, Dakota Prairies. The almost bleached open sense of place and colour. Patterns of squares, angles, circles, a patchwork quilt of images. Frozen wastes, hippy fractals, geometric connections and a fine sense of transport, of journey and the many connections.

Upstairs in Seomra de Paor, Rayleen Clancy plunges the viewer into a deep green and dark pool of cross cultures, of ancient ways, modern style and the chaos of encroaching weeds and darkness. Jellyfish Hybrids look at the duality of Pacific jellyfish and Atlantic jellyfish and the hybrid creature in between.

It's as if the artist is poised between childhood and adulthood, child becoming parent and setting down the journey, narrating it in paint to make sense of it.

In the best possible sense the work is as they say in Irish – idir eathurtha- more between places than neither here nor there.