Brian Teeling & Jennie Taylor
in the glow of a frozen flame

Join us for the Dublin launch of in the glow of a frozen flame, a collaborative project between visual artist, Brian Teeling and art writer, Jennie Taylor that explores Crawford Art Gallery’s building and its immediate surroundings. They will be in conversation with Seán Kissane, Curator of Exhibitions, IMMA.

Evocative, subversive images and flash fiction populate this publication, capturing and entangling a stillness of a witnessing object and the frantic movements of a living gaze. Time fictionally folds and collapses to bring details from 1921-24 into a dislocated moment. Imagery and storytelling act as tools to slice, swell and exaggerate sculptures, architectural features and historic events.

Teeling and Taylor’s work is drawn from research of the gallery with a focus on the display of 18th and 19th century sculptural forms in the gallery’s iconic Sculpture Galleries, combined with events that occurred and were visible from the building during the period and the life of a local artisan from the same time.

This is a free event, booking is required.

Designed by Keith Nally, this publication is one of six artists’ projects commissioned by Crawford Art Gallery as part of BUILDING AS WITNESS which is kindly supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media under the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012-2023.

Participant Biographies

Brian Teeling is an artist living and working in Dublin. He has no fine art qualifications and is entirely self-taught. Recent exhibitions include Portrait Lab at The Model, Sligo (2022-23), Speech Sounds at Visual, Carlow, Zurich Portrait Prize at National Gallery of Ireland (2021-22) and Crawford Art Gallery (2022), A Vague Anxiety at IMMA (2019).

Jennie Taylor is an art writer and educator. She has published her work in Critical Bastards Magazine, The Stinging Fly, Paper Visual Art and Visual Arts Newsletter. Jennie was the 2022-23 Writer in Residence at the Roscommon Arts Centre. She is currently a PhD researcher in Art Writing at the National College of Art & Design.

Seán Kissane is Curator of Exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin. He describes his practice as ‘curating the edges’, producing deeply researched exhibitions focussed on the work of female and queer artists whose work has been critically neglected. These projects have included major touring exhibitions such as the retrospectives for Derek Jarman, Leonora Carrington, and Mary Swanzy.  In 2016 he presented the critically acclaimed ‘Patrick Hennessy: De Profundis’, the first queer reading of Irish modernism. He is currently a PhD candidate at Gradcam, TU Dublin; undertaking research into queer art exhibited in Ireland during and after the Second World War examining how some Irish artists presented divergent images of masculinity that countered prevailing orthodoxies.