HIAP Artist-in-residence Niamh McCann (born1971) has created a new work during her residency. Cake Slice Through Vista is a chaotic, three- dimensional postcard as ‘meta-world’, sourcing and tweaking elements of Helsinki vernacular. The work as a whole assembles, alters and creates seemingly disparate objects and images to develop its own interior, idiosyncratic narrative system. The work is equally concerned with the seduction of materiality and surface as it simultaneously reveals and masks content.

In the broad terms McCann’s work invites a re-consideration of our relationship to the world around us – a questioning of how this world constitutes us as subjects and how we, in turn, give this world form. More recently this examines, in particular, to what extent our understandings of the grand themes of modernity, globalisation and urbanisation are actually shared and experienced in common? This thought process is developed and channeled through making – a making that explores philosophical riddles/conundrums through seemingly random juxtapositions and spatial relationships. Practically speaking, this involves aspects of representation; the framing and construction of visual landscape through devices such as the use of the de-contextualised, vestigial modernist icon or the recasting of information as pure image.

McCann has previously participated in several exhibitions in England, Ireland, France and Chile among others.
The cooperation between HIAP and Arts Council of Ireland has continued for three years.