Brendan Jamison gives gallery talk

Irish artist Brendan Jamison recently visited Mercer University to give a talk about his art work and to install a contemporary collage show in the Plunkett Gallery. He has had a lot of experience with doing public art around the world. His most recent project has been “Sugar Metropolis,” a large-scale collaborative project in which visitors could participate in creating sugar cube sculptures for installation in museums. This installation will be coming to New york in May.

Jamison was born in Belfast, Ireland. He graduated from the University of Ulster and went on to get his Master of Fine Arts in 2004. He has also received many awards for his art work including several awards from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, being elected to the Royal British Society of Sculptors, and being awarded residencies in New York and New Delhi.

He has received large-scale media coverage of his work in a number of magazines and newspapers like Sculpture Magazine and BBC News. Brendan Jamison is a world-renown sculptor from Northern Ireland who has had his work in different public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art  in New York, the Himmat in India, the Grosvenor in England, and the University of Ulster in Ireland. He has also had art work hosted in Scotland, France, Austria, Canada, New Zealand and China.

Jamison is the founder and chief curator of the non- profit organization called IMPACTICA (Impact! International Contemporary Art). The organization presents exhibitions in art galleries and museums in Europe and North America. Its current exhibit, located in Hardman Hall, is entitled “GLUE,” and was brought here with the help of Mercer University, the University of Florida and Down Arts Centre (Northern Ireland). The “GLUE” exhibit, curated by Jamison, surveys international contemporary collage art that contains a variety of works using cut paper, computer images and many more techniques. Mercer’s art professors Craig Coleman and Steve Simmerman are hosted in this exhibit along with other American, Irish, Japanese and Welsh artists.

There are six sections to the exhibit which include Time, Odd Beings, Desire, Translucency, Global Dynamics and Architecture. The artists’ works are categorized within these unifying groups but represent diverse topics like 21st century culture, feminism and the architecture of espionage. During Jamison’s lecture in the Science and Engineering Building on Jan. 31, he talked about “The Art and Architecture of Espionage,” his three-year research project, and discussed the work he has created over the past 10 years. He talked about his work in not only sugar cubes, but wool, wax, plastic, wood and bronze.

Jamison also gave a gallery talk in the Plunkett Gallery on Feb. 3. Jamison said that artists tend to have a large white cube in their head in reference to working with sugar cubes. He gets called to work in different places around the world. He likes to work in alternative spaces.

He said that he has always enjoyed playing with unusual materials that he felt a special connection with and he wants the public to connect with his work, too. Everything that he uses is relatively accessible and that’s what makes it cool, in his opinion. Like sugar, it is a more domestic material. People know what it looks like, feels like and tastes like. Jamison likes having that multiple sensory effect in his work. Jamison embraces the nontraditional in his work and the “GLUE” exhibit that he curated also reflects that nontraditional feel.

The Plunkett Gallery will host “GLUE” until Feb. 28. For more information about Brendan Jamison, check out his website at http://www.brendanjamison.com/index.shtml.