Order our gorgeous 2023 Scene + Heard French Navy 100% organic cotton Fair Trade T-shirt featuring the beautiful art-work of Peter Smyth and design prowess of Ste Murray. Pre-orders taken until FEB 5th and t-shirts will then be available for collection in Smock Alley Theatre from FEB 16th onwards. 
 
About the 2023 ARTWORK
In creating this artwork, the keywords which resonated with me within the brief were, reverberations, echoes, ripples, fruition and collaboration. My work sits at the intersection of Technology, Science & Art, focusing on their convergence, particularly the analogues between fungal networks & computers.
Naturally, in terms of fruition or growth I thought of hypha, or collectively a mycelium. I used diagrams/ models of hyphal networks as a point of departure to draw shapes which informed the shard like objects within the final piece, coincidentally looking like hard-edge leaf shapes.
 
Much like the decision-making processes of those hypha, the initial concepts bi-furcate and develop in different ways within the design programme. In the final artwork, the background is a rippled reverberation or an echo of an early rendition of the rendered foreground. It recalls a point in its own conception, bringing to focus the process involved.
 
Fungi embody natures collaborative proficiency, connecting the ecosystem, allowing it to thrive. Always growing, iterating and informing one another much like the process of making this artwork, and much like the creative ecosystem present within Scene & Heard. If mycology has the wood-wide web (trees, fungi, plants), then Scene & Heard has its audiences, artists and venue, bouncing off one another, intermingling & reflecting each other, like the shards within my piece.
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Peter Smyth is an Irish Artist based in Kilcock, Co. Kildare. He graduated with a degree in Painting from the National College of Art & Design in 2017 before completing his postgraduate studies in Cultural Policy & Arts Management at UCD in 2019. As part of his process, he uses computer generated renders as creative stimulus, translating them into painted works.
 
www.petersmythartist.com
Instagram: _petersmyth_