I think our destination is neither utopia nor dystopia nor status quo, but protopia. It is a state that is better today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better… Because a protopia contains as many new problems as new benefits, this complex interaction of working and broken is very hard to predict.

 – Kevin Kelly, founding editor of WIRED Magazine

Taking its title from Kevin Kelly’s concept of Protopia, the 2022 Interim exhibition is an experience of past, present and future ecologies. Artists Amelia Rafle, Catherine McDonald and Lindsay LeBlanc seek out alternative visions within a fear-driven world; an imaginative and entangled existence.

Please click on the links below to read reviews of the exhibition, written by fellow postgraduate students at BCA:

Review by Erin Besch

Review by Veronica Constantinou

Review by Chloe Teets

Review by Phoebe Tohl

Review by DeAnna Boyer

Lindsay LeBlanc is a multidisciplinary artist based between Ireland and Arizona. Lindsay’s work engages with past history and the illusion of controlled spaces, balance, and fragility through a technical approach utilizing traditional glass processes and immersive installation techniques. In illuminating the fears that arise from human encounters with the non-human world, she proposes space for pleasure and connection over control. Lindsay was a recent recipient of The Goodbody Sculpture Award for a work of distinction in any medium at The National Botanical Gardens in Dublin and the Jutta-Cuny Franz Talent Award. Lindsay received her Bachelor’s degree in visual arts at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is pursuing a Masters in Art and Ecology at The Burren College of Art.

Catherine McDonald is visual artist from county Wexford. She merges sculpture, film, light and sound to create multi-layered installations. Collaborating with natural and synthetic materials, she creates spaces which combine the real and the imagined. Through this practice she seeks to reframe constructed perceptions of the more-than-human world. Catherine completed her BFA at TU Dublin. Her graduate work was chosen for exhibition at the 2021 RDS Visual Art Awards at the RHA and received the Image Now purchase award. Her ongoing installation series Past, Present, Future was exhibited this year at the LAB Gallery and at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Her recent photography series, Genescape, was published in SEED: Objects of Wonder Journal in November.

Amelia Rafle is an American printmaker from Richmond, Virginia. She received her BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2021 and is currently in the MFA Art and Ecology program at Burren College of Art. She has exhibited work in both the United States and Ireland, and received the 2020 UROP grant to conduct research into birds on the VCU campus. Her art is strongly rooted in scientific research, and uses an expanded printmaking process to communicate information regarding the climate crisis. A love of birds is also prevalent throughout her work, Rafle makes use of bird imagery to symbolize how human activity affects both the human and more than human worlds.