Centre for Contemporary Art
Derry ~ Londonderry 10–12
Artillery St
Derry~Londonderry
BT48 6RG,
Northern Ireland
Our regular opening hours are
Tuesday–Saturday,
noon–6pm
This year, CCA has presented two awards to graduating students from the University of Ulster's Belfast School of Art MFA programme. We are delighted to announce that the 2022 Graduate Awardees are Charys Wilson and David Younglove.
David Younglove begins his Project Space exhibition on 1 July 2022. His work will be viewable through the windows on Artillery Street. David’s exhibition will be on view until 31 July 2022, with Charys Wilson's show taking place later in the year.
Alongside their exhibition in the Project Space, the graduates will both receive a mentoring session with CCA's Director Catherine Hemelryk.
Supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Derry City & Strabane District Council.
David Younglove is a multidisciplinary artist from Boulder, CO currently based in Belfast. His work primarily references the poetry and imagery from his heritage as the son of an Iranian-American immigrant. Conventions and motifs from Persian miniature are stylized with influence from western art history, allowing the work to explore this hybridized aspect of identity. Geometric patterning, biomorphic design and lyrical motifs of humans in nature are connected to the visual traditions of western counterculture and street-based practices such as flyposting through the medium of printmaking.
David's aim is to re-situate the lofty mysticisms of Persian poetry within the lineage of a renegade history, and to decouple them from the demonization of how they are perceived in the west. Within the synthesis of Western and Eastern imagery, David's practice explores how the combination of these varied elements can lead to the discovery of new ways of seeing. In this way, the work references the musings on perception from centuries-old poets as well as the current imperative to shift our ways of looking at the world in light of climate change. Within the aesthetic shift that happens in the merging of disparate visual languages, new and surprising modes of seeing start to emerge.
In recent works David has made several sculptures by modifying found objects such as bricks and other pieces of rubble. This method has allowed David to be responsive to the decay in the world around him and to search for a kind of poetic beauty within this process. Both the work with reclaimed materials and the turn towards a stylized pop aesthetic stem from his explorations in Belfast, particularly its alleyways and abandoned places. As David's practice develops, he continues to investigate his new surroundings and inquire for new methods and elements to be developed in response to his explorations.
Charys Wilson is a Fine Artist, working in a variety of mediums but primarily drawing and installation. She studied her bachelor’s in fine art at Aberystwyth University, majoring in Printmaking, graduating in 2015, and completing an MFA at Ulster University in 2022.
Her work focuses on modern day societies relationship with nature, allowing contemplative time and space for the viewer to reconnect with often overlooked/ underappreciated aspects of the natural world.
She aims to create work that immerses the viewer, often bringing the outside in, exploring pathways of illusion, mimicry, and shadow through the medium of installation.
The work aims to still the viewer both physically and mentally, to hold them and reconnect them to the present moment. Encouraging contemplation and stillness through the familiar, but also through the abstracted and distilled.
