5,313 works submitted, 515 on show: RHA Annual Exhibition 2024 ready to be unveiled

"Just off the main foyer, a quartet of works demonstrates how sensitive even the strongest artworks can be to the influence of their neighbours. Two gridded carborundums by Charles Tyrrell, Stoney Road Blue and Stoney Road Pink, hang next to Michelle Dalton’s Discomfort: A Portrait of Psychosis (Personal Medical Notes from 2006-2013). This latter is an antique cast-iron bed, with peeling paint. Its single duvet and pillow case are inscribed with stitched-together texts telling a disjointed narrative of mental breakdown and recovery. Beside this, also by Dalton, is Flourish, a wall piece that includes an original window frame from Our Lady’s psychiatric hospital in Cork. Adjacency momentarily lends Tyrrell’s work the unsettling sense of a pair of distorted, barred windows at dawn and dusk. Looked at in isolation, they return to themselves again, all the more powerful for the fleeting illusion."