Map of Dusk is an exhibition about sunlight and screen light. It presents a recent body of work evoking Curran’s encounters with her garden at the end of the day and draws on longstanding themes within her practice around landscape, memory, embodied experience and modes of attention.

Curran uses processes of painted collage, quilting and woven tapestry, piecing and patching fragments together through constellations of colour and material. Curran’s works orientate towards the touched and the felt through densely layered fields of stitched canvas and fabric, they reflect the physicality of their construction and an immersion in processes of making – painting, weaving, tearing, stitching.

Dusk marks a threshold, a space and time between day and night where subtle shifts in perception take place, where our eyes adjust to falling light levels and our senses are heightened. Colours briefly glow, detail and definition start to fade. We are called upon to pay closer attention to our surroundings, becoming more attuned to sensory experience and to the many other worlds at work within, behind and passing through our own. The garden offers a space of encounter with the realms of plants, animals, insects, earth and atmosphere; a fragment of a wider universe of belonging. Fading sunlight also contrasts with the persistent light of the screen and the ever-glowing distractions that increasingly consume our attention. Perpetual illumination undermines our connection to the diurnal and seasonal rhythms once used to orientate ourselves in space and time; the transitions between day and night, light and dark, action and rest, waking and dreaming.

This practice-based research uses colour and materials to map embodied experience that is drawn from encounters with the natural world via the space of the garden. It is informed by Virginia Woolf’s writings on ‘moments of being’ and everyday acts of attention.