Muirne Kate Dineen is in essence a colour artist. She has worked in many different mediums, but has pared this down to two main elements in her work, both concerned with the concept of 'building colour' as a physical object.
Muirne Kate Dineen is in essence a colour artist. She has worked in many different mediums, but has pared this down to two main elements in her work, both concerned with the concept of 'building colour' as a physical object.
The first of these elements is the process of Araash Fresco, an ancient and complex tradition of Fresco painting believed to have come originally from the area of Rajasthan in Western India and which dates back to pre Sultanate periods in Indian histoty. It is a built surface made up of Marble dust, slaked lime and pigments. Dineen has learnt and customised this practise in order to suit her own work.
The second and more recent addition to her practise is the use of Concrete in her work, a common and universal material, which provides a different method and opportunity of building colour as form. It is mainly these two processes that are referred to in the description and explanation of images, both in the Art work for exhibition purposes, and her work within an architectural context.
Kate Dineen's deceptively spare and simple 'sculptures' straddle the traditional and the contemporary and embrace both Indian and Western art. Her large polished blocks of intense colour, and her smooth egg shaped sculptures call to mind the formal concerns of an artist like Mark Rothko, as well as the cross-cultural and multi-media range of someone like Anish Kapoor. The complexes of Indian mythology also come to mind, but more than anything, there is pure, intense, luminous colour and an evocative tactile quality: you want to touch them, to run your hands along their smooth surfaces.
Dineen graduated with a first class honors from the London Colledge of Printing where she studies Graphic Design. She then went on to attend the Royal College of Art where she received an MA in Textiles and Illustration. In 1988 she received a British council/Commonwealth Arts scholarship to study "Araash" a kind of Fresco painting originating from Rajasthan in Western India. The method, involving the application of many layers of ground marble dust, and slaked lime was traditionally used by a particular caste of Masons, essentially as a way of finishing of walls and floors and giving them a high polished sheen. Dineen eventually earned a studio based PhD from the Royal College of Art that focused on the process. What she recognized was a method of working that could achieve the kind of rich reverberating colour that she sought "There's something about this - It's very uncompromising - the idea that I can build a solid three-dimensional block of pure colour, I like the weight of it, the fact that there is nothing lightweight or ephemeral."