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We need more criticism, I would love that. It is
important to grow and understand people’s perceptions of your work and what you can do better. sessed with it, it feels very natural for me – the aesthetic, the food, the fashion, the music – I love it.” A show is on the horizon for there in 2022 and the one artist she cites as an influence is Yayoi Kusama: “Iconic… very me.” I inform her of Naoshima, the art island there which hosts her legendary pumpkin sculptures as well as numerous other site-specific installations. “I will go full Harajuku when I go there,” she says, and I know she will. While Dunne had to postpone shows in New York and Puerto Rico owing to the pandemic, she still managed to have three here over the last year. “I emailed Caroline (Cowley) from the (Fingal) arts office at 2am with an idea and at the end of a long email that said, ‘If you think this is mad no problem, I’m just putting it out there.’ She emailed me back the following morning to say, ‘Let’s do it’.” What transpired was Transcending Time – a mobile 4D installation. “I thought if people can’t see my work, I’ll bring it to them. That’s when I came up with the mobile digital installation. It went to 400 houses over the course of two weeks. For me, the main motivation was to see if I could do it – can you still make work in the restrictions?” Later in 2020, she had Genesis in the works for the old Fruit ’n’ Veg market in Smithfield as part of Culture Night. It was going to be her biggest platform to date but, two weeks before, it was kiboshed owing to a new wave of lockdown restrictions. Undaunted and undeterred, her default state of perpetual reimagining aided her in turning it into a virtual show. “I created it from scratch, ending up happy but exhausted.” Currently, there’s 7thSENSE on in the Lab on Foley Street which runs to the end of August. It’s a sensory snap, crackle and pop with Dunne using new and old electronics, as well as found and distorted audio to create the illusion of spatial movement by designing the sensation of sounds that “move” around the visitor as they engage within the work.” Visually arresting and hyperkinetic, it bears all the hallmarks of Dunne’s style. I ask her which words, used in association with her work, cause her to flinch a bit. “Because there’s an intense colour saturation in my work, there is a tendency to say, ‘Aoife’s colourful work’, but it is so much more than that,” she adds. “It might be a stylistic thing. I think the trend here is very muted in the contemporary art scene. Abroad they want the absurd, excess and riot – it is understood a bit more.” This brings us round to the glaring dearth of informed criticism in the art scene here these days. She’s in agreement about it. “When I do international shows there is proper art criticism, but not here. All of my work has 20