IT IS NOT OFTEN THAT I GET TO SEE A HELICOPTER UP CLOSE
The Air Corps in conjunction with the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform currently operate two EC135 T2 aircraft. The first aircraft entered service in 2003, and both operate seven days a week in the Garda Air Support role.
Operational control of the aircraft remains with the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, whereas the Air Corps provide pilots to the Garda Air Support Unit to fly the aircraft.
The Eurocopter EC135 (now Airbus Helicopters H135) is a twin-engine civil light utility helicopter produced by Airbus Helicopters (formerly known as Eurocopter). It is capable of flight under instrument flight rules (IFR) and is outfitted with a digital automatic flight control system (AFCS). First flying on 15 February 1994, it entered service in 1996 and 1,400 have been delivered up to September 2020 to 300 operators in 60 countries, accumulating over 5 million flight hours. It is mainly used for helicopter emergency medical services, corporate transport, law enforcement, offshore wind support, and military flight training. Half of them are in Europe and a quarter in North America. The H135M, certified under the name Eurocopter EC635, is a military variant.
IMMA invited the artist Navine G. Dossos to realise an ambitious new commission for IMMA’s iconic courtyard, titled Kind Words Can Never Die, the work explores new psychological states that have emerged in response to a greater awareness of global and local climate change.
Inspired by the books Earth Emotions (2019) by Glenn Albrecht, and Thought Forms (1901) by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, these wall paintings designed through a series of workshops at IMMA, explore how we can use colour to express emotional states, and make images of these complex feelings that can be both negative and positive responses to ecological change.
Navine G. Dossos is a visual artist working between London and Athens. Her interests include Orientalism in the digital realm, geometry as information and decoration, image calibration, and Aniconism in contemporary culture. She has developed a form of geometric abstraction that merges the traditional Aniconism of Islamic art with the algorithmic nature of the interconnected world we live in. This is not the formal abstraction we understand from the western history of art, but something essentially informational, and committed to investigation and communication.
Dossos is a painter, and uses this medium and its history to ask fundamental questions about the ways in which we see, understand and represent the world around us. Her work suggests that contrary to the mediatic impulses of the present, we must not rely upon, nor constantly reproduce, the figurative language of television, online media, videos, and the endlessly circulating images which shape our shared imagination of reality. Her work frequently emphasises the contrast between the timeless and the ephemeral, whether in the painting over of temporary murals, her own effacement of underlying works in ongoing series where each iteration is applied over the last, or her choices of material, from traditional icon boards to cardboard and found wood, and the balancing of classical training and technique with a constant reappraisal and critique of the contemporary.