Faculty

Artist Biography

Born in Galway, Ireland in 1968, Kerrane received her BA in Fine Arts Degree from the University of Ulster at Belfast. She relocated to the United States in 1994, and earned her MFA from the University of New Orleans in 1997.

Currently residing in Denver, Colorado, Kerrane is Assistant Professor and Area Head for the sculpture program at the University of Colorado Denver. She is an advocate for the arts and believes that art and education are uniquely associated. Her primary interests lie in sculpture, assemblage/collage and multi-media installation. Kerrane examines the layered strata of mind, and the ways language maps and directs the intimate journey into socially constructed gender roles.  Kerrane’s work has shown in sculpture gardens and galleries in the United States and Ireland and most recently exhibited at JUST Sculpture Tour, Jackson, Tennessee. She was awarded Peoples Choice for sculpture exhibited in Art at Northlake Park, Orlando, Florida in 2004 and received both Best of Show and the Peoples Choice Award in the 2nd Annual Florida Outdoor Sculpture Competition in 2002. Returning to Ireland in 1999 and 2002 respectively, Kerrane was artist in residence at Cosan Glas, an environmental sculpture trail during the Earagail Arts Festival, and at the Flax Art Studio’s International Residency Programme in Belfast. She also co-designed and teaches a cross-disciplinary, site-specific art course as a summer programme for the Burren College of Art in County Clare, Ireland.

Kerrane’s collaborative work with husband, Mark Guilbeau, has developed into a series of installations called The Deluge Series. Through the work they investigate the complexities of modern life emphasizing the processes by which the global community is being developed. The Deluge Series is also influenced by individual aspects, such as their personal relationship and gender roles in association with the former. They invest the work with communicative ability, to invite and persuade with powerful instructive undercurrents and visual compositions that impress with magnitude and repetition.

Exhibited in a number of galleries, The Deluge Series showed at the 2001 Biennial at Atlanta’s Contemporary Art Center and the Engine Room Gallery, Belfast, Northern Ireland followed by exhibitions at SUNY Fredonia, and New Genre X, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Recent exhibitions are Consensual Nonreproduction at Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, Colorado in November 2005, and SPACES Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio in 2006.

Gallery

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Rian Kerrane
Assistant Professor and Area Head, Sculpture program

Rian.Kerrane@cudenver.edu
303.556.8839

Assistant Professor of Fine Arts
BA Fine Art, University of Ulster at Belfast
MFA Sculpture (minor in print making), University of New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana

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Photograph above:  Crolly Doll, 2006