Gustavo Barbosa, Dermot Browne, Eoin Butler, Merce Canadell, Paola Catizone, Anne Cradden, Emma Crean, Mark Cullen, Brian Duggan, Brendan Flaherty, Susan Gogan, Cormac Healy, Brid Higgins, Catherine Hildyard, Helen Hughes, Eilis McDonald, Gavin Murphy, Jo Neylin, Oran O'Siochain, Sally Timmons, Ivan Twohig

This is a different kind of art exhibition. This is not meant as an egotistical statement, for what makes it different is not the result of an exhaustive and elaborate set of ideological criteria that has been met, or the culmination of a curator's taste, status, perspective or target-audience. The work displayed here is bound together by one important and crucial common element, not the design of a central force, but simply the desire in each of its participants to make works of art. The exhibition was open to all artists renting a space in Pallas Studios, there was no imposed theme or barrier to entry and as such it is a reflection of the variety of art and art practictioners working in Dublin today

The studio environment is one in constant flux. Artists come and go, partitions move, the physical space evolvves and differs as much as the work contained within it. Those working within it make use of different means to transform ideas onto canvas, photograhic paper, TV monitors; into bronze, stone, installations; through projects, chalk and pencil onto paper. The studio and the path chosen by those within is labyrinthine - a complicated and irregular network of passages or paths. The studio also acts as a physical and historical anchor representing the route we as artists take. As such the exhibition features a specially designed and built space that has evolved through a dialogue that both reacts to the studio environment and in turn has been reacted to by exhibiting artists.

What makes art important to us is that it is not life. A novel, a painting, a piece of music can be rewritten, reworked, replayed. Art is where we can get things right. The title of the exhibition comes from the sixteenth century essayist Michael de Montagne - the word 'essai' (attempt) and its conception as a genre are essentially his invention - and he enlisted it as a vehicle to investigate his ideas and himself in the search for truth and to better understand humanity. What makes the studio important is that it is where we, the artists, make our investigations, where we replay, rework, rewrite and hope to get it right. With this exhibition and accompanying publication we hope to reveal a sense also of attempt.

Conservatory 1, chq building

IFSC, Docklands, Dublin 1

Presented by Pallas Studios and Dublin Docklands Development Authority. Exhibition co-ordinated by Dermot Browne, Mark Cullen, Gavin Murphy.

By Diverse Means We Arrive at the Same End was the first of many initiatives planned for the Dublin Docklands Development Authority's arts strategy demonstrating their commttment to the development of art and it's practice in the Dockland area.