Visual Artists' News Sheet - 2016 March April

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet ISSUE 2 March – April 2016 Published by Visual Artists Ireland Ealaíontóirí Radharcacha Éire

Jennifer Mehigan, ‘Eat U Up’, installation view, 2015, Substation Gallery, Singapore; inkjet on polyester and vinyl sticker

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Editorial

March – April 2016

Contents Cover. Jennifer Mehigan, ‘Eat U Up’, 2015.

Welcome to the March – April 2016 issue of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

For this and the May – June issue we have invited art critic James Merrigan as guest editor. For this issue he proposed the theme of sex, which threads its way through the contributions by Alan Butler, Jennifer Mehigan, Alan Phelan, Emma Haugh, Sarah Devereux and Merrigan in the thematic essay ‘Situational Erotics’.

5. Column. Peter Fitzgerald. Cheese on Wry. 6. Column. Jonathan Carroll. Under Pressure.

8. News. The latest developments in the visual arts sector.

9. Regional Focus. The visual art resources and activity in Mid and East Antrim are outlined by

The Braid Arts Centre, Larne Museum and Arts Centre, Sharon Adams and Laura Butler.

12. Theme Essay. Situational Erotics. Guest curator James Merrigan looks at sex in the Irish art scene.

13. Career Development. Sexting. James Merrigan talks to Sarah Devereux about her practice.

Our regional focus for this issue is North Down and Ards, with features from artists Laura Butler and 14. Project Profile. The Re-appropriation of Sensuality. Emma Haugh presents a script performed at her Sharon Adams, alongside updates from The Braid Arts Centre and Larne Museum and Arts Centre. recent exhibition held at NCAD’s gallery space.

‘Residency’ reports come from Iranian artist Siamak Delzendeh, who recently undertook a critical 15. How is it Made? Norway (Sex) Diaries. Alan Phelan discusses his upcoming film on Roger writing exchange at IMMA, and Katherine Waugh, who programmed a series of films as part of her Casement’s sexuality.

16. Career Development. www. Alan Butler talks to Jennifer Mehigan about her work. project residency at the Workhouse Union in Callan, Kilkenny.

17. Biennial. Still (the) Barbarians. Rory Prout interviews EVA curator Koyo Kouoh.

In his ‘How is it Made?’ article, ‘Norway (Sex) Diaries’, Alan Phelan tells of filming a new work on Roger 18. Arts & Health. Check Up, Check In. Lily Power reports from a recent arts and health Casement’s sexuality on location in Norway. In her article, Sue Rainsford introduces her process-oriented seminar held at The LAB, Dublin. writing and describes working with Bridget O’Gorman for her exhibition at The LAB, Dublin.

19. Critique. ‘Adventure: Capital’, Limerick City Gallery; ‘In the Flesh’, The Lab, Dublin; ‘She Devil’, Golden Thread, Belfast; ‘Things Made for Drawing’, Eight Gallery, Dublin; ‘On the Border ‘Career Development’ pieces in this issue cover a broad range of practices and feature artists at various stages of their careers. On the painting theme, Alison Pilkington talks to Donald Teskey about his Between Time and Loss’, Galway Arts Centre. influences and his choices, while Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty introduce their collaborative 23. How is it Made? Writing That Embodies. Sue Rainsford introduces her process-oriented art writing.

24. Festival. Our universe is ending sooner than we thought. Claire Feeley reports on the eighth edition of practice. Alan Butler talks to Jennifer Mehigan about her emerging practice. the Lofoten Arts Festival, Norway.

Reviewed in the ‘Critique’ section are: Sean Lynch at Limerick City Gallery; Bridget O’Gorman at The LAB, 26. Residency. Lapis Philosophorum. Siamak Delzendeh discusses his critical writing residency at IMMA Dublin; David Lunney at Eight Gallery, Dublin; group show ‘She Devil’ at Golden Thread, Belfast; and 27. Career Development. Romancing Collaboration. Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty introduce their Niamh O’Doherty, Victoria J. Dean and Laura Smith at Galway Arts Centre. collaborative practice.

28. Residency. The Posture of the Key. Katherine Waugh describes the film programme she curated As ever, we have details of upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public

as part of the Workhouse Union Project Residency at Callan Workhouse, Kilkenny. art roundups, news from the sector and current opportunities.

30. Career Development. Rooted in the Landscape. Alison Pilkington talks to Donald Teskey about the

development of his painting career.

31. Discussion: Painting. Pursuit & Practice. Artists Susan Connolly, Mark McGreevy and Dougal

McKenzie discuss the painting scene in Belfast.

32. Northern Ireland Manager. Glass Ceilings. Rob Hilken gives an overview of recent exhibitions in

Belfast.

32. Public Art Roundup. Public art commissions, site-specific works, socially engaged practice and

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35. VAI Professional Development. Current and upcoming workshops, peer reviews and seminars.

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Production: Curator: James Merrigan. Production Editor: Lily Power. Editorial Assistant: Catherine O’Keeffe. News / Opportunities: Siobhan Mooney, Adrian Colwell. Invoicing: Bernadette Beecher.

Contributors: Peter Fitzgerald, Jonathan Carroll, Rosalind Lowry, Laura Butler, Sharon Adams, Marian Kelso, Sarah Devereux, James Merrigan, Emma Haugh, Alan Phelan, Alan Butler, Jennifer Mehigan, Rory Prout, Koyo Kouoh, Gemma Carroll, Roisin Russell, Iain Griffin, John Graham, Aine Phillips, Sue Rainsford, Claire Feeley, Siamak Delzendeh, Ruth Clinton, Niamh Moriarty, Katherine Waugh, Alison Pilkington, Donald Teskey, Lily Power, Susan Connolly, Mark McGreey, Dougal, McKenzie, Rob Hilken.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

COLUMN

Peter Fitzgerald Cheese on Wry

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Roundup WHAT IF WE GOT IT WRONG?

Images from ‘What if We Got it Wrong’, 2016

a retrospective of Cork-based artist John Kingerlee’s career (17 Jan – 27 Feb).

‘Beyond the Beyonds’ featured works from 1962 to the present day, with pieces drawn from the well-known subject series Heads, Landscapes, Painted Collages and Grids. Also exhibited were some lesser known earlier works, including ceramics and a selection of large-scale luxury prints. Two film works accompanied the exhibition: Marina Levitina and Colm Hogan’s experimental documentary Kingerlee, which explores the inner world and the creative process of the artist; and a short film documenting a 1998 visit by the late Ted Pillsbury to Kingerlee’s remote Cork studio.

‘What if We Got it Wrong’, an exhibition touring from the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, ran at the F.E. McWilliam Gallery in Banbridge, Northern Ireland (13 Feb – 16 Apr). Centred around climate change, the group show “asks if progress has made us weaker, if luangallery.ie I was editor of Circa Art Magazine for 13 years, before it ceased publishing in maybe we have taken a wrong turn, if 2011. Its website is still there – circaartmagazine.website – and it holds a great perhaps we have gotten things wrong”. WATER FOR THE TRIBE wealth of material going back more than 30 years. Circa may come back – three The participating artists were Emily colleagues are currently working to define a new future for it. Recently, while I Robyn Archer, George Bolster, Mark was writing Wikipedia entries on two artists, I was reminded that the content Clare, Alice Clark, Blaise Drummond, Circa has online isn’t just interesting, it has its uses.

Seamus Dunbar, John Gerrard, Andrew Kearney, Susan Leen, Ruth Le Gear, SelAs for art criticism, it’s about art or context or theory, or any combination of ma Makela, Anna Macleod, Christine these. Many wonder why art criticism can’t mirror that of film or theatre, with Mackey, Seamus Nolan, Softday (Sean its plaudits and tomatoes. But at some point in the past the critic noticed that Taylor and Mikael Fernstrom) and Bristretching behind the artwork were staff, gallerist or curator, director, funder or gitta Varadi.

Jan Pleitner, Untitled, 2015; oil on canvas, 280 x 300cm patron or purchaser, institutions, the ‘art world’ and the art market. And s/he nofemcwilliam.com ticed that it all curved back around, that you have the funders or patrons again, a The Kerlin Gallery in Dublin presented magazine and its board, an editor, the critic and the selfsame artwork. At various TENDER WOUNDS ‘Water for the Tribe’, an exhibition of points there is the potential reader, who may be enthralled or confused or fleeing. new paintings by Jan Pleitner (23 Jan – 10 Mar). “Characterised by fast lines Judging art became problematic, given the what, why, who, when, where, how and deep pigments that bleed into one back-story behind each object in an art space. I’d even go a bit further, and here’s another”, the gallery noted, “the artan example of why: soon after I started at Circa I bumped into an artist/writer ist takes a highly tactile approach to friend who had been leading a large group of art critics around Dublin. He had a painting, scraping through layers of wild, scared look. “It’s horrible,” he said, “they criticise everything!” My point is paint as readily as he builds them up”. that as art writers we should probably get better at recognising that our own inkerlin.ie ner workings affect our theories and views of art.

RELIGIOUS extremists have this crap that their minds are tossing about. They have heaven and hell prodding them on. Atheists, in contrast … well, when my son was six a classmate assured the class that the best form of armour was cheese.

The atheists’ wonders of the cosmos are cheese before the loons. You can’t compete with imagination gone ape, a point to which I’ll return.

Quite apart from internal issues and external, institutional ones, there are related psychosocial factors governing who gets to talk about or write about art, what the entry costs are (in terms of effort, learning), what the rules and orthodoxies are, who knows / likes / owes whom, and so on. The reason your show didn’t get covered may even be that the nearest critic has no transport.

I did art at NCAD in the early nineties. Art was made in one place. Thinking about art in a formal manner occurred 100 metres distant. Art theory can seem like a steady accretion of something maddening; it can seem like wading through a thousand perspectives – past and present, simple or complex, clear or incomprehensible – on how art should be. In silence, as far as I remember, art criticism was left out of this mix at NCAD. The unspoken argument was possibly that art criticism is a creative activity, whereas thinking about what art should be is a rational, analytical activity. But by comparison there’s no vast theorising in science about, for example, how water should be. Maybe art itself is mostly like water.

A LONELY IMPULSE OF DELIGHT

sofinearteditions.com

THE FOGGY DEW/THE RETURN ‘The Foggy Dew’ was an exhibition of new work by RHA President Mick O’Dea (15 Jan – 21 Feb). Known for his paintings of the Irish War of Independence, O’Dea commemorated the events of the Easter Rising with four large-scale works on canvas. The pieces, exhibited in Dublin’s RHA Gallery, each focus on a different site in central Dublin: the GPO, Upper O’Connell Street, the RHA on Middle Abbey Street and College Green.

Running simultaneously at the RHA, Maeve McCarthy’s ‘The Return’ delved into childhood memories through a series of new charcoal drawings. The gallery explained that “while her previous work, ‘Kerry Nighttime Landscapes’, were small in scale and executed in traditional gesso, tempera and oil, these large atmospheric charcoal drawings are on a new scale, though continuing a nocturne theme”. rhagallery.ie

G R O U P S H OW

Image from ‘G R O U P S H O W’

Dublin’s GalleryX showcased the work of Greek painter Christina Tzani in ‘Tender Wounds’ (23 Jan – 20 Feb). The exhibition included oil paintings and ink drawings on paper and on canvas.

The opening was opened by H.E. Katia Georgiou, the Greek ambassador to Ireland, and featured a musical performance.

‘G R O U P S H O W’, curated by Phillip McCrilly and hosted by Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast, questioned the group show as a forum for productive artistic exchange (15 Jan – 13 Feb).

The exhibition featured work by Stuart Calvin, Christopher Campbell, Erin Hagan, Brónach McGuiness, Sinead McKeever, Paul Moore, Sharon Murphy, John Rainey and Michael Sheppard.

galleryx.ie, facebook.com/galleryxdublin

goldenthreadgallery.co.uk

Christina Tzani, work from ‘Tender Wounds’

BEYOND THE BEYONDS

SOLAS Michael Canning, 1893; etching, 55 x 45cm

The role of the editor in this mix is somehow to publish worthwhile texts about worthwhile art. Most bad texts suffer from jargon. Good texts rely on imagination, which can be surprisingly formulaic: create or find a link between two disparate things. In art writing, one of those things is (usually) the art, the other is whatever. Lightly add in some relevant knowledge and you should have engaging writing. It’s a twin sibling of how we make art.

Art criticism is at the intersection of art theory, which is philosophy, and objective judgment, which is unattainable. When you read a strong text in the likes of Circa, you realise that what saves the endeavour of criticism is imagination, this linking thing. In the world at large, and even if it hasn’t gone ape, imagination is the most powerful thing we’ve got. It’s stronger than cheese.

Peter Fitzgerald was editor of Circa Art Magazine from 1998 to 2011 and continues as one of two ‘caretaker’ directors. He is an artist, and he also runs Dnote and iCulture.

Michael Cullen, Louise Leonard, Niamh Flanagan, Niall Naessens, Paul Gaffney, Leo Higgins and John Behan.

John Kingerlee, from ‘Beyond the Beyonds’

Luan Gallery in Athlone kicked off their 2016 exhibitions programme with

Part of the official ‘Yeats 2015’ celebrations, the group show ‘A lonely impulse of delight’ at SO Fine Art Editions in Dublin (27 Nov – 30 Jan) marked the 150th anniversary of Yeats’s birth. The writers featured were John Banville, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, Edna O’Brien and Colm Tóibín. Participating visual artists were Donald Teskey, Hughie O’Donoghue, Richard Gorman, Diana Copperwhite, Martin Gale, Michael Canning, Barbara Rae, Norman Ackroyd, Stephen Lawlor, Aoife Scott, Jean Bardon, James McCreary, Ed Miliano, Amelia Stein, Yoko Akino, Lars Nyberg, Kelvin Mann, Kate Mac Donagh, Vincent Sheridan, Lina Nordenström,

Alison Lowry, Dolly Mixtures

The Glass Society of Ireland’s ‘Solas’ ran at Cork’s CIT Gallery, 6 – 29 Jan.

6 COLUMN

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet ROUNDUP

Jonathan Carroll

The touring exhibition, which has so far been hosted by NCAD Gallery, the Under Pressure Hunt Museum and Greyfriars Municipal Art Gallery, showcased the work “No pressure, no diamonds” (Thomas Carlyle, 1795 – 1881). “The lifestyle that an of Irish glassmakers. This year’s exhiartist can have, the freedom to wander in the landscape with no real pressure or bition was juried by Audrey Whitty, deadlines was a very attractive one” (John Dyer).

Head of Decorative Arts, Design and Did Pádraig Pearse drink coffee? I doubt it. What coffee drinker would plan Historical Collections at the National anything for a Monday morning? ‘Nah… I am not feeling it today, give us a shout Museum of Ireland alongside artist and Tuesday and we see how we are fixed’. I thought about this while tucking into my curator Susanne Jøker Johnsen. It in1916 Easter Rising commemorative chocolate bar. This bar was my first glimpse cluded work by Scott Benefield, Patrick into the year of commemorations. My second was an Easter Rising calendar sold Blythe, Emma Bourke, Sinead Brennan, by a charity (it includes horoscopes for 2016, and tells me: “You’re particularly Sean Campbell, Debbie Dawson, Róisín drawn to those who have an impressive background in art, culture or religion”). de Buitléar, Karen Donnellan, Gwyn I also recently rediscovered my ‘millennium candle’ – remember them? It Grace, Eamonn Hartley, Karl Harron, was in a bag of used light bulbs heading for the recycling bin. I look across at my Catherine Keenan, Peadar Lamb, AliGoethe and Schiller salt and pepper shakers (made in China), a present from a son Lowry, Sarah McEvoy, Meadhbh tenant, and think: ah the faith of all great men to be made into condiment dis- McIlgorm, Sadhbh Mowlds, Jenny Mulpensers – hooray! ligan, Michelle Ryan, Killian SchurSo, the pressure is on for artists to commemorate the centenary of the 1916 mann, Aoife Soden, Andrea Spencer, Rising – look out for 50 ways to commemorate such as: The Rising Yoga Mat. It Suzannah Vaughan and Catherine begs the question: Does forced creativity or prescribed creativity bring out the Wilcoxson. worst in the artist? Are deadlines the key to forcing otherwise laid-back creatives glasssocietyireland.wix.com to get stuff out of the studio? As the best-named theatre company, Forced Entertainment, believe, “force it and it will come” (also a useful motto for top brand MATTHEW THOMPSON laxatives). What of all those difficult second albums and unfinished sympho- Cork-based Matthew Thompson exnies… hibited paintings in both Helsinki and The plain fact is that deadlines come and go and other work gets in the way. New York during January, in ‘MetaIs it even necessary to finish something? Brian Wilson eventually presented Smile morphosis’ at Helsinki’s Caisa Gallery (1966 – 2004); Schubert’s ‘unfinished’ Symphony No. 8 gets constant play; Gaudi’s (8 – 28 Jan) and in the ‘International La Sagrada Família basilica in Barcelona (building commenced in 1882) is due to Contemporary Art Exhibition’ at New be completed by 2026, on the centenary of the architect’s death. And here we are York’s Gateway Art Centre (2 Jan – 31 complaining that the refurbishment of our National Gallery is delayed for a year! Mar).

Opportunity Knocks “No matter how gifted a person is, he or she has no chance to achieve anything creative unless the right conditions are provided by the field” (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi).

In his book Creativity, Csikszentmihalyi goes on to list and explain the seven major elements in the social milieu that help make creative contributions possible: training, expectations, resources, recognition, hope, opportunity and reward. So, for 2016, we have resources allocated, which leads to opportunity (commissions) and reward (payment, budgets, reviews), and in-turn give artists hope that in time this will all lead to recognition and ever more opportunities.

Deadlines and the roles of the curator, commissioner and the critic, as well as a waiting public are all connected by expectations. No use putting a ball up in the air if there is nobody outfield to collect it. Here is Lindsay Duncan playing a harsh theatre critic (Tabitha Dickinson) in Birdman: Michael Keaton: “Did I do something to offend you?” Lindsay Duncan: “As a matter of fact you did, you took up space in a theatre which otherwise might have been used on something worthwhile”. Ouch! Yet this illustrates perfectly the importance of expectation and the role of the critic in demanding something better, something of quality.

But as Fernando Pessoa puts it in The Book of Disquietude: “Every effort is a crime, because every gesture is an inert dream”, then quality may not be a requisite judgement and maybe we should lower our expectations.

There are obvious ways of imagining more worthwhile content in the galleries and theatres we visit this year. You can remember better exhibitions in the same space and compare previous theatrical performances. You can also compare what is being shown in spaces abroad and ask why the same could not be shown here; or, ask yourself why certain necessary conditions are in place elsewhere that are not in place here. Back to Birdman, who has a particular disdain for comparisons – “it’s just a bunch of crappy opinions backed up by even crappier comparisons, it’s just a couple of paragraphs, none of this costs you anything!”

Seth Siegelaub, when speaking of the role of the curator and collector in his projects (in A Brief History of Curating, Hans Ulrich Obrist) sought to make visible the hidden private decisions behind the public art exhibition and selection process. Of course the curator-director can pay the ultimate price for their championing of certain art and artists over others. They too can suffer from criticism and flounder when expectations are not met. Here is a headline from The Telegraph (31 March, 2015): “Penelope Curtis leaves Tate Britain after pressure from artworld”. This relates to the director of Tate Britain who received very bad press which included something as direct as “Curtis has to go. She really does” from the Sunday Times art critic, Waldemar Januszczak.

What I most of all wanted to say was…

March – April 2016

absolutearts.com, caisa.fi, artnyny.com

ADA (A DISTRIBUTED ARCHIPELAGO)

Shane Finan, A Distributed Archipelago; acrylic, 10 x 10cm

ADA (A Distributed Archipelago) is a painting project by artist Shane Finan.

The work consists of one single painting in 96 parts and it is viewable online. The money raised from sales of the work, which was donated by Finan to the Swiss-based gallery Wandelbar Art International, will help fund the gallery’s international ‘Celtic’ touring exhibition, which will travel to Ireland, Wales and Scotland during 2015/2016.

Newtownards (10 Dec – 23 Jan). The seven ceramicists and one jeweller, who are taking part in Craft NI’s 2015– 2017 Making It programme, showcased handcrafted work, which ranged from precious metal and plastic jewellery to sculptural ceramics, porcelain lighting and vibrant tableware. Funded by Invest NI and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the exhibition featured work by Wendy Ward, Helen Faulkner, Sasha McVey, Kerrie Hanna, Nicola Drennan, Andrew Cooke, Malcolm Murchison and Angela O’Keefe.

oped in the past year with the support of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland ACES scheme in conjunction with the CCA. cca-derry-londonderry.org

THE 061

ardarts.com, craftni.org Eoin Barry, image from ‘The 061’

TAYLOR GALLERIES WINTER GROUP SHOW

Seán McSweeney, Saltwater Land, 2015; oil on board

Taylor Galleries in Dublin presented their ‘Winter Group Show’ (12 Dec – 31 Jan), which showcased pieces by both gallery and invited artists alongside work by featured artist Seán McSweeney, who celebrated his 80th birthday in December. The artists exhibiting included Colin Harrison, Martin Gale, John Doherty, Patrick Scott, Patricia Burns, Ann Quinn, Helen O’Leary, Charles Tyrrell, James O’Connor, Louise Neiland, Siobhán McDonald, Janet Mullarney, David Quinn, Regine Bartsch, Mary Lohan, Diana Kingston, Pat Harris, Makiko Nakamura, Denis Farrell, Janet Murran, Kevin Miller, Ruth McDonnell, Maria SimondsGooding, Bernadette Kiely, Tony O’Malley, Brian Bourke, Michael Farrell, Fionnuala D’Arcy, Jane O’Malley, Tim Goulding and Michael Cullen.

Limerick Printmakers presented new works by emerging Limerick artist Eoin Barry at the Belltable, Limerick city (15 Jan – 1 Feb). Barry’s practice is based in social and societal issues, and he was the 2013/2014 recipient of the Limerick Printmakers Bursary, which is presented annually to an outstanding graduate of LSAD’s Printmaking and Contemporary Practice degree programme. limerickprintmakers.com

CHROMA

Kate Hennessy, image from ‘Chroma’

The Hunt Museum in Limerick hosted ‘Chroma’ by Kate Hennessy, an exhibition of Indian-ink drawings inspired

by John Hunt’s collection of Irish medieval sculptures and oil paintings based on the artist’s travels (8 – 28 Jan).

taylorgalleries.ie

SIT DOWN CROSS LEGS LINK ARMS

huntmuseum.com

UNFOLD

shanefinan.org

OKTO Sarah O’Brien, installation view, ‘Unfold’ Tonya McMullan, ‘Sit Down Cross Legs Link Arms’

Wendy Ward, Lace Droplet Spiral Chandelier; photo by Glenn Norwood

Eight designer/makers exhibited new work in ‘Okto’ at Ards Arts Centre in

Tonya McMullan presented a one-evening project and performance at CCA Derry-Londonderry (17 Dec). Centred around the script for a radio play titled Europa and the Bull, ‘Sit Down Cross Legs Link Arms’ used childhood and a coming-of-age as means of delving into European identity, the Disneyfication of memory, criminality and structures of narrative. Accompanied by an essay

by Finnish artist/curator Jussi Koitela, the project incorporated work devel-

Following a two-week residency at Cork Printmakers Studio, based around discovering or rediscovering the print medium, six artists – Johnny Bugler, Roselyn Cleary, Simon English, Dominic Fee, Rob Monaghan and Sarah O’Brien – presented ‘Unfold’ (16 Jan – 27 Feb) at West Cork Arts Centre, Uillinn.

The press release stated: “The residency provided an opportunity to develop hybrid approaches and to challenge the traditional boundaries of printmak-

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

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ROUNDUP ing.” The exhibition was a Cork County Council Arts Office project, presented

by Cork Printmakers in association with West Cork Arts Centre. westcorkartscentre.com, corkprintmakers.ie

SHILLS

Padraig Spillane, image from ‘Shills’

126 Gallery in Galway hosted Pádraig Spillane’s ‘Shills’ (9 – 24 Jan). The exhibition was part of an ongoing collaborative project between Galway’s Engage Studios and Cork’s Sample Studios.

Spillane’s work explores desire and intimacy. ‘Shills’ showcased new work by the artist, which, the gallery noted, “by incorporating object and image manipulations, [produces] anthropomorphic resonances and [extends] an ongoing investigation of mirror effect arrangements”. The exhibition was accompanied by a text by Sarah Hayden, lecturer in twentieth and twenty-first century American Literature and Culture at the University of Southampton. engageartstudios.com, padraigspillane.com

THE PAINTER’S PALETTE/ INSIDE & OUT

Arts Centre (15 Jan – 19 Mar), created KNOWLEDGE AND OTHER MYTHS by artist Nuria Güell in collaboration with Catalan activist Enric Duran. The fictional agency in the exhibition borrowed strategies used by international financial tax assessors to reduce the tax liability of neoliberal companies, to itself provide consultancy. The ex- Walshe, McKeon, Browne, Wall, Corroon, Guinan,‘Knowlhibition is presented in the context of edge and other myths’, 2016 the centre’s 2016 programme centring ‘Knowledge and other myths’, held at around rebellion.

Platform Arts in Belfast (5 – 20 Februprojectartscentre.ie, nuriaguell.net ary), sought to “validate experiential knowledges of young, female, queer, and precarious subjects”, the artistORADOUR, ELEGY FOR A TOWN curators stated. “Through the appropriation of rationalist discourses, the artists [Saoirse Wall, Tara McKeon, Kerry Guinan, Avril Corroon, Eimear Walshe, Renèe Helèna Browne] articulate frustration with the unacknowledged labour of the cultural sector, the objectifying gaze of medicine, the indoctrination of patriarchal values, and the marginalising erasure of histories”.

‘Knowledge and other myths’ was the second exhibition co-curated by the Paul Woods, Aftermath, 2014; oil on canvas, 119 x 150cm group, who have been collaborating In 1944, the town of Oradour-Sur-Glane in research, writing and practice since in France was destroyed and 642 of its 2013. inhabitants were massacred. This tragedy is still surrounded by controversy and questions: Why did it happen and why in this particular town? In ‘Oradour, Elegy for a Town’ at Dundalk’s An Táin Arts Centre, Paul Woods explored the processes, haphazard and illogical as they were, that led to the killing of innocent people in the town in which they lived (16 Jan – 20 Feb). antain.ie, paulwoodsart.com

Work from ‘The Painter’s Palette’

signalartscentre.ie

TROIKA FISCAL DISOBEDIENCE ‘Troika Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy’ was an exhibition about agency consulting on tax avoidance at Project

FOLDING LANDSCAPES

Miriam O’Connor, A hundred and fifty square miles of paradoxes, 2015

A joint exhibition between the Burren College of Art and 126 Gallery, ‘Folding Landscapes’ featured work by recipients of the Emerging Irish Artist Residency Award and ran 5 – 27 Feb. Featuring Hazel Egan, Patricia Farrell, Miriam O’Connor and Rory Prout, the exhibition will next travel to 126 Gallery Galway.

REVISIONS

Signal Arts Centre in Bray exhibited ‘The Painter’s Palette Group Show’ (5 – 17 Jan), a diverse mix of work ranging from portraiture to the abstract, by a group of painters who meet weekly under the guidance of Bray artist Conall McCabe.

Following this, ‘Inside and Out’ (18 – 31 Jan) was an exhibition of works by artists from both Sunbeam House and Carmona Artisan’s Studio. Eolas photography group from Sunbeam House visited numerous iconic locations to produce a variety of landscape photography for the exhibition, while the Carmona Artisan’s Studio, a studio for intellectually disabled artists who have been part of a number of group shows, presented work that covered many methods and styles of working. The artists featured reinterpreted source materials to make new and sometimes abstract artworks.

platformartsbelfast.com

burrencollege.ie

Julie Merriman, Drawing No. R, P/ 1465/- VII, 2003; typewriter carbon, film on paper

Over the space of a year, Julie Merriman spent time meeting with the housing, engineering and architecture staff who work with drawings (both making or reading) within Dublin City Council.

Once Merriman began working with typewriter carbon film, she discovered that ‘slippage’ occurs during the process of drawing. In ‘Revisions’ at the Hugh Lane in Dublin (5 Jan – 10 Apr), as the press release noted: “The visual language of the engineer and architect is still present but its functionality has been disrupted and the potential now exists for new perspectives to emerge.”

‘Revisions’ was curated by Ruairi Ó Cuiv, Public Art Manager with DCC, and was part of ‘Interaction with the City’, the second strand of the Dublin City Public Art Programme. hughlane..ie

HANDS LAID ON

Kathy Tynan, All Of Old, oil on canvas, 90 x 90cm, 2015

Kevin Kavanagh in Dublin hosted a two-painter show titled ‘Hands Laid On’, featuring work by Aileen Murphy and Kathy Tynan (7 – 30 Jan). Tynan’s work arises from walking and looking and the alternative landmarks – the cracks of a pebble-dash wall, spray paint on gable roofs, watching crows –

that she encounters. These quirks, slogans and symbols are elevated through observation and paint.

Aileen Murphy’s works are concerned, the press release noted, with “feeling rather than thinking [and] concerned with human emotion and the human condition in which tales of drama and lust abound”. The artist works from quickly-made drawings of gesture and movement, with sweeping brushstrokes evoking dance and exuding energy. The exhibition closed with a conversation between the two artists and curator Ingrid Lyons, followed by a performance by Richard Proffitt and a DJ set by Michael Hill. kevinkavanagh.ie

THE HUT PROJECT

Christopher Mahon, Jim & Doyler, 2016

rial duo RGKSKSRG presented ‘This is Public & Sexy’, a collection of artworks and minor dramas performed live in St Andrew’s Community Centre, Rialto, Dublin 8. The live event figured as the closing celebration of the team’s residency at studio 468, with Berlin-based Irish artist Emma Haugh. ‘This is Public & Sexy’ featured Emma Haugh, Vivian Ziherl, Stéphane Béna Hanly, James Moran, Dennis McNulty, Dan Walwin, Anne Strain, Sibyl Montague, Moira Brady Averill, Tomaso De Luca, Christopher Mahon, Emily Mast, Angela Fulcher, NCAD Student Bodies and RGKSKSRG. rgksksrg.com

BEFORE, DURING, AFTER ... ALMOST Jonathan Mayhew at The Hut

Jonathan Mayhew presented his durational performance ‘All Flowers in Time’ at OPW/RHA project space The Hut in Dublin (15 Jan – 19 Feb). The curator wrote: “We forget what we regularly encounter: buildings, trees, plants, people to a certain extent – entropy and slow decline rendered invisible due to day-to-day familiarity.” The second installment of the project, the work deals in memory, the real, time and decay. rhagallery.ie, daveymoor.com

David Farrell, work from ‘Before, During, After .... Almost’

As part of the 1916 centenary commemorations, the RHA presented ‘Before, During, After...Almost’ (15 Jan – 21 Feb). Photographer David Farrell compiled a provocative and complex collection of images from his own archive in response to the global context of 1916 and the Somme. The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated book with an introductory essay by poet Theo Dorgan.

ROW Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre presented an exhibition of photographs by Debbie Heaphy of Skibbereen Rowing Club (22 Jan – 2 Apr). Heaphy has been recording the activities of the Rowing Club for the past four years, often accompanying coach Dominic Casey on early-morning training sessions.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS: PART 2 Accompanying the exhibition was a limited-edition publication of photographs and essays. Funds from the sales of the publications and of the exhibited photographs went towards funding for the club.

HERE AND THERE David Baird exhibited some recent paintings in ‘Here or There’ at the Golden Mirror Suite, Leopardstown Racecourse, County Kildare (24 Jan).

The works move away from his more usual animal subjects to the people who inhabit the worlds of racing. Employing his ‘artarazzi’ approach, Baird surreptitiously photographs those in attendance at race meetings.

THIS IS PUBLIC & SEXY On the evening of Sat 6 Feb, curato-

rhagallery.ie

Image from ‘Close Encounters’

Part two of PS2’s ‘Close Encounters’ project was exhibited in the Belfast gallery (7 – 23 Jan) and featured work by Phil Hession. Filmed in a car park next to the gallery, his seven-minute movie Soft you tread above me was filmed mostly in the evening and the dark, with the camera close to the ground.

Foreboding and near-still, the video footage is painterly and accompanied by unmanipulated sound recordings.

Seagulls screech, cars pass, helicopters chop the air, a wind orchestra rehears-

8 ROUNDUP

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

News

creative relationships, collaborative projects and partnerships between profesEVA ARTISTS sional artists, academics, researchers and International has announced the 57 artpssquared.org students, working at the intersections of ists who will participate in the 2016 editheir disciplines. It is a practice-based tion of the biennial, titled ‘Still (the) programme developed from a shared WHAT WE RECOGNISE IN OTHERS Barbarians’. Opening on 16 April, the vision and collaboration between artist exhibition is curated by Koyo Kouoh, the John Moloney, The Blockheads Emer O Boyle and Professor of Astronomy founding artistic director of RAW (29 Nov – 9 Jan), Droichead Arts Cen- Material Company, Dakar and the cura- Lorraine Hanlon.” ucdartinscience.com tre presented the works of local art- tor of 1:54 Contemporary African Art ists “declar[ing] and demonstrat[ing] Fair in London and New York. EVA will their personal proclamation, celebrat- take place at Limerick City Gallery of Art, THE RCSI ART AWARD ing and promoting their independent Cleeve’s Condensed Milk Factory and The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) has announced the new €15,000 thinking and re-affirming the impor- various locations across Limerick.

RCSI Art Award, in conjunction with the Ciara Phillips, installation view, ‘What we recognise in tant role they play as an artist in our The participating artists are: Pio others’ Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and the society in the lead up to the centenary Abad (Philippines/UK), Larry Irish Times. Celebrating the contribuCiara Phillips presented a selection of celebrations”. The exhibition featured Achiampong and David Blandy (UK), tion that art makes to the healing process new works at CCA Derry-Londonderry work by Brian Lounds, Miriam Carroll, Philip Aguirre y Otegui (Belgium), Kader and the common heritage of the RCSI in her first solo exhibition in the UK Noel Feeney, Olga Duka, Mary McDonAttia (France/Algeria), Kostas Bassanos and the RHA, the winner will be chosen and Ireland since her 2014 nomina- nell, Áine Dunne, John Moloney, Cao(Greece), Eric Baudelaire (France), Hera from a shortlist selected from the RHA’s tion for the Turner Prize (16 Jan – 12 imhe McCarthy, Caroline Moore, Iseult Büyüktaşcıyan (Turkey), Tiffany Chung Annual Exhibition. The shortlist will be Mar). ‘What we recognise in others’ Aiken and Noilín Shaw.

(Vietnam/USA), Criodhna Costello announced on the exhibition’s centred on prints developed from phodroichead.com (Ireland), Jonathan Cummins (Ireland), Varnishing Day (20 March), with the tographs of Phillips’s friends in their Godfried Donkor (UK/Ghana), Samuel overall winner selected before the exhiplaces of work. The photographs were DUALITY OF FORM Erenberg (USA), Theo Eshetu (UK/ bition closes. The winning artist will screen-printed onto fabric, layered and Ethiopia), Mary Evans (UK), Tom receive a €5,000 prize, the RCSI silver masked with colour and text, and were Flanagan and Megs Morley (Ireland), medal, and a €10,000 commission for a accompanied in the exhibition with Liam Gillick (UK), Yong Sun Gullach new work to be displayed in the RCSI. wall paintings and fabric and paper (Denmark), Carsten Höller (Belgium), The award committee includes RCSI works. Phillips has previously colDorothy Hunter (Northern Ireland), president Declan J. Magee, Mick O’Dea, laborated with other artists, designers Jeremy Hutchison (UK), Joanna Hutton Prof Clive Lee, Dr Abdul Bulbulia, Louise and community and campaign groups, (UK), Alfredo Jaar (Chile), Michael Joo Loughran from the RCSI, and Laurence echoing the tradition of screen print(USA), Journal Rappé (Senegal), Kapwani Mackin. ing as a tool for activism. A poster deKiwanga (Canada/France), Abdoulaye signed by Phillips and in an edition of ‘Duality of Form’ installation view Konaté (Mali), Syowia Kyambi (Kenya), 300 was produced to accompany the Curated by Mary Cremin and featurKemang Wa Lehulere (South Africa), show. ing Eleanor Duffin, Caoimhe Kilfea- Leung Chi Wo (Hong Kong), Charles Lim VENICE SHORTLIST ANNOUNCED cca-derry-londonderry.org ther and Barbara Knezevic, ‘Duality Yi Yong (Singapore), Alice Maher Six proposals have been shortlisted to of Form’ ran 21 Jan – 11 Mar at Solstice (Ireland), Bradley McCallum (USA), represent Ireland at the 2017 Venice Arts ROSEBUD Arts Centre, Navan. A philosophical Naeem Mohaiemen (Bangladesh), Biennale, with all six teams proceeding inquiry into the nature and meanings Pádraic E. Moore (Ireland), Otobong to Stage II interviews. The successful of objects, ‘Duality of Form’ included Nkanga (Nigeria), Uriel Orlow (UK/ teams comprise an artist, commissioner sculpture, photography, drawing and Switzerland), Ulrike Ottinger (Germany), and curator and are as follows: Brian text. Kilfeather and Knezevic engaged Alan Phelan (Ireland), Johannes Phokela Duggan, Fire Station Artists’ Studios, with Walter Benjamin’s idea of the art- (South Africa), Sarah Pierce (Ireland/ Helen Carey; Eva Rothschild, Mary ist as collector, as someone who “liber- USA), Deirdre Power and Softday Cremin; Jesse Jones, Tessa Giblin; John Gerrard, Gavin Delahunty; Niamh ates things from the bondage of util- (Ireland/Sweden), Public Studio ity”, through photographic series and (Canada), Ican Ramageli (Senegal), O’Malley, Barbara Dawson, Sheena sculptural works respectively. Duffin Amanda Rice (Ireland), Willem de Rooij Barrett; Sam Keogh, Woodrow Kernohan, Michelle Boyle, ‘Rosebud’, 2016 exhibited the publication Phantom of (The Netherlands), Tracey Rose (South Vaari Claffey.

Form, which used text and graphics to Africa), Catarina Simão (Portugal), Mona A response to proclamations, manifes- create a fictional narrative around an Vatamanu and Florin Tudor (Romania), tos and the power of the printed publi- ‘other’ woman.

THE MAC ARTS AWARD Vo Tran Chau (Vietnam) and John Waid cation, ‘Rosebud’ at the Library Project The MAC launched its new Arts Award Mary Cremin stated: “We have (UK). in Dublin featured works in a wide now entered speculative realism – ‘a on 19 February, NortCern Ireland’s inaueva.ie range of mediums, including print, tap- world where the object, whether thing, gural Care Day. The initiative, which estry, banners, zines and performance tool commodity, thought, phenomaims to grant disadvantaged young peoUCD ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE (14 – 30 Jan). Curated by Alison Pilk- enon or living creature has regained its ple access to an accredited arts qualificaUCD Parity Studios has announced the ington and Cora Cummins (The Fold), rights, freed from the subject of mind, tion, will be part of the MAC’s continufour new recipients in the UCD Artists in the exhibition included the artists Mi- body and gaze’. The artists demonstrate ing outreach and engagement proResidence programme 2016. Brian chelle Boyle, Janine Davidson, Mary A. this liberation through artworks that gramme. As part of the scheme, the Duggan, Fiona McDonald and Jennifer Fitzgerald and Emma Finucane, Cathy obstruct, disrupt and interfere with sovenue has collaborated with Include Redmond were awarded residencies in Henderson and Robert Ballagh, Sophie cial-norms. In a time when objects tend Youth to deliver a superhero-themed UCD College of Science, while artist Carroll-Hunt, Mo Levy, Maeve Lynch, to define us through our reliance on comic workshop to 12 young people Marie Brett was awarded the UCD Philip Napier, Marcus Oakley, Sarah them for validation, to communicate, from a care background. Facilitated by College of Social Science and Law resiPierce, Sue Rainsford and Lee Welch. socialise, we perhaps need to re-assess dency. The 2015 artists in residency were Revolve Comics this workshop will be print.ie our relationship to the object and turn Vanessa Daws, Fiona Marron, Maria the participants’ first step towards achieving an accredited Arts Award with our gaze.”

McKinney, Michael McLoughlin and PROCLAMATION the MAC. The ACNI writes that “within solsticeartscentre.com Dominic Thorpe. UCD Parity studios is In 1916, the idealism and vision of the the workshop, participants and local artdescribed as “an artist-led initiative conartists, activists and militants of the ists created graphic novel styled artwork necting the ecology of arts in Ireland revolution was manifested in Ireland’s themed around superheroes. With many with research and education at ‘mission statement’, the Proclamation of the world’s best known superheroes University College Dublin, [whose] misfirst professed on the steps of the GPO and literary figures coming from a care sion is to create a dynamic network of

by Patrick Pearse. In ‘Proclamation’ or fostering background (Batman, es nearby. The artist writes that “Soft you tread above me attempts to capture the ominous feel of an empty car park”.

March – April 2016

Spiderman, Superman and James Bond), participants had the chance to share the stories of the challenges faced by young people, especially as they move towards leaving care”.

FRAMEWORK FOR COLLABORATION On 18 February the Arts Council and the County and City Management Association announced a new 10-year agreement to further the development of the arts in every county in Ireland. The Arts Council writes: “The agreement will enable the Arts Council and local authorities to develop a more streamlined and consistent approach to funding the arts based on key principles of arts development, public engagement and spatial planning. It will also allow the Arts Council and local authorities to set targeted outcomes where it will be able to measure the impact of this relationship and see increased levels of public engagement and participation.” It will place a formal structure on the relationship that has evolved between the Arts Council and local authorities.

GOLDEN FLEECE AWARD SHORTLIST The trustees of the Golden Fleece Award announced the shortlist for the 2016 award, which will be announced in a ceremony at Dublin Castle on 8 March 2016. The shortlists artists and craft makers are: painter Gerry Davis (Limerick); wood turner Liam Flynn (Limerick); ceramicist Sara Flynn (Belfast); and painter Jennifer Trouton (Belfast). The award, which aims to recognise the excellence and ambitions of both emerging and established artists, attracted over 130 entries. Now in its 15th year, the award is an independent artistic prize fund established as a charitable bequest by the late Lillias Mitchell who died in 2000. There is an annual prize fund of approximately €20,000, with the winner usually awarded between €12,000 and €15,000, and also a number of smaller merit awards.

SUKI TEA PRIZE The Golden Thread Gallery held an exhibition of work by the VAI-Suki Tea 2015 Art Prize nominees, Colin Darke, Clodagh Emoe, Michael Hanna, Vera Klute and Elanie Leader in its Project Space this February through March. The artists were selected by a panel made up of Patrick T Murphy (RHA), Sarah Glennie (IMMA), Peter Richards (Golden Thread Gallery) and Oonagh Young (Oonagh Young Gallery) from over 200 submissions. The Suki Tea Art was launched in 2015, courtesy of Suki Tea, and facilitated by the Arts & Business NI Investment Programme and Visual Artists Ireland. Colin Darke was announced as the winner of the £2000 prize at Stormont in October 2015.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

9

Mid & East Antrim: Resources & Activities The Braid

Absence & Presence

Footprint artwork at The Braid

Opening of the Methodist Modern Art Collection exhibition

The Braid Arts Centre at dusk

Maze sculpture at The Braid

SET in the town centre of Ballymena in County Antrim, the Braid Arts Centre is home to a thriving visual arts programme. In 2014, this developed into an annual month-long Creative Citizens programme, which engaged with 20,000 people in its first year. The 2015 programme was named the Year of the Artist and featured a month of special events in visual and public art, including the first ever visit to Ireland of the internationally renowned Methodist Modern Art Collection.

The collection was shown at the arts centre and in nine local churches, forming an art trail.

126 local people volunteered to be arts ambassadors for the project, learning about the collection themselves and encouraging others to interact with contemporary art.

In September 2016 artist-in-residence Philip Crean will exhibit his work ‘Chronoscopes’, along with a mix of artists from Spain, USA and Northern Ireland. As part of this project, Crean will engage with local groups and undertake projects in the areas of public art and arts and healthcare.

The venue has two formal gallery spaces and a range of smaller informal spaces. It is also home to a public art collection, which was commissioned at the time of building and has continued to develop over the past eight years. The Mid Antrim Museum programmes a range of exhibitions each year. Recent shows have included work by international photographer Jimmy Hughes and Maurice Orr in collaboration with Canadian printmaker Joyce Majiiski.

The borough has a long history of commissioning public art, most recently through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Re-Imaging programme, for which Japanese Artist Shiro Masuyama produced the Five Apples sculpture. In addition to this work, many more pieces across the area have been commissioned, including Galway artist Donnacha Cahill’s temporary installations

and his ‘Exploration IV’ project, developed as part of the 2015 Creative Citizens programme.

Our artist in the community scheme has seen the development of a range of mural projects undertaken with community groups over the years, which have directly benefitted community tourism initiatives.

The Braid Arts Centre has engaged with a range of artists over the years through a full and varied visual arts programme, which ranges from arts education initiatives to huge scale exhibitions from across the globe. We continue to encourage artists to approach us with proposals for projects. Our flourishing annual exhibition programme has provided local and regional visual artists with the opportunity to showcase their work in the venue, and arts bursaries are offered annually to young local artists to encourage their development.

Ballymena Arts Partnership, a forum of local arts activists, was established to encourage development of the arts across the borough and several long-term partnerships have developed through this initiative, including a series of events in association with Voluntary Arts Ireland and other agencies in the arts and education sectors.

The comprehensive programme offered by the Braid Arts Centre provides a wide spectrum of cultural events that attract audiences and artists from all over Northern Ireland, the UK and beyond. New initiatives and programmes are currently being developed to build on these audiences. We try to create opportunities for artists to create work, to encourage citizens to interact with art, to foster creativity and engagement and to partner with a range of sectors to promote the visual arts.

Rosalind Lowry, Manager, The Braid Arts Centre and Arts Development Officer for Mid and East Antrim Borough Council.

I was born and raised in Belfast but currently live in Glynn, a village in east Antrim, just outside Larne. Throughout my childhood I spent weekends and holidays in a cottage with neither electricity nor indoor plumbing, which was set within a stunning location on the Islandmagee peninsula near the ‘Gobbins’ cliffs and coastal walk. These childhood experiences, as well as strong family and friendship connections, inspired a love of the mid and east Antrim area and the Irish countryside in general.

Growing up during the Troubles, this rural experience provided a peaceful contrast to urban living, though I never consciously recognised the impact of the conflict upon my psyche until I moved away. I’ve never wanted to explore those issues in my artwork, though I greatly respect those who have.

I cannot remember a time when I did not draw and paint, and believe I did so from a very young age. In my last year at school I also began to explore photography, which remains a passion.

After leaving school I undertook my foundation art and design course at Ulster University, Jordanstown. Here I was taught by the wonderful painter David Crone, and was also influenced by the late, great Joe McWilliams.

I left home when I had just turned 20, to complete my art degree at Exeter College of Art in Devon, England. This course afforded me the freedom to explore different media before finally choosing my main subject. I also experimented with cinematography, making a number of independent films during and after graduation. I continued to paint, but when the time came to choose my major subject, I struggled to decide between photography and painting. In the end I opted for photography because I could only access darkroom facilities at college but could paint almost anywhere.

Leaving Ireland was a wrench, but since my teenage years I had felt a need to experience living somewhere else. I once wrote, in a notebook reflecting on these years, that “the sea was a barrier and the frontier was a barrier and I came to feel that movement outside of these was difficult, not just in a physical sense, but in thought, idea and aspiration”. Leaving home reduced my rest-

lessness, but this was replaced by an acute yearning, which was only ameliorated by visiting or by painting scenes of ‘home.’

Throughout college, my greatest preoccupation was always the strong connection I felt with the Irish countryside and in particular County Antrim, as well as the relationship between this landscape and the people and the way in which traces of people’s lives are recorded within the environment. This still remains my greatest interest. My paintings tend to depict places in which strong themes of absence and presence abound.

Sense of place is portrayed both in the depiction of scenes and in the titles of my paintings, which invite the observer to connect with them and recognise their traditional and cultural significance.

In 2001 I returned with my husband and son to live in County Antrim, and I have not regretted this for a moment. Coming back to my roots further inspired me and much of my recent work has explored themes around personal and family identity. I began exhibiting my work online, through newirishart.com, which has provided me with an excellent platform to display artwork to an international audience. I have seen a marked increase in interest in my artwork since first putting it online in 2008. My first solo exhibition was for the Kansas Irish Festival in 2010 and I have also exhibited locally in both solo and group shows.

I look for subject matter quite unconsciously, exploring on foot or in the car with my camera. I often feel that the old farms, overgrown pathways and derelict cottages that I love to paint reveal themselves to me. They often evoke strong emotions, as I contemplate the people who lived there.

I work intuitively, taking photographs of these places with a heightened awareness that is hard to describe. I paint from my photographs and compensate for the limitations of photographic images by opening up the perspective or adding detail to the shadows.

I use acrylic washes to block in colour, as they dry quickly, enabling me to move onto the oil layers faster. I love painting in oils, as they have an inherent softness in their hues and thickness of texture that does not depend on additives.

I love the freedom I experience using oils. They are very forgiving, allowing me to build up layers, repairing some details as I go along if need be. I work quickly, usually in three-hour bursts, but I leave a painting to dry between layers for a full week. My style is loose-representational, with impressionistic and expressionistic aspects and use of vivid colours.

Laura Butler newirishart.com/laurabutler

Laura Butler, The Open Blue Door, Ballymoney Cottages, Islandmagee, County Antrim; oil and acrylic on canvas board, 5 x 7 inches

Laura Butler, The Old Cottage at Straidkilly, Glencloy, County Antrim; oil and acrylic on canvas, 12 x 16 inches

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Standing My Ground I’M an applied artist, using wood, metal and textiles to explore the meaning and value of ‘work’. I mainly make functionless tools, which invite the viewer to imagine what they might be. I’m often asked the question: “What’s it for?” By repeating ideas and forms I dig into their core qualities and explore connections and meanings.

I am interested in place, memory and connection to the land. My practice is personal, and I now live and work in the same townland in which I was born and raised. Having spent 25 years away (mostly in London) I returned to Northern Ireland in 2012 and bought the old farmhouse and yard next to my family’s dairy farm in rural County Antrim.

Archaeologists working on the site of the A26 road upgrade recently found evidence that this valley, mid-way between the market towns of Ballymena and Ballymoney, has been farmed for 11,000 years. In an area so deeply steeped in agriculture, it’s no surprise that opportunities to see conceptual craft in the local council-run arts centres are fairly limited.

I came to my creative practice late. Most of my working life was spent in the production of commercial exhibitions, seminars and events, but by 2008 I had decided to resign as director of the Mind Body Spirit Festival and spend three years in full-time study at the University of Brighton. I selected a course snappily titled 3D Materials Practice (Wood, Metal, Ceramics, Plastics) because it allowed me to find out for myself if I wanted to work in art, craft or design. I never expected to wind up at the abstract end of that spectrum, nor did I ever expect to return to Northern Ireland, but as the three years of art school unfolded, it became clear that I very much needed to return home.

Since moving back to Northern Ireland I have all the space I need to explore my practice and create a thoroughly handmade life. My workshop is housed on the upper floor of the barn, where I am surrounded by stone and slate and dust, treading a fine line between chaos and decay. As I develop the facilities, I hope to offer them as a location for workshops or residencies. Visitors are always welcome!

When I was living in England I took part in open studio events and I wanted to do something here for Craft NI’s Craft Month. When I met ceramicist Rory Shearer at the ‘Art of Craft’ show in Armagh in 2014 we discovered a shared inter-

Sharon Adams, Byre, 2015

March – April 2016

Larne Arts & Cultural Centre est in showing local work to local audiences. I immediately loved Rory’s Townland pieces and I used those works as a starting point for curating a small selection from local makers to show at my home, an exhibition I called ‘Five artists show in a byre’.

As well as some of my own tools and Rory’s ceramics, the work included sculpture by Alice Clarke, drawings by Cushendun-based Katy English and furniture by Ballymena maker Noel McCullough. Using only natural materials, their muted colours were very much at home among the original fixtures of the byre, which was last used for milking by the previous owners in the 1960s. Poet Elaine Gaston read at the opening, and more than 200 visitors made their way here over 3 weekends, from farmers in boots to ladies in finery. Preparation for ‘Five artists’ 2016 is already underway.

After I first decided to move back to Northern Ireland, I responded to an open call from MAK9 for a group show at R-Space Gallery in Lisburn.

‘Things That Fall In Between’ became my first contact with a diverse group of artists and makers, and a tremendous introduction to the local scene. It also helped me to establish contact with gallery directors Robert Martin and Anthea McWilliams, planting the seeds of what has become an ongoing working relationship. I now work at R-Space once a week, primarily in a marketing capacity, and continue to connect with both local artists and those from further afield.

In 2015, R-Space introduced me to a project headed by Liz Nilsson of Print Block, Dublin. On Your Marks is an 18-month international collaboration between Ireland and Sweden on the theme of linen, which I am currently writing about for publication ahead of the concluding exhibition in Malmö in March 2016.

In my own practice, I’m expecting to complete a new body of work this year. After graduating in 2011, I embraced a scale and range that I would be able to create at my dining table, but thanks to a SIAP Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, I can now purchase additional equipment and reconnect with some of the methods and techniques that I took for granted in the university workshops at Brighton. Digging into the local landscape, it will be my first work in direct response to this place. It’s time to begin. sharonadams.co.uk

Sharon Adams, Spalted Beech Tools, 2011

Larne Arts and Cultural Centre

BUILT in 1905, the historic building that now houses the Larne Museum and Arts Centre opened its doors to the public in 1906 as the Carnegie Free Library, following financial assistance from the American millionaire and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. In 2005, to commemorate its centenary year, the building was restored and renovated, retaining many of its original features.

In addition to housing Larne Museum and Arts Centre, the building is also home to Larne Art Club and Larne Drama Circle.

The main museum gallery hosts permanent displays reflecting the agricultural, industrial, military and maritime history of the area. Larne is a principal gateway into Northern Ireland and the strong maritime links of this east Antrim coastal community are portrayed through a variety of exhibits relating to the first roll-on, roll-off ferries, the Royal Navy and the Princess Victoria disaster. Larne’s rural hinterland, which includes two of the nine glens of Antrim, is well represented in the museum’s folklife display. The ‘War and Conflict’ section hosts objects from the Home Rule Crisis, Larne gun running and the First and Second World Wars. Visitors can access accounts and memories of local people through oral history listening posts and can browse photographs in a digital community archive.

Larne Museum and Arts Centre produces a busy programme of events and temporary exhibitions within the John Clifford Gallery, which hosts a variety of exhibitions throughout the year. These include in-house or touring exhibitions as well as exhibitions by local groups and individuals.

The 2016 visual arts programme begins with ‘Song of the Quilt’, an exhibition of 27 musicthemed quilts made by Loose Thread Quilters, on display from 8 January until 26 February. In creating this exhibition, individual quilters took inspiration from music. Helen Hartley created a piece inspired by Sailing By, the theme to BBC Radio 4’s late-night shipping forecast, whilst Penny Cole evoked memories of the vibrant and colourful musical The Lion King.

Larne Art Club’s Spring Exhibition will take place in March. This is the club’s annual exhibition and sale of works, which consists of original pieces in a variety of mediums and genres.

‘TAMED’, which will be on display during April, is an exhibition by the Doherty family: Terry, Andrew, Mark and Erin. Writing about ‘TAMED’, the artists stated: “This exhibition is a celebration of amateur expression of a family.

The body of work encompasses a diverse range of subjects in words and pictures and in various mediums. Some are very personal and others simple depictions. They are by no means perfect, just us!

A father, two sons and a daughter.”

A photographic exhibition by Larne Camera Club will follow in June, showcasing images in a variety of genres from landscape to still life by this recently established club. Members include photographers with a wide range of skills and interests of various ages. The club aims to promote and foster all aspects of photography and to support and encourage individuals to improve their photographic skills.

‘As I see it’, an exhibition by award-winning photographer Bill Abernethy, who is based in the Ballyclare area, will run during May. This will comprise an eclectic mix of award-winning architectural, fine art, landscape and documentary images.

During September and October, the gallery will host an exhibition by local artist Brendan McAfee. McAfee paints at his studio home in Islandmagee, where he is influenced by the surrounding landscape and seasons. A tidal estuary dominates the landscape here and provides a constant background to the colour and atmosphere of his work.

An exhibition by Fran O’Boyle, a first time exhibitor but not a first time visitor, will follow in November. Fran is a Shropshire-based professional storyteller, illustrator and artist with family links to the Glenariffe area. Although this will be his first exhibition in the building, Fran has visited the museum many times providing storytelling sessions for young and old.

Marian Kelso, Heritage Officer, Larne Museum and Arts Centre.

Note The museum is managed by Mid and East Antrim Borough Council, and forms part of the Mid-Antrim Museums Service alongside similar local museums in Ballymena, Carrickfergus and Newtownabbey. Larne Museum & Arts Centre is open Monday – Friday, 10.00am – 4.30pm each day and admission is free. larnemuseumandartscentre.co.uk

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

THEME ESSAY

Genieve Figgis, Making Love with the Devil, 2014; 40cm x 60cm, acrylic on canvas

Situational Erotics JAMES MERRIGAN ASKS WHY SEX AND ART DON’T ‘SWING’IN THE IRISH ART SCENE. I have been thinking a lot about sex recently and its relationship to art. One reason is artist Emma Haugh’s question “How do we imagine a space dedicated to the manifestation of feminine desire?”, proposed in her recent solo exhibition ‘The Re-appropriation of Sensuality’ at Dublin’s NCAD Gallery (an edited version of the script performed during the exhibition is included in this issue, page 14).

Another reason is the forthcoming documentary on the artist Robert Mapplethorpe by American television network channel HBO. Mapplethorpe’s ‘smut art’ (artist’s own words) caused a political and cultural storm in the American cities of Washington D.C. and Cincinnati in the late 1980s/early 1990s when a grand jury issued criminal indictments against one art institution and its director for exhibiting Mapplethorpe’s touring retrospective of ‘sex pictures’. Art won out in the end, but the trial and the exhibition did question and challenge perspectives on the vices and virtues of contemporary art in the eyes of the public.

Anyone who has had a Mapplethorpe experience usually has a Mapplethorpe story to tell that involves some public discomfort.

My Mapplethorpe story begins with art critic Dave Hickey, whose book The Invisible Dragon I posted to a printing company as an example of what I wanted to achieve for a publication I was working on at the time. In the book there are several explicit examples from Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio. I didn’t think that the images were pornographic in private, but releasing them into the public ether and removing them from the context of contemporary art, with my name on the envelope that sealed them in, made me feel uneasy.

The question of obscenity and censorship drags up Banbridge District Council’s treatment of artist Ursula Burke’s portrayal of gay sex in one of her Arcadian landscape paintings for an exhibition hosted by F.E. McWilliam Gallery, in 2014. There is no point in comparing Mapplethorpe’s flinch-provoking images of the BDSM scene in New York City with Burke’s impolite costume drama – all they have in common is that they caused public unease. What I want to highlight (if you haven’t already noticed) is that the aestheticisation of homosexuality threads its ways through the examples that I have supplied here. But this unconscious intent or fluke coincidence does help to pose provocative questions about sexuality and the contexts that inspire, legitimise and allow expression of sex as art.

If we are willing to admit it, all our art biographies are interrupted by embarrassing or uneasy moments in which sex, or some related taboo, is the author of our discomfort. Sigmund Freud refers to the original situation érotique as the ‘primal scene’, when the child walks in on their parents having sex, or when we remove lust and desire for the sake of mental preservation, making love.

I remember being seated comfortably in a dark lecture theatre, 16 years ago today, whilst a fidgeting lecturer projected Jeff Koons’s Made in Heaven (1989–91) series of hyperrealist paintings and sculp-

Sarah Devereux, BFA Degree show work, NCAD, 2012

Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon

tures. The series portrays the Italian porn-star La Cicciolina copulating with Koons amidst a sickeningly tacky rococo neverland.

The in flagrante delicto of the whole situation caught me off guard as a young man among a female majority, especially how La Cicciolina’s spread-eagled crotch swallowed up my gaze. But the bubbling laughter of my female counterparts gave me permission to dispel the Catholic guilt of looking at this particular ‘top shelf’. Staring into Koons’s imagination in that dark lecture theatre 16 years ago we all became giddy kids who ordered the pink cocktail without really knowing what was in it, or the effect the alcohol would have on us afterwards.

When sex does enter the gallery, less naïve and more mature artists have a tendency to disavow it, which results in fetishised and ‘serious’ art objects that look like cocks and vaginas but are intellectually removed and emotionally concealed within a formalised shell.

As mature artists we tend to violate rather than play with the idea of sex, or we express sex as a violation. For the young and naïve, sex is indistinguishable from love, romance indistinguishable from lust.

The duality between the underground and the acceptable, private and public, cocks and flowers, plays out in the photographs of Mapplethorpe without prejudice.

Artists like Mapplethorpe also incite the phrase ‘in bad taste’.

In a review from 2013 I called out artist Alan Phelan (a contributor in this very issue) for being verbally brazen and explicit for the use of the word ‘HANDJOB’ for the title of his solo exhibition at Dublin’s Oonagh Young Gallery. The general tendency in the art world is to place value in being discrete and ambivalent in your expression. As Susan Sontag writes: “Good taste demands that the thinker furnish only glimpses of intellectual and spiritual torment.”

Sontag is referring here to the language of art, concealment being the epitome of good taste. The language of art always manages to transform art objects into something high, or ironises them in the dialect of the low in an effort to raise them even higher. These are the lessons that we learn in art college as young art students: to conceal and preserve our modesty in order to affect a sophisticated response from the knowing audience who like things to register on the level of implicit rather than explicit.

To my mind sex doesn’t inhabit the gallery as much as it should because we simply grow up. Yes, we have those eternal teenager artists, the Young British Artists, who continue to fetishise sex well into their 40s. And there are the American artists Paul McCarthy and the late Mike Kelley, who look like the 50-something metaller with the Black Sabbath T-shirt and scraggy-grey-dog hair that, sometimes, I envy. Generally, however, as we discover and experience more of the world and its hidden vices, we become more secretive about those experiences and discoveries. Maturity and reputation is the great censor, whereas naïveté can be foul-mouthed because it’s oblivious

to itself and the people around it.

When referring to Renaissance artists and the development stages of their creative identity, Ernst Gombrich calculated that 23 was the age when personal hubris was at its most frenzied state. The confused 18 to ambitious 20-something year old college student is split between what Freudian psychologist Eric Erikson refers to as “Ego Identity vs. Role Confusion and Intimacy vs. Isolation”. It’s a mouthful, but what this simply means for the art student is the potential for a whole lot of psychosocial and psychosexual instability, the best ingredients, I think, for making art that is sticky and aromatic and all-round messy. Young art students, and the mature ones that never grew up, are at that fork in the road between occupational promiscuity as would-be artists and the hope of sexual fidelity in their forming relationships with the weird world and its things.

In a sense we are just a cocktail of naïveté as young art students, poking fun and poking fingers at art objects out of blissful ignorance.

At a primal level we are just hands and saliva at that age, fumbling in the dark without a care, just an all-consuming need for discovery and desire. As an adult I look back on that naïveté, the anxiety of not knowing and just poking, as a powerful asset to being an artist, rather than the fugitive notion that we are only learning to become artists in art college.

Last year the whole hullabaloo over the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) student Shane Berkery, whose painted nakedportrait of then NCAD director Professor Declan McGonigle, was (to my mind) viscerally and politically limp. While upstairs, hidden away in the attic of the same NCAD degree show, and under the stairs at Dublin Institute of Technology, we got the ‘pink cocktail’ that I have been discussing here in the sexed-up and viscerally undressed installations of Luke Byrne (aka Luek Brungis) and Catherine Cullen respectively. For the reasons outlined above, this type of art never really graduates as a form of legitimate art-making in the Irish art scene.

As an art critic who has reviewed the Irish art scene inside and out over the last seven years, after repair after rupture after repair, I find the annual art degree exhibitions an antidote to the growing up, professionalism and conservatism that permeates the public and private gallery circuit.

There is something to be said, then, about the importance of art colleges in this regard. With more and more artist-run spaces being trampled by yet another burgeoning era of gentrification in Dublin, the spaces where art is allowed to be a little messier and visceral will now be the responsibility of the art colleges to safeguard. More importantly, however, it is the responsibility of teaching staff in those colleges to foster and value the subversive, the visceral and the messy, rather than dismissing it as just teenage kicks.

James Merrigan is an art critic at billionjournal.com.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

13

CAREER DEVELOPMENT JM: If it is true that the subject of sex doesn’t pop up in Irish galleries as much as I think it should, who are your idols? Are your idols in books, online or abroad? You are probably a Liam Gillick fan, right? Not to suggest Liam isn’t sexy or doesn’t make sexy art?

He is; he does.

SD: So I just Googled Liam Gillick, he is very good at ‘smising’ (Tyra Bank’s term for ‘smile with your eyes’, created for the 13th cycle of her hit reality show America’s Next Top Model). However, my idols are far less slick than Liam. I get inspiration from people and things that are more tacky or cheesy, basically, the mundane daily norms (they’ll be put through my conveyor belt into my noggin and come out tampered).

Sarah Devereux, BFA degree show work, NCAD, 2012

Sarah Devereux, BFA degree show work, NCAD, 2012

Sexting SARAH DEVEREUX WAS INVITED TO CONTRIBUTE AN ARTWORK COMPOSED OF TEXT AND DRAWING FOR ONLINE VIEWING ON VAI’S WEBSITE. THIS CONVERSATION BETWEEN JAMES MERRIGAN AND THE ARTIST AIMS TO DRAW OUT A CONTEXT FOR THIS ARTWORK, WHILE ALSO BROACHING THE SUBJECT OF SEX AND ART. SD: Without sounding like a sappity Ann, I automatically and instinctively go against ye old status quo. When putting together my degree show (*shudder* three years ago) one of my tutors said: “It’s like you don’t realise that this is an important event”. This, for me, was the greatest compliment. Because it was exactly what I was attempting to convey: my ‘clusterfuck’ of a haphazard show shoved in a corridor behind a student whose space kept growing and growing and growing (I think her show was about capitalism).

Sarah Devereux, BFA degree show work, NCAD, 2012

James Merrigan: After experiencing your BFA degree show in the basement of a building on John’s Lane, Dublin, I was smitten. You disappeared off my radar for a couple of years until sometime in 2014 I caught the tail end of a thread of your perverted commentary on Facebook. There was an uncensored precision to it all that I equated to art, even though it was being displayed on something as fugitive as social media. To my mind you were a cross between American poet Patricia Lockwood’s Twitter ‘sexts’ and Raymond Pettibon’s hyper-dialectic drawings. I questioned why I didn’t get to see more of this kind of stuff, sex stuff, in Irish galleries. Do you know why sex and art don’t tag team as much as they could in the Irish arts scene?

Sarah Devereux: Well James, is this “tag team” a case of art slapping sex in the hand as its partner to tag in against the world, or is it a question of art vs. sex? You have to be more specific when it comes to tag teams.

Who is against whom? Is there consent? Is there equal involvement?

Is there mud involved? These are the things everyone must ask before partaking in a tag team between sex and art. Is the sex willingly becoming art or is it trying to just remain sex? Are we too afraid to tag in? Or do we think we are better than having sex in the gallery? Of course I mean sex as a subject matter. As a matter of interest, have you?

JM: As an artist I never tagged sex in the gallery; well, not that I am aware of. What I mean by that is, as an art critic I have noticed that sex is everywhere in the Irish gallery in its outright denial.

So base objects that look like cocks and vaginas are intellectually denied as sex objects, or dressed up in theory that removes the artist from the subject of sex. ‘You are the one seeing the dirty pictures’ is the response by the invisible artist. I do respond to what you say about the fear and the attitude towards sex – that we think we are above and beyond sex in the gallery, or are ‘in control’ of our primal instincts. For you, is there a pressure to conform to the status quo?

JM: So you are aware and maybe revelling in or frustrated by the fact that your way of making things and expressing things lies somewhere outside of what is considered art?

SD: Well, I sort of took a bit of a side step and a jump away from ye old gallery art, creating work in formats such as ‘zines’, and displaying and performing these at somewhat casual events. Are we back to that question, what is art? SHIT... How much am I getting paid per word? Let’s do this! Wait, am I getting paid for this?

JM: Speaking of me “stalking” you online, for your Facebook cover photo you have a picture of yourself and American filmmaker John Waters shoulder-to-shoulder and smiling. A fan?

SD: The god in my life is most definitely John Waters, who I got to meet in 2014. I was interning in a reality TV company in NYC at the time and was showing a colleague some clips from a John Waters film, as he had yet to watch any of his work. I went into a hazy daydream with sunshine and lollipops, and rambled about what I would say and do if I ever got to meet him – I had so much to say. Not even an hour later, after I had done my daily stash bag with as much free food from the kitchen as possible, I picked up the weekly magazine that was always floating about the office for the subway ride home. Flicking through the magazine on the train with eyes glazed over, I turned the page and there it was, a half-page advert: “Meet John Waters”. He was promoting his new book and was doing a reading and signing the very next day. I burst out crying, the HEAVING sort, and then hysterically laughing at how much I was crying. Finally, a right of passage. I was that crazy person for the commute home. I put together a collection of my most filthy and depraved drawings as an offering and spent $26 (out of my last $33 for the week) on the book in order to guarantee meeting him. It was like a religious experience. He is my glory hole.

But all I could do was cry and mumble something about my clammy hands. A dream!

JM: Is this verbal dialect you perform an alter ego? What I am asking is, although I have never spoken to you in person, I have talked to you on the phone. Are there two different Sarah Devereuxs?

SD: I don’t think anyone shows all aspects of their personality to every person they meet/talk to. I wouldn’t say it’s an alter ego... but that being said my default voice bounces from a melodic Derry accent to a sassy 1940s New York news reporter.

JM: For me, the way you perform desire in writing and drawing is balanced between nuanced and visceral moments. Is humour the only way that sex can be expressed in art? Or do humour and sex JM: Going back to what I said earlier about equating your and filthy language exist in the same carnival, a notion that Facebook commentary to art, which may seem sacrilegious and Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin celebrated. not ‘serious’ to the art cognoscenti, how do you see your verbal SD: I’d take a ride on the ferris wheel at that carnival and I fucking hate dalliances online? Is it art, research or just tipping your toe in the heights – sounds great. There mightn’t be any intentional humour but public consciousness about what is possible to verbally express? it’s our reaction to the artwork that brings it out. A release. Think of an SD: So you were basically Facebook stalking me is what you are trying artist who wants to create a giant hairy ballsack hanging from the ceilto say? In the time we have been Facebook ‘friends’ (I checked: ing on a sensory mechanism that dips the sculpture onto the viewer’s December 2012) you have never once liked, commented or shared face. In their (the artist’s) mind it is highly erotic and oh so super serianything on my page. You’ve pretty much just been an observer of my ous, but it instantly becomes a cheap laugh. Like, why can’t giant hairy balls dipping into your face in a gallery be erotic and sensual?! (Any dalliances – a dalliance if you will!

I do enjoy writing, whether they are rambles, rants or recounting galleries out there want me to make this just hollar at me.) tales of wit or wine. Maybe it’s a racket on your feed or maybe I’m a raconteur feeding you. I do treat it as a platform though, a dirty digital JM: When we first discussed your contribution to VAN, I said something about the subject of sex in relation to art being always soapbox. subsumed by the politics of gender and feminism and that raw JM: Artist statements invariably promote and proclaim intellec- sex doesn’t get a mention in criticism or in the gallery. As a female tualism above instinct and subjectivity. For me your “textual artist who makes art about sex, are you interested in the gender sexuality” (Dodie Bellamy) includes the street and the library, life and feminist question? In other words, is your work an instincand theory, night and day. You know how they say to models tual or academic protest? ‘don’t over think it’… well, what’s your process? Is it reactionary SD: Please refer to what I wrote in the online artwork for VAN, the bit about Mel Gibson will hopefully explain my answer to this because I or carefully thought through?

SD: I’m definitely more of a reactionary-vomiter (get it out of my sys- am weary and this interview is way past due! tem and compile a pile of bile and just go with it, and trust that the Sarah Devereux made a website that hasn’t been released or updated in about two years. It’s yellow glow will be enough to impress even an impressionist). By the cargocollective.com/sarahdevereux. If you would like to offer her opportunities that she could later way, are you trying to call me a model? OMG thank you! I’m flattered, add to this site don’t hesitate to contact her. No prank calls please. that’s so sweet xoxo.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

PROJECT PROFILE

The Re-appropriation of Sensuality THE FOLLOWING SCRIPT WAS FIRST PERFORMED BY ARTIST EMMA HAUGH AT THE OPENING OF THE EXHIBITION ‘THE RE-APPROPRIATION OF SENSUALITY’ AT DUBLIN’S NCAD GALLERY IN NOVEMBER 2015. THIS LONGTERM, COLLABORATIVE PROJECT SEEKS TO “RE-FORMULATE REPRESENTATIONS OF DESIRE AND THE POLITICS OF ARCHITECTURE, LOOKING AT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BODY KNOWLEDGE, PERFORMANCE AND THE ANATOMY OF SPACE. UNDERPINNING THE WORK IS THE QUESTION: HOW DO WE IMAGINE A SPACE DEDICATED TO THE MANIFESTATION OF FEMININE DESIRE?” 1 THE EXHIBITION WAS CURATED BY RGKSKSRG.

Emma Haugh, ‘The Re-appropriation of Sensuality, NCAD Gallery, Dublin, 2015; photo by Louis Haugh

WHEN I’m having sex, places I’ve often been to randomly flash into my mind, clearly rendered for what feels like an extended moment.

These site-memory-flashbacks incorporate a diversity of the familiar and the less familiar. Regardless of the amount of contact I’ve had with the recalled space the internalised visual is always crystal clear.

These visual renderings have some aspects in common. They are always urban points of convergence – roads, buildings, pedestrian pathways, wastelands, crossroads – seen from a slightly elevated angle and always devoid of people. Imagine a part of the mind shuffling out 3D SketchUp memory files of detailed spatial architectures, but only when that part of my mind is stirred awake by sexual intimacy.

The corner of Dame Street and George’s Street in Dublin has been a recurring site for this imaging experience. On the George’s Street side there is The George, a long-standing gay bar and nightclub of the same variety found in many cities around the world. Tacky, vulgar and familiar, I imagine that The George being located on this corner has some connection with my spatial recall of this particular location.

The exterior of The George is purple, pink neon, rainbow, gold, textured glass, wood; you cannot at any point see inside. The corner of the large building edges down an alleyway where there is a single door, painted black, for late night entry. The internal architecture of The George is specific and amenable to the cruisy walk around. There is a continuous line of sight towards the elevated stage, mirrored along its back wall. The bar is central and runs across the front of the stage, doubling as a dance floor after drag shows, bingo and karaoke. Imagine smoke machines, microphones, wind machines, props and spotlights.

There are three flights of stairs, which allow for continuous and fluctuating channels of movement from above and below. One staircase holds a huge mirror with an overtly ornate gold frame that momentarily contains your whole body as you move towards it.

Another staircase snakes down the side of the stage with a small landing half way. On this staircase people throughout the club can easily see you. The third staircase meets the toilets, cigarette machine and small huddle space.

The upstairs space is wrapped by a balcony and overhangs the stage. From above you can see the crowds beneath reflected in the mirrored wall; here, you can watch people watching. Alcoves, mirrors, stage, elevation, red, gold, pop star, animal print, pillars, faux leather, black painted, sticky floors, bodies, eyes, velvet, cigarette machine, tiles, ATM machine, reflective copper colour, blue colour, pink colour, plastic pitchers of cider, beer, shots, pints and smoking area.

Emma Haugh, ‘The Re-appropriation of Sensuality, NCAD Gallery, Dublin, 2015; photo (detail) by Louis Haugh

Gay and lesbian bars are closing in America, in England; longstanding bars into destructive power dynamics and oppressive routine.

On Wednesday 2 February 2011, around 2,500 members of in London, New York, San Francisco; institutions, patchwork histories. The Berlin’s police force were deployed to evict 25 residents and to quell George too is currently in receivership and up for sale. crowds of supporters at the X Liebig squat in Friedrichshain, close to I can see The George in my mind’s eye – a thumbnail-sized model on a Frankfurter Allee in East Berlin. There was a five-hour struggle to rotatable axis, swaying slightly, waiting to be spun and viewed from all sides, break through the doors that had been barricaded. The police and washed with bright coloured lights: blues, pinks, purples, and a strip of yellow. bailiffs finally gained entry using axes and sledgehammers to break through barricades of barbed wire, sharpened metal poles and concrete There is something obscene seeing this space displayed this way, blocks.

The tenement building was first squatted in 1990. Berlin City without people, a disembodied, depopulated object. It makes me feel nauseus and queasy to hold it there, a miniature model of a space Council made a lease agreement with the squatters allowing them to dripping and oozing years of hopeful, desperate, compromised, live there legally on a very low rent. At that time Berlin’s City Council fulfilled, frustrated, disappointed, ashamed and indifferent desires, was happy to repopulate the largely abandoned Eastern parts of the including my own. Seeping and making me seasick at each turn of the city. X Liebeg was well known as a self-organised queer and transaxis. Maybe it’s the limitations and lack of imagination woven into feminist-activist centre, home, bar and party space. Since February this particular overarching aesthetic: the nasty high-pitched pop 2011, the building has been redeveloped and renovated as apartments.

In my own strong desire to make space (architectural, cultural, music remixes and dance anthems, or the casual misogyny encountered across time, or all eyes on the drag queens impersonating, libidinal) I want both Hakim Bey’s temporary power surges and the emulating and adoring the skinny, the blonde, the famous. Maybe I fixed location of the X Liebeg squat as a place to return to. I want the feel queasy because in its passing I also acknowledge some deep and TAZ unhinged from the “power dynamics of oppressive routine”, with awkward feelings towards that place, the pull of whatever it is we do the potential to erupt and disrupt unexpectedly, and to disappear before becoming encased in repetition and solidification. In these when caught inside a continuous cultural compromise. ways the TAZ appeals to me very much, and I understand that it has The Dragon, The George, Loafers, The Other Place, gone, going, gone, gone… become a tactic throughout my own life. It’s a queer tactic – a means of occupying spaces of satisfying togetherness without binding to The TAZ, or Temporary Autonomous Zone, is a concept by anarchist structures or systems that demand stability through repetition. A way writer Hakim Bey in a chapter called ‘The Psychotopology of Everyday to occupy and share space when you have no access to or interest in Life’.2 Bey describes TAZs as nonpermanent spaces of potential that capital.

But there is a niggling doubt as I recognise that TAZs are being can erupt and exist outside of the ‘mapped’ and the ‘controlled’. appropriated by the neoliberal ‘pop up’ event: art space, shop, café, Liberated zones, outbursts or uprisings, psychic ‘nomadisms’. In a similar way to something going viral, the TAZ is difficult to predict. club and bar. I appreciate more and more the meaning of holding The TAZ, in Bey’s own words, proposes that: “For the time being we space. I feel the profound loss of places like the X Liebeg squat, and also concentrate our force on temporary ‘power surges’, avoiding all – along with a nauseating ambivalence – the gay bar. I am swaying entanglements with ‘permanent solutions’. [...] We are looking for along this line of tension between the building of something, and the ‘spaces’ (geographic, social, cultural, imaginal) with potential to very different intention of ‘making something happen’. And I wonder, flower as autonomous zones – and we are looking for times in which if you imagine something, does it begin to exist? these spaces are relatively open, either through neglect on the part of the State or because they have somehow escaped notice by the mapmakers, or for whatever reason. Psychotopology is the art of dowsing for potential TAZs. [...] The art of spontaneity is crucial.”

Bey claims that the repetition of structures and the mindset of working towards permanence eventually, inevitably and fatally fall

Emma Haugh is a visual artist living and working in Dublin and Berlin. emmahaugh.com Note 1. Exhibition notes for ‘The Re-appropriation of Sensuality’ 2. Hakim Bey, ‘The Temporary Autonomous Zone’, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, Autonomedia, 2 Sub edition, 2003, (http://hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html)

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

15

HOW IS IT MADE?

Alan Phelan, production still from Our Kind, 2016; image courtesy of the artist

Alan Phelan, production still from Our Kind, 2016; image courtesy of the artist

Alan Phelan, production still from Our Kind, 2016; image courtesy of the artist

Norway (Sex) Diaries ARTIST ALAN PHELAN SHARES HIS THOUGHTS ON ROGER CASEMENT’S SEXUALITY WHILE FILMING IN NORWAY. DAY 1: 27 JANUARY 2016 I am on a plane, writing while ‘in-flight’ over the North Sea en route to Norway to film fjord landscapes and exterior scenes for my new film Our Kind.

After much paperwork, some flight cancellations, co-ordination of five people (Gina Moxley, Luca Rocchini, Blaine Rennicks and Ragnar Bøe) coming from five different places in four different countries (France, UK, Ireland and Norway), we are soon to converge in the glamour of an airport hotel in Bergen. The forecast is for rain, sleet and snow, which will be a good match for the rain-soaked cabin in Wicklow where we shot the interior scenes in early December.

The film itself is a counter-factual re-imagining of Roger Casement’s life had he not been executed in 1916. The story is set 25 years later in a remote cottage in an unspecified Norwegian location, where he lives with Adler Christensen and is visited by Alice Stopford Green. Both were connected to the ‘real’ Roger Casement, with Christensen as trick turned manservant and companion during Casement’s time raising arms for the ill-fated Irish Brigade in Germany, and Stopford Green as a friend, colleague and supporter in the Congo Reform movement.

Casement’s history is seething with sex, as the notorious Black Diaries have coloured his story for the past 100 years. What were once used to discredit the great humanitarian are now seen by some as irrelevant, given our subsequent sexual liberation and the decriminalisation of homosexuality.Others see them as liberating, portraying the proud yet closeted sexual life of a queer martyr. The diary deniers are still out there though, finding faults and inconsistencies that somehow equal suspicion and fraud. Most have, however, come to terms with their veracity after their full publication over a decade ago.

Most ridiculous is the accusation that the diaries are homophobic, which brings to mind much of the twisted rhetoric against the marriage-equality referendum last year. This position simply backfires.

Pun intended.

Casement’s sexuality was used to hang him, but strangely you can go to a lecture or read a pamphlet where it’s not even mentioned.

Is this the price we pay for integration? Yielding to equality yet eschewing simple truths? There has been a reluctance to discuss his sexuality as it’s seen to overwhelm the good work he did. The implication of this, however, is that what he got up to in his own bedroom was somehow wrong or distasteful. This is when I start using the word ‘eschew’.

Our first meal in Norway took us to Dolly Dimples, which might have been a strip club but wasn’t. Instead it was that special Scandi treat of fusion pizza: industrial pizza crusts topped with pineapple, cashew nuts, jalapenos, onions and marinated chicken. Blaine said it was delicious.

THE NEXT DAY I am awake at 5am in my prefab room. Maybe it’s the bonkers pizza, or just strange noises in a strange place. Maybe it’s Gina. Yes, there is a woman in my room. Needs must. Well, budget requires it – no chance of single rooms for all four of us.

Today we become five. We are picking up Ragnar, the locations guy, at a Statoil station on the other side of Bergen in a few hours.

Instructions are all very vague and with a slight misdirection into the suburbs we find him at H&M instead.

Not unlike in Ireland we experience every kind of winter weather possible in one day, from winter wonderland driving snow to pelting rain across into Hordaland. I swore I would never chase rainbows again after being on a trip as a student with a bunch of not very creative photographers who literally jumped in their cars and sped off when the cloud got the right kind of puffy. Yet this seems to be what we are going to have to do here. A break in the snow reveals a stunning mega-monochrome waterfall.

An early press release titled my film Casement in Exile. A friend asked me about this recently, and realised that the reason Casement was in exile in the film is that the new Ireland, in the immediate aftermath of 1916 and still 25 years later in the DeValera years, would not have been a welcoming place for an outed homosexual, given that the Black Diaries revealed his homosexual private life and destroyed public support for the appeal on his execution. Maybe if the Black Diaries were never revealed he could have continued in Ireland and maybe become Taoiseach or President? That is usually what happens in counter-factual scenarios: history makes epic leaps of goodness, world events change for the better, tides turn and everyone lives happily ever after. But in my world the diaries do exist and cannot be denied.

THE FOLLOWING DAY Staring at fjords in the freezing cold, driving hail, rain, sleet and wind, my mind returns to the warm, odd guesthouse we stayed in the night before. There were no right angles anywhere in the building, which was a mix of a nineteenth and eighteenth-century buildings. Nothing was straight: wavy lines on floors, doors and windows. Segue to my Casement plot where everything is wrong, everything is historically inaccurate except the characters that bear some resemblance to the originals.

On the way to Eidfjord we get stuck in a traffic jam through a mountain tunnel with two roundabouts and a stunning exit straight onto a suspension bridge. ‘Storm Tor’ is raging and the bridge is sporadically closed due to high winds. Tunnels became my obsession when in Helsinki a few years back, but they are everywhere in Norway and indeed Scandinavia. I never read them as arteries but passages, back passages, anal cavities. Churlish I know, but I don’t see the world as vaginas, cocks or boobs. The radicality of the anus as love object

never leaves me. This is the plight of the gay man maybe, that thing that remains mainly unsaid. Casement’s diaries revealed that he was a bottom, the submissive, “the invert” as they accused him. The horror of the bourgeoisie to have a hero who liked taking it up the ass meant the he could not be let off for mere pederasty. Being a real homo was really bad. The autopsy post-execution revealed a dilated anus, one of the many horrendous things done to the man to further disgrace him – apart from killing him of course.

THE PENULTIMATE DAY I am getting more and more convinced that 10 people live in Norway, as we see hardly anyone anywhere. The rest of the population is just plain sensible, staying cosy inside. We did see the sun today for about 10 minutes and captured an amazing big landscape shot or three. This storm chasing and avoiding is exhausting, and the driving has been epic on my neck, peering out at the ever-decreasing circle of visibility in front of my steering wheel. We head onto Norheimsund for a date with Hardanger Maritime Centre.

THE LAST DAY Cecilia is the best woman skipper in Norway, so we were told. We detoured to hire her and a boat to sail us into the fjord. Off-season travelling has meant budget savings here and there that could be spent on location luxuries. We step into a fancy launch originally built for the son of the prime minister – well suited to a lady like Alice Stopford Green. The weather continued to test us with total white-out conditions leaving brief moments of sunshine to see the epic mountains of the fjord. Cecilia steered around the bay in circles as it was too dangerous to sail out into Hardangerfjord proper.

Perhaps my film does the same, never getting to the real destination of historical truth – a place of pure imagination, I must note. The film focuses on betrayal, the truth of what actually did happen. New work in gay history counters the edited mainstream narrative. There are a lot of extraordinary secret or private lives being recovered, for example in the forthcoming Patrick Hennessy show at IMMA. The Black Diaries foisted Casement’s secret, closeted life onto a general public that was horrified by this truth. History turns the private into public, otherwise nobody knows and nobody cares. Today social media twists our public and private lives and makes truth even more circuitous.

After a few chilly hours we set off back to Bergen on a road that resembles a downhill ski slope. The thaw and rain close to the city is a great relief. Next stop, Storm Henry.

Alan Phelan’s ‘Our Kind’ runs 10 March – 2 October 2016 at Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, as part of ‘High Treason: Roger Casement’ and ‘Artist as Witness: 1916 – 2016’, The Hugh Lane’s 2016 Commemorations Programme.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

www.

ARTIST ALAN BUTLER TALKS TO JENNIFER MEHIGAN ABOUT ART, THE INTERNET, PAINTING AND PORN.

of paint. Its messiness, leakiness, sliminess; it’s all super-gendered. I think that’s more where I am coming from when I paint. There’s anxiety, sensuality and poetry in the act. It’s like a gross primal-sex-child thing. And I get the same feeling in my body from digital sculpting tools Zbrush and Cinema 4D as I do from having a paintbrush in hand. Software imposes an aesthetic upon the work, but so does my body. It’s funny that you describe it as Baudrillardian, because I think of it in more performative terms.

AB: I just think your painting is at this really interesting point where the simulation has unintentionally replaced the real as its grounding. Baudrillard might have described it as ‘the perfect crime’, but there remains the real/virtual division. Your phrase “the software is making me nostalgic for real life” is kind of wonderful and sickening. When I see your work online, I’m often convinced that the installation photos are computer generated. Even though I’ve even exhibited in some of the same gallery spaces as you, it’s like none of your work exists in real life.

Is your work actually physically real?

JM: Haha, yes. Everything is real!

AB: They are super clean photos. Maybe I just think everything is computer generated.

JM Haha! I did a lot of Photoshopping for money when I lived in Australia, mostly porn and fashion, but sometimes interiors. I walk the art catfish line.

Jennifer Mehigan, XXL,120x200cm, acrylic on canvas/xerox print

Jennifer Mehigan, XXL, 100x150cm inkjet on aluminium composite, durians, spray paint, vinyl sticker, xerox print

Alan Butler: I want to talk to you about the labelling of your work, our work, as ‘internet art’. How much of this stuff is actually about the internet? I think the term ‘internet’ is vague and doesn’t describe the territory adequately, especially when it comes to groups of artists. Aesthetically, what is referred to as internet art is more often web-mediated, or, more importantly, software-mediated work, which is centred around painting, new media, sociological or design discourse. Do you accept this, or where do you fit in?

Jennifer Mehigan: I agree with you about the inadequacy of the term ‘internet art’. I feel it’s just a convenient name for a very large group of people making work who also have internet connections and use ‘www.’ in their work. But to be honest I don’t really see how we’ve outgrown terms like new media, painting, performance, installation, etc. It’s really just all about people wanting to feel part of something new. Perhaps this forces a new kind of categorisation, so we get things like clickbait and hyperactive hashtag cataloguing to generate online connections.

when the work looks like the applications used to make it. You said something funny like “the work is betrayed by the software”. I like that. When I make work with software I can’t help but feel that the work itself is about the software. I riff on the oppressiveness of that notion. It’s why I still love Cory Arcangel’s gradient prints, the titles of which are the instructions for how to make the piece in Photoshop.

JM: Now that I think of it, Cory Arcangel was the artist who came up with term ‘default aesthetic’. What you call its ‘oppressiveness’ is kind of funny.

AB: Nobody believes me, but I’ve been using art software since the first half of the 1980s – before primary school even. I think about this stuff instinctively, to the point where the virtual precedes the real. In your work I don’t think ‘painting’ so much as Fractal Design’s Painter, which was a real-media simulation application for the PC, released in the early 1990s. This association makes me think of your work as positively Baudrillardian, in the sense that you are replicating the simulation of paint. So, AB: Aside from the propaganda angle, how do feel about it in an for me, software is embedded in your work. However, you’re academic context, or in terms of discourse? Do the buzzwords younger than me and didn’t get it from that application. Is it fair confuse or mislead the viewer from what’s actually happening for me to make these associations?

JM: I’m laughing a bit now at screenshots of that Painter programme in the work?

JM: I definitely don’t accept the terms ‘digital artist’ or ‘internet art- that you mentioned. It looks the same as the painting software Arist’ to describe me. I think I’m a painter who is moving towards a tRage does today, with the pointless skeuomorphism. more interdisciplinary practice. I work with and make images that are sometimes generated very obviously by certain software or ma- AB: So you think programmes that provide creative tools that chines, so in that sense they have a default aesthetic. They are also resemble their real-world counterparts are pointless? distributed online. I can’t decide, however, if it would be cute or an- JM: Actually, I’m not sure if they’re pointless. I do feel a bit manipnoying if everyone started naming software in their lists of media ulated by software that is trying to make me nostalgic for real life, for shows and websites, but isn’t that what is essentially happening? which I find creepy. But I think I approach painting the same way in real life as I do with a computer, simulating everything, even with AB: Funny you should say that. I just finished a video work and paint itself – except for the one great advantage of the undo feature at the end of the credits I listed the software I used to produce on a computer. the work. I never usually do credits, because it’s just me making it, but I have always made work as a sort of collaboration with AB: Do you mean that you are simulating the production? Or the software: the software guides me as much as I control the would it be fair to say that you’re ‘performing’ the act of paintsoftware. Now that I think about it, I probably did this because ing? of something you said previously about a ‘default aesthetic’, JM: I just love the wetness and the abject performance of the medium

AB: Australian porn? I didn’t know there was Australian porn.

I’d assume there’s a lot of Photoshopping involved in that – removing giant spiders and whatnot. How did that affect your visual sensibilities – practically I mean? There are elements of BDSM in your work, both photographically and aesthetically.

I think they float around in this software environment, which removes the ‘porniness’. The photos feel more like artefacts, and the aesthetic takes on an expressive function.

JM: For my next show the walls will be covered in bug stickers, so that’s a cute promotional segue. But really, learning to Photoshop pictures of bodies and scenes so excessively was anaesthetising and depressing. I think editing photos of installs – not even in a major way – feels a bit like porn too: ridiculous, performative, consumable, normative, etc. Art and porn makes me think of glossy art websites like Contemporary Art Daily, which is like an art Penthouse.

I’m happy you said artefacts; I like that a lot more than the alternatives. My process allows the appropriated materials from the archives to become malleable forms. Vice-versa, the painterly gestures are almost representational or become object-like forms. The forms in the abstract paintings and more gestural images – such as the stickers I’ve started designing – are humanised through incorporating photos and screen-captures of real people and bodily gestures.

I think that this element of humanisation removes the pornyness too, in the same way that humanised objects can be seen as artefacts.

Generally, digital environments tend to encourage dehumanisation and objectification. I think the queerness inherent in amorphousness, bodies and the image being unreadable or illegible opens up the space to reinterpretation.

AB: Porn is a really good comparison, especially with regards to quantity. I think all of those online noise journals like Contemporary Art Daily, Artsy, Artslant and all the pretend journalism blogs have really damaged the potential for artists to engage with the web in a meaningful way. The entire art world has migrated to their Facebook pages. It’s a total cringe-fest. Just as porn is sex without the sex, art online is art without the art.

Fuck the internet! Where is your next show?

JM: I’m impressed we managed to get this far without referring to Singapore, where my next show is, at Shophouse 5 in Geylang.

AB: Ah! The red light district. Nice. Anyway, I can’t make it.

Guess I’ll have to check it out on your website.

Alan Butler is an artist based in Dublin. He lectures in Photography and Lens-Based Media at Limerick School of Art and Design.

Jennifer Mehigan (b. 1988, Singapore) currently lives and works in Clonakilty in Cork. jennifermehigan.com, alanbutler.info

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

17

BIENNIAL kind of decorum in the country’s culture? That, to me, is such a clear postcolonial feature. You see it in South East Asia, in Africa and in South America. So this is one layer that interests me.

Another layer of postcolonialism that I am really interested in is forms of memory: visual memory, physical memory and inherited memory – how these play out day-to-day and how artists approach this idea. I strongly believe that the features of occupation and domination – especially by major colonisers such as Britain, France, Portugal and Spain – are more or less the same. There is memory, erosion of language and architecture, because architecture is a very important colonial tool used to impose power and awe. I’m trying to bring these together comparatively. This is also why the participating artists are from a very broad spectrum of backgrounds.

RP: You are navigating quite complex cultural threads, and a biennial seems to be a suitable forum in which to unpack those relationships. Speaking of language, Cavafy’s poem ‘Waiting For The Barbarians’ has been cited in reference to your exhibition Koyo Kouoh; image by Deirdre Power

Installation view, ‘Streamlines Oceans – Global Trade and Migration’, Henning Rogge, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, December 2015 – March 13, 2016, curated by Koyo Kouoh

Still (the) Barbarians RORY PROUT INTERVIEWS KOYO KOUOH, CURATOR OF EVA INTERNATIONAL 2016.

title, and is associated today with the idea of a foreign threat that never quite arrives, yet drives political policy, militarisation, and fearmongering. Could you expand a little on the idea of the barbarian in the title?

KK: I was interested in discussing Ireland’s postcolonial state as a starting point to look at postcolonialism in contemporary art, keeping in mind that the Irish don’t really consider themselves postcolo-

Rory Prout: To give some background, and an idea of what is im-

your location. We are constantly connected to the world. There is no

nial subjects. I wanted somehow to bring that debate to this edition

portant to you as a cultural producer, perhaps you could tell me

isolation as such. Even the remotest places are connected to the rest

of EVA.

a little about Raw Material?

of the world. What is done in Singapore has an influence in Santiago

In Cavafy’s poem the barbarians have a kind of a double bear-

Koyo Kouoh: I started Raw Material Company in 2008 because, as an

de Chile, in New York and in the Niger Delta. I think that the world

ing or attitude. He’s suggesting that the barbarians are these warrior-

exhibition maker, curator and researcher, I realised that I didn’t have

has always been like that, it’s just that nowadays we are even more

like, fierce people, but that they were also important as a sovereign

access to a space in which I could discuss art as a thinking system in

conscious of it, due to the flurry and flood of information that we can

culture that exchanged with other societies back then, specifically

its own right, without feeling any need to borrow from other disci-

access. I don’t see the global and the local as two separate entities. For

with the Greeks and the Romans.

plines. Context very much defines everything that we do and Raw

me, it’s two faces of the same coin.

Material is a space that responds specifically to its Dakar context.

I was interested in what ‘barbarians’ have come to signify today, in terms of horror and violence, and in how that relates to the en-

As a result of its colonial heritage, Senegal is a country that has

RP: You have described Ireland as a sort of central point of the

terprise of colonialism, which is a violent enterprise that results in

a very strong organisational and even philosophical orientation to-

British colonial project, a laboratory. To what extent will that

alienation for those subjected to it. We realise how little we have de-

wards France. Arts and culture are structured and managed more or

specific history be examined during EVA, or do your concerns

veloped, because politics is still extremely exploitative. This is why

less in the same way. If you look at it from an infrastructural point of

lie more in the present, in the postcolonial legacy and its effect

the title has a double meaning. You can read Still Barbarians, meaning

view, Dakar has everything necessary to provide a healthy environ-

on culture, identity and politics today?

that the world is still barbaric, but also Still (the) Barbarians. Then you

ment for the arts. There is an art school, a university and a biennial.

KK: I’ve always thought of the Republic of Ireland as a country that

realise, oh, wait a minute, the barbarians were a very important soci-

There are galleries. There are public and private institutions. But ev-

has endured so much but is kind of quiet. It’s the only country I can

ety like every other.

erything is, in my opinion, geared towards art as a kind of fifth wheel,

think of with fewer inhabitants today than 40 years ago.

not as an integral part of the locomotive of society. There is a need to

In terms of EVA, what attracted me was that it takes place off

RP: There is a sense from press releases that ongoing conversa-

the beaten path but with an international format. It began locally,

tion and public engagement will be a feature of ‘Still (the) Bar-

As an exhibition maker I am interested in the critical aspects

which really makes EVA very special. It is an event that was initiated

barians’. Is this important to you and what has been your strat-

of artistic practice and in how art intervenes in society, in politics

by artists for artists. Very few people know that EVA has existed for

egy in opening a discursive platform around the biennial?

specifically, providing another language for discourse. This is why

39 years. If you look at the line-up of curators and artists that have

KK: We are working to have a colloquium at the end of the event

Raw Material Company started. At first we were mobile; we didn’t

shown there, it’s quite amazing. Any other place would be boasting.

in early July. It will look at the influence and the importance of art-

have a space. Then we realised that being mobile didn’t give us a real

Any other country would be cherishing that event and giving it all

ists and cultural advocates in revolutions. I’m especially interested

anchor, that we didn’t have a real root, so we set up a space in 2011

the means necessary, but Ireland doesn’t. It doesn’t really care much!

in the role of poetry, looking at how poetry performs revolutions, or

and focused on exhibition making, publishing and residencies. Now

[laughing]. That’s very interesting. For me it’s a kind of analogy about

how revolution is performed through language. We are working very

we’re working towards a new programme that will be more focused

the whole discourse of postcolonialism, which doesn’t seem to be a

hard to make all the EVA publications bilingual. I was shocked that

on education.

subject of discussion here.

no catalogue for the project has ever been done in Irish.

understand art as a value maker in society.

We live in the age of the supremacy of the image, but we want RP: So you recognised that, despite having a system in place in

RP: It might become more of a discussion this year, during the

to discuss the supremacy of the word, which I think is still relevant,

Dakar that could support it, there was no space like Raw Mate-

1916 centenary, but I agree that it hasn’t been a prevalent issue.

because images need words to support them. We want to look at this

rial?

KK: Yes. And this is what makes it very attractive to me. Since I’ve

comparatively: from an Irish perspective, an African perspective, a

KK: Yes, absolutely. In that framework we were the only ones doing

been travelling here – working, meeting artists, doing research and

South East Asian perspective, a South American perspective and so

it, but it is part of a thriving, up-and-coming contemporary art scene

so on – I’ve realised that the whole postcolonial discourse annoys

on. There will be a few talks throughout, but the main discursive

that has been emerging in Africa over the past 10 to 15 years. In 2012

certain people, because Ireland doesn’t really see itself as a postco-

space will be the colloquium.

we organised the first major symposium on building art institutions

lonial site. To a certain extent this can be understood by the length

in Africa, during which many of Raw Material’s concerns were dis-

of British occupation, which brought about so much assimilation.

cussed.

People forget at some point that actually, hey, something massive happened here. However, if you go back to the history books you re-

RP: Large-scale symposiums, exhibitions and biennials are be-

alise of course that no occupation, no invasion, is ever just accepted.

coming ever more concerned with globalised perspectives. This

There has always been resistance.

seems apparent too in EVA, a biennial that originated in a decid-

Through EVA I want to look at how this plays out in contempo-

edly local context in Limerick. What has been your experience

rary times, by looking at language, for instance. I think that one of

of resolving the global with the local? Is it a concern?

the most palpable consequences of colonial domination is the loss

KK: I believe that the local exists within the global and that the glob-

of a language. For me, as an outsider looking at Ireland, I see such

al has an influence on the local. It’s really a matter of interdependen-

ambivalence about Irish: who speaks Irish, who doesn’t speak Irish,

cy, not either/or. It’s a question of how you see yourself, regardless of

who feels like Irish should be the national language or not. Is Irish a

Rory Prout is an artist and writer based in Limerick city. He was the 2015 painter in residence with the Irish Embassy in Addis Ababa and runs the Arba Minch Art Project, which delivers visual art workshops and support for artists in Arba Minch Prison in southern Ethiopia.

The artists selected for Eva International 2016 are Pio Abad, Carsten Höller, Otobong Nkanga, Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, Dorothy Hunter, Uriel Orlow, Philip Aguirre y Otegui, Jeremy Hutchison, Ulrike Ottinger, Kader Attia, Joanna Hutton, Alan Phelan, Kostas Bassanos, Alfredo Jaar, Johannes Phokela, Eric Baudelaire, Michael Joo, Sarah Pierce, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Journal Rappé, Deirdre Power and Softday, Tiffany Chung, Kapwani Kiwanga, Public Studio, Criodhna Costello, Abdoulaye Konaté, Ican Ramageli, Jonathan Cummins, Syowia Kyambi, Amanda Rice, Godfried Donkor, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Willem de Rooij, Samuel Erenberg, Leung Chi Wo, Tracey Rose, Theo Eshetu, Charles Lim Yi Yong, Catarina Simão, Mary Evans, Alice Maher, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley, Bradley McCallum, Vo Tran Chau, Liam Gillick, Naeem Mohaiemen, John Waid, Yong Sun Gullach and Pádraic E. Moore.

18

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

ARTS & HEALTH

Check Up, Check In LILY POWER REPORTS FROM THE ‘CHECK UP, CHECK IN’ ARTS AND HEALTH SEMINAR, WHICH TOOK PLACE AT THE LAB, DUBLIN ON 29 JANUARY 2016.

in the “uselessness” of art, which is important in its own right. He encouraged artists to focus on what is “probable” rather than what is possible, in terms of funding applications, but still to lead the way rather than waiting for institutions or politicians, citing the recent ‘Waking the Feminists’ protest at the Abbey Theatre as an example of such action.

Participant at ‘Check Up, Check In’; photo by Joseph Carr

Eleanor Phillips and Jesse Jones at ‘Check Up, Check In’; photo by Joseph Carr

WORKSHOP AND FEEDBACK In the afternoon Jesse Jones and Eleanor Phillips ran a workshop where participants were split into small groups to discuss the frustrations of working in the arts and health sector. Reporting back, Jones relayed the participants’ main concerns. These fell largely into three categories: a lack of understanding of the work itself, a dearth of funding and an absence of time allocated for projects. Artists also brought up issues around communication flow, leadership and precarious working conditions. They expressed feelings of isolation and of being made to feel like a volunteer rather than a professional.

The participants made varied and creative physical manifestations of their concerns. Jones described these as a kind of “wailing wall”. She closed the workshop by encouraging practitioners to decide which things they could and which they could not change in order to gain agency over their grievances and returned to the idea of the manifesto, urging artists to codify their values and aims.

ON Friday 29 January at The LAB in Foley Street, a few dozen artists academics and health workers gathered with an aim to “take the pulse of arts and health in Ireland and promote solidarity and connection among practitioners”. Hosted by Create, artsandhealth. ie, Waterford Healing Arts Trust (WHAT) and The LAB, ‘Check Up, Check In’ comprised a day of talks and workshops centred around the aspiration for a “shared arts and health manifesto”, a desire to define the role of artists in the field and to identify the challenges they face.

Incorporating a range of practices and theories, the discussions were varied, demonstrating just how fluid and flexible ‘arts and health’ can be.

er. It is a starting point. It faces us towards the global revolution we simply can’t afford not to have”.1

PLENARY SESSION After a brief introduction by WHAT Director Mary Grehan, Pat Cooke, Director of the MA in Cultural Policy and Arts Management at UCD, began with a discussion on proclamations and manifestos.

Cooke asserted that, while the arts are central to fulfilling human rights, they provide no clear way, instead reflecting the messiness and confusion of life. He noted that a heavier burden is placed on artists in secular society, where people no longer have religion to look to for answers.

Following on from Cooke, Clive Parkinson, Director of Arts for Health at Manchester Metropolitan University, gave a memorable presentation titled ‘A Love-Filled Slap’: A Manifesto for Arts and Health, taking the idea of manifestos and proclamations in a new direction.

A founder of the North West Arts and Health Network, Parkinson detailed the process behind the group’s Manifesto for Arts and Health, developed against the backdrop of ‘global financial crisis’ and austerity policies in the UK. Parkinson emphasised his commitment to writing a manifesto about what arts and health should be, while avoiding the language of funding applications and “pseudo-science”, and without shying away from politics. Parkinson’s view of the role of arts and health was broad, ambitious and engaging. He rejected art as a quick fix, understanding it as a human right, central to democracy, wellbeing and “human flourishing”. He criticised the “happy clappy evangelism” surrounding mindfulness and wellness, an attitude which “opposes deep thinking”. For Parkinson, the arts improve public health by challenging, not by comforting.

He quoted former Chief Executive of Mersey Care NHS Trust Alan Yates, who said that “if the arts hadn’t been invented, we would now do so as a front line health service” and described his desire for arts and health to become a “social movement from the ground up”, rather than a tool of government which places artists at the bottom of the ladder.

The title of the talk referenced feedback from Jami Bladel, Artistic Director of KickStart Arts in Australia, who described the Manifesto as “a love filled slap in the face of consumerist society”. She continued: “It’s about social justice, about joined up thinking, it’s about a courage we fear might not happen in our lifetime … It is at once bleak and hopeful, a troubled text searching for answers, asking questions and promising nothing if we don’t start working (creatively) togeth-

SHORT TALKS After a short break and a few of artist Jennie Moran’s flapjacks, the second half of the morning began with some short presentations from artists working in arts and health. Moran spoke first, introducing Luncheonette, the canteen she runs at NCAD (which provided the food for the day). Moran posits Luncheonette as a public artwork, which provides hospitality and a space for “loitering unconsciously”, as well as nourishing both physical and psychological health.

Next, Marie Brett introduced her work, which often deals with difficult subjects and trauma. In ‘Amulet’, for example, she explored infant loss, working with bereaved parents, while in ‘E.gress’ she examined experiences of dementia. Brett described how she works without preconceptions of the completed project, constantly reassessing and questioning her own priorities. Her work crosses a range of disciplines but she tries to focus on her role as artist, not viewing the work as “doing good” or “healing”.

Alan Counihan introduced his ‘Personal Effects’ project, which comprised the possessions, photographs and documents seized from patients committed to the Richmond Asylum at Grangegorman and raised issues of privacy, in particular the right to privacy after death, and the depersonalisation of patients in such institutions.

Mary Dineen of Arts and Minds in Cork, the only healthcare professional presenting, detailed the organisation’s various projects and emphasised the importance of helping participants to feel comfortable in spaces like galleries.

Charlotte Donovan stated her intent to “avoid certainty”, to renounce the “arts ego” and to acknowledge that participants and staff in a health setting may have other priorities and opinions. Emphasising the importance of integrity and responsibility, she highlighted the issue of accountability and reiterated Marie Brett’s point about constantly questioning your motives.

Marielle MacLeman gave a performative presentation, talking directly to the audience as she would participants in her arts and health practice. She laid out a ‘statement of intention’, demonstrating a preference for certainty, structure, guidelines and creative freedom.

Dancer and choreographer Ríonach Ní Néill spoke about her work with older people and the relations between dance and dementia. She described her work facilitating partner dancing for dementia patients and creating meaningful, beneficial processes that don’t rely on participants developing or improving in any traditional way. Participants with dementia, she stated, must be treated as “experienced and sophisticated” people despite the limitations of memory loss. Ní Néill pondered the “ephemeral nature” of dance and the tension between viewing the form for its health benefits or for its artistic value.

Ray Yeates closed the morning session. Speaking to artists as a funder and organiser, he discussed the difference between arts and health and arts and therapy (a point reiterated throughout the day), stating that practitioners in the former field should not be obliged to create therapeutic work. Yeates stated that artists should take pride

PANEL DISCUSSION The day culminated with a panel discussion featuring Professor Gerry Kearns alongside artists Dominic Thorpe and Niamh O’Connor.

Kearns introduced his research into art and activism during the AIDs crisis, focusing on the Act Up group, who enacted public performances to highlight government inaction and prejudice. He examined how art and performance gave the movement strong imagery and twisted social metaphors to encourage conversation and openness around both homosexuality and AIDs. Dominic Thorpe introduced some of his performance works, which dealt with subjects like direct provision and institutional abuse. For his performance at Tulca 2013, Thorpe responded to the Ryan Report and the idea of mass societal complicity, looking specifically at the Redress Board hearings, which required victims to give evidence in court and resulted in mental health problems and several suicides among victims. Thorpe explored the idea of memory and responsibility in relation to trauma.

Niamh O’Connor introduced her work as an artist facilitator with Spark, a centre for independent living in Leitrim where she was resident for a year. She emphasised the benefits of being deeply embedded in order to create a lasting impact. O’Connor went on to describe some of the themes of her work, such as body image, internalised stigma and self-perception in relation to health.

The panel discussion, chaired by Ailbhe Murphy, began with a conversation about the concept of crises in relation to art and health.

Kearns argued that artists can be crucial in identifying crises that are not necessarily obvious, and responding to them in creative ways.

Taking from this, Thorpe spoke about arts and health work often amounting to “firefighting”, where practitioners are working with people in states of crisis. He emphasised his preference for intimacy in such work, working one-on-one to effect lasting change.

A comment from the floor raised the issue of arts and health practitioners never really being ‘inside’ the institutions that they are involved with. In response, Kearns discussed the mutually beneficial relationships that Act Up activists developed with medical professionals, citing the ‘buddy system’ implemented by San Francisco General Hospital.

In closing, Murphy spoke of “strategies of resistance” and “strategies of care”, bringing the discussion back to Parkinson’s Manifesto.

‘Check Up, Check In’ asserted arts and health as a site of action for change, while providing a forum and an outlet for the difficulties faced by artists working in field. Though the day covered myriad topics and disparate practices, there was a commitment among speakers to constantly rethinking and re-evaluating the essential idea of arts and health, to lead change by example and to attempt to disentangle the sector from governmental agendas and trends.

Lily Power is Production Editor at Visual Artists Ireland.

Notes 1. Clive Parkinson’s talk can be found at artsanhealth.ie 2. All quotes taken from the live event

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Critique Supplement Edition 24: March – April 2016

Sean Lynch, Adventure Capital, Bricks, 2015 and Peregrine Falcons Visit Moyross, 2008; LCGA installation image

Sean Lynch ‘Adventure: Capital’ Limerick City Gallery of Art, 21 January – 24 March “Man was born naked, without claws, unable to

exist; that is strength”, Lynch is not just exploring

run fast, with no shell or natural armour. But he

how the public interacts with art but how art inter-

could observe nature and imitate it. He saw how

acts with the public. In swapping the subject and

water ran down the side of a hill without sinking,

the object, he investigates how art behaves towards

and then invented a roof for his house. Soon more

society.

houses and villages appeared, and more stones

The precarious positioning of art and society

were needed. Mighty tools and machines were in-

is reflected throughout the other works on show.

vented. Demand increased. My chisel got harder,

A Church Without a Steeple examines the history

my hammer heavier. Villages turned into towns…

of modernism in Ireland. A video piece accompa-

towns into cities … stone … rock … next stone … next

nied by reproductions of newspaper cartoon from

rock.”1 Lynch’s project ‘Adventure: Capital’ traces a

the 1950s, its title references Knockanure church,

journey around Ireland and Britain following the

ment of the local population. Through a montage

personified spirit of architecture and sculpture

of sites – the gallery, church, storage area, carpet

“from myth to modernism”. Using narratives, sites

store and architecture school – the possibility of a

and objects, Lynch enacts a unique form of cultural

single viewpoint is shattered. The anecdotal public

anthropology and investigates art, form, function

reactions recorded do not reflect the canonical idea

and worth. From Greek river gods to public art, via

of a rational modernism, but instead portray how

abandoned quarries and a traffic roundabout, the

modernist works were caught up in the nitty-gritty

scale of materials and research is exhaustive.

of the everyday.

built without a steeple to the apparent bewilder-

Commissioned for Ireland at Venice 2015,

In Bill Clinton, Lynch explores the ways in

‘Adventure: Capital’ is exhibited alongside a selec-

which art adapts and interacts with everyday life,

tion of Lynch’s previous artworks. The work is an

pushing this idea to its comical limits. For his 1998

anthropomorphic archive composed of stone, clay,

presidential visit, the town of Ballybunion com-

plastic, lithography, brick, metal, photography and

missioned a bronze sculpture of Clinton mid-golf-

video, the latter an unreliable narrator well-versed

swing, but, due to a delay with the work, a plaster

in the art of storytelling. The film presents a jour-

cast, spray-painted bronze, was displayed instead.

ney that begins, poetically, in a quarry, as a stone

In the film, Clinton’s golf ball is reproduced and

walks out of its burrow, inheriting the earth and

presented on a plinth surrounded by photographs from the tour. This act a vandalism inspired headlines like: “One of the president’s balls is missing!”

(The ball has since been recovered.)

Investigation of public reaction continues in A Rocky Road, which uses the histories of existing artworks to explore the intersections of reception, protest, vandalism and the media. David Lilburn’s print Towards from the Forceps to the Chains of Office, featured in Eva 1984, depicts the artist reclining naked and with an erection. On 2 November 1984, the Limerick Leader were alerted to the plans of local café owner Richard Coughlan to destroy the work. After Coughlan smashed its frame and made to spray it with paint, Hugh Murray, chairman of the exhibition committee, pushed him away and a struggle ensued. Both Lilburn’s original work and the photographs of the tussle are exhibited. The original artwork has been usurped by its subsequent afterlife.

‘Ireland at Venice’ is a multidisciplinary exhibition incorporating ethnography, history, archaeology, archiving, storytelling and satire. The ex-

Sean Lynch, Adventure Capital, 2015; image courtesy of Studioworks photography

Sean Lynch, Bill Clinton, 2007; LCGA installation image

reproducing fruitfully upon its surface.

exhibition. Reading the Irish tour supplement is necessary to really understand the work. Similarly,

“As I touched it, I felt connected, and part of a

the juvenile photo essay style doesn’t always con-

forward movement. The owners of these wonders

vey the complex themes in the work. This disjunc-

must believe these stones have come through a

tion between conception and execution is perhaps

special intervention of fate ... Remnants dug up out

due to the fact that Lynch is ‘telling tales’ – story-

of the earth are no longer covered and pitifully hid-

telling is the modus operandi. We already know

den in mud.”2 The film cuts to Liverpool airport and a sculp-

that stories are unreliable, sometimes cheeky,

ture of John Lennon. Lynch presents an unfamiliar

Lynch concentrates on the object, illuminating

history of modern sculpture, which jumps from

the gaps in the verifiable. By exploring the ways

one airport to the next, and ends in a lament for

in which the object acts upon the subject, sources,

an abandoned sculpture on a County Cork round-

sites, and artefacts are given new afterlives. They

about. An animated sequence featuring the sculp-

each present their own narratives, whether you

ture tells of its neglect and abandonment. The

believe them or not.

piece, which started its life as a community commission, is now rusting away on the margins of Sean Lynch, Adventure Capital, 2015; LCGA installation image

tensive research at times seems divorced from the

that community. In stating, ambiguously, that “we

often abstracted. Turning away from the subject,

Gemma Carroll is an art writer based in Cork.

Notes 1 &2. Sean Lynch, script excerpt from ‘Adventure: Capital’

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet CRITIQUE SUPPLEMENT

March – April 2016

Bridget O’Gorman ‘In the Flesh’ The LAB, Dublin, 29 January – 12 March

‘She Devil’ Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast 17 December – 6 February

Bridget O’Gorman, installation view of ‘In the Flesh’, 2016; courtesy of The LAB Gallery

IN 2015 Bridget O’Gorman was invited to respond, in collaboration with research partners and institutions, to the 1916 Rising in its centennial year.

So began 12 months of site visits with historian Brenda Malone at the National Museum of Ireland at Collins Barracks and a collaboration with writer Sue Rainsford. O’Gorman’s response is the first in a series of such exhibitions commissioned by The LAB, a gallery which regularly facilitates cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Entering the ground floor gallery, the eye is drawn to the opposite wall. Two red bands slash down the wall like slings, weighted into shape by abstract blocks of the clear substance they hold – ballistic gel, we are told. The floor is scattered with aluminium structures: strips that rise, fall or fold at various points, interspersed with blue drips and further blocks of ballistic gel. An open-topped box reveals a clay heart and fist. A sealed box and a table, topped by an arrangement of small clay objects complete the display.

The next room houses the first video piece, In the Flesh (Re-enacted), in which a museum conservator’s hands carefully clean a rifle. The gun, once an instigator of violence, appears vulnerable and in need of care. The rifle is no longer functional but instead symbolic, a tangible link to the past.

This juxtaposition of hard, rusting metal with soft hands, full of life, ties into a recurring interest of O’Gorman’s: aligning materials which provoke contrasting sensations. A hypnotic droning soundscape reflects the concentration of the action and conjures a sense of the tension of the Rising.

Upstairs, the second video piece, In the Flesh (Slow Tear), depicts the storage space that currently holds the National Museum of Ireland’s Easter Week collection. The families of those involved in the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence donated this accumulation of items and personal effects. The film presents mundane objects – lockers, shelves and boxes – in a stark way, enriched by Rainsford’s voiceover, which brings to life the precious historical and personal artefacts hidden safely from view. One of the opening lines in the script, “I’m being ever lessened by the hurtful properties lain latent in the air,” recalls the rifle in the previous video piece and reminds us why these objects are stored away. This video piece comes in advance of an exhibition planned for March 2016 at Collins Barracks, for which a selection of these artefacts will be displayed for visitors to browse.

Multimedia shows can sometimes feel disjointed, comprising standalone elements combined by a common thematic thread but missing

Bridget O’Gorman, still from In the Flesh Film; work in progress, filmed on location at the National Museum Collins Barracks, 2015

a narrative. In this show, the two video works and the objects in the main gallery space each attain a new meaning and depth once they are experienced as part of a whole. The materials in the ground floor space offer a static yet tangible link to elements referenced in the video pieces. The aluminium strips echo the sterility of the storage space. Supporting documentation tells us that museum professionals simulate bullet impact or other similar trauma to flesh by using modelling clay and ballistic gel. The human body and its relation to inanimate objects is a theme considered throughout the exhibition.

The little objects on the gallery table, moulded from clay and displaying fingerprints, echo the careful touch of the conservator’s hands on the rifle, which itself gains new life through Rainsford’s emotive script, In the Flesh (Slow Tear). In an interview for RTE Radio 1’s Arena, O’Gorman notes that, sometimes, “experience exceeds conventional use of language”. Rainsford’s words succeed in projecting a sense of bodily trauma and violence, giving new sensation and a human connection to a past already evoked by the rifle.

These complementary works serve to highlight the place of curation and narrative in exhibitions. Artist, historian and writer join their respective expertise to create a rich and rounded exhibition linking the viewer to the past. The year ahead will see countless 1916-related events take place. This exhibition demonstrates that art can address these issues in an indirect way, leaving space for the viewer’s imagination and encouraging us to consider the links between works in order to gain a fuller experience. ‘In the Flesh’ is a fitting prelude to the ‘people’s exhibition’. It will facilitate a new way of experiencing the artefacts, while deepening our appreciation of the people who have ensured their survival.

Roisin Russell is a writer based in Dublin. Her writing has featured in Paper Visual Art Journal and Circa online.

IN ‘She Devil’, two video projection screens fill the huge darkened warehouse space of Golden Thread’s Galleries 1 and 2. This doesn’t mean, however, that there are a small number of artworks on show. Between them, these two screens play a continuous loop of 15 video works. The ‘She Devil’ project has been presented, with different content but in a similar format, in Rome and Bucharest.

For the 15 artists featured there are a dizzying number of curators involved – 19 in fact – arranged in a complex hierarchy. In Gallery 1, Golden Thread’s own Peter Richards has selected Northern Irish/Irish curators from an array of art institutions (Queen’s Film Theatre, Digital Arts Studios, Golden Thread, IMMA, Millennium Court and CCA DerryLondonderry), who have each selected a work by a female video artist. In Gallery 2, Richards has selected a further 11 video works by female artists from the pool of works selected by other curators for previous editions of ‘She Devil’. Italian curator Stefania Miscetti originally set all of this in motion and the format has led to a multi-authored enquiry into gender identity, both in Ireland and internationally.

The broad scope of work includes both documentation of performance art, video art and everything in between. Furthermore, the artists selected range from the emerging to the established, both Irish and international. On the Irish side of things Isabel Nolan, Daphne Wright and Sinead O’Donnell all feature. Nolan’s Sloganeering, in which the artist writes and scores out snappy self-referencing slogans on successive t-shirts that she wears and takes off, particularly stands out.

Despite being made back in 2001, its presentation of female identity asserted through a sentence of text seems particularly relevant to our current social media culture. Another work that demands the viewer’s attention is Daphne Wright’s I Know What it’s Like, in which a deadpan unblinking elderly woman delivers intimate statements, on topics such as breastfeeding her child, straight to the camera. The unflinching facial expression and equally flat tone of the presenter’s voice contrast with the statements she is delivering. The effect is wholly captivating and makes for a wonderfully strange scripted performance.

By devolving the selection of artworks to so many curators, ‘She Devil’ explores the current critical discourse surrounding gender identity as represented by female artists working in film.

In addition to this, knowingly or unknowingly,

the show also questions the presence and importance of the curator in relation to the exhibition of artworks. On this point, there is an interesting conversation between the curatorial format of ‘She Devil’ and ‘G R O U P S H O W’, which runs simultaneously in Golden Thread’s Project Space.

Both of these exhibitions can be read as presenting the function of the artwork as secondary to that of the curator, whose selections and decisions are presented as the primary narrative. Phillip McCrilly has curated a self-aware exhibition that questions the legitimacy of a group show in which a selection of artists are presented together, often with tedious connections.

In this case the artists are the graduates of Golden Thread’s Career Enhancement Programme: Stuart Calvin, Christopher Campbell, Erin Hagan, Brónach McGuiness, Sinead McKeever, Paul Moore, Sharon Murphy, John Rainey and Michael Sheppard. McCrilly’s strong curatorial style, which in this exhibition includes artworks presented on free-standing metal shelving units, fluorescent tubing, a pot plant and retro television monitors, makes him a visible presence in the show, rather than a silent decision maker operating in the background. Given (and due to) the disparate practices of the artists involved, McCrilly’s heavy curatorial touch gives the show a confident and singular narrative, which feels necessary. In contrast, due to the sheer number of varied practices (both art and curatorial) presented in ‘She Devil’ the suggested singular narrative is less convincing.

‘She Devil’ does present some strong individual works, which convey something of the national and international discourse on gender identity being formed by female producers of video art. However, the discourse presented by the exhibition itself seems more focused on ideas around the role of the curator(s) in a visual art exhibition. This, of course, is a justifiable area of focus, and in fact proves very interesting when presented next to ‘G R O U P S H O W’, which explores similar themes. The two shows when viewed in tandem present a fascinating narrative on contemporary curation. But of the 44 curators and artists on display across Golden Thread’s galleries it is in fact the small group show of emerging artists led confidently by an emerging curator andd staged in the project space that steals the limelight.

Iain Griffin is a visual artist and writer based in Belfast.

Installation view, ‘She Devil’; photo by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artist and the Golden Thread Gallery

March – April 2016

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet CRITIQUE SUPPLEMENT

David Lunney ‘Things Made For Drawing’ Eight Gallery, Dublin, 29 January – 7 February

David Lunney, installation view; image courtesy of the artist

David Lunney, Kilmashogue #1, 2016; image courtesy of the artist

EIGHT Gallery is housed in a large room on the first floor of a Georgian mansion on Dawson Street.

Natural light enters through the grimy panes of three tall sash windows overlooking the street. A redundant chandelier shines weakly from the ceiling rose. ‘Things Made for Drawing’ is a small, formally cohesive show, its eight works placed sparingly around the jaded but elegant room. There are six wall works in two sets of three, their titles, Three Rock and Kilmashogue, referring to well known locations in the Dublin Mountains. Each of these sets has a causal connection to one of the two remaining works, a pair of squat, jerrybuilt structures standing apart on the grey painted floor.

The group entitled Three Rock subdivides into Looking Down, Looking Out, and Looking Up. The individual works are similar in material and formal configuration but differ, as their titles suggest, in the perspectives that their representational elements depict. Grids of taut, variously coloured string wraps the upper and lower sections of small panels. Set between these woven matrices, smaller panels contain thinly painted views of a wooded landscape.

The strung borders are a frame of sorts and, simultaneously, a sort of code, their colours and configuration in visual correspondence with the painted elements.

The structure standing nearest to this set is called Traffic Mirror. A provisional-looking framework of timber off-cuts (screw-heads and clamps abound) supports an armature of thin wooden laths and variously shaped mirrors. A circular one at the head of the structure is the mirror of the title. This armature also appears within the painted sections of the wall panels, depicted as a viewing apparatus, an eccentric tool through which aspects of the landscape have been variously framed and refracted.

The group named Kilmashogue presents a similar set of relationships. Three wall panels each contain aspects of the named location. Each panel has similar borders of tightly stretched string. The second floor piece, Sliding Mirrors, is larger than the first but is similarly constructed from timber, with opposing surfaces of reflecting materials. It too appears within the painted elements of the related wall panels. This tricky play of object and image is complicated further by the nature of the depicted landscapes themselves, Three Rock and Kilmashogue being areas of ‘natural’ beauty which are synonymous with the careful management and cultivation of Ireland’s reforestation programme. The landscape is as much a construct as our depictions of it.

The artist himself also appears in the work, reflected in the viewing devices integrated within and disrupting his painted settings. Artifice is everywhere, colliding in a play of endless referents.

Tilted planes, a muted palette, the collision of depicted objects with the objects themselves; for all of the post-modern playfulness in Lunney’s work it’s the modernism of Picasso and Braque, particularly the twin peaks of analytical and synthetic cubism, that his work most strongly evokes. Think of Picasso’s Still Life with Chair and Caning (1912), a tiny masterpiece effectively yoking together painted representation, collage and the frame itself into a complex little oval. The compression of pictorial space achieved by Cubism is both mimicked and contradicted in Lunney’s eclectic mash-ups of scale, texture and sharply juxtaposed points of view.

Our heads may be spinning but experiments with composition and form don’t carry the urgency they once did. The idea of progress, inherent in the roped-together ascent of the cubist pair, is hardly available to contemporary artists, however unorthodox they may be. These days an artwork is more likely to stand or fall according to its own creed, its own believability; in an epoch without rules there are no more ‘isms’ to construct or deny. Lunney’s painting – his actual use of paint – is sufficient to build his prismatic compositions, but there’s no surfeit, nothing extra to hold your gaze. His use of string, the sense of the visual and the tactility this brings together is more satisfying, and is perhaps indebted to the artist’s background in printmaking.

An artist’s print can operate on one hand as merely a copy of something (a reflection of its own matrix) and on the other as a peculiarly rich markmaking system. In previous work Lunney has harnessed the medium of etching to good effect, nesting starkly black and white images within complicated wooden frameworks. His renderings with coloured pencil and acrylic are less emphatic. They lack the bite of the printed line, its distinctively embossed authority. Ripe with reflections, distortions and a kind of object-based intertextuality, in teasing out your attention these works remain fixated on the modes of attention themselves. This has its merits but I found it frustrating. I longed for something definite – a tension to match the tautness of those strings – but definition is a quality this work seems determined to sidestep.

John Graham is an artist, lecturer and writer based in Dublin. johngraham.ie

‘On the Border Between Time and Loss’ Victoria J. Dean, Niamh O’Doherty and Laura Smith Galway Arts Centre, 22 January – 26 February BOUNDARIES and partitions are staple themes in Irish cultural production. Over the last 100 years the Irish have struggled with the realities of a physical border, alongside metaphysical, social and political divisions. In this centenary year, such themes convey the complexities of our national identity.

The three artists in this exhibition all explore aspects of what borders mean in relation to the passage of time.

On the ground floor of Galway Arts Centre (GAC), Niamh O’Doherty interrogates the experience of time. Her video work The Enlightenment (2016) compares our measurement of time with the passage of time in nature. It was shot on Hrísey Island in Iceland and filmed during two research trips, once during 24 hours of daylight and again in 24 hours of darkness. In this intriguing 12-minute piece, film of a fixed-viewpoint seascape is imposed onto a drawn background, which follows the contours of the panorama but often slips ‘out of register’. We see the video image on screen for a few seconds before, staccato-like, the image flashes to a white background inscribed with errant contour lines, disrupting our expectations.

O’Doherty travelled to Hrísey Island on residency. Set in a narrow fjord just south of the Arctic Circle, the island has 24 hours of daylight in summer, and only two in mid-winter. This flux in the manifestation of time is reflected in Fragments of Landscape (2015), a photographic montage of Hrísey Island from the sea. It is fractured, deconstructed into interlacing segments, but merges together with cubist grace. There is a sense of historical moments intermingling with the present as images proceed unexpectedly from black and white to saturated colour.

Victoria J. Dean’s series of sophisticated photographic works meticulously document familiar structures erected by local authorities along the Irish coastline. Her images reveal a human compulsion to rationalise space and to control the environment. Dean records various examples of seaside architecture – from public lavatories to bus shelters, promenades to leisure areas – highlighting the tensions between nature and encroaching human development. A contested borderline is revealed between nature and human time – a loss of innocence in our engagement with the environment.

According to Dean, “the various fortifications, including urban furniture, encourage us to survey the natural environment from the safety of the manmade, be it from behind a wall, or from a bench”. She provides a contemporary iconography of coastal spaces as borderlands between the elemental and the artificial. Sometimes referencing soviet or military architectural structures, these

photographs also recall Willie Doherty’s disquieting images of Derry-Londonderry in the 1980s. In the series Lifeguard Station I – VI (2012), a forbidding metal container appears as a dominating fortification, existing to defend and command nature. In Signs I –VII (2012) public signage mediates the liminal border between the land and sea, seeming to restrain the inevitabilities of both time and loss.

Laura Smith’s HD video work When All is Said and Done explores time as represented through human memory, traces of past conflicts through personal stories and boundary-making through environment. A local man somewhere on the Ulster border tells of the overnight disappearance of surveillance equipment at a key moment in the peace process. In another sequence, a young woman runs through an immemorial landscape, expressing absolute freedom and fearful escape in her fervent physical action. The video format shifts from full screen to circular frames with poetic nuance as the narrative slides enigmatically from fact to fiction.

Smith creates compelling visual and performative images in her investigations of political and social restrictions, specific to Northern Ireland but still universally relevant. Through a combination of scripted acts, a stunning sequence of fleeting, swirling texts, documentary and foundfootage, the video focuses on histories of forced division and deportation of communities. The meaning of the Troubles in Ireland and its intimate aftermaths become the subtext to this work.

Historical and present-day border conflicts are explored, provoking themes of social disruption and transformation.

At the nucleus of the video is a beautifully presented account of the Diomede Islands in the Bering Strait: two islands situated on either side of the International Date Line, 3.8 km apart, with one island belonging to Russia and the other to the USA. Travel between them is illegal despite the ice bridge that unites them during the winter months. The story of these islands is one of division and conflict caused, and the loss of the islanders’ familial connections and heritage. The Diomede archipelago becomes a metaphor for the fragmentation and rupture that artificial borders can produce.

Responding to this, the works in this exhibition convincingly provide a healing process for these momentous injuries.

Niamh O’Doherty, The Enlightenment, 2016

Victoria J. Dean, installation view, Galway Arts Centre

Áine Phillips is an artist and writer based in Clare. Her current project is a speaking tour of the USA with her new book ‘Performance Art in Ireland: A History’, published by Intellect Books and the Live Art Development Agency, London.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

23

HOW IS IT MADE?

Still from In the Flesh (Slow Tear), filmed on location at the National Museum of Ireland (Collins Barracks), 2015

Still from In the Flesh (Slow Tear), filmed on location at the National Museum of Ireland (Collins Barracks), 2015

Writing That Embodies SUE RAINSFORD DESCRIBES VISUAL ART PROJECTS IN WHICH HER PROCESS-ORIENTED WRITING EXPLORES MATERIALITY AND EMBODIMENT. THE Greek term ekphrasis is defined as ‘a highly descriptive kind of writing’, one that brings the experience of an object to a reader or listener. Its true meaning entails a relaying of not only an object’s physical properties, but the emotional content it engenders. The written work should capture the object so surely that it can be shared by someone who has never held, seen or heard it.

This capacity for embodiment is what I pursue in my writing: presenting a quality that makes the emotive or sensory space of an object or experience available to the reader.

Some years ago I started producing visceral and lyrical pieces for every article I wrote that attempted criticality. These deeply subjective works slowly became my focus: they were self-sufficient, allowed me to write across genres and eventually became texts in their own right. The means by which they achieve some degree of embodiment might be rhythmic, subversive or pointedly aesthetic.

Whenever I write I’m reminded that every body of writing has two strands: the content and the means by which that content came to be. To what extent the latter is embedded in the former is the author’s decision, but I think there’s much to be said for making the connection explicit in writing that can somehow encounter or inhabit visual art.

Conceptual writing is a contentious term, but its assertion of process as primary and integrative provides us with something tangible. It also allows us consider those somatic and symbolic sensations that often evade traditional description.

Essentially, process-oriented writing is better equipped to operate on an experiential level and, in writing about art, this approach sees different mediums speaking to one another in kind. Writing that is exposed to contingency, that shows evidence of having been in the world, can speak better to the malleable materials of art practice.

This is the kind of writing I want to make, a gestural form that bears the weight of its making. The belief that prose can behave in this way is rooted in an enamoured reading of Georges Perec, whose experiment Lieux underscored the materiality implicit to the experience of writing and its ability to forge actual connections to time and place. Not just representations of a time and place, but determinedly concrete links. What does this mean for the art object if writing has the capacity not only to relay and explicate but to embody and induce? Is there a way to write a speculative piece that will allow an encounter outside the physical and temporal parameters of the gallery, exhibition or studio?

Instances where I handled writing – specifically literary fiction – as a malleable form prone to contingency include: Foaming at the

Mouth No. 1 (June 2014); ‘Death In The Afternoon’, Project Arts Centre (July 2014); ‘Grab A Chair’, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh College of Art (May 2015); Foaming at the Mouth No.5 (July 2015); and ‘Phonica: One’ (January 2016). The first step was to recast works of fiction I’d been working on, reproducing fragments of novels and stories, and making handwritten erasure pieces. During the reading itself, I dipped the handwritten texts in water.

This particular treatment entails handling words as disparate entities, and is truthfully a kind of indulgence: it recalls learning how to read and write and admiring a word for its sound and appearance, never mind what it might mean. Sly, for example, holds the curvaceous pleasure of the ‘s’, the height of the ‘l’ matched by the dip of the ‘y’. It can be drawn out in one long hiss.

This is what I’m thinking about when I pull away the drapery of syntax, grammar and exposition, removing words from their learned definitions and displacing the reader or listener’s response. Emotive resonance now comes from counter-intuitive pairings, from a fusing of imagery and rhythm that culminates and declines in accordance to an embedded narrative arc.

All of this is a meandering means of making explicit the risk that writing poses to language – the risk being the reader, the signifier who entails her own set of sprawling connotations within the sensible world. I was also determined to achieve a sense of writing’s implicit materiality without seeming to call for other genres or disciplines: an emphasis on texture and spatiality is not, for example, a melding with performativity. Writing isn’t calling to modes outside of itself when it behaves in this way. By its own nature it is also handling, is also reading aloud, is also pacing the length of a room.

Derrida writes, of The Golden Bowl, that even if its every copy were destroyed it would still exist as an ideal object. That it is ideal in the sense of having been there all along. This makes the writer’s task one of probing discovery rather than authorial invention, but the process is no less rigorous, no less demanding.

In 2015 Bridget O’Gorman asked me to collaborate on her exhibition ‘In The Flesh’ at The LAB (January – April 2016), by writing a script for her new video work, which focuses on the 1916 collection in the museum store at Collins Barracks. Bridget and I worked over a long period of site and studio visits, conversation and correspondence that was followed by a comparatively short and intense writing period. I was writing while she was filming, but I knew the premise: the camera pans around the smooth and maintained cabinets inside the museum store, their surfaces giving up nothing of the deteriorating objects they hold – objects that are never revealed

within the video. This was the role of the script, to function obliquely and give a first person perspective to the razors, hats and flasks that comprise the collection.

The point of entry in writing the script was the overlap between living and inanimate bodies, a connection made by conservationist terminology: within museum studies historical objects are ascribed symptoms, they ‘blister’ and ‘weep’. This language can be ascribed to an object as well as a human body. The common experience of erosion, corrosion and decay was the point most prone to intervention – what Caroline Bergvall would term the ‘minimal point of maximal pressure’.

On a technical level, my question was how to make startling the slow violence being enacted upon these artefacts from both within and without. How would I allude to their auto-destructive tendencies, and the reverberations of these tendencies, for the history they embody? Bridget and I wanted the script infused to a highly visceral degree, a chaotic tactility that defies the measured tranquillity of the museum and the preservative aims undertaken. This called for a fusion of metaphoric and expressive language, an imagistic text that sees rational understanding delayed. In foregoing narration and rational meaning, the content operates at a slow trickle, incrementally revealing its intent and implicating the listener so that, hopefully, the eventual aesthetic impact also includes empathy.

Even now, there comes the popping sound of lead. In the moment of the pop the chiselled droplet of lead has already sliced through the air and the left the story of its arc in bruised skin, in tendril smoke. Heated and propelled, far flung lead that punctured the air like a sheet held taut on the line.

There is a potency available in expressive or hybrid writing, a facet we can draw on when we find conventional language ill-equipped or over-used. Those elements more evasive for the symbolic or somatic spaces they inhabit might resist vocabulary, but can still be expressed, intuited and eventually recognised. The resulting texts needn’t be esoteric or explicitly radical in form, but they must supply something that displaces our rehearsed experience as a reader. In short, space must be left for the other – the reader and listener – to intervene. As Barthes writes in The Pleasure of the Text, there is not, out in front of the text, someone passive, and behind it someone active.

Writing must make appeal to the other, must disallow her passivity and make her implicit in the text’s progression. She must be obliged to ask: What’s happening within the page? And what is happening to me as a result?

Sue Rainsford is a writer and researcher based in Dublin and Vermont. suerainsford.com

24

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

FESTIVAL

Isabel Nolan, There will be time no longer, 2014, LIAF 2015

Dennis McNulty, I reached inside myself through time, 2015, LIAF

Our universe is ending sooner than we thought, scientists say CLAIRE FEELEY REPORTS ON THE EIGHTH EDITION OF THE LOFOTEN INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL, NORWAY.

Kjell Ove Storvik

Isabel Nolan, Soft thinking in tall places, ‘Our Universe is Ending Sooner Than we Thought, Scientists Say’, LIAF 2015

March – April 2016

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

25

FESTIVAL OUR universe is ending sooner than we thought, scientists say, the title for Isabel Nolan’s work for the eighth edition of the Lofoten International Art Festival, is a good place to start when addressing the themes that dominate the central exhibition curated by Matt Packer and Arne Skaug Olsen. ‘Disappearing Acts’ is a show that explores a universe that is in flux, undergoing continuous transformation and intimately linked to human efforts to understand and control it. It is tempting to re-read Nolan’s title not as a declaration of the coming apocalypse but as a personal lament, made by a scientific community, for the impending redundancy of their knowledge in the face of rapid change.

Upon arriving in Lofoten, a cluster of peak-like islands high in the Arctic Circle, it is hard not to be overwhelmed by such dangerous and beautiful expressions of nature. The terror of this vastness, of the immensity of the sea and the sky, forms the backdrop and context for ‘Disappearing Acts’. It also facilitates three historically linked readings of the ‘sublime’: the natural, the technological and the posthuman. Indeed, this archipelago, with its extreme geology and inhospitable climate, conjures up Burke’s notion of a terrifying authority, as well as Kant’s theory that we experience an inner freedom when our minds encounter a force beyond the limits of comprehension.

Anna Ådahl’s Impossible Image (2015) picks up on this visionorientated encounter with the sublime. She presents three views of Lofoten, each of which tempts human perception beyond its limits, evoking technologies that allow us to see further and deeper. The first, and most traditional, presents a showreel of artists’ representations of Lofoten, charting the shift in attitude from romanticism to realism that characterised Norwegian art in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This movement precipitated social theorists such as Christian Krohg to warn us away from idealising nature to depicting ‘things’ as they really are. This ambition towards truthful depiction is taken to task in the second view shown by Ådahl, in which sand from one of the island’s beaches is scrutinised beneath a microscope camera until each grain of sand is so enlarged as to reveal a crystalline, alien structure difficult to reconcile with any idea of ‘beachness’. Completing the triptych is a composite picture of every digitally available image of the island, blended with artistic contrivance until they shimmer with an alluring glow, suggesting that this past 100 years, with all its attendant advances in data capture, has done little to advance our representational approaches.

The compression and expansion of timescales forms the premise for Dennis McNulty’s meditation on immensity. Here, McNulty puts a pin in the present moment, as if to hold it still against the backwash of history and the propulsion towards the future. This horizon of the present is represented on a retrofitted monitor, where a bi-directional timeline emanates from an invisible middle point, before travelling outward beyond the edges of the screen. The timeline, adopted and re-configured from Olaf Stapeldon’s classic 1930s book The First and Last Men, multiplies and shifts scales, representing evolution over two billion years, moving between cultural, historical, geological and finally cosmological time codes. The elasticity of time finds a counterpoint in McNulty’s soundscape, which echoes throughout the exhibition space. Here, an a capella recording of A-ha singer Morten Harket is cut up and reordered to intone the work’s sphinx-like title, I reach inside myself through time, and then played and re-recorded across various sites on the island, including military bunkers, sports halls, dry docks and traffic tunnels. The reflected sound delays time, both figuratively and literally, allowing us a privileged, extended journey through the present moment.

At several points in the exhibition, ‘Disappearing Acts’ alludes to the rapture of technology, where a sense of awe and terror is transferred to factories, war machines and the relentless harvesters of natural resources. This historical trajectory is captured in Katja Novitskova’s Patterns of Activation, a diorama of sorts that recreates the extreme deep-water landscapes in which hydrothermal vents cause bizarre and unearthly enzymes to multiply at a rate of knots. Cutouts of rock formations are intermingled with the images of babies’ cradles, rocking to and fro, watched over by benevolent machines.

The reference here is to the image technologies used in underwater exploration now that these submerged terrains have caught the attention of mining interests, and also to the potential for life suggested by the existence of similar vents on celestial bodies elsewhere in our solar system. The image presented, however, seems oddly dated, and more in line with the ideals of exploration and domination prevalent in centuries past. Perhaps Novitskova’s vision is of a technologi-

Dennis McNulty, I reached inside myself through time, 2015, LIAF

cal endgame, where creating a visual inventory of available resources has become so routine as to be utterly devoid of fascination.

‘Disappearing Acts’ teases out the ways in which artists are beginning to imagine a reality beyond the human. Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni’s Untitled (La Vallée Von Uexküll) (2009 – 2014) demonstrates some of the paradoxes inherent in this endeavour. For this ongoing project, the artists film a setting sun, repeating the process each time as a more advanced, more highly resolvable digital camera comes on the market. Filmed with no lens, the light is registered directly on the sensor and projected on screens as fields of tinted light, each varying imperceptibly in tone and intensity. As a project, it is tempting to envision a technological singularity at some point in the future, where the digital eye will surpass the human, but this notion would do an injustice to the separateness of our vision from that of pure data capture. The way in which an eye ‘sees’ is in no way analogous to the workings of a digital camera; any comparison of the two can only operate on the level of rhetoric. As such, Giraud and Siboni’s project appears as both timely and belated – setting forth a post-human future while also observing art’s failure to offer ways of penetrating it.

Giraud and Siboni’s work is characteristic of the sentiment running through ‘Disappearing Acts’: a sort of ‘disappointment sublime’ or what writer Simon Morley calls a “thwarted transcendence”. Many of the artists appear to be seeking encounters that will take us away from a human-centered worldview, primarily looking at two frontiers: technology and nature. Paradoxically, this project manifests itself as radically materialist, in how we can view and experience it as a collection of art objects in an exhibition. There is a pervading sense for the inadequacy of the human ‘machine’ to exert agency in an arena packed with diverse, indifferent objects that so obviously exceed us. Take for instance Elizabeth Price’s West Hinder (2012), a fantasy in which a cargo of luxury cars acquires collective consciousness after being shipwrecked off the coast of the UK. The cars speak in unison, constructing a language by recoding sales brochure rhetoric towards their own ends. Price’s appropriation of language is less sophisticated here than is typical of her practice, precisely because language isn’t truly displaced. Language simply moves from one field of seduction to another, without us really needing to know anything about the technology itself; purely accepting that it is exalted and that somehow ‘other’ will do.

This leads us back to a perennial issue, the problem of the unrepresentable in art. The exhibition makes reference to Tim Morton’s concept of hyperobjects: “things that are massively distributed in time and space”, such as global warming and plutonium radiation, the “genuinely non-human” in that they are not simply the products of a human gaze. According to Morton, hyperobjects are “so vast, so long lasting that they defy human time and spatial scales”, which connects us back to the preoccupation with perception running through discourses on the sublime – i.e. how can we apprehend things when we only ever see a tiny aspect of them at any one time?

Usefully, this does allow us to engage with the theoretical issues of scale. Ursula Heise has noted that, implicitly or explicitly, the issue of scale underlies many current discourses in the humanities when we think about big data, deep time, the anthropocene, slow violence, species thinking and climate change. And if we look at the landscape of mainstream art practices, we see an attendant pull towards the large scale: Anish Kapoor, Damien Hirst, Ai Weiwei, James Turrell,

etc. It’s as if the ‘great’ art of today must be really really big to hold muster alongside the sheer scale of the environmental-economic problems that we face. It achieves this through a markedly materialist aesthetic – and not one that offers anything beyond an affirmation of the status quo. Is this the culmination of the sublime in art?

The factors incentivising the production of large-scale artworks are widely accepted and equally at play in the islands of Lofoten. The North Norwegian Art Centre established LIAF along the established grounds of place-making, tourist offerings and investment in the tertiary sector in the face of industrial wind-down. However, since its inception, LIAF has been progressive in carving out more and more space for both artists and curators to have direct control over the means and motivations of production, while openly acknowledging that this art event happens in a place where very few people live.

This has set it apart from sister projects such as Skulpurlandskap, a much more costly endeavor featuring strikingly similar permanent outdoor commissions by Kapoor, Gormley and Cragg (and an undeniably beautiful Dan Graham) with a view to using the landscape as a museum for contemporary connoisseurship of art. In its difference to this regime, the curating of ‘Disappearing Acts’ is decidedly brave, insisting that invited artists have enough time to develop new work for the show (for the most part) without the requirement that a material trace be left beyond the knowledge and experience created.

Rather than deploying large-scale permanent art to affirm a place-making agenda, ‘Disappearing Acts’ offers a diverse set of artistic positions from which to approach the representational paradox of addressing an aesthetics of changing nature and technology. Some are poignant in their sheer simplicity. For instance, Jason Dodge’s In Norway, Siri Blomstrand wove yarn the colour of night and the length equaling the distance from the earth to above the weather, where the ‘colour of night’ turns out to be pale sky blue, reminding us of the uncanny wonder of Lofoten’s ‘midnight sun’. Tue Greenfort’s How to make fire is a video presented within an enclosed circular installation of gypsum, where artist, accomplice and child are filmed building a fire from ready-to-hand materials in the artist’s gallery. Others immerse us in psychedelic and schizophrenic narratives. There’s Sam Basu’s The Actual Possibility of Escape, an engrossing and richly rewarding fictional scenography for a real-life meeting between a fugitive Black Panther leader and a fleeing LSD advocate in Algeria. John Donne’s speculative verse on death and change is evoked in Isabel Nolan’s broken funereal flags. And not to forget Roderick Hietbrink’s sleight of hand, where intense emotions such as anger and fear, that do not themselves have physical form, become manifested in objects and experienced as much larger than the human body.

In the opening essay, the curators describe ‘Disappearing Acts’ as marking out “a territory and landscape that is far removed from the scenery outside – the mountains and the sea – but still closely connected to the idea that this place (like all places) is being changed before our eyes through processes that we, the inhabitants of places, have unleashed but lost control over”. The resulting exhibition is a vertiginous fall through a set of artistic worlds that are at once thoughtful and timely, riding on the crest of delirious forces, unhinged phenomena and philosophical insight.

Claire Feeley is curator of Jerusalem. tillwehavebuilt.com Lofoten International Art Festival took place 29 August – 27 September 2015 in Svolvaer, Norway.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

RESIDENCY

Gabriel Beranger, Loughlinstown Dolmen, 1777

David Beattie, The Impossibility of an Island; image courtesy of the artist

Grace Weir, If only something else had happened, 2011; image courtesy of the artist

Lapis Philosophorum

SIAMAK DELZENDEH DISCUSSES THE RESEARCH HE CONDUCTED DURING THE CRITICAL WRITING EXCHANGE RESIDENCY BETWEEN IMMA, DUBLIN AND KOOSHK, TEHRAN. THE critical writers exchange programme between Kooshk in Tehran and IMMA in Dublin was held in two parts: the first over three weeks in Tehran (November 2015) and the second for just under two weeks in Dublin (28 November – 12 December). I was selected as the art critic from Iran, and Anne Mullee and Barry Kehoe as my Irish counterparts. One of the objectives that we initially agreed upon as participants was to aim for a variety of critical responses while being exposed to artworks from both countries.

I established a career as an art critic when I returned home from Canada in 2009. Since then I have published several critiques and reviews of contemporary art exhibitions, as well as analytical essays in prominent art journals in Tehran. For the last three years, I have conducted research on Iranian modernist art and major pictorial shifts in Iranian art history, which will be published as a book in spring of 2016.

During my two-week residency at IMMA, I had the chance to visit different collections of art in prominent art galleries and museums, as well as historic sites, studios and a variety of exhibitions.

One specific theme that drew my attention was the incorporation of stones in different bodies of works from multimedia and conceptual installations to photographic exhibitions. These artistic approaches to the incorporation of stone, with all its symbolic, philosophical and connotative meanings, became the focus of my research in Dublin.

Visiting various historic sites in Ireland, I was fascinated by the dominance of megalithic pieces of stone in shaping the Irish landscape, from the Hill of Tara to the Newgrange, and from the huge tombstones of the Glendalough monasteries to the castles built using monumental applications of stone. Reflecting on the agency of such material, I explored the multiple representations of stone in contemporary and classical artworks.

On the way to Cork, our group stopped at Lismore Castle Arts, where both the enormous Neo-Gothic castle and the exhibition itself stimulated my reflections on stones. ‘Reverse! Pugin’, curated by Sean Lynch, centres around Gabriel Beranger, who, in the second half of the eighteenth century, “made trips around Ireland to sketch megalithic monuments, ruined castles and abandoned monasteries”. One of his drawings, Loughlinstown Dolmen (1777), displayed in the exhibition, is an Irish landscape with a kind of megalithic monument at the centre. Depicted in the image are a group of gentleman standing at leisure, looking at the structure. The gigantic stones overshadow the

whole scene, demonstrating their materiality and scale.

Michele Horrigan’s photographic appropriation of Beranger’s drawing, also on display in the gallery, examine the long-lasting influence and centrality of megalithic stones in shaping Irish landscapes, both in classical and contemporary representations. The whole site of Beranger’s landscape has dramatically changed, yet the monument has remained in almost the same condition over the course of three centuries. It acts as the only connection between the two depictions of this landscape.

While both Beranger and Horrigan’s works are based on representations of real, natural stones, it seems that many contemporary artists have developed their practice by incorporating cast stone into their work. I had a chance to look at the work of David Beattie, currently a resident artist at IMMA, during a group studio visit. Beattie has developed a sort of philosophic approach towards the nature of objects and their connection to time and mind.

In the installation The Impossibility of an Island Beattie continues his interest in the physicality of sound. This work is based on the passing of time and the erosion of material objects, such as a rock-shaped piece of concrete and a cymbal. The cymbal rotates by means of a cable shaft connected to an electric coil near the ceiling.

A sound is produced as long as the cymbal gently bites into the rock.

As the stone is gradually rubbed away, the sound will cease. Beattie explained: “In many of my works I employ rotation to create cycles and loops of constant present, and as part of this I often create a slight disturbance to offer a reminder of imperfection and avoid complete repetition.”

The installation also reflects the disturbing and relentless sounds of our surrounding environment: the kind of sounds one can also imagine while looking at Horrigan’s photographic landscape. At an indexical level, Beattie’s work can be understood as a reference to Ireland’s stone-based heritage – from megalithic monuments to cast-stone castles and monasteries to other contemporary artworks.

Grace Weir’s installation If only something else had happened (2011), which forms part of her retrospective show at IMMA, deals with the process of reasoning and logical deduction. The work is a result of a period of research conducted with Ruth Byrne, a psychologist and professor of cognitive science in Trinity College. Weir incorporates stones into two pieces within this audio, video and conceptual installation. The first “is displayed as a table with stacks of

Michele Horrigan at Lismore Castle Arts

paper held in place with stones,” the exhibition literature notes. The stones look very similar to each other, but differ slightly in terms of darkness and brightness. The possible combinations of A and B are written on each stack of paper. In this work, “subtle differences in the paper types and shapes of stones call into question the logical deductions, when content and context are introduced”. The second piece is an audio work embedded in a cast stone on the floor in which Weir discusses her theory of reasoning with Byrne. They consider the idea of “fault lines”, the aspects of reality that are more readily changed in imaginative thinking.

The exhibition catalogue explains how Weir’s works explores the dynamic of practice and representation, and the levels where identity and time coincide. Considering Weir’s work in the context of my research, I concentrated on the material agency of stone and its relation to practice, representation, time and identity. At an iconological level there are two different types of stone in this project: the small round stones on the table, which appear to be natural, and the cast stone on the floor. Both types could indexically refer to contemporary art practice in Ireland, but symbolically signify time and identity. The fault lines on the round pieces of stone are traces of time that shape identity. Time is irreversible, but identity is something constructed; it is not solid, but open to modification and improvement. Yet David Beattie’s The Impossibility of an Island demonstrates that even cast stone – as a symbol of constructed identity – can be rubbed off by the passage of time. What artists such as Weir, Beattie and Horrigan achieve is the transformation of a cheap material into valuable ideas. It seems that they add something, an imaginary substance similar to lapis philosophorum, to their basic material, letting it vibrate and radiate deep reflections on the connections of time and matter.

The incorporation of stone in Irish contemporary art goes beyond mere the symbolism of identity. The artists I looked at achieved a philosophic contemplation in their practices, giving material agency to the non-material while still dematerialising the heavy bulk of a constructed identity.

Following my residency, I hope to elaborate on this theme in my research by including examples of Iranian contemporary art.

Here, glazed pieces of ceramics will replace the stone used in Irish contemporary art, while the questions relating to practice, time and identity remain relevant. Finally, in response to the residency, I will compose an essay with further examples and analytical details, to be published in both English and Persian. The English version will be printed in the Kooshk annual booklet and the Persian text will hopefully appear in an art journal in Iran in the near future.

Descriptions are cited from the exhibition catalogue, Grace Weir: 3 different nights, recurring, IMMA, 2016.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

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CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Romancing Collaboration RUTH CLINTON AND NIAMH MORIARTY INTRODUCE THEIR COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE.

Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty, Fog Detector (detail), 2014; production shot from ‘Amid the Deepening Shades’, Deer Park Hotel, Howth

Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty, Setting (detail), 2015 (Amharc Fhine Gall X: Transhistorical Terrain, Draíocht); photo by Brian Flanagan

Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty, I am fit and well and at last come into my own (detail), 2015; performance still from Foaming at the Mouth 6, Amsterdam

OUR practice is built out of research, exploration and conversation.

We use performance, video, sound installation and storytelling, along with a detailed research process, to convey visions of transience and resistance.

Throughout our practice there exists a dialogue between the romantic and the pragmatic that is enacted both within the work and through the collaborative process. An in-built criticism develops and informs our activities, through which each decision is carefully deliberated. Working closely with another person can be both encouraging and constructive, enabling us to develop a kind of practiced synchronicity. Collaboration, verging on telepathy, is crucial to all of our endeavours and often lies at the centre of our work, influencing its form and content.

Using our own bodies and our immediate surroundings as a starting point, we engage with local environments, histories and communities in order to open up spaces of renewed reflection. Each exhibition is intended to provoke a parallel sense of adventure and trepidation in sympathy with our own processes.

Written and performed texts have often been the logical conclusion for our work, which is produced through concentrated research and discussion. For our first solo/collaborative endeavour in 2012, we developed an intimate tour over and along Stoneybatter’s culverted rivers, as part of an experimental sound residency at The Joinery, Dublin. We built a device made from corrugated piping that physically connected the reader (ourselves) to four listeners, so that the conduit for listening was evocative of the tunnels below.

Beyond writing texts, a good example of the way in which sharing an artistic practice has shaped the form of our work are the videos and labyrinth made initially for Hilltown Festival in 2013, and later reworked as part of ‘Territory of Strangers’ held at Broadstone Studios in 2014. Using each other as guides we compiled a series of videos that follow an imagined path or labyrinth, retracing the same number of paces and orientation in a selection of anonymous landscapes. The same path was then mapped out using individually painted phosphorescent stones, initially in a large concrete yard in Hilltown and subsequently on the heavily patterned carpet of Broadstone (though the room was kept in pitch darkness for the duration of the exhibition). The videos were paired up and displayed as splitscreen images, making visible the matching paces and changes of direction in each. To make the videos one of us would hold the camera and slowly advance as the other hid behind issuing directions, making sure to stay out of shot. Our presence here was spectral but integral to the success of constructing the images according to the initially agreed upon formula. Once or twice the camera would turn to reveal a double shadow, or in the case of a recording made in a field of long grass, the vague shape of our trampled path.

In 2014 we were invited to contribute to Foaming at the Mouth, the visual art spoken word series curated by Tracy Hanna and Emer Lynch. Composing a performance for this experimental event prompted us to investigate our shared identity as collaborative art-

ists and attempt to reveal how our singular voice might sound out DEPARTMENT OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCES loud. We decided to perform something spoken in unison. CoinciIn consideration of this morning’s flood dently, we came across a long, meandering interview with German warning, we thought you would be relieved to filmmaker Werner Herzog in which he describes a set of Yorkshire learn that books and manuscripts dating from twins who stood trial for a crime of jealous passion. They were inthe early 19th century can absorb between 80separable, spoke almost entirely in unison and were the first people 200% of their original weight in moisture. in Britain permitted to testify together at the same time. Herzog told It seems to us that you will be in a very of their subsequent journey through a mountain in which they were good position in deed should any emergencies eventually, and mistakenly, forever sealed. arise. I was also speaking with a fellow from To construct the text for Foaming at the Mouth we made recordthe subcommittee on dendrology at the Botany ings of ourselves taking turns to tell each other the story of the two Department who assured me that the overgrown Yorkshire sisters. We transcribed an edit of those recordings, includOregon Maple trees that stand behind the Old ing all of the pauses and hesitation noises (‘em’, ‘eh’). This was folLibrary can ingurgitate a disproportionate lowed by a period of intense rehearsal from which we learned by amount of liquid. However, I am unconvinced heart – and in unison – the exact intonation of our original recordthat any such tree would be capable of avertings: the idea being to sound like one voice. We performed it in the ing a great catastrophe in this case basement of historical Dublin pub the Stag’s Head, dressed in similar clothing, to a densely packed room.

For the next Foaming at the Mouth, held in Amsterdam in AuOLD LIBRARY gust 2015, we again told the story of two intensely linked twins. These Don’t talk to me about floods. The flood besisters were aspiring writers who were bound together in a pact of gan in 1801 when we became a legal deposit silence that prevented them from communicating with anyone but library and it continues to this day. The each other. We spoke about the power struggle that took place in shelves heave under the weight of so many their private world of dolls, pulp fictions, addiction and, eventually, words - so many worlds contained in such volcrime. A banner, hung behind us on the stage, read: “I am fit and well ume of volumes. The books, the manuscripts, and at last come into my own”, referring to the words spoken by one the maps, the music, the people, the skin, twin after – as she perceived it – the inevitable demise of her sister. the hair, the clothes, the respiration, the Later in 2014 we made a piece entitled ‘Wound with a Tear’ for perspiration, the pollen, the stone, the the Douglas Hyde’s Gallery 3 project, curated by Michael Hill. Invited stars, the city, the noise. Like a plume from to create an offsite work that would be situated on the campus of a volcano there is a cloud of dust rising up Trinity College, we set about researching the history and current conthrough our central staircase and dispersing dition of the Old Library, the Museum Building and their surroundthroughout the room. What we have here is a ings. For this, we each took a role and corresponded in character via crowded atmosphere in the Greek sense of the email. This process resulted in a series of fictional interdepartmental word (atmós - vapour, smoke; sphaira - globe, memos between the Old Library and the Geology Department that ball). Of course we enjoy the most beautiful participants were invited to read as they followed a prescribed route sunsets as a result. Gazing through one of around the college grounds. Objects were situated in windows and our many fine windows of an evening, from a alcoves along the way, including a series of black and white photoparticular spot in the middle of the shelves, graphs, a short video loop, a misplaced memo from the Botany Deone can admire the deep red glow that appears partment, an hour-long tape recording, a large lightbox painted with to settle over the campus. Wet days are a leather dust and a forgotten piece of rusted machinery. These instaldifferent matter. lations, plus the imagined correspondence between the two Trinity departments, invited the audience to wander through the college and contemplate ideas of conservation and disintegration, pragmaRuth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty, excerpt from ‘Wound with a Tear’, 2014. tism and romanticism, impermanence and stability, bureaucracy and creativity, formalism and empathy.

Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty are currently based at Temple The Library, intoxicated by the dust left behind by countless Bar Gallery and Studios in Dublin. They are also undertaking an tourists, attempts to engage the Geology Building in a deliriously artists’ residence at Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh. melancholic dialogue, only to be met with dispassionate practical ruthandniamh.info advice and ultimately a stern rebuke.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

RESIDENCY

Bridget O’Gorman, A Word Not Spoken Holds Weight; photo by Brian Cregan

Brian Cregan, Enclosure, photographic research and installation; photo by Brian Cregan

Callan Workhouse Union Building; photo by Brian Cregan

Temporary Institute (One): the Bio-Archive led by Vagabond Reviews; research library designed by Lid Architecture; photo by Brian Cregan

The Posture of the Key KATHERINE WAUGH CONTEXTUALISES THE FILM PROGRAMME, ‘THE POSTURE OF THE KEY’, 1 WHICH SHE PRESENTED AS PART OF THE WORKHOUSE UNION PROJECT RESIDENCY IN CALLAN, KILKENNY, CURATED BY ROSIE LYNCH AND HOLLIE KEARNS.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

29

RESIDENCY “The least one can do when filming a place… You need to go there

space called SHUNT, located in old wine cellars under London Bridge

and walk around. Walk around a place or a village three times, and

station. Sylvere and I have been close friends ever since; our mutual

find the right topographic, strategic point. In a way that one may be

interest in Artaud is a constant thread returned to in different guises.

able to see something, but without destroying the mystery of what

Two projects I curated in London (in collaboration with writer

one sees…”2

David Morris) on the artistic legacy of Sylvere’s 1975 New York event Schizo-Culture also drew on Artaudian modes of experimentation.

Jean-Marie Straub

One of these projects in particular helped to initiate discussions with IN 2015 I was one of five artists and curators (along with Ailbhe

Ciaran Smyth of Vagabond Reviews. I invited Smyth to participate

Murphy and Ciaran Smyth of Vagabond Reviews, Bridget O’Gorman,

in one of the ‘Schizo-events’ during the London weekend, which

Deirdre O’Mahony, Brian Cregan and Orlaith Treacy) awarded a resi-

specifically addressed power and institutions in the context of the

dency as part of the admirable Workhouse Union project based in

anti-psychiatry movement. Voyage to Rodez seemed a form of conduit

the old famine workhouse in Callan, curated by Hollie Kearns and

between Sylvere, myself, Vagabond Reviews and the positive ethos

Rosie Lynch. The residencies culminated in a weekend in November

of collaborative research in Callan. Artaud’s life, writing and experi-

where we presented our individual responses. My contribution ‘The

ences with psychiatry fed into many aspects of Workhouse Union

Posture of the Key’ combined a film programme, a presentation by

and had a strong affinity with the Temporary Institute’s research

invited artist Imogen Stidworthy, and discussions with philosophers and artists all emanating from my local research, which was in itself

‘When is an artwork an artwork?’ active research station led by Orlaith Treacy; photo by Brian Cregan

a surprisingly fascinating experience. The feel of Callan was so different to my own hometown of Skibbereen that I felt compelled to capture that strangeness in the films I chose to screen.

framework.

The history of Callan is also a history of power expressed through edicts – the many laws and letters, orders and commands,

In Absentia, an extraordinary film by the Brothers Quay, was in-

punishments announced, even pedagogical rationalities articulated

spired by an exhibition in the Hayward Gallery called Beyond Reason:

through institutions – a history of how language marks and shapes

When sitting on the Norman moat in Callan last summer, a Art and Psychosis (1996 – 1997), which consisted of works from the seemingly natural yet man-made hill with a perfect vista over the Prinzhorn Collection, a collection of artworks and artifacts created

the body and its fate.

expanse of the town, I was struck by how oblivious we can be to the by the inhabitants of mental institutions. The film is dedicated to deep materiality of a history embedded in a landscape (perhaps even “E.H. who lived and wrote to her husband from an asylum”, and has a

and infiltrate our relationship with language, our speech, our abil-

more so now that we are in centenary commemorations mode).

powerful score by Karlheinz Stockhausen whose own mother died in

institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are

We fix various landmarks into established narratives far too an asylum where she had been imprisoned by the Nazis. quickly – in Callan the medieval churches, famine workhouse, nineThe screening of In Absentia (which took place in the old chapel

endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strate-

How does power work on the body today? How does it structure ity to express affects, our rhythms? Foucault noted: “Power is not an

gical situation in a particular society.”3 What strategic situation do we find ourselves embedded in

teenth-century administrative buildings and the very moat I was sit-

of the workhouse) sought to complement Bridget O’Gorman’s film

ting on. The view and the background birdsong brought to mind Too

and research, as it invoked the deeply moving stories of families and amidst the chaos and speed of contemporary life? Two films adlovers separated by the rationality of the brutal regime implemented dressed this subject from contrasting perspectives on language: the

Early Too Late by filmmakers Straub-Huillet, which so strikingly addresses the subject of a landscape’s complicated materiality. Too Early Too Late is about the beginnings of revolutions, the weight of history in a landscape, and, given the upsurge of recent political movements, it also reminds us of the traces in a landscape which might allow us to re-think history – Paris and Egypt in this film but also the potentialities of our own humble Callan. Stealing time in such places reaps unexpected rewards.

When programming a cinematic response I could, of course, have selected shorter contemporary artists’ films chosen to display

by this institution. The workhouse’s very architecture brought its American independent film Frownland, directed by Ronnie Bronpalpable history to bear on O’Gorman’s haunting and haunted short stein, and Fernand Deligny’s Le Moindre Geste (1971). Frownland film A Word Not Spoken Holds Weight, which was installed elsewhere presents one desperate character’s specific battle with the fantasy of articulacy, the impossible dream of some kind of ultimate ‘parrhesia’, in the building.

My central screening of the weekend was another Brothers where truths can be expressed unedited, where the raw edge between Quay film Institute Benjamenta (based on the novel Jakob von Gunten language and power is negotiated with an ever increasing sense of

by Robert Walser), a strangely compelling cinematic unfolding of panic and urgency: to be understood – to feel the boundaries of the the choreography and techniques of institutional control. Walser, a human, a kind of linguistic de-tox. Frownland feels at times like a Swiss born German speaking writer (1878 – 1956) was better known cinematic version of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony – in this case the pro-

appropriate. I have seen too many cleverly curated short film pro-

in his time than Kafka and Walter Benjamin, and his work had a pro- tagonist’s struggles and failures scar his body and composure in each found influence on both these men. Today Walser’s texts, completely tortuous social encounter.

grammes that never really hit the mark with site-specific projects as

re-edited since the 1970s, are regarded as among the most important

embedded and situated as this venture (marked as it is by Kearns and

writings of literary modernism and are seen as creating an important cal educator and social activist admired for his work with the marginalised) is a film which presents autistic challenges to language itlineage up to W.G. Sebald and Peter Handke.

an ‘art world’ response to Callan’s specificity, but I felt this was in-

Lynch’s impressive level of commitment to the local community in the most inclusive sense). It felt necessary to address the particularly intense relationship between subjectivity, power and language that I perceived when engaging with the town, on a different register to a city-based gallery or museum or festival. ‘Cinema alone’, as film writers Serge Daney and Raymond Bellour have argued, felt adequate to the task.

My aspiration was to draw people into the duration and materiality of worlds and lives which in some way responded to the complex intersection of forces through which institutional language,

Le Moindre Geste by Deligny (a friend of Felix Guattari and a radi-

Walser himself entered a training school for servants in Berlin self. Made with the help of Chris Marker and Truffaut, it was screened in 1905, despite his first book having already being published. His in Callan in response to both the transformational work done by the subsequent life and 26-year internment in an asylum are as fascinat- local Camphill community and to guest artist Imogen Stidworthy’s ing as they are tragic. He developed an obsessive relationship with Deligny-inspired art project Balayer – A Map of Sweeping.

The open conversation on power, language, institutions and the the act of writing and invented a completely unique form of microscript calligraphy (echoing In Absentia) that has since been decoded body I ‘immoderated’ on the Saturday afternoon included Imogen and published. To further embed Walser in a Callan context I placed Stidworthy, Aislinn O’Donnell (whose research, writing and activism his Microscripts on display in one of many ‘bio-archives’ created for as a philosopher are unique and invaluable in Ireland) and Vagabond Reviews (whose project for Callan, Temporary Institute One: the BioVagabond Review’s Temporary Institute in the library.

upon the body in Callan, particularly in the nineteenth century. I

The workhouse’s history of incarceration inevitably bled into Archive, provided such an important framing context for the entire many of the films, including Voyage to Rodez, a short 16mm film by weekend).

also wanted the films to resonate with the other residencies and open

my friend, philosopher Sylvere Lotringer. The film is an experimen-

out some of the subjects they engaged with: institutional violence

tal road-movie-like response to the visit Lotringer made years ago to deeply serious research and conviviality, born, not of habit, but of the Rodez Asylum where Antonin Artaud was forcibly held, given valuing otherness, Workhouse Union’s curators collaborated with

power and new forms of ‘governmentality’ (Foucault) were enacted

and pedagogies (Vagabond Reviews); the singularity of the female voice and experience in the workhouse (Bridget O’Gorman); and the borders and ‘outside’ of conventional language as we know it.

The artist Imogen Stidworthy, with whom I had previously worked on my project Schizo-Culture: Cracks in the Street in London, and

In tune with their instinctive cultivation of a potent mix of

ECT over 50 times, and emerged close to death after his treatment un- the great conjuror of hospitality, Etaoin Holahan of Fennelly’s, to der Dr Jacques Latrémoliere. Lotringer confronted Latrémoliere in an finally draw the various research strands together with the local interview during that visit in 1983 (later published and made avail- community in an evening of shared food, more films in Etaoin’s conable to read in the Temporary Institute) and his lifelong fascination verted cinema-shed and a late (and slightly delirious) night of music

displayed an extraordinary depth and commitment to all of these

with Artaud and extensive writing on him culminated in two related and dancing. “Revolution comes in the strangest ways” (David Bowie, productions in 2015: the translation of his book Mad Like Artaud and We Prick You, 1995).

subjects, was invited to present aspects of her practice. The generos-

the completion of the film I co-produced with him on Artaud’s own

ity with which she approached the weekend resonated with a similar

pilgrimage to Ireland, The Man who Disappeared.

whose work – which moves across film, installation and sound – has

and quite unique level of altruism shown by all participants. Lynch

Voyage to Rodez in fact marked my first meeting with Sylvere,

and Kearns have proven particularly adept at fostering such an at-

having been a fan of his writing and publishing with Semiotext(e)

mosphere, which deserves the rare accolade of being (in our present,

for many years. While I was filming him in London in 2008 for The

mostly self-serving cultural conditions), dare I say it, ‘inspirational’.

Art of Time (which I co-directed with Fergus Daly), he invited me to

The films I chose were ones I love and have been deeply affected by, and are films I felt formed very real connections with Callan.

an intimate screening of Voyage to Rodez, which took place in an incredible (and since ‘disappeared’) experimental art and performance

Katherine Waugh is a writer, curator and filmmaker.

Notes 1. From Emily Dickinson’s ‘The Prison Gets to be a Friend’, 1862 2. Jean-Marie Straub, ‘Speaking of revolutions’, interviewed by Céline Condorelli in Paris, 20 October 2010 (http://lux.org.uk/blog/speakingrevolutions-too-early-too-late) 3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, 1978

30

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Donald Teskey, Sidings, 2008; 100 x 120cm, oil on canvas; image courtesy of the artist

Donald Teskey’s studio; image courtesy of the artist

Rooted in the Landscape DONALD TESKEY TALKS TO ALISON PILKINGTON ABOUT HIS CAREER IN PAINTING. Donald Teskey’s work could be described as rooted both physically and psychologically in the Irish Landscape. His paintings are included in many private and public collections both nationally and internationally.

Alison Pilkington : What were the most important elements of your art education in terms of art college, mentorship or other aspects?

Donald Teskey: Art college, definitely. I went to Limerick School of Art and Design (LSAD). The art and design course was new and the school was in transition. We actually moved premises a couple of times before getting to George’s Quay. The studios there had fantastic light with big windows overlooking the river. There was plenty of space for making big paintings.

It was the mid 1970s and I spent my summers working in Canada, stopping off in New York before travelling on to Toronto. New York in the 1970s was amazing; it was the time of Taxi Driver and the streets were full of characters. It was a bit scary and Times Square was full of X-rated cinemas, very seedy, but it was such an experience. I got to visit the Guggenheim, the Met, MoMA and other great galleries several times between 1974 and 1978. Seeing firsthand the major American painters – Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella and so on – fed my desire to paint and to paint big.

We had a range of visiting artists at LSAD. Barrie Cooke had returned from Borneo and had made a series of large immersive paintings based on the rainforest. Charlie Tyrrell also visited. This clash of expressionism and the geometric set up a dichotomy that fuelled my work as a student. After graduating I took a very different approach to making work. I exclusively made drawings and I didn’t return to painting for another 12 years or so.

AP: Career breakthroughs can happen in many ways, perhaps through a particular piece of work, or a gallery exhibition or patron. Could you talk a little about how particular breakthroughs affected your career path?

DT: Shortly after graduating from LSAD the drawings I was making became a series, which developed into quite a strong body of work. I was offered a show at the Lincoln Gallery in Dublin. The Lincoln Gallery was probably the best place for a young artist to show at that time and they already had some really good people showing. I moved to Dublin and I had my first solo show there in 1980. The response to that first show was amazing and set a lot of things in motion. I was selected for the Guinness Peat Aviation awards and various other

things.

The 1980s were actually a very good time to be making art as there was a great deal of corporate investment in the visual arts, lots of new strategies for boosting the arts, and individual collectors and patrons with significant influence. There was ROSC, the Living Art, EVA and more. I got commissions and I also got some part-time teaching hours in the College of Marketing and Design, as it was known then, later to become DIT. In 1982 I managed to get a studio space in the Great Strand Street Visual Art Centre. It had been set it up as a co-operative studio and I think it was the first of its kind in Ireland.

The rent was low, the spaces were good and it was subsidised by the Arts Council. It was the kind of group studio model that set the ball rolling in Dublin, to be followed by Temple Bar Gallery and Studios a couple of years later.

Five of my drawings were selected by New York art critic, author and activist Lucy Lippard for a major show of contemporary Irish art that toured the USA and Canada, beginning in 1985. Her selections favoured work being made during the Troubles and focusing on the political situation in Ireland at that time. The show was organised by Paula McCarthy Panczenko, who had set up the Irish American Arts Exchange. It was important because at that time it was almost impossible for most Irish artists to show in UK galleries as a result of the ongoing IRA bombing campaign in Britain. It would be another 10 years, following the Peace Process, before attitudes changed and Irish art was shown in London again.

I had my first solo show in London in 1996, after taking part in a group show. By that time I was painting again and in 1998 I joined Art First Contemporary Art in Cork Street, London. I also began showing with the Rubicon Gallery Dublin and I continued to show with them for the next 20 years. I moved to the Oliver Sears Gallery in 2013 and that relationship is going well.

AP: What is your studio day like? And could you talk a little bit about your process?

DT: I try to get something done every day. My studio is at home so whatever the day throws at me I nearly always find the time to be in my studio. Ideally I like to work long days and late into the evening. I like to work within the framework of a project, making drawings and paintings around a theme or a place, hopefully realising a body of work which can be exhibited as a whole.

Finding places and subjects that are challenging enough to sustain my attention and producing work that is transformative and meaningful is the ultimate aim of my process. Artist residencies have

been hugely valuable, whether it’s the Ballinglen Arts Foundation or the Albers Foundation. It’s always made sense to me to present work based around a single theme, like the result of a field trip. Ultimately the goal is to take the raw material, the sketches and small studies, and make paintings on a much bigger scale in the studio. I began working en plein air a number of years ago to see if it worked for me; to a certain extent it does, but I’m really a studio painter. Speed and urgency works in the field, while time and patience is what is needed in the studio.

AP: You have a good international profile. How do you feel Irish painting is considered on an international level?

DT: In my experience people respond very well to work by Irish artists.

If an artist’s work is good and the context in which it’s presented is right then it will be received as positively as work from anywhere else.

I’m talking about painting and printmaking specifically within the UK and USA. I also had a great response to my work in Paris when I showed at the CCI in 2013.

I’ve been showing in London for a long time. It was an ambition from early on and when I had my first show there I was over the moon.

I now have representation in the US and my work is gaining traction in New York on a modest level. This has been mostly at art fairs, but it’s great to show there and it means that my work reaches a wide audience.

Interestingly, when I began making prints with Stoney Road Press, I was excited by the collaborative process of working with master technicians, but I wasn’t entirely sure how it would benefit my career. However, printmaking has opened up my work to an American audience, which in turn has led to my paintings being shown and collected there. It’s largely down to working with good people that you can trust, and I think that’s how it is for Irish artists who have created an international presence on whatever level. An artist either lives and works outside of Ireland and builds their career from there or else develops a good working relationship with a gallery in whatever city or country.

AP: What are you working on at the moment?

DT: I spent some time in Sligo during the summer and had a studio in the Model Arts Centre, so I’ve been working on some pieces based on the Sligo landscape and coastline. I have two shows coming up at the end of this year which I’m preparing for, in Art First in London and in the Hunt Museum in Limerick. I’m priming canvases and making plans.

Alison Pilkington is an artist based in Dublin. She completed a practice-based PhD through painting at NCAD and is currently a studio member of Temple Bar Studios, Dublin. donaldteskey.com alisonpilkington.com

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

31

DISCUSSION: PAINTING

Pursuit & Practice BELFAST-BASED ARTISTS DOUGAL MCKENZIE, SUSAN CONNOLLY AND MARK MCGREEVY DISCUSS THEIR PERSPECTIVES ON PAINTING IN THE CITY.

painting exhibited in these spaces.

The MAC has done an awful lot to address this, with shows ranging from Peter Doig, Adrian Ghennie, Richard Gorman, Kevin Henderson, Paddy McCann and of course yourself Susan. It’s like you say Mark, it raises the question of what ‘professionalism’ means as a painter in the North. But it’s never really bothered me. The disadvantage of there not being a big painting gallery scene in Belfast is definitely outweighed by the advantage of what the city provides in the way of studio space. It’s good that we have a vibrant studio scene here: QSS at Bedford Street, Flax, Orchid, Array, Loft Collective, Pollen, Platform, to name just a few.

I think that artists in Belfast get as much out of being part of a studio community here as they do from going out on the gallery scene – the studio is where dialogue is happening, not at the ‘private view’.

There has always been a sense in Belfast that it’s more about the pursuit and practice of painting, but that also raises questions about where you put that painting practice.

Dougal McKenzie’s studio

Mark McGreevy: I agree with you Dougal, when you were talking about there being no ‘official’ style of painting in Belfast. This is one of the most interesting things about the painting that is made here. It’s probably because there is little to no market influence, not that market influence is a bad thing, but you just don’t get different versions of an international style in Belfast.

For a time in Europe it was sludgy greys, greens and browns painted in a physically reductive manner, which you could see taking off in Ireland but not really in Belfast. Maybe the oddball eclectic nature of painting here is seen as a type of provincialism?

Dougal, you also mentioned David Crone. I definitely feel he should be held in much higher regard in both Ireland and Britain. His

Mark McGreevy’s studio

Susan Connolly’s studio

Dougal McKenzie: From my experience, so much of what has

fondly all the visiting artists (most if not all from Belfast: Susan

second half of the twentieth century, but yet there have only been a

happened for painters in Belfast coalesces around the MFA. When I

MacWilliam, Michael Minnis, Lorraine Burrell, Mark Pepper) that

few large exhibitions of his work (I think Banbridge’s F.E. McWilliam

discovered that Alastair MacLennan – who was the MFA course leader

both you and Áine invited down to give artist talks. I know that this

Gallery and Dublin’s Royal Hibernian Academy will be putting

in my time – had been a painting student at Dundee (although I was

was very influential in helping my peers and I to understand that it

something on soon).

coming from Aberdeen), I was interested in how he thought about

was possible to be an artist outside of the college/academic

I do think that there is an upside to the commercial sector. There

painting in relation to performance. I wonder how much the MFA

environment – that there was a professional life beyond Limerick.

is something to look at, objects and things that people have made

affected, and continues to affect, how we see painting in the North, and

When it came to applying for a Masters course there never really was

which aren’t as visually restricted by academic research, or

work easily holds its own with painting from the two islands in the

whether it truly does have any more of an influence than the any other option for me than Belfast.

as impenetrable as the art found in most museums or publicly-funded

undergraduate painting course in Belfast?

art spaces.

As an undergraduate student in Scotland I only knew about the

Mark McGreevy: Is there a culture of painting in Belfast? I don’t really

exciting choice. I very quickly discovered that painters who had come

know. I guess the other question would be is there a culture of painting Susan Connolly: I suppose that leads me to discuss the ‘academic in Ireland, North or South? Would it differ from one province to research’ aspect of painting (mostly because I am currently completing

out of the MFA in the late 1980s and early 1990s had remained in the

another? Why would it differ or what would constitute such a thing?

city, in what was an active arts scene. The interesting painters for me

In Belfast there are certainly serious painters dedicated to their

MFA in Belfast, outside of the London options, and it seemed like an

at that time were (and still are) Paddy McCann, Ronnie Hughes, Michael Minnis and Áine Nic Giolla Coda, so they seemed like one good reason to stay. (Interestingly, these artists are all still teaching painting, at Belfast, Sligo, Galway and Limerick.)

There were also other artists during the 1990s who had gone through the BA or MFA in Belfast, or had studied somewhere else and then returned, like Susan MacWilliam, Darren Murray, Cian Donnelly, Gary Shaw and of course Willie McKeown. There was always a ‘painting scene’ in Belfast, even if the art school seemed to be better known, and maybe still is, for artists who use performance and video.

I have to say that, from an older generation, David Crone, who taught at the art school, was, and remains, the top painter in the North, maybe even in Ireland. During my early years in Belfast this vibrant art scene

a PhD looking at aspects of expanded notions of painting).

I think, overall, it’s important that the painter’s voice is heard and work and managing to make it into the studio whenever possible, but documented. The discipline of painting, not just the act of making that’s where any sense of professionalism ends for 99% of artists in paintings, but also the written and the verbal, forms part of any city. This is the reason why so many people may view artists as contemporary practice as a whole. Painting, with all of its histories, dilettantes, weekenders and part-timers. It’s a reductive attitude that I needs to participate in the growing academic research models and think may be accentuated by the Calvinist perspective that runs platforms that have evolved over the last 15 years. If artists, especially through ALL communities and across the political spectrum in painters, don’t engage in this process then unfortunately painting gets Northern Ireland. Of course this is a bigger societal issue and we’re written about and contextualised only by those who have never or can talking about painting in Belfast at the moment. never fully understand the material process of making, producing and Living as an artist day-to-day in any city has its pros and cons. In adding knowledge to the visual language of our culture.

Belfast it’s relatively inexpensive to rent a space (though not as cheap I believe that this is increasingly under threat from the as you may think). A subsidised studio in the centre of town will be homogenisation of our lives and the value we give the written word around £45 – £110, so, for me, most of the pros for living in Belfast are over the importance of a visual language. Importantly, in Belfast there monetary. We can afford to rent a house and studio and I can manage are supports for artists like myself to pursue this type of research

kept me very much connected to painting and its potential.

a good work/studio balance while still living in a city environment. I inquiry, through Ulster University’s well established and funded could never manage this in Dublin, having to commute to the studio programme.

Susan Connolly: It’s funny really because, for me, having come

from rural Kildare, which I did for a number of years.

through an undergraduate course in Limerick School of Art and

Dougal McKenzie: All of those possible strands to the painter’s Dougal McKenzie: Yes Susan, what you say about painting being a contexts are interesting ones Susan – the academic, the theoretical, the medium-specific discipline at LSAD – although I do remember quite a gallery and so on. I personally have come to the realisation, however,

Design (LSAD), at a time when it was very much an end of era for ‘medium-specificity’ discipline distinction at undergraduate level, the MFA in Belfast offered me the opportunity to explore, experiment and move away from painting. I had very much been doing it in Limerick,

few painting students doing installation, photography and so on – was that the main context I am interested in is, other painters, and what I no bad thing. And it’s still quite like that in Belfast at BA level. This is make of their work, and what they make of my work. I think painters

often wondered why I did this and, now, with some distance, I think it

good because it gives new graduates something to break away from, or make work for other painters. That attitude may be viewed as push in other ways, on an MFA. That’s definitely something I did when reductive and far too insular, but I do feel this strongly.

had to do with stubbornly holding onto ‘painting’ and the challenges

I came to Belfast to begin with.

but I decided to return to painting once I arrived here in Belfast. I have

it offered.

Also, you really have to stick to your own agenda in Belfast, to dig

My decision to come to Belfast was influenced by Áine Nic Giolla

deep when it comes to keeping your profile up as a painter, because,

Coda and yourself, Dougal, when you taught in LSAD. I remember

even though we have a special artist-run scene, you don’t see a lot of

Dougal McKenzie is a painter based at QSS Bedford Street, Belfast, and also lectures in painting at Belfast School of Art. Susan Connolly is an artist, researcher and lecturer based in Belfast.

Mark McGreevy is an artist based in Belfast.

32

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

NORTHERN IRELAND MANAGER

PUBLIC ART ROUNDUP

More Than a Headcount

Public Art

NORTHERN IRELAND MANAGER ROB HILKEN GIVES AN UPDATE FROM THE REGION.

PUBLIC ART COMMISSIONS, SITE-SPECIFIC WORKS, SOCIALLY ENGAGED PRACTICE AND OTHER FORMS OF ART OUTSIDE THE GALLERY. PLANTING A SEED

Ciara Phillips, ‘What we recognise in others’, installation shot, 2016; CCA Derry-Londonderry

Ciara Phillips, ‘What we recognise in others’, installation shot, 2016; ; CCA Derry-Londonderry

IN January, the Saatchi Gallery in London opened its first ever all-

to the fabric of the gallery. A public screen-printing programme,

female exhibition, ‘Champagne Life’. It is disappointing that this is still

which runs for the next five months, will see eight local organisations

so newsworthy, reflecting the very real glass ceiling that exists in the

engage with this traditional technique, which influenced the design

art world. Male artists still dominate commercial galleries and attract

and production of radical political material.

the highest sale prices, of both living and dead artists, by an order of

Platform Arts in Belfast is one of the city’s most dynamic spaces magnitude. Our institutions are equally complicit (although and, uniquely, selects its entire gallery programme from an annual improving), with only 25% of Tate Modern’s solo shows since 2007 open call. ‘Knowledge and other myths’ featured six young and having been awarded to women. exciting artists, Saoirse Wall, Tara McKeon, Kerry Guinan, Avril Reflecting on the gender inequality of the art world in general, it

Corroon, Eimear Walshe and Renée Helèna Browne, and was the

was great to find the public galleries of Northern Ireland leading by

second exhibition curated by this group of frequent collaborators,

example in the first two months of 2016. Exhibitions featured work

who work together as writers, researchers and curators.

from over 30 emerging and established, national and international

Opening the same night as Platform Arts were three solo

women artists, with six of the largest non-profit galleries featuring all-

exhibitions at The MAC. New York-based Helen O’Leary created a

female lineups. A programme of talks accompanied the exhibitions,

sprawling site-specific installation of paintings and painterly sculpture

where gender equality and identity featured prominently in the

using what seem to be scraps of wood and metal but on closer Artists’ names: Carol Anne Connolly, Augustine O’Donoghue inspection reveal themselves to be precious and finely crafted Title of work: Planting a Seed

discourse.

‘She Devil’, held at the Golden Thread Gallery, was the eighth iteration of Stefania Miscetti’s ongoing series of exhibitions, which began in Rome in 2006 and feature female artists producing moving image works. Gallery director and curator Peter Richards curated one half of the exhibition, choosing works for his programme from the previous seven installments, and six female curators were invited to each select a new work for the second programme. Each programme ran for an hour in its own darkened room, allowing the audience to consider each curator’s unique perspective in relation to their selection. The six films selected by the guest curators have been added to the ‘She Devil’ project archive, which comprises over 100 works.

Accompanying the exhibition was a lively discussion with project organisers Stefania Miscetti and Manuela Pacella, with invited speakers Daniel Jewesbury, Emma Campbell and Sara Greavu. Themes such as feminist activism, queer identity and crip theory were

components. Niamh McCann’s varied work included a site-specific Commissioning body: Department of Education and Skills painting, drawings, a new video work and a huge inflating and Date advertised: 16 April 2013 deflating parachute. The work follows an extensive period of research Date sited/carried out: September 2014 – December 2015 into early modernism manifested as in poetic stories that are as multi- Budget: €43,000 layered as they are transdisciplinary. In contrast, American artist Commission type: Per Cent for Art Commission Mariah Garnett offered an intimately personal window into her own Project partners: Irish Seed Savers Association, National Trust and journey to reconnect with her estranged father. Garnett discusses with Woolsthrope Manor UK, Parity Studios UCD and UCD School of Sciher father the film, made by the BBC about him in the early 1970s, that ence forced him to leave Belfast. The dual channel video installation, text Brief description: Planting a Seed was a yearlong Per Cent for Art and second video documentary are the beginnings of an ongoing body commission created for Coláiste Íde and Iosef Community College of work that weaves documentary with experimental filmmaking and in Abbeyfeale, County Limerick. The project was a collaboration between artists Augustine O’Donoghue and Carol Anne Connolly. The fact with fiction.

Lastly, VAI held a two-day event in partnership with Belfast project aimed to link the school to a broader community through Exposed that included a talk on working with curators and galleries by a series of creative engagements that investigated ideas and encourMary Cremin (curator, Tulca, 2015) and one on online marketing by aged thought and discussion on education, art and science. Artworks

explored, moving on to a more general conversation about the Berlin-based art critic and journalist Nadja Sayej. The second day saw for the commission were made with the participation of students, difficulty of finding opportunities for contemporary artists working 11 curators from across Ireland join us for a speed curating event, the teachers and the local public. A diverse and thought-provoking with moving image and the role of the gallery in that process. It was first outside of the annual VAI Get Together. Over 90 artists took part programme of events and workshops were developed for students, noted that Golden Thread has one of the richest programmes of both moving image works and works by female artists in the country.

over the two days and were welcomed to the gallery by curator Ciara forging partnerships with the National Trust, Irish Seed Savers AssoHickey, who introduced exhibitions by the internationally renowned ciation, UCD Art in Science programme and UCD School of Science.

Millennium Court Arts Centre in Portadown during December and

Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen and emerging talent Ruby A unique element of the project was the donation of apple seeds by Wallis, who is part of the gallery’s first Belfast Exposed Futures the National Trust UK from Isaac Newton’s infamous 400 year old

January and culminated in a symposium on the themes of the

programme.

exhibition: materiality, technology, consciousness and memory. Matt Packer (Director, CCA Derry-Londonderry) introduced the symposium

Sara Greavu, Curator of Public Programmes at CCA Derry- colnshire. The trees will be grown in a heritage Irish apple orchard Londonderry, said: “It’s great, of course, to see some new names on the school grounds which was planted as part of the project.

and chaired a panel discussion with the artist and speakers Rachel

showing in these spaces and to see more women getting these

O’Dwyer and Tina Kinsella, which focused on the influence of both

opportunities. I think it has to be more than just a headcount though,

immaterial networks and psychoanalytic theory on contemporary

so, from my own perspective, it’s interesting to also see these artists STREET LINE CRITICS ON TOUR producing complex projects that are addressing – sometimes explicitly Artists’ names: Street Line Critics

The exhibition ‘Exhuming the Archive’, by Jiann Hughes, ran at

artistic practice.

Flower of Kent apple tree from his estate in Woolsthrope Manor, Lin-

the first solo show in UK or Ireland by Ciara Phillips since her Turner

and sometimes more obliquely – gendered questions around a range Title: Street Line Critics on Tour of subjects including precarity, queer histories, and posthuman Commissioning body: These Animals, Pixelache Helsinki

Prize nomination in 2014. Her immersive site-specific print installation

futures.”

‘What we recognise in others’, at CCA Derry-Londonderry, was

included works on paper and fabric as well as imagery directly applied

rob@visualartists-ni.org

Date advertised: July 2015 Date sited/carried out: 24 – 27 September 2015

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

33

PUBLIC ART ROUNDUP

Public Art

artist Fionnuala Halpin to develop a piece that would incorporate all the aspects of the North Strand area and communities, spanning across all of the seminal moments in history through the centuries from the arrival of the vikings to the modern issues faced by the community today.

In late June 2015 with the support of the Croke Park Community Fund, the plan was put into action. With an extended group of youth people from Swan Youth Service along with a host of local artist volunteers, the group spent an entire week for often 12 hours a day, transferring the ideas developed from their workings on paper to the paint on the wall that you see today. The result of their successful collaboration spans the wall of the Garden of Remembrance on the North Strand Road. artist in residence programme (2013 – 2015).

Commission type: Artist-in-residence programme Project Partners: Temple Street Children’s University Hospital and

BUSKERS

Cork University Hospital Brief description: ‘Cloudlands’ will tour arts venues and hospitals across Ireland in 2016. Themes of alternate realities, escape and hidden stories are revealed through two distinct pieces of artwork, developed by artists Rachel Tynan and Eszter Némethi with teenagers in Temple Street Children’s Hospital and Cork University Hospital.

The Titans, developed by artist Rachel Tynan and the teenagers, is an interactive installation formed through a family of beautiful Budget: €500 Commission type: Self-initiated project Project partners: Culture Ireland, Helsinki Transport System, Aalto University Brief description: Street Line Critics are a network of writers who express their thoughts, experiences and insights about particular urban places and city routes using chalk. Led by artist Lotte Bender, the group opens up the streets with their impermanent monuments of/to the everyday, and map out in words the way in which a city is lived, walked, worked and used. In July 2015 Street Line Critics were invited to bring their method to Helsinki. They gathered questions, dreams and creative expressions about Helsinki from its collaborators in Ireland.

They invited passersby in Kulosaari metro tunnel to respond by writing urban poetry, creating a dialogue between places and cultures. Together they explored how the reality of one place can be fluid, depending on the information given and the person experienc-

wooden figures. As the figures are moved into different combinations, they reveal sound recordings of the teenagers’ stories, from a Star Lady who heals, to a transforming, cheeky Faun. The Titans will tour to arts venues.

Radio/Silence, developed by artist Eszter Némethi and teenagers in Cork University Hospital, is an interactive radio game that alters the hospital environment for the listener. Using mobile phones, listeners can help the characters save the world from an evil doctor intent on spreading silence. This piece will tour to teenagers in hospital and will also be available to access through participating galleries in documentary form.

The ‘Cloudlands’ project was developed by Helium Arts as an

nent monument for the passerby.

Title of work: Buskers Commissioning body: Cork City Library

artist residency programme connecting artists with teenagers in Date sited/carried out: April 2016 hospital through collaborative projects. The project has been specifi- Commission type: Self-initiated project cally designed for teenagers who have to endure long hospital stays,

Project partners: Cork Libraries

often in wards with much younger children and with little creative

Brief description: Over several months, photographer Azem Ko-

stimulation.

leci took pictures of the street artists, musicians and performers that busk in the centre of Cork and “give so much buzz to city”. Around

ing it. This is done in the form of play, acted out and documented through chalk, becoming an immediate action but also an imperma-

Artist’s name: Azem Koleci

20 photographs will be on display at Cork City Library during April DO YOU KNOW THE FIVE LAMPS?

2016. These were previously exhibited at Longford Row Cafe and Music Store. All profits from sales will go to charity.

CLOUDLANDS

FLOWER SPRIG

Artists’ names: Fionnuala Halpin, Eoghan Cleary and Swan Youth Services North Strand Title of work: Do You Know the Five Lamps?

Commissioning body: Marino College, Swan Youth services Date sited/carried out: July 2015 Artists’ names: Rachel Tynan and Eszter Némethi Title of work: ‘Cloudlands’ Commissioning body: Helium Arts Date advertised: 2012 (as an artists-in-residence programme) Date sited/carried out: ‘Cloudlands’ project: 2013 – 2015; ‘Cloudlands’ national tour: March – June 2016 Budget: The Cloudlands national tour received an Arts Council of Ireland Touring and Dissemination of Work Award of €16,400, while the Cloudlands project was funded as part of Helium’s hospital-based

Budget: €1000 Commission type: Community project Project partners: Croke Park Community Fund Brief description: Do You Know the Five Lamps? mural was a project initiated by Eoghan Cleary and the young people of Swan Youth Services in the North East Inner City. When Roisin Lonergan came to

Artist’s name: Lynda Christian Title of work: Flower Sprig Commissioning body: Conventhill Shopping Centre, Killaloe, County Clare Date advertised: Proposed by artist Date sited: December 2015 Budget: €500

them with a space beside Marino College they leapt at the opportu-

Brief description: Christian’s flowers are made from tin cans, riv-

nity to create a piece of mural art in such a prominent and central

eted together and painted in enamel paints. The stems are metal rods

location within their local community.

that were bent and twisted together by hand. At its widest point it is

The young group collaborated for over six months with local

about 10 feet long by 6 feet.

34

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

OPPORTUNITIES

Opportunities Linocut and Lino Etching (NEW!):

COMMISSIONS CARLOW ARTS FESTIVAL Carlow Arts Festival, in collaboration with Carlow County Council Arts Office, is holding an open call for proposals for the 2016 festival programme. There are three individual commissions available to either make or site existing work, with €2000 bursaries available for the production and presentation of the work.

Selected proposals will be presented as part of the broader visual-arts programme for Carlow Arts Festival.

Deadline 5pm, Friday 11 March Web carlowartsfestival.com/open-commission-call

SUBMISSIONS / OPEN CALLS CURIOS ABOUT, DUBLIN ART COLUMN Each week, the column Curios About features a single work by a Dublin-based artist on the Dublin Inquirer and The Square in the Circle websites. If you would like your artwork to be considered for inclusion, please complete the online form.

Web squareinthecircle.com dublininquirer.com Email thesquareinthecircle@gmail.com

COURSES / WORKSHOPS / TRAINING CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITURE IN ENCAUSTIC This step-by-step instruction (which takes place 11 – 13 March, 10am – 6pm) will show you how to approach a portrait or figure from the initial drawing to the final highlights. The tutor will demonstrate how to use the hot palette to create luminous skin tones, how to accurately draw the head, how to interpret light, halftone and shadow, and how to paint features. She will also demonstrate the use of water-based encaustic paint as one of the final steps in portrait painting.

Cost: €300.

Email artforlife@live.ie Web loramurphypaintings.com ADULT EDUCATION, CORK PRINTMAKERS Cork Printmakers host a series of courses in adult education held throughout the week. Weekend and day courses: Paper Making and Casting; Saturday – Sunday, 12 –13 March; cost: €190. An Introduction to Printed Textiles: Saturday – Sunday, 9 – 10 April; cost: €195. Relief Printmaking

Saturday – Sunday; 23 – 24 April; cost: €180. Bookbinding for Artists and Designers: Saturday 7 May; cost: €95.

Photopolymer Printmaking: Saturday – Sunday, 26 – 27 May; cost: €200. WaterBased Photo Screen Printing: Saturday – Sunday, 11– 12 June; cost: €195. Night and Morning Courses: Water-Based Photo

Screen

Printing

(NEW!):

Wednesday mornings from 24 February for 6 weeks; cost: €245. Water-Based Photo Screen Printing (NEW!); Tuesday

health or social care backgrounds. Cost:

Print Block, The Donnelly Centre, Cork

nine-day drawing masterclass with Arno

€110.

Email

Street, Dublin 8

Kramer (14 – 22 May). Fee includes tui-

childrenstheraphycentre@gmail.com Web

DRAWING CLASSES, KILDARE TOWN

tion, accommodation, food, collection/

childrenstherapycentre.ie Telephone

delivery to Ballina by bus or train, full Marta use of the foundation’s art reference Golubowska for drawing classes in library plus studios and Ballinglen faciliJoin

professional

artist

Kildare Town. Classes cater for both

0876488149 Address

beginners and more experienced artists

Parish Centre, Leixlip, Co. Kildare

and more. Small groups and a relaxed

DIGITAL MEDIA SKILLS

atmosphere.

Email

and incorporate still life, blind drawing

Fire Station Artists’ Studios Digital Media Skills Programme will focus on film/

fourhandsart@gmail.com Telephone

video for the spring, with further courses

0871259596

in publication design, video editing and

ties. Cost: €1513.

Email baf@iol.ie Web ballinglenartsfoundation.org

FUNDING/AWARDS/ BURSARIES ARTIST IN THE COMMUNITY SCHEME

sound design later in the year. Artist’s

LIFE DRAWING AT A4 STUDIOS

Twice yearly, the Arts Council of Ireland

Talk with Clare Langan: 31 March, 5pm

Eimhin McNamara’s life-drawing classes

offers grants to enable artists and com-

– 6.30pm; artist/filmmaker Clare Langan

are back for 2016. There are two course

munities of place or interest to collabo-

will present on her work, methods and

options (taught and self-directed) at this

rate on projects. Managed by Create, the

role as film director; cost: free. Artist as

time, with any and all skill levels wel-

scheme is open to artists working in any

Producer: 15 April, 10am – 5pm; director

come. Courses take place Wednesdays

of the following disciplines: architecture,

and producer Tadgh O’Sullivan will dis-

7pm – 9pm. Taught #1, 3 February – 9

circus, street art and spectacle, dance,

corkprintmakers.ie Telephone

cuss the fundamental principles and March. Self-directed #1, 16 March – 20 methods of working as a producer and April. Taught #2, 27 April – 2 June. Self-

film, literature (Gaeilge and English),

0214322422 Address

producing your film/video projects; cost: €40. Publication/Catalogue Design with

directed #2, 9 June – 13 July. Cost: one

ditional arts. The aim of the scheme is to

class, €10; six classes, €50.

Web

promote

evenings from 5 April for 6 weeks; cost: €245. Collography and Mixed Media: Tuesday evenings from 4 April for 4 weeks; cost: €185.

Email info@corkprintmakers.ie Web

music, opera, theatre, visual arts and trameaningful

collaboration

Cork Printmakers, Wandesford Quay

David Joyce and Oonagh Young: TBC

a4soundsshop.org/products/learn Address

interest and artists. It is therefore essen-

MALAKTA FOTOLAB

pants; cost: €60. HD video coloring, fin-

FotoLab (30 June – 3 July 2016) is an

ishing and grading with Michael Higgins

A4 Studios & Gallery, St Joseph’s Parade,

the artist and the community group, so

off Upper Dorset Street, Dublin 1

that both parties are involved in deci-

the opportunity to explore photography

FCP X with Guy Robbins: TBC November;

May; 1.5-day workshop with 10 partici-

international gathering for photogra- of EMG Post Production Studios: 14 phers and artists that gives participants October; cost: TBC. Video editing with through hands-on collaboration and 1.5-day workshop with 10 participants; experimentation in an open and inspir- cost: €60.

Web ing atmosphere. Over four days, photofirestation.ie/skills graphic artists Darn Thorn (IE) and Patricia Rodas (FI) will lead a number of tests

considering

a

contemporary

approach to landscape photography, with a particular focus on film-based work. The lab will be held at the end of June to take advantage of the light and midnight sun in Finland. Cost: €150 plus €50 for materials. €15 per night for accommodation.

Deadline 11 March 2016 Email annika@malakta.fi Web malakta.fi Telephone 0035 8451894450 Address

betweens communities of place and/or tial that consultation take place between

sions relating to the nature of the project, ETCHING: GREENER METHODS

with group ownership of the art main-

Etching – Greener Method with Vincent

tained at every stage. The project realisa-

Sheridan: weekend workshop, 5 – 6 March; five participants max.; cost: €200

tion may result in a variety of outcomes.

Deadlines

(including materials). Etching – Colour

Round 1, Monday 14 March;

with Colin Martin: Thursdays 31 March

Round 2, Monday 27 June Email

LIMERICK PRINTMAKERS

– 5 May, 6.30pm – 9.30pm, Saturday 6

Limerick Printmakers will host several

March, 10am – 5pm; seven participants

workshops in March. Photo Etching

max.; cost: €285 (including materials).

support@create-ireland.ie Web

Intensive Weekend: 5 – 6 March, 10am –

Photo Etching with Janine Davidson: create-ireland.ie 5pm; cost: €150. Intro to Letterpress: 26 midweek workshop; 16 – 17 March; six March, 10am – 6pm; cost: €80. Prices for participants max.; cost: €200 (including all courses include materials (ink, paper,

materials). Bookbinding with Caroline

newsprint

Byrne: Saturday 9 April, 10am – 5pm; six

etc.).

Students/seniors/

RESIDENCIES

participants max.; cost: €95 (including

CITIZEN ART AT STUDIO 468

materials).

Contact

Studio 468/Common Ground invite proThe studio is available for between six

061311806

Hazel Burke (General Manager) Email

high-quality, rent-free, non-residential

PRINT BLOCK

info@print.ie Web

unwaged receive a 10% discount.

Web limerickprintmakers.com Telephone

Introduction

to

Textile

posals from artists and/or communities. months and two years. Studio 468 is a studio with 24-hour access 7 days a week.

Printing print.ie Techniques: Tuesdays, 4 – 25 April, 6pm Telephone

Heating, lighting and internet access are

016773629

Ground invited Dr Aislinn O’Donnell to

Art Factory, Malakta, Malax, Finland

– 9pm; and Saturday 30 April, 10.30am –

INTRODUCTION TO ART THERAPY

and more to get you started with textile

4pm. This course covers all of the basics

respond to studio 468 and the art pracCREATIVE SPARK DUNDALK

This experiential one-day workshop and printing. Topics covered include block Creative Spark, Dundalk hold workshops training course introduces participants printing, screen printing with paper in Clay Figure Modelling and Mould to art therapy as a form of psychotherapy stencils, screen printing with photosensi- Making: 12–13 March; cost: €190; and and includes a brief history and overview tive screens, colour mixing and fixing of the art therapy profession, experien- and caring for printed fabrics. The course

tial activities, links to casework exam- will equip you with a good understandples, debriefing, discussion and explora- ing of the processes involved, which can tion of further training options. This even be adapted for the home. Suitable includes a Level 8 Principles of Art for beginners. Price includes basic supply Therapy Certificate and the Level 9 materials. There are six places available Master of Arts in Art Therapy. The work- on the course. Cost: €210. shop is suitable for those who want to Web experience the therapeutic power of art, printblock.ie and for professionals from arts and Address

included. In 2015, studio 468/Common

Sewing Machine Embroidery: Saturday 9 April; cost: €80.

Email

tices that emerged.

Deadline 5pm, Monday 14 March Email info@commonground.ie Web commonground.ie

hello@creativespark.ie Web

facebook.com/studio468 Telephone

creativespark.ie/programmes/calendar Telephone

017078766 Address

0429385720

Studio 468, St Andrew’s Community Centre, 468 South Circular Road, Rialto,

DRAWING MASTERCLASS The Ballinglen Arts Foundation hold a

Dublin 8

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2016

35

VISUAL ARTISTS IRELAND operates a wide range of professional development training events throughout the year. The delivery of this programme is greatly supported by our relationship with local and international visual art professionals and partner organisations throughout the island of Ireland.

Visual Artist Ireland works in partnership with local authorities, visual arts venues and others, combining resources to support the professional development of visual artists at regional level.

ROI Spring and Onward 2016

Dublin City

Dates and further details on the following topics will be announced on the VAI website. Funding from Dublin City Council supports our Dublin training.

HANDLING, TRANSPORT AND STORAGE OF YOUR ART WORKS WITH MAURICE WARD @

@Visual Artists Ireland, Dame Court, D2. Date TBC. 10.30 – 16.30. Cost: €40/20 (VAI members).

Cost: €40/20 (VAI members).

forward to working with the Bealtaine Festival in May through talks supporting mature artists and their practices. Talks will look at: legacy planning for visual artists; tax and pension entitlements for artists over 65; mental health and life balance in older age; and an artist keynote. Places: 20 – 30. Cost: €10/5 (VAI and Bealtaine members).

WORKING WITH DIGITAL IMAGES WITH TIM DURHAM @Visual Artists Ireland, Dame Court, D2.

Thu 16. Jun (10.00 – 16.00). Places: 10. Cost: €60/30 (VAI members).

DOCUMENTING YOUR WORK WITH TIM DURHAM @Visual Artists Ireland, Dame Court, D2.

Thu 14 Sept (10.00 – 17.00). Places: 10. Cost: €60/30 (VAI members).

CHILD PROTECTION AWARENESS TRAINING WITH TOM KENT @Visual Artists Ireland, Dame Court, D2. Sat 17 Sept (10.30 – 15.30). Places: 10 – 20.

Cost: €20/10 (VAI members).

VAI & RDS VISUAL ARTS AWARDS CAFÉ @RDS, Ballsbridge, D4. Wed 26 Oct (11.00 – 16.00). In partnership with the RDS Visual Arts Awards. With talks from a previous Taylor Award artist and a curator from the 2016 selection panel. Places: 30 – 40. Cost: €10/5 (VAI members).

WRITING ABOUT YOUR WORK WITH JOANNE LAWS @Visual Artists Ireland, Dame Court, D2.

Spring date TBC. Places: 10. Cost: €60/30 (VAI members). Venue: Visual Artists Ireland, Dublin 2.

TOURING EXHIBITIONS @Visual Artists Ireland, Dame Court, D2. A series of presentations and case studies of successful touring visual art exhibitions.

Places: 20+. FREE VAI members /€5 non-members LEGAL ADVICE CLINICS FOR VISUAL ARTISTS In partnership with the Design & Crafts Council of Ireland.

PRESENTATION SKILLS FOR VISUAL ARTISTS WITH ANDREA AINSWORTH In association with the Abbey Theatre. @Visual Artists Ireland, Dame Court, D2. Date TBC (10.30 – 16.30). Cost: €40/20 (VAI members).

HEALTH & SAFETY FOR VISUAL ARTISTS

HEALTH & SAFETY FOR VISUAL ARTISTS

intention? The event will delve into artistic

DEVELOPING CREATIVE PROPOSALS WITH In partnership with Clare County Council. @Venue intention, production processes, distribution ANNETTE MOLONEY @Visual Artists Ireland, TBC. TBC Jun (12.00 – 18.00). Places: 15 – 20. Cost: channels, funding opportunities, support networks, the role of luck as well as the shortcomings Dame Court, D2. Date TBC (10.30 – 16.30). Cost: €20/10 (VAI members). €40/20 (VAI members).

VAI ARTISTS’ CAFES AND ‘SHOW & TELL’ (10.30 – 15.00). Places: 18 – 20. Cost: €30/15 (VAI DATES FOR YOUR DIARY members).

Foley St, Dublin 1. Thu 26 May (all day). We look

teamed up to facilitate a conversation about an ever-

CHILD PROTECTION AWARENESS TRAINING expanding medium. What defines a moving image MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA FOR VISUAL WITH TOM KENT @Venue TBC. In partnership with as an artist film rather than a commercial film and ARTISTS WITH AOIFE DWYER @Visual Artists Clare County Council. Sat 10 Sept (10.30 – 15.30). vice versa? Is it down to dichotomies like those of scale, budget and narrative? Or is it simply personal Ireland, Dame Court, D2. Date TBC (10.30 – 16.30). Places: 15 – 20. Cost: €20/10 (VAI members).

Visual Artists Ireland, Dame Court, D2. Thu 21 Apr

VAI & BEALTAINE SEMINAR EVENT @The LAB,

Clare

VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFÉ & SHOW & TELL

In association with DLArtNet, Dun Laoghaire. Sat 30 Apr, DLArtNet, Dun Laoghaire. VAI has scheduled the above dates for Café events during 2016 and invites interested artists groups, venues or partners to get in touch to express interest in hosting a Café.

Email: monica@visualartists.ie. Fri 3 Jun, Sat 3 Sept, Fri 28 Oct, Sat 3 Dec.

Fingal POSITIONING & NETWORKING YOUR PRACTICE @Malahide Visitors Centre, Malahide Castle. In partnership with Fingal Arts. 5/6 May (10.00 – 16.30).

Cost: €20/10 (VAI members).

COSTING, PRICING & BUDGETING FOR YOUR WORK WITH ANNETTE MOLONEY In partnership with Fingal Arts. @Malahide Visitors Centre, Malahide Castle. 22/23 Sept (10.00 – 16.30). Cost: €20/10 (Fingal artists).

Laois DOCUMENTING YOUR WORK WITH VERONICA NICHOLSON In partnership with Dunamaise Arts Centre. @Dunamaise Arts Centre, Portlaoise. Fri 13 May (10.00 – 16.30). Places: 10. Cost: €40/20 (VAI members).

Cavan WRITING ABOUT YOUR WORK WITH JOANNE LAWS In partnership with Cavan County Council and Town Hall Cavan. @Town Hall, Cavan Town. Date TBC (10.00 – 16.30). Places: 10 – 12. Cost: €40/20 (VAI members).

COSTING & PRICING YOUR WORK WITH PATRICIA CLYNE-KELLY In partnership with Cavan County Council ND Town Hall Cavan. @Town Hall, Cavan Town. Date TBC (10.00 – 16.30). Places: 12 – 14. Cost:

associated with the form.

Fees VAI members receive preferential discount of 50% on fees for all VAI, Training and Professional Development events. Fees range from €€€5 – €40 for VAI members.

Tell us about your training needs!

If you are interested in training please do get in touch with us directly or forward an expression of interest in a topic/s through the Professional Development Training web page. We often repeat workshops when there is a strong demand for a topic.

Artist & Tutors Panel Visual Artists Ireland has an ongoing open submission process for artists and arts professionals interested in being part of an available panel of tutors contributing to the VAI Professional Development Training Programme. For details go to our training registration page and click on Register for the PDT Artists’ Panel.

BOOKINGS/INFORMATION Monica Flynn Professional Development Officer Visual Artists Ireland T: 01 672 9488 E: monica@visualartists.ie

visualartists.ie/professional-development VAI members receive preferential discount of 50% on fees for all VAI, Training and Professional Development events. Fees range from €5 – 40 for VAI members.

NI Bangor PROJECT CLINIC WITH ANNETTE MOLONEY @ North Down Museum, Bangor. Sat 12 Mar (12.00 – 17.00). Building on November’s proposal writing workshop, the clinic allows you to get expert feedback on artist statements to artist CVs, project proposals to funding applications. Note: All written work must be sent two weeks in advance to allow for the best possible support.

PRICING YOUR WORK WITH PATRICIA CLYNE KELLY @Venue TBC, Bangor. Sat 9 Apr (13.00 – 17.00). Whether submitting commission proposals, working to project budgets or selling your work, it is essential to know how to price your work to both cover the cost and to fund research and developments during quieter times. The workshop will look at basic financial accounting, developing a day rate for your work as an artist, building in ongoing overheads into your costings for projects

€40/20 (VAI members).

and work. Please bring a pen and paper!

ARTISTS’ BOOKS WORKSHOP WITH READ THAT

Belfast

IMAGE In partnership with Cavan County Council and Town Hall Cavan. @Town Hall, Cavan Town. Date TBC (10.00 – 16.30). Places: 12 – 14. Cost: €40/20 (VAI members).

CINEMA OR GALLERY – ARTIST FILMMAKERS BETWEEN TWO PATHWAYS? @PS2 Gallery, Belfast.

Mon 14 Mar (18.00 – 20.00). VAI and PS2 have

REFLECTIVE WRITING WORKSHOP @Belfast Exposed Photography Gallery. Sat 16 Apr, 30 Apr, 14 May (15.00 – 17.00). As artists are required more and more to articulate the underpinnings of their work, writing has become increasingly essential. Over three sessions this workshop will engage with reflective writing as a way of exploring new perspectives on your work. Through presentations, readings of artists’ writings, discussions and group feedback sessions, it will aim to give you the inspiration, confidence and tools to start writing, whether it be for inspirational, promotional or conceptual purposes. The workshop is open to all visual artists curious about the form, and those new to writing are particularly welcome. Three sessions: £30 (VAI members) / £60 (non-members).

INTRODUCING EAST BELFAST @Strand Arts Centre, Belfast. Tue 26 Apr (13.00 – 17.00). This networking and information event will provide an excellent opportunity to learn more about visual arts exhibition spaces, studios, resources and collectives in East Belfast, as well as giving you the chance to meet other artists and arts organisations in an informal setting. The afternoon will include a ‘Show & Tell’ with up to 10 artists talking about their work in five minute bursts, and a chance to relax and chat over some refreshments. If you are interested in taking part in the ‘Show & Tell’, please contact Rob Hilken at rob@visualartists-ni.org.

Derry-Londonderry DOCUMENTING YOUR WORK WITH SIMON MILLS @VOID Gallery, Derry-Londonderry. Sat 5 Mar (13.00 – 16.00). Good quality documentation of your work can make all the difference to exhibition proposals, funding applications, curator visits and promotional materials. Professional photographer Simon Mills documents exhibitions for The MAC, works on Freckle magazine and was a founding member of online visual arts magazine Collected.

BOOKINGS/INFORMATION Rob Hilken, Northern Ireland Manager E: rob@visualartists-ni.org

NEW PROJECTORS AT VAI! VAI will soon have a new Infocus IN124STA short throw projector for rent.

The InFocus IN124STa combines short throw, high brightness and networking, making it perfect for situations where the space to project is tight.

See visualartists.ie for details and prices.