Visual Artists' News Sheet - 2016 November December

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet ISSUE 6 November – December 2016 Published by Visual Artists Ireland Ealaíontóirí Radharcacha Éire

Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones, The Touching Contract, 2016; performed by Deirdre Murphy; photo by Miriam O’Connor

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Editorial

November – December 2016

Contents Cover. Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones, The Touching Contract, 2016; photo by Miriam O’Connor.

Welcome to the November – December 2016 issue of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

5. Column. Joanne Laws. 2016: The Proximity of History.

Writer and researcher Joanne Laws is the guest editor for this issue, which takes a look back at important themes, projects and exhibitions from 2016.

6. Column. Jo Mangan. National Campaign for the Arts.

7. Column. Aislinn O’Donnell. Into Exile: The Transubstantiation of Women’s Bodies.

8. Column. Helen Carey. To Commemorate or Not to Commemorate?

The topic of commemoration is explored in Helen Carey’s column ‘To Commemorate or Not 8. Northern Ireland Manager. Rob Hilken. Regeneration & Collaboration. to Commemorate’ and in the ‘Public Art’ profile of ‘Stormy Petrel’ by Brian Hand, Orla Ryan and Alanna O’Kelly. In his ‘How is it Made? article, Andrew Duggan outlines the multi-venue exhibition 9. News. The latest developments in the visual arts sector.

10. How is it Made? Do We Live in History? Joanne Laws talks to Andrew Duggan about his ongoing ‘Proclamation’, looking at the 1916 centenery in a range of ways. project ‘PROCLAMATION’.

This theme ties directly into another, which reoccurs throughout the issue: that of feminism and gender equality in contemporary Ireland. Columns by Joanne Laws and Aislinn O’Donnell look at recent visual arts projects that investigate these ideas, while Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones discuss their ongoing commission ‘In the Shadow of the State’. In her profile of the Dublin Live Art Festival 2016, EL Putnam also delves into some of these issues.

12. Project Profile. A Hunger for Liveness. EL Putnam discusses the Dublin Live Art Festival 2016.

14. How is it Made? Towards a Post-Patriarchal State. Joanne Laws interviews Sarah Browne and Jesse

Jones about their ongoing project ‘In the Shadow of the State’.

16. Organisation. Collective Voice. Sheena Barrett and Helen Carey discuss the MONTO Arts Group,

located in Dublin 1.

Moving further afield, James L. Hayes writes about his recent exhibition ‘A Near Visible Past...’, held in 18. Public Art. Native Landscapes. Kathleen Bitetti profiles public artworks by Caoimhghin Ó Fraithile New Orleans, and Kathleen Bitetti profiles public art works by Caoimhghin Ó Fraithile and Michael and Michael Dowling sited in Boston.

Dowling in Boston. Other features include Michaële Cutaya’s interview with 2016 Tulca curator Daniel

19. Critique. ‘The Touching Contract’, The Rotunda, Dublin; ‘Now Came Still Evening On’, The

Jewesbury, a report on this year’s Get Together and a look at The Enquiry @IMMA, a research group

examining exhibition-making strategies.

Dock, Leitrim; ‘All Mountains are Moving’, Limerick City Gallery of Art; ‘Expanding Spaces’, Draoicht, County Dublin; ‘Glow’, Catherine Hammond Gallery, County Cork.

23. Organisation. Finding Chinks in the Armour. Michele Horrigan and Sean Lynch give an overview of

‘Organisation’ profiles for November/December focus on Askeaton Contemporary Arts in County recent projects at Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

Limerick and the MONTO Arts Group, a collective of arts organsations and galleries located in north 24. How is it Made? Making Visible. James L. Hayes looks at the arts scene in New Orleans and inner city Dublin. introduces his recent exhibition in the city.

25. Festival. The Headless City. Michaële Cutaya interviews Daniel Jewesbury, curator of Tulca 2016.

Reviewed in the ‘Critique’ section are: Paul Murnaghan at Limerick City Gallery of Art; Robert Kelly at 26. VAI Event. Get Together. Lily Power gives an overview of the 2016 VAI Get Together.

Draiocht, Blanchardstown; Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones’s performance event at the Rotunda, Dublin; the 28. Public Art. Human Telegraphs. Orla Ryan, Alanna O’Kelly and Brian Hand discuss their work group show ‘Glow’ at Catherine Hammond Gallery, Cork; and Gary and John Coyle at The Dock, Leitrim.

‘Stormy Petrel/Guairdeall’, developed for the ‘GPO Witness History’ public art project.

As ever, we have details of upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public 30. Residency. Frontier 1. Carl Giffney discusses his participation in the ongoing EU-funded ‘Frontiers in Retreat’ residency. art roundups, news from the sector and current opportunities.

32. Project Profile. Counter-Exhibitionary Strategies. Jeanette Doyle, Jennie Guy, Emer Lynch, Kate

Strain and Fiona Hallinan introduce The Enquiry@IMMA research group.

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

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34. Opportunities. All the latest grants, awards, exhibition calls and commissions.

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Production: Guest Editor: Joanne Laws. Production Editor: Lily Power. News/Opportunities: Siobhan Mooney, Shelly McDonnell. Invoicing: Bernadette Beecher. Contributors: Joanne Laws, Helen Carey, Aislinn O’Donnell, Jo Mangan, Michele Horrigan, Sean Lynch, Carl Giffney, Michaele Cutaya, Daniel Jewesbury, Lily Power, Colm Desmond, Susan Campbell, Andy Parsons, Kirstie North, Anne Mullee, Jeanette Doyle, EL Putnam, Jesse Jones, Sarah Browne, Brian Hand, Orla Ryan, Alanna O’Kelly, Sheena Barrett, James L. Hayes, Andrew Duggan, Emer Lynch, Jeannette Doyle, Kate Strain, Fiona Hallinan, Jennie Guy, James L. Hayes, Kathleen Bitetti. A: Visual Artists Ireland, Windmill View House, 4 Oliver Bond Street, Dublin 8 T: 353(0)1 672 9488 E: info@visualartists.ie W: visualartists.ie A: Visual Artists Ireland, Northern Ireland Office, 109 –113 Royal Avenue, Belfast, BT1 1FF W: visualartistsni.org Board of Directors: Mary Kelly (Chair), Naomi Sex, Michael Corrigan, David Mahon, Niamh McCann, Donall Curtin, Richard Forrest, Clíodhna Ni Anluain. Staff: CEO / Director: Noel Kelly. Office Manager: Bernadette Beecher. Publications: Lily Power. IVARO: Alex Davis. Communications Officer:/ Listings Editor: Shelly McDonnell. Professional Development Officer: Monica Flynn. Book-keeping: Dina Mulchrone. Membership Services Officer/Listings Editor: Siobhan Mooney. Northern Ireland Manager: Rob Hilken (rob@visualartists-ni.org).

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

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Joanne Laws 2016: The Proximity of History WE work exceptionally hard in the arts. Whether working day in, day out in studios, travelling the length and breadth of the country, grant-chasing, freelancing or maintaining real jobs at the fringes of day jobs, we move mountains every day.

While critical reflection is inbuilt in what we do, how often do we actually pause to reflect on our progress or marvel at our achievements? As the final Visual Artists’ News Sheet of the year, this issue is positioned to consider recent developments across our sector, while assessing some of the challenges that remain.

2016 has been a momentous year. What might the Reeling in the Years montage of 2016 look like? Which prevailing narratives will be retrieved from archives in years to come? In a year defined by global terror and the migrant crisis, Europe’s borders – once softened under free trade agreements – suddenly seemed to stand to attention. Amidst the uncertainties of Brexit, we watched imperial nationalism shrivel in front of our eyes, fold inwards and splinter. Meanwhile, at the periphery of Fortress Europe, Ireland marked the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, a pivotal moment in the founding of a fully independent Irish Republic.

Despite reservations that remembering histories shared with Northern Ireland might prove contentious, or that audiences nationwide might become jaded by seemingly endless renditions of pageantry and memorials, the commemorations so far have largely been well received. As outlined by Helen Carey in her column, the visual arts have taken centre-stage in marking the ongoing decade of centenaries (2012 – 2022). With one eye on future archival trajectories, this issue considers a number of artists’ projects that mediated important ground on modern day notions of equality, resistance and citizenship.

The 1916 centenary saw additional funding being allocated towards a range of international projects, some of which are profiled in this issue by Andrew Duggan, James, L. Hayes and Caoimhghin Ó Fráithile. In addition, a number of major statefunded commissions, such as ‘In the Shadow of the State’ and ‘Stormy Petrel/ Guairdeal’, have comprised performance-driven or event-based spectacles, suitably emphasising physical and temporal experiences over permanent structures.

Importantly, projects of this nature have served to reaffirm the vital role of narrative and ‘witness-writing’ in preserving these ephemeral live encounters.

A burgeoning awareness of the importance of archives has also emerged as a defining feature of these commemorative landscapes, heavily informed by oral histories, material objects and other primary sources. It therefore seems incongruous, in this year of reflection, that ‘heritage’ should have to fight for representation in cabinet portfolios, that museums should be so underfunded or that libraries should be closing – a situation akin to the state eating itself, one word at a time.

A number of key developments this year have been punctuated and infused with an awareness of the past, as if some time-shrinking device had been unleashed, heightening our relationship with the historic and drawing it ever closer. Just as commemorations of the 1913 Dublin Lockout brought the disenfranchised workers of last century into conversations about modern labour practices, so the martyred rebels of the Rising cast a watchful eye over proceedings.‘Beware of the Risen People’ – taken from Patrick Pearse’s poem The Rebel – offered a galvanising slogan for last year’s countrywide anti-water charge protests. ‘Was it for this?’ has also frequently been used, both as a rallying cry and a benchmark to assess contentious developments, from Olympic tickets and Apple taxes, to NAMA dealings and vulture funds, as though Yeats’s critique of the self-serving politics of 1913 could not be more relevant for modern Ireland.

The proximity of history was nowhere more poignantly felt than in national synchronised readings of the 1916 Proclamation – an iconic and visionary manifesto for sovereignty and equality. Addressing the suffrage and allegiance of “every Irish man and Irish woman”, it is easy to overlook how radical the Proclamation actually was. Against a backdrop of the Republic’s abysmal history regarding the treatment of women, a wave of women’s campaigns and feminist projects have galvanised this year, building on the momentum generated by 2015’s Waking the Feminists, as discussed by Aislinn O’Donnell in her column. Under the unifying theme ‘Rise and Repeal’, tens of thousands took part in the fifth annual march for choice in September, providing commentary on the “failure of the Republic to fulfil the promise of equality made in 1916”.

For the complacent, developments this year felt like a full-blown feminist ambush; however for those who have campaigned invisibly for decades, they felt like hard-won validations of their efforts. The contribution of artists’ activism in augmenting wider resistance by generating dialogue and visual awareness (via murals, posters, banners and badges) is a subject that warrants further scrutiny.

This issue also features a column by Jo Mangan of the National Campaign for the Arts (NCFA), outlining the vital role of the arts in Irish society. In response to Budget 2017, the NCFA stated that, while the arts sector was congratulated for its contribution to commemorations, there was “insufficient conviction within government” to maintain levels of investment that would reflect Ireland’s “world-class creative sector” and value it as the our “most obvious natural resource”.

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Roundup CHEEK BY JOWL

Naomi Sex, ‘Cheek by Jowl’

‘Cheek By Jowl’ was a touring performance written and directed by visual artist Naomi Sex and featuring Damien Devaney and Darina Gallagher. It was performed at Crawford Gallery, Cork, on 16 Sept, moving to IMMA, Dublin and Limerick City Gallery of Art. The work comprised “a series of layered, highly descriptive vignettes,” the press release noted. “Its title sets a claustrophobic scene for a single ubiquitous character, You/One, to navigate an abstract, non-place”. crawfordgallery.ie

ENNISKILLEN VISUAL ARTS OPEN

Red Bird Youth Collective, a youth arts group based in Galway, presented ‘Claiming Space’ at Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge, Kildare, 29 Aug – 1 Oct 2016. The exhibition showcased Red Bird’s collaborative methodology, both with each other and with professional artists and architects. Over the years Red Bird has worked with artists such as Louise Manifold, Ruby Wallis and Dominic Thorpe, and with architects Bláithín Quinn and Dominic Stevens. Although created by different members and different professionals, all the artworks in this exhibition were rooted, the press release noted “in exploring and challenging the world from a young person’s point of view whilst claiming artistic and public space for young people”. The tour was facilitated by Galway Arts Centre and supported by the Arts Council. theredbirdcollective.com

GLAS JOURNAL Silvia Loeffler’s exhibition ‘Glas Journal’ ran at the National Maritime Museum of Ireland, Dun Laoghaire Harbour, from 10 to 25 Sept. Loeffler’s work comprised two books made through collaborations with people who live, work and feel associated with different locations in Dún Laoghaire Harbour, from RNLI volunteers to employees of the Quay Fish Shop.

Image from ‘Ghosts of Other Stories’

British Council Collection to mark the 1916 Rising. The press release states: “Art collections by their very nature rarely convey a definitive narrative of the development of artistic practice ...

Each collection is a babble of riotous voices telling of the myriad concerns and questions at the heart of every individual artwork. ‘Ghosts of Other Stories’ explores works within the British Council Collection where threads of lost stories or forgotten histories flash momentarily into the light”.

The exhibition features works by Tomma Abts, Ed Atkins, BANK Arts Collective, Tacita Dean, Ryan Gander, Graham Gussin, Merlin James, Steve McQueen, Rosalind Nashashibi, Mike Nelson, Susan Philipsz, Wolfgang Tillmans, Phoebe Unwin, Rachel Whiteread and Cerith Wyn Evans. themodel.ie

COISCEIM AN PHIARSAIGH

ANOTHER REALITY Promotional image for Enniskillen Visual Arts Open

The 2016 Enniskillen Visual Arts Open ran at Higher Bridges Gallery, the Clinton Centre, Enniskillen, Fermanagh (16 Sept – 15 Oct). The work was exhibited in the gallery and throughout Enniskillen town centre during the Fermanagh Arts Festival. The participating artists were Andy Parsons, Brian Kielt, Carolin Koss, Des Cullen, Ellie Niblock, Emma Zukovic, Fionn Wilson, Floating World Collective, Gavin Porter, Kevin Gillett, Kiera O’Toole, Mairead Macormack, Mary A. Fitzgerald, Mary Furlong, Nicholas May, Noah Rose, Pawel Kleszczewski and Kasia Zimnoch, Phyl Guerin, Rachel Leary, Ruth Gonsalves Moore, Simon Carman, Stephen Gunning, Tansey Cowley, Trina Hobson and Wendy Ferguson. Fermanagh and Omagh District Council invited Outland Arts to curate the 2016 Visual Arts Open in association with the Arts Office. The curators were Helen Sharp, Anna Macleod and Diane Henshaw. flive.org.uk, fermanaghomagh.com

CLAIMING SPACE

‘Claiming Space’ image (detail)

Bernie Joyce, work from ‘Coiscem An Phiarsaigh’

Bernie Joyce’s exhibition ‘Coisceim An Phiarsaigh’ comprised a series of paintings based on Patrick Pearse’s short stories, which were written in his summer Nuala O’Sullivan, But it might rain; oil on canvas, 100 x 100 house Teach an Phiarsaigh, Ros Muc, cm; Laois Arthouse in which the artist lives. They were Nuala O’Sullivan’s exhibtion ‘Another shown at Féile Phobail Béal Feirste, Reality’, which ran at Laois Arthouse from 31 Jul to 10 Aug. The first nine (8 – 30 Sept), demonstrated the artist’s paintings were based on the characters interest in the culture and aesthetic in Pearse’s stories, while the second of the 1950s period. The press release group of works depict the route taken described how O’Sullivan’s paintings by the character Nora in the story Na explore “the friction between outward Bóithre. The last paintings show the appearance and hidden restriction”. boundary stones with Ros Muc village These works reference family Super 8 names that are mentioned in Pearse’s films and photographs from the 1950s writings. Joyce also produced a book to and 1960s, many of which were col- accompany the exhibition. lected by the artist over several years.

For O’Sullivan, “history remains a presence in our lives and our personal his- TO FOLLOW THE WATER tories continue to resonate in the stories we construct about ourselves and our society today”.

GHOSTS OF OTHER STORIES From 10 Sept to 27 Nov, The Model, Sligo will partner with the British Council on an exhibition drawn from the

Image for ‘Follow the Water’

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Jo Mangan National Campaign for the Arts

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet ROUNDUP From 15 – 18 Sept Olivia Hassett, David Fagan, Mary-Jo Gilligan and Ciara McKeon presented a series of works in performance, sound, object making and psychogeography to pose questions, the press release noted, “around the phenomenological and ontological nature of water, the social history of the canal and the organisms inhabiting its depths”. ‘To Follow the Water’, curated by Anne Mullee, was a continuatation of the ‘Artists’ Armada’ project developed in 2015, which began an exploration of the country’s waterways. The works centred around the 73M, a former working Guinness cargo barge built in 1936.

standing of the in-between in experience in nature and the wider context of interplay and integration of energy between the physical and meta physical forces”.

RESORT REVELATIONS

Chinkwell Field, Portrane

‘Resort Revelations’ ran from 6 to 11 Sept at Lynder’s Mobile Home Park and various locations in Portrane, North County Dublin during the annual Bleeding Pig Cultural Festival. ‘Resort Revelations’ provided a platform for the artists resident at Lynder’s to reflect on their experience of the area and present work to a local and wider audience. The participating artists were Michael McLoughlin, Mike Finn, Alan James Burns, Fiona Marron and Claire Halpin, Citadel (detail) Caroline Doolin. The exhibition was The Olivier Cornet Gallery, Dublin pre- curated by Emer Lynch and Ella de sented a solo exhibition by Claire Hal- Burca and responded, the press release pin titled ‘Glomar Response’ (11 Sept – stated, to “the very depths of the area,” 2 Oct). Halpin’s work explores the idea drawing on its history, fiction, geology, of contested territories and histories communication and community. through painting, drawing and installation. In this new body of work she attempted to navigate the “contemporary ‘TIL THEY CAME UNTO A CAVE theatre of war,” the press release noted, “as battlefield expands to battlespace in the information age”. ‘Glomar Response’ examined the means, methods and technologies of modern warfare, such as mass clandestine surveillance programmes. The paintings employ imagery from the media, surveillance, military history, maps, archaeology, early civilization, bible stories and Marble Arch Caves, Fermanagh from the canon of art history of Byzantine and Early Renaissance to weave ‘til they came unto a cave was a perfortogether a narrative through painting. mance by Phil Hession which took oliviercornetgallery.com place in Marble Arch Caves, Fermanagh on 15 and 16 Sept. The event POLLENATE was curated by Sinéad BhreathnachCashell on behalf of Northern Ireland Screen Digital Film Archive and FilmHubNI for the BFI Britain on Film project. Fermanagh singers Gabriel McArdle and Rosie Stewart joined Hession each evening to perform a repertoire of traditional Irish songs within the caves, weaving together archive film ‘Pollenate’ performance image and local songs in this unique location. britainonfilmscreenings.org.uk From 16 to 24 Sept, The Void, Derry hosted a collaborative exhibition

by James King and Sandra Corrigan THREE RAVENS & OTHER DREAMS Breathnach, exploring the ways in From 12 – 25 Sept Signal Arts Centre, which opposites can be complemen- Bray held an exhibition of paintings tary and mutually sustaining. Notions by Veronique Castellanos titled ‘Three of dark and light are examined through Ravens And Other Dreams’. In this the visual language of natural materi- exhibition Castellanos explored ideas als and presence, “intimating balance about what is meaningful to the artist, in contrast and through an under- taking a variety of approaches, from GLOMAR RESPONSE

THE voluntary group the National Campaign for the Arts (NCFA) has had an extremely busy year to date. Among our activities, a new manifesto was written, pre-election hustings were organised, members met with candidates all over the country, the new policy document, Culture 2025, was examined and we held ‘What Next?’ meetings each Wednesday morning. In addition, strategic planning meetings took place, presentations were given at Oireachtas Committee hearings on the arts, galleries were packed for the arts debate motion in the Dail, meetings were held with the minister, opposition spokespersons and the Arts Council, the NCFA pre-election submission was drafted and then – the budget. For the arts, Budget 2017 was good news as well as bad: the glass was half full, but also half empty.

A small group of dedicated NCFA volunteers converged in Dublin from points all across the country on Tuesday 11 October to formulate our response to Budget 2017. We had spent a year making a compelling case that the extra €48m spent on the 1916 Commemorations events should be retained for the arts on an annual basis. We were hoping that our politicians’ constant praise for the arts would be translated into investment. We called for a leap of faith. What we got was a hesitant step forward. Or was it a dismaying step backward?

Year on year, the Department of Arts allocation has been cut 16%. Many in the arts community were and are furious. Our social media feeds reflected despair, anger and disbelief that, in a year when the arts sector were being congratulated for commemorations projects, there was insufficient conviction within government to hold on to that investment, to begin to row back on the disastrous cuts over the last number of years and perhaps even begin the process of investing in arts and culture as our most obvious natural resource.

On the face of it, the headline figures for external arts and cultural agencies look good. There are increases of €5m for the Arts Council, €2m for the Film Board and €1m for Culture Ireland, as well as additional small allocations to National Cultural institutions. This was what we at the NCFA had been encouraging – investment in the external agencies – as this is how money gets to artists most effectively. However, these small uplifts do not go far enough to have any real impact on artists and others working in the sector. The sums we are talking about are minuscule in the context of a €1.3bn budget. The whole sector of film in Ireland under the Irish Film Board receives €19.5m, and that is with the increase.

Those working in the arts are extraordinarily hard-working people who bring nothing but positivity to their communities and reflect glory on this country by picking up international awards for their endeavours. But we could do so much more with the right level of investment. When will the penny drop that we have a world-class creative sector that needs real investment to thrive? When will a government truly be visionary and transform official Ireland’s approach to arts and culture because it is what a civilised country values most highly?

Artists continue to create work that brings hundreds of thousands of cultural tourists to this country. We continue working with children, disadvantaged groups, young adults and the elderly, transforming their lives in the process. We continue to fill the pages of the New York Times with the only consistently good news stories coming out of the country – tales of our creative genius. And it would seem that, despite this, thousands of our most talented and creative citizens must be content to live below the poverty line. For many the glass remains half empty.

The National Campaign for the Arts is a voluntary lobbying group. If you wish to get more involved please email info@theperformancecorporation. com or visit ncfa.ie.

November – December 2016

copying to creating solely from imagination. signalartscentre.ie

TORTURE Andre Serano’s exhibition ‘Torture’ runs at Void, Derry, 8 Oct – 17 Dec in partnership with a/political. The American artist’s dramatic and provocative photographs have featured a wide range of subjects, from his own bodily fluids to Middle America, Catholic lay workers, guns and human sexuality.

For this new exhibition, Serrano based himself in the French industrial town of Maubourguet, and assumed the role of the torturer. The press release stated: “Using The Foundry as his black-site, he photographed more than 40 models in improvised positions with devices produced on-site by local residents…

This ‘danse macabre’ recalls and points us to images and sources as widespread as Nazi Concentration Camps and Stasi interrogation centres to Abu Ghraib in Iraq and the Hooded Men in Northern Ireland who were subjected to reoccurring ‘deep interrogation’… The vast compositions have been elevated to the status of Renaissance altarpieces and are among the largest images the artist has ever produced.” void.ie

PLINTH II

Image from ‘Plinth II’

‘Project Plinth II’, which ran 16 – 30 Sept at the Sailor’s Home, Limerick, was an artist-led initiative started by recent graduates Dervla Mulcahy, Lisa O’Brien, Mellina Van Der Valk, Mollie Sinnott, Rachael Wilhite and Shane Cunningham. Their aim was to provide a support structure and platform for recent graduates in Limerick for the development of ideas and for collaboration across disciplines. ‘Plinth II’ was curated by Simon Fennessy Corcoran. plinth.weebly.com

LOW LYING

Image from ‘Low Lying’

Ciara McKeon, Robbie Blake and Jessie Keenan presented ‘Low Lying’, a walk through the Dublin Docklands, as part

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

COLUMN

7 ROUNDUP

of the Tiger Dublin Fringe, 23 – 25 Sept.

“This show is not about how the bubble Into Exile: The Transubstantiation of Women’s Bodies burst,” the press release stated. “It’s about what we felt after we heard the THE unfamiliarity created by time’s passing can sometimes allow for the past to be crash”. ‘Low Lying’ comprised music, peered into as though it were a strange specimen: foreign, obdurate, even astonishvisuals and dance from seven performing. At other rare moments, the present feels as though it is punctured. The year of ers: visual artist Ciara McKeon, chore2016 looked as though it might be one of Historic Revolution, embalmed through ographer Jessie Keenan, composer Robmemorialising and commemorating, manifesting its power through military bie Blake, singers Michelle O’Rourke parades and celebrations of Great Men. We were offered occasional acknowledgeand Rory Lynch, and dancers Sarah ments of those others, those women... But then there are moments when ‘how it is’ Ryan and Marion Cronin.. is seen, as though for the first time. fringefest.com When the ‘human telegraphs’ of ‘Stormy Petrel/Guairdeall’ moved through the courtyard of the GPO one night in April 2016, their movements and cries CHORUSES FROM THE ROCK recalled that other night, a hundred years ago, as women of that time moved through the landscapes of violence in order to speak, declare and proclaim independence.1 In the post office, the site of exchange and communication, it was as though the fragile, symbolic figure of the tiny sea bird was announcing another storm. The cracks, fissures and unheard voices are opening up, as if the revolution – a revolution that never seemed to find its path on this island – was beginning to remember its convictions, hopes and dreams. Rather than devising a Grand Plan, it is scattering like sparks from the sephiroth, then gathering and restoring, tiqqun: #Wakingthefeminists, ‘In the Shadow of the State’, Repeal, IMELDA... Another Maurice Quillinan, work from ‘Choruses From the Rock’ generation of women and their allies seek to resist a state machine that institutionalises gender inequality in its constitution and in its practices. But it is no time for Maurice Quillinan’s exhibition ‘Choharanguing, for crude ideologies, posturing or lecturing. It is a time for gentler and ruses From the Rock’ ran at Friars’ Themore invitational politics that extend the ethical imagination to find new affiniatre Limerick from 1 to 30 Sept. The ties and ways of gathering, listening and collaborating with others. exhibition featured a series of works on How it is: Women remain second class citizens, unequally paid and valued as paper in conte crayon, gouache and waworkers as evidenced by Micheline Sheehy-Skeffington’s landmark case in NUI, tercolour, alongside paintings in oil on Galway. How it is: If we speak, we are not heard. And by proxy, our loved ones will linen, dating from 2015 – 2016. be silenced by association. How it is: Women, if pregnant, are non-citizens, beyond the law, beyond the basic protections of international human rights, denied bodily integrity or informed consent, gagged de jure, whilst experts, judges and politiLINES OF NEGOTIATION: cians decide what is to be done, allowing the touch of the state and the law to conMAPPING THE LAND tinue to extend into the most intimate of our encounters, even if it means risking our lives. How can it be: that those who do not and cannot love us or care for us – the bureaucrat, the priest, the judge, the expert, the politician – hold power over our lives? Is this some tale from Kafka? Is this another iteration of the policing of women’s bodies, from the Contagious Diseases Act in 1864, the Magdalene Laundries, and forced symphysiotomies, to the medicalisation of pregnancy, gender inequality and the numbers that govern our lives and bodies: the Eighth: 40.3.3; 41.2.

Tectonic rumbles at a distance, voices of another time, are coming to haunt the present, revealing the ‘how it is’ of this time: the half-living ruins and archaic Bernadette Beecher, image from ‘Lines of Negotiation’ sediments of patriarchy. Cassandra has the gift of prophecy, but no one listens:2 ‘Lines of Negotiation: Mapping the What other prophetic voices remain unheard, as though their tongues and words Land’ (16 Sept – 5 Nov) was curated by are too foreign or barbarian for our political imaginaries? Sinead Dinneen’s uncanClaire Behan and featured nine artny polymer clay veils mimic proto-creatures.3 Gashes of embroidery crash through ists: Katherine Atkinson, Bernadette fabric like the cut of the surgeon’s knife. Stamped with the violence of medicalised Beecher, Diana Caramaschi, Anne discourses, she gazes directly at us naked, scarred, post-hysterectomy. Provoking Cradden, Kathryn Maguire, Patricia hyper-sensitivity to the different kinds of touches we encounter in everyday life, McKenna, Kiera O’Toole, Nick Ryan The Touching Contract evoked personal histories, involuntary memories, invasion, and Ida Mitrani. The work explored the the affinities of living bodies, the enmeshment of politics, history and the law with mountainous area of Dún Laoghairelived experience and the feeling that one’s life is never one’s own.4 Rathdown County. The press release In my view, repealing the Eighth Amendment runs more deeply than binaries noted: “Mountains are regarded as might suggest, striking at the heart of what it means to be a woman in Ireland inalienable hallowed land, as if untoday. Once pregnant, women are transubstantiated into another kind of being, touched by man but in reality they are one beyond citizenship. The law is suspended, and so we become infra-human, alive with human activity… changes dispossessed, a special category of subjects that attains neither the status of human in the landscape reflect the interplay nor of citizen. It is a law that invades the personal, yet places women beyond public between natural and cultural forces.” and political spheres, reasserting the iterations of those institutions that ‘knew Katherine Atkinson, one of the particibest’. Those who love you cannot help you. You will not speak; you will hold your pating artists, performed The Terrain as silence. You will not ask for what you need, and this matter – the matter that is your part of the exhibition programme. This body, your life – will be taken care of by the experts, the bureaucrats and the legal off-site event took place in Lead Mines practitioners. Such matters are too important for you to decide. And in the infinite Way, engaging and responding directwisdom that it has claimed since its foundation, the state will decide what is in ly with the landscape and the audience. your best interests.

Aislinn O’Donnell

dlrcoco.ie

Aislinn O’Donnell is Professor of Education at Maynooth University and a founding member of Philosophy Ireland, a grassroots network that seeks to promote philosophy in schools and communities across Ireland.

Notes 1. ‘Stormy Petrel/Guairdeall’ by Orla Ryan, Alanna O’Kelly and Brian Hand was commissioned as part of An Post ‘GPO Witness History’ to commemorate the 1916 Easter Rising 2. Alice Maher, Cassandra’s Necklace, 2012 3. Sinead Dineen ,‘Whisper+’, 2016 4. Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones, The Touching Contract, 23 – 25 September 2016; part of the artists’ collaborative project ‘In the Shadow of the State’, funded by Create, Art Angel and the Arts Council of Ireland

BRENDAN MCAFEE An exhibition of work by Brendan McAfee ran at Larne Museum and Arts Centre, 16 Sept – 22 Oct. The exhibition featured new paintings made in the last year celebrate landscape, light and experiences. “Through colour, line and

Brendan McAfee, image from Larne Museum exhibition

gesture,” the press release noted, “these recent works try to capture the joy of a moment, a memory or a place”.

REFUSING THE VOID From 2 to 22 Oct, Catalyst Arts, Belfast presented ‘Refusing the Void’, the first solo presentation in Northern Ireland of the work of Irish artist Patrick Jolley. Born in County Down, 1964, Jolley lived in Ireland, London, New York and Berlin, and had been living in County Meath until his sudden death in India at the age of 47.

The exhibition featured screenings of three films: This Monkey (2009), Fall (2008) and The Door Ajar (2012) an 84-minute visually stunning feature length film based on the French writer Antonin Artaud’s enigmatic visit to Ireland in 1937, which preceded his confinement in a number of psychiatric institutions. Catalyst hosted a series of discursive events around the show, looking at the artist’s influence and legacy as well as current practices and concerns in moving image in Ireland. catalystarts.org.uk

AIDEEN MONAGHAN

Mukherjee, Somnath Mukherjee, Seamus Nolan, Amol K Patil, Nikhil Raunak , Krishna Reddy, Caecilia Tripp and Sawangwongse Yawnghwe. The work considers ideas around colonisation, independence and nationhood, specifically, the press release stated, “‘the nation’ as a conceptual project and ‘modernism’ as an aspirational value”. The exhibition asks whether nationalism in post-colonial societies curbs its citizens’ fundamental rights of freedom, such as those relating to sexuality, gender and the body. “Historica considers the state’s responsibility towards art and its aims, by way of the museum concept, to continue the modernism project as way to construct national identity based on a constitution”. imma.ie

LIGHT MOVES From 3 to 6 Nov, Limerick City Gallery of Art screened two films by Tacita Dean as part of the Light Moves international festival of dance on film. The first, Craneway Event, is choreographer Merce Cunningham’s last collaboration. In November 2008, Dean filmed Cunningham and his dance company rehearsing for an event in a former Ford assembly plant. “Craneway Event is a document of a celebrated practice, of a legendary man at work, and a moment lost in time,” the press release stated.

The second film, Dean’s 2015 Event for a Stage, reflects her experiences working with prolific actor Stephen Dillane as they struggled to understand and accommodate each other’s disciplines. lightmoves.ie

FRACTURED CONNECTIONS

Aideen Monaghan, Joyce’s Car Park (detail)

Aideen Monaghan exhibited at Farnham Galleries, Mary Berry Hall, Simpson College, Indianola, Iowa from 3 to 27 Oct. The exhibition featured oil paintings, mixed media work on paper and sculpture. Monaghan documents everyday experiences and spaces, creating new scenarios which play with the viewers aesthetic sensibilities. simpson.edu/farnham-galleries

HISTORICA: REPUBLICAN AESTHETICS ‘Historica: Republican Aesthetics’ is a group show curated by Sumesh Sharma, which runs at IMMA, Dublin, 15 Sept – 26 Feb. The participating artists are: Kemi Bassene, Yogesh Barve, Judy Blum, Sachin Bonde, Nandalal Bose, Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty, Nadine El Khoury, Aurélien Froment, Poonam Jain, Naresh Kumar, Saviya Lopes, Aurélien Mole, Benode Behari

Anne Marie Curran, We are here (detail), 2016

Anne Marie Curran presented a solo exhibition at Signal Arts Centre, Bray, Co. Wicklow, 26 Sept – 9 Oct. ‘Fractured Connections’ featured a largescale installation made from rice paper and burnt with incense, for which Curran was awarded the Grand Prize in the NCAD CEAD Exhibition. Other works consisted of pigmented encaustic on rice paper and a series of images of maps with boundaries and lived spaces delicately burned and punctured.

Curran used themes, the press release noted, “of mapping geography and fragility to convey her central theme of disconnection”.

8

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

COLUMN

NORTHERN IRELAND MANAGER

Helen Carey

Rob Hilken

To Commemorate or Not to Commemorate?

Regeneration & Collaboration

Rita Duffy, ‘The Souvenir Shop’, 2016

Rita Duffy, ‘The Souvenir Shop’, 2016

EILEEN Gray emphatically stated: “We must ask nothing of artists but to be of their own time”.1 Just as the work of this most modern artist demonstrates, art can express whole histories and deep excavations of the human condition in a single gesture or movement without narrative or direction. Thus, when contemporary artists are invited to make great art to mark defining moments in the history of the state, the resultant artworks usually look both at the past and into the future. As a curator, I am interested in the capacity of contemporary artists involved in commemorations to examine visible traces of history.

By uncovering former power relations upon which the present is based, artists can show how these past agendas and institutional ideas, if unchallenged, might dominate the future.

In 2008, there was a sense of anticipation that the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising would be the major national celebration, claiming the legacy of liberty from colonisation. However, the financial crash happened and, during the following austere years, the vocabulary shifted. Through the lens of the less nationalist Fine Gael/Labour coalition, the phrasing became one of a ‘decade of commemorations’ (2012 – 2022), proposing more of a process than a watershed moment. The programme commenced with a predictably subdued centenary of the signing of the 1912 Ulster Covenant, followed by commemorations of the 1913 Dublin Lockout. 2014 saw notable national revivals of World War I as a significant event in the history of Ireland. To mark the 1916 Easter Rising, a range of visual arts projects were commissioned or funded by state agencies in recognition of the Republic’s coming of age. The artworks that emerged examine the foundations on which our society is organised. I curated significant projects and exhibitions during the 1913 and 1916 centenaries, and patterns are emerging even at this early point.

For the centenary of the 1913 Dublin Lockout, artist Mark Curran developed The Market, which scrutinises the financial systems of the world stock exchanges. Curran’s ethnographic approach allowed him to identify and interrogate pivotal decisions of our age. Curran presented field research, such as transcripts of discussions between stock market traders who, in the post-crash trading exchanges, realised that they were pawns in algorithmic, pre-ordained global financial systems. They – and increasingly we – soon understood that these systems normalised extreme measures, and that deconstructing, resisting or striking against this faceless, omnipresent power can seem hopeless. In 2013, as the Lockout centenary unfolded, Curran placed transcripts of the traders’ thoughts into the public domain. Algorithms were manifested as computer-generated visualisations and audio pieces, derived from public speeches of decision-makers. The people and sites of the stock exchange were photographed, revealing contested terrain and the annihilation of opposition – something American historian John Gillis describes as being commonplace within fields of commemorative activity.2 Arguably, what is at stake with commemorations in the public domain is an analysis of victory as well as of the failed belief systems that cannot sustain us into the future. As a contemporary artist, Curran uncovered powerful hidden influences. In making visible the ephemera of this control through twenty-first-century display conditions, the project is best described as a repository of truth.

The Dublin Lockout of 1913 was a victory for the wealthy employers and middle classes over the workers, asserting power relations that still persist today. When approaching the defining moment of the 1916 Rising, the agendas of those in power (once believed to be above criticism) carried a heightened visibility. In a ‘1916/2016’ Arts Council-funded project, Belfast artist Rita Duffy developed ‘The Souvenir Shop’ as a vehicle to examine dominant narratives through humorous and surrealist methods, juxtaposing popular myth with banal and everyday items. Coming from a nationalist tradition – where 1916 continues to represent a contentious low point for the community as the beginning of abandonment – Duffy depicted legendary figures such as Michael Collins and Bobby Sands on votive candles, articulating their divine mythologies, while questioning what part truth and reality actually play in developing sacred cows. With a complicit audience, who could and did purchase the goods, ‘The Souvenir Shop’ had selling at its heart, aimed at exposing the methodology of myth-making and consumption, what makes truth, art and power, and the crucial question of how these can be sold.

In curating artworks and projects in this terrain, it is hard to ignore the appearance and re-appearance of the salesman, whether the trader or buyer on the exchange floor, or the power-broker, mythmaker or souvenir seller. Certainly, as we make our way through the remaining decade of commemorations, trade deals litter the public discourse in this post-Brexit world, while the money machine that makes Western power weighs up the cost of letting immigrants flee their torturers. What of ethics and of honesty? Through field work and methods that excavate behaviours and truths, artists in this terrain address this question, while levering open these complex fields of discourse with robust, timely and necessary inquiries.

Helen Carey, independent curator and Director, Fire Station Artists’ Studios.

Notes 1. Jennifer Goff, Eileen Gray: Her Work and Her World, Irish Academic Press, 2015 2. John R, Gillis (ed.), Commemorations. The politics of national identity, Princeton University Press, 1994

November – December 2016

PS2 in Belfast has a new home. Originally set up as a project space for Paragon Studios, PS2 has become one of Belfast’s most exciting, engaging and accessible gallery spaces. Curator Peter Mutschler, one of the Paragon Studios’ artists, has developed a contemporary art programme that focuses on social interaction and community engagement. Artists, curators, architects, researchers and collectives have produced exhibitions and events both inside and outside the gallery space that have stimulated discussion about the role of visual art in the community.

The new location on North Street is just around the corner from their old space and is unusual in Belfast in that it has a large, street-level presence on a city-centre shopping street. North Street itself has been undergoing a quiet revolution over the past few years: the Community Arts Partnership’s ‘Hit the North’ street art festival has brightened the oppressive metal shutters that have been a feature of the street after 6pm; in late 2014, Jamshid Fenderesky opened a new space on North Street for his private gallery, Cafe 31; Ink Monkey artist supplies and gallery are a few doors up from PS2; and the Tivoli Barbers host the Goose Lane Gallery that I mentioned in my last column.

The building was previously home to Joseph Braddell and Sons fishing and hunting supplies, with a long history and a dedicated and supportive customer base. It ended abruptly in December 2014 when a fire destroyed the shop and they lost the majority of their stock. It was a blow to the local community and the city lost yet another independent, family-run business.

The business community on North Street began engaging with PS2 as soon as they got the keys, eager to find out what was happening as artists moved into the space. Old customers of Braddell’s have come back to reminisce and talk about PS2’s plans for the future. Mutschler sees the connection to the building’s past and relationships with their new neighbours as integral to the gallery going forward, but also realises that the move itself should signify a change to the way the gallery operates.

Established artists Aisling O’Beirn and Michael Hogg have joined Paragon Studios, enlarging the group to seven. The ground floor will house the new gallery space and is much bigger than the old premises, so offers a lot of scope for ambitious projects. This week, Takafumi Sakanaka, the international resident at Flax Art Studios, will launch ‘Water Works’, a large installation based on an old poster found discarded in the space, which features two men sitting on a fishing boat. Expect a lot of water!

PS2 has been curated and managed by Mutschler on a voluntary basis, and in order to maintain a diverse and high quality programme, he has increasingly sought to collaborate with artist-curators on delivering projects. Mirjami Schuppert is just beginning the next curatorial residency as PS2 seeks to start a conversation with local artists and curators about how a new model of working could be developed. They will host a series of talks and discussions in coming months and welcome input from the local visual arts community.

Throughout 2016, collaboration and regeneration are two subjects that have been extensively explored in Northern Ireland. Local curatorial collective Household hosted a series of talks and masterclasses entitled ‘The Imagined City’. They invited speakers from across Europe to explore subjects such as public art, artists working in cities, urban renewal and international/local perspectives through case studies, panel discussions and an alternative bus tour of imagined works. As part of their 20/20 anniversary programme in August, Creative Exchange Artist Studios hosted a symposium entitled ‘The Real Cost of Regeneration’, looking at the pros and cons of the arts as a vehicle for regeneration, both in East Belfast and beyond. A full house of local residents, businesses, artists and arts organisations participated in a lively discussion that will no doubt continue.

Much of this dialogue has been sparked by changes in the government departments at Stormont.

The Department for Culture, Arts and Leisure has been merged with the Department of Social Development to form the Department for Communities. The arts sector are concerned that we will struggle to find a voice in this new department, which also includes housing, sport, language, benefits, pensions, child support and urban regeneration. Events such as ‘The Imagined City’ and ‘The Real Cost of Regeneration’ underline how central the arts can be to many of the challenges faced by this new megadepartment.

The other topic that has been much discussed in 2016 is collaboration, which has many different meanings. On a governmental level, it often means saving costs and better value for money. From an artist’s perspective it can mean endless possibilities and exciting new projects. For residents, collaboration can manifest as the building of new relationships and of cementing existing ones. It means many things to many people and is almost always embraced as a something to be encouraged.

Visual Artists Ireland have participated in several collaborative projects this year with overwhelmingly positive results. In response to identified needs from across the sector, Arts and Business NI, Dance Resource Base, Audiences NI, Voluntary Arts Ireland, Community Arts Partnership, Arts and Disability Forum, Theatre NI, Craft NI and VAI have formed a cross-sector arts collaboration group. This group will build on common ground to pool knowledge, increase access to development resources, offer practical support and participate in dialogue that explores deeper collaborations across the sector.

On a practical level, as part of the Belfast Visual Arts Forum, VAI were involved in producing the new Belfast Art Map, highlighting 35 visual arts organisations across the city as well as a selection of public art. Widely distributed throughout the city, this map has given visibility to some of the city’s hidden gems and is inspiring visitors and locals to explore the richness of the city. This project was made possible through the collaboration of the , which comprises many of the city’s galleries, studios and arts organisations.

Rob Hilken, VAI Northern Ireland Manager.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

News

November – December 2016

can condone. The NCFA calls on the Government to rethink their ongoing BUDGET 2017 strategy for the arts and work actively The Minister for Arts, Heritage, with the arts community to raise arts Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, funding to the EU average as a matter of Heather Humphreys TD, announced urgency.” For further breakdown of alloincreases in funding across a range of cations see ahrrga.gov.ie. arts and heritage bodies under her department’s remit for Budget 2017. The Minister has said that Budget 2017 will ARTIST IN THE COMMUNITY SCHEME allow her department to build on the Create, the national development agenpositive legacy of the Ireland 2016 cy for collaborative arts, has announced Centenary Programme, while also the successful applicants to the second delivering for rural communities across round of the Artist in the Community the country.

Scheme in 2016. The Artist in the While the overall budget for arts Community Scheme is managed by was down by 16 per cent (€188.5m in Create on behalf of the Arts Council.

2016, reduced to €158.3m for 2017), Ms Seven applicants were successful under Humphreys said this was due to one-off the Research and Development phase, capital funding in 2016 for Easter four with mentors, and six applicants Rising-related projects such as the GPO were successful for Project Realisation, visitor centre. Key points on the arts in securing funding of up to €10,000 for Budget 2017 include: an additional €5 long term projects. million for the Arts Council, an 8% The selected artists were: Shireen increase in its annual budget; boosts in Shortt (All Sorts, St. Andrews LGBT funding for all of the national cultural Youth, Dublin), Jenny MacDonald (St. institutions; an increase of €2 million Patrick’s Mental Health Services, for the Irish Film Board and €1 million Dublin), Louise White (Lantern Centre for Culture Ireland; an additional €1 International Women’s Group, Dublin), million to assist the Heritage Council Oonagh Murphy (I-dentity LGBT with its work; funding of €5 million for Support Group, Dublin), Alain Servant implementation of Culture 2025/ (Horizons, St. John of God, Kildare), Ireland 2016 Legacy Programme; €40 Emily Waszak (Japanese Tea Ceremony million for the delivery of the LEADER of Dublin), Siobhan McGibbon (Galway Rural Development Programme in 2017 University Hospital Radiology Speaking to The Irish Times the Department), John Conway (The New Arts Council chair, Sheila Pratschke, Normal, Dublin) and Treasa O’Brien said the increase of eight per cent in the (Migrant Support Group Gort Resource Arts Council’s budget was: “a major vote Centre, Galway). For more information of confidence in it. It also recognises the see create-ireland.ie. important contribution that the arts make to the lives of people across Ireland. We particularly welcome the TOTTENHAM HALE INTERNATIONAL hard work and commitment demonSTUDIOS (THIS) RESIDENCY strated by Heather Humphreys, in Jointly organised by THIS and Askeaton securing this increase in funding for Contemporary Arts, the Tottenham the arts in a very competitive budget Hale international Studios (THIS) process”.

Residency provides an artist with the In a press release issued from The opportunity to live and work in London National Campaign for the Arts (NCFA) next summer, following an open call for Chairperson Jo Mangan said: “We recapplications earlier this year. Tottenham ognise all the efforts made by Minister Hale International Studios is a nonHumphreys to maximise the outcome profit, artist-run space housed in a latefor her department. While recognising nineteenth-century church in North the positive impact of the steps taken, London. Opened in 2010, the studio curwe are disappointed that the outcome rently contains 22 artists, offering an was not more positive for the sector. In affordable, innovative working enviour pre-Budget submission the NCFA ronment where critical dialogue and stressed the need to work urgently open engagement are core to the stutoward restoring the €30 million dio’s approach. stripped from the Arts Council funding Eleanor Duffin is a visual artist since 2008 and the devastating cuts to whose works are predominantly sculpthe National Cultural Institutions. This tural in nature and are characterised by would have provided some much needthe tension between materiality and ed stability for artists and arts organisaform. Her research is driven by a curiostions. ity to understand material intelligence There is strong disappointment and how matter can shift and escape coming from members who expected a control. She is drawn to the connoted significant increase from Budget 2017, and historical value of material and this in order to make extraordinary art hapintrigue also informs the production of pen for the citizens of Ireland. At 0.1% her works. Duffin’s work oscillates of GDP, Ireland’s expenditure on Arts somewhere between the domestic and and Culture is at the bottom of the list of the alchemical.

EU countries compared with an average of 0.6%, surely something no country

9

VAI News

– 31 October in the RDS Concert Hall.

VAI also held a Visual Artists’ Café VAI’S NEW OFFICE event on Wednesday 26 October at the Having been in Dame Court, Dublin 2 RDS as part of this collaboration. for five years, Visual Artists Ireland Speakers on the day were: artists Rachel have moved to a larger location at Doolin, Gabhan Dunne and Maria Windmill View House, 4 Oliver Bond McKinney, Anna O’Sullivan (Curator Street, Dublin 8. The space will faciliand Director, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny) tate our career development workshops, and Noel Kelly (CEO Visual Artists VAI archive, member hot desks and our Ireland/Chairman of RDS Visual Arts expanded equipment hire service.

Awards Judging Panel and RDS Arts We will continue to provide our Committee and Visual Arts Working help desk, advocacy, advice and memGroup member). bership services on a drop in basis as Each of the artists discussed their well as by phone and email. Our contact career development and the role the number remains the same (016729488).

RDS Taylor Art Award has played in the We hope you can drop in for a visit soon. development of their career, offering We will host an open day/house warmadvice to emerging visual artists from ing in the new space shortly, once we their own experiences. Anna O’Sullivan have unpacked and settled in. discussed her work as a curator, talking about how she works with visual artists and the remit of the Butler Gallery in BELFAST OPEN STUDIOS Kilkenny. Noel Kelly spoke about the Belfast Open Studios 2016 has been a RDS Visual Arts Award submission and great success, with events, workshops selection process, pointing out some and talks in studios around the city. key strengths within the proposals Events continue into November, with received from the selected artists.

Speed Curating on 5 November at Belfast Exposed. The curators in attendance will be: Niamh Brown (Ormston VAI/THE LAB WRITING AWARD House, Limerick), Ann and Ken Bartley Visual Artists Ireland, in Partnership (ArtisAnn Gallery, Belfast), Maoliosa with Dublin City Council and AICA Boyle (Void Gallery, Derry), Warren Ireland, is inviting submissions for the Harper (independent curator and 2016 Critical Writing Award, judged by researcher), Kate Self (Radar, J.J. Charlesworth (AICA UK, Associate Loughborough), Alessia Cargnelli and Editor, artreview.com), Sheena Barrett Clare Gormley (Catalyst Arts, Belfast), (Assistant Arts Officer, Dublin City Moran Been-Noon (Platform Arts, Council), and Noel Kelly (President, RETURN DEADLINE EXTENDED: Belfast), Adam Smythe (Bluecoat, AICA Ireland, Director, Visual Artists 11 NOVEMBER Liverpool), Jackie Barker (Millennium Ireland).

RETURN is the service provided by the Court, Portadown), Brendan Fox (Talbot The winning writer will have their Irish Visual Artists Rights Organisation Gallery, Dublin), Ruth Caroll (RHA, piece published in The Visual Artists’ (IVARO) which pays royalties to visual Dublin).

News Sheet, receive a fee of €500, and creators whose works have been reproOn 13 November, Visual Artists’ join The Visual Artists’ News Sheet duced in books and magazines pubCafe: Preparing for Studio Visits will be panel of art writers. They will also be lished in Ireland. Due to overwhelming held at Black Box Studios. Susan invited to be part of the LAB Gallery’s demand the deadline to claim has been McWilliams will talk about her experi2017 programme, with a €300 writing extended so that even more creators can ence of working with curators and how commission. Previous winners have claim their share. she has prepared for curators who have included James Merrigan, Rebecca RETURN is run annually and artvisited her studio.

O’Dwyer and Joanne Laws. ists need to submit a claim each year.

Topics that will be discussed Award submissions should be a Applicants must complete an online include: Research – finding and inviting 1200-word critique of an exhibition, claim form detailing how often their the right curators; Preparing For Your event, festival, public artwork or simiworks have been reproduced in books Studio Visit – how to talk concisely lar that has taken place in Ireland durand magazines. Creators can claim for about your practice and setting up your ing 2016. Applications should also any artwork or photograph that has studio; Following Up – building a relainclude full contact details. Submissions appeared in an Irish book or magazine tionship with the curator. McWilliams should be sent to info@visualartists.ie up until 31 December 2015, so long as will be joined by Riann Coulter (F.E. with CRITICAL WRITING 2016 in the they own the copyright. The same pubMcWilliam Gallery) and Feargal subject line. Applications should reach lished works are eligible each year and O’Malley (Ulster University Gallery), VAI no later than 5:30pm Friday, 26 any new images can be added to the who will discuss their approaches to November 2016. Late applications will claim. building relationships with artists and not be considered.

RETURN is available to all visual how different curators have different creators, not just IVARO members. The ways of discovering and working with beneficiaries of deceased artists can new artists.

VAI ONLINE also claim during the copyright term of Don’t forget, the Visual Artists’ News the artworks (up to 70 years after the Sheet has a new home for online articles artists’ death). IVARO have extended VAI & RDS at visualartistsireland.com. Following the deadline for this year to 11 VAI Director Noel Kelly has been each issue, select articles and reviews November 2016. Full details, FAQs and involved in the evolution of the new will be featured online, sometimes with the online claim form can be found at format RDS Visual Art Awards in his additional documentation and imagery, ivaro.ie/return or by contacting IVARO position as chair of the panel of judges. and are open for comments and discusManager Alex Davis on alex@ivaro.ie Artists that made the award shortlist sion. with any further questions. showed works in an exciting exhibition, designed by Alice Maher, held from 26 ARTS COUNCIL TOURING AND

DISSEMINATION OF WORK SCHEME 15 December is the deadline for applications to the Touring and Dissemination of Work Scheme for tours beginning in the period July to December 2017. The Advance Planning strand for this scheme has the same deadline for tours from January to December 2018.

Application forms will be available through online services from 15 November 2016.

As with previous rounds of the scheme the Arts Council have agreed with their colleagues in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to jointly support north/south tours. This means that applications from NI and the Republic can include dates in both jurisdictions.

This is an incentive to companies and venues to work together in both jurisdictions to enable excellent work to be seen on the whole island. Since their introduction in 2010 the touring schemes have been based on the principle of collaboration between those who produce and those who present work to audiences.

For general details on the scheme, please contact Val Ballance or Regina O’Shea. If you have questions specifically related to art forms, then email the relevant team. All contact details are on the Arts Council website contacts page.

10

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

HOW IS IT MADE?

Do We Live in History?

JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS ANDREW DUGGAN ABOUT ‘PROCLAMATION’, A MULTI-VENUE EXHBITION FUNDED BY CULTURE IRELAND.

Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones, It Only Remains Until Such Time; part of ‘PROCLAMATION’

Jazmin Chiodi performs at the National Gallery of Ireland as part of ‘PROCLAMATION’; photo (detail) by Alex Isili

John Scott and Jason Akira Somma, ‘PROCLAMATION’

Anthony Haughey, HD still from Manifesto; part of ‘PROCLAMATION’

November – December 2016

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

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HOW IS IT MADE? Two neon signs in a field A public act What’s said?

‘It Only Remains’ (into the night) (out of the dawn) ‘Until Such Time’ Explicit or evocative, for discourse or meditation A spell to conjure a desired state of affairs A declaration that a state of affairs pertains Sounds: between crying and sighing What’s projected?

The view from the house, The after image and the image after, Image of place as text in place We were in two minds The Irish and the English In two tongues In and out of place An authentic nuclear past, An eerie electric present A proclamation To stir, to rouse, Propose, promote, provoke Another Act: The yearly inspections, Five pounds for keeping to the Gaelic, For a child in school in the 50s After that: A right decision A hurtful aftermath Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones, October 2016

Joanne Laws: Was ‘PROCLAMATION’ conceived from the outset as a touring exhibition?

Andrew Duggan: From the beginning the project was intended to be presented in various international cultural spaces that would offer platforms for deeper explorations of both the artworks and the historical and cultural contexts. In spaces like the Irish Arts Center in New York, the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris and The EU Committee of the Regions in Brussels, understandings of Irish culture were a given.

I felt it was important to include artists from various disciplines, such as visual art, dance and performance, who would be unified through lens-based and moving-image sensibilities. As well as myself, the artists who exhibited as part of ‘PROCLAMATION’ were: Jazmin Chiodi and Alexandre Iseli, Olwen Fouéré and Kevin Abosch, Anthony Haughey, Frances Hegarty, Andrew Stones, Nigel Rolfe, John Scott and Jason Akira Somma. I thought that bringing together these important artists would create an interesting syntax of visual and verbal dialogues, offering an alternative to the anticipated 1916 commemorations in Ireland.

JL: What was your approach in leading the project? How does an artist-curator (as opposed to a curator, director or producer) influence a project in different ways?

AD: Rather than giving a brief, I invited the artists to contribute to a project where the centennial imperative would reframe ideas of place, language, equality and identity inherent both in the artists’ work and in the 1916 Proclamation. I trusted their integrity as well as their potential involvement and varied responses. I have encountered a certain amount of fear of artist-led projects among established curators in recognised institutions, particularly large traditional institutions. They fear that an artist-led project is a wild cat, a thing with an

unforeseeable trajectory. For me, this unpredictability is a strength. I came of age in the nineties and early noughties, and saw the rise of the single (predominately white male) curator. In many ways, artist-led projects are the antithesis of such distantly-directed exhibitions.

I have received positive comments from the partners and venues, who feel that the insights offered by artist-curators (into the technicalities and philosophies of exhibition-making and the process of working with artists) are crucial to the transmission of the artworks.

As an artist-curator, I had an almost symbiotic empathy with the artists and confidence in everyone involved. I may have brought the artists and institutions together, but artists like Jazmin Chiodi, Alex Iseli and Anthony Haughey ran with the project in their own ways, branching out and organising further artist-led events to extend the exhibition experience.

ever the importance and beauty of our text. In our work, poetic words come out of the mouths of drowning refugees – non-Irish born people, submerged in water and trying to speak in gasps. The water is a place of transition – of birth or death – that is neither land nor country. The 1916 Proclamation text inspired the performers in our film, who were very moved by how relevant it is today. They did not have any deep knowledge of the Irish War of Independence or the Easter Rising. This message has been lost in continuing to reconcile Irish unity and the Troubles”.

JL: Can you give details about the work you developed for the project, situating it in relation to your ongoing research interests?

AD: Siobhán Dempsey, a camera person with a background in ethnography, and I developed the film Plus ça Change with a Russian immiJL: In your view, how is the 1916 Proclamation relevant for mod- grant named Irina Bystrov in Ireland. Bystrov shifts rubble from one ern Ireland? pile to another and back again, not unlike the mythological figure AD: I cannot help but compare the 1916 Proclamation with the pro- Sisyphus, who was made to carry out a laborious, repetitive and futile cess of viewing art and understanding artist-led practice. The action for all eternity. Plus ça Change pits two fundamental human Proclamation was created within a particular time and context – conditions against each other: the resigned acknowledgment of the ahead of its time in many ways – and it exists now, still resonating and fundamental immutability of human nature and the enduring desire influencing us. The 1916 Proclamation’s fervour, vision and imperfec- to effect change through praxis. tions are all manifest or perhaps hidden within the object itself. Like Through the woman’s repetitive and recursive action, Plus ça an artist-led project, the desire for unfettered control is clear. I was Change metaphysically meditates on the paradox of change: the ‘void’ greatly taken by the opinion of Gerry Kearns, Professor of Geography is built and un-built. It is not complacent viewing and the relationship at Maynooth University, who stated that “in fewer than 600 words, the between the work and the viewer is important. Action is halted by an Proclamation promises what independence will be for, laying a heavy off-camera voice, presumed to be a director, revealing that all forms of obligation on future generations to be worthy of the sacrifice made in witnessing are constructed. its name”.1 For me, the 1916 Proclamation points us in the direction of what JL: Your commissioned works often interrogate or respond to is possible and what remains unfulfilled. It is an object and a living artworks housed in civic collections. Can you describe your ongodocument that should be taken from the political bodies that wish to ing relationship with the historic? control it and redistributed to public. As described by Olwen Fouéré, AD: Artist Nigel Rolfe asks the question “Do we live in history or does the Proclamation of 1916 “carried a great promise which many Irish history live within us?” I feel that I have an ongoing conversation, as I people would regard as unfulfilled”. She believes that in the hundred suspect many artists do, with previous artworks. It’s a conversation not years since it was written, “the time is way overdue for us to unearth unlike the one Pearse and Connolly may have had before drawing up the hidden histories, to listen to the code carriers, to embody the the 1916 Proclamation, where the present and past were consolidated. shadow and to discover what it is we still really need to fight for”.

In some ways artists continue discussions that began in the past but persist in the present. National institutions understand this continuJL: Perhaps you could describe some of the responses to the 1916 um and are surprisingly open to such dialogue.

Proclamation that emerged in the work?

AD: All the artists share a great intensity and conviction. This is evi- JL: How do you feel about the different iterations of dent in the depth of the works they created and perhaps indicates a ‘PROCLAMATION’ across different exhibition contexts and locatide-change in Irish arts, where emotion, creativity and intellect can be tions? interwoven.

AD: Nigel Rolfe described the audience responses to ‘PROCLAMATION’ Anthony Haughey described the importance of language to his as “heartening, thoughtful and generous, with the artworks raising work Manifesto, stating: “There are references to the 1916 Proclamation societal issues and inquiries into meaning”. Since it first opened in as well as historical and contemporary literature, evoked through New York, the social, political and cultural landscapes have changed cinematic camera movements and the exploration of liminal land- dramatically. The bombings in Brussels and Paris, and Britain’s exit scapes.” In the film, “a young African-Irish woman walks towards the from the European Union, have influenced perceptions and readings viewer dressed in a military green coat. She is similar in age to many of the work. of Ireland’s 1916 revolutionaries and epitomises Connolly’s phantasy Anthony Haughey’s references to the “310-mile-long open of egalitarian citizenship in a Republic-to-come, but like her predeces- wound – divided culture running down the length of my body” in sors, she is marginalised and erased from history before it is written”. Manifesto, seem even more poignant now, as does Rolfe’s commentary In the closing sequence, “the camera pans a windswept moun- on the shifting definitions of ‘border’. In each of the cities in which we tainside. In the distance, a small concrete square is cut into the bog. have exhibited, real concerns have been proclaimed. The project has The camera moves slowly towards this object. The narrator describes created connections between art, artists, audiences and institutions, a ‘300 mile open wound, running down the length of my spine’ (a ref- and seems to have prompted debate well beyond the discourse erence to Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldúa). The camera finally reveals a implied within the work itself. concrete helicopter landing pad, a former British army outpost on Ireland’s border. The sequence fades to black”. To close, the narrator ‘PROCLAMATION’ is a multi-venue exhibition of new lens-based references Brian Friel’s Translations: “To remember everything is a form and moving-image works by leading figures in Irish visual art, of madness.” dance and performance. It is supported by Culture Ireland’s Jazmin Chiodi and Alexandre Iseli’s film, A thing is a thing is a thing International Programme for 2016, which celebrates the centeis something else..., addresses embodiment and “examines the tension nary of the 1916 Easter Rising. between proclamations of intention and physical realisation”.

Opposed by “flesh, memory, culture and structures, both individual Andrew Duggan is an Irish artist whose video works, installaand social”, true realisations of idealised change are frequently resisted tions and projects explore the complex relationships between on many levels. self and place. Duggan makes work and leads projects which John Scott and Jason Akira Somma described being inspired to bring artist and institutions, art and ideas together in new “rediscover the Proclamation in the context of the world today, par- dynamic ways. Previous projects have led to new lens based ticularly in view of the decrease in civil liberties that is creeping into works by artists from various creative disciplines.

Irish life and society as a whole”. They continued: “Thinking about the Note aspirations of the Proclamation in the context of the current climate 1. Gerry Kearns in conversation with Andrew Duggan, ‘Using the Proclamation: Arts, Activism and the of xenophobia and racism against refugees made us realise more than Academy’, Royal Irish Academy, April 26, 2016

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

PROJECT PROFILE

Julieann O’Malley, U.K. Delivers: 0.56 miles, Dublin Live Art Festival 2016; photo (detail) by Blue Print Photography

Sara Muthi, PERFORMANCE: An Afterlife, NCAD Degree Show 2016; photo (detail) by Aron Cahill

A Hunger for Liveness EL PUTNAM DISCUSSES ‘DUBLIN LIVE ART FESTIVAL 2016’ AND THE RAPIDLY EXPANDING FIELD OF PERFORMACE PRACTICE IN IRELAND.

Jelili Atiku, Agurmenta Dialogorum (What did I buy from you?), Dublin Live Art Festival 2016; photo (detail) by Blue Print Photography

Harold Offeh, Choreograph Me, Dublin Live Art Festival, 2016; photo (detail) by Blue Print Photography

November – December 2016

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

13

PROJECT PROFILE

Rachel Rankin, Paradise (Yellow), Livestock in the Complex, 2016; photo (detail) by Amber Baruch

2016 has been a year of national reflection as Ireland considers the legacies of the 1916 Easter Rising. As such, the convergence of art with political ideas and action has gained momentum, with a focus on how this particular relationship manifests in local and national contexts.

Such was the backdrop of this year’s Dublin Live Art Festival (DLAF), which brought together a rich and provocative series of performance artists including Julieann O’Malley, Rosalyn McDonagh, Lena Šimic, Harold Bloom and Jelili Atiku. The array of performers presented works that highlight a range of key concerns and ideas relating to culture, politics and power, interweaving personal narratives with national and transnational concerns. As Ireland looks back at the rebellion that would lead to the birth of a nation, DLAF asked its attendees to take these contemplations of commemorations and look outwards. The festival prompted reflection on both the proliferation of performance art across Ireland and the important role of writing in mediating these developments.

INTERSECTIONAL EXPERIENCES The politically motivated performance events presented at this year’s DLAF offered varied aesthetic encounters for a dedicated audience, weaving a rich tapestry of ideas and experiences. Some artists exposed audiences to underrepresented aspects of Irish culture, their general absence from the wider commemorative programme notable in this year of national self-reflection. Rosalyn McDonagh, an Irish Traveller woman with a disability, presented Chair, which consisted of poems describing her experiences in a humorous yet direct manner to an engrossed audience. As she spoke, her words cut through the fog of pretense and ignorance, revealing a sense of collective naiveté, despite people’s attempts to be conscientious or inclusive. In A Rose by Any Other Name, Irish poet Vickey Curtis used street harassment as the guiding force of her remapping of Dublin. Taking responses from an online survey, Curtis brought audience members to different sites across the city where instances of verbal abuse had occurred, including Camden Street, where she herself was physically attacked earlier this year. Amidst wandering tourists and Sunday strollers, this powerful tour of the city served to highlight instances of verbal abuse that are commonly treated as inconsequential or harmless.

In addition to broadening considerations of Irish experience, UK artist Julieann O’Malley probed increasingly visible contestations of the Irish Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, while tracing its transnational implications. Her performance UK Delivers: 0.56 miles, connected Ireland to Liverpool, where she lives, by referencing the thousands of women that travel to the UK for abortions each year. Her subtle yet poignant gestures emphasised the private shame these women endure as a result of stringent political legislation. UK-based Croatian artist Lena Šimic further probed intersections of the personal and political pertaining to reproduction with Friday Records, tying her experiences of “maternal time” with the uncertain future of the United Kingdom after the Brexit vote. As an academic and artist, Šimic shared the unpredictability of claiming time for writing while bringing up a toddler, taking private maternal struggles into the public domain.

While the festival incorporated various convergences of politics with personal experiences, artists also explored the dynamics of audience interaction. In Choreograph Me, Harold Bloom presented his body at the disposal of his spectators, who provided instructions for him to follow. Beginning with simple motions, including jumping and lying

Even though performance has gained increased visibility as an independent art form and in conjunction with other types of creative practice, it is by no means a mainstream artistic medium. It continues to pose challenges for production, reception and art historical interpretation, while not always being well received by viewers. Northern Irish performance artist Sandra Johnston describes how “performance art is an extensive and multifaceted language of human interconnection, yet it remains for the most part marginalised”.2 However, such challenges to general acceptance is part of the medium’s appeal, and Johnston goes on to emphasise how occupying this position allows performance art to be “self-sustaining, flexible and responsive to patterns of social change”.3 As such, creating performance art has its challenges, particularly considering the necessity of space and audiences in realising live work. In addition, funding for performance art is rarely clear-cut, as artists often find themselves in differing public funding categories depending on their background and the nature of their work. With the medium’s formal and historical allegiances to visual arts, dance, theatre and music, there are different strategies governing how performance artists might apply for financial support. on the ground, the work took a humorous turn as Bloom was asked to Many employ creative initiative in finding ways to present work, imitate his favourite childhood pet and purchase wine at the local off- including Angela McDonough of Arbour Hill, Dublin, who began license. At times, audience requests had the potential to be degrading, opening her home to performance events with ‘Room’ in 2015. such as an instruction to perform mouth-to-mouth on an audience member. However, Bloom handled this with comic grace, demonstrat- SCRIVENINGS ing his control over the scenario despite having supposedly relin- The publication of Performance Art in Ireland: A History marks a signifiquished power to the audience. Jelili Atiku, who was arrested earlier cant milestone for the art form in this country, as it provides a docuthis year during a performance in the Ejigbo area of Oshodi-Isolo, mented place in the art historical canon of Irish contemporary art.

Lagos State, presented Agurmenta Dialogorum (What did I buy from Writing is a key activity in relationship to performance art for several you?). Wearing a black morph suit, the artist concealed his corporeal reasons, primarily in providing a means of documenting multisensoidentity and transformed himself into a human candelabrum that ry, ephemeral performance events. While photographs and video members of the audience were asked to light. Instigating a mix of capture visual and sonic traces of a performance, there are other senbeauty and danger, Atiku implicated his audience in rituals on an altar sory qualities, including smell, proprioception, temperature and perin sarcastic devotion to neoliberalism. Overall, what was striking sonal sentiments – e.g. danger, discomfort, empathy – that are not about this year’s festival was how it engaged a range of social and always translated through documentation. For example, witnessing political concerns, welcoming artists whose work emerges from differ- Jelili Atiku move through the gallery space with burning candles projecting from his body stimulated sensations of anxiety, not only for his ent ways of being in the world. own safety, but for that of audience members who crowded in to light the wicks. In most cases, photographic documentation flattens the PERFORMANCE ART IN THE PRESENT Performance art is not a new art form in the Irish context. As made experience into two-dimensional visual planes. This is not to underevident by Áine Phillips in her book Performance Art in Ireland: A value the importance of good quality performance photography – at History, the practice has been growing on the island for decades, con- times this can make a poor performance appear more successful – but nected with rising transnational interest in provocative forms of crea- visual and even audio documentation can only capture and commutive production.1 However, the inclusion of the live art event ‘Future nicate partial versions of events.

I hosted two writing workshops in affiliation with DLAF, aimed Histories’ as part of the Arts Council’s 1916 commemorative programming brings the vitality of Irish performance art into sharp focus. at emphasising the significance of writing in supplementing the expeWith emphasis on action, the corporeal and the incomplete, perfor- rience of performance for the reasons already outlined. In these workmance art appeals to various artists, appearing in different forms shops we addressed the distinctive qualities of performance as an throughout Irish contemporary art practice. Both north and south of artistic medium, alluding to: the experience of art as an event; ambivathe border, there are currently numerous groups and events that focus lence towards the subject/object relationship, whereby the artist as on performance art. In Dublin, ‘Livestock’ – which takes place approx- producer also constitutes the object of aesthetic appreciation; transforimately every two months – is facilitated by artists Eleanor Lawlor and mation of the body and materials; acts of creation and reception occurFrancis Fay, providing a space for novice and experienced artists to ring simultaneously and unfolding in time and space; a reliance on the present new work. In Belfast, Bbeyond has held monthly performance co-presence of the artist and audience in unpredictable and spontanegatherings since 2008. These events take place in different public ous exchanges. These elements not only characterise qualities of some spaces incorporating simultaneous solo performances and group forms of embodied performance art, but also contribute to wider disimprovisations, while taking advantage of the unpredictability of cussions on the nature of aesthetic encounters and artistic experiences in other media. performance.

As such, this year’s DLAF is one manifestation of a thriving perThe live art festival ‘Live Collision’, which takes place at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin (a venue that has supported perfor- formance art scene in Ireland. While this particular festival focuses on mance artists in Ireland and abroad since the 1970s), showcases perfor- the live encounter, it offers an opportunity to consider how performance art alongside experimental theatre. IMMA continues to sup- mance has infiltrated contemporary art across the island, appearing in port performance in conjunction with other contemporary practices, various forms across different institutions and events. Furthermore, including a recent performance by Aideen Barry in response to Carol this form of contemplation provides opportunities to reflect on the Rama’s exhibition ‘The Passion’. Similarly, the success of Amanda significance of critical writing as a process that runs in conjunction Coogan’s exhibition ‘I’ll sing you a song from around the town’ at the with performance, not just as a means of documenting or archiving RHA in 2015, which included six weeks of live performance, demon- these experiences, but extending them beyond their initial encounters strates a growing acceptance of the medium within longstanding and weaving them into broader understandings of art and aesthetics. institutions. Students around the country are also presenting performance work as part of their degree exhibitions. NCAD hosts an annu- EL Putnam is an artist/writer based in Dublin. She is the editor al, day-long performance art event for graduating degree and MFA and co-founder of in:Action: Irish Live Art Review (inaction.ie). students. In 2014, the ‘Performance Caravan’ emerged from the Notes Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork. In addition to presenting 1. In addition to the timeline in Phillips’s book, see the online “Timeline Performance Art in Ireland” for a range of practitioners using performance as a form of artistic produc- a list of practitioners and key events 1972 – 2014 (irishperformanceart.blogspot.ie) 2. Sandra Johnston, Beyond Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation of Doubt, Risk and Testimony through tion, these events and groups also make apparent the audience hunger Performance Art Processes in Relation to Systems of Legal Justice, LIT Verlag, Zürich and Berlin, 2014, p.192 3. Ibid., p.194 for live art.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

HOW IS IT MADE?

Towards a Post-Patriarchal State JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS SARAH BROWNE AND JESSE JONES ABOUT THEIR ONGOING PROJECT ‘IN THE SHADOW OF THE STATE’.

Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones, Of Milk and Marble, 2016; site-specific live performance; performed by Louise Mathews; photo by Miriam O’Connor

Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones, The Truncheon and the Speculum, 2016; stills from live online broadcast written and directed by the artists, featuring Lisa Godson and Klau Kinky/ Gynepunk and presented by the Liverpool Biennial and archived online

Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones, ‘In the Shadow of the State’ legal drafting workshop, Dublin, 2016; drawing by Alwyn Gillespie

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

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HOW IS IT MADE? Joanne Laws: Perhaps you might explain how your collaboration came about and introduce some of your initial ideas in developing this major new project?

Sarah Browne/Jesse Jones: We’d known each other’s practices for many years and felt that at some stage we would find the right opportunity to work together. In 2014, we started discussing a potential collaboration with Patrick Fox (then Director of Create), and later Rachel Anderson (then producer/curator at Artangel, London). We attempted to identify the greatest urgencies for us as artists at that time and felt there was a renewed need to examine and refigure the position of women in relation to a patriarchal nation state. From the beginning of our work together, law and its instruments have been a critical focus.

The Irish Sea also loomed large in our imagination.

Our initial collaborative proposal centred on adapting Máiréad Ni Ghráda’s Irish language play An Triail into a courtroom drama that would tour Ireland with a community cast. A proposed series of outside broadcasts would take the form of an interactive ‘feminist chat show’. That proposal was unsuccessful, but subsequent discussions with Artangel ultimately led to a co-commissioning partnership with Create to produce a major new project which was formalised in 2014.

In keeping with Artangel’s working method, we carried out one year of research, followed by an evaluation, and one year of production. This intense period of research in relative privacy allowed us to develop our methodology and to plan upcoming activities. The project began as an enquiry into how women’s bodies have historically been symbols of political hope and freedom, yet were materially forced to endure painful injustices by the state. Drawing on postcolonial and counter-revolutionary narratives, we felt that the Irish experience in particular is well-placed to critique modern concepts of statehood and capital. We were excited to consider this feminist inquiry through a transnational project residing in dual legal jurisdictions, and believed it was important to produce research that would not only illustrate the past, but offer logic to decode contemporary realities.

JL: Can you outline the project’s various phases?

SB/JJ: During our first year of research, we followed our instincts through a succession of interviews, archive visits, meetings and field trips to sites such as: the Blasket Islands, the Dublin to Liverpool ferry, feminist and women’s libraries, and the Royal College of Gynaecology and Obstetrics Museum in London. We also visited courtrooms, sat in on the symphysiotomy trials and began engaging with the Northern/ Irish Feminist Judgments Project.1 This was an incredible learning experience and opened up the law to us in a very detailed and performative way. As part of their final programme, we were privileged to present our first public hearing of ‘In the Shadow of the State’, entitled The Voice Emerges.2 In March 2015, we initiated our application to the Arts Council’s ‘ART: 2016’ centenary programme, and were later shortlisted and awarded funding as one of nine open call projects across art forms. We then assembled our core team of collaborators: legal academic and activist Máiréad Enright, midwife Philomena Canning, composer Alma Kelliher, material culture historian Lisa Godson, photographer Miriam O’Connor and Derry-based curator/producer Sara Greavu. We realised the importance of site-specific live performance for the project, as a platform to test our collaborative voice, activate our research and share the expertise of our collaborators. We planned a series of four events in Ireland and the UK, comprising private legal workshops (to examine the ‘touch’ of the law, with an invited group of women) and subsequent public performances.

During the first year we developed Burn in Flames: Post-Patriarchal Archive in Circulation, which offered ways to perform the project rather than trying to describe it. We identified everyday objects and named them as evidence of the late-capitalist oppression of women. In an active form of critique, these items were imprinted with the PostPatriarchal Archive stamp and placed back in circulation.Using a perfomative lecture and workshop format, we presented key research inquiries, such as the construction of ‘feminine hygiene’ or the nature of ‘patriarchal time’.

Audience members were invited to bring their own materials to be stamped. We gave presentations in Ireland and the UK in a variety of community, activist and academic contexts, partly as a way to build an engaged audience for the project.

Of Milk and Marble was staged in Derry in March 2016, in a home frequently raided during the Troubles. It featured a single performer

imagination. The centenary allowed these issues to be vocalised and there was an appetite for questioning from all sides.

When I was growing up during the Celtic Tiger, people were confident, but it was a shallow, material confidence: they could get a job, a good wage, travel, buy property and so on. I think we have a different type of confidence now that is more grounded in social issues, social change and the fact that we are all in it together. As artists, we intervened into that space to ask: What might our national culture look like if it embraced these experiences? How could it find radical and inventive ways to articulate itself, not as historical revision, but as a way to challenge fundamental ideas about art and how it relates to the political?

JL: You recently stated that women are only mentioned a handful of times in the 1937 Constitution of Ireland. Perhaps you could elaborate on how this document intersects with women’s everyday lives in the twenty-first century?

S.B: ‘Woman’ is mentioned only three times in the Irish Constitution, Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones, Burn in Flames: Post-Patriarchal Archive in Circulation, 2015 in article 41.2 and in the Eighth Amendment, article 40.3.3. Article (Louise Mathews) at the kitchen table, for a day-long run of perfor- 41.2 neatly conflates womanhood with motherhood and the institution of the family, in relation to work within the home, which is recogmances with small audiences of around a dozen people.

The Truncheon and the Speculum was staged in July as part of the nised as a ‘necessity’, ‘duty’ and ‘support’.

The Eighth Amendment equates the right to life of a woman who Liverpool Biennial 2016. This live internet broadcast from the radical community bookshop News from Nowhere explored historic state is pregnant with that of a foetus. In effect, this means that Ireland is violence enacted through gynaecological means. It identified the one of very few countries in the world that has a constitutional ban on Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s as a key moment in the legislation abortion. However, what isn’t so widely discussed is that this article of state violence against women. Featuring material culture historian impacts on all issues of consent for pregnant women, for example Dr Lisa Godson and self-identified ‘cyborg witch’ Klau Kinky, of the requesting or refusing certain tests or procedures. This means that Catalan collective Gynepunk, this performance proposed supplanting medical professionals act as legal interpreters. These legal artefacts state-sanctioned broadcasts into domestic spaces. A transnational attest to how we are viewed by the state. The Eighth Amendment hovaudience was invited to this online platform to question the terrestrial ers as an implied threat over all women living in Ireland who could become pregnant. Should this happen, we will live in a state of excepillegalities of reproductive rights for women.

Staged in September 2016 in the Pillar Room of the Rotunda tion where our human rights are suspended.

Hospital (the first lying-in hospital in Ireland and the UK), The Touching Contract proposed new ways of understanding how we JL: Can you outline some of the methods you have developed to encounter the touch of the law every day, with and without consent. document the project?

The immersive performance featured a soundscape composed by SB/JJ: We have worked hard to find sensitive, appropriate and critical Alma Kelliher. A legal score, devised in collaboration with Máiréad means to document the project. The drafting sessions were for invited Enright and an invited group of women in Dublin, determined how groups of women who remain anonymous unless they choose otheraudience members chose to participate. The performance will be wise. These sessions were not recorded, videoed or photographed, but newly adapted and re-staged in November 2016, with a different cast, we took extensive notes, as did our legal collaborator, Máiréad Enright.

We worked with two courtroom artists, Alwyn Gillespie and Priscilla for the former juvenile courtroom in Toynbee Hall, London.

Coleman, who made drawings of the proceedings. By using this stratJL: What are your thoughts on the range of women’s campaigns egy of representation, we could make evident the presence of law in and feminist projects that appear to have gained momentum this everyday places and situations, while also respecting the participants’ year? Do you think they have been heightened by the 1916 cente- privacy.

As artists who often work with moving image, we had the strong nary, which has brought our relationship with the past into sense that we didn’t want the outcome of our work together (about sharper focus?

JJ: I think we had a mature and brave centenary actually. It could have tactility and the body) to take an image-based form. We delegated the been a jingoistic nightmare, but I think overall there was an appetite visual sense of the project to our photographer-in-residence Miriam for reflection. When you spoke to people they were linking it to the O’Connor, who created a photographic record that does not attempt to defeat of the water charges and to the fight for equality and anti- aus- be ‘objective’ documentation. O’Connor photographed a series of key terity. There was a feeling of responsibility, of not leaving it to the gestures devised and choreographed by performers, but we didn’t government to decide. The centenary was a great imaginative spark record the performances themselves, which are documented extenthat really kicked off with Waking the Feminists, when the Abbey sively through rumour and first person accounts. Traces of the project missed the zeitgeist and a backlash ensued.3 An eruption of publicness also exist online on our twitter account, @pparchive, and through the emerged out of private conversations that women were having for a monthly newsletter we deliver to our mailing list subscribers via long time without being heard. When it started, it was like an ava- intheshadowofthestate.org. lanche.

I think the foundation was laid with the same-sex marriage refer- Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones are visual artists based in Dublin. endum, in terms of society’s expectations for equality. As someone Their collaboration, as a feminist practice, brings together mutuwho is left-wing, I generally feel quite alienated from Irish politics, but al concerns. They have each made numerous works within and the shared sense of victory felt after the vote for marriage equality was outside gallery spaces, and have extensive experience working in very empowering. We had achieved something that 10 years ago collaborative contexts and through public art commissions. would have been impossible.

It was a loosening of the Catholic state noose and the prescribed arrangement that emerged from the fallout of the Irish Civil War. Over Notes 1. Northern/Irish Feminist Judgments Project was established by legal academics and feminists across the last year, the pro-choice movement has gained momentum, with the UK and Ireland to reopen cases over the last 40 years and re-write the judgments from a feminist increased symbolic and public visibility bringing the campaign to the perspective 2. In Green Street Courthouse, Dublin, the artists staged The voice emerges from the body/the speculum fore. It is a very hopeful and creative community – inventive and enters the body/architecture surrounds the body, which comprised presentations by material culture humorous in its dissent. In many ways, the interconnected issues of historian Lisa Godson, philosopher Tina Kinsella and legal historian Linda Mulcahy, with a subsequent screening of horror film The Entity marriage equality, Waking the Feminists and repealing the Eighth are 3. When the Abbey Theatre launched its programme to mark the centenary of the 1916 Rising, only 1 underpinned by the question: What kind of society, love, marriage, out of the 10 plays programmed were written by a woman and 3 out of 10 were directed by women.

A group of theatre professionals (Waking the Feminists) held a public meeting at the Abbey Theatre life, choices, autonomy do we want? Nobody ever asked us that before. and soon after, the board and director issued a public statement on their plans to develop a compreIt takes confidence to stand up and ask for these things. They require hensive policy on gender equality, and to programme more work by women artists

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

ORGANISATION

Collective Voice SHEENA BARRETT AND HELEN CAREY DISCUSS THE MONTO ARTS GROUP, A COLLECTIVE OF ARTS ORGANISATIONS BASED IN NORTH INNER CITY DUBLIN.

Sinead Onora Kennedy, Cloy, 2014; Most Promising Graduate Award Winner, Talbot Gallery and Studios

Seoidin O’Sullivan, artist in residence at Kids Inc Montessori, seen here at the LAB Gallery as part of Project 2020

Jane Fogarty, Strut, 2016; Mark Swords, Feathers, 2016; Artbox

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

17

ORGANISATION

Vittorio Santoro, In/Voluntary Movement Diagram’ (Josef K) and Related Works, installation view, 2015; Oonagh Young Gallery

THE heart of the inner city is a place full of history and adventure, with all the character that Dublin is so renowned for. Once the largest redlight district in Europe, ‘Monto’ was the setting for the ‘Circe’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, often referred to as ‘Night Town’. Its streets and safe houses witnessed revolution and the birth of the nation, while the walls of the Magdalene Laundry still cast a long shadow. From street traders and dockers to brothels and garrisons, labour has always been precarious in this area. It is a real, lived-in, city-centre neighbourhood, where socio-economic divides are clear.

In 2015, we formed MONTO Arts Group as a means of making visible a creative hub of visual arts organisations studios, residencies, workspaces and galleries located in the area. We decided it was important to reclaim the Monto name and embrace the area’s past in order to help build an embedded future. Our members are curators, educators and cultural producers, namely: Sheena Barrett and Liz Coman (The LAB/Dublin City Council Arts Office), Hilary Murray (Artbox), Helen Carey (Fire Station Artists Studios), Oonagh Young (Oonagh Young Gallery/Design HQ) and Elaine Grainger (Talbot Gallery and Studios). By formalising what had started as a means of sharing information, resources and equipment, we began to work together more strategically, learning from each other and leveraging local and international supports and networks.

ining the future. As the North East inner city becomes the focus of welcome investment to combat socio-economic neglect and austerity, and as decision-makers begin to implement a coherent strategy for local workers, residents and visitors alike can maximise the value of what MONTO has to offer.

Vanessa Donoso Lopez, Culture Night at The LAB, September 2016; photo by Peter Varga

and artists, and unlocking their voices as citizens (for further details see our ‘Project 20/20’ blog dublincityartsoffice.ie/project2020). This year, children from Central Model National School are curating an exhibition from the state collection as part of a major collaboration with the Office of Public Works (OPW) and the Department of Finance and Personnel Northern Ireland. We have also recently received an award from the Docklands Arts Fund to fund MONTO arts residencies and have invited artists-in-residence Seoidin O’Sullivan and Mary Jo Gilligan to explore the relationship between the docks and the Monto area.

Fire Station is beginning to explore and introduce 3D printing, as well as developing an off-site location for pristine artists’ design studios. This will promote design and software skills to a new generation working in the creative industries who might be responsible for the next Game of Thrones. Where artists imagine their future, so too do the other workers in the neighbourhood. Artbox functions as an incubation space to analyse levels of engagement and possible points of intersection between contemporary art and higher education. Along with the Oonagh Young Gallery, Artbox is looking at innovative ways to build an art-buying public through commissioning attractively priced multiples. Talbot Gallery and Studios is taking a break from gallery shows to focus on enhancing its studio provision, with the aim of attracting more artists to the area.

Each venue brings in research partners through various initiatives including Fire Station’s Summer School, the Art Research Collaboration MA with IADT at the LAB and Artbox’s involvement with Connect at TCD. International curators, informed via Fire Station’s international curator programme, know Monto very well and have attended events here, including our picnic, since MONTO’s inception. With each monthly opening, an informed art world descends on the area, where local people lead public tours between arts venues, underscoring Monto as a prominent arts destination.

However, none of this works in isolation. Collaborating with community groups across many fields – from activism and employment to environmentalism and education – visual artists continue to find ways to change perceptions of the neighbourhood and invest in community and place. For MONTO, artistic activity is not separate from the places and people that make the city thrive. Dereliction can be countered by developing hubs of creative enterprise that nurture arts practice, so when an initiative like ‘The Tree Line Project’ finds its way onto the street, it will be because artists have allowed the city to flourish.

MONTO PICNIC & THE TREE LINE PROJECT Dublin City Council (DCC) and the Arts Office remain key supporters, providing capital support for Fire Station Artists’ Studios, running the LAB and licensing and funding Artbox. We further extended our relationships within the DCC to work with the Central Area Office in developing initiatives such as the MONTO Picnic – an event conceived as a way of reclaiming the public park from drug dealers, by introducing arts activities, music and installations, and encouraging people to take their lunch al fresco. The space is there and is well kept, but it needed to be activated in a new way. The event introduced us to new neighbours as we presented artworks on balconies and hung our MONTO Picnic bunting, designed by Oonagh Young. We worked with the Parks Departments, Housing and Community Officers, residents, the Gardaí, local businesses and importantly our artists, including an artist-in-residence programme led by the LAB, with Seoidin O’Sullivan in Kids Inc. crèche overlooking the park.

The MONTO galleries and artists’ spaces have the expertise and vision to imagine the local environment differently, as demonstrated COLLECTIVE VOICE Through seemingly small gestures, such as hosting exhibition open- in an exciting new venture ‘The Tree Line Project’, led by Oonagh ings on the same night and developing joint public tours, we sought to Young and Mary Cremin. This flagship project was awarded €150,000 make Monto more of a destination. We feel that collectively we have a through the Arts Council’s Making Great Art Work Award, having greater voice, giving the place a sense of strength in numbers, commit- been selected through a national open call. ‘The Tree Line Project’, ment and a future plotted against a strong awareness of history. The launching on Bloomsday 2017, will comprise a tree-planting profact that MONTO Arts Group comprises a blend of local authority, gramme in conjunction with Parks and Landscape Services to improve private galleries and publicly-funded organisations all working differ- the public realm of Joyce Street, with the aim of involving local resiently in the same geographic context, has helped us to garner new dents and workers in selecting indigenous trees and plants listed in the audiences, supports and collaborators. This year, we successfully nego- ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses. The project will also feature a temporary tiated being named as a district for Culture Night, rather than being pavilion for the park designed by architect Donal Colfer (which will function as a space to show both a curated arts programme and comlisted under Trinity and Docklands.

Collectively, MONTO Arts Group supports artists to experiment munity-led content selected by groups in the area) and an LED piece and make new work by offering studios, facilities, advice, commission- memorialising Joyce’s writing. The project speaks to a local democraing, exhibitions and opportunities for community engaged practice cy, literally at grass roots level, as well as to a fierce pride in heritage and innovative learning programmes. In short, MONTO provides and the future. spaces for artists to live, make, show, discuss and collaborate, making the visual arts more visible in our neighbourhood and across the city. PARTNERSHIPS & RESEARCH We want to think creatively about public space and work with artists, As the LAB builds on its reputation for risk-taking and innovation, it designers and our community to power change. Using our diverse will continue to deliver groundbreaking education programmes such perspectives and skills, we enjoy dreaming up ambitious plans as ‘Project 20/20’ – a five-year visual literacy initiative which, over Sheena Barrett, Curator/Arts Officer, Dublin City Council and inspired by the context. What is unique about MONTO Arts Group is time, focuses on developing the visual literacy of children and young The LAB. Helen Carey, independent curator and Director, Fire that we have embraced the area’s past to develop a platform for imag- people in Dublin 1, by connecting them with contemporary Irish art Station Artists’ Studios.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

PUBLIC ART

Native Landscapes KATHLEEN BITETTI OUTLINES ‘TIR NA NÓG’, A TEMPORARY PUBLIC ART INSTALLATION IN BOSTON, COMMISSIONED BY CULTURE IRELAND.

Caoimhghin Ó Fraithile, South of Hy-Brasil, 2016; Back Bay Fens, Boston; photo courtesy of P.T. Sullivan

ARTISTS Caoimhghin Ó Fraithile (IRL) and Michael Dowling (US/IRL) drew on Ireland’s rich culture and mythology for their temporary public artworks in Boston, which were commissioned as part of Culture Ireland’s 1916 – 2016 Centenary Programme. Under the project title ‘Tir na nÓg’, meaning the ‘otherworld’, Dowling’s Well House and Ó Fraithile’s South of Hy-Brasil explored the concepts of myth and ancestry as thresholds of otherworldliness. The artworks were sited from September to October 2016 in the Back Bay Fens section of the Emerald Necklace, an expansive park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted that is linked by waterways. The site-specific artworks were presented by Medicine Wheel Productions1 in partnership with the Fenway Alliance’s Public by Design initiative.2 Ó Fraithile’s large-scale floating artwork South of Hy-Brasil was sited in the lagoon behind the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MFA), in an area known locally as the ‘Muddy River’. The piece (which measures 25 foot long, 10 foot wide and 18 foot high) was created using natural materials: wood, cloth, birch trunks, bamboo, reed and plywood. The artwork was built on flat-bottomed pontoons and its buoyancy and stability was improved by incorporating two outriggers.

Eight moorings were tied loosely, so as to allow rotation and movement with the prevailing wind, which made for a very active piece of work. Not only did the cotton rag-work flutter in the breeze, but the whole structure performed this mesmerising movement.

Inspired by optical illusions and dazzle camouflage, Ó Fraithile created a gridded pattern on the artwork’s rear curved sections, suggestive of sea serpents cresting the water’s surface or a distant island coming in and out of view.3 The roofline was set a foot above the water, further extenuating the reflection of the piece as it swiveled in the wind. Up on high, a shrine-like structure emerged from the cascading cloud formation, appearing like some sort of mountain temple adorned with billowing prayer flags.

South of Hy-Brasil was in the pipeline for five years, since I encountered Ó Fraithile’s work in New York in 2011. Our traditionally Irish neighbourhood in south Boston inspired Ó Fraithile to develop a project to honour the Irish diaspora and the previous generations of immigrants who were forced to start new lives in foreign lands. The city of Boston continues to play a significant role in the story of the Irish diaspora, with the Boston Metro area in particular representing the highest concentration of people with Irish American ancestry in the country. It is therefore very fitting that ‘Tir na nÓg’ formed part of international commemorations to mark the centenary of the 1916

Michael Dowling, Well House, 2016; Back Bay Fens, Boston; image courtesy of the artist

Ireland’s border region along Lough Foyle and the Foyle River, which explores water as a source of mythology, history and energy.

Dowling’s Well House was installed near the Kelleher Rose Garden on the Fens side of MFA. Exploring the concept of water as a blessing, Well House was inspired by the Emly Shrine, an Irish eighth-century bronze, wood and enamel reliquary found in the permanent collection at MFA. The surface pattern of this holy casket informed many of Dowling’s artworks, especially those incorporating geometric or tiled elements. The structure of Well House (which measures approximately 8 feet by 4 feet and is 11 feet in height) is covered in a grid pattern and adorned with silver leaf. In the centre of the sculpture, an alcove houses a water feature, reflecting the importance of water – a notion at odds with the fact that the Muddy River is contaminated with industrial waste.

Dowling’s creations act as inviting thresholds, where viewers can Caoimhghin Ó Fraithile, South of Hy-Brasil, 2016; find quiet moments for contemplation. Well House prompts reflection Back Bay Fens, Boston; photo courtesy of P.T. Sullivan in a number of ways. On a physical level, the silver leaf used in the Easter Rising – a pivotal moment in the founding of an independent geometric design creates a shiny, highly reflective surface which Irish Republic. Culture Ireland’s involvement as commissioner of the bounces light back at the viewer. In addition, the work explores the project also offered additional leverage within city government, giving universal concept of water as a life-giving resource. Dowling also creus access to park workers, who gave so much of their time. ated this work on a personal level, given the influence he drew from Ó Fraithile’s piece directly references the Irish mythical island of his family’s Irish heritage. The Ó Dubhlaing or Dowlings were one of Hy-Brasil, believed to be located off Ireland’s west coast. According to the seven ‘septs’ or descendants of the medieval kingdom Loígis, legend, the island only becomes visible once every seven years and is known today as County Laois, and are among the oldest Irish families home to a mysterious, advanced civilization. The artwork offers view- with connections to the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Tribe of the Gods. ers the opportunity to reflect on the present as well as the past through Dowling’s family lore stated that his grandmother was in charge of the the artist’s use of natural materials linked to the cultural practices and bucket at the sacred well site associated with St. Bridget and the Celtic traditional crafts of his native landscape. For example, the artist creat- goddess Brigit. His grandmother always kept a small bottle of holy ed a curved, sloping section with materials and processes used in water in her home in Quincy. Well House is dedicated to his grandthatching, one of the oldest methods of roofing. Similarly, his use of mother and the blessing of water as the source of all life. cotton brings to mind the act of tying cloth in healing rituals, as one might find on Irish rag trees, while the placement of spiritual offerings Kathleen Bitetti is a practicing visual artist, arts administrator, near water sources or significant sites is still practiced in Ireland to this public policy expert and curator based at Medicine Wheel day. In conjunction with this outdoor public artwork, the Norman B. Productions, South Boston.

Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library displayed several of Ó Fraithile’s sketch books and ink drawings alongside maps from their Notes 1. Founded in 2000 by Michael Dowling, Medicine Wheel Productions is a community-based arts collection depicting the imagined seascapes of Hy-Brasil. organisation located in South Boston For over 25 years, Michael Dowling’s practice has focused on 2. The Fenway Alliance is a non-profit membership service and advocacy organisation dedicated to the creating places for people to gather and to heal. He has developed a prosperity and growth of the Fenway Cultural District, a vibrant and creative hub for South Boston 3. ‘Dazzle camouflage’ was a form of camouflage used extensively on ships during World War I, range of site-specific public art projects including an ambitious, long- whereby complex geometric designs and patterns would be rendered on the surface of vessels using running project ‘The Tonnes: A Meeting of the Waters’, situated in bold, contrasting colours

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Critique Supplement Edition 28: November – December 2016

Gary Coyle, The Dark Woods, ‘Now Came Still Evening On’ installation view, 2016, The Dock; photo by Keith Nolan

John Coyle, Tennis Courts – Dun Laoghaire, 2012, The Dock; photo by Keith Nolan

John and Gary Coyle ‘Now Came Still Evening On’ The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, 10 September – 12 November ‘NOW Came Still Evening On’ is a unique exhibition presenting the work of father and son John and Gary Coyle. John’s intimate paintings occupy The Dock’s light and airy Gallery One while Gary has created a vast immersive installation in the largest of The Dock’s three galleries.

John Coyle’s paintings and drawings depict scenes and people close to his studio and home. The works have a conciseness and authority clearly developed over a long career. They are reminiscent of the intimiste paintings of Vuillard and Bonnard,

the potential for greatness in the everyday.

A sense of magic in the everyday is a theme that also runs through Gary Coyle’s work, as does a profound engagement with art from the past. His installation is situated in a darkened room where the viewer is dazzled by the installation’s sheer scale and intensity of colour. The gallery has been papered floor to ceiling in a bright green vinyl drawing of a forest. The woodland scene acts as wallpaper, rather like the elegant flock papers in eighteenth-century salons. On top of it there are charcoal drawings displayed in a salon-style hang, complete with their own meticulously drawn baroque frames.

The forest depicted in The Dark Woods (2016) is Coole Park, a key site in the Irish literary revival where W.B. Yeats went looking for fairies with Lady Gregory. The woodland setting is a continuation of a theme first explored in Coyle’s 2015 RHA exhibition ‘Into the Woods’, which depicted the forest in Montana that was home to the environmental terrorist known as the Unabomber. The woodland scene in The Dark Woods is an environment where anything can happen, a place that is real and also surreal.

The imagery in the charcoal drawings, of cats and chickens and clowns, is derived from the internet. Coyle lovingly re-works these ubiquitous images, which are consumed in their millions all around the world. The images are drawn on heavyweight paper in a process involving great care. They are revised, erased and redrawn until they are right.

The drawings in tandem with the wallpaper reflect on our problematic relationship with nature.

The choice of cats is apt, as they are both familiar and unfathomable creatures. They represent our unease with nature and the uncanny within the familiar. Nature in Coyle’s work is like one of the thoroughbred cats in his drawings: having been manipulated by man, their future actions are unclear and possibly not benign.

A significant aspect of the work is the presence of kitsch. In Venus (2015/2016) Coyle depicts an oven-ready chicken against a background derived from Titian’s Venus and Cupid with an Organist (1548/1549). Coyle explores kitsch in art history and contemporary popular culture, as well as on the internet. Of the artists Coyle quotes or alludes to, Titian is often seen as beyond reproach. Others, such as Watteau, are frequently viewed as populist or superficial. Coyle presents a subtle examination of the workings of taste over time and our shifting relationship with images.

There is something subversive about the artist’s deployment of such overt levels of skill and even more so in the evident pleasure he takes in process. The works play with ideas of scale. Subjects that are immediate and close at hand, like the domestic animals, provide a counterpoint to the expansive woodland backdrops. One is also reminded of the vastness of the internet. From this superabundance of images and stimuli, Coyle creates a spectacle and at the same time presents multi-layered and contemplative objects. His work is so infused with irony that it is not ironic at all. The effect is the opposite of the ironic pall that surrounds so much contemporary work made in traditional media. In choosing to explore popular culture and the history of art simultaneously, Coyle presents the viewer with a visual feast.

and of works by their more northerly descendants in Dublin and London.

The paintings are rooted in empirical study, in the act of looking closely and analysing the world close at hand. They seem to flow from a desire to understand and to convey the poetry of the everyday. Although the visual language can be traced back to Post-Impressionism, these works are completely contemporary, presenting an unfiltered response to the world as it is right now. The sympathetic hanging of the works helps further convey their sense of contemporaneity.

In Old Boat Dun Laoghaire (2014) the taut construction of interlocking planes edges towards abstraction. At the point when the painting might become an abstract configuration, Coyle brings the viewer back to an awareness of the motif. This friction between the object depicted and the formal language deployed to represent it is evident in Flowers Still Life (2015), where the welter of brush marks threatens to dissipate the image. Here, again, Coyle brings the viewer back from a tipping point with just enough information about the vase and flowers.

The to and fro between representation and abstraction is a result of looking really hard and bringing to each picture an awareness of the endless possibilities of the language of painting. In Now Come Still Evening On (Clarinda Park) (2014) Coyle has captured the fading evening light in a painting that is close to dissolving in front us. In choosing a Andy Parsons is an artist based in Sligo. He is the title from Milton, he has asserted his faith in finding founder of Floating World Artist Books.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet CRITIQUE SUPPLEMENT

Paul Murnaghan ‘All Mountains are Moving’ Limerick City Gallery of Art, 15 September – 30 October

November – December 2016

Tom Climent, Eamon Colman, William Crozier, Neal Greig, Eilís O’Connell, Peter Martin, James McCreary, Michael Ray, Conor Walton ‘Glow’, Catherine Hammond Gallery, Skibbereen, 9 September – 19 October

THE stated aim of this group exhibition was to explore and interpret the idea and theme ‘Glow’, visually echoing the shift from late summer into autumn, whether experienced as a continuous radiant beam from a light source, the result of energy produced by vibrating electric colours or, contrastingly, through the gentle light of changing luminosity.

Eamon Colman’s two large oils on paper, Seeking refuge, the green earth turned towards the river and Morning swim by the Sultan’s tower introduce a strong warm presence at the front of the gallery with their swathes of expressionistic colour and addictive energy. Referencing landscape, they can be read equally as abstract gesture.

A similarly warm palette underpins Tom Paul Murnaghan, The stars don’t shine upon us, we’re in the way of their light ture is an intricate web of forms and was made by Climent’s paintings, The Heart Waits and The Heart pouring molten lead into water. When these two Holds. However, the surface and paint treatment is substances come into contact the metal crystallises denser and more textured, seeming to absorb light into elaborate patterns, a process known as molyb- and forcing us to concentrate on the underlying domancy, which originated in Ancient Greece structures depicted. Climent also holds back from where it was used to tell the future. Despite the precise definition of his subject, leaving the viewer many references to divination and mysticism, the to interpret his geometric, irregularly-patterned and self-serious persona of Beuys does not apply to subtly-coloured forms. The balance between repreMurnaghan, who instead presents these ritualistic sentation and abstraction is cleverly construed. We practices in a refreshing, childlike way. In its entire- could read these as town or mountain scapes, or as ty, the exhibition is playful and inquisitive, prompt- some other inner pictorial place, and it’s refreshing ing us to look with fresh eyes at the materials and at that it doesn’t really matter.

Paul Murnaghan, Balance In William Crozier’s large carborundum print our belief systems.

The biggest of the upper-floor rooms holds a The Lure of Evening, the fading light bathes a hillside PAUL Murnaghan’s exhibition ‘All Mountains Are diorama of miniature gold animals, most of which in dappled greys, dark blues and off-whites. The Moving’ explores archaic belief systems by courting are hybrid species, combining, for example, the deep shadow of foreground foliage contrasts with wonderment and superstition. This new body of body of a goat with a fish tail for a head. These ani- the dusk light. It is strongly atmospheric and chanwork refers to outmoded ways of magical thinking, mals converge around a flickering lake on a bed of nels the theme with gentle luminosity. James but also arouses a sense of mystery in the viewer fake fur. Scattered around them are pebbles that McCreary’s prints in muted tones, October Moon and through a clever use of materials and techniques have been split in half by the artist’s grandfather Autumn Leaves, draw us into his microscopically Loftus Lowndes. The humble pebble becomes an elegant treatment of glowing leaves floating on dark that make us question what we are seeing.

‘All Mountains Are Moving’ is exhibited object of fascination as the diorama is juxtaposed backgrounds.

Light is essential for Eilís O’Connell’s Deálan/ upstairs in Limerick City Gallery of Art across with a large-scale projection, 100 Stones. This comnumerous rooms around the square first floor bal- prises still images of the split stones, intensely mag- Burning Coal, an irregularly-curved cast-resin object cony space above the Atrium Gallery. The first room nified, accompanied by ambient music and the mounted at shoulder height on a wall near a side on the right omits a yellowy glow, created by an sound of a high symbol or triangle, which brings to window. Its smooth surface is infused with amber orange stain on the glass window. In the middle of mind eastern religious practices. The projection is tones, like swirling galaxies trapped within. The the room is the sculptural work The stars don’t shine immersive, hypnotic and meditative. The rusty quiet but strong presence of this work gave the fullupon us, we’re in the way of their light. This is com- orange and grey-blue patterns in the stones evoke est interpretation of the overall theme. The other posed of an unlikely and precarious combination of the expansiveness of the cosmos and this gives rise sculptural piece, Michael Ray’s Melt 1, is a translumaterials, including an arching arm of plastic cov- to the elusive perception of something essential and cent ice-blue cone made from kiln-cast crystal. It is a ered in fake leather, which is held up by part of a primordial in what was previously small and insig- cooler, more formal piece that works in subtle ways.

Conor Walton shows two small realist still life peeled tree branch. Nothing is fixed, but rather nificant.

‘All Mountains Are Moving’ gently prompts us works. An open pound of butter is exactly what you employs and seems to transcend the laws of gravity.

At one end of the arm is an antique weight which to reflect on the meaning of life and the meaning of get in Butter. All rich yellow dairy substance and roots the structure to the floor. At the elevated end is death. This reaches its climax as we move around a hoover-like mouth with synthetic orange rope the space and into the final room. Here, a more hanging from its end. Above this, and at the peak of somber sculptural installation is made up of, among the arch, is a levitating feather-covered ball that other things, the donated ashes of a man named rotates slowly around in the air. This element of the Robert Paulson. These have been emptied onto sculpture is captivating and introduces the perva- another antique pedestal. It is unusual to see the sive sense of mystery and magic that permeates the ashes of the deceased, which normally remain out exhibition. The feather ball also adds an air of fragil- of sight, concealed within an urn, buried underity to the piece as all the disjointed materials appear ground or scattered into the wind. Offered up for to be harmoniously balanced, yet could fall apart at visual contemplation, the ashes are surprisingly any moment. Through its materiality, The Stars… voluminous. Looking closely, chips of bone are visirecalls a lineage of conceptual sculpture by combin- ble. Somehow, studying these remains doesn’t feel ing the drama of Richard Serra’s balancing steel morbid, but rather testifies to the interconnectedworks with the natural materials of ritualistic prac- ness of things as Murnaghan again grounds us in the tices used in the sculptural installations of self- matter of the world. ‘All Mountains Are Moving’ invites us to contemplate the relationship between appointed shaman Joseph Beuys.

In the corner of the balcony space is the work small stones and the cosmos, between these ashes Balance, which reinforces this comparison. Balance is and ourselves: our return from dust to dust. composed of a lead sculpture resting atop an antique Kirstie North is an independent writer, curator wooden pedestal. It looks as if it should fall over, as and artist who teaches History of Art at one of the legs is shorter than the others. The sculp- University College Cork.

‘Glow’, installation view; photo by Colm Desmond

golden foil, it is a beautiful work that stands out among the various landscapes. Hanging above this, A Jug of Milk is more subtle, with a single white highlight on the surface of the jug. Walton’s third painting, Burning, depicts, in ochre-orange tones, a full-length male nude running and holding a flaming torch, its fire engulfing his head and upper body.

While technically impressive, it seems startling and incongruous here, and a less subtle interpretation of the exhibition theme.

Initially, Peter Martin’s lighted stained-glass cityscapes in wooden frames might also seem out of place. Deep black borders give these works a strong filmic feel. Wrapped in Walls depict public housing and city landmarks brightly drawn against deepcoloured night skies populated with angry-looking clouds. The distant tower of Shandon Church situates us on Cork’s northside, a boarded-up shop beside some houses bringing forth a sense of social deprivation. There is character and strength in how this subject matter is worked through a medium which is usually used for more abstract or ethereal themes.

Finally, I returned more than once to Neil Greig’s three oil paintings, unable to quite pin them down in the context. Knockmanny, Kilvey Lake and Whitethorns offer robust depictions of a woodland, a lakeside and a rough hillside respectively. Lightlydappled encaustic floats across the surfaces with gestural highlighting of grasses, reeds and leaves.

Such an intense combination of effects is somewhat unfashionable these days. The painterly treatment is very different from the fluid expressionism of Colman or Crozier’s works, or the calm measured structures of Climent. While located in the Irish countryside, the locations depicted seem idealised.

Knockmanny could be a woodland scene in warmer climes, while Kilvey Lake reminded me of a fastflowing North American river scene. Several approaches to painting are combined with great technical flair and intensity. Despite the risks involved, the works are far from academic or staid, and their rich and varied palette is fresh and lively.

Curated by Maureen O’Sulllivan, this is a very reflective and intelligent selection of work, arranged to make best use of the bright, naturally-lit space.

The challenge of demonstrating a consistent theme across a group show, without ascribing excessive meaning or interpretation, is well achieved.

Colm Desmond is an artist based in Dublin.

November – December 2016

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet CRITIQUE SUPPLEMENT

Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones ‘The Touching Contract’ The Rotunda Hospital Pillar Room, Dublin, 23 – 25 September 2016

Robert Kelly ‘Expanding Spaces’ Draoícht, Blanchardstown, 24 September – 19 November ROBERT Kelly is a print-maker whose appetite for

ised organisms. Displayed open, they retain creases

exploration takes his work from the flat surface into from fold patterns, creating relief works that fluctuthree-dimensional space. In his latest exhibition, ate between whole and partial forms while expand-

Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones, The Touching Contract, 2016; photo by Miriam O’Connor

THE day of the second public performance of Jesse Jones and Sarah Browne’s The Touching Contract fell on a date of heightened emotion for women in Ireland, taking place just hours after Dublin saw thousands take to the streets in the fifth annual March for Choice, part of the campaign demanding that the government repeal the Eighth Amendment.

The atmosphere in the Rotunda Pillar Room’s antechamber was withdrawn and respectful; the audience appeared fragile.

The third chapter of four performative works in the pair’s first collaboration ‘In the Shadow of the State’ was devised in consultation with local women.1 Feminist legal scholar Mairead Enright wrote the ‘legal score’ for the work, drawing on the archive of legal documents relating to the treatment of Irish women by the state and by the medical profession, both here and in the UK. This source material reveals a sorry history of medical misdemeanors and the enforced adoption of illegitimate children.

The artists view this legacy as a history of violence against women and, given the horrors endured by survivors of symphysiotomy2 and those who suffered incarceration at the hands of the church (in the Magdalene Laundries for example), it is difficult to argue otherwise.

Against this backdrop, the audience was required to read a set of terms and conditions, before filling in and signing a contract of consent to be touched during the activation of the work. This prompted an instantaneous wariness in me as a viewer – now a ‘participant’ – as the legalese hinted that the territory ahead might prove unnerving.

“Participants shall not bring or cause or permit to be brought into the Performance any fragile hopes or expectations for the state or its laws” warned the terms. “…Notwithstanding the foregoing, any such expectations of or aspirations are carried at Participants’ entire risk”.3 Before entering the main performance space, participants were required to complete a contract giving their consent to be touched in a variety of ways: sexual, violent, medical, paternal – even sonic.

There was the option to refuse consent and instead to act as ‘witness’, in which case one’s senses would be impeded with a blindfold and earplugs.

The scene was now set – emulating the experience of being admitted to an institution – and participants finally entered the Pillar Room. Performers dressed in pale blue and wearing nurse-like white shoes sat and stood around, waiting to be activated by the chime of a triangle, signifying the initiation of The Touching Contract.

Moving between the standing participants, the performers approached and retreated, in a loosely

coordinated choreography of gestures and unspoken instructions. This voiceless show started timidly, with the performers offering participants a listen from their MP3 players (I was given a blast of Baby it’s Cold Outside), then slowly grew in intensity as they mimed washing and inspecting their hands, framed the cleft between their legs with forefingers and thumbs to form the shape of a triangle – a woman’s sex – then raised their hands over their faces, snapping their teeth and grimacing. Jamaican pop reggae band Inner Circle’s 1992 hit Sweat (A La La La La Long) boomed throughout the room.

The performers ran through the crowd in a seemingly random sequence, at one point gathering a few male participants together. Some threw themselves at our feet, crying out or soundlessly crumpling to the floor. They reached out, beseeching us to take their hands, and then drew us closer together in an intimate huddle. Finally, each one of us was led out of the Pillar Room, in many cases embracing the performer before leaving. Back in the ante room, we were given tea and toast, like so many newlyminted mothers.

It was a visceral and consuming work. With its immersive nature (the hand of Anu Productions evident) and accelerated references to what we now know about the treatment of the Magdalene victims and the experimentation on Irish women by surgeons who split bodies and removed wombs with impunity, it felt like a kind of assault. It was a missile lobbed at the shocking complicity of the agencies that perpetuated these actions, even after the fact.

In a recent issue of Art Monthly, writer Morgan Quaintance argued vigorously for the pressing need for socially engaged work to “inform, empower and support the public by presenting and elucidating the subject matter of works dealing with contemporary socio-cultural and political realities that, through bias, oversight or lack of interest, are not presented elsewhere”. Though he was discussing such work in the UK, the ferocity and conviction of The Touching Contract proves an unassailable force in the face of such oversight – the political as absolutely personal.

this space is the ground-floor gallery at Draoícht,

ing the space between paper and frame. This expan-

where some works are conventionally framed while

sionary dynamic, referenced in the exhibition title,

others emerge and expand to more fully occupy the

is also found in the shift from fragmented geometry

architecture. This choreography leads the viewer on

to open curvilinear forms. It gains momentum with

an unfolding visual journey, underpinned by

the unframed Zephyr – Wind of Change II, mounted

thought and process. The artworks also feature

on a ‘hidden’ wall, which the visitor discovers upon

material folds, which manipulate internal spatial

rounding a corner. Conceived as a composite of

relations and introduce conceal-and-reveal dynam-

multiple carborundum prints, its crisp, lyrical

ics.

motifs are arranged within a familiar grid pattern The first five prints establish a link with Kelly’s

that connects it to architectural features such as the

exhibition ‘Interconnectedness’, held at Droichead

tiled floor. But its unity is tenuous; the 16 sheets,

Arts Centre in 2014. The imagery is built up in car-

each measuring 42 x 42cm, are loosely joined, cor-

borundum layers on Somerset paper, which entice

ners protruding to hint at the spaces behind. Each

the viewer into discerning the order in which they has horizontal, vertical and diagonal (right or left) were laid down, while attesting to the time invested folds, scored rhythmically, with discordant eleby the artist. In The Space Between with Triangles,

ments, to suggest both stability and flux. The larger

Circles and Squares, it appears that a folded insert and

Entropy is similar in form, and introduces new linear

background sheet were printed with a painterly

formations that abut each other in lively, discontin-

texture, while outlines of the eponymous shapes

uous arrangement.

were masked out and later overprinted in primary

The final act is a pair of sculptural offshoots of

and secondary colours. The finished works are dis-

the paper hexaflexagons and folded books shown in

played with half-open pleats, which causes slippage

2014. Zephyr – Wind of Change features the printed

in their geometry and creates, for Kelly, ‘liminal’

organic motif of Zephyr II, but is the more uniform

zones. The connection between these white spaces

of the two, suspended from the full-height section of

and the printed image recalls American physicist

the gallery. It is equal and in many ways opposite to

David Bohm’s theory of implicate and explicate

Expanding Spaces, which commences high on the

order, in which visible and invisible elements relate

wall, grows in scale as it tumbles to the floor, and

in an unfolding and enfolding flow.

features geometric, hand-drawn elements that bring

The rhythmic variation of the first group of

the print-drawing dialogue full circle. Both unite

images is maintained in Fold/Unfold, a sequence of

the front and back of individual sheets – the meant-

four works that are diverse in terms of their scale

to-be-seen and unseen areas – with meeting points

and the way they are framed. Made with charcoal

derived from matching fold patterns.

and pastel on single sheets of (mainly) Fabriano

This is a smaller, more integrated showing

paper, they explore the interface between drawn

than ‘Interconnectedness’, but it advances the art-

and impressed elements. Reduced in formal com-

ist’s exploration of similarity and difference through

plexity, and with a less vibrant palette, their recur-

the recurrent use of motifs and materials. Kelly’s

ring motifs are more calligraphic than geometric.

responsive practice subjects geometric form and

According to Kelly, they are non-representational,

pattern to time-based process, movement and

but draw on ideas from astrophysics and biomedical

engagement with the unseen, substituting taut

science. They are an attempt to “understand the

order for a subtly reverberating atmosphere of

natural order” and allude to “the notion of things

change and possibility.

happening from within”.

The style, repetitive mark-making and use of granular mediums, combine to produce almost

Susan Campbell is a PhD candidate in history of art at the University of Dublin, Trinity College.

decorative works that evoke microscopic or fossil-

Note 1. Robert Kelly on ‘Expanding Spaces’, 12 September 2016 (draiocht.ie/blog)

Robert Kelly, Expanding Spaces and Zephyr – Wind of Change

Robert Kelly, Unfold print series; images courtesy of Draoícht

Anne Mullee is an art writer and curator of the Courthouse Gallery and Studios in Ennistymon, County Clare.

Notes 1. ‘In the Shadow of the State’ was co-commissioned by Create (Ireland) and Artangel (UK), and is a key project in the Arts Council’s ‘ART: 2016’ programme for Ireland 2016 2. The practice of symphysiotomy involved the severing of a woman’s pelvis to assist childbirth. See symphysiotomyireland.com 3. Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones, Terms and Conditions, ‘In the Shadow of the State’, 2016 4. Morgan Quaintance, ‘Rules of Engagement’, Art Monthly, October 2016 p7–10

VAI/DCC Critical Writing Award

Visual Artists Ireland, in Partnership with Dublin City Council and AICA Ireland, is inviting submissions for the 2016 Critical Writing Award, judged by J.J. Charlesworth (AICA UK, Associate Editor, Art Review), Sheena Barrett (Assistant Arts Officer, Dublin City Council) and Noel Kelly (President, AICA Ireland, Director, Visual Artists Ireland).

The winning writer will have their piece published in the Visual Artists’ News Sheet, receive a fee of €500, and join the Visual Artists’ News Sheet panel of art writers. They will also be invited to be part of the LAB Gallery’s 2017 programme, with a €300 writing commission.

Previous winners have included James Merrigan, Rebecca O’Dwyer and Joanne Laws.

Award submissions should be a 1200-word critique of an exhibition, event, festival, public artwork or similar that has taken place in Ireland during 2016. Applications should also include full contact details.

Submissions should be sent to info@visualartists.ie with CRITICAL WRITING 2016 in the subject line.

Applications should reach VAI no later than 5.30pm, Friday 26 November 2016. Late applications will not be considered.

Visual Artists Ireland Windmill View House 4 Oliver Bond Street Dublin 8 01 672 9488 visualartists.ie

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

23

ORGANISATION

Finding Chinks in the Armour MICHELE HORRIGAN AND SEAN LYNCH GIVE AN OVERVIEW OF RECENT ACTIVITIES AT ASKEATON CONTEMPORARY ARTS.

David Bestué in Askeaton, 2016

bridge but follow the signpost on the main road, charming houses, a riverside walk and the towering ruins of fortress and friary. There is an information centre in the square and, by the riverside below in the castle, a signboard of the rarest kind. It says nothing of the past or present but predicts happenings in Askeaton in the distant future.

Between 2240 and 2263AD, a succession of horrible happenings are to occur, terminating in the destruction of the castle by 36 lighting strikes and a fireball.”

This summer, David Bestué from Barcelona resided in Askeaton.

His time here was spent imagining a construction site of sorts, a place where architectural improvisation, individual agency and ‘making do’ override the town development strategies normally extolled by civic planners. Remembering that much stone was salvaged from the local castle following its destruction by Cromwellian troops in 1652, and spread around the town to shape new buildings and walls, David removed a rock from the castle grounds and turned it into a new door handle for the local tourist office. He then positioned himself inside a sculpture he made at the Franciscan Friary, with only his eyes visible, surprising his audience as they walked through the fourteenthcentury doorway. After enjoying the camaraderie of Ranahan’s Bar, he asked its landlady, Patricia, if he could cast her hand. The finished sculpture appeared on her front door, a welcoming sign on our annual public open day. Later, he joyously presented it to her in what was described by the local drinking fraternity as The Handover.

Askeaton native Seanie Barron’s art has had a more private trajectory, fermenting secretly for many years before being revealed in a flourish. After featuring in his first exhibition at the age of 67 in our local tourist office, his work has been seen in galleries and museums in London and Dublin. Irish daytime radio has proclaimed his art – which takes the shape of surreal walking sticks, smoking pipes and increasingly more sculptural forms – as “the next big thing for Irish hipsters once they finish growing their beards”. He tours around Ireland, enthralling audiences with stories related to his art and life. At a packed village hall on Inisbofin island he explained his philosophy on keeping active, claiming that “there are two things that can kill you in this life: the electric chair and the armchair!”

Barron literally takes it all in his stride, choosing a new walking stick from his collection each day to go on his evening walk. He shares his vast knowledge of the west Limerick terrain with visiting artists, which he has acquired after decades of roaming around Askeaton through hedges and bushes in search of a special branch that might become one of his creations. Barron was a manual labourer all his life and worked for Roadstone, Ireland’s biggest construction company.

His recent retirement means he now spends much more time on his real work, which he ardently still describes as a ‘hobby’. Before retiring, he squirreled away a collection of cats’ eyes, hard-wearing reflectors used as road markings for night driving. He had a feeling that they might come in useful and today they form the eyes of animal heads, staring out at you from the handles of sticks in his dimly-lit workshop.

If you half close your eyes, you take a journey with him, walking through arboreal countryside, feeling the grain of the timber in your hand and holding the handle of the stick to the ground that reconnects it back again to its earthiness … it’s the spark that created the universe.

The sticks resemble everything from deer horns, mink, badgers, running men or even faraway dolphins. Now they are all interconnected and together as one. There are no longer borders or divisions, only the material of the world in front of you.

Seanie Barron and Quim Packard, Star Wars Man, 2016; Limerick City Gallery of Art

David Bestué in Askeaton, 2016

WE established Askeaton Contemporary Arts in 2006 in the small town in west Limerick where we live. Since then, over 80 artworks have been made by artists who travel from around the world and reside here for short periods of time. The progamme has an ethnographic strain to its character, something that came about from having artists living and working in the midst of Askeaton’s everyday life. This model of contemporary art is well established: we admire and borrow from the communality of the Arts and Crafts movement and the investigative and experimental approaches of contextual art movements of central Europe in the 1990s. Artists like asking questions and finding possibilities for their practices within the social fabric. Our activity here, by its very nature, is meant to find alternative viewpoints to the social status quo.

Neither of us have any formal curatorial training, so we’ve been learning on the job in Askeaton over the last decade. Our experiences have, for the most part, been about working closely with artists in the production of new artworks and their subsequent public sitings in what are considered ‘non-art’ venues. We do not maintain a gallery space, so everything has to exist and fit around the daily rhythm and sites of Askeaton. Artworks have appeared in locations such as the hairdresser’s floor, the petrol station forecourt, a fourteenth-century castle, a launderette and a pub. On many occassions local individuals and businesses share their knowledge, expertise and resources with artists.

We feel that there are many towns throughout Ireland with more or less similar social and political structures and demographics to Askeaton. Many public art briefs require the artist to arrive and magically find the true singular essence of the place, distilling it into art for all to see. We believe the challenge for an artist is to find a role within the comings and goings, rather than pulling an aestheticallypleasing rabbit out of a hat! We consider Askeaton a testing ground, our back yard, where the long-term hope is that forms of cultural pursuit become the primary way of representing our immediate environment here, with artists at the centre of, and the impetus for, these dialogues. We like to imagine that this model could be useful in other places: in regional development, rural sustainability or more generally around the neoliberalisation of spatial politics. These realisations have led to exhibitions that act as enquiries into how environments develop over time, how they are experienced and what art can achieve in these conditions.

Limerick has been a region obsessed with its own identity and branding as it attempted earlier this year to become a future European City of Culture. This was evident in the spectacle-driven campaign to get people interested in potential regeneration. This idea, at its core, is about utilising the creative industries to improve the standard of living and access to leisure activities for a predominantly middle class audience, and in turn finding ways to kick-start local investment opportunities. You can judge this process by the fact that the very building that housed a vibrant artist-run space in 2010 is now Limerick’s first Starbucks.

From our experience we know that art as a social form is about much more. The causality of the human condition is often about dissonance and dislocation. Cultural identity imposed by local government will always be inherently conservative. It’s surely much more exciting not to know who you are, and instead to understand your life through encounters. Few interesting artworks have ever been made by general consensus; friction and agitation are crucial. This is a difficult proposal to reconcile with the hierarchical structures of civic life and its social frameworks, but we still believe that it’s a challenge worth pursuing.

Recently we worked with independent curator Catalina Lozano and the Curating Projects workshop at Tabakalera, the International Centre for Contemporary Culture in San Sebastián, Spain. We gave an overview of significant moments in the Askeaton journey so far, with a particular focus on the shape and form of the artist residency programme and an exhibition Sean Lynch curated at Flat Time House, London in early 2016, called ‘Bandits Live Comfortably in the Ruins’.

Another project we hold close is a graphic artwork by Stephen Brandes, which lies in the back yard of Askeaton’s tourist office Michele Horrigan and Sean Lynch are artists and run Askeaton overlooking the town’s medieval castle. On first viewing it looks like Contemporary Arts. an information board for local heritage, but on closer inspection a more twisted narrative unfolds, all based upon the presence of a ruined Hellfire Club inside the castle grounds.1 Some time ago, a Notes 1. Built around Britain and Ireland during the eighteenth century, Hellfire Clubs are best described as a journalist from Ireland of the Welcomes, the country’s predominant satirical gentleman’s club, and were a way for the aristocracy to try to shock the outside world and the glossy magazine for tourists, passed through the area and encountered ideals of the Enlightenment. Lurid tales of drinking, orgies and devil worshipping are recounted in their history and the Askeaton ruin became the subject of a series of artist commissions in 2012. An the artwork. He offered the following description: accompanying publication features a reprinted 1968 article from Hibernia magazine by Brian “Askeaton was a strategic river crossing where the bodies of O’Doherty. He suggests that the few ruined and remaining Hellfire Clubs in Ireland might be considered as spatial and spiritual anomalies, one of the few places that Catholic dogma couldn’t inhabitants were defended by a notable castle and their souls by colonise. In correspondence in 2012, O’Doherty wrote that he considered “the scandalous history of Franciscan brethren whose friary stands close by. The village has been the Hellfire Club as a good canvas”.

2. This text is also due to be published in November 2016 by Tabakalera, San Sebastian, Spain, as part reduced in strategic importance by the building of a bypass and a new of the Curating Projects workshop (20 – 24 June 2016), curated by Catalina Lozano.

24

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

HOW IS IT MADE?

Royal Street, Louisiana, New Orleans

James L. Hayes, Mixtape, The Analogue Series, 2016; unique cast bronze

Uno St. Claude Gallery, New Orleans

Making Visible JAMES L. HAYES DISCUSSES THE ARTS SCENE IN NEW ORLEANS AND HIS RECENT SOLO EXHIBITION ‘A NEAR VISIBLE PAST…’ If you go to New Orleans, You ought to go see the Mardi Gras, When you see the Mardi Gras, Somebody’ll tell you what’s Carnival for Professor Longhair (1959)

AS Professor Longhair sang in Mardi Gras in New Orleans, this city is best known for its (in)famous Mardi Gras season, which is a sight to behold. However, from my experience, the carnivals and costumes do not cease at the end of the traditional Mardi Gras season, rather, all year round the city’s diverse inhabitants find ways to imbue their daily lives with a sense of celebration. New Orleans Louisiana (NOLA) or ‘N’awlins’ as it should be pronounced, is a multi-faceted and unique American city that possesses an infectious sense of cultural pride for its great culinary traditions and musical heritage.

In recent years, NOLA has also given rise to a vibrant and cuttingedge contemporary art scene. Amidst the well-beaten paths of the French Quarter, the city’s biggest tourist hotspot, there is Royal Street, a picturesque, balcony-clad street which is home to kitsch, tourist-trap galleries that have become very successful due to the city’s influx of Creole-seeking consumers. So much so that some of NOLA’s painters, and more recently photographers, have established galleries to exhibit their own artworks all year round. This phenomenon can also be seen in the Garden District along Magazine Street. Further downtown in the Warehouse Districts, mainly on Julia Street, are cool, glass-fronted contemporary art galleries showing an array of local and international commercial artists. Downtown, there are the obligatory metropolitan art institutes, including the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, which shows international, national and sometimes local practitioners, and the city’s main art museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), in City Park.

Away from the bright lights of the French Quarter, St. Claude Avenue cuts a line across midtown stretching from the east to the west of the city. It is here that the most interesting galleries and art exhibitions can be found. In the 10 years since Hurricane Katrina, this urban neighborhood has become home to artists, who returned after the violent storm of 2005 that ripped apart the social fabric of the city.

The art scene has regenerated this area with an array of artist collectives, funky ‘dive’ bars, restaurants, food stalls, studios, workshops, pop-up galleries and commercial galleries, under the somewhat unpredictable topography of the St. Claude Arts District.

Here, you turn the handle of a reinforced metal door and a slick, newlyformed contemporary art space is revealed. I love this about NOLA: everything is possible and everyone’s always open for business.

Last summer I presented my second solo exhibition in New Orleans, ‘A Near Visible Past...’, at the UNO St. Claude Gallery (13 August – 4 September 2016). The exhibition was generously supported and made possible by Culture Ireland, as part of their ‘I Am Ireland’: Ireland 2016/1916 Centenary Programme. In 2011, I was invited by Irish performance artist Malcolm McClay, a colleague and friend who lives in New Orleans, to exhibit at Good Children Gallery, an artist-run space in the St. Claude Arts District. This show was funded under ‘Imagine Ireland’, Culture Ireland’s ambitious year-long programme of Irish arts in the United States. I established a number of professional relationships among the city’s art community during this first visit, and was subsequently invited by Kathy Rodriguez, director of the UNO St. Claude Gallery, to show new work in 2016. The UNO St. Claude Gallery belongs to the University of New Orleans, who recognised the vibrancy of this upcoming arts district and opened the space off campus on St. Claude Avenue. This recently acquired space, located in an old garage, houses two large white cube rooms with shutters that can open out the front wall for the installation of large-scale work.

Funded by the university, the gallery programme shows the work of its MFA candidates as well as national and international artists, both emerging and more established.

‘A Near Visible Past…’ brought together a new body of work based on ongoing research, which I began in 2015 when the National Sculpture Factory supported a production residency at IMMA. This research reflects on a formative period of my early artistic career when I worked in the art industry, supporting and fabricating work for other artists. This new body of work reconsiders some explorative artworks I made during this time, and the influence of artists such as Welsh sculptor Barry Flanagan. I was always heavily invested in the visibility of process, and in sculpture that referenced industry. These factors provided the impetus for work that interrogates the language of production, its unseen aspects and the relationships between artisan and artwork, artisan and artist.

My most recent explorative bronze works, The Analogue Series, reference the often incongruous relationships between preparatory art objects, sculptures-in-production and finished artworks. These works keep the material and methods of their fabrication highly visible, in an attempt to preserve the rich and beautiful compositions that are so frequently discarded. This series of sculptures was offset by a new moving image work, The Cellar, filmed in a cavernous Victorian basement. Resembling a ‘fine art bone-yard’, the space houses stacks of moulds used in the fabrication of an array of celebrated modernist and contemporary sculptures dating back to the 1970s. This film considers these moulds as visually and conceptually interesting objects in their

own right. I spent a lot of time in this cellar and wanted to convey its eeriness, as well as its enduring place in the modernist and contemporary art canons.

It seemed fitting to show this film for the first time in New Orleans, because I noticed many storage units when driving around the city’s suburbs and residential areas. I later learned that these facilities are dedicated to the storage of the city’s elaborate Mardi Gras costumes, floats and sculptures – a revelation that again made me consider the nature of production and its relationship with collective artisan consciousness, made visible across a city that continually celebrates and safeguards its culture, history and traditions. It is predominantly through the work of artists that these very special things are retained.

The art scene on St. Claude receives little funding and is instead reliant on artist collectives and a committed art audience. The artistic economy on St. Claude Avenue also relies on the support of a number of dedicated art collectors who regularly buy work and show genuine interest in the efforts of these galleries, the art scene in general and the international artists they welcome into the city. The opening of my exhibition was busy, attended by an informed audience invested in contemporary art. The large turnout was no doubt helped by the fact that all the galleries in the city open on the same night between 6pm and 9pm on the second Saturday of the month. Between these hours, art audiences take part in an ‘art walk’, migrating between established galleries, pop-up spaces in the backs of trucks, spontaneous puppet shows, barbeques and other cultural festivities which take place along the New Orleans Bywater, Marigny, the Canal districts and the French Quarter. August 2016 was also the month of ‘dress-up’ artistic openings such as ‘white linen’ in the Warehouse district, an upmarket art opening where everyone dresses in white linen and drinks champagne.

This was followed by the less glamorous ‘dirty linen’ in the French Quarter galleries on Royal Street. St. Claude doesn’t do the ‘linen’ thing, but the night of my opening did coincide with the Red Dress Run, a bizarre charity event in which men and women wearing red dresses run through the city. I didn’t see much running, just a lot of drinking, but it was visually spectacular making my way to the opening through a sea of thousands of people wearing bright red out on the streets in the sun. Some might say this is what New Orleans is all about.

James L. Hayes is visual artist based in Cork and a lecturer in Sculpture at CIT Crawford College of Art. jameslhayes.ie

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

25

FESTIVAL

Patrick Jolley, Kola Region, 2009 – 2011; digital black and white archival pigment print mounted on diabond; 112 x 166cm

Daniel Jewesbury, The Headless City, performance event, Schlachtensee, Berlin, 2014

The Headless City MICHAËLE CUTAYA INTERVIEWS DANIEL JEWESBURY, CURATOR OF TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS 2016, HELD IN GALWAY 5 – 20 NOVEMBER, WHICH IS TITLED ‘THE HEADLESS CITY’.

Michaële Cutaya: You are the curator of this year’s TULCA and your theme is ‘The Headless City’. The city is a central concern in your work as a writer, curator and filmmaker. Previous projects such as ‘Re-Public’ (Dublin, 2010) and ‘The Headless City’ (Berlin, 2014) explored our relationship with the city and its spaces. Can you describe how this inquiry will manifest in Galway this month?

Daniel Jewesbury: What is interesting for me about the city of the industrial era (Galway has never been an industrial city but it was part of the industrial era) and what is the starting point for this TULCA, is how we historically moved to the city to escape certain types of social and economic ties that were very much linked to place. We exchanged bonds of obligation, religion and family for other types of bonds. There was this idea that in the city you got a certain type of freedom as a worker in exchange for selling labour. This process underpins the birth of socialism and social democracy, movements based on class affiliation and class interest rather than rootedness, family, clans and so on.

With the development of the neoliberal city in the last 30 years – the city as financial instrument, as one large complex derivative – that contract between the individual labourer and the city has been eroded. The social democratic city as it existed has been broken. I don’t know that neoliberalism really represents a new stage in the city’s periodisation. I think it’s a stage of transition and we don’t know where we are going.

interesting, because across so many of his philosophical concepts – including the theory of expenditure, which highlights capitalism’s inability to conceptualise unproductive time or waste, and his notions of sovereignty, base materialism, heterology and so on – he asserts that what we most urgently need to do is dispel our desire for the city to function as a perfect system, because perfect systems are the problem here. In the midst of the most stark and basic social inequality, we get distressed about how badly the system is run. In fact, it’s only thanks to the system being so badly run that we manage to survive at all.

Bataille reintroduces all the things that we try to repress in the modern, clean, ‘smart’ city: dirt, death, blood, pain, loss. This isn’t just a valorisation of the low and the base and the mean; it’s a simple statement that these things aren’t going away. They are what our city is built on, and we have to be able to embrace this difference in trying to get ourselves out of this mess. There may be some things that we have to re-appraise, some approaches to the city that we’ve forgotten, but we have to look toward rethinking ourselves too, so there is a Janus-like activity here, with ‘headlessness’ evoking a beautiful tension. In decapitating and removing the sovereign, we must not simply replace him or occupy his position, echoing the cold, calculating rationality of capitalism; rather we must try to find new sensibilities – a task that is essentially also headless.

MC: There has been rising concern over the privatisation of public urban spaces with the spread of Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS), blurring the differences between the two, and our MC: You wrote that the concept of ‘The Headless City’ was perception of which is which. inspired by both Georges Bataille’s writings on architecture and DJ: In her book Ground Control, Anna Minton cautions against the utopian urbanist Bruno Taut. Bataille considered that fetishising public space or seeing it as always inherently more free; headlessness (in reference to the decapitation of the tyrant) was a rather, we need to consider which aspects of the public control of precondition of the modern city, whereas Taut argued for the space we want to protect and preserve, and how it is qualitatively need for a city crown, such as the cathedrals, or the acropolis, to different from privately-managed space. It is important to challenge bind us together communally, preventing the modern city from the idea that public space is something that exists as a common good.

In all my projects, I want to eliminate static notions of the public as a losing its way.

DJ: The tension here is that I’m not trying to prescribe a response. I can space that’s ‘outside’ and can be ‘entered’. Much more dynamic see a problem – the problem I’ve already outlined – but what interests concepts of the public are possible.

I have been writing recently about triadic definitions of the me is that there are so many different ways to approach this. There are public.

There is the ‘public sphere’ in the bourgeois sense, the ‘public dark futurisms that see human existence being fundamentally challenged by the development of urban society, yet there are more sector’ – infrastructures managed by the state, which in turn derive regressive responses based on the idea that the city itself is the legitimacy from the public – and ‘public space’, which is perhaps the most nebulous of all. There is no public space unless we create it problem.

I see Taut’s socialist idealism, his longing for a completely together. We only create it through some actual manifestation of planned city, as a wistful nostalgia for the order of pre-capitalist being ‘in common’. It’s not there waiting for us to occupy or inhabit. societies, but it’s essentially backward-looking. Bataille is incredibly These interconnecting ideas destabilise one another, creating a lot of

tension, but suggest ways of shedding static notions of the public as an unproblematic ‘good’ in opposition to privately owned things. The private is not simply bad while the public is simply good. We need to have a much more unstable understanding of what the public is.

MC: Galway is often discussed as a ‘festival city’, and TULCA is itself a long-running visual arts festival. What possibilities does the format offer for destabilisations?

DJ: As well as artworks in the main venues, there will be a range of live works and performances around the city, as well as interventionist pieces and some offsite works. Each weekend a number of events are planned, because I wanted to create situations and opportunities for reflection in common, rather than the focus being on individual reflection in the tradition of the connoisseur going around the galleries. Such activities will bring audiences out into the city, forcing us to assess our relationship with the city, while prompting us to question what might be an appropriate use of public space or how we are expected to behave.

Our festival venue this year is Fairgreen, a pristine concrete retail space that’s never been used for its intended purpose, where we’ll be showing work by five artists, including Liam Crichton and Paddy Jolley (1964 – 2012). I’m excited about it because it’s the site of Galway’s former abattoirs. The last slaughterhouse in the city was there until about 15 or 20 years ago. So here we have the cool rectilinear space of commerce, unused, taken over as the site of art, and standing on the blood of all the animals that were slaughtered there for 40 years.

Paddy Jolley’s work will also be showing in Galway Arts Centre, a film of his that I understand hasn’t been exhibited in Ireland before.

There’s a huge amount of new work too, from commissioned artists and the open call. An artwork by Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925 – 2006) will be presented by one of his collaborators, the artist Leslie Edge, who will recreate one of Finlay’s wall texts in Galway Arts Centre. This is very exciting for me personally, as he’s probably the artist who’s had the most influence on me, and I wrote to him years ago, before I even went to art college. There are two pieces being produced for Galway University Hospital (GHU), including a permanent commission by Miranda Blennerhassett, as well as a site-specific work outside the old Nurses’ Home by Jane Butler. I really want people to come down for the opening weekend, as we have a huge amount on: a performance by James Moran in the Mechanics’ Institute, a performance around the city by Glasgow duo Two Ruins and a screening of an amazing, disturbing film called Aaaaaaaah! by London filmmaker Steve Oram, which stars Toyah Wilcox and Noel Fielding. It’s kind of like Themroc done by Vic Reeves on acid.

Michaële Cutaya is a writer on art living in County Galway. She co-founded Fugitive Papers and is currently co-editor of CIRCA online. Daniel Jewesbury is an artist, researcher, writer, editor and freelance curator based in Belfast. He also lectures in Film Studies at the University of Ulster.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

VAI EVENT

‘Spaces to Work’ panel at Get Together 2016; photo by Louis Haugh

Get Together 2016 LILY POWER LOOKS BACK AT THE 2016 VISUAL ARTISTS IRELAND GET TOGETHER, WHICH TOOK PLACE ON 26 AUGUST AT IMMA, DUBLIN.

Speed Curating at Get Together 2016; photo by Louis Haugh

‘Equal Opportunities in the Visual Arts: Gender’ panel at Get Together 2016; photo by Louis Haugh

Get Together 2016; photo by Louis Haugh

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

27

VAI EVENT THE fifth Visual Artists Ireland Get Together took place at IMMA, government financial backing”, adding that “artist groups are piloting Dublin and comprised a series of panel discussions on a broad range of a range of different strategies aimed at providing good quality spaces at affordable prices.” topics as well as artist talks and one-to-one sessions.

Another topic addressed was the unpaid labour involved in managing artists’ workspaces. VAI’s Monica Flynn stated that there EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES IN THE VISUAL ARTS: GENDER Jeannie Scott (Director, A-N, the Artists’ Information Company) “seemed to be consensus around the need for artist-owned provision chaired this panel discussion and began by introducing A-N’s recent or aligning creative spaces with urban and cultural planning for longresearch on artists’ livelihoods. Their findings show that opportunities term sustainability”. Cook observed “the beginnings of a manifesto”, for artists in the UK have generally declined, along with public which highlighted a need for studio groups to work together in funding, particularly from local authorities. The average earnings of securing support from government agencies. He concluded that, the artists surveyed were less than £9000 per annum, despite most “despite difficult circumstances, the studios sector remains active, having at least one Bachelor’s degree. In terms of gender disparity, A-N positive and experimental in trying to address the challenges it faces”.

noted recent trends towards ‘fictional’ art writing, which has been encouraged at Critical Bastards. Chris Clarke (writer and curator, Glucksman Gallery) also spoke broadly about how he approaches art writing from both an independent and institutional perspective.

O’Donnell summarised the event as a “fruitful debate on accessibility in art writing”, which addressed reader access to printed publications or online platforms and accessible styles of writing, and suggested that inaccessible writing can in some cases be valuable. The familiar poles of art criticism (as a branch of “hard-boiled journalism”), and art writing (as a kind of “floating poetics”), embody different approaches towards translating, assessing or serving art.

found artists’ earnings to be similar early on, with men earning more later in their careers.

In the sphere of art education, this disparity was also evident.

Though significantly more women graduate from art school (75% of A-N’s members are women) there are more men in teaching posts.

Francis McKee (Director, CCA Glasgow) noted that, although art school staff may appear roughly even, women are more likely to be working part time and men to be holding senior positions.

Furthermore, funding cuts have meant more group learning in third level education, which has proven to favour men.

Fiona Kearney (Director, Glucksman Gallery) conveyed her surprise at the institutional sexism in academia compared to the visual arts. Nonetheless, in 2009 the Glucksman still gave 75% of its shows to male artists and only 37% of Irish artists chosen for the Venice Biennale have been women. Kearney believes that everyone in the arts is responsible for effecting change. A comment from the floor echoed this sentiment, suggesting that institutions should have to disclose details of how many women they fund and show.

Artist Kerry Guinan spoke about the division of labour in the arts and the relevance of reproductive labour. Though the arts are dominated by women in terms of participation, many of these roles are underfunded or completely unpaid, with women taking on more work in a non-arts field. Guinan highlighted the lack of proper support structures to allow women with children to participate in the arts.

Ann Mulrooney (Director, VISUAL) described her struggle to maintain an art practice as a single mother. She also suggested that socio-economic backgrounds are now greater barriers to employment in the arts, noting that the sociology of arts management has shifted from ‘old impresarios’ to middle class white women.

UK-based artist, writer and curator Sonya Dyer agreed that equality of opportunity extends beyond gender, referring to other unspoken biases within the arts, which are hard to quantify. Artist Avril Corroon argued that having women in positions of power in the arts is not necessarily enough to change attitudes. She detailed her experiences working in an all-female collective, whose work is often described in gendered terms. A curator once suggested they do a topless calendar.

The discussion concluded with thoughts on how to move forward. Dyer argued that women need to develop cross-generational networks that extend outside their immediate friendship groups.

Kerry Guinane stated that, though research is important, people can get bogged down in it, and emphasised the need to make external arguments to the state rather than solely within the visual arts.

ARTISTS SPEAK This day-long event in the Lecture Hall featured presentations by eight artists at various stages of their careers: Liam Crichton, Mitch Conlon, Maria Simonds-Gooding, The Project Twins, (James and Michael Fitzgerald), Elaine Leader, Fiona Kelly, Susan Kelly and Hannah Fitz.

Commenting on the event as a whole, Fitz stated noted that Get Together “formalised something that should be formalised,” providing “a place for ‘checking in’ with the concerns and activities of wider cross-sections of artists, revealing formal and collective possibilities”.

SPACES TO WORK Chaired by David Cook (Director, Cook Creative and previous CEO, Wasp Artists’ Studios), this session provided an overview of the situation for studios across Ireland. Clíodhna Shaffrey (Director, Temple Bar Gallery) discussed the realities of running a large, established studio, while Aideen Quirke (Artistic Director, Sample Studios) and Andrew Edgar (Co-founder, A4 Sounds) described managing smaller, more recently-founded studios through a range of multidisciplinary funding approaches. Matthew Nevin (Co-director, MART) discussed MART’s studio expansion around Dublin.

Presentations by Gail Prentice (Studio Manager, Flax Art Studios), Janet Hoy (Co-founder, Creative Village Arts) and Moran Been-Noon (Co-director, Platform Arts) conveyed issues in Northern Ireland.

Louise Spokes (artist and 126 Artist-Run Gallery) discussed 126’s struggle to secure space in Galway City, a problem also currently faced

by Sample Studios in Cork, highlighting the precarity of renting in a volatile commercial property market. Cook agreed that “most studio groups are facing similar challenges of short-term leases, amidst the pressures of public regeneration, private redevelopment and modest

MAKING THE MARKET Chaired by artist and researcher Jason Bowman, this panel broadly examined notions of the art market relating both to the sale of works in a commercial sense and to the labour of artists and arts workers.

Domo Baal (Domo Baal Gallery) outlined her experience of running a private gallery in London and the changes she has seen in the art world. She described how she builds relationships with artists, gallery visitors and buyers, as well as independent galleries and public institutions. Baal spoke about her gallery’s programming ethos, which eschews any particular social, gender or subject focus and instead seeks out “certain single-minded independent artistic practices”.

The panel also discussed the implications for artists who choose not to engage with the codes and cultures of the art market. Leah Stuhltrager (curator and art and technology consultant) outlined her own experience working in a range of settings in New York and Berlin.

She detailed different strategies adopted by artists in promoting their work, outlining a ‘how-to’ guide for both artists and curators in a fastpaced, neoliberal art world. She emphasised the importance of using technology and the correct platforms for communication.

Jason Bowman examined the differences between working in the UK and Scandinavia, where, for example, artists are responsible for paying for their gallery space before securing funding. Bowman also discussed the edition of PARSE Journal that he co-edited in 2015 on the ‘value’ of the art market and his ongoing three-year enquiry, Stretched, investigating the organisational practices of artist-led cultures.

Conor McGrady (Dean of Economic Affairs, Burren College of Art) described how the private, rural residency and education institution maintains itself. He listed challenges and benefits of this financial model, which is particularly unusual in the Irish gallery and art educational landscape.

THE JASON OAKLEY ART WRITING FORUM This year’s art writing panel, dedicated to VAI’s Jason Oakley, was chaired by J.J. Charlesworth (Editor, Art Review) and examined how art writing could be better supported, disseminated and funded as a practice, and whether it can be ‘more’ than it is already.

Current editors of Critical Bastards, Suzanne Walsh and Jennie Taylor, outlined the trajectory of the publication and notable texts that have featured since its inception in 2011. They emphasised the publication’s experimental nature, situating it amidst new literary publications such as Gorse and Fallow Media, which have helped to expand audiences for art writing.

Eimear Walshe (artist and writer, Totally Dublin) mentioned recent projects which explore different types of art writing and innovative dissemination approaches. For example, Rebecca O’Dwyer’s A Response to a Request invites essays responding to single images, which are published online for a limited time.

Artist Alan Phelan outlined his case study on Irish/Norwegian publishing house Broken Dimanche Press, Berlin. Phelan described the small-scale publishers’ ambitious nature and commitment to text art editions, exhibitions and events that extend the boundaries of writing, language and spoken word.

Nathan O’Donnell’s spoke on John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, which he described as a “singular nineteenth-century experiment in art criticism (with a peculiar model for distribution)”. This was particularly relevant in the context of Grizedale’s ‘A Fair Land’ project, which filled the courtyard outside and gave some context to conversation on modes of distribution and technology.

There was much discussion of the language of art writing itself.

Jennie Taylor opened with quotes from Theodor Adorno (arguing for purposefully difficult language), George Orwell (promoting the use of clear language) and Maria Fusco (on the art object as a riddle). Taylor

VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFÉ At the heart of the Get Together, the ‘Visual Artists’ Café’ provided a space for people to meet, talk and ask questions. This year, the organisations present were: Artbox, Arts and Health, Burren College of Art, Catalyst Arts, Create, Creative Spark, National Gallery of Ireland, Galway 2020, Griffith College, Irish Arts Review, IMMA, IVARO, Luan Gallery, MART, Maurice Ward, NCAD, NCAD Gallery, NIVAL, Ormston House, Pallas Projects, RDS, Read That Image, Standard Utilities, Rua Red, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, National Campaign for the Arts and VAI. SPEED CURATING The ever-popular ‘Speed Curating’ event returned this year, with new curators and participants, as well as those who have returned yearly to avail of this unique opportunity. The curators were: Anna O’Sullivan, Anne Kelly, Ben Crothers, Brenda McParland, Brendan Fox, Davey Moor, Donal Maguire, Elaine Grainger, Emily O’Flynn, Emma-Lucy O’Brien, Eoin Dara, Grace McEvoy, Hilary Murray, Jerome O’Drisceoill, John Daly, John Duncan, Maeve Mulrennan, Mary Cremin, Mathew Nevin and Ciara Scanlon, Muireann Ni Chonail, Olivier Cornet, Patricia Hurl, Peter Mutschler, Ruth Carroll, Sheena Barrett, Sean Kissane, Aedin McGinn, Aisling Prior, T. Kiang and T. Lambe, and Therry Rudin. Describing his first experience of participating, Ben Crothers said: “The event provided an invaluable opportunity to spend time with artists from throughout Ireland whose work I was unfamiliar with. I have continued conversations with several of the artists and I hope to feature their work in future curatorial projects.”

CLINICS One-to-one ‘Clinics’ took place throughout the day and offered attendees specialist advice related to their career. Annette Moloney, Brenda Tobin, Eilis Lavelle, Gaby Smith, Marianne O’Kane Boal and IVARO advised on a range of subjects including finances, legal concerns and copyright. Alex Davis (Manager, IVARO) said: “Having one-to-one chats allowed a lot of ground to be covered in a short space of time. It also gave us the opportunity to find out what intellectual property issues are currently affecting artists.”

PORTFOLIO REVIEW ‘Portfolio Reviews’ allowed artists to meet with curators and mentors for extended discussions and feedback on their work. Woodrow Kernohan (Director, EVA International) said the event was a “refreshing and rewarding way of meeting new artists and discovering interesting practices”. He noted a “resurgence of drawing – an expanded form of drawing – across disciplines,” concluding: “it was great to meet so many fantastic artists and I will keep an eye on what they’re up to next”.

Lily Power, Production Editor, Visual Artists Ireland.

Note VAI would like to thank the IMMA team and our Get Together Assistants. We are also grateful to the Arts Council of Ireland, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Dublin City Council, Belfast City Council, Standard Utilities and Suki Tea.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

PUBLIC ART

Orla Ryan, Alanna O’Kelly, Brian Hand, ‘Stormy Petrel/ Guairdeall’, 25 April 2016; ‘GPO Witness History’; 30-min performance; photo courtesy of Ros Kavanagh

Orla Ryan, Alanna O’Kelly, Brian Hand, ‘Stormy Petrel/ Guairdeall’, 25 April 2016; ‘GPO Witness History’; 30-min performance; photo courtesy of Ros Kavanagh

Human Telegraphs ORLA RYAN, ALANNA O’KELLY AND BRIAN HAND DISCUSS THEIR PROJECT ‘STORMY PETREL/GUAIRDEALL’, COMMISSIONED AS PART OF THE AN POST ‘GPO WITNESS HISTORY’ PUBLIC ART PROGRAMME COMMEMORATING THE 1916 EASTER RISING.

November – December 2016

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

29

PUBLIC ART

Orla Ryan, Alanna O’Kelly, Brian Hand, ‘Stormy Petrel/ Guairdeall’, 25 April 2016; ‘GPO Witness History’; 30-min performance; photo courtesy of Ros Kavanagh

‘STORMY Petrel /Guairdeall’ is a collaborative project that began in early 2015 as we examined women’s witness statements on the Bureau of Military History Archive website. We became specifically interested in women couriers involved in the 1916 Easter Rising and quickly realised these women were a forgotten and marginalised group of revolutionaries. Our project is one of historical research and reclamation that creatively attempts to tell lesser-known or overlooked stories, to make visible erased memories, and to confront the war machine through a spectrum of media, live art and experimental approaches. The collaboration has three phases: a temporary public artwork commissioned for ‘GPO Witness History’ and two subsequent exhibitions, in the Vietnamese Women’s Museum, Hanoi (May – June 2016) and in VISUAL, Carlow (November 2016 – January 2017).

GPO WITNESS HISTORY Chapter one unfolded as part of the An Post ‘GPO Witness History’ public art commission, curated by Valerie Connor and Ruairí Ó Cuív.

The two-stage competition invited submissions from all art forms for a temporary public art work in the new courtyard of the GPO, to which we responded, were shortlisted and then interviewed for in midsummer 2015. Our proposal was selected alongside Dublin International Dance Festival, with both commissioned projects having a shared focus on women, feminism and gender issues in the Easter Rising. The GPO is a very powerful site to tackle: it is haunted by colonial power, the violence and sudden passion of the Rising, as well as the institutional clampdown of post-independence Ireland. We created a large mobile acoustic radar sculpture, a rig with an assemblage of 28 flare horn speakers for a sound installation and printed material including an artist’s book, a CD, a newspaper and a poster. As part of the commission, a performance took place on the evening of Monday 25 April, featured included 11 female performers who mingled with the audience as the crowds dispersed into the open courtyard.

For this project, we focused on the band of women couriers or intelligence agents who left Dublin early on Easter Monday at the command of Pearse and Connolly. These couriers memorised the Proclamation, and were dispersed as human telegraphs, with instructions to eat the messages they carried rather than be found with them. The cipher was concealed in clothing and hair and delivered to commanders who blatantly refused to obey orders. In their heroic accounts, some of the men’s statements do not mention these women couriers, while the women’s witness statements suggest an alternative narrative. These women were minimised and marginalised, yet Connolly and Pearse trusted, respected and considered them equal within their organisation.

The Acoustic Radar, a large mobile metal sculpture, evokes the overriding horror of war and militarism 100 years ago. This large device for listening to the battle sky contextualises the different revolutionary voices, events and temporalities that came together during the Easter Rising of 1916. Having visited the Somme this

summer, it is hard not to reflect on the screeching violence and fury of the First World War and the bureaucratic ambivalence to mounting war casualties – over one million during the Battle of the Somme alone. While the Easter Rebellion can easily be read as an example of what revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon referred to as ‘colonial mimicry’, it was also a rebellion against the war and conscription, and, at least for Connolly and the Citizen Army, was perceived as ‘a military holocaust’ concerned with ‘the grab for Africa’. During the early twentieth century, there were great developments surrounding women’s suffrage, social equality and the desire to eradicate colonial authority, yet these were largely subdued before the establishment of the first Free State government. From a feminist perspective, Easter 1916 reminds us of the multiple strands and flight-lines that existed in movements throughout the twentieth century. The acoustic radar is always on because, as the soldiers in the Battle of Picardy knew, it’s the ones you don’t hear that will get you.

Orla Ryan, Alanna O’Kelly, Brian Hand, ‘Stormy Petrel/ Guairdeall’, 24 April – 2 May 2016; installation and sound sculptures at ‘GPO Witness History’; photo courtesy of Ros Kavanagh

guairdeall dom/They left me wandering all night, the title of our book, evoked the plight of some of these women who were often sent from one place to the next with little concern for their wellbeing, and left hidden among borderlines, in between villages, streets and townlands: women hidden in history and hidden in domestic work.

VISUAL, CARLOW The final aspect of our collaborative project is a second exhibition which will be presented at VISUAL, Carlow, from November 2016 to January 2017, supported by VISUAL, Art Links, IT Carlow, and Wexford and Carlow County Councils. Continuing our dialogue with Vietnam, the exhibition will also feature a body of work by guest artist Huong Ngo’s on women and conflict in the Vietnamese colonial context. As we mapped the journeys and studied the statements and interviews, we wanted to condense and use aspects of the narrative accounts that spoke to us. These fragmented narratives formed part of the sound installation at the GPO and the spatially fragmented ‘factual poems’ in our artists’ book. An additional creative impulse was to imagine these women’s relationships with popular culture at that time. Attracting a large female readership, action-adventure fiction was strikingly translated into Serial Queen Melodrama films, featuring female heroines who actively challenged assertions about the portrayal of women in film. At VISUAL, we will present archival footage from Serial Queen Melodrama films, while our aforementioned artists’ book further explores the genre through the experimental format of a lipogram. Omitting the letter ‘e’, this formal device harks back to the constraints of typesetters who printed the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic, while also resonating with the ‘make do’ aesthetic of early twentieth-century collage and assemblage.

As American film theorist Ben Singer and others have pointed out, these films are a vernacular index of the radical renegotiation of womanhood during the early twentieth century, as demonstrated in burgeoning consumerist markets for a generation of economically independent young women. Books and films such as What Happened to Mary, The Hazards of Helen, The Romance of Elaine, The Perils of Pauline and the French serial The Vampires presented action-filled scenes of women’s courageous physical daring on trains, planes and automobiles.

Far removed from the domestic, these action adventure heroines were physically resilient and actively courted danger, supplanting former notions of female passivity and decorum. Yet these fantasy spaces and newly emergent emancipatory discourses remained contested, fragile and incomplete, evident in the violent suppression of the suffragette movement. It was fascinating to observe how these popular culture references permeated the accounts given by the women couriers. The ‘cloak and dagger’ edginess of crime and mystery drama was evident in references to ‘cryptic knocks’, ‘cryptic postcards’ and the moving of ammunition ‘under the noses of the detectives’.

VIETNAMESE WOMEN’S MUSEUM The second phase of the project was an exhibition (May – June 2016), comprising a series of photographs, a video and a sound installation, which was presented at the Vietnamese Women’s Museum in Hanoi at the invitation of the museum curator Pham Phuong Cuc. This exhibition was supported by IT Carlow, Culture Ireland and the Irish Embassy in Vietnam, which was celebrating 20 years of operations.

The museum displays tangible evidence of women in Vietnamese history acting as agents and couriers, associated with secrets and hiding. We compared and contrasted women in both independence movements as poets, writers and propagandists. A day before the exhibition opened, the Irish Ambassador to Hanoi, Cáit Moran, hosted a panel discussion with artist Huong Ngo on women in revolutionary conflict.

‘Stormy Petrel’ translated into Vietnamese very easily as ‘Bái Ca Chim Báo Bao’, because The Song of the Stormy Petrel – a poem by Russian writer Maxim Gorky from 1901 – featured frequently in the twentieth-century communist curriculum. Several exhibition visitors recited its verses. ‘Bái Ca Chim Báo Bao/The Song of the Stormy Petrel’ is a metaphor for global war. The tiny seabird is a prophet of global storms and has numerous folklore associations relating to and catastrophe, bad omens and the haunting of sea crews. And yet, as American poet Emily Dickinson wrote, “hope is the thing with feathers”. We discovered this creature when reading a text where the suffragette Charlotte Despard was described as a “stormy petrel of liberty”, and began exploring the rich symbolism attached to the petrel as a metaphor for a radical revolutionary.

Petrels nest in their thousands on the Blasket Islands, hatching young in land burrows before migrating thousands of miles without landing for years. The petrel has multiple aliases: Alamonti, Assilag, Mitty, Mother Carey’s Chickens, Luch Fharriaige, Spence, Tom Tailor, water witch, Urdhubhán and Guairdeall. ‘Ag guairdeall’ also means: to Orla Ryan, Brian Hand and Alanna O’Kelly are artists and writers hover; encircle; to be restless; to loiter or to wander. Thug siad oíche ar who also lecture in the School of Art and Design at IT, Carlow.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

RESIDENCY

Carl Giffney, I really don’t feel them, 2016; installation view, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin

Carl Giffney, Waterford and Coat of Arms (diag. 1)

Carl Giffney, Ubermensch A (diag. 3), 2008; made while on residency in Ard Bia, Berlin

Carl Giffney, Diag. 4. I really don’t feel them, 2016; cinematic premiere at Arctic, Saamelaiskulttuurikeskus (SAJOS), Inari, Finland

Carl Giffney, I really don’t feel them, 2016; HD still

Carl Giffney, 407.C (diag. 2), 2011; freelance emergency response vehicle that participates in patrols and reconnaissance trips in Cork and Dublin

Frontier 1 CARL GIFFNEY DISCUSSES HIS PARTICIPATION IN ‘FRONTIERS IN RETREAT’, AN EU-FUNDED RESIDENCY PROJECT COORDINATED BY HELSINKI INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS’ PROGRAMME (HIAP), AND PRESENTS A TEXT RELATED TO THE WORK HE PRODUCED THERE.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

31

RESIDENCY

Carl Giffney, I really don’t feel them, 2016;HD still

Carl Giffney. I really don’t feel them, 2016;HD still

around 100 strong, with some coming and going over the years. We have all met en masse twice. It is well supported with material budgets, fees, stipends and travel expenses. To date I have completed seven residencies of two to three months each, sometimes back to back, working recently in Finland, Estonia, Serbia, Scotland and the Netherlands.

We are now two and a half years into FiR, marking our half way point. I have spent the first portion of time making just one work, my first feature length movie entitled I really don’t feel them (HD video, 1 hour 39 minutes, 2016). It comes from the place of vacuum I speak of in Ireland. There are other strands, sub-works, publications, exhibitions and public performances, but all works come under the movie’s title. I really don’t feel them (IRDFT) has been back-tracking the journey taken in its shooting, taking the form of an EU tour, from below sea level in AND LIVING IN A TOTALLY DIFFERENT LANDSCAPE the Netherlands, to Scotland’s politically-charged highlands, to Winter It is a narrow window to be a Cub. You would want to have started college in Finland, and travelling deep into the Arctic on a search, where the around 2001 – 2003 to have ridden the economic waves of the Celtic Tiger film ends. and be out in the world before the social crash in Ireland fully culminated On this tour, IRDFT premiered in the Arctic [Diag. 4]. It was (Diag. 2. 407.C, freelance emergency response vehicle [2011]). I was working FRONTIERS IN RETREAT (FIR) as artist in resident in Arigna Coal Mines, Co. Roscommon, when the word I was invited that year by the Scottish Sculpture Workshop (SSW) to shown at the largest cinema there, called Saamelaiskulttuurikeskus RECESSION hit the radio airwaves. High summer 2008. The workers were participate, as one of the three artists put forward by them, in Frontiers (SAJOS), and has been moving steadily southwards showing at small rattled. After some time, the IMF bailed us out. in Retreat (FiR), a five-year international residency project (2013 – venues, in specially kitted-out art spaces, in industrial units made into 2018) funded by The EU Culture Fund and coordinated by Helsinki cinemas and in some of the special sites that feature as significant THESE CUBS MARK A CHANGE International Artists Programme (HIAP). FiR involves eight art centres landmarks in the movie – a bronze foundry was a particularly nice The Cubs are a social group that is landmark. Until this point young groups spread across seven European countries. All are remarkable due to one.

In addition to the EU tour, we organised a homecoming were clutching onto the last remains of social cohesion in Ireland: the church, their stark and eclectic contextual relationship to borders, land use, the idea of the family unit, the GAA, the pub as social centre, having kids, the ecology and isolation, elements which became common themes of exhibition in Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin. It was a three-day event person as defined by their career, having employment at all, nationalism… artistic inquiry during the project. Across Finland, Scotland, Latvia, that itself was split in two. In the daytime, it took the form of an everything was heavily eroded. By the time we came out into the real world Serbia, Iceland, Spain and Lithuania, we are talking about remote exhibition comprising 15 video stills on aluminum, original antique everything had suddenly collapsed around us (Diag. 3, Ubermensch A [2008] places, from deep winter group studios in the Arctic to industrial seating on the floor and a large free-standing timber screen with Berlin). buildings on the Danube River in post-conflict Belgrade. There is projection set but turned off. For this, the gallery lights were on. At Scotland’s rich oil country in its stony northeast, and a tiny inhabited 6pm a drinks reception was held for up to 36 people. Gin. It was a short None of us Cubs have mortgages. None of us own houses. Few of us have kids. island in the Baltic called Utö. There are currently militarised borders, social event that preceded a full HD video projection of IRDFT. For Few of us have cars. Mainly, we take no part in the church. We have no even tiny townlands, partitioned by no man’s land between east this, the gallery lights were off.

The film I made on this EU residency is free for all to watch, in pensions, we have no insurance, we have no health care. No bank loans. We Finland and west Russia. often migrate.

Three artists are nominated by each art centre, making 24 in total. full length and in HD, and will be actively spread further around the The artists move around from space to space, averaging around seven Europe as a solo work and freely distributed online. To watch, visit 2008 was the culmination of many major social collapses that happened right months of residencies each year. We are commissioned to make new carlgiffney.com and select I really don’t feel them at your pleasure. across the 1990s. It began with the Catholic Church being disgraced in work all the time, in both individual and collaborative ways, and in Ireland and came to a head in the Celtic Tiger’s sudden demise. We Cubs relation to the context and ecologies we experience. Along with the 24 Carl Giffney is a visual artist and a founding member and director began our careers at its very peak and started out through its collapse. We live artists, there are an equal number of curators and directors who are of The Good Hatchery (2007 – 2016). in the space immediately after social (and economic) collapse, but also before very closely involved. A further 50 people, comprising invited experts, carlgiffney.com new replacements began. In this place of vacuum, we live. students, assistants and technicians, bring our working group to WE CAN PROTEST NOW IT IS A PLACE BEYOND PROTEST We can protest all we like now, take over the town square and live in it for a It is a place where people don’t identify much with nationality. It is a place year, if we wish. That’s all fine now. nearly beyond gender. And politics. It is sometimes misdiagnosed as an apathetic place, when it is actually a chasm devoid of communication. There IT’S TO DO WITH AGE are no familiar shared terms of reference yet to allow conversation. And so I was born in 1983 in Waterford and grew up there (Diag. 1 [left] ,Waterford). visual art is one important language of this place. Music is another. It may be The name for the small city is Veðrafjórðr in Norse and Port Láirge in Irish. It a place of primary and secondary partners. We may identify, or not at all. It is an ancient Viking city that has been used as a major international port for is charcterised by things unfolding slowly – characterised by an overwhelming over a millennium [Diag. 1 (right), coat of arms]. People come in and go out. I feeling, and understanding, and trust, that things are unfolding into new space left in 2002, aged 19. I am a Celtic Tiger Cub. I was educated in Dublin with no possible clue to where we they are going. In 2013, I found myself during the boom and first graduated there at its very height, Summer 2007. again entangled within this vacuum place, while working with it as subject We are almost 10 years on now. matter.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

PROJECT PROFILE

Counter-Exhibitionary Strategies JEANETTE DOYLE, JENNIE GUY, FIONA HALLINAN, EMER LYNCH AND KATE STRAIN INTRODUCE ‘THE ENQUIRY @ IMMA’, A SEMINAR GROUP AFFILIATED WITH GRADCAM THAT ARE DEDICATED TO ANALYSING EXHIBTION-MAKING STRATEGIES, BOTH HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY.

The Enquiry @ IMMA; photo (detail) by Louis Hough

THE Enquiry is a seminar group affiliated with the Graduate School for Creative Arts and Media, Dublin (GradCAM) and hosted by IMMA. It was first convened in 2009 by Georgina Jackson, who was then a PhD candidate with GradCAM. Originally the group was concerned with collating research on seminal counter-exhibitionary strategies.

The current working group comprises Jeanette Doyle, Jennie Guy, Fiona Hallinan, Emer Lynch and Kate Strain. We are concerned with developing a performative analysis of exhibition-making modes, both historical and contemporary.

LES IMMATÉRIAUX Our current research focuses on the relationship between Lucy Lippard’s theorisation of dematerialised art practices during the 1960s and 1970s, and more recent considerations of ‘immateriality’, including explications of the digital age by French philosopher JeanFrançois Lyotard. We recently examined ‘Les Immatériaux’, a groundbreaking exhibition held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1985, curated by Lyotard and Thierry Chaput. ‘Les Immatériaux’ was informed by theories on matter and materialism found in Lyotard’s earlier writings, including Discourse, Figure (1971), perceived as a veritable ‘postmodern manifesto’1 and The Post Modern Condition (1979), which infused the exhibition with its “language games”, refusal of a “meta-narrative” and predictions of the rise of the digital.2 The exhibition had five different strands, categorised using titles beginning with ‘mat’, which conjured an ontology of telecommunications: Matériau (medium); Matrice (matrix/code); Materiel (receiver); Matière (referent); and Maternité (emitter). The format of the exhibition itself was a form of physical ‘surfing’.

Dramatically-lit grey walls, suspended wire meshes that supported artworks. An obligatory headset indicated aurally which path visitors might take, with a different track for each of the five sections offering multiple pathways through the exhibition. Lyotard later theorised the ‘immaterial’ in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1991), a text that has proven central to our research. Using terms like ‘nuance’ and ‘timbre’,3 Lyotard denoted the barely perceptible differences between sounds (such as the same note played on a piano and flute) and colours,

The Enquiry @ IMMA; photo (detail) by Kate Strain

depending on the medium used to produce the colour, situating the sublime within these “minutiae of difference”.4

According to Lyotard, to be ‘inhuman’ is our natural state, while to be ‘human’ is something that has to be learned.

Following a second extract from Fahrenheit 451 (‘Train Gaze’), Kate Strain began to tell a story connecting a recent aeronautical experience THE ENQUIRY @ IMMA As a culmination of six months of regular meetings, ‘The Enquiry @ with two existing texts: Ernst Fischer: A Philosopher and Death written by IMMA’ was conceived as a platform to perform our practice-based John Berger in 1974, describing the last day of Fischer’s life; and The research. The event took place on Friday 15 July 2016, commencing in Necessity of Art by Ernst Fischer himself, published in 1959, describing IMMA’s former bookshop, where visitors were welcomed with warm why art matters in the face of capitalism. While Strain told the story, beverages prepared by Fiona Hallinan. The drink was yellow in colour footage played in the background, showing her computer desktop and and visitors were invited to alter its gradient, taste and intensity with various internet searches for material related to ‘Les Immatériaux’.

After Guy’s third extract from Fahrenheit 451 (‘Running Man’), turmeric available in various forms: fresh, grated, powdered, whole and in syrup. Hallinan had also organised a selection of key readings Jeanette Doyle presented her piece Rough, which began and ended that had informed the group’s research, printed on different shades of with a text-based animation playing out against eight different yellow paper. The audience were invited into the lecture room for a background colours. Donna Summer and Barbara Streisand’s duet series of screenings and live presentations. Having departed the now Enough is Enough formed part of the soundtrack, emphasising the disused bookshop, the first film, presented to the audience by Jennie distinction between the nuance and timbre of the two voices. Halfway Guy, was an extract from Fahrenheit 451, François Truffaut’s 1966 film through, Streisand and Barry Gibb’s rendition of Guilty was adapted from a novel by Ray Bradbury, which portrays the mass accompanied by moving images of destruction caused by erupting volcanoes. This work contrasted theorisations of the sublime by Kant incineration of books (‘Book Drop’).

This was followed by Emer Lynch’s piece, a 14 minute reading of and Lyotard, whereby the former would cite the sublime in our an abridged chapter from Lyotard’s The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. inability to comprehend vastness and magnitude, while for the latter Chapter one, entitled ‘Can Thought go on Without a Body’, is split into the sublime appears in the minutiae of details. The event concluded two parts: ‘He’ and ‘She’. ‘He’ speaks largely from the perspective of the with a final extract from Fahrenheit 451 – a film that foretells a future impatient, practical-minded scientist, accusatory and reproachful of reality where information is considered a dangerous force. Guy’s aim ‘She’ – the philosopher – for “wearing out your reader” with questions was to slow things down a little, delivering relentlessly slow edits or that “have to remain unanswered in order to deserve being called looped sections that confront the viewer with what it means to discard philosophical”. The text was delivered live from the back of the room or disrespect knowledge.

by Lynch and her father, Brian. The difference in tone between the two The Enquiry (Jeanette Doyle, Jennie Guy, Fiona Hallinan, Emer familial voices reflected Lyotard’s inquiries.

Lynch and Kate Strain) continue to meet regularly at IMMA and This was accompanied by an initially almost static video of a would like to thank Lisa Moran (IMMA) and Dr Noel Fitzpatrick bleached out scene depicting a tiny black hole on a cliff face. Four (GradCAM). adult bodies eventually emerged feet first from this hole, blinded by Notes the intense natural light, stumbling forward and then crawling 1. Bernard Stiegler, Shadow of the Sublime, p.148 2. Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 1979 precariously down the rock formation, before walking off-screen. The 3. Jean Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: A Reflection on Time, 1988, p.140 intellectual density of Lyotard’s text was diffused by this footage, 4. Jeanette Doyle, ‘Jeanette Doyle: Fifteen Days and Factory Direct at the Andy Warhol Museum: The Relationship Between the ‘Immaterial’, ‘Dematerial’ and ‘Material’ in Contemporary Art Practice’ in M. which was partly humorous and partly a primal ‘birthing’ scenario. Causey, E. Meehan and N. O’Dwyer (eds.), The Performing Subject in the Space of Technology, 2015

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

33

PUBLIC ART ROUNDUP

Public Art

Date advertised: Autumn 2015 Date sited/carried out: 17 May 2016 Budget: €5,000 fee for the year (some of which was used towards the project) and €450 production costs

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

Commission type: Residency Project partners: UCD Parity Studios Brief description: What is a Lake? was a celebration of the UCD Lake and the finale of a body of research undertaken by Vanessa Daws

OBSERVING OFFALY

during her yearlong residency at UCD Parity Studios. What is a Lake? offered the UCD community a chance to escape land temporarily and view their familiar campus from a new perspective. Throughout the day there were boat tours crewed by a giant copepod (a microscopic zooplankton) and a sound piece on the boat. The Dublin Model Boat Club were invited to sail their model boats on the lake during the day.

2016 (Maritime Academy, Boston, Massachsetts as part of the New England American Conference for Irish Studies, ‘1916 Revolution(s) and all that Followed’) Budget: €5000 Commission type: 1916 Centenary Programme Brief description: Here we are at the risk of our lives was a multi-media

As part of the project, Anika Babel from the UCD School of Music wrote a new work titled I Am a Lake. The piece was performed in the School of Science by the specially assembled Lake Orchestra. During the evening there was a book launch of What is a Lake? and Professor Joe Carthy, the Dean of UCD School of Science, introduced Dr Jennifer Mitchell, a Microbiologist at UCD, and Dr Caroline Wynne, Senior

Freshwater Consultant at RPS Group Ltd, who both gave presentations installation that referenced the lost heritage of Irish music halls, along on what the project means to them in their jobs as scientists and with the theatrical landscape and culture of 1916 Dublin. Artist Sue researchers.

Morris and academic Susanne Colleary wanted to represent the social, Artist’s name: Veronica Nicholson Title of work: Observing Offaly

The aim of the work was to explore the value of and role that historical and cultural contexts and tensions leading up to and bodies of water play in our terrestrial world. Daws’s fascination with through the turbulent events of the Rising. The work comprised a two- the UCD Lake began in January 2015, when she undertook the work channel video using filmed performance and archival footage from

Commissioning body: Offaly County Council

the Imperial War Museum, London, found and fabricated artefacts and

Date advertised: November 2014

print media.

Date sited/carried out: May 2015 – May 2016

Through the fictitious character of Kitty Kelly, a music hall

Budget: €24,000

performer and ‘masher’ (male impersonator), the work interpreted the

Commission type: Per Cent for Art Scheme

tradition of the Irish popular voice and performance, examining and

Project partner: Offaly County Council

re-imagining contemporary populist narratives of identity and nation.

First Solo Swim Crossing of UCD Lake. This initial voyage was the starting point of the artist’s exploration of the history, architecture, source and science of the UCD Lake, which she describes as a rather unconsidered, ignored body of water that is nonetheless an important part of campus life.

Brief description: Photographer Veronica Nicholson was This fictional work was situated against the historical backdrop of the BROKEN BRIDGE commissioned by Offaly County Council to capture a visual profile of razing of the Coliseum Theatre in the crossfire between the British Offaly at this current moment in time by engaging with a wide range army and the rebel headquarters at the GPO on O’Connell Street. of people. Nicholson travelled the length and breadth of Offaly for over a year observing the everyday life of the county as experienced by those who live there.

WHAT IS A LAKE?

The artist attended local events, was invited into people’s homes and witnessed how national events such as the marriage equality referendum, the refugee crisis, the flooding of December 2015 and the centenary celebrations, impacted the county. Nicholson also sought to capture the ever-present bog, focusing particularly on women farmers in the county in order to highlight their invaluable contribution to the farming community. Nicholson produced an exhibition and a book as part of the project, which will be launched on 24 November 2016 in Tullamore.

Artists’ names: David Ian Bickley and Paul Coughlan Title of work: Broken Bridge

HERE WE ARE AT THE RISK OF OUR LIVES

Location: Doyles Pub, Graignamanagh, County Kilkenny Date commissioned: August 2016 Date sited: October 2016 Budget: €1700 Commission type: Self-initiated project Project partners: Doyle’s Pub, Graignamanagh Brief description: David Ian Bickley and Paul Coughlan created a mural work for the smoking room in Doyle’s Pub, Graignamanagh, based on a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s famous film The Seventh Seal.

In the scene a knight who returns from the crusades plays chess with death for his life.

In Broken Bridge, the artists recreated this image with a street art aesthetic to make the knight (who references a thirteenth-century figure from the local Duisk Abbey) play chess with a Graignamanagh monk. He is celebrating life with a pint of stout and in the background we see Graignamanagh Bridge with a break in the middle. This refers to the break that was made during a skirmish in the 1700s, the marks of which can still be seen today. It also symbolises the bridge between

Artists’ names: Sue Morris and Susanne Colleary Title of work: Here we are at the risk of our lives

Artist’s name: Vanessa Daws

Commissioning body: Dublin City Libraries, Dublin City Council

Title of work: What is a Lake?

Date sited: May – July, 2016 (Dublin City Libraries tour); November

Commissioning body: UCD Parity Studios

life and death, with the gap as eternal mystery. The text is a quote from the film which reads: “I shall carry this memory carefully in my hands as if it were a bowl brimful of fresh milk”.

34

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2016

OPPORTUNITIES

Opportunities FUNDING/AWARDS/ BURSARIES

COMMISSIONS

GOLDEN FLEECE AWARD

BEAUFORT COLLEGE

The trustees of the Golden Fleece Award

PER CENT FOR ART

are

Beaufort College (Navan, Co. Meath)

delighted

to

announce

that

completing the application form on the

LINO PRINT/

to learn fundamental technical skills in

RHA website.

Deadline

JAPANESE STAB STITCH BINDING

painting. Students will receive written

Courses will take place at Graphic Studio

feedback on course completion. Tutors:

4 November Web

Dublin in November. Japanese Stab Damien Flood, Conor Walton, Geraldine Stitch Binding Course with Éilis Murphy. O’Neill ARHA, James Hanley RHA, Una

rhagallery.ie

Suitable for beginners and intermediate

RESIDENCIES

applications are now open for the 2017 Public Art Working Group will HOSPITALFIELD INTERNATIONAL award. The mission of the Golden Fleece commission a permanent artwork in the RESIDENCY Award is to provide resources for form of a ‘creative and contemplative Artists, writers, architects, producers, practicing Irish craft and visual artists space’ within their school for students dancers, choreographers, curators, aspiring to innovate and develop their and staff through the Per Cent for Art designers, educators and researchers are artistic vision. It aims to help outstanding Scheme. It is envisioned that this overall invited to apply to the Hospitalfield artists needing support at strategic stages artwork will be sited inside the building.

International Residency. The residency is in their careers. The award is intended for The total budget for the project is open to those working across the arts artists working in the area of figurative €43,000. The selection process will take who recognise that they require some visual art or of craft and applied arts. the form of a two-stage open competition. time to focus on the development of They will normally live and carry out It is open to all interested professional their work. their creative work on the island of artists at any stage of their career or For individuals or collaborative Ireland or otherwise will have strong experience. Selection will be based on groups it can be a testbed for developing artistic connections with Ireland. the information supplied, establishing their practice and an opportunity to The Golden Fleece Award is now in the competence of the artists to carry out concentrate on a specific project. Places: its sixteenth year. It is an independent this commission. No designs or detailed eight for each residency period. artistic prize fund established as a proposals are required in stage 1.

Residency period: 13 – 26 March 2017, 21 charitable bequest by the late Lillias Stage 1: Artists are invited to express August – 3 September 2017 and 13 – 26 Mitchell, who died in 2000, and the first their interest in being considered for this November 2017.

Golden Fleece Award was made a year project at the first stage of this Deadline later. commission. Artists may do this by Midnight, 28 November The Golden Fleece is an annual completing the application form and Web prize fund of €20,000. This winner is

submission of a CV and images/details of

usually awarded between €12,000 and

recent relevant works/projects. Stage 2:

€15,000 and others on the shortlist

From the completed Stage 1 applications

receive smaller awards. These generous

a shortlist of artists will be selected by

awards make the Golden Fleece one of

panel jury. Stage 2 shortlisted artists will

the most valuable arts prizes made by a

be paid a concept development fee of

private philanthropist in Ireland. All

€150 to work on a detailed proposal for

applications must be made through the

final selection. A stage 2 brief will be

online application form. Please note an

available to shortlisted artists and a site

administration fee of €20 applies to all

visit is expected at this stage.

applications.

Deadline

two/three members of the public art

The selection panel will consist of

2pm, 25 November Web

project manager.

Deadline

12 noon, Friday 9 December Contact

JOB VACANCIES DIRECTOR, DOUGLAS HYDE GALLERY

Rina Whyte Email

applications from suitable candidates for vacant at the end of 2016. The new Director will bring distinctive ideas,

to work directly from observation of life

Suitable for beginners and intermediate

models. Easels and boards are supplied,

participants. Students will cover the artists are asked to bring their own paper entire process of cutting and printing and preferred drawing or painting from a linoleum block, creating lines,

10.00 – 16.00. Cost: €170.

Web

4 November Web

graphicstudiodublin.com Email

rhagallery.ie Contact

education@graphicstudiodublin.com.

Address

Kate McBride Email

Distillery Court, 537 North Circular

kate@rhagallery.ie Telephone

Road, Dublin 7

016612558 FIGURATIVE PAINTING WITH PADDY MCCANN The Dock, Leitrim will host a two-day intensive painting workshop (12 and 13 November) for artists wishing to SOUNDING OUT THE SPACE energise their painting practice. Paddy Although substantial research on the

conference

His most recent solo exhibition ‘Black

imbalance, fostering an interdisciplinary

of the institution in both the local and

rent for three six-month slots in 2017.

international art worlds and to deliver an

The

artistic programme that furthers the

approximately 4.7m x 4.9m and are fully

studio

spaces

measure

international equipped with a sink and storage units.

There is also a common room and

reputation. This is a full time, five-year fixed term contract with a salary of

kitchen facilities available. The studios

€60,000 per annum. For application

have 24-hour secure access and are non-

details see the website below.

Deadline

residential. Two studio slots are available

5pm, 21 November Web

July – December (three studio slots in

douglashydegallery.com

to be considered should apply by

from January – June and one is available total are being offered). Artists wishing

aims

amongst

to

address

researchers

this

Quarter’ was held at the MAC, Belfast.

spirit

Day one will deal with ‘simplification’

practitioners.

THROUGH DESIGN

with a limited colour palette. Exercises

‘Mise Éire – Shaping a Nation through

will encourage quick responses with presentations from sound artists, visual large brushes on a range of scales. Day artists, composers, academics and post-

and

The conference committee invites

two will deal with colour massing – how

graduate researchers that consider the

collective and national identities in to look at reducing the human figure to Ireland through the lens of design and essential contrasts in order to move the

spatiality of sound in all its diverse forms.

craft. Taking place at the National

painting forward.

Web

Conservatory of Music and Drama, the

thedock.ie Email

GradCAM. It is generously supported by

info@thedock.ie Telephone

(SMI), the Contemporary Music Centre

0719650828 Address

the Solstice Gallery, the Spatial Music

academics were invited to explore

The Dock, St Georges Terrace, Carrick on

and Technology Association. For details

notions of national identities. From the

Shannon, County Leitrim

on how to apply see the website below.

Deadline

RHA COURSES

31 March 2017 Website

contemporary practice, it aims to initiate

The RHA School is offering studios to

sound art and visual art studies, much of

MISE ÉIRE – SHAPING A NATION

historical perspective of 1916, to

expected to develop a vision for the role

CALLS FOR PAPERS

this work has remained separate. This

Design historians, practitioners and

RHA STUDIOS

materials. The terms will be structured as

textures and negative and positive follows: Cost: €225 – €450. images. Dates: 19 and 20 November, Deadline

Fine Art programme at Ulster University.

COURSES / WORKSHOPS / TRAINING

Design and Crafts Council of Ireland.

to the post.

The successful candidate will be

exercise for professional artists wishing

Lino Print Course with Louise Leonard.

He teaches painting on the BA (Hons)

National Museum of Ireland and the

leadership and a strong curatorial voice

November, 10.00 – 16.00. Cost: €170.

within the disciplines of musicology,

and a partnership project between the

STUDIO SPACE

The format will remain a self-directed

Hospitalfield House, Arbroath, Angus, represented by the Fenderesky Gallery, Scotland Belfast and Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin.

part of the 2016 centenary programme

the post of Director, which will become

decorate the cover. Dates: 5 and 6

spatiality of sound has been carried out

History, Collins Barracks, this event is

0872389591

focus on creating a highly personal offered on a weekly basis on Thursdays hardback photo album using gold leaf to over 15 weeks starting on 12 of January.

McCann is a Belfast-based artist,

Museum of Ireland – Decorative Arts and

The Board of the Douglas Hyde Gallery, rinawhyte@yahoo.com Trinity College, Dublin, invites Telephone

significant

submit/67567 Address

working group and two professional Design’ takes place on 4 and 5 November, artists. It will be chaired by the curator/ and will explore the expression of

goldenfleeceaward.com

Gallery’s

hospitalfield.submittable.com/

Sealy RHA, Colin Martin RHA and Blaise

participants. Students will explore a Smith ARHA. Cost: €450. Self-Directed variety of Japanese stab stitches and will Life Drawing Classes: Sessions are being

dialogue and question the impact of Painting Course Term 1: This 15-week, global influences as well as the role that part-time course in painting takes place cultural diversity and technology play in

11 January – 19 April and provides basic

shaping identities.

technical skills to underpin a painting

This conference is hosted by DIT Dublin School of Creative Arts and the Society for Musicology in Ireland (CMC), the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Collective and the Irish Sound Science

soundingout2017.com SHBH

investigate the role that museums, and

practice. Students will learn how to SuperMassiveBlackHole magazine seeks prepare and create a variety of grounds submissions for work to be included in

ultimately the state, have played in

and surfaces, the physical and chemical

In addition the conference will

the first issue of 2017. The broad theme is

interpreting and shaping this overall rules for the application of paint, ‘New Frontiers’ and SMBH encourage advanced colour theory, tonal value and originality. narrative. Cost: €45/€65. glazing. Students who would benefit Deadline Web https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/mise-eire-

from this course are artists who wish to

shaping-a-nation-through-design

up-skill or build on existing knowledge

1 December Web

in painting, as well as students who wish

smbhmag.com

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 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.

Autum & Winter 2016

VAI ARTISTS’ CAFÉS & SHOW & TELLS

ROI

Artists’ Café event in your area. Email: monica@ visualartists.ie

Dublin City DEVELOPING CREATIVE PROPOSALS WITH EILIS LAVELLE @Visual Artists Ireland. Fri 18 Nov (10.30 – 16.30). Cost: €40/20 (VAI members).

DOCUMENTING YOUR WORK WITH TIM DURHAM @Visual Artists Ireland, Thu 24 Nov (10.00 – 17.00). Places: 10. Cost: €80/40 (VAI members).

HEALTH & SAFETY FOR VISUAL ARTISTS WITH VINCENT KIELY @Visual Artists Ireland. 25 Nov

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.

(10.30 – 16.30). Cost: €40/20 (VAI members).

PEER CRITIQUE: SCULPTURE & INSTALLATION WITH JANET MULLARNEY @Visual Artists Ireland. 4 Nov (10.30 – 16.30). Cost: €60/30 (VAI members).

Laois VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFÉ & SHOW & TELL EVENT FOR LAOIS ARTISTS in partnership with

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.

Dunamaise Arts Centre @Dunamaise Arts Centre, Portlaoise. Sat 26 Nov (11.00 – 15.30). Places: 30+.

Cost: €5/0 (VAI members).

SITES

OF

TENSION

–

Belfast Office. 16 and 17 Nov (9.30 – 17.00). Cost:

VAI invites interested artists groups, venues or early bird tickets before 2 Nov £20/£10 VAI mempartners to get in touch and discuss hosting a VAI bers; full price tickets £30/£20 VAI members;

SITES

OF

NI

Dunamaise Arts Centre. 19 Nov (10.00 – 16.30).

Cost: €40/20 (VAI members/Laois artists).

Cavan ARTISTS’ BOOK WORKSHOP in partnership with Cavan County Council & Town Hall Cavan. @ Town Hall, Cavan Town. Date tbc (10.00 – 16.30).

Places: 12 – 14. Cost: €40/20 (VAI members).

Tipperary CHILD PROTECTION AWARENESS TRAINING in partnership with Tipperary County Council. @ Clonmel tbc. Nov date tbc (10.30 – 15.30). Places: 15 – 20. Cost: €20/10 (VAI members).

VISUAL

ARTISTS’

CAFÉ:

PROJECT

MANAGEMENT & PLANNING @North Down

Museum. Sat 12 Nov (13.00 – 16.00). Cost: £10/£5 you shift your mindset, find your focus and (VAI/DAS members). Visual artists often find sharpen your creative mind. themselves juggling many projects at the same A two day exploration of best practices for

time, including their art practice itself, market-

making ideas happen. Pragmatic action-oriented

ing and promoting their work, writing grants

insights and skills are shared to empower you to

and proposals, facilitating workshops and work-

make good the ideas you have in waiting... when

ing on multiple exhibitions or commissions.

it comes to creative work, every decision matters.

This presents real challenges. This workshop

AMINI SCREENING AND DISCUSSION WITH

aims to provide practical support and techniques

PETER TAYLOR @Beanbag Cinema. Thurs 24

to help improve your basic project management

Nov (19.00). Cost: £3/ £2 VAI members. Peter

skills.

Taylor (BFMAF) joined Berwick Film and Media

VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFE: LET’S MAKE IT

Arts Festival in January 2015.

HAPPEN! Venue TBC. Thur 19 Jan (19.00 –

Previously based in Rotterdam where he

21.00). Cost: FREE.Start the new year as you mean

worked as a freelance curator, Peter has been a

to go on at this fun, lively social event with a

film programmer and researcher for the

twist. Belfast-based artist Charlotte Bosanquet

International Film Festival Rotterdam since 2006

has something unusual up her sleeve to get your

and up until 2012 was also a programmer at

creative juices flowing. Kick out the old and get

WORM. Other recent activities include curating

inspired to make things happen in 2017.

programmes for the DEAF Biennale and PLASTIK, Ireland’s festival for artists’ moving image.

Derry

VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFE: SOCIAL MEDIA AND KRISTINA ONLINE PRESENCE @Void. 24 Nov (11.00 – CRANFELD AND ROSE BAKER @Beanbag 16.00). Cost: FREE. This workshop will look at AMINI

SCREENING

WITH

Cinema. Thurs 15 Dec (19.00). Cost: £3/£2 VAI

COLLABORATION: ART & ECOLOGY SEMINAR in partnership with Dunamaise Arts Centre @

includes lunch. Setting Your Own Agenda helps

Bangor

Belfast BELFAST OPEN STUDIOS SPEED CURATING Sat 5 Nov. Cost: £2 per appointment. This is a perennially popular strand of our Get Together and Belfast Open Studios and one that can potentially lead to all sorts of opportunities.

ways artists can use free internet tools to support members. Born in Uzbekistan, Cranfeld is a their overall professional development and to London-based artist and filmmaker. promote specific exhibitions.

Her work is a combination of speculative narratives, performances and social experiments, which investigate and challenge the impact of societal and political systems on human lives.

Baker is a freelance film programmer with a

The format offers just 15 minutes get to

background in special events. She has created her

meet a curator and introduce your practice. From

own initiatives (Filmgoer, Late Night Art Film)

past experience, we ask that you look at each and worked with existing organisations (Belfast curator’s interests and remit carefully, making Film Festival, Belfast Photo Festival, Film Hub NI, interesting and favourable comparisons. Taking

NI Screen). Working alongside individual film-

the time to matchmake yields results.

makers in recent years has enhanced her focus

SETTING YOUR OWN AGENDA WITH PATRICIA

on exhibiting experimental film and artists’

CLYNE-KELLY in partnership with Craft NI @VAI

moving image.

We will explore platforms that enable you to showcase your work on-line, such as WordPress and Tumblr. We will also look at how social media can help expand your audience and other ways to connect, such as developing and maintaining mailing lists and contacting journalists. The day will also include tips on how to use internet-based tools to support your applications and proposals.

BOOKINGS/INFORMATION Rob Hilken, Northern Ireland Manager E: rob@visualartists-ni.org T: 028 9587 0361

SPACE FOR RENT AT VAI’S NEW OFFICE! The spacious upper floor at our new Dublin 8 office is now available to rent. The large, light-filled room is suitable for rehearsals, auditions and presentations as well as meetings, talks and conferences. Please call 01 672 9488 or email info@visualartists.ie to discuss options.

JOIN VAI! Visual Artists Ireland provides practical support, services, information and resources for professional artists throughout their careers.

Visit visualartists.ie for more details.

NEW PROJECTORS AT VAI! VAI has 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.