Regional Focus
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2022
To Be ‘Of a Place’
Tipperary
Helena Tobin Artistic Director, South Tipperary Art Centre
Source Arts Centre Brendan Maher Director
THE SOURCE ARTS Centre in Thurles, County
Tipperary, holds a contemporary gallery and a theatre, as well as the local library branch, which is housed in another section of the building. The centre rests alongside the River Suir and was designed by architects McCullough and Mulvin, winning the Architectural Association of Ireland Award for Best Public and Cultural Building in 2007. With funding support from Tipperary County Council and the Arts Council, the venue hosts up to 180 events during the year, across all artforms. The gallery, positioned between the arts centre and library wings, has a trapezoid shape, echoing the shape of the town’s Liberty Square – wider at one wall and narrowing towards the other parallel wall. The gallery walls are four metres in height and in the ceiling, a recessed opening for daylight, again trapezoid, runs directionally counter to this gallery shape. In programming, Source has looked to bring work of local importance as well as national and international standing to the gallery. Tipperary has an enviable list of artists, who are either connected to or live in the county, including Alice Maher, Bernadette Kiely, John Keating, Austin McQuinn and Gerry Davis, who have all exhibited at Source in the past four years. Both Joy Gerrard and Aideen Barry, again with county links, will exhibit in the gallery over winter 2021 and spring 2022. Source has actively sought and invited these artists to show at the venue, not for regional reasons, but because of their national and international reputations. In the case of Alice Maher’s 2018 exhibition, ‘Vox Materia’, it was the first time the artist had presented a solo exhibition in Tipperary. That show eventually toured to Crawford Art Gallery in Cork and in another iteration, to the Katzen Arts Center in Washington. Making a connection to, and engaging with, the public is important. Early discussions with artists can lead to exciting and resonant links for the audience. Eamon Colman’s 2021 exhibition, ‘Into the Mountain’, was inspired by the nearby Sliabh na mBan mountain. Alice Maher’s work
was informed by a visit to see a carving of a mermaid in Kilcooley Abbey in North Tipperary. Photographer Seamus Murphy met with the newly arrived Syrian Community in Thurles for his 2020 show, ‘Citizens’, which dealt with the post-conflict lives of Irish War of Independence Veterans and those fleeing the Syrian Civil War. Artists also hold gallery talks or workshops during their exhibition run, with strong interest from attending audiences and local second and third-level students. The venue looks to gain added value for exhibiting artists where possible, in extending contact with them through additional projects. Red Fox Press in Achill produced a book of Eamon Colman’s work in association with Source in 2021 and Austin McQuinn and Colman will both produce editioned prints through Parallel Editions in Limerick with support from Source in 2022. Seamus Murphy’s exhibition, extended in format and theme, will have an additional showing in Dublin Port in 2022, which will be curated by Source. The arts centre has developed a strategy for 2022-24 with a priority to secure studio space for artists in Tipperary. This aspiration, which we feel is important to encourage and maintain artists living in the area, will naturally feed into the gallery programme. Additionally, we will look to work with artists in non-gallery-specific or cross-disciplinary projects, which will allow us to develop wider opportunities for artists and the centre. With this approach in mind, Source commissioned Gordon Hogan to make Moving Portraits – a looped video-work with over 60 filmed portraits – which was screened on the boardwalk outside the arts centre on Culture Night 2021. Moving forward, we will return to a substantially submissions-based approach in developing gallery shows and non-gallery-based projects from 2023 onwards. We welcome approaches from artists and will look to engage in early discussions, to achieve concrete artistic and career supporting outcomes. thesourceartscentre.ie
Alice Maher, ‘Vox Materia’, installation view, Source Arts Centre, March 2018; photograph by Debbie Hickey, courtesy the artist and The Source Arts Centre.
Na Cailleacha, installation view, South Tipperary Arts Centre, May 2021, photo by Dara McGrath, courtesy the artists and South Tipperary Arts Centre
WHAT DOES IT mean to be ‘of a place, or area’?
Questions like this have at various moments in my life and work prompted me to ‘zoom out’ and see things from a wider perspective. Some say it specifically refers to your geography – your location. But what does that mean in a post-pandemic era, in which people are embracing remote working, with many no longer needing to be physically ‘located’ anywhere near their actual place of employment? What does this mean for the arts, and how do we respond to this cultural shift? This is the type of questioning that I use to challenge and inform my role as Artistic Director at South Tipperary Arts Centre (STAC), placing artists and audiences at the core of everything we do. Founded in 1996 to bring high quality arts programming to Clonmel and the surrounding region, STAC is part of the cultural fabric of the area. It is housed in a former bus station, a building that is a rare example of Modernist architecture in County Tipperary. Our geographical location here in the south-east makes for fertile cultural soil – the River Suir acting as a visible reminder of our shared border with County Waterford, and nearby Slievenamon, whose east-facing view is shared with our County Kilkenny neighbours. But physical location is only one aspect of STAC, with previous notions around the limitations of geography completely upended by the pandemic. I was only ten months or so into my role here when Covid struck. As a two-person team, my colleague Eimear King and I scrambled (like so many others) to work from home and to re-imagine how to support artists and reach audiences remotely. Support under the Arts Council’s Capacity Building Award last year allowed us to build a new website which could accommodate our online content, including our already established podcast, as well as our new Virtual Tour feature, and recordings of online talks and workshops. Our first show of 2021, ‘Project Cleansweep’ by Dara McGrath, took place behind closed doors in April, with our virtual tour and online content being the only way for audiences to engage with the exhibition. Thankfully, by May we were able to re-open our doors for the first ever exhibition by the all-female artist collective, Na Cailleacha. This show was one of the high-
lights of 2021 for me, directly challenging attitudes to aging and creativity, while interrogating Gloria Steinem’s idea that women become more radical with age. A one-day symposium discussing these ideas was live-streamed and is still available to access. Accessibility to the arts for all is central to what we do. We work closely with our partners, Clonmel Junction Arts Festival and Finding A Voice concert series to reach a more diverse range of audiences. Other priorities include developing strong partnerships with regionally based arts organisations and artists; working with Tipperary County Council and Arts Office to deliver opportunities for artists, such as our Tipperary Artists-in-Residence Award; and engaging with local schools and groups through programmes like our recent Radio Play Project with transition year students from Presentation Secondary School, supported by Creative Ireland. 2022 promises to be our most ambitious year yet, with a jam-packed gallery programme including some newly commissioned and touring exhibitions. We kick off with an exhibition by 2021 Tipperary Artist-in-Residence, John Kennedy, followed by Walking in the Way, a touring retrospective of Pauline Cummins and Frances Mezzetti’s work. Other programme highlights will include an interactive exhibition by Ed Devane, in partnership with Clonmel Junction Arts Festival, as well as new work by Stephen Brandes and a three-person show co-curated with Anne Mullee which looks at female artists working in and with ‘the rural’. Running concurrently throughout 2022 will be ‘STAC @ the Chapel’, a series of mini-residencies and performances at the Kickham Barrack’s Chapel and as part of Faoin Speir/ In the Open – Clonmel, INSIDE/OUT, which will see artists including Joe Caslin and CANVAZ bringing art to the walls and streets of the town this spring. More and more we are realising the value and importance of arts programming in regional and rural locations, and this shift of focus beyond our cities is set to continue. southtippartscentre.ie
