Visual Artists' News Sheet – 2020 March April

Special Issue: March – April 2020

VAN100

100th Issue of VAN SURVEY: FOUR DECADES OF SCULPTURE INTERVIEWS: ARTISTS TALK TO ARTISTS PROFILES: IRELAND’S SCULPTURE CENTRES COLUMNS: COLLECTIONS, ARCHIVES, PARKS

Contents On The Cover Corban Walker, Zip, 2004, LEDs 1040 × 260 × 280 cm, Ballymun Civic Centre, Dublin; photograph by Patrick Redmond, courtesy the artist and Ballynum Civic Centre Editorial 6.

SSI / VAN Archive (1980 – 2020). Joanne Laws uses the publications archive to reflect on VAI’s 40th anniversary and the 100th issue of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

Four Decades of Irish Sculpture

Invited artists, curators and writers pick their favourite Irish sculptures from the last four decades.

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Irish Sculpture of the 1980s.

Irish Sculpture of the 1990s.

Irish Sculpture of the 2000s.

Irish Sculpture of the 2010s.

Artist Interviews 20.

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Scale and Ambition. Jane Fogarty and Isabel Nolan discuss some of the technical and conceptual aspects of sculptural practice.

The Vernacular of Utility. Katie Watchorn talks to Matt Calderwood about their shared backgrounds in farming and art making.

Staging Space. John Rainey and Janet Mullarney discuss material concerns in their work.

A Pushed Over Fence. Sam Keogh and Anne Tallentire discuss absurdity, security and agency.

Disturbances. Aoibheann Greenan talks to Andrew Kearney about the evolution of his work.

Time & Continuity. Avril Corroon interviews Kathy Prendergast in her London studio.

Sculpture Centres 30.

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Material Processes. Seán O’Reilly provides an overview of the facilities and programme at Leitrim Sculpture Centre.

Security of Tenure. Gail Prentice outlines the range of facilities offered at Flax Art Studios in Belfast.

Dynamic Alignment. Helen Carey discusses the evolution of Fire Station Artists’ Studios.

Introduction We are thrilled to present VAN 100 – the 100th issue of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet – which coincides with the 40th anniversary of Visual Artists Ireland this year. For these reasons, we are celebrating the organisation’s origins in sculpture, with this special issue.

Central to VAN 100 is a specially commissioned survey, Four Decades of Irish Sculpture, profiling significant sculptural works from the last 40 years.

In addition, we present a series of Artist Interviews between artists at different career stages, with the aim of generating expanded discussion on the nature of Irish sculpture.

This issue also features profiles of some of the country’s main Sculpture Centres and an extensive series of Columns. Paula Murphy outlines Ireland’s main sculpture collections, while Karen Downey introduces the upcoming Sculpture Dublin programme. We also have archival insights from NIVAL and the Barry Flanagan Estate, while current postgraduate research is discussed by Chloe Austin and Audrey Walshe.

As always, we extend our sincere gratitude to everyone who contributed to VAN 100: Sara Greavu Aoibheann Greenan Isobel Harbison Chris Hayes Rob Hilken John Hutchinson Andrew Kearney Sam Keogh Róisín Kennedy Tina Kinsella Joanne Laws Declan Long Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith Eamonn Maxwell Paul McAree Jo Melvin Brenda Moore-McCann Megs Morley Janet Mullarney Anne Mullee

Chloe Austin Sheena Barrett Katie Blackwood Cecily Brennan Matt Calderwood Susan Campbell Helen Carey Jonathan Carroll Chris Clarke Maeve Connolly Avril Corroon Caroline Cowley Colin Darke Oliver Dowling Karen Downey Carissa Farrell Fergus Feehily Jane Fogarty Brendan Fox John Graham The Visual Artists' News Sheet:

Features Editor: Joanne Laws Production Editor/Design: Christopher Steenson News/Opportunities: Shelly McDonnell, Siobhan Mooney

Visual Artists Ireland:

CEO/Director: Noel Kelly Office Manager: Bernadette Beecher Northern Ireland Manager: Rob Hilken Communications Officer: Shelly McDonnell Membership Officer: Siobhan Mooney Publications: Joanne Laws, Christopher Steenson Professional Development Officer: Monica Flynn Opportunities Listings: Shelly McDonnell Exhibition Listings: Christopher Steenson Bookkeeping: Dina Mulchrone

Columns 36.

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Collections. Public Collections. Paula Murphy outlines some of the main sculpture collections in Ireland.

Programme. A Place of Interaction. Karen Downey introduces the Sculpture Dublin programme.

Sculpture Parks. The Past, Present and Future of Sculpture. Helen Pheby discusses the evolution of Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Postgraduate Education. Expanded Sculpture. Audrey Walshe outlines the recent IADT MA exhibition ‘Unassembled’ at the LAB Gallery.

Postgraduate Education. The Body That Makes. Chloe Austin discusses the Ulster University MFA interim exhibition, ‘KEEP-DRY’, at Catalyst Arts, Belfast.

Archives. Recording for the Future. Katie Blackwood discusses some of the sculpture collections at NIVAL. Archives. The Sound of the Sculpture’s Making. Jo Melvin outlines some of Barry Flanagan’s early sculptures as well as his approach to documentation.

Critique Supplement i. ii. ii. iii. iii. iv. iv.

Cover Image: Daphne Wright, Zimmer, 2019.

Daphne Wright at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

‘Past/ures’ at Library Project, Dublin.

Maria Loboda at The Model, Sligo.

Sarah Lewtas at Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny.

Alan Magee at LAB Gallery, Dublin.

Lauren Gault at Gasworks, London.

Paula Murphy Isabel Nolan Rachel O’Dwyer Marianne O’Kane Boal Sean O’Reilly Helen Pheby Kathy Prendergast Gail Prentice Aisling Prior John Rainey Peter Richards Logan Sisley Clíodhna Shaffrey Declan Sheehan Kate Strain Anne Tallentire John Thompson Aoife Tunney Audrey Walshe Katie Watchorn

Board of Directors: Michael Corrigan (Chair), Cliodhna Ní Anluain (Secretary), Michael Fitzpatrick, Richard Forrest, Paul Moore, Mary-Ruth Walsh, Ben Readman, Gina O’Kelly, Gaby Smyth Republic of Ireland Office Visual Artists Ireland Windmill View House 4 Oliver Bond Street Merchants Quay, Dublin 8 T: +353 (0)1 672 9488 E: info@visualartists.ie W: visualaritsts.ie

Principle Funders

Project Funders

Northern Ireland Office Visual Artists Ireland 109 Royal Avenue Belfast BT1 1FF T: +44 (0)28 958 70361 E: info@visualartists-ni.org W: visualartists-ni.org

Corporate Sponsors

Project Partners

International Memberships

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Editorial

Irish Sculptors Society Newsletter, Winter 1980; the first publication produced by the Sculptors’ Society of Ireland, which took the form of a black and white, four-page pamphlet.

SSI / VAN Archive (1980 – 2020)

Sculptors’ Society of Ireland Newsletter, 1990, Vol. No. 2, Issue No. 5; by the 1990s the newsletter had expanded to encompass multiple pages, printed on glossy paper.

Imagine all that is going on around you, all those struggles Picturing them just like historical incidents For this is how you should go on to portray them on the stage: The fight for a job, sweet and bitter conversations Between the man and his woman, arguments about books Resignation and revolt, attempt and failure All these you will go on to portray as historical incidents.

(Even what is happening here, at this moment, with us, is something you Can regard as a picture in this way: how the refugee Playwright instructs you in the Art of Observation) – Bertolt Brecht 1 SOMEONE SHREWD ONCE asked me: “Who do you write for?” This proved a useful

JOANNE LAWS USES THE PUBLICATIONS ARCHIVE TO REFLECT ON VAI’S 40TH ANNIVERSARY AND THE 100TH ISSUE OF VAN.

exercise in identifying my underlying values as a writer, at an early stage of my career.

Foremost would be the publication, I ventured, extending to the editor and its readership – yet that didn’t seem a fulsome response. I am also writing for the artist whose work I am reviewing, I thought, as well as the gallery and perhaps the wider visual arts community (who might appreciate international coverage of Irish exhibitions). But this line of thinking also seemed incomplete. I felt sure I was writing for myself – mainly because engaging with the work of artists teaches us something about ourselves – but an audience of one is no motivation at all.

Ten years later, amid a frenzy of publishing activities, it dawned on me that I was writing primarily for the archive. It transpires that bearing witness to art in the present is actually a rare privilege. Exhibitions are ephemeral events, and moments of crystallisation within an artist’s practice can be equally fleeting. I have also written about the work of enough deceased artists to know that my words should be plotted against a durational index – that each observation must be etched with posterity in mind.

As archival co-conspirators, the best writers respond to the ‘situatedness’ of an artist’s work – viewed according to their own cultural horizons – while assessing how its value might be represented or transmitted over time. In this regard, one often addresses an

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

undefined and speculative audience, whether reading five months or 50 years later.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Visual Artists Ireland (VAI), which coincides with this 100th issue of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet (VAN). However, VAI’s publishing archive extends back to 1980 with VAN’s predecessor, the SSI Newsletter, published by the Sculptors’ Society of Ireland (SSI).2 For the past 18 months, we have been working on the SSI/VAN Archive (1980 – 2020) and now have a searchable database of previously published content. Our long-term plan is to digitise this material and make it accessible online. A special archival issue of VAN will be launched at the VAI Get Together at TU Dublin on 12 June, featuring previously published material from the last 40 years.

The SSI/VAN Archive offers an important vehicle to reflect at this key milestone.

First and foremost, it encapsulates 40 years of labour and care. It also reveals a range of interesting insights, not least in terms of the publication’s evolving historical remit. Originally devised as a ‘newsletter’ for a readership of sculptors, it disseminated information and opportunities to members, while also providing a critical forum for discussion throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. This highlights the historically important role of printed matter, prior to the internet or email communications. It also emphasises the value of specialist subscriptions, particularly when we consider the automated and algorithmically generated content that defines so much of our engagement with contemporary publishing. As we grow evermore accustomed to instant digital content, there remains something weighty and reassuring about physical artefacts.

Early SSI newsletters were typed and photocopied in-house, before being transported by car to the GPO on O’Connell Street for postage. Items in the archive attest to the limitations of early electronic typewriters, with the widespread use of Tippex, as well as the addition of Irish punctuation by hand in biro. These characteristics form part of the publication’s material history, reflecting significant shifts in aesthetic and design. Commencing in 1980 with a functional four-page pamphlet, the publication later morphed into a magazine format, first in black and white and then in colour, from 2000 onward. The first issue of VAN was published in September 2003, employing the newspaper format which continues to this day.

Key moments in the organisational history are memorialised in the publication archive, including records of AGM’s and staff appointments, as well as the name-change in 2005, when the Sculptors’ Society of Ireland became Visual Artists Ireland.3 Similarly, the organisation’s staff and board members (listed at the start of each issue) collectively point to a formidable community who made vast contributions to the Irish visual arts during this period. Through the archive, we can trace the progression of some of Ireland’s most significant artists, who wrote for the publication early in their career, as art students or recent graduates. The publication also charts the emergence of many organisations or artist collectives that are still in operation today.

It is impossible to engage with the SSI/VAN archive without acknowledging the vast legacy of Jason Oakley, who was editor for over two decades, from the mid-90s onward. Under Jason’s editorial direction, the publication broadened its remit in 2003 to include a greater emphasis on contemporary art as well as sculpture. Memorable moments included regular contributions from ‘The Shy-Stir’ (who articulated “artworld gripes”); the ‘Concierge of Agony’ (who “proffered solutions to art-related woes”); the Domestic Godless (outlining recipes for dubious dishes including “Quenelle of Goldfish”); and Pablo Helguera’s Artoons, illustrating the “foibles, ironies and occasional stupidity of the art world”. Jason also introduced a regional section in 2003, giving coverage to artists and arts organisations nationwide, while the introduction of the Critique section in 2011 consolidated the publication’s periodic exhibition reviews into a formal compendium, offering robust and timely discussions on Irish and international art practice. Just as it is impossible not to laugh out loud at the faux-sincerity of a fullpage public apology (printed across the July 2004 front cover), it is equally difficult not to reel at the loss articulated on the November/December 2015 cover: “When someone great is gone”.

We are celebrating the organisation’s origins in sculpture with this special issue: VAN 100. We are excited to present ‘Four Decades of Irish Sculpture’, featuring profiles by artists, curators and critics, who were invited to select a significant artwork from the last 40 years. This vibrant survey is presented chronologically, outlining a diverse range of sculptural disciplines, from public art and land art, to bricolage and performance-based sculpture. This survey also makes visible the shifting parameters and values of sculptural practice, variously considering craft traditions, objecthood, dematerialised and socially engaged methods, as well as expanding modes of display, including sculptural installation, now increasingly common within multidisciplinary practice. In many cases, contributors recount their own personal engagements or sentimental associations with their chosen work, collectively producing an affectionate form of historicisation.

Editorial

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Sculptors’ Society of Ireland Newsletter, March/April 1999.

Under Jason Oakley’s direction, the Newsletter had a great ability to combine parody with critque.

Sculptors’ Society of Ireland Newsletter, September/ October, 2000. The publication moved to a magazine format and was now printed in colour.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet, September, 2003. The first issue of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet, introducing the newspaper format which continues to this day.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet, November/December, 2005. The Sculptors’ Society of Ireland started trading as Visual Artists Ireland in 2005 (See Endnote 3).

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet, November/December, 2015.

This issue was dedicated to VAN’s editor, Jason Oakley, who passed away on 2 October 2015.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet, January/February, 2019. An example of VAN in its current format, under the direction of Features Editor, Joanne Laws and Production Editor, Christopher Steenson.

Joanne Laws is Features Editor of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

Notes 1 Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (Bertolt Brecht) ‘Speech to Danish working-class actors on the art of observation’ (1934), published in Bertolt Brecht, Poems: 1913–1956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, 2nd edition (Great Britain: Eyre Methuen Ltd, 1976) p237.

2 The Sculptors’ Society of Ireland was established in 1980 to improve the professional standing of sculptors, raise the profile of sculpture and develop the quality and scope of commissioning procedures and opportunities. In addressing these needs, the SSI initiated sculpture symposia and thus provided opportunities for sculptors to work with new materials, new contexts and fundamentally, to engage in dialogue with their peers. Exhibitions and conferences likewise provided much needed platforms for contemporary Irish sculpture, to critically appraise and encourage the development of the artform in Ireland. The SSI was also instrumental in facilitating the 1988 implementation of Per Cent for Art legislation in the Ireland and developing codes of practice for the commissioning of public art. Since its inception, SSI encouraged the broadest possible definition of sculptural practice, encompassing object-making, lensbased media, digital arts, installation and performance.

3 In 2005 the SSI undertook a rebranding of the organisation as Visual Artists Ireland, which now caters for all visual artists and is the only all-Ireland representative body for professional visual artists.

Four Decades of Irish Sculpture To mark the 40th anniversary of the Sculptors’ Society of Ireland and the 100th issue of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet, we are celebrating the organisation’s roots in sculpture. ‘Four Decades of Irish Sculpture’ features profiles by artists, curators and critics, who were invited to select and discuss a significant artwork from the last 40 years.

Free Derry Corner (1978)

Free Derry Corner; photograph by Jim Collins, courtesy of the photographer and the Museum of Free Derry

Kathy Prendergast, Waiting, 1980, fibreglass, resin, parquet flooring and sewing patterns, 184 × 230 cm; courtesy of the artist and Kerlin

IN JANUARY 1969, in the aftermath of police attacks on homes in the Bogside, Derry teenager Liam Hillen painted “YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY” across the gable end of 33 Lecky Road. Eamonn McCann had suggested the slogan, adapting it from one used in student protests at the University of California in Berkeley. The lettering was subsequently repainted by John ‘Caker’ Casey in black block capitals with a serif. The sign demarcated one boundary of the self-declared autonomous zone, Free Derry, that existed at various times between 1969 and 1972. The text remained in place long after the moment of revolutionary promise it referred to was lost, giving its name to the location, Free Derry Corner. In the late 1970s when the area was redeveloped, the row of houses on which the slogan appeared was demolished; however, the community insisted that the gable wall should be preserved as a free-standing, house-shaped pentagon. At each side, carved from the remains of the row, sits a triangular prop that runs from roof-edge to the ground. It is at this point that its status, perhaps, changes – as it becomes Free Derry Wall. While the wall resists traditional understandings of an artwork’s authorship and ownership, by many measures it functions as an important and durational work of public sculpture. For over 40 years, it has claimed space, place and objecthood – even its silhouette is unmistakable – and it carries an affective connection between audience, the physical world and social experiences over time. Situated in the place of its making, in its form, scale and historical context, it embodies a poignant tension between presence and absence.

Sara Greavu

1980s Waiting (1980) Kathy Prendergast THE WORK WAS purchased by Dublin Corporation in 1980.

Richard Serra, Sean’s Spiral, 1984, steel in cobblestone, 395 × 1220 × 40 cm; photograph by Jonathan Carrol

Antony Gormley, Sculpture for Derry Walls, 1987, cast iron, three double figures: each 196 × 193 × 54 cm; courtesy of the Antony Gormley Studio, © the artist

It had been exhibited at the ‘Irish Exhibition of Living Art’ in August of that year when it was awarded a Carroll’s Prize.

Critics described it as “an archetypal image of women in a male society”, and as “very striking, with a subtle sense of menace”. Prendergast had just finished her diploma at the National College of Art & Design and the work, a student piece, was created in the college. She has described experiencing a huge sense of relief that she had actually made a proper piece of sculpture. For many years it was displayed in the entrance hall of The Hugh Lane Gallery.

Ambitious in its scale, 5 feet high, and in its engagement with the human figure, Waiting consists of three seated female figures set on a parquet floor. These floating forms, made up of unfinished ball gowns, suggest conventional passive femininity but also a tangible sense of tension and anticipation.

There are no faces but the arms and hands, the most complete elements in the work, are cast from life and their differing poses bring a strange human presence into the sculpture.

Made of fibreglass, a material that had been associated with abstraction in the 1970s, its translucent nature produces an ethereal quality. Its chequered surface adds a decorative note as well as reflecting back light. Behind the figures is a large board covered with transparent dress patterns made of tissue paper. Their two-dimensional haphazard outlines act as a perspectival foil to the three-dimensional gowns in front.

While apparently delicate and disposable, the patterns act like a map or plan that silently wields power and control. They allude to the idea of construction, not only of the garments, but of identity, and are of course a precedent for Prendergast’s lifelong engagement with mapping. Waiting combines,

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

in fact, the two major tropes of the artist’s work, the map and the body. The work is inspired not by theory but by family photographs of Prendergast’s parents attending dress dances during their youth, in the early 1950s. Prendergast later wrote that “It wasn’t a feminist statement. I think I was just curious about my mother’s generation”. The work is significant in its exploration of femininity and is an early and imposing example of an Irish artist taking on this theme. Its combination of readymade materials and its emphasis on craft presages the ‘post-surrealist aesthetic’ that came to flourish and dominate a section of art practice in Ireland and internationally in the following decades.

Waiting differs from much of Prendergast subsequent work in its scale and in its use of sculptural form. The abiding monumental qualities that prompted its original acquisition and success persist. The graceful fragmented bodies, revealed through clinging, flowing robes, recall the classical statuary of the ancient world. They might have been inspired by the pediment of some Greek temple, appearing like post-modern versions of antique goddesses. The large scale of the work, the parquet floor and the dominance of the human figure make this an imposing dramatic sculpture, the elements of which work in playful tension with each other. Its subtle reexamination of the past through its delicate combination of materials and its astute theatricality resonate as much today as when it was first exhibited. It remains an important work, not only in the development of Irish art practice, but in the wider social understanding of the formation of identity.

Róísín Kennedy Sean’s Spiral (1984) Richard Serra NOT KNOWN FOR the subtlety of his monumental steel pub-

lic sculpture, Richard Serra was invited to Dublin in 1984 to make one of his most discreet works. Embedded in the cobblestoned Crane Street outside the Guinness Hopstore, Sean’s Spiral has been driven over and walked upon for the last 36 years, as if it wasn’t there. Sean’s Spiral was commissioned by ROSC ‘84, as part of a concerted effort to include installations beyond the confines of the gallery and to bring artists themselves to Dublin to install the work. Sean’s Spiral is in very good company with renowned American conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner’s work visible across the street.

Weiner contributed several of his well-known typographic text pieces, with one stencilled on the wall adjacent to Serra’s work on Rainsford Street. The text piece Stone upon Stone upon Fallen Stone (1983) is repeated alongside the Irish translation: Cloch os cionn cloiche os cionn cloch leagtha. While Weiner’s work fades with the years, Serra’s seems to have improved with the polishing of the passing traffic. Sean’s Spiral (named after Sean Mulcahy, Serra’s host while in Ireland) was initially meant to be curvilinear but apparently the local foundry could not achieve the affect Serra desired, so instead fabricated a triangular spiral with sharp angles, cleverly imitating the narrow gauge tramways (still visible on Rainsford Street) used for transporting Guinness barrels. Jonathan Carrol Sculpture for Derry Walls (1987) Antony Gormely

GORMLEY’S THREE-PART Sculpture for Derry Walls was com-

missioned by Declan McGonagle, Director of The Orchard Gallery, and funded through the ground-breaking public art programme, TSWA 3D. Gormley’s sculptures were originally sited in three locations along the city’s seventeenth-century fortified walls: on the east overlooking the Foyle River; over the Bogside by the remains of the Walker Monument; and on the Bastion overlooking the Fountain Estate. Each sculpture consisted of two identical cast-iron figures joined back-toback. They held a cruciform pose and were placed in such a way that one faced into the walled city, while the other was outward-looking. It has been said that the sculptures represented Derry’s two dominant religious communities, turning away from each other, but paradoxically joined as one body; separated by their religious, cultural and political differences, but united in their Christianity and their shared location. Upon installation, Gormley’s sculptures were subject to graffiti, fire and vandalism, with the artist later commenting

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

that they functioned as “a poultice, draw[ing] out what was already present in the public mind about the place.” Only one of Gormley’s figures remains, appearing somewhat benign in its new location outside the Millennium Forum Theatre.

Joanne Laws In Their Place (1987) Locky Morris THIS WORK WAS situated in an art practice which evolved

through the lived experience of 1970s Derry, art college in Belfast/Manchester in the late 1970s/80s, and the artist’s commitment to return to Derry in the mid-80s, specifically through this proposal for a series of nine poured concrete sculptures, sited on the Derry Walls, of human figures cast from life – friends and acquaintances posed and anonymised by the artist. The artist defined In Their Place as “political and politically metaphorical in the interests of producing new knowledge and renewed awareness of oppression”, in response to a review (in CIRCA 1987) which had aligned the work only in relation to Gormley’s contemporaneous Sculpture for Derry Walls. Morris’s response asserted sculpture as an “ordinary everyday social activity … defining, solving, celebrating, questioning, criticising and giving pleasure”, determining the politics of the work within the “conversations (and) small discussions” of its process of making – those commonly overlooked parenthesis of art making, just as the figures were themselves overlooked: anonymous figures doing nothing but looking over walls and killing time; corner boys drinking cans; busy mammies carrying bags of shopping. The politics of the work was determined in its materials – the concrete of the bollards used in checkpoints in the miltarised city – and in the responses it received in the locality, including the “active mutilating” of one beheaded sculpture, and the alleged army bombing of another. Declan Sheehan … Very Much Like the Wild Irish: Notes on a Process Which Has No End in Sight (1988) Jimmie Durham

WHILE UNDERTAKING A residency at the Orchard Gallery, Derry, in 1988, American artist Jimmie Durham created a temporary, site-specific artwork within Derry’s city walls – an area of the city that was heavily fortified at the time, through permanent checkpoints. Durham carved a self-consciously rough, totem-like structure from the trunk of an existing yew tree. The sculpture seemed to have potent ceremonial or tribal significance, drawing parallels between Irish and Native American cultures, based on a shared history of colonisation. Incorporating found objects – including rear-view mirrors and a lens fashioned from the base of a glass bottle – the sculpture resembled a rudimentary video camera. Its elevated position conjured a panopticon-like vantagepoint, heavily resonating with the widespread use of CCTV surveillance technology across Northern Ireland. The technology was introduced during the conflict in Northern Ireland, as a means of state social control, enabling the British Army to police monitor paramilitary activity, while also tracking the daily lives of citizens. Throughout his residency in Derry, Durham compiled photographs and records, based on local information gathered from members of the public. The artist also created a small earth work nearby, reminiscent of an archaeological site. Joanne Laws

The Gap of Two Birds (1988) Anne Tallentire ANNE TALLENTIRE’S The Gap of Two Birds was made in 1988, almost a decade after Rosalind Krauss lamented, “rather surprising things have come to be called sculpture”.

Like many of her works before and after it, Tallentire’s piece was composed of assorted objects, time-based technologies and performance put to work in what she has described as “acts of resistance and critical delineation” (Frieze Online, November 2018).

Curated by David Thorp for The Showroom following a trio of London exhibitions (including Tallentire’s 1988 post-graduate degree show from Slade School of Fine Art),

Four Decades of Irish Sculpture the work included a monitor, a large, hinged wooden screen, floor bound glass panes, text on acetate, paper, charcoal and photographs. Her eponymous silent video, originally filmed on 8mm, showed partial views of the artist’s hand, an Irish mountain pathway, and her hair blown across her cheek, a sequence looped and shown on a monitor. Beside it Tallentire undertook a five-hour durational performance. At intervals she moved around the gallery space engaged in repeated, sequential actions: grinding stones together, moving prints around, and scratching charcoal on paper to make rubbings inscribed with ‘North’ and ‘South’. She then distributed these rubbings, using them as prompts to engage audience members in conversation about their reading of these symbolic and often divisive compass points.

Engaging with peers and theories of post-colonialism, political identity, post-structural literature and intersectional feminism had resonated with her own formative experiences in and beyond Northern Ireland, and during this period Tallentire’s activation of social relations through contingent objects seems less about advancing sculpture or its discourses than as a process of ‘dismantling thought, a way of thinking, a kind of acting out of searching’ (Make 85, 1999, 22). Her boundary crossings, material and epistemological, are as restless and inventive today as they were then. What’s more it is difficult to imagine the wealth of lateral thinking held within Irish sculpture – works by Niamh O’Malley, Isabel Nolan, and Aleana Egan to mention only a few – without her fine example. Isobel Harbison

Locky Morris, In Their Place, 1987, Reinforced concrete, paint, metal rings, reflectors; photograph by and courtesy of the artist

1990s Gallifa Study XII (1992) Barry Flanagan LUGGING SOME impossibly heavy bronze objects up an

improvised ramp in the old RHA building in Ely Place in 1994, I was a participant in a scene reminiscent of Ancient Egypt, except the participants were largely fuelled by Danish pastries and sausage rolls from the nearby Kylemore Bakery on Baggot Street. Or rather, I was placing my hands on the load and watching the ex-squaddies from the transport company do the heavy lifting. This was my first encounter with the work of Barry Flanagan. Working as a technician – or more accurately, doing any odd job around the place – I was seeing many things for the first time. Though I had, at that stage, already been a regular at the Oliver Dowling Gallery, the Hendricks and Taylor Galleries for several years. The Oliver Dowling Gallery had shown some of the artists that Flanagan’s earlier work might be associated with, like Michael Craig Martin. I didn’t see Craig Martin at Oliver’s space, though I did see early shows by Willie Doherty, Mary Fitzgerald, Cecil King, Ciarán Lennon and others. Flanagan, long associated with Ireland, was a mercurial artist, now perhaps best known for his large sculptures of an impish and magical hare, often leaping. The hare sculptures have never meant that much to me, despite their prominence in his work, but there were many other strange objects in this show in 1994.

The work I have chosen here, Gallifa Study XII, from 1992, which was first shown by Hans Mayer in Düsseldorf, seems to me to have been predictive somehow. In the early 1990s, Flanagan was tapping into something in this work that seems to predict ways in which sculpture would come to develop.

It’s loose, casual and distinguishes itself from the post-minimalist and conceptual work Flanagan was originally engaged in. The piece looks slightly like a living organism, with both arm-like appendages and cups or open bells halfway down either side, but it is certainly not describing something specific.

It might even be seen as frivolous, a note of moment quickly manipulating clay in the studio, then cast and made concrete.

It’s reminiscent of something made of ceramic, part vessel, part funky lightshade stand, a mutated vase, say. It is beautiful and weird in equal measure. You might think of Willem de Kooning looking at it, though it seems more benign, less troubled. It possesses the loose and informal quality of much contemporary ceramic sculpture. Looking at an image of it now, I think of the work of Rebecca Warren, Erika Verzutti or any number or artists that have made ceramic or bronze a contemporary medium to work in. I’m not sure I noticed it much at the time, but this particular work has somehow

Jimmie Durham, Untitled, 1998; photograph courtesy of Declan McGonagle

Anne Tallentire, The Gap of Two Birds (performance detail), 1990 version, The Showroom, London, photograph courtesy of the artist

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Four Decades of Irish Sculpture stayed with me. I have found myself many times looking at the catalogue of the Dublin show and stopping at that page, that being one of the important aspects of a work of art, something that operates upon you, if I can put it like that, over time. Fergus Feehily Berry Dress (1994) Alice Maher

Barry Flanagan, Gallifa Study XII, 1992, edition of 8 + 2 ACs, bronze 28.9 × 14.9 × 14 cm; courtesy of Barry Flanagan Estate

Alice Maher, Berry Dress, 1994, Rosehips, cotton, paint, sewing pins, 25 × 32 × 24 cm; collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, purchase, assisted by funding from Maire and Maurice Foley, 1995; courtesy of IMMA

We see an upright child’s dress – cotton, buttoned, with pleated sleeves, stiffened with paint. The skirt of the dress is crafted from rosehip berries and pins; it sits on a raised glass shelf where it spills and pools, like globulous, congealed blood drops. At first glance, and from a distance, the dress – perched high, overhead – is a strange, floating, juju object.

But when you move closer and view it from below, this little dress pulls the viewer into a disturbing, uncanny, aesthetic entanglement. Peering up into a dress is a transgression of socio-cultural norms, a taboo. But with this sculpture, one has to take up this position of transgression for Berry Dress to reveal its secrets. Not only is the inside and the outside of the sculpture simultaneously, ominously, present to vision.

From this somewhat perverse position, the viewer can also see that the pins which pierce the cotton material to stitch the rosehip berries to the skirted dress would pierce the flesh, should the dress be donned. This is a baby’s dress. And it represents danger, and threat. The inception, execution and reception of Berry Dress cannot be separated from the social context of the 1990s in Ireland, a time during which Church and State mandated sanctions on divorce and contraception shaped the sexual mores and behaviours of the nation. The rosehip is the berried fruit of the rose flower and the fruit is the sexual organ of the plant. The hip berry forms as the result of successful pollination: the rosehip is, both literally and symbolically, the plant’s pregnancy. Whilst the dress represents the oppressions that the body – and, with regard to reproductive rights, the female body most particularly – were subject to since the foundation of the Irish State, it also speaks to us through time, to remind us of the unacknowledged and unspoken perils and dangers of childhood as well as its joys and freedoms. The hairs hidden inside the rosehip berry can be used as itching powder, a substance that Maher recalls formed part of her childhood pranks with friends. The pins concealed inside Berry Dress not only, then, signal threat but also the glorious, subversive irreverence of children’s play.

The dress, fashioned from berries garnered from ditches, is also a memory conduit for the oppressive labour of living in the countryside, of coping with and managing nature. But it also recalls us to youthful days spent picking berries, the sensorial delight of squashing these fruits between pincered fingers, the anticipation of sticky juices running over fingers, staining tongues. Over the years, the rosehip berries have shrivelled so that the sculpture takes on a fetish or relic-like status that provokes reflection on the relationship between time, memory, maturity and ageing, of both the individual body and the collective Nation body. Yet, Maher’s Berry Dress is not only a holder for memories of a recent past; memory

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persists through time to connect the past to the present and the future. Berry Dress labours through such “memory work”, embodying, visibilising and corporealising both the passage of time as well as the transgressive potential of memory to prod, irritate, rattle and provoke turbulent emotions, those feelings that are ever-present and always on the verge of erupting into present time. Tina Kinsella Perpetual Motion (1996) Rachel Joynt & Remco de Fouw THE GENIUS OF Rachel Joynt and Remco de Fouw’s quite monumental sculpture – commissioned by Kildare County Council under the Per Cent for Art scheme – is for me, mainly in what it is not. The work is not made of metal, it has no sharp angles, it is not a sculpture of yet another equine figure (the curse of Kildare public sculpture); in fact, it is not figurative at all, but is uniquely conceptual. Joynt and de Fouw have cleverly produced a very site-specific and roadthemed sculpture relating directly to the commission. The hollow Ferro-cement sphere, located on a busy roundabout, replicates the road system that surrounds it on the Naas dual carriageway. With arrows indicating the flow of traffic around it, Perpetual Motion is the most playfully assertive of public sculptures. This is no easy task for an artwork unable to be experienced while static. Seen at speed through windscreens, contemplating the artwork is not really an option. Brilliantly aware of these viewing conditions, Perpetual Motion taps into the absurdity of the busy commuter, as well as early romantic notions of the autobahn. Jonathan Carroll

The End and The Beginning I (1997) Kathy Prendergast THERE ARE AESTHETIC minefields in making artwork, IEDs that threaten to blow your career into smithereens particularly if you are a woman, a mother and you choose as your subject matter the historically undervalued experience of childbearing and motherhood. In the work The End and The Beginning I (1997), a delicate, gentle celebration of growing and ageing, Kathy Pendergast knowingly enters the fray, wending her way with supreme skill. Using the simplest of materials, she evokes the absent body, allowing the viewer to imagine, celebrate or grieve. So much fine balancing, evocation not explication, and at the same time the work is filled with humanity and common understanding. An arte povera work using a simple Mothercare baby’s bonnet. I remember buying exactly the same bonnet for my own baby, undoubtedly one of the reasons why I love this work so much. The fine, wisp-like hair sewn into the bonnet brings to mind the tousled warmth of a baby’s head and hair, and at the same time the frail brittleness of old age. The End and The Beginning I provokes so many memories; a small Van Dyke oil study, The Princesses Elizabeth and Anne, Daughters of Charles 1, bonneted and entitled with pearls around their necks. We can remember them, or we can go to the soggy fens of Northern Denmark, yielding up Bronze Age Tollund Man, his hanged and collapsed body crowned with a beautiful pointed leather cap. All ends and all beginnings. Cecily Brennan

Stray (1997) Siobhán Hapaska

Rachel Joynt & Remco de Fouw, Perpetual Motion, 1996; courtesy of the artists

Kathy Prendergast, The End and The Beginning I, 1997, cotton bonnet with human hair, display case 13 × 20 × 20 cm; courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery

SIOBHÁN HAPASKA’S Stray (1997) was one of an ensemble of sculptures she presented at that year’s Documenta, the sprawling five-yearly exhibition in the small German city of Kassel, which remains one of the two most significant such events on the international art calendar. (The other is the Venice Biennale where Hapaska represented Ireland, alongside Grace Weir, four years later). Curator Catherine David’s historically recondite Documenta X included an unusually small number of younger artists. So, for Hapaska, then in her early 30s, to be offered a substantial gallery of her own in the Documenta-Halle was a serious accolade. Stray comprises a short stretch of aluminium track on which a genuine American tumbleweed, attached to a motorized support, shuttles back and forth endlessly, a long way from home, while lodged in the brittle tangle of its branches is a polystyrene cup (a

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Four Decades of Irish Sculpture

Siobhán Hapaska, Stray, 1997, American tumbleweed, copper, aluminium, electronic components, 67 × 70 × 500 cm; courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery

Lorraine Burrell, Consumed Utterances, 1998, fibreglass and resin, speakers, 27 cm × 22 cm × 40 cm; courtesy of the artist

second version of the work swapped this out for a length of blue ribbon). While Hapaska herself tends to emphasise the sculpture’s intimations of mobility, there is no denying that the tumbleweed’s freedom of movement has been seriously compromised in the process of its translation from the wideopen plains to the art gallery. Like much of this artist’s work over the past quarter of a century, Stray invites us, succinctly and with disarming levity, to consider a bundle of serious concerns: the nature-culture dynamic, the tension between motion and stasis, the question of displacement, differences between native and alien, and problems of origins and roots.

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith

or initiating the vector-like flight of Reedpod (2006). For any given motion there exists potential for its opposite, a dualism enacted in Carapace, with its two distinct forms united in perpetual motion. Like the familiar yin-yang symbol, these are spiral-bound, the origin of each arising from the other. It is a choreography the sculptor returned to in 2016 and 2018, with miniature bronze, steel and silver editions.

Dualism is integral to the lived world, where language articulates our focus on the sameness and difference between ourselves and ‘other’, and between things. It is an environment in which forces of order and disorder interact, and species thrive by devising means of protection. The momentum of this piece suggests autonomy from an ever-changing context. Made from stainless steel, with some parts woven, the ‘carapace’ of the title refers to the hard layer that covers and safeguards animals such as crabs and turtles. While metals (especially bronze) are favoured by O’Connell, her repertoire of materials also includes lead, resin and fibreglass. Susan Campbell

Consumed Utterances (1998) Lorraine Burrell IN THE SPRING of 1998, Derry’s Context Gallery (the CCA

as it’s now known) held a show of Belfast artist Lorraine Burrell’s then recent work, titled ‘Consumed Utterances’. The central piece was a small, ridiculous sculpture which gave voice to diverse thoughts on physical and intellectual sustenance. Its cleverness, couched in puerile absurdity, placed it firmly in the Dada tradition. The scarlet resin object, ovoid with two protuberances, was described by me at the time as: … looking like an hermaphrodite stomach, from which emanates a recording of a babbling Pinky and Perky voice, reciting quotations both profound – Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” – and absurd – Ohio Express’ “Yummy yummy yummy, I’ve got love in my tummy/ and it makes me feel alright” … interspersed with sounds of burping, farting, babyish giggling and the occasional “fuck off – whoops! …” (CIRCA Issue 84, Summer 1998, p.57).

Quotations also included Shakespeare and Philip Sidney, whose “sweet food of sweetly uttered knowledge” defines the nature of the object’s monologue. The work was accompanied by staged photographs of the artist interacting with the work – in one chatting amiably and in the other sharing a mutual sulk. This has continued to be a characteristic of much of her work since – photographic records of her relationships with her own sculptural production. Art is thus saved from being alienated from its maker and instead a symbiosis is established with the fruits of her labour. I loved this piece at the time and, looking back on it now, I love it all over again.

Colin Darke Carapace (1999) Eilis O’Connell

AS IS EVIDENT in this relatively early sculpture, a common

feature of O’Connell’s work is its inherent dynamism, whether in disclosing the inner surface of Unfurl (2000 and 2018)

Ghost Ship (1999) Dorothy Cross

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Eilis O’Connell, Carapace, 2018 edition; photograph by Donal Murphy, courtesy of the artist and Scott Tallon Walker

Dorothy Cross, Ghost Ship, 1999, DVD, 12 min. 17 sec. loop; courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery

I’LL ADMIT IT – I never saw this work at the time, but

undoubtedly felt its presence and sometimes imagine it as I look out to the Irish Sea from the Northside. I like to repeatedly trace the moments when Ireland began to consider its vision for public art as one which was intrinsically linked to contemporary art practice. The year 1997 saw a move to revise the National Guidelines for Per Cent for Art Scheme, in recognition of new artforms and the introduction of the Nissan Art Project Award. This brave new initiative, launched in association with IMMA, provided significant investment and opportunity for the creation of new work that would represent an ambitious modern Ireland – an Ireland that was projecting itself onto an international stage. With this new venture, artists could explore new contexts, experiment with materiality and time, and be emotionally responsive to our sites of history. Under the award, Dorothy Cross’s Ghost Ship proposed a tribute to 12 engineless, anchored, skeleton staffed ships which floated on the Irish sea. The ships marked sites of danger and acted as guides to all vessels which entered our waters and were later replaced by automated marine buoys. Dorothy’s winning idea was met with much anticipation in the media. The coverage highlighted challenges, curiosity, excitement and the individuals involved in its creation; the work performed its site, monumentalised the disused ship and excited audiences everywhere. From the acquisition of the ship from the Commissioner of Irish Lights, the valuable manpower of the sea scouts, the unwavering support of the commissioners and the curator, Sarah Glennie, and the creation of the new phosphorescent paint and timed UV light system (which would see the work arrest in daylight and shimmer in darkness), Ghost Ship was in-situ for three weeks. It surpassed its original timeframe through

Tina O’Connell, In Dublin, 1999, one-tonne bitumen sphere, installation view, The Barley Mow pub, Francis Street, March 1999; courtesy of the artist

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Four Decades of Irish Sculpture a film and work exhibited at IMMA, a beautiful print edition, and was memorialised on a national stamp. For me, it highlighted the number of supports needed to truly realise the vision of the artist, while setting a new standard for what artists working within this realm might come to expect. It is these invisibilities that will always keep Ghost Ship firmly in my memory. Caroline Cowley In Dublin (1999) Tina O’Connell

Liam Gillick, In order to be able to draw a limit to thought, 2001, wall mural, Balfour Avenue, Belfast; photograph by Ros (geograph.co.uk), distributed under Creative Commons License BY-SA

I vividly recall experiencing Tina O’Connell’s In Dublin, encountering it as both object and event amongst an excited crowd of onlookers packed into a pub in the Liberties. I remember the intense concentration of energy in the building and a heightened sense of shared time, uncommon in my experience of sculpture. Part of my own excitement stemmed from the opportunity to go upstairs, moving from the ‘public house’ into a more domestic realm. I made many trips up and down those stairs, trying to see the whole of the sculpture – an impossibility. From above, a briefly perfect sphere of bitumen sat waiting, apparently inert. But something was always happening below, as the viscosity and weight of this thing

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

was pulling it relentlessly down through the hole and onto the floor. I remember this process as slow, slow, slow and then suddenly fast, so fast I think I actually missed the moment when the black stuff touched the ground.

In Dublin was an ‘Off Site’ commission by Project Arts Centre, one of many ambitious temporary works programmed

by Fiach MacConghail and curated by Valerie Connor during the construction of Project’s new gallery building on East Essex Street. An Irish artist based in London, Tina O’Connell made the sculpture while on residency at IMMA, with support from multiple organisations including Irish Tar. The object itself, later remade for the exhibition ‘0044’ at PS1 in New York, consisted of a bitumen sphere, assembled from two casts, over a metre in diameter and weighing a tonne. It was installed in The Barley Mow, a disused pub on Francis Street, an area then (and now) subject to the forces of gentrification. The interior was then entirely intact, complete with a wooden bar and dark leatherette seating. Twenty years on, the signage is still visible, but the building is little more than a shell, its windows either missing or boarded up. Standing in front of The Barley Mow, I try to imagine the exact centre of the dark sphere that once descended from ceiling to floor, using this structure as the support for a massive, and irreversible, hourglass. Maeve Connolly

2000s In order to be able to draw a limit to thought (2001) Liam Gillick

Shane Cullen, The Agreement, 2002, photograph by Ian Charlesworth, courtesy of the artist and Golden Thread Gallery

Detail from The Paradise book, 2002; photograph courtesy of John Hutchinson

THIS WALL TEXT, located on a gable end on Balfour Avenue in south Belfast, was commissioned as part of The International Language, an event organised and curated by Grassy Knoll Productions (Phil Collins, Annie Fletcher and Eoghan McTigue) that took place across Belfast between 28 April and 12 May 2001. The International Language also included performances, interventions and public sculptures by local and international artists Heather Allen, Phil Collins, Jeremy Deller, Seamus Harahan, Torsten Lauschmann, Eoghan McTigue, Philip Napier, Asier Pérez González, Susan Philipsz, Stuart Watson, and Sislej Xhafa. The question in Liam Gillick’s wall text, “How can quantum gravity help explain the origin of the universe?” was one of 10 questions about theoretical physics that the artist publicly posed in Belfast using wall texts, cake decorations, taxi business cards, beer mats, a conference/lecture and a website. With the exception of this wall-based work, little exists publicly today (bar a review by Miriam de Búrca in CIRCA, Autumn 2001, which is archived online) to document The International Language and the public art produced as part of it, emphasising the importance of defining and canonising permanent as well as intangible and temporary public art works. In order to be able to draw a limit to thought does not commemorate, celebrate or advocate the views of any particular community, as many of the traditional Belfast murals it is listed alongside in guides do; nor does it attempt to heal, renew or restore, like other more recently commissioned public art in Belfast.

Instead, positioned at the end of a terraced street overlooking the River Lagan, it provides a striking, thought-provoking moment of questioning that continues to interrupt the affirmative fluency of the daily commute and the prescribed touristic ‘post-conflict’ city experience. Alissa Kleist

The Agreement (2002) Shane Cullen

Corban Walker, Zip, 2004, LEDs 1040 × 260 × 280 cm, Ballymun Civic Centre, Dublin; photograph by Patrick Redmond, courtesy the artist and Ballynum Civic Centre

Maud Cotter, More Than Anything, 2005, installation view at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; photograph by Janice O’Connell, courtesy of the arti and domobaal gallery

SOME SCHOLARS OF the 1998 Good Friday Agreement hail it as a model of ‘constructive ambiguity’ – an artfully uncertain structure, open-ended enough to invite contrasting interpretations of its contents. Evasive language allowed difficult decisions to be postponed. Definitive plans were not set in stone. For other commentators, any emphasis on the perceived ambiguity of this momentous, multi-party accord is misleading. The Good Friday Agreement is, they argue, a work of skillful specificity: an intricately wrought textual construct that delineates precise and distinct political proposals, using sensitive, subtle language to articulate communal aspirations and shape new political forms.

Shane Cullen’s sculpture The Agreement (2002) – a land-

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Four Decades of Irish Sculpture

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mark artistic response to the official resolution of conflict in the north of Ireland, originally commissioned by London’s Beaconsfield gallery – can be read in each of these contrasting ways. It is a work of monumental scale and style: the entire 11,500-word text of the negotiated settlement mechanically inscribed onto fifty-five four-foot-wide polyurethane panels.

Massive, and imposing, it gives the appearance of solidity and permanence, resembling an elaborate public memorial, intricately detailed with unchanging, authoritative declarations.

As such, it appears to mark the solemnity of an historical milestone with ambition, grandeur and certainty. And yet, this is an ‘uncertain’ sculpture too: made from relatively lightweight material, it is mobile and potentially impermanent. It is not set in stone. Rather than a grounding, durable form, it is a precarious maquette, a promise of a monument-to-come.

Cullen’s sculpture, variously staged in Belfast, Derry, Dublin, London and Portadown during the early, anxious, post-Troubles years, is an ambiguous construct: a shifting, unsettled, ‘open’ form, that also, at an important point in Ireland’s recent history, pointed towards the hoped-for potential of closure.

Declan Long More Than Anything (2004) Maud Cotter A MODULAR STRUCTURE of variable dimensions made

from 1.5mm birch plywood, More Than Anything embodies many of the themes that continue to preoccupy Cork-based sculptor, Maud Cotter. Cotter has worked consistently with materials that allow her to provoke awareness of such interfaces as mind and matter, interior and exterior, individual and collective, macro and micro. The work was installed in different guises in the Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast (2004), Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (2005), VISUAL, Carlow (2009) and, later, The Lab, San Francisco (2011). Where one iteration appeared to overwhelm the existing infrastructure and evoke architectonic form, another slowly encroached and divided spaces. The basic units from which each is made are lightweight, yet strong, and mirror the cellular makeup of the body. Also reminiscent of spinal structures, they convey resilience rather than vulnerability. The crosses formed where planar elements connect allow light and air to penetrate, while the repetition of this motif and its scaled-up explorations of horizontality and verticality invite comparison to the Modernist grid. At the art-craft juncture, the work’s systematic construction recalls the woven textile, an ancient technology bound up with cohesion and unity. However, a lack of rigid regularity breaks rank with this analogy and suggests propagation and growth. Susan Campbell Zip (2004) Corban Walker

CORBAN WALKER WAS commissioned by Aisling Prior for

Breaking Ground – the Ballymun Regeneration Per Cent for Art programme – to create a site-specific work for the interior atrium of the Civic Centre in Ballymun. Responding to the vast proportions of the space, Walker created a sculptural piece for one of the corners, comprising interlacing green and blue LED lights. With meticulous geometric precision, Zip appears to weave together the two perpendicular walls.

This work attests to the philosophies of architecture and scale, recurrent in Walker’s wider practice, which often involves the creation of free-standing geometric configurations or minimalist glass stacks. Installed high on the wall, viewers must experience Zip from floor level, while looking upward. This spectator position highlights the ways in which Walker, the son of an architect, seeks to consider the pedestrian experience within the built environment. Joanne Laws A Pampootie

FOR MANY REASONS I found it impossible to choose a

favourite piece of contemporary Irish sculpture, but an unexpected alternative quickly came to mind – a pampootie from the Aran Islands. When I began to wonder why, the reasons became clear. First, I recalled that one had been included in ‘A Dream of Discipline’ (2006), a show by Kathy Prendergast, Dorothy Cross, and William McKeown at the Douglas Hyde

Napier & Hogg, The Soft Estate, 2006; photograph by Peter Richards, courtesy of the artists and Golden Thread Gallery

Gallery, and that an image of the same shoe had appeared in an earlier gallery publication called The Paradise (2002). The pampootie had accrued some sculptural or ‘artistic’ qualities by osmosis.

More significantly though, I’ve always found the shape of pointed-toe pampooties graceful and beautiful, almost otherworldly, as though they were worn by fairy folk. Their real social origins, of course, were far more down-to-earth. Made from single pieces of untreated hide with the hair left on, held together by leather laces or twine, pampooties were used as everyday footwear by Aran fishermen, who had to keep them moist in order to retain their suppleness. They were not expected to last very long.

It is said that J.S. Synge insisted on the use of real pampooties in his productions of his Aran Islands play, Riders to the Sea, because their pre-modern ‘authenticity’ was crucial to one of its themes, the tension between tradition and contemporary life. This natural ‘authenticity’, however romanticised, as well as their sense of functional agility, helps to account for much of my liking for them. At the same time, however, they are inextricably linked in my mind with artists like Kathy Prendergast, Dorothy Cross, and Aleana Egan, because their work frequently references, or is made from, natural materials and vernacular objects. I find it endlessly fascinating to see how the meanings of ideas and things keep shifting and developing according to their contexts and connections. John Hutchinson

Tim Shaw, Parliament, 2006, black polythene, wire and straw; photograph by and courtesy of the artist

The Soft Estate (2006) Napier & Hogg (Philip Napier & Mike Hogg) THE SOFT ESTATE comprised a constellation of various and changeable sculptural units, orbiting around a series of dining tables. The tables functioned as specially constructed negotiating tables, whilst the accompanying units explored forms of measure and a revised language of assigned common attributes. Initially the first of the tables appeared as a sturdy extending dining table. The table, beautifully manufactured,

by Gilbert Logan and Sons, was actually a facsimile of a table originally destined for the ill-fated Titanic that now resides on public display in the Custom House, Belfast. Strategically presented in a de-familiarised state, and fully lengthened with its engineered mechanism exposed by the deliberate omission of its central panels, the work invited considered reflection and discussion.

The second table existed in a bastardised state, prone to fail under its own weight, as a precarious assemblage. It stood vastly over-stretched and provisionally shored up to prevent

Seamus Nolan, Hotel Ballynum, 2007, furniture from Room 2; courtesy of the artist

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Four Decades of Irish Sculpture

Eva Rothschild, The Rock and the Arch, 2007, polystyrene, jesmonite, ceramic tiles, grout, painted steel, 311 × 447 × 144 cm; photograph by Andy Keate, courtesy of Courtesy Modern Art London, © artist

its inevitable collapse. Again, the table made a feature of its negative space, a temporary gap to be filled, and provided a counterpoint to the first table’s assured historical posturing.

Rather, it brought to the fore a sense of the collective amnesia, necessary suspension of disbelief, and the tangible fragility on which the optimism for the then relatively new North of Ireland had been founded.

The Soft Estate was first shown at the Golden Thread Gallery in 2006, before being reconfigured and re-presented at The Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, and as part of the University of Ulster’s Interface project, ‘I Confess’, in Belfast. In later configurations of the project, the initial two tables were accompanied and then superseded by the introduction of a pneumatic dining table – a table that quite literally bucked the potential of any negotiated consensus being formed. The tables, the measuring tools and the diagrammatic displays functioned simultaneously as parts of a whole and as units with something in common, associated in theory that formed temporary groups “within which various relationships can be found.” Sure enough, as if foretold through this project, the region’s newly formed political structure collapsed through its quest for consensus. Peter Richards Parliament (2006) Tim Shaw PARLIAMENT MARKED A pivotal moment in the work of

Brian O’Doherty, Charles Simonds, Patrick Ireland, The Burial of Patrick Ireland, Death Mask, 2008, plaster cast and paint, collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, donation, 2008

Belfast-born sculptor Tim Shaw. Prior to making this work, Shaw had been consumed for four years by a large commission for the Eden Project in Cornwall that contained over 30 life-size elements – copper-beaten figures and vines depicting a Dionysian sacrificial rite that celebrated untamed nature.

After completing this monumental work, Shaw retreated from the studio and took part in the artist residency programme at Cill Rialaig in County Kerry. After two uninspiring days of acclimatising to the cold, bleak landscape, he began to notice flickering shapes in the trees. At first glance, they appeared to be the dark silhouettes of crows and rooks but revealed themselves to be shredded pieces of agricultural polythene, snagged in the branches.

Inspired by the illusion, Shaw set out to make 25 life-size rooks from materials gathered from the surrounding area – polythene, straw and wire. The behaviour of the birds invited the comparison with those in positions of power and the resulting installation saw Shaw augment the sculpture with a soundtrack of corvid voices, layered with the chattering of debating parliamentarians. A clear departure from his wellknown work in metal, this work manifested a desire to make political commentary within his work. Subsequent works Man on Fire, Tank on Fire and Casting a Dark Democracy all draw directly on elements that can be traced back to the Cill Raillaig work – the heavy use of black polythene, augmenting sculpture with soundscapes and using the work to make a political statement. Parliament has been exhibited several times since its creation, most notably at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2019 and most recently with Anima Mundi at the empty and derelict Vicarage Flats in St Ives, Cornwall. Rob Hilken Hotel Ballymun (2007) Seamus Nolan

ON A SUNNY day in spring, the views from the Thomas

Julian Opie, Suzanne Walking in Leather Skirt, 2006, collection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (Reg. No. 2013); photograph by Ros Kavanagh

Clarke Tower were fantastic; priceless, in real estate terms, and yet before long everything would come tumbling down.

The demolition of Ballymun’s iconic towers may seem like a portent for other, more widespread collapses, but on that bright afternoon the canopy of blue stretched faultlessly to the horizon. Fifteen floors below, familiar streets looked beautiful too, abstract and logical, in a way that never seemed true on the ground. Though I grew up on the fringes of Ballymun, it remained oddly obscure, a no-go area ruled by kids much tougher than me. Ballymun was no one’s idea of a destination and yet, here it was, an obsolete tower block reimagined as a boutique hotel.

In the first decade of the new millennium ‘Breaking Ground’, led by curator and artistic director Aisling Prior, commissioned an extraordinary array of artists’ projects in the Ballymun area. Most of these engaged directly with local communities and collectively they helped to redefine the

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

idea of public art in Ireland. In tandem with a regeneration programme that, ironically perhaps, would see the destruction of the towers, Seamus Nolan’s project was an audacious last stand. Declan McGonagle called Breaking Ground “A museum without walls”, and as sunlight flooded into the top floor of the tower housing Hotel Ballymun, his metaphor felt literally true. In the nine, short-stay bedrooms, tasteful arrangements of twigs and fresh flowers civilised the bare walls.

Different in every room, abandoned furniture and household bric-a-brac had been refashioned into new forms of modernist chic. A side-table looked like a Rodchenko sculpture.

Old chairs were spliced and reformatted into mildly indecent couplings. A cool and clean aesthetic with a twist – it was as though the working class had taken out a subscription to Elle Décor.

Dublin airport was just up the road and as a plane flew in low between the tower and the sun, its shadow moved across the concrete interior. Perhaps I’m imagining this. Or I might be confusing it with a trip to Marseille, where for two days my wife and I lived in the Unité d’Habitation, otherwise known as Cité Radieuse – the radiant city. We were less high up there, the seventh floor I think, but the sense of elevation was even greater, because we were inside Le Corbusier’s masterpiece. Being in Marseille made my appreciation of Nolan’s project greater too. I felt the link between the two visions in my bones.

In one corner room, a puffed-up double bed was supported by a myriad of spindly chair legs. How deliciously incongruous it looked, as though Kafka’s Gregor Samsa – waking from his beetle dream – had transformed into the bed itself. There was a rubble room too, I seem to remember, a small room full of the stuff the whole building would soon become. In the music room a stack of old cassette tapes had been left behind by previous tenants and were playable on a dodgy-looking ghetto blaster. Randy Crawford’s Rainy Night in Georgia leaked out between the sunbeams. I’m imagining that too. I don’t remember what was on the cassettes. I wish I could. I was touched by the idea of it though; the past lives recycling on those dusty tapes, their wobbly hiss like the oxygen of the future slowly leaking away.

Though fully booked throughout its four weeks, Nolan’s project was built to fail. It was, in a sense, a hymn to failure; an elegant pass at what might have been. More than 70 people had collaborated to organise and run the hotel, its undoubted poignancy off-set by the sheer scale of its ambition. While larger questions persisted about the long-term fate of Ballymun and its communities, on that bright afternoon at least, everything was illuminated. John Graham The Rock and the Arch (2007) Eva Rothschild FRAGILITY AND SOLIDITY are playfully inverted in Rothschild’s two-part sculpture, in which neither element looks especially stable. An example of her inventive use of materials, the ‘rock’ has been hewn from polystyrene and covered in tiles to create an illusion of heaviness. This is an effect the artist, who lives and works in London, later exploited in Do-Nut (2009). Also difficult to discern, the frail-looking arch is constructed from durable steel. Both components are faceted, which counters their differences to establish some commonality. The steel ‘arch’ hints at human form, its bifurcations alluding to limbs – as made explicit in the similarly structured Someone and Someone (2012). Reading from left to right the ‘figure’ overtops onto the rock, but in the reverse direction appears to arise from it. Where a straight line establishes a direct connection, the arch instigates a more dynamic link. Its apparent instability and the rock’s irregular profile channel Baroque tendencies, evidence of a critical practice that also revisits the restrained ethos of Classicism and decisive language of Constructivism. An artwork from a sculptor as willing to engage cosmic machinations as the prevailing political landscape, it invites viewer interactions that unshackle experience from expectations of certainty. Susan Campbell

Burial Mask (2008) Brian O’Doherty, Charles Simonds, Patrick Ireland Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth – Oscar Wilde

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Four Decades of Irish Sculpture

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ON 20 MAY 2008, the artist Patrick Ireland was buried in the

grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). He was thirty-six years old and had been a pioneer of installation art in the form of a series of Rope Drawings since 1973.

He was buried wearing a mask of the face of the artist Brian O’Doherty, made by Charles Simonds. O’Doherty’s multifaceted career put identity at its core for sixty years, using several fictitious personae and anticipating the concerns of much later art. Patrick Ireland’s ‘life’ began almost fifty years ago, following Bloody Sunday in Derry on 30 January 1972, when 13 civil rights marchers were killed by the British Army. In a unique gesture of peaceful protest, O’Doherty changed his artist name to Patrick Ireland in 1972, the first performance art in Ireland. This durational performance was to last for thirty-six years until the Troubles ended in the Good Friday Peace Agreement in 1998 and the Burial of Patrick Ireland in 2008. Taking a historical event rooted in conflicts of identity, the Name Change gesture only became complete when the artist’s name no longer represented that conflict, as efforts to transform fixed notions of identity became established. It is to be hoped that the ‘death’ of Patrick Ireland and what the name stood for will remain a memory, a part of art history.

Brenda Moore-McCann Suzanne Walking in Leather Skirt (2008) Julian Opie

WHEN INVITED TO nominate a piece of sculpture, I imme-

diately thought of a public work, and Julian Opie’s Suzanne Walking in Leather Skirt came to mind. On reflection, of course, there are works by Irish born artists that come to mind also. However, as this work has been on public exhibition outside The Hugh Lane Gallery on Parnell Square for over ten years now it is surely part of the soul of the city. It was acquired after the exhibition ‘Julian Opie: Walking on O’Connell Street’ (20 January – 25 October 2008) curated by Barbara Dawson, Director of the Hugh Lane. That exhibition down the centre path of O’Connell Street made a marvellous impact, featuring five animated walking figures, some relaxed and others appearing more stressed. It was a perfect example of how works of art can engage the public; I remember being struck by how I myself was stopped in my tracks and observing so many others being affected and even mesmerised in the same way. Up close and from a distance, those works lit up the street. Suzanne Walking in Leather Skirt is a portrait in simple black outline with light, reflecting the contemporary age of light and movement. It could be a shadow or refection.

Like all simple images, it is complex too. It is the movement and energy that I get from it that affects me each time I pass it. It can have the effect of slowing the pace and be quite hypnotic. It has a timeless quality. Oliver Dowling Voices (2009) Cecily Brennan

VOICES COMPRISES OF five unique life stories from people living in Ballymun, commissioned by Breaking Ground when Ballymun was in the middle of its regeneration process.

Working with five people from diverse backgrounds, these individual’s stories covered alcoholism, sexual and physical abuse, homelessness and self-harm, but perhaps most importantly, reflected each individual’s capacity to love and survive hardship. Each person was represented by one photograph, a still life of something suggested in each story, along with an audio piece of their story. The work launched in Ballymun Civic Centre in August 2009, before being permanently located in Poppintree Community Centre. While the work at first glance appears quite minimal and simple, the interviews draw the viewer deep into each participant’s life. Disarmingly honest and open, some of these stories were harrowing, reinforcing a sense that we can never know what is truly going on in people’s lives. The work in its simplicity also disguised the monumental effort and devotion of Cecily herself, who worked tirelessly and selflessly with the participants over two years, becoming deeply involved in their lives. If Breaking Ground’s mission was to present public art projects in diverse and alternative ways, Cecily’s work was a resilient triumph, celebrating the voices of the voiceless, and the stories which are uncomfortable to hear. Paul McAree

Cecily Brennan, Voices, 2009, commissioned by Breaking Ground; image courtesy of the artist

David Beattie, Drum roll, 2009, drum, motor, plastic bag, electrical cable, dimensions variable; courtesy of the artist and Berlin Opticians Gallery

Drum Roll (2009) David Beattie DAVID BEATTIE’S KINETIC sculpture, Drum Roll, featured in the exhibition, ‘All humans Do’, presented at Whitebox (New York) and The Model (Sligo) in 2012, supported by Culture Ireland. Drum Roll is innovative in terms of its materiality, interdisciplinarity and public engagement strategies.

A plastic bag is attached to a drum, which rolls forwards and backwards. We hear the rustling sound of plastic being squashed, twisted and expanding again. A machine facilitates this activity, driven by a motor linked by a long wire to the power socket. The piece gives new meaning to the 18th-century Zen kōan about the ‘sound of one hand clapping’. Form, they say, is function; but maybe, function, in the case of Beattie, is form. Beattie has continuously worked with materials that transcend their original function, making connections with sculptural forms in unique but quotidian ways. Beattie continues to be successful in major public art commissions and has brought his forensic interest in materiality to these new works. Aoife Tunney

John Byrne, Misneach, 2010, bronze on granite; photograph by Rory McAllorum, courtesy of the artist

2010s Misneach (2010) John Byrne CURRENTLY LOCATED ON the grounds of Trinity Comprehensive School in Ballymun, Misneach (Courage) is a public sculpture created by John Byrne in 2010, curated by Aisling Prior and commissioned as part of the Ballymun Regeneration, the largest urban regeneration project ever undertaken in Ireland. Subverting the military tradition of equestrian sculpture, Misneach depicts a local Ballymun teenager (the then seventeen-year-old Toni Marie Shields) astride a horse, modelled from a former colonial monument, the Viscount Field-Marshal Gough Memorial, originally sited in Phoenix Park until it was destroyed by Irish Republicans in 1957.

Cast in bronze at 1.5 times life-size and mounted on a monumental granite plinth, Misneach’s significance lies not only in the triumphant artistic accomplishment of the work itself, but in what the controversy it provoked at the time revealed. Its proposed placement in the town centre of Ballymun, spurred responses spanning from the sublime and the sardonic-fuelled, to outright hysteria by certain media moguls.

At times this bordered tantalisingly close to public discourse

Isabel Nolan, Turning Point, 2010, rolled steel, paint installation at T2, Dublin Airport, 870 × 574 × 314 cm

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Four Decades of Irish Sculpture

Sam Keogh, Monument for Subjects to Come, 2011, wood, expanding polyurethane foam, polystyrene, acrylic medium powdered mica, glitter, earth, laminated wrapping paper, sellotape, rope, sponge & duct tape, 322 × 153 × 480 cm; courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery

Isabel Nolan, The Provisory Rug adapted and documented for past, present and future, 2012, set of 6 black and white photographs, AP18 × 27 cm each; courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery

Gracelands: Circling the Square, 2012, EVA International; courtesy of Vaari Claffey

about public art. How the image of a young track-suited girl from Ballymun riding bareback astride a mount originally created for a viscount could become the focus of such national debate exposed the underpinning of this regeneration process as primarily an ideological one, and one that was operating primarily through the space of representation. In the contested history of public monuments in Ireland, we appear to be challenged when that representational space is occupied by anything other than rich rockstars, martyred revolutionaries, or (if you happen to be female) virtuous Mother Irelands or busty fish sellers. Perhaps in an age of historical revisionism – where the only individual with enough courage to tackle the imbecilic and dangerous advances of the western hemisphere’s most vitriolic rulers is the unlikely character of a seventeen year old schoolgirl from Sweden – its placement will be reconsidered and Misneach may yet find its rightful place in the heart of Ballymun. At least I hope so. Megs Morley Turning Point (2010) Isabel Nolan

Ruth E. Lyons, The Forgotten Works, 2012, timber, screw, bitumen, lights, installation view at Project Arts Centre; photograph by Denis Mortell, courtesy of the artist

IN THE SUMMER of 2008, I, along with Patrick Murphy and Vincent Honoré, was kindly invited by Clíodhna Shaffrey and Ruairí Ó Cuiv, to nominate three artists for consideration for a major commission they were managing for the yet to be built Terminal 2, at Dublin Airport. This was a challenging curatorial proposition as, given the context and scope of the commission, the artists’ brief was particularly demanding.

One of the three artists I proposed was Isabel Nolan for her beautiful, deceptively delicate, sculptural work, with its recognisable and defiant ‘hand-madedness’. Isabel’s deftness with materials and with shape, and the absolute clarity of the presentation of each finished piece, struck me as being acutely assured for such a young artist. Also, the genial, ludic element to her practice beguiled me. What might she – with her incomparable sense of colour, and her ability to manipulate form and space – make, if she were to work on a large-scale project? Against significant international competition, Isabel was unanimously awarded the commission.

Encountering Turning Point now causes a spin of excitement in me. That a work of art can have such a somatic effect on me is warmly received. The seemingly gravity-defying work, which Isabel spent two years making, is fluid and graceful, static yet imbued with a sense of movement which tricks the eye. Turning Point appears to twirl and rotate as you move up the escalator or simply walk past it. And as you see it, or indeed watch it, it changes, and re-frames what you see through it. It’s mesmerising, and as I travel less and less, I miss these thrilling encounters.

It takes great courage to make a piece of art for a public place, especially for one of such national importance. However, Isabel Nolan’s Turning Point has exceeded expectations and has surely become a beloved contemporary national icon.

Aisling Prior Monument for Subjects to Come (2011) Sam Keogh AMONGST THE ARRAY of works exhibited at O’Connell Street, Limerick, as part of EVA International 2012, Sam Keogh’s Monument for Subjects to Come (2011) stopped me in my tracks. This ominous, overpowering monolith looms over the spectator, bearing down on them with its imposing heft, shimmering surface, and the sheer mystery of its meaning.

It is simultaneously ancient and alien, embedded with powdered mica and glitter and plant life, wrapped in rope and folded fabric, and tethered to a makeshift wooden ‘palanquin’, a platform ready to be carried aloft through some unknown religious procession.

Keogh’s sculpture is uncannily attuned to the biennial’s title and theme of ‘After the Future’, curated by Annie Fletcher and named after Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s book. Monument for Subjects to Come amalgamates earth and soil with polyurethane foam and sellotape, and, in the process, infers the rituals and reliquaries of a future civilization, where geology and industry, natural elements and man-made waste, are so deeply enmeshed that one can no longer distinguish between the two. That this speculative distant society feels both so removed from our era and yet strangely familiar is an unsettling indication of how far along this trajectory we’ve already travelled. Chris Clarke

Gracelands: Circling the Square (2012) EVA International 2012 GRACELANDS WAS AN outdoor happening devised and curated by Vaari Claffey, which presented Irish and international artists, working across a range of disciplines. The annual event (which ran from 2008 to 2011) usually took place over the course of one day and night on the grounds of the Mimetic House – the home of artists Grace Weir and Joe Walker, in Dromahair, County Leitrim. On 2 August 2012, ‘Gracelands: Circling the Square’ was presented at the Milk Market in Limerick, as part of EVA International 2012. The site-specific programme comprised a series of performance installations, sculptural installations and a screening programme. Over the course of the evening, the commercial site was transformed

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Four Decades of Irish Sculpture

Clodagh Emoe, An Exercise in Seeing, 2013, site-specific participatory artwork, Redcross Forest Co. Wicklow; photograph by Enda Dorran, courtesy of the artist

into a temporary exhibition – part sculptural installation, part theatrical arena. Responding to the canopy which covers the Milk Market, a number of fabric-based sculptural works were displayed, while other works incorporated performative aspects. The event considered the ‘square’ as a central meeting point – the site of social exchange, civic and political gathering – as well as a platform for the display of produce, artefacts and effects. It considered the process of circling as a kind of ‘uncertain or preparatory gathering’, with the site itself becoming a performative and kinetic sculpture. Joanne Laws The Provisory Rug, adaptable for past, present and future (For Marie Lieb) (2012) Isabel Nolan INSPIRED BY THE distinctive mark-making of a woman at

a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg in 1894, Isabel Nolan’s The Provisory Rug, adaptable for past, present and future (For Marie Lieb), celebrates the disarming nature of a stubbornly partial object, one that demands attention, alters perception, and reaches for meaning beyond what is known. The work was originally commissioned by Vaari Claffey for Gracelands: Circling the Square, as part of EVA International, in 2012.

It takes the physical form of 144 individual steel rods (each measuring between 4 cm - 190 cm) enclosed and handsewn into lightly padded, variously patterned fabric. These components are accompanied by meticulous installation instructions for a range of geometric reconfigurations, with each variation dedicated to someone or something. I first encountered the work at Kerlin Gallery, where I was tasked with helping to set it up for photographic documentation. The first time I picked up one of the deceptively heavy steel pieces, I fell in love with it. Since then I have shown the work as a year-long durational sculpture, in four of its potentially infinite reconfigurations, during my first year as artistic director at Grazer Kunstverein.

Of all the works I have known and loved, this one stands out as offering one of the most powerful and effective ways of re-arranging space, and re-ordering fragments in order to make sense of a whole. This desire for material agency was, I am sure, something Marie Lieb was reaching towards as she laid out torn strips of bedlinen across her bedroom floor in that hospital in Heidelberg in the 1890s. For her, the question must have been not how can she make art, but how can she not? Kate Strain

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Sean Lynch, A blow by blow account of stonecarving in Oxford, 2013–14, installation view, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; courtesy the artist, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Ronchini Gallery, Modern Art Oxford and the Hugh Lane

The Forgotten Works (2012) Ruth E. Lyons COMPRISING OVER 500 bitumen-coated timber struts –

screwed together to resemble a hastily built nest or a giant’s game of pick up sticks – The Forgotten Works was a largescale, temporary sculptural installation that made a brief but ecstatic appearance on the balcony of Project Arts Centre in the summer of 2012. Starting life as a drawing – a scribble of matted black marks, menacingly poised between two buildings – it was spotted in the artist’s studio by the then curator of visual arts, Tessa Giblin, who commissioned a reallife realisation of the sketch. Lyons, who is undaunted by the impossibility of things, constructed the sculpture over a number of weeks in full view of the passers-by on the streets below. Even upon completion, the work looked precarious, unstable, risky – a dark hulking clatter of matter, set to engulf the building from which it so suddenly seemed to emerge.

Bitumen, a black sticky tar-like substance and the lowest residue of oil, was used to coat each 16ft length of wood used in the sculptural composition. This material, ordinarily used to bind together the surfaces of our streets, held a fascination for the artist, who was interested in thinking about fossil fuels as layers and layers of compressed time, condensed over millennia, to become energy. Thinking like this, in huge spans of time, is something that distinguishes Lyons’ work as an artist who is unafraid to reach into the deep past and think into the far future, exploring what a person, work or idea can be capable of, in the face of unstoppable processes. Kate Strain

Sven Anderson, Continuous Drift, 2015, public sound installation; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist

An Exercise in Seeing (2013) Clodagh Emoe FUNDED BY WICKLOW County Council and the Arts Council of Ireland, An Exercise in Seeing is a work developed and enacted within the curatorial project, ‘I Won’t Say That I’ll See You Tomorrow’ – a series of events and exhibitions centred on the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Clodagh Emoe responded to the writings of Wittgenstein, who talks about society and the limits of language, our perception of objects and how we imagine objects in an art context. Belief and mysticism form the basis of this project. The public were invited to engage with and encounter her work in a forest and this was an innovative and surprising piece to find in this context. Emoe is an influential artist who has been widely recognised for her videos, sculpture and event-based projects.

She was shortlisted for the David and Yuko Juna Award in 2019. Aoife Tunney

David Best, Temple, 2015, produced by Artichoke in Derry/Londonderry; photo by Matthew Andrews; courtesy of David Best Temples

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Four Decades of Irish Sculpture A blow-by-blow account of stone carving in Oxford (2013–14) Sean Lynch

Cliona Harmey, Dublin Ships, 2015, custom LED screen displays, networked computer with software linked to API, AIS antenna, network box; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist

Aideen Barry, Brittlefield, 2016, installation view, RHA Gallery; courtesy of the artist

A BLOW-BY-BLOW account of stone carving in Oxford (2013– 14) by Sean Lynch is at once an installation comprising sculptural elements, photographs and a narrated slide projection, and a reflection on the historical, social and spatial facets of sculpture. The work arises from the artist’s research into the nineteenth-century stone-carvers, John and James O’Shea, who were renowned for their naturalistic representations of animals and plants. After completing a series of notable carvings in Dublin in the 1850s (such as The Museum Building at Trinity College), they moved to Oxford to work on the new Museum of Natural History. Controversy surrounded their carvings of monkeys on the building’s façade, with claims that they represented Darwin’s theory of evolution, then the subject of vigorous debate. The resulting quarrel led to James O’Shea’s attempt to carve a series of caricatures of Oxford authorities as parrots and owls.

Lynch’s installation revisits this story through a deft combination of the material and the historical. A carving of a monkey, completed by Stephen Burke following the style and ethos of the O’Sheas, sits atop a hefty table resembling those used by sculptors to support blocks of stone during carving.

Nearby, a pile of rubble and six black and white photographs document the process of the monkey’s creation. A slide projection, narrated by Gina Moxley, reflects on the legacy of the O’Sheas in Dublin, Oxford and beyond. Lynch’s recrafting of the story moves beyond the facts and explores the interplay between patronage, authenticity, the outsider, science, art, institutional values and the museum… a story staged in the 19th century but with enduring repercussions and relevance.

The work was shown in 2013 as part of the ‘Sleepwalkers’ programme at Hugh Lane Gallery, where it has since joined the collection (so I must confess an interest in nominating this work). It travelled to Modern Art Oxford the following year, connecting the two cities, just as the story of the O’Sheas as retold by Lynch connects 19th and 21st century sculptural practice. Logan Sisley

Continuous Drift (2015) Sven Anderson CONTINUOUS DRIFT IS a sound installation integrated John Gerard, Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), 2017, simulation, dimensions variable; courtesy of the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Pace Gallery, New York

Aleana Egan, sisters (cloche), 2018, untreated bronze, unique, 182 × 49 × 6 cm; courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery

into Meeting House Square in Dublin. Initiated in 2015, the long-term artwork is designed and curated by Sven Anderson within ‘Manual for Acoustic Planning and Urban Sound Design (MAP)’, a public art project commissioned by Dublin City Council. The installation acts as a framework for various sonic atmospheres that can be activated by members of the public via mobile devices, to be played back from eight loudspeakers integrated into the four retractable panels that cover the square.

Existing compositions and site-specific commissions make use of mono, stereo and quadrophonic arrangements.

Among these are Peter Cusack’s glacial recordings from the heartland of Siberia and Cristina Kubisch’s electromagnetic soundscapes. More locally, Danny McCarthy’s contribution features field recordings made when the neighbouring Crown Alley functioned as a telephone exchange, resurrecting the lost soundmarks of a vanished Temple Bar. Meeting House Square was designed in 1991 by Temple Bar Properties as part of the regeneration project that transformed the area into a touristic and cultural quarter. It is named after the former Presbyterian and Quaker meeting houses that once flanked the space. The acoustic design of the meeting house manifested Quaker notions of egalitarianism; spaces were designed to amplify voices originating from anywhere in the building. Continuous Drift explores the soundscapes of contemporary Dublin, but it also asks who owns and controls these public spaces. Who has the right to broadcast and who has the right to occupy them, sonically or otherwise? Distinctions between what is acceptable sound and what is noise, between who gets to speak and who must only listen, are key.

From its parasitic relationship to existing infrastructures, Continuous Drift acts within the limits of what can happen in public in what is now, essentially, a private space in the heart of the city. The installation emerged just months after Dublin City Council’s closure of the cooperatively run arts

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

space, Exchange Dublin, due to complaints about ‘anti-social behaviour’. For many, this closure demonstrated the removal of independent cultural spaces in Temple Bar specifically and in Dublin more generally. What kind of shared culture is left and what kinds of compromises have to be employed to produce it? Anderson’s installation and the broader project it emerged out of (his proposal to act as an acoustic urban planner and sound designer for Dublin city) seems to be an exercise in tactics for producing these shared acoustic spaces.

Rachel O’Dwyer Temple (2015) David Best CALIFORNIAN ARTIST DAVID Best was commissioned to

produce an extraordinary temporary public sculpture in Derry that was ceremonially set alight on 21 March 2015. Best garnered an international reputation for his temples, which he had been building (and subsequently burning) at Burning Man Festivals in the Nevada Desert since 2000. The first temple was created to commemorate the death of a friend, who died on his way to the festival. In the years that followed, the temples became more elaborate but retained the spirit of healing and remembrance that inspired the original.

Best was invited by Artichoke to create his first major international work – a temple in the city of Derry that would bring together people from all communities to build this cathartic monument to forgiveness. A bonfire of a different sort. The site at Corrody Road Country Park, known locally as Kelly’s Field, certainly wasn’t a neutral space, although it became one for the duration of the project. Artichoke received significant funding from project partners including the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and raised £30,000 through Kickstarter to meet their funding goals. The Kickstarter campaign (and its 629 backers) was symbolic of the participatory nature of the project, in which the 21 American crew members were joined by 98 local volunteers to create the sculpture. 40 local apprentices were trained, and 60,000 people visited the sculpture during the week it was open. 15,000 people attended the burning ceremony, which saw the temple and the thousands of messages left inside slowly disappear.

Rob Hilken Dublin Ships (2015) Cliona Harmey

DUBLIN SHIPS WAS a temporary public artwork, commis-

sioned by Dublin City Council in a partnership with Dublin Port as part of the Dublin City Public Art Programme. On the one hand, it was a technologically complex sculptural work that pushed boundaries in its application of live electronic information system (an Automatic Identification System) tracking ships entering and leaving Dublin Port. On the other, it is a strikingly simple artwork, where the tracked ships were named (as they entered and departed), on two giant LED screens, installed on the Scherzer Bridges beside the Samuel Beckett Bridge. Muscular and poetic, present and spatial, the ships’ names read as pure poetry – Ulysses, Celtic Mist, Aurora, Bro Deliverer, South Highway, Lemonia – shaping a bold and rhythmic arrangement of names on screen, conjuring ideas of geographies and distance, commerce and trade, sea and horizon. A fantasy of ships tales mingling with the realities of an island nation, so utterly interdependent on an external world – bringing, leaving, consumption, waste, the essential reliance on others and elsewhere. Lasting nine months, Dublin Ships brought Dublin Port into view for a time. Clíodhna Shaffrey Brittlefield (2016) Aideen Barry

IT’S SUMMERTIME, YET we find ourselves plunged into

darkness in the voluminous main gallery at the RHA. Flickering screens of domestic turmoil greet us; in those enigmatic films there is a humour, a dark humour, but we find ourselves smirking. Beyond, rises up nine shards, piercing the very floor on which we walk, repelling yet attracting the viewer. Approaching these shards, we are aware of oval apertures on the side of each and a gentle flickering, beguiling

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

us closer, closer, closer… Placing one’s head through each opening we encounter nine different video works made by the artist between 2007 and 2016. These short films explore the artist’s ongoing concerns with the uncanny, the gothic and the horror of domesticity, being provocative and humorous – characteristics often missing from sculptural practice.

For me, the installation functions as the perfect metaphor for contemporary art in Ireland and its shifting positions from the formal, rigid and often conservative approach of fine art education, to the reality that many artists no longer exist within a single discipline. Yes, these are video works, but the artist has transformed them into a single cohesive sculptural intervention that will resonate and influence for many years to come. Eamonn Maxwell Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) (2017) John Gerrard IN AN ARID landscape, a tall flagpole bears a flag made of

thick black smoke, continuously belching its toxic vapours.

Commissioned by Channel 4 to mark Earth Day in 2017, Gerrard’s work is an entirely digital creation, built as a virtual simulation and recreated using sophisticated computer game software. The work was informed by meticulous research into the location. Spindletop marks the site of the first significant global oil strike in 1901 – the Lucas Gusher – and the beginning of the petroleum age. Western Flag is a non-durational video work, originally broadcast on Channel 4, and via a large screen in the courtyard at London’s Somerset House, though it was also widely disseminated through social media. Its black smoke flag is a portent of an unresolved future, mourning the exhaustion of natural resources. The work slowly reveals the smoking flag in the round, monumentalising this menacing totem – this warning to humanity. Anne Mullee O. Winston Link (2018) odd wires (2018) sisters (cloche) (2018) tools and rags (2018) Aleana Egan

WHEN THE WORD ‘poetic’ is used to describe an artwork (though I’ve probably employed it myself ), it feels like an evasion, shifting the demand to describe or even to criticise, into a register of dreamy imprecision. So, it may not be helpful to note that sometimes poetry I admire, or the writing about it, brings the work of Aleana Egan to mind. And yet it does. Certain poems are Egan-esque. In 2016, reading a lengthy review, in London Review of Books of Colm Tóibín’s On Elizabeth Bishop, I copied into my notebook multiple phrases or ideas that resonated with my own aesthetic desires.

Foremost amongst those notes is a quote from Bishop that flags the immense difficulty of wishing to write justly about works such as Egan’s, works that feel beautifully resistant to one’s petty propensity to narrate work into meaning: “It is annoying to have to keep saying that things are like other things… even though there seems to be no help for it.”

One recurring form in Egan’s works is an organic, midsize, linear, wall-mounted sculpture, latterly cast in bronze.

They compel and puzzle in equal measure. Resolutely static, they seem yet to have shifted, shrugged or even shimmied into being, making and occupying odd spaces in space. The titles – some examples from 2018 being O. Winston Link, odd wires, sisters (cloche), tools and rags – shed little light on what might be at stake in their making, though the text somehow amplifies the figuration that the abstraction of the works seems to make light of. In part the immense appeal of her work is its utterly convincing illegibility (even when engine parts, blankets or clothing feature). This reads not as an irritating will to obfuscate but rather a paean to the complexity of lived experience and a polite refusal to be dragged into clarity, into being a substitute or an idea of anything other than itself. And magically they feel very much of the world.

They are works that are themselves, which is I find quite rare.

The reviewer describes Bishop’s poetry as a “blend of stealth and appeal, of patience and need” a fitting match for both Egan’s work and the perfect frame of mind for trying to take it in. Later comes the line, “Bishop said the art she admired most contained three qualities: “Accuracy, spontaneity and mystery.” In my notebook from that year, I drew a Venn dia-

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gram comprised of these three words and beside them (most probably enviously) scrawled “Aleana’s work!” Isabel Nolan Iontaise/Iontas (Fossil/Wonder) (2018) Ruth E. Lyons THERE’S SOMETHING REALLY particular about the idea of a school community. It has a leader who usually sets the culture, and this ripples out through the staff, students and parents whose lives are completely intertwined for an intense but relatively brief period of ‘formative experiences’. Many school’s percent for art commissions work very hard to create a sense of ownership for new works, often through participation; but with every invitation, someone is excluded. The idea of making a work to be enjoyed by generations after that participating school community is gone is challenging, but for me, Ruth E. Lyon’s Iontaise/Iontas (Fossil/Wonder), both acknowledges a specific moment in time, with its time capsule qualities, while also reminding us that we’re all just part of a much longer story, encapsulated in the granite boulders. Commissioned

by Kildare and Wicklow ETB and curated by Wicklow Arts Officer Jenny Sherwin and curators Jennie Guy and Eílis Lavelle, this gathering of sculptures, embodying the stories of our ancestors, have been adopted onto the grounds of Coláiste Raithin, with embedded gifts (given by the students) cast in clear resin, which complement the original wonder of the pigments in the stones, but also add their own imprint upon the ecosystem of the stone’s surface. The resulting characters are both impressively epic, gently inviting and filled with wonder, like a big hug just when you need it. And who wouldn’t like that in their school yard? Sheena Barrett

Kevin Francis Gray, Greek Onyx Girl, 2018, carrara marble and onyx on bronze pin and marble & corten steel base, 178 × 98 × 63 cm; © Kevin Francis Gray, courtesy Pace Gallery

Greek Onyx Girl (2018) Kevin Francis Gray Kevin Francis Gray’s Greek Onyx Girl (2018) was first exhibited at Frieze London 2018, marking the début of a new body of work. After the success of his three solo exhibitions in 2017 – in Marketplace Gallery, Northern Ireland; Pace Gallery, New York; and Villa Santo Sospir, France – Gray embraced the task of pushing his work forward, ever challenging the physical limitations of stone. Displayed on an elegant bronze pin and marble base, Greek Onyx Girl gives the illusion of a modern artefact, echoing classical Roman statuary or the lost treasures of Ancient Greece. Those familiar with Gray’s earlier works will recognise the supple manipulation of the stone, particularly in the delicate contours of the lips. However, the incorporation of the striking slab of jade-green onyx, slicing her portrait, shows us the tensions boiling under the veneer of her beauty. There is an emergency; an urgent need to literally destroy and break through his previous bodies of work, as well as those of sculptors from past generations. Joanne Laws

Ruth E. Lyons, Iontaise/Iontas (Fossil/Wonder), 2019, granite, resin, miscellaneous objects, stainless steel; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist

Screw Protruding Tubes (2019) Nero Profondo (2019) Fergus Martin IN ALL OF his work, Fergus Martin is concerned with scale and space and light as reflected in his paintings, photographs and sculptures. The sculptures I am referencing are his most recent, included in the exhibition ‘Then and Now, Fergus Martin’ (15 February – 13 October 2019) at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The titles are very apt as Martin aims to present the work as it is and his preoccupation with ordinary everyday objects, especially those relating to industrial materials. The material in these sculptures is plastic covered in car paint. The visual response as you approach is one of infinity and up close of serenity and sensuality. The high gloss finish daringly invites touch. The tubes are placed on the wall in such a way as to give a sense of floating and yet the reality is that these are tough objects. They reflect an aspect of our culture that can be seen as hard and unyielding and yet they have a magnificent beauty that can defy description. The artist himself has said “I would like the work to have a real and material presence, to contain my feelings about the weight and density of things, their expansion and contraction, containment and release as well as their fragility and impermanence”. Oliver Dowling

Fergus Martin, Screw Protuding Tubes, 2019, plastic pipe, plastic spacers, carpaint, 15 pipes, each pipe 100 x 7 cm (left). Nero Profondo, plastic pipe, plastic spacers, carpaint, 1 pipe, 100 x 7cm (right); photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Artist Interviews

Scale and Ambition JANE FOGARTY AND ISABEL NOLAN DISCUSS SOME OF THE TECHNICAL AND CONCEPTUAL ASPECTS OF SCULPTURAL PRACTICE. Jane Fogarty: Thank you for agreeing to this interview. As you know, after graduating from art college, I worked as your studio assistant for a number of years. This is a wonderful opportunity for me to more specifically discuss with you approaches to art, and sculpture in particular. Your sculptures often feel as if they are on the brink of collapse; yet they are created using industrial materials such as welded metals, modroc, glass and jesmonite. Frequently you finish the work with fabric or pastel colours which have the effect of softening the overall appearance. They are beautiful objects. What drives these aesthetic choices?

Isabel Nolan: Thanks to you also, Jane. Something that probably cuts across all of the work is that I like it to look and feel handmade – with visible brushstrokes, stitching, joints and so forth. When I’m trying to figure out how to make certain forms or images happen, special materials or technical ingenuity doesn’t appeal to me much, so works usually hover in the middle of a spectrum that has high finish at one end and found objects or ready-mades at the other. There is something about the tension of a thing that clearly is made as an artwork but is also trying to belong to the world in an ordinary way that I like a great deal. I suspect that is where the materials and the softening come in. Colour is seductive and transformative, and I think it changes the attitude, even the speed, of a work, whether it pops or withdraws. I want works to be available and pulling away, wrong and generous. In big picture terms, in the world at large, most things feel only temporarily coherent. The meaning or existence of anything is always on the verge of collapse. I want that mixture of familiarity and imminent disintegration to permeate the work.

JF: I’m thinking specifically of Turning Point (2010) in Dublin Airport T2 – when conceiving of this sculpture, how influential was the site on its scale?

IN: I think both the brief and the location required that scale.

I had to push for the central location because I wanted the work to be in the midst of things, visibly if not actually ‘in the way’. It is, or certainly was at the time, the only non-functional thing in the airport and I wanted it to assert its purely aesthetic role, so it needed to be large, but not domineering. The colour changed during the realisation – originally it was to be a kind of odd lilac colour, but I realised it would disappear into the colour scheme of the terminal. In thinking about how you work with colour: on the one hand, you use pre-made coloured tissue papers to make the sculptural works, and on the other, you carefully mix egg tempera to paint with – I’m wondering where the control lies? It seems there is a nice tension between the precision and relinquishment of choice at play...

JF: Yes, I always set parameters when I begin making my work. The predetermined colour from tissue paper used in the sculptures was a way of having the form and surface continuous; the colour did not sit on top of a support – it was embedded within it. This resulted in sculptures with a friendly, pastel colour palette. I have relinquished control of the end result; a paradigm is established and must be followed through. For the egg tempera paintings, I create a very specific palette derived from colour swatches of the sculptures.

The control is there, but in another way. This approach helps me when working in a wholly abstract way; it determines the framework which the artworks function in. Your work straddles figuration and abstraction. At what point do you determine which approach is most appropriate for an idea or new piece of work?

IN: I don’t know that I see a clear boundary between them.

It is difficult to think of abstraction or figuration as distinct modes without invoking a set of artificial separations. What

a work might be doing, how it comports itself or occupies space is more interesting to me than deciding whether a form I would like to exist – to see in the world – will be either abstract or figurative. I’m not at all sure I would know how to designate a lot of my works as one or the other – I tend to think in terms of actions. Something might be opening up, or shutting in on itself, breaking apart or coalescing. Likewise, work that stays slippery within conventions or subverts them quietly is the most interesting to me. No matter what approach you settle on, people generally want to find a reference for the work or make an analogy out of it... “It’s like a... it reminds me... it’s about...”

JF: That’s an interesting point; I think we strive to apply language and terms of reference to things or artworks. Really the terms abstraction and figuration are all about language.

Do we have a word to describe what’s in front of us? I like the idea of work staying slippery within conventions. Finally, I was wondering, as we face into the new decade, what do you think is the potential for sculpture in Ireland?

IN: Bloody hell. That’s a tough question. Across every generation, there are a lot of terrific artists in and from Ireland making sculptural work – so in that sense, the potential is vast.

I would love to see new studios open here: huge, adaptable spaces that could accommodate the production of very ambitious, large-scale projects. I’ve little interest in spectacle for the sake of it, but we are much too used to working in small rooms. Large studios would dramatically shift the capacities of artists here to work to their full potential. It would be very exciting to see what artists could do with superb facilities.

And apart from the aesthetic/intellectual/social potential, there is a secondary sense that resource-rich artists can more easily garner curatorial (and commercial) attention that is harder to snag when you are working on three pieces simultaneously, rather than eleven or thirty. In the long term though, the appetite for that kind of work, or those ways of working look potentially untenable, or perhaps I mean increasingly inappropriate... It may be that the future for artistic activity is shaped in material terms by our collective consciousness of climate change. Dennis McNulty once posed a question during a panel discussion I was involved with, querying what it might mean to make sculpture on a small island. I think it’s a weird and interesting question to ponder and I wonder if it will become ever more relevant, as the era of cheap air travel possibly draws to a close. Is this a question that might inform your own work in any way, or more broadly, what you see as the potential for sculptural work in Ireland?

Jane Fogarty, sm no.10(s), 2019, paper, crepe paper, glue, jesmonite, pigment, installation view, ‘slow motion’, MART Gallery; photograph by Stephen Maybury, courtesy the artist

JF: I hadn’t considered the consequences of island living in relation to a sculptural practice until recently. Transporting objects abroad is costly and not environmentally friendly but I have similar concerns when producing objects full stop. I try and keep an eye towards an environmentally sound way of working but ultimately, I am adding more things to the world.

Conversely, I don’t want to live in a world where certain kinds of art are no longer produced. Maybe these questions will shape the art of future generations and drive them towards new technologies and cross-disciplinary ways of working, while becoming ever more environmentally, politically and socially engaged. This may negate the need for mega-studios in Ireland, but I wonder if it would hamper our artistic potential and international presence? It will be interesting to see how it unfolds anyway.

Isabel Nolan’s work includes sculpture, textiles, paintings, drawings, photography and writing.

Jane Fogarty is a Dublin-based artist working with sculpture and painting.

Isabel Nolan, It Was Hot, Dense And Smooth, 2018; The Light Poured Out Of You, 2017; and Partial Eclipse (Above), 2017 – 2018, mild steel, paint, fabric and dye; courtesy the artist, Kerlin Gallery and EVA International

The Visual Artists' News Sheet

Critique Edition 49: March – April 2020

Daphne Wright, Zimmer, 2019, installation view, ‘A Quiet Mutiny’; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2020

Daphne Wright ‘A quiet mutiny’ Crawford Art Gallery, Cork 15 November 2019 – 16 February 2020

Daphne Wright, ‘A quiet mutiny’, installation view, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; photograph by Jed Niezgoda; courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery

‘A QUIET MUTINY’ by Daphne Wright is a

sculptural exhibition, showcasing the artist’s skills, techniques and competencies across the materials of clay and film. The exhibition is dominated by over 30 pieces of sculpture, made from unfired clay – the epitome of a hands-on material. In order to sculpt with clay, the artist has to touch and bring close this flexible material during the process of making. Such gestures chime with the ‘humanist’ themes that are present in the exhibition, signified in large part by the clay sculptures on display, depicting an assortment of domestic objects. A fridge door, Zimmer frame, shopping trolley, clothes-horse, and rug – all of these objects surround us at different stages of life, from infant, to child, to adult and into our elder years. The sculptural depends on the forming and placing of an object, so that it stands out from the ordinary stream of our world. Making works emerge from the reservoir of the domestic world, as Wright does, plays with the limits of the sculptural.

On the back wall of the ground-floor gallery, there are 18 pieces lined-up – six upon each of the three shelves. These pieces are more like masses of material than fully formed objects – nothing identifiable, but familiar and relatable nonetheless. Some look remarkably like ginger roots in their rhizomatic form, others more like half-alien bodies. They are at the stage where forming is still taking place. Similarly, there is a strange-yet-familiar quality to the video piece, Song of Songs (2019). This work features an assemblage of two humans – a middle-aged man and a more senior woman – facing the camera, her raised hands held open by his, both connected as one. They engage in a performance that seems to be improvised in the moment of recording. She chews, he hums, he covers her eyes with his right hand and she stops chewing, sounds and gestures that allude to the warming up exercises of actors and singers. Splutters of enigmatic dialogue are emitted: “Excuse Me! … Excuse Me! … Feeds itself! Nay, nay, nay breathes itself! Nay, nay, nay.… Monster.” I’m tempted to say there is something Cthulhuesque being signified, but the characters do not emit a sinister aura. Wright has referred to her films as ‘notebooks’; as storage spaces for ideas relating to her sculptures. The video thus raises the interesting question of what is sculptural in film.

If we take it that one is based on making objects

and the other on movement, then here the positioning of the actors bears the clear mark of sculptural thought, exhibiting an understanding of the affects released by specific distancing and dimensions. They kneel but are framed to confuse the viewer’s sense of how they are placed.

Song of Songs also stood out in contrast to the exhibition’s uniform colour palette, dominated by the cool, chalky-grey tones of unfired clay. In Wright’s second video piece, Is everything okay?

(2019), an old man robotically recites phrases from the worlds of business and health care. The application of face paint depicts the man as a lion, making him resemble a speaking sculpture.

The face paint’s faded quality underlines the forlorn quality of the film. In fact, it should be noted that muted colour is used across all media in this show. In the eight watercolours of the ‘Little Sad Face’ series and in the clay plates, colour is deployed so faintly as to give the impression of fading away, hence adding pathos.

Many of the sculptures play with the fragility of structure. The pencil-thin frame of Shopping Trolley (2019) expresses this structure-essence-fragility motif. When light shines on it from behind, its frame seems doubly threadlike and insubstantial. Another piece, a sculpted cat on a pedestal, was so fragile and precariously set in place that it had been broken by the time I made my first visit to the gallery. It was returned when I next visited, but I couldn’t help think how the absence of this sculpture somehow underlined the compositional qualities of the collective works.

The large sunflower sculptures that form the bulk of publicity material for the show are towering examples of both the aesthetic and human themes that inform the exhibition. They are lanky yet stable, potted in very ordinary buckets, their pathos is that of the colourful and lively, gone droopy and drained of colour. These flowers cannot be separated from art historical references to Van Gogh. But Wright’s take on the sunflowers – as with her take on all the objects in the exhibition – draws our attention to the specificity of sculpture’s affects.

John Thompson is an artist, art writer and researcher whose interests are conceptual art, politics and materialist philosophy. He is also a co-curator of the Guesthouse Project, Cork.

‘Past/ures’ The Library Project, Dublin 17 – 31 January 2020 ‘PAST/URES’ AT THE Library Project, Dublin, opened during the same week that over 400 farmers from all over Ireland reluctantly deserted their farms and descended on Dublin’s Merrion Square in their tractors to demand a new deal with the government and a fair increase in price for their beef. These notions of abandonment and defying the odds resonate throughout all of the offerings in ‘Past/ures’, which was curated by Leah Corbett, the recipient of the Black Church Print Studio’s Emerging Curator Award 2019.

Caitríona Leahy’s prints, Monument to Memory I & II (2011), recontextualise the familiar by extracting abandoned handball alleys from their environmental surroundings and depicting them instead as mysterious monolithic structures, floating in a timeless realm, the echoic architecture accentuated in a crisp monochromatic muteness. In our contemporary collective consciousness, these structures may now be viewed as naive as any folly, dormant of love and players, yet through Leahy’s intentions these redundant structures take on an almost spiritual monumentalism. She excavates a series of ambiguous tensions that swing between memory, temporality and utilitarian concerns around our collective occupation of architecture.

A block of salted beeswax rests on a folded rug atop of a rusting galvanised metal stand.

Katie Watchorn’s forlorn sculptural work, A Calf Remembered (2018), speaks of dependency and considers the shared intimacy of an animal’s narrative in the context of farming. It quietly confronts us with a creed of vulnerability, whilst we encounter what feels like an orphaned entity. The work reads like a poem of three verses.

The preserved organic substance nestled upon the domestic, momentarily shielded from the inevitable cyclical agricultural reality. This layering and the sensitive economies of language and form are what we have come to expect from Watchorn’s multifaceted practice.

A cold light convincingly bleeds, framing another galvanised structure in Dorothy Smith’s oil painting, Mathew’s Cow Shed (2009), as she interrogates the contrasting linear interior of the fallow building. On the squelch of the organic floor, lays a mysterious white object, perhaps discarded by the occupants of the composition who have now all but vanished. Smith’s second painting, The Dairy (2009), plays with similar com-

positional observations, this time a hefty yellow hose trails from the foreground into an open steel door, like an umbilical cord connecting us, the viewer, to the darkened interior. Smith deftly illuminates these momentary stillnesses, lending them a contemplative vigour that roots us deeply in the world she depicts.

Ronan Smyth’s Westwood Jazz No.27 (2019) is a tactile cacophony that smirks with an array of unnatural materials, yet still speaks to organic form. A series of impractical polymer clay vessels and objects adorn a circle cut from an MDF frame, brimming with mossy green fringes, defining a black velvet pit. Smyth evokes a sense of playful futility with this materiality that synergises the labour of the artist and his agricultural environs. There is a creed of campness at play here that is seldom articulated in a rural context, whilst the friction of form confronts palpable generational tensions.

“We carry the weight of the past – the gaze of someone else is always present – another viewer, another father”. Hayley Gault’s text, Things me and my father have in common (2018), is a homage to both her heritage and the resilience that she and her father share in spite of the strangling vice of global capitalism. Gault meditates on the solitary labour of the artistic and farming communities that “replicates that of many other dispersed individuals, working in their own way”. It is an emotive consideration of isolation and togetherness that is reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s poem, Digging (1966).

‘Past/ures’ is a contemplative window offering us a view of contemporary rural life that brings together a group of artists who are very much immersed in the culture of cultivation. Corbett’s consideration of the fertility of both the Irish soil and the artist’s perspective goes beyond the poetic and the metaphorical. ‘Past/ures’ does not romanticise our agricultural heritage. It speaks of solitude and collectivity, of loss and resilience without ever leaning on nostalgia. It depicts an Irish landscape, without the saturated green pastures of optimism; it problematises the precarity of both artist and farmer as they look upon a shared horizon, and yet press on with the practice and production of hope.

Brendan Fox is a writer, curator and visual artist based between Dublin and Rome.

‘Past/ures’, installation view, Library Project, Dublin; photograph by Kate Bowe O’Brien; courtesy of the artists and Leah Corbett

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2020

Maria Loboda ‘Hearing Otherworldly Music’ The Model, Sligo 1 December 2019 – 2 February 2020

Sarah Lewtas ‘Dearest, Someone Was Asking for You’ Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny 7 – 25 January 2020 ‘DEAREST, SOMEONE WAS Asking for You’ is

Maria Loboda, The Omniabsence, 2019, high fidelity equipment, fake snow; photograph by Daniel Paul McDonald, courtesy of the artist and The Model, Sligo

“SHITE-TALK”, A woman remarked, as she passed me and a group of art students discussing Maria Loboda’s enigmatic exhibition. Loboda has a fondness for ‘verbal sculptures’ and might have appreciated the hewn simplicity of the woman’s curt assessment.2 We were standing around a stack of silver audio components covered in fake snow. Perhaps it’s a miniature tower block, a student suggested, its inhabitants sealed in ice. It’s as though the sound has been dampened, someone else said; snow-covered things are quiet and soft. Consisting of several cassette decks and amplifiers, the waist-high tower also included a graphic equaliser – an outmoded component from the recent past. Called The Omniabsense (2019), the piece was strikingly reminiscent of Rodney Graham’s Rheinmetall/ Victoria 8 (2003). Also focused on outmoded technologies, Graham’s work stages a stand-off between a 35mm film projector and the images it projects of a snow-covered typewriter. We wanted our own stand-off, but the curt critic wasn’t hanging around.

Suggesting the slatted light and shade of film noir interiors, a wall of grey and white horizontal stripes leads you into the main exhibition area. Once inside, the evocation of film continues with a series of obliquely connected objects and texts, giving the impression of an extended mise-en-scéne. Huge and exotic looking bugs crawl across many of these set pieces (not literally crawling – the bugs were either fake or dead, I wasn’t sure) instilling an entropic, mildly nauseating air. Perhaps the bugs are being curious on our behalf, I thought, feeling their way into the cryptic zones our minds find it difficult to enter.

In dOCUMENTA (13), Loboda moved twenty potted cypress trees through a parkland under the cover of darkness. In last year’s Venice Biennale, she draped lumps of wet clay in shirts and sheets of plastic. Her work tends to remain protean and shifting, changing with each presentation and context, the viewer a protagonist in a game of hide and seek. A group of framed, photographic prints is titled, Sleeping with Gods (2019). Under the cover of blankets, a figure (we see only the hands) holds a book open on an image of a clay pot. Different in each image, the ceramic centrefolds are illuminated by torchlight, lending a surreptitious, slightly forbidden air to the perusal of otherwise innocent looking containers. The idea of containment carries into

the central exhibition space, where a black and white painting, The Business Vase (2019), extends across several walls. The painting describes the outline of a curvaceous vase, draped with a man’s tie at various stages of unravelling. The unravelling seemed to figure a transformation of some kind – but of what, and into what, remained stubbornly opaque.

Less opaque, but remaining somewhat impenetrable, A Man Takes Down a Painting while Standing on the Sofa (2019) is a stained glass panel, depicting the action described in the title; a scene bathed in the same striated light found at the exhibition entrance. This large panel covers a window overlooking the gallery café below. From the vantage of the café, the stained glass panel appears like a magic window, at once obscuring what’s inside and inviting you in. The image is fashioned from a moment in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980). Loboda cites Schrader’s film, and particularly John Bailey’s distinctive cinematography, as an important influence. Bailey’s photography tends to draw attention to its own facture, his knowing, theatrical artificiality chiming with much of Loboda’s work here.2 The Model’s largest room is left mostly empty and in semi-darkness. A handful of alabaster wall lights, The Chosen (2019) – crawling with the aforementioned bugs – offer a glimmer of illumination. An enormous, stylised painting, Grand Interiors (2018) partially blocks access to the room. Such grand gestures are accompanied by little ones – a discreetly positioned cocktail, Note the Old Fashioned in the Rafters (2019) – adding up to a show that teases while keeping you at a distance. A vinyl wall text, Untitled (2019) cites a passage from a Raymond Chandler novel, “… We make the finest packages in the world, Mr. Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.” It’s a blunt note to end on. But you get the feeling that Loboda’s work doesn’t really end. It continues to be unwrapped, again and again, prompting speculations and intrigues, devoid of definitive answers.

an exhibition by Sarah Lewtas in Gallery 2 and the Atrium Space of Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny. The work is conversational and reflective; there is dialogue between artworks themselves and within the trajectory of the artist’s practice – new work references older work and materials from 20 to 30 years ago. This creates an atmosphere of continuity and coherence, while simultaneously making individual artworks difficult to fully reconcile as standalone entities. Everything is intertwined and related; the work is multi-layered in terms of materiality, production and referents. Lewtas often addresses another person (mostly unnamed) in her pieces. In this case, there is a favoured addressee, endearingly referred to as ‘dearest’, with no further information supplied.

The exhibtion was conceived as a site-specific response to Gallery 2. The viewer enters the gallery at an elevated level, accessesing the space below via a ramp. Lewtas saw this as a “sympathetic atmosphere for the components of the installation”.1 These sculptural elements are intended to communicate an abyss or transitory space. Lewtas’s title for this main installation is ‘Dearest’ and she includes a lengthy subtitle to reflect her primary thoughts on the space: “Abyss, Labyrinth, Mystery, Myth, Revelation, Lost, Found, Time space continuum, Key, Open, Close, Echo, Yoni, Tea cup, Taj Mahal, stuff like that…” She also references ‘Yoni’ from Sanskrit, meaning ‘abode’, ‘source’ or ‘womb’ – the feminine generative power. This subtitle also includes a dialogic between opposites, such as lost/found and open/close. ‘Abyss’ is important, in referencing a deep immeasurable space or cavity, and also linking with the sea. The gallery is an otherwise confined space, yet the artist sees it as much more. The installation consists of a centrally-placed assemblage, a handmade seat created from horse bones (these were found 25 years ago by the artist’s daughter on Magheraroarty Beach), upholstered with velvet and placed on a black pinth.

The ‘abyss’ could be that of the black net canopy, placed above the central sculptural element.

There are six concentric circles of black netting and each varies in length. Their edges are weighted with small pebbles sewn into the netting that give the impression of sea forms, particularly

jellyfish, further emphasised by the transparency of the netting. The jellyfish could act as a cogent metaphorical counterpart for Lewtas here, as the species can detect stimuli and transmit impulses throughout the nerve net and around a circular nerve ring. Many jellyfish have ocelli – light sensitive organs to detect light and dark. The artist’s placement of the seat, spot-lit on a plinth below the net circles, is interesting; there is an inherent dialogue created between the nets and the plinth object. The activation of the netting in terms of its nerves and light sensitivity strengthens the relationship between these sculptural elements.

On the walls there are a series of plaster reliefs. These feature the face of St Gobnait, the patron saint of bees, each within a hexagonal shape, referencing the cells of a beehive. On one wall there is a linear sequence of reliefs and opposite there is a configuartion of nineteen reliefs, arranged to reflect the structure of a hive. There is a final solitary relief visible on the wall as the viewer enters the space. There is a general ambience of light and dark in this gallery. The installation has a reflective, almost spirtual dimension; the abyss referred to by the artist might be the space of the imagination, entered when viewing this sculptural construct.

The final element is a series of eight drawings that the artist has entitled ‘Epigynes’, featuring the external genital structure of a female spider.

These were previously exhibited in 2002 at Context Gallery (now called CCA) in Derry, and are part of Lewtas’s inspiration for her ‘Dearest’ installation. She observes: “I relate to them in different ways, as with many things their strange symmetry gives them a meditative mandala like quality which is what first appealed to me”.2 Lewtas is an artist who works slowly. Her sculptural installations are often products of an extended period of time, consideration and reflection. This sustained engagement and self-investment by the artist combine to create engaging and thought-provoking scultural realms.

Marianne O’Kane Boal is a writer and curator. She is expert advisor on art for the Ministerial Advisory Group for Architecture and the Built Environment.

Notes 1 Author email interview with the artist, 31 January 2020.

2 Ibid.

John Graham is an artist based in Dublin.

Notes 1 From an interview with the artist by Karolina MajewskaGüde. artmargins.com 2 See especially Bailey’s work on Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

Sarah Lewtas, Dearest, 2019, velvet upholstered horse-bone, photograph by Charlie Joe Doherty; courtesy of the artist and Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2020

Alan Magee ‘Among the dregs of daily toil’ The LAB Gallery, Dublin 7 February – 16 March 2020 ALAN MAGEE’S EXHIBITION, ‘Among the

dregs of daily toil’, could have been perfectly timed to capture the zeitgeist of the recent general election. In a series of highly conceptual works, Magee explores understandings of labour and the handmade, broadly speaking, through the prism of critical theory. Magee creates an allegory for how human intellect and self-identity is tied into the material self – the sustenance of the body and life. Marx understood this as ‘species essence’, from which individuals have been alienated by modern capitalism’s demand for the mass production of useless and meaningless things. Magee presents seven works, as listed on the gallery leaflet – a mix of kinetic and object sculpture, video and printed imagery in a taut and bare display that benefits from an abundance of white space. Magee finds different ways to illustrate the mind-body relationship by creating a visual study of himself making digital and ceramic objects. From one piece to another, ideas overlap to create satisfying linkages.

The first piece encountered is the most poetic work. Subconscious Labour, Conscious Growth is placed in The LAB’s vestibule space on a slender square plinth with a sleek glass case. Inside the case a set of seven iron finger-nail castings are casually arranged, as though they are artefacts in a vitrine, a bit like some of the Ór displays at the National Museum of Ireland. These items, however, are pitiful, unsightly and grubby with rust and white corrosion. They carry both the contemporary burden and the historical loss of human endeavour to capitalism.

In the main gallery, a large banner hangs over a bar and drops down on two sides, confronting the visitor immediately. Machine Flesh #1 & #8 depicts the veined surface of unidentifiable internal organs through which fingers can be seen pushing and pressing down. To the right of the banners another work, Immaterial Organ Series, comprises 12 slick hexagonal grey plinths laid out in a molecule diagram imitating a trendy tech expo. On each plinth, Magee has placed one crude and gaudy handmade ceramic sculpture of an organ – a liver, kidney, bladder and so on. These vulgar lumps of bright pink glossy matter are, like the fingernail iron castings, at odds with the highly conceptual and technological nature of the other works on show. In

the next space a video projection shows Magee forming these ceramic organs while wearing a virtual reality headset with a back projection showing his virtual environment – simply a 3D image of the organ he is trying to blindly approximate in clay. The banner, organs and video triggers an abstract feeling of visceral discomfort – a kind of involuntary gut wrenching that is utterly let down by the elementary appearance of the ceramic objects. Both the iron castings and these three linking works amplify the feeling of disconnection between body and mind.

Hanging on a metal scaffold nearby, a robotic arm flexes and moves from time to time in Celestial Machines (a). Beside it, in Celestial Machines (b), an eleven-minute video documents Magee’s complex construction of the robot from tiny component parts. This is the most satisfying work in the exhibition and makes for compulsive viewing. The arm emits murmuring clicks and wooshes with each flex, moving gracefully in a dancing ballet. There is closure in this work, as the product of the intricate and skilled workmanship in the video is evidenced by the robot prototype elegantly demonstrating its range of movement. The two works reinforce the fundamental affirmation of making useful things in an uncomplicated and humble manner.

The final work in the show, 1 and 0 paper balls, brings humour to Magee’s thesis. A tiny recessed shelf holds two tiny scrunched up paper balls, one of which has been 3D printed in sandstone.

Twelve feet above, till roll spews endlessly from an invisible slot, upon which the code required to process the 3D printing is thermally printed. The scrunched-up paper is described in the gallery list as Magee’s ‘redundancy letter from lecturing post’. While it punctuates the exhibition with a very definitive full stop, there is also a sense that Magee has barely scraped the surface of this humongous human theme. The recent general election, helped in some way by climate action, marks a growing consciousness of how the capitalist economy has impacted the human condition, wellbeing and the environment. Magee pitches an insightful and affecting series of works that is reflective of this awakening.

Carissa Farrell is a writer and curator based in Dublin.

Alan Magee, Celestial Machines (a) (detail), installation view, LAB Gallery, Dublin, photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist and The LAB Gallery

Lauren Gault ‘C I T H R A’ Gasworks, London 23 January – 22 March 2020

Lauren Gault, C I T H R A, 2020, installation view, commissioned by Gasworks; photograph by Andy Keate, courtesy of the artist

‘C I T H R A’ IS AN exhibition of new work by

Belfast-born and Glasgow-based artist, Lauren Gault. This is Gault’s first solo exhibition in London, showcasing installations that both revisits and further exploits the artist’s key approaches and concerns, which revolve around the use of unorthodox techniques and a wide variety of materials. The show emerges out of research undertaken by Gault during a residency at Gasworks in spring 2019. A key starting point came from a publication held in the British Library, a long forgotten science-fiction novel, The Men of Mars (1907), by Martha Craig, a relative of Gault’s. Craig was an explorer who developed a series of theories, including explanations for the origin of the universe, material travel and dual consciousness. From this book, loose conceptual overlaps feed into each other and inform subjects addressed in the exhibition.

The gallery text primarily frames this conceptual riffing around the artist’s upbringing in rural Ireland and the mythological figure of Mithras. An early rival to Christianity, this Roman religion produced iconography which centred on bullslaying, with repeated images of dogs, snakes and ravens. What connects these disparate ideas is a shared vocabulary relating to the history of agriculture, which is present throughout the show, and within this, Gault finds stories about wildness and domestication.

It seems almost as if the two exhibition spaces are divided between these polar opposites. The first space addresses ideas of wildness, through sculptures of wild animals and burning Roman arches; while the second describes the rise of the industrial, through depictions of extinct species and the usage of mass-production techniques.

In the first room, there are three distinct sculptures which share a pale palette of pure and off-whites, light greys and a rare poke of brown. Collectively, the sculptures act as a stage for particular protagonists: arched and snarling eyeless dogs with sharp teeth, stretching upon their hind legs against the taut nylon; a leisurely disembodied hand resting on a platform above; and hand-sized bulls sinking into the base of a long, narrow floor-based sculpture. In the second, mostly dark and empty space, three transparent water tanks are cut into the ceiling. Light

shines through the liquid within each of the tanks, casting a gentle sparkle onto the wall behind. The emptiness in the space allows the light to bounce and glow, in contrast to the synthetic quality of the water tanks. One easy-to-miss hoof-print emerges from the wall, hauntingly depicting an auroch – an extinct species of wild cattle – serving as a reminder of what progress can leave behind.

Related but not exactly the same, there’s a logic between the adjacent poetic resonances of history, biography and mythology which seems to guide the construction of the works. It is less useful to think of these sculptures as singular objects; rather they seem to act as a sequence of materials, relationships and actions which hold a symbolic weight of their own. I think that’s why the charm of the works is found more so in particular sculptural flourishes, rather than the whole piece itself: in the taut nylon, stretched over solid wooden boards, which gives way to long sleek slender curves of fabric; in the offwhite dust, set against the bright titanium surfaces of the sculptures and walls, which act as framing devices; and in a sagging ball of glass, frozen like a water droplet.

While there are many narratives and formal strategies to engage with in Gault’s work, it’s something beyond this which feels significant too. Her process is shaped by the rituals which she riffs upon, while history – that of agriculture, of Ireland and her own personal biography – becomes a raw material, creating rich points of departure for wider social and ecological concerns.

More and more contemporary artists are revisiting unknown thinkers with alternative theories as subjects for their work, with such inquiries often focused on redeeming counter-histories and reflecting on other existential possibilities.

Gault creates sculpturally-led works which hint at something almost occultic, the off-terrain spirituality of rituals centered on a tension between wildness and domestication, harnessing the otherworldly energy of nature and myths.

Chris Hayes is an Irish writer and editor based in London.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Artist Interviews

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The Vernacular of Utility KATIE WATCHORN TALKS TO MATT CALDERWOOD ABOUT THEIR SHARED BACKGROUNDS IN FARMING AND ART MAKING. Katie Watchorn: You’re based in London, but are from Antrim – do you have a space in Antrim where you can make work?

Matt Calderwood: Yes, my family still have the farm where I grew up and while I’ve been living in London for 20 years or so, I spend quite a lot of time there and always consider it home. It has sometimes been the obvious location to make specific works, like, early on, there was a video work I wanted to make that involved firing a shotgun and, being a farmer, my dad owned one, so I was able to go and make that on the farm relatively easily. Later, in 2011, I was commissioned to make some new work which was going to be a film and sculpture. I decided to use the opportunity and to turn a brutalist looking concrete potato shed into a makeshift film studio. I’ve continued to use that space as a studio since, but whatever I’ve done in there, the biggest part of the project was always convincing my father it was a good idea for me to work there at all.

KW: I had a similar situation with a shed at home. The most important part of making that space was the interaction with somebody else, to actually renovate it. Which turned into the work, or the performance.

MC: Yes, for me too it was important to work with my dad to clean up the space and to put myself in a position where I had a place to work there that would allow me to be there more. I started to really think about making a new space from scratch; or making an ‘object’ that you could use the inside of. I was thinking about scale – the ever-expanding volumes of art and exhibition spaces. I started thinking how you could make quite a considerable sculptural object that is, at the same time, quite a modest building. These two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive and the messy notion of function can be an exciting difficulty to add into an artwork.

KW: I’m interested to hear about your family’s farming background. In my own upbringing, a distance was formed quite early on, which led me to establish my own relationship to the farm. Can you describe how, if at all, the farm may have impacted your work?

MC: When I was born, I would have been seen as a likely successor to the farm, so it’s like I had to create my own distance. But now, I spend a lot more time there and often think about the similarities between making art and farming. They are both ways of life more than careers. They both require self-reliance, ingenuity and buckets of optimism. What I’m working on now as an artist may not come to fruition for months or years and sometimes projects come to nothing.

In the studio and on the farm, there are great rewards and sometimes dead losses – but, there’s this sense that anything is possible – being capable and self-sufficient is a really central theme to both.

KW: Do you think that growing up in that material heavy environment has informed what you’ve been drawn to?

MC: For the longest time I was doing the best I could to distance myself from those materials. The more I look at it now, I appreciate that these are the things I have inevitably been drawn to. When I think about materials like the rubber I’ve used in the past, to me it was industrial; there was an absence of hand-making in it. But when I think of it in a farming context, there’s so many things that also have that quality. When I’ve cast rubber, it was because I needed a resilient material that could be thrown around without getting damaged. It could also be inked up and used as printing blocks to make works on paper. I’ve used concrete for its mass and permanence and plasterboard for its vulnerability to damage. I am often choosing materials that will serve the idea and perform specific functions. On the other hand, I have used found materials, like discarded estate agent signs, to make functional objects like chairs. I have often used items found on site as components in ‘found object’ works. In this

Matt Calderwood, Some things just work out, 2004, Shovel, broom, 150 × 96 × 50 cm; photograph by Matt Calderwood, courtesy of the artist

case the object dictates the form of the work, but the initial idea and site dictates the selection of object. When I’ve used performance, it’s mostly utilised as a document of an experiment – it has been particularly useful in capturing a deliberate failure or collapse of a system like a ‘found object’ work.

KW: With your balanced works, the patina of life and labour is still present in the objects, unlike the manufactured ones.

What draws you to certain objects?

MC: I like the idea of taking used, functional objects that carry a record of their life’s work on their skin. For example, Some things just work (2004) was made around the heyday of reality TV. These two very ordinary, everyday objects, which had been living in a warehouse their entire life, were now free.

They were like a celebrity broom and shovel that never had to work again. Some of the more precarious pieces came from being invited to be part of shows. I would travel to the gallery with nothing or, at least significantly less things than I would need to make the work, so that I knew the work had to be made with what I found on site. It kept a very live aspect to everything. Like on the farm, when a hole appears in a hedge, at that particular time, anything at hand that can fill it is the right thing. That could be a bale of hay, the bonnet of a car, a wooden pallet or a person. That sense of pressing things into duty due to requirement in a specific moment – I think there’s a creativity in that act and that choice. The objects I’m drawn to are usually unlikely candidates. They often echo the make do attitude I’ve witnessed on the farm. In the end, the thing doing the job is often really far removed from what you might expect to be there. There’s a natural pleasure in that.

Matt Calderwood, Span, 2009, shovels, buckets, plastic crates, nylon strap, paint can, 200 × 35 × 100 cm, photograph by Stephen White, courtesy of the artist

Katie Watchorn is an artist from County Carlow. She is currently based in Fire Station Artists’ Studios (until 2022) and is working towards a solo show as part of Glasgow International 2020 (24 April – 10 May) in Studio Pavilion at House for an Art Lover, Glasgow.

Matt Calderwood is an artist from Northern Ireland living and working in London and County Antrim. He is represented by Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London. mattcalderwood.com

Katie Watchorn, BalehomeBalehome, 2018, installation view, VISUAL Carlow; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist

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Artist Interviews

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Janet Mullarney, Ubiquitous Undesired Friend, 2009; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist

Staging Space JOHN RAINEY AND JANET MULLARNEY DISCUSS MATERIAL CONCERNS IN THEIR WORK.

John Rainey: When I’ve experienced your sculptures in the past, there were distinct points of identification for me. There’s a combination of a visual language – signs and symbols that you seem to have developed over time – with a type of rendering that suggests a natural affinity with materials. What were your early experiences of working with materials?

Janet Mullarney: I think everybody works with their own signs and symbols to a lesser or greater degree; visual language is what we’re at. We’re communicating what we can’t communicate through verbal or written language, through what happens to be a material language. When it works, I think one can understand what we’re looking at, without necessarily fully understanding it logically. As a child I was given a lot of materials to work with. I was given paint and had my father’s workshop to mess around in, making puppets for myself. He loved wood – we had an old Georgian house and he worked on it a lot. He had great skill. I obviously had a lot of admiration for that and wanted to be admired by him.

JR: My father also has a wood workshop, where he built and made things for our house. I was always very aware of what he was doing. I also have very clear memories of sculpting puppet heads in clay at a young age.

JM: These things are very formative. Later, as a young artist, I won many Glen Abbey and Caltex competitions, which gave me money to escape Ireland when the time came. In Italy, I dropped out of art school very easily; it meant nothing to me – I was far too young for it, I think. Besides many odd jobs, I started working in furniture restoration. Learning to work with wood in that context was a type of training. I sort of ignored art making until a lot later. Restoration is the opposite of art making really – the less you are seen, the better restorer you are. I was very intent at that, but then I made a little figure one Sunday afternoon – I’ve still got it. It was the first time I thought of sculpture. It went on from there without any clear idea of what an artist was meant to be doing.

JR: I have a similar core training in ceramics, introducing other materials over time. I’m interested in the pluralistic approach you have with materials, which seems to be led by a sense of appropriateness in any given instance. Are there other factors that inform your material choices?

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Artist Interviews

Janet Mullarney, Domestic Gods II, 1998, wood, plaster, wallpaper, mixed media, 210 × 80 × 50 cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 1998

JM: I spent time in India early in my career. That was transformative for my use of materials. It came about at the right time, in the sense that I had been working very studiously with life-size figures in wood. It was a more real-life approach that I think actually got at me and irritated me. It wasn’t really what I was after, even though knowing how a body works is absolutely imperative, if you’re doing figurative work – even if you’re doing ‘bad’ figurative work, you have to know how the body works. India made me realise that you didn’t need a studio, objects, tools – you didn’t need anything. You’d come across stuff lying on the beach that you could use – bits of wire, little bits of plastic and cloth. It was a matter of hunting, searching around and finding things. Nearly everything was considered precious, so leftovers were few but intriguing. In terms of combining materials, my dancers with the big hemp skirts from the late 1980s are important; I think they were quite courageous.

At that time, they would have been seen as very out of whack, but I didn’t care – of course I cared inside but I didn’t know I cared. Way back, I had seen Degas’ little dancer with her shaggy skirt, and she was extraordinary, like something that had been born thousands of years ago and would go on forever.

JR: Your sponge dogs are an interesting example too. Do people ever mistake what the materials are?

JM: Yes, the Ubiquitious Undesired Friend; there are several versions of it. I’ve done pieces in sponge and I’ve done pieces in bronze and I don’t think people know the difference.

I’ve done it on purpose because I’m tired of the art world putting a price on bronze and not on other materials. I play around with materials now and again, so people won’t know the difference. I’ve done the same with bronze pieces that I’ve remade in wood and vice versa.

JR: There’s a question I have about intentionality and how work develops. How fully formed is an idea when you begin?

John Rainey, Rolled Back from Copia Romana (installation detail), 2019; photograph by Dewi Tannatt Lloyd, courtesy of the artist

JM: With wood, it can take a bit of planning. You need to have an idea of what you’re doing. It’s much easier to surprise yourself in clay (or plaster or sponge or cardboard) – there, I’ve done things that I wasn’t expecting, certainly.

JR: It’s about clay usually being an additive process, whereas with wood it’s usually subtractive, so actions have to be more intentional?

JM: Clay, I don’t use much, unless I am definitely playing.

Spontaneity with wood and many other materials has happened more recently I suppose, after many years of knowing what I’m doing.

JR: I wonder what you think about the term playfulness and how that relates to a type of sculptural enquiry that may link our work. I’m using the word ‘play’ in the sense of inquisitiveness, and a kind of uninhibited openness in engaging with things that children have, but not all adults retain.

JM: That’s a good way to put it. I think ambiguity is in there too – embracing a sense of the ambiguous.

JR: I think having an eye for interplay, and ambiguousness is a big part of the process of staging exhibitions with works that span different time frames. I know you’ve done this on a number of occasions, and I’ve started to do it, more so in recent years. How do you approach that process?

JM: It takes a while. You can’t show everything, so you leave things out – and you’re sorry to leave some out – but then you realise if you put that in, then you can’t put in the other one, so it does take a lot of thinking. But the outcome is a lovely overview for oneself.

JR: I think the term ‘staging’ is important here.

JM: Yes, and the connections being staged are to do with size, shape, space; some sort of mental stream going on. Space

is the most important part of sculpture. How much space around, how much background, making sure there’s nothing interfering with sightlines. It’s one of the problems with sculpture – with painting it’s within its own frame, but with sculpture you’ve got to plan both the interplay and eye view that you have.

JR: That’s also one of the things that always drew me to sculpture though, that it sits within our world and you get a 360-degree experience of it.

JM: Very much so, although I don’t always worry about the whole 360 degrees in the work itself. I don’t mind you walking around it, but quite often, the back might be quite flat or even incised from another sculpture. It tells a story. It’s not all carved out or finished, but that adds to the whole, because I’ve said enough.

JR: What advice would you give to an early-career sculptor working today?

JM: I think it’s hard for younger artists because you used to be able to do more with a lot less. The main thing is to keep going and to realise when you’re being brave, even when you’re not thinking of yourself as brave. You’re going to despair, but you’ll come out of that despair, something else will happen and you’ll be delighted. Hold onto those moments when something is just working – there’s nothing better than when something you know is good comes out.

Janet Mullarney is a sculptor currently dividing her time between Ireland and Italy. janetmullarney.com

John Rainey is a sculptor based in Belfast. He is a current studio member at Flax Art Studios. johnrainey.co.uk

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Artist Interviews

A Pushed Over Fence SAM KEOGH AND ANNE TALLENTIRE DISCUSS ABSURDITY, SECURITY AND AGENCY. Sam Keogh: Well, to prepare for our conversation, I was reminding myself of some of your work. I looked at the series of ‘Manifesto’ works you made with John Seth, where you collect things from the street and bring them to the studio and clean and arrange those found things, whilst documenting the process. Then you present the documentation with the arrangement of objects in the gallery space. And it made me think – and I don’t mean this in a derisory way – this is absurd. Because what you’re doing is trying to make meaning from scratch, which has to begin with meaninglessness. I feel that whenever I begin something in the studio, that kind of hollow feeling of absurdity. But then I’ll finally do something, and then do something else to that thing and eventually something unexpected will happen, some phenomenon which is pleasurable to manipulate and eventually through that manipulation meaning starts to blossom. But in the beginning, it always feels ridiculous or absurd!

Anne Tallentire: It does. I think it is about being engaged with a process of looking for something that you can recognise as being meaningful to an ongoing internal conversation or a set of problems or ideas. For me this process requires in part going into a kind of temporary amnesia or blindness that is then necessary to recover from, to find something not ever fully understood. A folly perhaps. You don’t want what you find to be too familiar, because if too familiar it can lead to mindless repetition. So, this thing that is recognised has also to be uncomfortable, strange and unknown. It is a slightly bizarre activity, yes.

I was in Belfast over the last few days researching for work that will be in a show there this coming summer. I’m originally from the north, so Belfast is familiar, but my relationship

to the city has always been in relation to other people, my family or teaching duties. I’ve seldom made or shown work there, so I knew this would take me on a kind of fool’s errand that would necessitate recalibrating my past and present. So, as I often do when arriving to work in a place I don’t know, I walked around parts of the city to places I did not know, engaging a process of estrangement, that enabled me to think and experience the place differently. It was amazing.

SK: What happened?

AT: Well, I knew I wanted to find sites earmarked for or in various states development. Wasteland places. By total chance, I was given a room at the back of the hotel I stayed in, near the city centre, that overlooked a large derelict site. In the centre of the site, there was a black stain I assumed to be the remains of a 12th July bonfire. I then noticed along one edge a row of pushed over, temporary metal fencing panels standing in the most extraordinary configurations. It’s the kind of metal fencing you see at music festivals which sit in concrete blocks. This particular fence had been reinforced at key points with two more sections joining to form a triangle.

But large sections had been pushed over, upended.

Simply, it was fencing, upended in that particular way, but it was doing something I recognised but had never seen before. I trespassed into the space, to take some photographs.

Not long after an alarm began to beep which was, I think, triggered by a surveillance camera. Not wanting to deal with having to explain my presence, I walked back over the fallen section I had come across. When I came back a few hours later, it was all mended. All the fences were upright again. So, this may never go anywhere, it may never become anything.

On the other hand, what I describe here is to do with a familiar process. What I recognised in this were certain tropes that have been used in my practice before. The kind of processes that I on my own, and when with John, have used for many years. Going to a place, throwing a dice more or less metaphorically, to take ourselves out of something that’s already prescribed and then looking for something with which to question what that thing was.

SK: I’ve been thinking about fencing too. There’s another type of fencing which stretches for a number of kilometers along the entrance of the Eurotunnel in Calais called ‘Eurofencing’.

I read the webpage of the company who make the fencing and the language they use to describe it is so calculated.

They only really describe its formal qualities, the durability of its materials, how easy it is to install. The closest they get to invoking an image of a human in relation to the fence is when they describe the ‘aperture’ or the space between the metal rods, as too small to let fingers or toes get a purchase – so it can’t be climbed. But to be a deterrent there needs to be something in excess of function, it needs to spill into being a sign. So, whilst it does physically prevent people getting into the tunnel, its main function is to produce an image of itself.

On one side, on our side, as people who have the ‘correct’ passports, it’s to produce an image of ‘something being done’ which both assuages and produces another image – a racist of ‘floods’, ‘hordes’ or ‘swarms’ of refugees coming into Europe.

And on the other side of the fence, it’s to produce an image of the impossibility of getting to the other side.

AT: So, there is no doubt that you cannot penetrate this, that it’s fool proof.

Anne Tallentire, photographic research, image on studio wall, A4, relating to midstep_8 site one (working title) 2020; courtesy the artist

SK: Yeah, and also the reason these are fences rather than walls is because you can see through a fence with a security camera. So if you’re trying to traverse it, it threatens you being seen by the police and not being able to hide, even if you do manage to get a purchase on the aperture (which is a word we’d be more familiar with as a part of a camera!) So, it has all

of these aspects which are about a kind of carceral visibility, and its primary function is as a visual deterrent. But to be that, it needs to be in excess of its function to physically keep people off the tracks, a kind of maze of walls that you can’t hide behind. But to serve that meta-function, there has to be this ridiculous or absurd amount of fences.

AT: In Belfast, I also noticed protective panels around pavement scaffolding. One in particular grabbed my attention, because it was so high-end and utterly overdesigned, paradoxically named ‘layer protect system’. This ‘protect system’ was doing two things; it was protecting people from walking into scratchy and sharp scaffolding but more so, it was protecting the status of the building. It looked like a section of a temporary wall, but it had an exaggerated level of durability that could be read as a fence but more so as something that was leaning towards a logic-related infrastructure. It had a strange abject quality in it’s over clean gleaming materiality. A polished and impenetrable finish which spoke to a whole other agenda related to ‘fencing’ that I hadn’t encountered before.

SK: It’s kind of like the metal sheets they put on doors and windows of empty buildings to stop squatters moving in. Just a smooth seamless surface, without even a crack to jimmy a crowbar into.

AT: Yes, unlike the fencing that was upended, the disrupted open fencing. There it struck me that what had occurred was a wilful act of making something, not to do with the thing itself, but more an act of sheer pleasure that communicated something of that time and place. Through manipulating those objects the people involved were taking decisions not so far from what we (as artists) take too. This is about acknowledging the creative agency which draws our activity very close to the activity of the street. I’m very interested in that; in how people who are not thinking through the lens of art – any kind of sculptural activity or language associated with visual culture – do things that are extraordinarily informed about how to disrupt, or how to add to or subtract from daily life.

SK: Yeah, and what do you think informs those decisions?

You think it’s to do with pleasure?

AT: I think there’s an element of that. Yeah, that comes into it. Arrangement of stuff in the world is a kind of activity that most people engage with. Or trying to have some sort of agency in relation to the physical world to speak to the world we live in.

SK: A kind of unalienated work. Which is what I would say, is the most open definition of what an artist is.

AT: Yes. I think that’s a wonderful description.

Sam Keogh is an artist based between London and County Wicklow. His exhibition, ‘Knotworm’, runs until 1 March at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris.

Upcoming exhibitions include ‘Outer Heaven’ at Southwark Park Galleries, London, in June 2020. samkeogh.net

Anne Tallentire was born in Northern Ireland and lives and works in London. She was a recipient of the 2018 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Artists and was on the selection panel for the 39th EVA International ‘Platform Commissions’. A major solo exhibition of recent work will run at The MAC in Belfast from August to November 2020. annetallentire.info

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Artist Interviews

Disturbances AOIBHEANN GREENAN TALKS TO ANDREW KEARNEY ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF HIS WORK. experiences of what you are or are not allowed to access, and of my personal experience as a queer man in an unfamiliar environment. The castle’s skin was made-up of the same familiar corrugated galvanised material, but this time put together without showing any external fixings, completely impenetrable. The walls were mounted on circular steel tracks, so that the structure could rotate randomly, blocking or unblocking the space that the visitors could occupy. Shifting control from the viewer to the artwork, people could look up to the ambiguous pink structure inside the castle’s walls but could not gain any understanding of what it was intended for.

Andrew Kearney, Mechanism, 2019, installation view, Cork; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of the artist

Aoibheann Greenan, Switching, performed by Fionnuala Kennedy at Tate Modern, London, 10 December 2019; photograph by Guillaume Valli, courtesy of the artist

Aoibheann Greenan: One of the first things that strikes me about your work is your use of kinetic technologies. When did your interest in kinetics begin?

Andrew Kearney: As an MA Sculpture student at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, in 1991, I had a large studio space which paired up with meeting other international students, lecturing artists and great technicians. Being able to use dedicated workshops expanded my approach to the work I was developing. Up until then, most of my work lived on walls. But from this point on, it could become more physically engaged with the whole space it inhabited. For me, exploring movement was the way of expressing this newfound freedom. My brother, Erik, was also living in London at this time. He’s an electronic engineer. This proximity allowed us to discuss new technologies and for me to explore their expressive qualities in my practice.

AG: Looking back at one of your earliest works – Untitled (1992) at Serpentine Gallery, London – many of the concerns that have persisted throughout your practice are already visible, notably the theme of surveillance. Can you describe your thinking behind that piece?

AK: In Ireland, at the time of the ‘Troubles’, we grew up aware of surveillance and movement control. When crossing over the border from the south to the north, you encountered large concrete and galvanised steel structures that defined a threshold. Later on, being an Irish immigrant in London, I experienced first-hand the reticence of people and became aware of cameras watching; at this time there was a heightened fear of IRA bombing in the financial district. The castle-like structure of Untitled (1992) reflected on these earlier

AG: Quite often your works integrate sensors that harness immaterial processes like sound or movement. In the case of Silence (2001/10), for example, you positioned a microphone outside Limerick City Gallery, which converted street noise into a light and sound composition within an inflatable orb in the gallery. What is the intention behind these translational gestures?

AK: These localised everyday phenomena have become a way of introducing unpredictable rhythms within the process of my art making. Live sound feeds, combined with lux levels, are used to score and introduce new synthesis within a given space, making the familiar unfamiliar. The same set of objects within different venues could change with the introduction of new and local rhythms. Material and immaterial compositions, developed in tandem, have become a fundamental part of my methodology.

AG: I’ve noticed that structural supports are generally hidden in your work. Suspended forms appear to be floating, lending them an autonomous presence. It makes me think about the way new technologies increasingly conceal the medium, to produce a heightened sense of immediacy. Is this something that informs your work?

AK: Yes, I’m very aware of the role of the audience or, rather, how I perceive their role to be, as unwilling volunteers within a sonic, lux happening. With Skylum (2012) in Toronto, for example, no supports were visible. All you could see was this 16-metre elliptical inflatable in the space. The work’s score used 100 sonic samples; music, spoken languages, song and animal sounds responded to the movement of the audience, which triggered the ever-changing sequence of sound and light. The installation became a medium and the activity below an integral part of the artwork. Nonetheless, the work conceals how this is achieved, heightening the ambiguity between the I and the other; between the artist and the public.

AG: These inflatables feature prominently in your work, along with other synthetics, such as PVC, aluminium and rubber. What is it about these materials that you’re drawn to?

AK: I’ve gone through phases with materials. I have made luminous inflatables with internal light-sources; silver foil inflatables, reflecting its ever-changing surroundings; now I’ve started making black orbs that are non-reflective, totally light absorbent membranes. They have similar connotations of weather balloons, listening stations, material fetishism and the blackness of outer space. Man landing on the moon, new ideas of modernity, science fiction’s representation and influence on our day-to-day has always intrigued me; that sense of otherness, that journeying beyond, out of oneself or from one place to another. Growing up, synthetic foods and fabrics were seen as a positive realisation of the new future we were entering into. Still nowadays these manmade materials allude to industrial processes, research and functionality that counteracts the historical character of the spaces that my work is often shown in. For me, the art of making an object always merges with the architectural space it inhabits, triggering various means and processes. Materials have their own inherent nature and histories. It is the act of making, that physical interaction with the material, in my case dovetail-

ing new technologies with older traditional work processes, which is explored to reveal new narratives within the work and the place it is in.

AG: Can you talk about the relationship between place and memory in your work?

AK: Spaces have always been an important part of my practice, a place of new beginnings! Early on in my career, buildings became an intricate part of that making process. This led to ideas around the work inhabiting an environment, developing relationships within those places and their histories. My installations are developed within the context of scale, identity, sexuality, local history, location and the process of materials.

AG: This relates very much to the research project you carried out in Middlesex University, titled Spaces Buildings Make (2005–08), in which you proposed a more embodied approach to architectural historiography. Can you describe the impetus behind this research and how it has informed the work you’ve made since?

AK: These years were spent investigating ideas around the nature of the university and its intended usage, the architect’s methodologies and how the space was being developed for an ever-changing academic society. Sound scores were composed about building materials used in the construction of the campus; histories were documented and then randomly spoken through speakers in different parts of the building; historic images of the building’s construction were found in the library and reprinted on the refractory’s lampshades, images and text showing students and the building’s changing activities over the decades. Being part of an institution for three years allowed me time to develop interactions with the staff, students and building, which enriched the narrative of the work by layering up the current and the historical realities of the place, affecting and reflecting on our experience of those same everyday spaces within the university campus.

AG: There’s a sense that your research is physically permeating the fabric of reality, in a way that’s very different from more self-conscious modes of display, something that might entail a separation. Where do you situate the borders of your work?

AK: Beginning with the project A Long, Thin Thread (1997/98), which I did at Heathrow Airport, I became interested in making work that merged with a place’s architecture in such a way that you couldn’t tell where the artistic intervention began or ended. The brief for this project was to inhabit a corridor space in the airport, which I achieved by giving the artwork a sense of function, as it is perceived with most objects in an airport. I cast the elliptical corrugated wall surface of the space and mounted sixty black vacuum formed spheres, each containing digit counters linked to twin infrared barrier beams which recorded the comings and goings of the passengers from Ireland to England over a period of a year. In other works, the borders are more tangible, for example in my recent exhibition at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, I used PVC industrial curtains to make the audience aware that they were crossing from one threshold to another.

Andrew Kearney is an Irish artist based in London.

Through 2017 to 2019 his multifaceted installation, Mechanism, toured to Centre Culturel Irlandais (Paris), The Dock (Carrick-on-Shannon) and Crawford Art Gallery (Cork). andrewkearney.net

Aoibheann Greenan’s performance, installation and moving image works examine the mutability of cultural documents across time, probing their transformative potential in the present. aoibheanngreenan.com

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Artist Interviews

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Kathy Prendergast, Atlas 4, SLIGO-BELFAST, 2017, AA Road Atlas of Europe, ink, 30.5 × 43.5 × 1 cm; courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery

Kathy Prendergast: I know you’re here to interview me, but can you tell me about your work as well? I’m curious.

Time & Continuity AVRIL CORROON INTERVIEWS KATHY PRENDERGAST IN HER LONDON STUDIO.

Avril Corroon: I work with quite a varied mix of mediums, which have been changing more frequently since going through the MFA programme at Goldsmiths. My last major project, called ‘Spoiled Spores’, was presented at The LAB Gallery (14 November 2019 – 9 January 2020). I took swabs of mould from rental accommodation, including my own, and I used these samples to make around 30 large artisanal cheeses, which I named after the participating tenants. They have individual colours, textures and scents, and are quite sick, abject bodies. I also made a film which documents the provenance of these moulds and the cheese-making process, with menus outlining rental fees and ingredients lists, which includes black mould.

KP: Wow… Black mould is very toxic and dangerous stuff. So, is food a big thing in your work?

AC: Sometimes. I’ve done a few other works that include food, but they’re used to reference class dynamics and labour politics. For Latte Art, I used hidden-camera footage of me serving in a gallery café – effectively working on the edge of a world I aspire towards.

KP: Do you mean operating as a service worker, while not being recognised by the art world?

AC: Yes. I documented the kitchen areas, showing really common behindthe-scenes practices, such as eating leftovers because you can’t bear food waste or because you don’t have time for a proper break. I’m interested

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

in those kinds of backstage tactics. Can you discuss your approach towards found materials? Often, you’re altering the surface through a system of erasure – why is that?

KP: Most recently, my work has focused on using atlases and maps as raw material. In the ‘90s, my ‘City Drawings’ were pencil drawings on paper, transferred from maps of cities.

Since then, I’ve been using actual atlases and maps as the support, working directly onto their surfaces. As you can see on my walls here, I’m using a road atlas at the moment and thinking about roads as a metaphor. There is a road atlas of Minnesota which I’ve become slightly obsessed with, in particular the flat areas and regular grids. I just started colouring them in different configurations, to see what different patterns the roads can make, finding a system to reveal something about us in the world. I’m doing a very long linear project called ‘Road Trip’, working on those maps. I do have some rules – like highlighting every square mile with black infill, which looks like a form of coding. Conceptually, I do like the idea of a road atlas, because you bring it with you when you’re travelling, so the map travels the roads it contains. I’m also thinking about the human impressions we leave on the landscape.

AC: I was wondering how the intensity of current politics affects your work? From what I’ve seen, you leave the work quite open-ended, so that people can make their own interpretations. Is this non-didactic approach important to you?

KP: Although politics do affect me, I wouldn’t want my work to be seen solely from a political point of view; more a human perspective. Migration, identity, loss – all those things have affected me really strongly throughout my career. I started the ‘Atlas’ series when I was messing with Google Earth. The toolbox at the top shows the stars above your location, and I thought I would try that out on a map, blocking out everything but the white dots. I use one particular brand of maps because of their white borders which have adjacent places written in red – I do think about borders a lot. When the maps are blacked out and only the dots remain, they show how we’ve historically moved across the landscape settlements; how a city evolves and grows over time. Those ‘stars’ contain all that history. After I made lots of Black Mapworks for the walls, I decided to make a whole atlas that could spread out. I made 100 map works of an opened motoring atlas – which become 200 pages when you open them up – containing the whole of Europe. When displayed on tables, people can walk through, as if navigating these invisible European roads.

Artist Interviews that might actually disappear?

KP: Yes. I have also worked with places that are named ‘Lost’, which is a common place name in America, possibly named by the pioneers who moved from East to West. I also had reworked a compass with ‘LOST’ written on it, instead of NESW. I like the idea of this instrument, which is meant to help you find your way, making you realise that it can’t. Writers such as Rebecca Solnit have written about getting lost and the importance of not knowing where you are all of the time.

AC: I guess this brings up your work, End of the Beginning II (1996)?

KP: I made End of the Beginning II at home. I remember asking my mum: “Can I have a bit of your hair for a piece of work?” So, there was her hair, my hair and hair from my son, who was probably about eight months at the time. It’s funny talking about that piece now, because my mum isn’t alive anymore, and I feel like when I made that work, I didn’t think about those kinds of things. But certainly, that piece was about continuity. Her hair is in the centre and my son’s is on the outside, so in theory, if he has children, their hair could be added, so it could continue forever – as with life.

There’s quite a bit of my mum in other works, including a piece I made while studying at NCAD called Waiting (1992), which is in the Hugh Lane Gallery. At home we had photographs of my mum and dad when they were in their 20s. They were both working in the Dublin Corporation and that’s where they met. In those days when a woman got married, she could no longer work. My mum was really smart. She got something like tenth in the country in the Leaving Cert and was the first in her family to complete secondary school education. Her parents couldn’t afford to send her to university, so she went to work in Dublin Corporation. She said that they were the best three years of her life. In the photo, my parents were the same age I was, when studying in NCAD in 1979. For me as a 20-year-old in the late-70s, feminism was a big part of our thinking, and I was conscious that my mother ended up as a housewife because she couldn’t work.

AC: What was it like being included in a museum collection while still in art college?

AC: Some of your works seem to resonate with current anxieties around climate change. Are there references to places

KP: I do think I was very lucky. It was kind of extraordinary times. I made that piece for my NCAD degree show and then put it in the ‘Irish Exhibition of Living Art’. I was working in RTÉ, training as a cameraman, and then I got a phone call from the head of the college, Campbell Bruce. He said: “There’s something going on about that piece – you need to

Kathy Prendergast, End of the Beginning II, 1996; courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery

Kathy Prendergast, Interior with Light, 2018, Wood, paint, museum Plexiglass, 210.8 × 182.9 × 91.5 cm; courtesy of the artist and Kerlin

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ring them up and tell them how much it is, better do it now”.

So, I rang them from a public payphone in RTÉ. I didn’t even know how to price the work – no one knew in those days – it was really quite extraordinary, looking back on this now.

AC: As an expanded discussion on Irish sculpture is the running theme of this issue, I was wondering how you feel about your work being described as ‘Irish sculpture’?

KP: I do always think of myself as an Irish artist, even though I’ve lived here in London longer than I’ve lived in Ireland. I feel a certain amount of loss from not living in Ireland, but I go back quite a lot and I’m still very close with a lot of my college peers in Dublin. I often wonder how visual arts organisations in Ireland feel about the Irish diaspora and how willing they are to acknowledge us as being part of Irish artistic culture. I do think there’s a gap there.

AC: Your work Mittens shows the effects of decay and time passing, yet it is still quite beautiful.

KP: Those Mittens were emotionally very loaded. They were knitted by someone and given to me as a present, when one of my children was born. They were so beautiful I put them away, and when I found them, they were barely holding together from the moths. So, I took a photograph before I moved them, because they’d disintegrated. I was trying to hold onto some semblance of them.

AC: I guess I’m attracted to that because when I’m dealing with mould and different organic materials in the home, I’m also looking at how decomposing has its own aesthetic impression, as it takes away the look of the thing it’s spoiling.

KP: And also, there’s a time element which you’ve no control over, and that is important as well. I do have to ask you; did you have a cheese tasting session?

AC: Oh no, they’re poison!

Avril Corroon is a visual artist working between Westmeath and London. She is currently on residency at ACME Studios with the Goldsmiths MFA Award. avrilcorroon.com

Kathy Prendergast is a London based Irish artist who represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 1995, where she won the Silver Lion Best Young Artist Award for her ‘City Drawings’ project. kerlingallery.com

Avril Corroon, Spoil Spores, 2019, cheese wheels in industrial fridges, installation view, Goldsmiths MFA Degree Show; courtesy of the arist

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Sculpture Centres

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Paddy Bloomer, Personal Deployable Crannog, LSC Residency, Glenade Lake, 2017; all images courtesy of Leitrim Sculpture Centre

Material Processes SEÁN O’REILLY PROVIDES AN OVERVIEW OF THE FACILITIES AND PROGRAMME AT LEITRIM SCULPTURE CENTRE.

LEITRIM SCULPTURE CENTRE (LSC) is located in Manorhamilton, a rural market town in County Leitrim, at the confluence of five glacial valleys near the Northern Irish border. Established in 1997 as a charity supporting the practice and understanding of the fine arts in Ireland, LSC initially functioned for a few years as a FÁS training centre. Since 2005, it has achieved significant developments, both in the expansion of its spatial and technical infrastructure and in the diversity and vision of its artistic programme. Through my own leadership as director of LSC since 2005, and with the collaboration, support and advice of local artists and communities, I have sought to establish LSC as one of the country’s foremost resources for the advancement of contemporary visual arts, attracting both local, national and international practitioners.

One of the key markers in moving towards this vision was a major capital development programme (2007 – 2009) that enabled us to completely renovate and redesign LSC around nine new workshop areas dedicated to stone, ceramics, woodwork, metalwork, foundry, hot glass, mould-making, traditional print and photography. These material-based technical resources were further complimented by 21 studios for individual practitioners; three project spaces; a superb gallery; a community ‘pop-up’ on Main Street; as well as three residency studio-apartments and five private rooms for artists visiting the centre.

These technical resources were conceived as ‘open access’, in the sense that any creative practitioner within Ireland or abroad can easily obtain affordable resources for a day and up-to a month to develop their work. In the context of the increasing vulnerability of infrastructural supports to artists, both in Ireland and internationally, LSC has become strategically important in maintaining a comprehensive range of material-based technologies for visual arts practices in Ireland and especially in the North West.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

One of the most important ways we support artists at all levels of experience is by providing the spatial and technical conditions for experimentation and risk in the development of new work. The demystification of technique is achieved through workshops that cater for both basic and intermediary levels of experience. Masterclasses bring professional artists together to explore advanced practice around a specific medium or process through the sharing of knowledge and skills.

Technical support is offered throughout, ranging from oneto-one work with artists wishing to advance a new technique or operate specialist equipment, to more in-depth support, where specialists are enlisted to address a specific process.

Another major development in 2009 was the LSC Gallery, where the continuation of the creative process extends to experimentation with new forms of arrangement, display and communication. Full-time technical and curatorial support is available to all artists installing exhibitions and site-specific projects. Complimenting the gallery, a current development is the LSC Community Pop-Up space on Main Street in the centre of town, offering scope for artists to test out new configurations of their work in a public context. It also offers opportunities for a wide variety of community initiatives and social exchanges that in many instances integrate with the region’s local culture and interests, whilst also encouraging the active participation of different publics in projects that advance the creative capacity of participants.

Sculpture Centres

Aideen Barry, Work in Progress, LSC, 2010

ARTIST RESIDENCIES

If one had to pin down where all these supports best culminate, or where LSC truly excels, it would have to be the Artists Residency Programme. Residencies are the most effective and dynamic ways that we support artists at various stages of their creative cycles and careers. Residencies also provide the inspirational force for many of LSC’s other programming strands, feeding into research and conceptualisation; creation and experimental development; community engagement, collaboration and contextual practice; exhibitions, documentation and archiving. They also reinforce our function as a resource organisation, as each residency comes with a studio-apartment with generous access to additional space and technical facilities. We currently have three separate residency strands that provide up to 12 residencies per year: •

•

•

‘Technical Development Residencies’ (TDRs) focus on advancing creative and practical engagement within specific technical areas chosen by the artist. Residencies are for four weeks and include an artist’s fee of €1,500 with free access to technical resources and support. Each year, we provide up to four TDRs through an open call, however artists may also choose to organise and fund their own TDRs and can contact LSC for guidelines on how to do this.

‘Professional Development Research Residencies’ (PDRs) offer an exploratory research base for artists, curators and writers who need time out to speculate on new work, ideas and/or collaborations in a rural context and/or in relation to specific material processes without the requirement of an exhibition or any specific outcome at the end. Residencies number up to four per year and last for six weeks including an artist’s fee of €1,500 and access to technical and archival resources and curatorial support.

‘Exhibition: Context and Collaboration Residencies’ (ECRs) support site-specific modes of collaboration with the landscape, place and communities of North Leitrim. This residency involves the development of new collaborative practices leading directly to public exhibition, display, and involvement in the gallery. There are five residencies per year, each lasting eight weeks, with an artist’s fee of €2,000 and material allowance of €500.

COLLABORATION IN THE RURAL CONTEXT

Context and Collaboration Residencies also serve to shift the overall emphasis in LSC from the technical development of new work (based on traditional sculptural media), towards a more social engagement with the surrounding region. Critical considerations of landscape, place and the rural figure highly in an expanded practice that enlists the active participation of a multitude of social actors including: human participants, materials, objects, plants, animals, histories, heritage sites, physical spaces and structures, forces of nature, as

Technical Support in Stone carving, LSC, 2017

Welding Workshop, LSC, 2018

well as everyday practices, cultural representations and public issues of concern. It is from these socially entangled spaces that site-specific modes of co-operative action are researched, developed and activated and where potential involvement from local communities, schools, businesses, as well as different sectors of the town (such as heritage and tourism) are developed. Outcomes may appear in the gallery or onsite and address a range of issues such as land use, climate change, biodiversity, environmental stress or propose positive and sustainable models of practice and dwelling in the rural context; in the fields of agriculture, the economy, the built environment and cultural diversity. Such projects may also strive to examine these aspects within a global dimension and, where possible, relate to issues of national and international import.

Leitrim Sculpture Centre has come a long way since I arrived in 2005 and this would not have been possible without the encouragement, critical insights and financial support of the Arts Council, Leitrim County Council and the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, not forgetting the immense support provided by LSC staff and especially local artists, communities and businesses. We thank them all for working with us and look forward to continuing the development of LSC as a significant resource for the advancement of contemporary visual arts practice, both in Ireland and beyond.

Seán O’Reilly is Director of Leitrim Sculpture Centre. leitrimsculpturecentre.ie

Jonathan Ball, Hot Glass Fabrication, LSC, 2019

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Sculpture Centres

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Philip Napier in his old studio at the Flax Art Studios’ Edenderry Mill premises, c.1990; all photographs courtesy of Flax Art Studios

FLAX ART STUDIOS was founded in 1989 by a small group of artists who

Security of Tenure GAIL PRENTICE OUTLINES THE RANGE OF FACILITIES OFFERED AT FLAX ART STUDIOS IN BELFAST.

needed space to make large-scale installation art works. The top floor of the Edenderry Mill was found – a former linen mill in North Belfast.

The studio was artist-led and the first Board of Directors consisted of Philip Napier, Michael Minnis, Áine Nic Giolla Coda, Ruth Graham, Sharon Kelly and Paddy McCann. In 2004, tragedy struck, and the mill was destroyed by fire, taking with it 15 years of archival and current work belonging to the studio artists. In May 2004, Flax secured new premises in Belfast’s city centre, on Corporation Street. Flax later moved to Havelock House, the former home of UTV, in the city centre location of Ormeau Road in 2018, which has proved to be a positive interim move for us.

Havelock sits on a 1.78-acre site and has almost 60,000 square feet of office-style studios, production space and an industrial workshop. We are delighted to have the opportunity to have full use of this building, which has such an illustrious history, steeped in Belfast’s heritage.

Flax has a robust track record of 30 years of working at the cutting edge of contemporary art. We significantly contribute to the region’s visual art practice through studio provision; act as a hub for professional development and international networking opportunities; and foster greater understanding through outreach and engagement activity. We provide subsidised studio provision for emerging, mid-career and established artists, particularly those working with sculpture, installation, new media and time-based media. Flax provides studio space for over 50 artists, including 12 emerging artists, two international residents and two curators-in-residence. The International Residency Programme was established in 1994.

To date we have hosted artists from Australia, Canada, United States of America, Columbia, Finland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Iceland, India, Japan, Korea, Slovenia, Lithuania, Spain, Thailand and Sweden. We

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Sculpture Centres

Flax Arts Outrech Archive

also provide at least ten production residencies and open our workshop facility to external artists, through our sculpture workshop programme.

SCULPTURE WORKSHOP

Flax Art Studios sculpture workshop is the only facility of its kind in Northern Ireland. We aim to make it accessible to professional artists, with fees set at an affordable level and subsidised by Flax. We have been developing our studios to provide professional sculptural production and media facilities. Our workshops include wood, plaster, casting, digital fabrication, textile and large internal/external workspaces. We also offer media production space, including a photography studio and a sound-staged film studio.

We have two types of membership: our Sculpture Workshop Membership for makers, which gives full access to our facilities; and a Media Production Membership for creatives who wish to only hire our studios.

This spring we will be introducing new courses in sculpture, mould-making and casting processes. Taught by highly skilled and experienced artists, these workshops are open to everyone and are suitable for beginner and intermediary levels, with all materials provided. Geraldine Owens is a sculptor working in film and television. She uses traditional sculpture techniques essential to work in this field of the industry. This year, we will be offering three master classes with Owens, where she will provide demonstrations of traditional sculpture techniques that are rarely taught in formal education today. She will lead a workshop on ‘Scaling Up’ (25 – 26 April), ‘Polystyrene Carving and Sculpting’ (9 – 10 May) and ‘Copying from a Cast’ (23 – 24 May). Stuart Calvin will lead a wood machining course on 16 May, providing an introduction to the variety of wood machines in Flax’s sculpture workshop. John Rainey will lead a ‘Plaster and Mould Making’ workshop (6 – 7 June), focusing on plaster of paris and its advantages as a material for creating sculpture and moulds. Rachael Campbell Palmer will lead a workshop on ‘Silicone Mould Making and Casting Materials’ (27 – 28 June), providing an introduction to a range of materials that can be used in sculpting and casting processes, including polyester casting resin, jesmonite and crystacal. To book a course or to find out more about the studios, contact: flaxartstudiosfacilities@gmail.com.

The Film Studio at Flax Art Studios in current premises at Havelock House, Belfast

The Photography Studio at Flax Art Studios in current premises at Havelock House, Belfast

THE FUTURE OF STUDIO PROVISION IN BELFAST

During our 25th anniversary year in 2014, Flax organised a symposium which brought a more focused level of thinking about the development of a vision for studio space across the city. We then undertook a feasibility study in August 2015, focusing on the baseline provision of studio space for visual artists in Belfast. This report established that much of the existing provision was not sustainable, revealing high levels of dissatisfaction with the quality of workspaces available. Central to the case for investment is the fact that the majority of existing studio projects face significant and real challenges to their short-term sustainability – one of the major reasons being that they have no real security of tenure. The study predicted that some 58% of existing provision may not be available to visual artists by 2020. Subsequent developments and dynamics in the market have now led to a significant reduction in the volume of available studio space. Artist studios in Belfast are at a critical stage; if Belfast is to have sustainable artist studios in the future, a new model of working is needed. Flax and other artist studios work hard to attract, nurture, promote and retain artistic talent in the city. Providing studio space and a place to work for professional artists is vital in ensuring that artists continue to have the resources and infrastructure to live and work in Belfast and Northern Ireland. We hope to continue to do this in future.

Gail Prentice is Managing Director of Flax Art Studios. Flax Art Studios is funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Belfast City Council. flaxartstudios.org

Fabrication Workshop at Flax Art Studios in current premises at Havelock House, Belfast

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Sculpture Centres

Dynamic Alignment HELEN CAREY DISCUSSES THE EVOLUTION OF FIRE STATION ARTISTS’ STUDIOS. THE LOCATION OF Fire Station Artists’ Studios (FSAS) is an important part of the institution itself, contributing much to the character, choices and decisions of this fluid and changing organisation. Along with the many artists who have made FSAS so valuable in terms of Irish artistic legacies, its place, building and today’s context, make the place prized and cherished.

How did it come about? It is now something of a rarity that large buildings in need of changed functions become artists’ studios. FSAS serves as a prime example of what can happen when an enlightened local authority meets creative community energy. FSAS was founded in 1995, when the Fire Station on Buckingham Street was decommissioned, and the fire crews and engines found a home on North Strand.

Many worthy contenders wanted to take over the impressive, solid, red-bricked building in a part of Dublin’s strong inner-city residential communities, which survived despite the issues of an inner-city area beside the docks and being held to ransom by drug barons. However, the energies of a visible community of artists from all fields, historians, residents and community activists won the day, creating a base and home for visual artists, for which the council asked a peppercorn rent for a 100-year lease.

Embodying the zeitgeist of its time, the role of the arts in regenerating neglected communities was understood and embraced. Central to the FSAS coming into existence was its connection to the local community and neighbours. A large-scale capital project funded by the Arts Council of Ireland was developed and the former Fire Station became Fire Station Artists’ Studios, with nine live/work studios with leases of up to two years nine months. It is of note that there is no other live/work space on this basis in Ireland and while this makes FSAS a beacon, it is a shame that the success of this adaptation did not breed other iterations throughout Ireland, as large buildings in public ownership became available over the last quarter of a century. Well-designed studio apartments, where artists could live and work in security and support, were reinforced by connections to communities who undertook activities within the buildings, with FÁS courses and placements taking place alongside FSAS participation

in local commissions. Adding the sculpture workshop, the transformation of the old fire engine rooms into smaller workspaces and the digital media resource areas gave the feel of a ‘hub’ long before it was a thing… What emerged through this time was the commitment to socially engaged art as a field of artistic work, that FSAS could nurture in a leader’s role. This was a direct result of its origins, allowing ambitious projects for artists and communities to be imagined and delivered.

Continuing into the boom of the early 21st century, FSAS rang the changes through its relationships to local communities, as well as responding to the needs and resources for artists. FSAS responded to a growing confidence in the area by giving support to independent projects and by managing large-scale commissions close by, as well as into Dublin Port area and other neighbourhoods. Internationally renowned artists (both Irish and of other nationalities), who passed through the doors of FSAS, meant that in the visual arts field, Dublin 1 stood for excellence and best practice. This reputation is in stark contrast to a more general view of the area: as recession and criminality bit deeply, Dublin 1 became a troublesome part of the city, as its pristine financial services neighbour prospered, due to neglect and broken promises.

Most of Ireland’s visual artists know and love Dublin 1, seeing the area affectionately as nourishing their creative lives, by comparison with the national approach to the same area.

In 2014 FSAS added the house at 12 Buckingham Street to its footprint through the support of Clancourt plc, Croke Park Community Fund and Dublin City Council’s agreement to extend the peppercorn rent and lease conditions.

This meant adding two apartments and a project space. With upgrading of services within the buildings, FSAS now provides 11 live/work accommodation for 2 years 9 months and has a curator apartment for selected international visitors, extending Dublin 1’s reputation among artists. Furthermore, through ongoing experimentation, FSAS has developed provision of leading technology to artists at affordable prices, which attracts Irish and international artists, offering a unique combination of resources.

Logically following on from this, FSAS continues to

Mould-making course with Ciaran Patterson, 2015; all photographs by John Beattie, courtesy of FSAS

make the case, with many artists and other studio groups, for repeating and reinventing this resource provision across Ireland in derelict buildings or new developments as a soldering instrument for communities as well as a platform for the development of the nation’s contemporary artistic life.

Dublin has lost over 70% of its studio spaces at this time, and while Dublin cherishes its consolidated studio providers, valiant and consistent attempts to stem this crisis has met with unenlightened and rather cowardly indecision and delay.

Meanwhile Irish artists leave the city and country in droves.

Never has the enlightenment of the recent past, which delivered FSAS, contrasted so easily with the indecision of current decision makers.

In terms of community, the FSAS relationship to the local community changed. The remaining community presence of North Centre City Community Action Project (NCCCAP) within the FSAS building finished, when NCCCAP amalgamated with sister project Lourdes Youth Community Services (LYCS) in 2019. This allowed extra day studio spaces to be added to the FSAS provision. Although the FSAS/local community shifted shape through the decades, the challenge of a physical separation is different. Looking at FSAS strengths and the challenging, persistent and profound needs of the local community, FSAS needed to re-imagine how the studios could play their part, moving from a notion of community of place to a dynamic alignment with social justice.

The creative skills building platform for young people has at its core developing and reinforcing the strengths of the participating young people combined with the FSAS facilities and expertise, specifically in digital media. This format shows a potential for engaging 21st century artists with the community in terms of economic power, namely real skills and work.

In FSAS, the mission of responding to artists’ needs, playing a part in the community and thinking into the future represents investment in public culture. It is a vibrant and ever-changing life in the old fire station. If only there could be more like this – it is as needed now as it was in 1995.

Helen Carey is Director of Fire Station Artists’ Studios. firestation.ie

Welding Demonstration with 2013

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Columns

Collections

Programme

Public Collections

A Place of Interaction

PAULA MURPHY OUTLINES SOME OF THE MAIN SCULPTURE COLLECTIONS IN IRELAND.

KAREN DOWNEY INTRODUCES THE SCULPTURE DUBLIN PROGRAMME.

A BUZZ OF conversation around public sculpture occurred in Ireland in November 2018, prompted by the appearance of The Haunting Soldier (2017) in St Stephen’s Green in Dublin for three weeks. Such lively chat about a piece of sculpture had not been heard for some considerable time − perhaps even since the last century, when the ROSC exhibitions introduced new types of sculpture to the Irish public.

It was the temporary presence of this work − and indeed of ROSC − that stimulated engagement. Permanent pieces of sculpture in the public domain are afforded much less attention.

Constancy and distraction conspire to make them invisible. And yet there is much sculpture on display across the country − seemingly independent pieces of sculpture, in or out of doors, that are part of collections formed by different bodies, from local authorities, government agencies and semi-state companies, to academic institutions, religious and medical establishments and, obviously, art museums.

Yet art museums are not necessarily the go-to places for sculpture in Ireland. Apart from the dedicated F.E. McWilliam Gallery & Studio in Banbridge, which opened in 2008, Irish museum collections tend to concentrate more on 2D rather than 3D work. Although, it should be recalled that when the National Gallery of Ireland opened in 1864, it housed a vast sculpture gallery, replete, as was common at the time, with 100 casts of antique and near eastern sculptures – none of which remain extant. The gallery has little sculpture on display today, and in spite of its focus on painting, it used its most recent Per Cent for Art funding to commission a site-specific sculptural work by Joseph Walsh, which has proved popular – as much for the dedicated new courtyard space in which it is displayed, as for the artwork itself. In contrast, Crawford Art Gallery retained and proudly exhibits its set of Canova casts, presented to Cork in 1818, in a sculpture display that is popular with the public and one of the treasures of the city.

Museum collections develop differently to those of other institutions. Where the museum will often be desirous of filling gaps or purchasing up-to-the-minute work, local authorities are more concerned with space enhancement (aesthetics) and/or memorialisation (education).

However, the bottom line for both, in terms of acquisitions and commissions, is available funds – and there is rarely sufficient money to meet the purpose. The Hugh Lane has a compelling work located at its entrance, Suzanne Walking in Leather Skirt (2006) − a deft acquisition from Julian Opie’s exhibition on O’Connell Street in 2008. But it is inevitably IMMA that holds the most significant collection of contemporary sculpture in Ireland, a collection that was even richer in its early years, when it was in temporary possession of the loan (long since returned) of British sculptures in the Weltkunst Collection.

Trinity College has one of the most impressive public sculpture collections in the country, with work by Irish and international artists including Louis-Francois Roubiliac, Patrick MacDowell, Alexander Calder and Eilís O’Connell. A noticeably visible and popular

sculpture, Arnaldo Pomodoro’s Sfera con Sfera (1980s) – which is far from unique, existing, as it does, in multiple variants across the world – is located at the entrance to Trinity’s Berkeley Library. This sculpture shares popular public recognition with the statue of Trinity alumnus, Oscar Wilde, located in nearby Merrion Square, where more viewing space has recently been created for the increasing numbers that visit.

Among other academic institutions, University of Limerick is worth noting for its small but strong sculpture collection, including works by Antony Gormley and Michael Warren, and expectations are high regarding sculptural developments on the newly established campus for TU Dublin at Grangegorman.

The local authorities and OPW have a more extensive brief, with responsibility for the sculptures in the streets, parks and buildings that come under their respective remits. Inevitably, in the case of the buildings, not all areas are open to the public, and as a result, some fine public sculptures are rarely, if ever, accessible to the public. Iveagh House in Dublin is a notable example, where the original version of American Harriet Hosmer’s Sleeping Faun (1865), her most celebrated work, widely copied for museums in the US, is hidden away. If only this and the other sculptures in the entrance hall of what is now the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade could be on public display.

Sculpture trails abound in forests (for example Devil’s Glen, Wicklow) and parks (such as Fitzgerald Park, Cork), and in less contained spaces (like Lough MacNean Sculpture Trail). Perhaps the most impressive is Lough Boora’s Sculpture in the Parklands in County Offaly, which began with a symposium in 2002. The disused bogland, which is borderless and therefore permanently open, includes work by Irish and international artists. Work is created onsite employing found materials, with new sculptures incorporated by way of artist residencies. However, the collection has been static for more than a decade since its last residency in 2009. The local authorities appear to have shifted their focus at Lough Boora to different forms of public recreation, undermining the potential of the sculpture park and, it could be said, public discernment.

Surely those people who engaged with The Haunting Soldier were indulging in a form of recreation, drawn to this particular sculpture by its topicality and historical context; its aesthetics and technique – all of which can be found in the range of work that is permanently on display in Lough Boora and everywhere else in Ireland.

The short stay of the soldier, and its pertinence at the time, brought media attention which was instrumental in generating public awareness. Such is the familiarity of something that is ever-present that it can be passed unnoticed.

Awareness of the permanent sculptures that surround us and that form part of our public collections needs to be revived.

Paula Murphy is Professor Emeritus at the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, University College Dublin.

SCULPTURE DUBLIN IS a Dublin City Council initiative being developed by Parks and Landscape Services and the City Arts Office.

It is an 18-month programme that will include a series of sculpture commissions, a public programme and a communications campaign. It has emerged from the Dublin City Parks Strategy (2019 – 22) which acknowledges art as a welcome and “sometimes controversial” presence in the life of the city’s parks. The strategy refers to: the distribution of artworks; plans to make interpretive material more accessible using new digital formats; and the possibility of developing a sculpture park in Dublin in the longer term.

A particular source of inspiration for Sculpture Dublin was the Millennium Sculpture Symposium that took place in 1988, organised by the Sculptors Society of Ireland and sponsored by AIB, FÁS and DCC. Over a three-month period, sculptures were created by ten artists (including six women) and installed in parks across the city (for further information see: rte.ie/archives).

Last year, DCC and Visual Artists Ireland facilitated a series of stakeholder consultations, bringing together the arts community and city officials to help forge a vision and purpose for Sculpture Dublin. Jenny Haughton (independent curator and Grangegorman Public Art Coordinator) was invited to speak about the sculpture symposium as a model of practice and to speculate on what a contemporary sculpture symposium might look like. She described its key characteristics: a gathering of artists engaged in intensive discursive and co-operative working, where artworks are created over a short period of time, often outdoors, using locally sourced materials. The works are produced on-site, and the process-of-making is open to public view. The idea of developing a contemporary variation of the sculpture symposium as part of Sculpture Dublin has exciting potential. It will require further exploration and input from artists, but as a model of practice that is artist-led and foregrounds experimentation, co-creation and public engagement, it is a compelling proposition.

NEW & EXISTING WORKS

Many of the consultation participants called for the programme to draw attention to existing public sculpture across the city. In her presentation, Professor Paula Murphy described how people were more engaged with public works in the past, when the sculptures were more visible in public spaces and the pace of life was less frantic. She proposed that public awareness and understanding of sculpture to be made an accompanying feature of the programme. Paula also discussed the importance of quality in public work, referencing historic examples and urged that commissioners be risk-takers and not just concerned with installing readily popular work.

Claire Feeley (Head of Exhibitions and Audience Development at Jupiter Artland) was invited to speak about contemporary sculptural practices and public art commissioning. Claire began with the question: “Why do this?” Why would it be interesting to develop a programme of public sculpture in Dublin? Her presentation consisted of examples of highly ambitious responses to

public art commissions that challenge the limits of what is possible and desirable. She referenced artworks such as Alfredo Jaar’s Skoghall Konsthall (2000), which involved the construction and subsequent burning down of a paper museum in a town without a museum in Sweden; and Katie Paterson’s Future Library (2014–2114), which will involve planting 1,000 trees and commissioning 100 texts by well-known writers over 100 years to be held in a secret library in Oslo and printed as limited-edition anthologies in 2114, using paper made from the trees.

VISION

Sculpture Dublin aims to embody a broad inclusive vision, which will potentially enable the exploration of ideas as disparate as leisure and landscape; environmentalism and climate change; colonial histories; migration and identity; materiality; human and non-human ecosystems; and artificial and organic coexistence.

The curatorial framework will be developed around the commission sites, with special attention given to the historical context, topography and user-communities of selected sites. This approach aims to provide a catalyst for artists to move in different directions, to propose different kinds of responses ensuring that a multiplicity of forms and perspectives are realised.

In her essay, What Is Sculpture? Sinéad Hogan identifies sculpture as a “place of interaction” made up of co-constitutive relations.1 Hogan proposes that “[…] objects are activated by a set of relations between environment, materials, spaces, makers, skills, techniques and these, gathered together, work as a place of interaction called ‘sculpture’. In turn, when sculpture is set in place, it activates the specific area it occupies, as a set of relations, affects and discourses, like a concrete hyperlink.” This idea of interdependency and co-production relates to Vagabond Reviews’ insightful report for DCC Arts Office, Art in Urban and Suburban Open Space (2007), which proposes the idea of “co-orientation” around the question of commissioning art in open space and calls for “significant levels of individual and inter-institutional co-operation, strategic alliances and shared enthusiasm in order for something truly innovative and interesting to happen”.

DCC will announce a series of commissioning opportunities on 21 April and will work over the year ahead with stakeholders and the wider public to develop a programme of partnerships and associated activity. At its core, Sculpture Dublin will be a space of participation and experimentation – an encounter with sculpture yet to be imagined. In its most ambitious form, it will enable people to see their city differently; to reconnect with each other and their own sense of agency while “exploring and prototyping alternative futures in the here and now”.2 Karen Downey is a visual art curator and producer. She is Programme Director of Sculpture Dublin.

Notes 1 Sinéad Hogan, What Is Sculpture? (2018), see imma.ie 2 Melanie Dodd, Ed. Spatial Practices: Modes of Action and Engagement with the City (Routledge, 2019)

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Sculpture Parks

The Past, Present and Future of Sculpture HELEN PHEBY DISCUSSES THE EVOLUTION OF YORKSHIRE SCULPTURE PARK.

Ai Weiwei, Iron Tree, 2013; photograph by Jonty Wilde, courtesy of the artist and Yorkshire Sculpture Park

FOUNDED IN 1977 as a temporary exhibition

of sculpture in the grounds of Bretton Hall College, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) has evolved to become an internationally respected centre for the creation, display and appreciation of sculpture, with local relevance and impact.

We curate a rolling programme of exhibitions, displays, commissions, live art, performances and events across 500 acres of historic landscape, five indoor galleries and an eighteenth-century chapel, integrated with learning, public and outreach activities. A recent independent economic assessment established that we contribute £11.5m to the regional economy each year, through employing 180 staff, tourism to the area and trade with suppliers. YSP is a charity and receives public funds from Arts Council of England and Wakefield Council. It welcomes nearly half a million visitors each year and engages over 40,000 people in learning programmes.

The land we manage was described as ‘wasteland’ in the Domesday Book. Yorkshire was part of William the Conqueror’s ‘Harrying of the North’ (1069 – 70), an extremely forceful subjugation of an uprising that left much of the north uninhabitable for years. The land now known as the Bretton Estate, home to YSP, was given to one of the King’s faithful knights and the estate grew in size and significance until its heyday between the mid-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It then entered a decline that culminated with it being seconded for signal training during the Second World War and afterwards was sold by the Beaumont family to Wakefield Council. At that time, the West Riding (as West Yorkshire had been known since Viking times) benefited from a progressive Head of Education – Alec Clegg. He founded an Art Teacher Training College in the mansion house in 1949, inspired in part by a book by the Yorkshire-born art critic, poet and only known knighted anarchist, Herbert Read. Written in 1943, in the middle of the war, Education Through Art advocated that every child’s potential was realised through a creative approach to education, leading to a highly fulfilled and functioning society. The belief that nurturing people’s creativity leads to problem solving, innovation and evolution is still at the

heart of YSP’s ideology.

A lecturer at the college, Peter Murray, proposed siting an exhibition of sculpture in the grounds to open the beautiful landscape up for the benefit of all, not just an aristocratic elite; to mark the birthplace of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth and to bring the best of international practice to regional audiences. Peter, who continues as YSP’s Executive Director, will say himself that there was little appetite for contemporary art in the industrial communities of northern England. It is testament to his vision and that of his colleagues over the years that we are now not just a popular tourist destination but an important part of people’s lives.

The artistic programme is developed through research, visits to art festivals, galleries and artist’s studios. We loosely consider it to comprise three main themes: the past, present and future of sculpture; the wellbeing of people and the planet; and creativity as central to humanity – which is articulated through art historical exhibitions, working with contemporary artists but also residencies for young and emerging artists. Over 80 artworks in the open air trace the history of sculpture from Moore and Hepworth, to the New Generation of Anthony Caro and Philip King, to the Land Art movement represented by Andy Goldsworthy and James Turrell, and through to contemporary practice. We invite visitors to consider what sculpture was, is and could be.

The final theme questions the role of art and its institutions in the world and enables partnership work between artists, researchers, publics and policymakers to capitalise on creative thinking and doing to help solve problems in the world and bring together people who might otherwise never meet. Although we frame this as the ‘future museum’, it actually acknowledges that the making and appreciating of objects is something that our ancestors have done for thousands, if not millions, of years. It celebrates and nurtures our human inclination to innovate and problem solve, offering hope for the future in a world that sometimes seems bent on its own destruction.

Dr Helen Pheby is Head of Curatorial Programme at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Columns

Postgraduate Education

Expanded Sculpture

The Body That Makes

AUDREY WALSHE OUTLINES THE RECENT IADT MA EXHIBITION ‘UNASSEMBLED’ AT THE LAB GALLERY.

CHLOE AUSTIN DISCUSSES THE ULSTER UNIVERSITY MFA INTERIM EXHIBITION, ‘KEEP-DRY’, AT CATALYST ARTS, BELFAST.

Anishta Chooramun, Taking A Bow, 2020 (sculpture); Lisa Freeman, Brows For Days, 2020 (digital video and vinyl; photograph by Jamin Keogh

EVEN THOUGH THE term sculpture continues to be employed largely to describe the construction and situation of an artwork in a space, the possibilities of expanding sculpture beyond its physical properties into differently defined spaces – relating to ideas, sound, movement, light and virtual reality – was rigorously explored in a recent exhibition, ‘Unassembled’, at The LAB Gallery (16–19 January). Academics have taken different stances when evaluating the sculptural space, with critics like Rosalind Krauss analysing the encounter between spectator and artwork, and artists such as Joseph Beuys instead describing sculpture in terms of conceptual practice. It is interesting to bear these kinds of theoretical differences in mind, when looking at this show, curated by Julia Moustacchi, which presented the practice-based research of ten artists at the conclusion of their IADT Masters in Art and Research Collaboration (ARC).

Looking broadly at the work in this exhibition, it is clear that sculpture was employed in some sense by many of the artists, in most cases forming part of a multidisciplinary practice, rather than as a standalone media. Anishta Chooramun – the only artist in this exhibition who defines herself exclusively as a sculptor – invited a classical Indian Kathak dancer to perform in the space alongside her work, Taking A Bow, with the performance beautifully demonstrating her collaborative research process. It was interesting for the artist and curator to include this element of Chooramun’s process which, while it was expressed in the final artwork, was in itself a completely distinct encounter for the spectator, allowing them to engage with both the material form of the physical work and also the conceptual framework behind it.

Other forms of expanded sculpture in the exhibition included installations which were not limited to the experience of one object but were accompanied by screen-based or virtual technologies. A striking example of this was Marie Phelan’s work Shapeshifter. Here she used video, audio and sculpture to draw on the acoustic properties of a specific site in County Roscommon, with haunting field recordings of crows at

dusk permeating the gallery, emanating from her eerie beak-headed figures.

‘Unassembled’ engaged with the concept that the ideal space of the exhibition has changed for artists, curators and art audiences. Artists and curators have traditionally used models and drawings to plan and design exhibitions. In recent years, however, newer technologies of previsualisation have become more widespread in art production. Artists are finding new ways to display artworks and explore alternatives to conventional physical exhibition spaces. This sense of exploration was particularly evident in Lisa Freeman’s work, Brows for Days, an audio installation with digital video on flat screen TV. Her drawing and text-based vinyl works were placed both inside and outside the gallery, engaging with the formal properties of the architecture of the space. Her work played with familiar symbols and fonts, arranging a contradictory assembly of chaos. Here, the idea of the gallery space as part of the installation was explored in depth and Freeman was unrestrained in her use of space and light, reaching onto the street outside to draw it back into her work. Her choice of colour for the vinyl was fresh and lively and held the viewer’s attention in the busy exhibition space.

Continuing this exploration of the gallery space itself as a trope, were Marie-Louise Halpenny’s striking, large-scale photographic prints, titled Gang of 20, Blind in One Eye and 103 Previous Convictions. At first glance, her seemingly innocuous urban scenes had a steely presence, with the clarity of post-produced images. On closer inspection, their setting between two columns of text, with a string of words (like ‘brawl’, ‘dark’, ‘feral’ and ‘rampage’) gave them a darker tone. This language was extracted from journalistic accounts of street crime and violence that had occurred at the locations of her shots. Taken in isolation, these words felt like a frame to the architectural images; however, the text-image combination created something altogether more meaningful and disturbing.

Audrey Walshe is an artist/researcher and IADT ARC MA student.

DIVISIONS, ROOMS AND corners at Catalyst Arts are occupied by a variety of mediums.

Through the positioning and the presence of these works, a sense of wonder and memory is evoked. Key themes surface as one navigates the space: texture, scale, place, edge and light.

Each artist aims to introduce new modes of communication through use of sculpture, video, sound and painting.

Vasiliki Stasinaki’s, Hellenism, is a work that commands attention. Three monitors are stacked like a pillar, surrounded by freestanding Greek statuettes. You feel the urge to come close, to study the carefully casted female faces, which embody the emotions coming from the screens.

The work addresses (dis)connection of place, a striking theme that also underpins Sarah Smith’s Loom, which focuses on the historical struggle for interconnectivity of women referencing labour. The entanglement of the loom threatens us, towers over us, as the body that ‘makes’ is displaced by the body that ‘perceives’.

A sculptural installation by John Connolly displays an assortment of found and made objects, elevating them from the floor of the gallery using a plinth, which becomes part of the work and showcases his interest in methods of display. In the process of looking at the intimate canvases of Saffron Monks-Smith, our bodies are controlled. We move closer to view these small pieces that seek to capture our fear of darkness and our fascination with the unknown.

On the opposing wall, we encounter Gemma Kirkpatrick’s painting series, A House Made of Sugar. On a larger scale and using a tense colour palette, we are confronted with lost objects and forgotten spaces. Objects find themselves take the place of figures, and human gestures exist within the shadows. There are connections between Kirkpatrick’s paintings and Stephanie Tanney’s sculptural installation. Exploring narratives of home and displacement, we are invited to explore her manipulated wardrobe, catching glimpses of different angles, via a mirror placed behind the structure. Through use of lighting, the piece is highly complimented by expressive shadows. Both artists transform our perceptions of objecthood and value, creating curious juxtapositions and experiences.

A sculptural video installation by Nollaig Molloy is situated in an enclosed space. Two vid-

eo works, projected onto a table, are accompanied by audio narration. The work seeks to explore the values of craft in a contemporary context, posing questions about gesture and abstraction in the action of making. Similarly, Dominic McKeown’s sharp and exposed sculptures emphasise the importance of process. The relationship between metal and cement is dramatised by lights, casting harsh shadows. The materials are manipulated and exposed, connected and disconnected. Similar material concerns run through my video installation, Loved to Death, comprising close-up and confrontational images of exposed flesh, supported by a text piece. Here, the body lives as something fragmented and desecrated; the body is the object. Fragmentation also occurs in Sinead O’Neill-Nicholl’s performative sound piece, Fuck You Up, which invites viewers to ascend a ladder into an enclosed space, where they encounter a powerful deconstruction of the female voice.

Jennifer Alexander’s Bonnie is, Just Over a Few Horizons, displays her interest in process and memory. This large-scale piece features projected images, which illuminate the unique texture of the canvas. There is specific emphasis on distortion of image and memories over time. Further examining this relationship, Valanti Athanasiou uses abstraction to challenge conventional perception and thinking. Her projection displays patterns supported by spoken word, promoting feelings of tranquillity and consciousness. Rosemary McMillen’s video installation conveys modes of communication between feeling and thought, reality and abstraction. Video projected onto casted pots, highlights performative aspects that can exist within contemporary sculptural practices.

Developed in line with popular culture, contemporary sculptural practices have embraced abstraction, futurism and installation, among other approaches. ‘KEEP-DRY’ has successfully managed to combine a diversity of mediums and is a prime example of how sculpture has evolved to truly expose ideas of presence and wonder.

Chloe Austin is a visual artist, currently in her second year of MFA at Ulster University’s Belfast School of Art. chloeaustinart.com @mfafineartuub

‘KEEP-DRY’ (9 to 17 January), installation view, Catalyst Arts, Belfast; photograph by Trevor Wilson, courtesy of MFA 2nd Year Students and Catalyst Arts

Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020

Columns

39

Archives

Recording for the Future

The Sound of the Sculpture’s Making

KATIE BLACKWOOD DISCUSSES SOME OF THE SCULPTURE COLLECTIONS AT NIVAL.

JO MELVIN OUTLINES SOME OF BARRY FLANAGAN’S EARLY SCULPTURES AS WELL AS HIS APPROACH TO DOCUMENTATION.

ON THE NOTICEBOARD at the National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL) there is a photocopy of a telegram from the Earley Collection.

Earley and Co. was an ecclesiastical decorators based in Camden Street, Dublin, from the mid1800s to the mid-1900s. The collection contains design drawings and administrative records. The telegram reads: “No sign of altar, explain immediately”. Taken alone, this historical document poses more questions than answers. Where was the altar? How can something as big as an altar go missing? Did it ever turn up? There may be more clues within the Earley Collection about what happened, or there may not. Archives are full of the unexpected, which can lead researchers down different paths from the ones they originally intended to follow.

NIVAL is a collection of documentation on Irish art and design from 20th century to the present day. Although located within the NCAD campus, it is part-funded by the Arts Council of Ireland. Therefore, it is intended to be a national resource that is open to the public free of charge and without membership.

NIVAL was officially established in 1997 but the archive’s origins truly began in the mid1970s, when Edward Murphy, then a librarian at NCAD, began collecting information on Irish artists. At the time, very little was being published but students were requesting material on the local art scene. Artists’ files were created.

A typical file might contain any of the following: correspondence, newspaper cuttings, press releases, reviews, interviews, images, invitations, posters, fliers, leaflets, small catalogues, diaries, price lists, CVs, statements, cards and notes, exhibition layouts, and more. In time, this expanded to creating files on galleries, arts organisations, design and other related subjects. All the small pieces of ephemera within a file work together to build a picture of an artist’s career or a gallery’s exhibition programme. It also stretches to other themes and topics. There are endless untapped research possibilities within NIVAL, particularly within the sculpture collections.

The sculpture collections at NIVAL tell the recent history of sculpture in Ireland. Much of the documentation is unique primary source material that is unavailable online or from any other public resource. As well as information on individual artists and galleries, there is abundant material on organisations like the Institute of Sculptors of Ireland and the Sculptor’s Society of Ireland (now called Visual Artists Ireland); events and exhibitions like the International Conference on Sculpture 1988, Sculpture in Context; and projects like Breaking Ground and the Per Cent for Art Scheme. There is also extensive documentation on public art, monuments, sculpture parks and trails and performance art, to name but a few.

Part of the Dorothy Walker Collection contains files on some significant international artists and their time in Ireland. Walker documented Joseph Beuys’ attempt to establish the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research in Dublin as well as Christo’s proposal to wrap the footpaths of St. Stephen’s Green during ROSC 1977. Both of

these projects ultimately went unrealised, but their documentation lives on. A more recent acquisition are the records of the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment. Within NIVAL’s collections, a multi-layered picture emerges of all the different sculptural activities taking place in Ireland during a time of change, as the country gradually went from being an insular place, where art was often censored, to the more outward looking nation that we live in today.

Many Irish artists actively donate material to NIVAL and these donations can contribute information on aspects of their career that would be impossible to acquire otherwise. NIVAL has a network of regionally-based collectors who routinely collect ephemera from all over Ireland.

Irish artists who are based abroad can send in material. One such artist is Katie Holten, who often sends in items for her file and, as a result, her international exhibitions are thoroughly documented within our records.

In 2015, the sculptor and performance artist Brian Connolly donated his paperwork relating to public art commissions, which includes fascinating insights into the process, from ideas stage to the finished artwork. Briefing notes, sketches, plans, financial negotiations, dealings with manufacturers and minutes of meetings all feature.

Connolly also donated images of his artworks and performance pieces. Due to the ephemeral nature of performance art, documentation is vital for those not present at the event, in order for it to be experienced at all.

Artists, galleries and arts organisations can be instrumental in archiving their own documentation to preserve their own activities. The easiest way to start is to set aside a box for paper records and to set up a folder on a computer for digital records. Put in anything relevant to your artwork and career. This can include invites, catalogues, scrapbooks, diaries, proposals, images, sketchbooks, finances, letters, emails, press cuttings, interviews, exhibition details, administration and anything that could potentially shed light on your process, inspiration, artworks, projects and career. Don’t forget to regularly back up digital records. Get in touch with NIVAL and talk to a member of staff about how to donate or bequeath your records.

NIVAL’s potential future collections are currently dotted around the country in offices, studios and homes. They are in attics and sheds; they are on the hard drives of soon-to-be-obsolete computers. As an artist, gallery or arts organisation, ensuring that your papers and files are preserved and accessible in the future means that your work will continue to live on. New audiences will be reached and the history of art in Ireland will be richer and more complete.

Researchers will continue to come to NIVAL asking questions and hopefully the clues will be there to follow.

Katie Blackwood is a library assistant at the National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL).

“Is it that the only useful thing a sculptor can do, being a three-dimensional thinker and therefore one hopes, a responsible thinker, is to assert himself twice as hard in a negative way” – Barry Flanagan1 ON COMPLETING HIS sculpture studies at St

Martins School of Art in 1966, Barry Flanagan was offered a solo exhibition at the Rowan Gallery, London. He had been introduced to Alex Gregory-Hood, its eccentric director and a former guardsman, by the sculptor Philip King, who showed with the gallery and was one of Flanagan’s lecturers. This prestigious opportunity is the kind that fine art graduates continue to dream of, and Flanagan’s good fortune continued with the enthusiastic reviews he received.

The gallery was in a well-heeled neighbourhood and had carpet on the wall. Flanagan had twelve sculptures in the exhibition, including ringn 66 (1966) – made from 100lbs of sand poured directly onto the carpet – and mmmzzmm (1966) – a twisted paper strip, hanging from the ceiling.

It is hard to imagine now, but the fact that Flanagan made sculpture by pouring sand straight onto the gallery’s carpeted floor – intervening with the natural heap by scooping out sand with cupped hands in the directions North, South, East and West – was surprising to viewers. The word ‘ring’ in the title is ambiguous. Is it the ring of an announcement and associated with sound? Or is it the ring that the sand makes as a shape on the floor; or with the letter ‘n’, the negativity of the shape where the sand is removed? He joined the ‘n’ to the word ‘ring’. He said, with typical ellipsis: “it was just dry sand […] poured on the floor.”

Perhaps mmmzzmm was titled by the sound of the sculpture’s making. The fact that we can ask the question is due to Flanagan’s record keeping. Both these works figure on the list of works included in the Rowan Gallery. This list and additional records for the works are in his archive. The paperwork was “alas destroyed” in Flanagan’s handwritten notation – the sand sculpture still exists and is now in the Tate Gallery collection.

Flanagan’s attention to record keeping began when he was a student. He documented finished works on filing cards with a photograph, the title, date, medium, any exhibition in which it featured, and occasionally its sale, with the name of the collector. This diligence applied also in lectures; his friends remembered that he always sat right at the front, in order to make notes.

A few years later, in 1969, Flanagan started printing ‘funds’, partly in order to have currency for his assistants. Minting ‘art money’ was also a humorous comment on the operations of the art market. Like Andy Warhol’s dollar bills, Flanagan’s lino prints symbolise exchange, both in the art product’s commodification and its transaction value for services rendered. Flanagan gave envelopes stuffed with prints in denominations of five, ten and fifty pounds to his collaborators. The Flanagan mint plays on notions of authenticity in the art object; each note bears his thumbprint, marked in blue ink. The choice of the colour blue utilises a witty double bind of the blueprint,

which in itself is a characteristic feature of Flanagan’s work. The following year he made a series of monoprints, again using his inked thumbprint as the stamp. Each was configured differently.

The fingerprints draw attention to his hands-on manipulation of clay; this is consistently demonstrated in the sculptures. There are traces of his hand’s grip and the imprint of fingers and thumb in many of his bronze works.

When Flanagan stated that the activity of making sculpture was an extension of our three-dimensional experience of the world, he opened up the conventions of the term. This meant that sound and light were as much part of his sculptural vocabulary as material objects. The tactile, surface, colour, weight and balance, sound and light are considered for their three-dimensional properties. These are brought together in sculptural propositions that are at once serious and humorous, clear and contradictory, for instance shadow catcher ‘77/79 (1977) made from gauze and hessian attached to a wooden framework hung on the wall. The idea of catching shadows is, in practical terms, impossible to realise, except, what Flanagan does is demonstrate through the sculptural construct, a pragmatic but nonetheless imaginary solution.

Jo Melvin is Director of the Barry Flanagan Estate.

Notes 1 Barry Flanagan, letter to Anthony Caro in 1963. The letter was subsequently printed in Flanagan’s magazine, Silans, in 1965. The magazines were later published as a book, Silans 1964-65, edited by Jo Melvin, which was launched at Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane in 2011.

Top: Barry Flanagan, shadow catcher ‘77/79, 1977/79.

Bottom: Barry Flanagan, ringn ‘66, 1966. Both images courtesy of Barry Flanagan Estate.