Arts Round-up INTERCULTURAL ARTISTS SHOWCASE Terra Nova Productions, Northern Ireland’s intercultural theatre company creating culturally diverse, professional and community-led projects for over 13 years, has been working with some of Northern Ireland’s most exciting freelance artists, from diverse backgrounds, throughout the lockdowns. The company is delighted to announce that the first set of work developed by the artists is ready to view and will be released weekly online until 31st March. Supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Organisations Emergency Programme, this project provides a platform to showcase artists who, through various art forms, explore and highlight a range of current issues including the impact of the pandemic, family separation and loss, social justice and #BlackLivesMatter. The short pieces are wide ranging in style and are based on the artist’s investigations. They include everything from how languages other than English may influence the performance of Shakespeare, intimate storytelling, to compelling work about injustice and reparations and a piece capturing the sound of mornings all across the globe. The commissioned pieces will be released weekly online until 31st March and are free to view. For details visit www.terranovaproductions.net
Terra Nova Productions participating artists: Katie Varga, Bryony Randall, Michelle AshwoodStewart, Jamal Franklin, Raquel McKee, Rosa Stourac McCreery, Raoul Brand, Shannon Yee, Michelle Yim.
OUR SONGS, OUR PLACE The Ulster Orchestra is delighted to announce the release of a new recording, Our Songs, Our Place, featuring nine songs by local songwriters developed through the Orchestra’s Your Song Now project. With the live music industry thrown into disarray with the COVID-19 restrictions closing venues across the country, musicians have been forced to find new ways to express their creativity. Composer and arranger Paul Campbell approached the Ulster Orchestra in April 2020 with the idea for a project that sought to curate a musical response to the first COVID-19 lockdown.
This became the Your Song Now project, which invited songwriters at any stage of their career to submit a song that spoke of their life and experience of the lockdown. From 69 entries, nine songwriters were selected to work on their songs with mentors Duke Special (2007 Choice Music Prize nominee), Kitt Philippa (NI Music Award Best Album winner in 2020) and Paul Campbell, culminating in this recording, an album that crosses genres and generations, while exploring the common experience of lockdown and how it has changed all our lives. Speaking of the album, Paul Campbell said: “In the midst of all that’s conspired to keep us apart for many months now, the music we make is a gift - inspiring us, providing us with deeper connections and closer community. Producing Our Songs Our Place, with such a wealth of local talent surrounded by the sublime sounds of the Ulster Orchestra, has been a truly overwhelming experience for me personally. These songs are saturated with real life - our lives - and I hope that the album might remind us of all that’s precious about these challenging times, long after they’ve become a distant memory.” Our Songs, Our Place is available for purchase digitally and in CD format from: www.ulsterorchestra.org.uk/news/ oursongsourplace/
IN RESONANCE In Resonance, an exhibition by Saffron Monks-Smith, will run from 3-27 March at www.artisann.org. This online exhibition from ArtisAnn Gallery focuses on life that could have been, depicting a contrast between abandoned rural houses and urban street-lit locations of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The paintings attempt to breathe new life into places that no longer harbour human life – where reality and imagination cross paths - where the present and the past strangely exist all in one space. These paintings attempt to conceal and reveal the life that could have lived within these buildings whilst showing the bustling urban streets as somewhere ghostly and isolated. Saffron Monks-Smith graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from Ulster University in June 2020 and is now a member of Arcade Studios, Belfast. Her practice in printmaking during her undergraduate degree awarded her the Belfast Print Workshop Membership in 2015 as well as the Seacourt Print Workshop Graduate Award in 2018. Now focusing on painting, Saffron has expanded on her ideas of memory and atmosphere through her nocturnal urban and suburban landscapes. In her most recent body of work for the ArtisAnn Emerging 60
Artist Exhibition of 2020, her work offered a play between light and dark, absence and presence through the everyday, mundane and often nocturnal surroundings. The exhibition runs at www.artisann.org from 3rd to 27th March 2021.
‘Rising Mist’ by Saffron Monks Smith.
