Visual Artists' News Sheet - 2014 November December

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet issue 6 November – December 2014 Published byVisual Artists Ireland Ealaíontóirí Radharcacha Éire

Causeway Coast & Glens Tulca 2014 Studio Olafur Eliasson Metamodernism Yvonne Cullivan’s ‘In The Current’ Visionary Strategies Art on Television Critique: ‘In a Landscape,’ Leanne McDonagh, Maria Simonds-Gooding, Mark Clare. These Immovable Walls Alan Counihan’s ‘Personal Effects: A History Of Possession’ Kinsale Arts Festival R-Space Gallery Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh Profile

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Editorial

The Visual Artists’News Sheet

November – December 2014

Contents

1. Cover Image. Phillip Napier Soon ‘These Immovable Walls: Performing Power’ Dublin Castle 11 – 12 June 2014. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Joseph Carr 5. Roundup. Recent exhibitions and projects of note.

5. Column. Francis McKee. Under the Radar.

6. Column. Jason Oakley. Let’s Be Modern About It. 7. Column.Conor McGrady. Ex-centric Alternatives.

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

8. VAI News. Research, projects and campaigns.

9. Regional Focus. Visual arts resources and activity in Causeway Coast & Glens.

11. Residency Ask For Zippy. How and why Bill Drummond established an artists’ residency in a tower located in small Antrim coastal town, 12. Project Profile. Speeds of Life. Aisling Prior discusses her approach to curating Tulca 2014, ‘Neutral’.

14. Internship Profile. Quasi Objects & Shooting Hoops. Fiona Gannon describes her internship at Studio Olafur Eliasson, Berlin.

15. Seminar Profile. The Return of History. Kris Dittel reports on the ‘Metamodernism Modernism Marathon’ 16. Art in public: Case Study. Re-framing the Ringroad. Yvonne Cullivan discusses her public art project ‘In The Current,’ commissioned for Belturbet, County Cavan.

17. VAI Advocacy. 2020 Vision. Jason Oakley outlines VAI’s thinking on the need for a visionary strategy.

18. Media. Art on the Box. An interview with Sarah Ryder, Assistant Commissioning Editor at Rté Factual.

19. Critique. ‘In a Landscape,’ Solstice, Navan; Tristan Barry, Ards Arts Centre; Leanne McDonagh, Origin Gallery, Dublin; Maria Simmonds-Gooding, RHA, Dublin; Mark Clare, Crawford Gallery, Cork.

23. Media The Reality Show? Noel Kelly Director / CEO outlines VAI\s recent involvement with a reality-style business mentoring show tv show.

24. Performance / Seminar Profile. Pushing Ideological Walls. Áine Phillips reports on ‘These Immovable Walls,’ a live art event and seminar on the embodiment and performance of power.

25. VAI Event. The Rise & Rise. VAI Membership Manager / Listings Editor Adrian Colwell describes the evolution of the VAI Show & Tell event.

25. Seminar. Freelancers Unite! Bernadette Beecher profiles Cultural Freelancers Ireland 26. Project Profile. Dark History, Dark Expression. Alan Counihan describes his recent project ‘Personal Effects: A History Of Possession’.

27. VAI Northern Ireland Manager. Flux and Success. Rob Hilken outlines how Derry-Londonderry’s key visual arts spaces are committed to expanding the legacy of Derry-Londonderry City Of Culture 2013.

27. Organisation Profile. Art of Our Time. A profile of the Golden Thread, Gallery, Belfast.

28. Festival. Impish & Intelligent. Sarah Kelleher outlines her impressions of the 2014 Kinsale Arts Festival (19 – 28 September) 30. Institution Profile. Twists & Turns. Dorothy Hunter Profiles R-Space Gallery, Lisburn.

31. Career Development. Potential for Damage. Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh decribes how he is making a career as an artist.

32. Public Art Roundup. Public art commissions, site-specific works, socially engaged practice and various other forms of art outside the gallery.

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

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

Production: Editor: Jason Oakley. Assistant Editor: Lily Power. News & Opportunities: Niamh Looney.

Invoicing: Bernadette Beecher.

Contributors: Francis McKee, Jason Oakley, Malcolm Murchison, Sara Cunningham-Bell, Desima Connolly, McCall Gilfillan, Bill Drummond, Aisling Prior, Fiona Gannon, Kris Dittel, Yvonne Cullivan, Sarah Ryder, Catherine Mary Nolan, Dr. Pippa Little,Anne Mullee, Iain Griffin, Roisin Russell Noel Kelly, Áine Phillips, Adrian Colwell, Bernadette Beecher, Alan Counihan, Rob Hilken, Peter Richards,Sarah Kelleher, Dorothy Hunter, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh Contact: Visual Artists Ireland, Ground Floor, Central Hotel Chambers, 7–9 Dame Court, Dublin 2 T: 353(0)1 672 9488 F: 00353(0) 1 672 9482 E: info@visualartists.ie www.visualartists.ie Board of Directors: Liam Sharkey (Chair), Maoiliosa Reynolds, Roger Bennett, Susan MacWilliam, Linda Shevlin, Fergus Martin, Niamh McCann, Donall Curtin. Staff: CEO / Director: Noel Kelly. Office Manager: Bernadette Beecher. Publications Manager: Jason Oakley. Assistant Editor: Lily Power. Advocacy Programme Officer: Alex Davis. Professional Development Officer: Monica Flynn. Communications Officer: Niamh Looney. Book-keeping: Dina Mulchrone. Listings Editor / Membership Assistant: Adrian Colwell. Northern Ireland Manager: Rob Hilken (rob@visualartists-ni.org). West of Ireland Represenetative: Aideen Barry (aideenbarry@gmail.com).

The views expressed in this publication, unless otherwise indicated, do not necessarily reflect those of the Editors, Editorial Panel or Visual Artists Irelands’ Board of Directors.

Visual Artists Ireland is the registered trading name of The Sculptors’ Society of Ireland. Registered Company No. 126424.

The Visual Artists’News Sheet

November – December 2014

Column

Francis McKee

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Roundup Quaternion Quest

Under the Radar At the end of December 2013 I experienced an odd nostalgia for the Troubles that began to disturb me. Julian Cope, formerly of The Teardrop Explodes, had just cancelled a January date in Belfast due to a bomb blast in the Cathedral area of the city. I had forgotten how at the height of the Troubles in the 1970s few British or international performers would include Northern Ireland on their tour schedules. As they turned away from the province so did the mainland media in Britain, unless it was to bring fresh accounts of violence, which in their turn overwhelmed any vision of normality.

In effect, the region disappeared in a state of blackout, cauterised and amputated from British consciousness. And, over the subsequent 40 years, social desire paths have crystalised around the void, passing it by, blind to its reality. The peace process has not been enough to dispel this phenomenon and so, in many ways, Northern Ireland still operates under conditions of social and national invisibility.

This is clearly a factor in the way in which the contemporary art world in the North is received. There are very positive developments that demonstrate just how much is happening in the province: the Turner Prize in 2013, the ongoing achievements of Catalyst Arts, Golden Thread and Void, the establishment of the Mac, Belfast and CCA, Londonderry-Derry. Yet this momentum barely seems to impact on the UK media (perhaps the Turner Prize gained some profile but attention was primarily focused on the artists and there was little peripheral context).

Perhaps the real question is: why should it matter whether the UK media and academia are paying attention to Northern Ireland? The recent referendum in Scotland was driven less by nationalism than by a population’s desire to control its own infrastructure at a time when Westminster seems unable to connect with any region beyond London’s boundaries. And Glasgow, facing a similar dilemma to the cities of the North, seemed to gain traction when it bypassed the London art world and plugged into New York, Berlin, Los Angeles or Mexico City directly. Achieving success there eventually forced recognition from London, while founding networks that rendered the attention of the UK media much less necessary. The question is: What can UK media and academia really provide from their relatively solipsistic positions? It could be argued that focusing on the unique textures of Northern Irish identity can propel artists from that region much further in the international art world. Surrendering that identity in favour of a more generic UK brand surrenders much of the context that locates the work of a Northern Irish artist.

Local identity remains vital in this situation. In the North the various communities may have their divisions but each of them has a strong sense of place and culture that is unique to their geography. For an artist to abandon this for the sake of UK media recognition would be to cut themselves off from their own roots.

Some may choose that anyway, as those roots are not always so easy to accommodate and often come with strictures that can be punishing as well as nurturing. Overall though, if the province is going to benefit from its current artistic momentum it needs a substantial base of artists to remain there and it needs to keep refining its own infrastructure. If it can persuade artists to stay in Northern Ireland and work there then funders could support them by helping to establish artistic links around the world.

Often, being ignored is a moment of opportunity. There is a heavy cost that comes with the attention of UK media, academia and high-level strategic policy makers. The greatest danger is homogenisation, a scenario where Northern Ireland becomes just an outpost of the London art world importing touring exhibitions and a Tate franchise.

Right now, the MAC art prize has got off to an impressive start with a strong panel of judges and a very exciting shortlist of artists. The appointment of Matt Packer to CCA in Derry-Londonderry also demonstrates ongoing commitment to a space full of potential. At a time when Westminster politics and UK media are losing touch with grassroots reality, this is a moment to shape something new that body swerves those failing entities. Northern Ireland can more easily work with Scotland or Wales, Dublin or Cork. Likewise, this is a moment to attract artists and stimulate creative momentum. While London is now recognised as one of the most exciting world capitals it is simultaneously pricing artists and galleries out of the city, embalming itself as a ‘safe zone’ for the rich like Manhattan. And, though it’s sad to see London’s petrification, there are clear opportunities now for other cities to take advantage of this situation.

One of the great issues today in the art world seems to be the relationship between the local and the global. Northern Ireland’s unique voice certainly asserts the strengths of the local and, if it can avoid the homogenisation of UK culture, it can participate much more interestingly in global dialogues. In that arena, the province will not encounter the ingrained myopia that characterises British media and academia.

Francis McKee, Director, CCA Glasgow

Emma Donaldson,Untitled 2013 Aisling O’Beirne,Quaternion Quest, The Lab, 2014

Aisling O’Beirn’s exhibition ‘Quaternion Quest’, based on the findings of Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, ran at The Lab, Dublin (11 Sept – 15 Nov). Whilst walking from Dunsink Observatory to the Royal Irish Academy, Hamilton experienced a moment of sudden realisation and inscribed the formula for quaternion equations on Broom Bridge. O’Beirn’s film and installation work focused on this act of mathematical vandalism, which formed a type of bridge in modern mathematics between algebra and geometry, in an attempt to try to understand the equation and map that process.

represent a move towards a more handson approach in Donaldson’s practice. “In assembling work,” Donaldson stated, “I want it to appear spontaneously casual or quick. My surfaces seem thin, singlecoated and flat – like an emotion flooding through, before fading, without tangible trace of reason”.

Amanda Coogan, image of performanceYou Told Me...

An exhibition of paintings by Armaghborn artist Paddy Lamb ran at the Market Place, Armagh (26 Sept – 25 Oct). “While acknowledging the role of landscape as a repository for our history, culture and collective memory,” the press release stated, “his work explores the imprint of society on nature in a variety of locations”.

‘Contemplation’ by Olive Eustace also ran at the gallery during this time and comprised a series of paintings.

Eustace focuses on her immediate surroundings and childhood. Each painting provides a snapshot of life and features a single figure. In the press release, the artist stated, “All these works are created from my imagination. I have a particular interest in the face, finding it the most expressive part of the body”. marketplacearmagh.com

The Sophisticated Neanderthal

brianduggan.net, balzer-art-projects.ch

Making Trouble University of Hertfordshire Galleries at the Museum of St. Albans hosted an exhibition of drawing and sculpture by Emma Donaldson titled ‘Making Trouble’. The works, the press release noted,

You Told Me To...

Market Place

Olive Eustace,Lift Me Up

Irish artist Brian Duggan was invited to present a new body of work for the group show ‘Das Leben ist (k)ein Stillleben / Life is (not) a still life’ at Balzer Projects, Basel from 6 Sept – 18 Oct. The press release explained how, during World War II, the US government took control of uranium for development of the atom bomb and confiscated the Homer Laughlin China Company’s stocks. Homer Laughlin discontinued Fiesta red in 1944. The company reintroduced Fiesta red in 1959 using depleted uranium (rather than the original natural uranium) after the Atomic Energy Commission relaxed its restrictions on uranium oxide. This new project included original 1930 Fiesta wear pieces, testing equipment and audio readings as an installation in the gallery.

templebargallery.com

herts.ac.uk

Das Leben ist (k)ein Stilleben

Brian Duggan, Balzer Art Projects Gallery, 2014

The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview, a film work by Nathaniel Mellors, was shown at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin (5 Sept – 1 Nov). The action focuses on an interview between Truson, a character from Mellor’s earlier work Ourhouse and an apparently genuine Neanderthal man. The film explores the shift from the hunter-gatherer mode of human existence to the more knowledge-based Neolithic way of life, looking specifically at the emergence of art-making, which “marked a shift in consciousness toward the intelligent and creative modern human mind”, the press release noted.

Amanda Coogan and Dublin Theatre of the Deaf developed a collaborative project ‘You Told Me to Wash and Clean Out My Ears’, which ran 16 – 20 Sept at Project Arts Centre, Dublin as part of Irish Sign Language Awareness Week and Tiger Dublin Fringe. The live performance – aimed at both hearing and deaf audiences – featured 40 deaf performers aged 18 – 80 and included International Sign Language, sculpture, staged scenes, first person testimony, movement, performance and live art around the theme of deaf history.

fringefest.com

Do You Care For Tea?

Noel Molly,Do You Care For Tea?, 2014

Ann McKenna and Noel Molloy presented a mixed media exhibition at Hawkswell Theatre, Sligo (3 Oct – 12 Nov). McKenna’s paintings and etched prints were shown alongside Molloy’s sculptural wall relief works. The exhibition was inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the artists tried to reflect the story’s sense of “confusion and bewilderment… told with humourous ease”, the press release noted.

hawkswell.com NathanielMellors,The Sophisticated Neanderthal, 2014

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Column

ROUNDUP

Jason Oakley

Not Life / Necessarily

around ideas of the sea “as a connecting force between disparate geographies either through travels in the form of immigration, vacation, and commerce, or through the circulation of stories and memories”.

Let’s Be Modern About It In 2009 Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker established the webzine www. metamodernism.com, and in 2010 co-authored the essay ‘Notes on Metamodernism’ for the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture.1 The duo and their associates describe ‘metamodernity’ as an “ongoing research project documenting developments in aesthetics and culture that can no longer be explained in terms of the postmodern”.2 Pedants might grumble. Meta ordinarily means ‘beyond’ or ‘after’ doesn’t it? Not so different from ‘post’. Curmudgeons might roll their eyes at the idea of a crisply branded website dedicated to a trendy academic buzz-concept dreamed up by some hip Dutch academics. But bear with it. The prefix also means ‘about’. Meta-fiction is fiction about fiction; meta-data is data about data etc. So what’s really at stake is the rather arresting and only slightly irritatingly idea of ‘modern modernism’.

Vermeulen and Akker suggest that a transition has taken place from the prevalence of pessimistic post-modern irony to new kind of sincerity and optimism, albeit of a very knowing kind. It encompasses a belief in imagining better futures – ie ‘modern’ times – as opposed to a perpetual replay of capitalist realist conditions of the ‘contemporary’ from which we can only expect more of the same: boom and bust economics, erosion of the socio-political realm.

Metamodernism fully acknowledges the volatile nature of the present. As Vermeulen and Akker have put it “…the ecosystem is severely disrupted; the financial system is increasingly uncontrollable; and the geopolitical structure has recently begun to appear as unstable as it has always been uneven. This triple crisis infuses doubt and inspires reflection about our basic assumptions, as much as inflaming cultural debates and provoking dogmatic entrenchments. History it seems is moving rapidly beyond its all too hastily proclaimed end”.3 At the VAI Get Together in May the AICA / VAI discussion Art in a Time of Transition explored these same three coordinates.

A landmark moment for metamodernism took place on 25 September this year, when the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, hosted the Metamodernism Marathon.

Running from 11am – 11 pm the event featured Francis Fukuyama, Michel Bauwens, Hassnae Bouazza, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Bojana Kunst, Nina Power, Cally Spooner, Adam Thirlwell and Camille de Toledo reflecting on how those “promised a life of peace and plenty, of consensus and comfort – the generations born in the 1980s and 1990s – are now confronted with an increasingly uncertain existence. Confident and confused, assertive and anxious, isolated and connected, pampered and poor, they try to come to terms with this rather unforeseen reality and the not-so-foreseeable future”.4 A full report on this event can be found on page 15.

The Metamodernism Marathon event was framed in terms of Vermeulen and Akker’s theorisation of Metamodernism as “a structure of feeling that emerged around the turn of the millennium,” typified by new forms of artistic production such as the “New Engagement in the arts and the New Aesthetic in design, the New Sincerity in literature and the New Weird in music, Quirky Cinema and Quality Television”.

There isn’t space in this column to properly unpack these snappy terms, but some common-sense meanings should be immediately apparent. In essence there seems to be a hopeful desire afoot for change; this is apparent in the recent transition towards socially engaged art, music, literature, film and TV that doesn’t treat is audiences like imbeciles or cynical know-it-alls.

The new aesthetic in design is a more particular and peculiar idea. It is tied up with the rather self-effacing idea of a ‘post-human’ aesthetics. Its focus is on the look, feel and consequences of the networked digital realm. There’s links to the philosophical theory of object-orientated ontology, which perceives inanimate objects (natural or of human manufacture) as existing on a kind of level playing field of relevance.

It stresses geological time in contrast to the relative brevity of human history. For example, the architectural expression of metamodernism is in a tendency to make buildings that resemble monumental geological outcrops or sprawling landforms.

Elements of this might ring alarm bells for some. Isn’t it all a bit happy-clappy and simplistic in the face of horrendous current events? Can the ‘quirky’ cinema of Wes Anderson really betoken a counter-position to globalised capitalism and Isis terrorism? Or help solve plight of Palestine? Doesn’t the whole post-humanist ‘networked digital culture is changing human consciousness / we’re all just objects like the world around us’ shtick play into the hands of the neo-liberal consensus that humanity is a dumb herd, motivated by predictable avaricious self-interest?

These are tough but fair questions, but it would be wilfully simplistic and narrow minded not to tolerate contradiction, complexity and nuance within an ambitious body of theory and analysis that’s neither embarrassed nor afraid to venture towards identifying a new paradigm. The concept of metamodernism is really just a sign-post, intended to direct the curious and intelligent to consider a varying terrain of new viewpoints and analyses. Perhaps it’s time to modernise the modern?

Notes 1. Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Vol 2, October 2010, www.aestheticsandculture.net 2. metamodernism.com 3. e-flux.com/announcements/metamodernism-the-return-of-history 4. Timotheus Vermeulen & Robin van den Akker, editorial, metamodernism.com

siriusartscentre.ie

The Cutting Rooms

November – December 2014

work makes direct visual and conceptual reference to educational play objects devised by educator and inventor of Kindergarten Friedrich Fröbel. For the artist, the press release stated, “parenthood acted as the catalyst for this enquiry into methods of merging real life with his art practice, where his ongoing concerns are the interplay of art, architecture design and education”. roscommonartscentre.ie

Exhibition images by Walsh and Brenan

The National College of Art and Design Gallery held an exhibition of work by Chloe Brenan and Chanelle Walshe titled ‘Not Like / Necessarily’ (19 Sept – 24 Oct). Brenan and Walshe undertook a residency in Dresden, Germany to explore the points of confluence in their respective practices in development the exhibition, which included painting, photography and installed sound and sculptural work. The title was borrowed from the closing lines of Samuel Beckett’s poem Something There (trans. 1974).

In reference to the poem, the press release stated, “both artists’ practices consider and reflects on the subject of the unknowable, poetically pointing to moments likened to an oscillating point on a fulcrum”.

Mary Theresa Keown’s exhibition ‘The Cutting Room II’ ran at Leitrim Sculpture Centre (5 – 25 Sept). Keown’s work explores the use of collage in painting and the idea of “crossbreeding languages,” the press release noted. For this exhibition she divided the space into different collections of recent work: the Mimetic room, the Diptych room, the Narrative room, the Liquin room and the Post-Mortem room.

ncad.com/about/gallery

leitrimsculpturecentre.ie

Temporary Sights

Exhibition images from ‘Temporary Sights’

Multimedia exhibition ‘Temporary Sights’ ran at MART, Dublin (18 – 19 Sept) as part of an ongoing project curated by Siobhán Mooney. The exhibition featured work by Aaron Stapleton, Jane Fogarty and Eve Woods based around the concept of time. Each piece, the press release noted, “will touch on or abound with Time… the work interacting with this vast subject in a durational sense, a thematic sense or both”. mart.ie

All obstructing walls...

Mary Theresa Keown, The Cutting Room

Concentrate on Your Breathing Marie-Claire Keogh’s exhibition of new print works, ‘Concentrate on Your Breathing,” ran at Draiocht Arts Centre, Blanchardstown (19 Sept – 22 Nov). In the press release, Keogh described the work as an “investigation of suppressed emotion and thought rediscovery, using printmaking (collographs, drypoints, monoprints) as a form of self-expression”.

Draoicht also presented an exhibition of paintings by Bernie Masterson titled ‘Weather’, which explored the landscape as untamed nature. In these new works, Masterson stated, her “response to the landscape (both the beauty and the terrors of nature) [was] to ‘poeticise’ it, just like early nineteenth century artists did. Weather changes landscape, it shapes it, and subsequently our relationship and response to it”.

We All Live On The Same Sea

Exhibition poster from ‘All obstructing walls...’

Catalyst Arts, Belfast held an exhibition of work by Amanda Beech titled ‘All obstructing walls have been broken down’ (17 Oct – 21 Nov). The exhibition featured a new series of works on paper (2014) alongside the large-scale video installation Sanity Assassin (2010). Both works, the press release noted, take the “freeways, the retreats, and the housing tracts of Los Angeles” (where the artist lives) as their primary reference, and “traversing the landscape of alienated systems of life, both installations interrogate the hopes, possibilities and consequences of new forms of constructing life in lived space… together the works produce a certain narrative on the condition of reality and its architectures”. catalystarts.org.uk

This Way to Enchantment

draiocht.ie

A History of Play

Exhibition poster from ‘This Way to enchantment’

‘We All Live on the Same Sea’ exhibition image

Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh presented the group exhibition ‘We All Live On The Same Sea’, curated by Rana Öztürk and featuring Cliona Harmey, David Farrell, Deniz Üster, Fiona Marron, Gülsün Karamustafa, Margaret Fitzgibbon, Mark Garry, Paid Murphy, Sean Carpio and Tayfun Sertta. The multidisciplinary work, the press release stated, focused

Eamonn O’Kane, ‘History of Play’, 2014

Eamonn O’Kane transformed the gallery at Roscommon Arts Centre into an interactive installation for the exhibition ‘A History of Play’ (4 Oct – 14 Nov). The

‘This Way to Enchantment’ was an exhibition by Rory Tangney at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh (18 Oct – 16 Nov). Tangney used a combination of found and new materials and sounds in this new body of work, which questions whether science can provide us everything we need in a post-religious world. “This is essentially a search for the ‘spirit’ in the machine’,” the press release stated, “ideas about obsolescence – of technol-

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2014

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Column

ROUNDUP

Conor McGrady

ogy, people and ideas – emerge through sculptural objects, sound and drawings that are carefully imagined and skilfully made”.

Ex-centric Alternatives What is the role of the art school in the current social and political conjuncture? From 17 – 18 July 2014, over 60 international participants attended Burren College of Art’s ‘Ex-Centric Alternatives’ symposium to address this and other pertinent questions facing artists, academics, students and administrators. Present were representatives from the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Cardiff School of Art and Design, Crawford Institute of Technology, Uversity.org and the former Minister of Culture for Denmark, to name but a few.

Eschewing panel presentations, the event featured a number of roundtable discussions, breakout sessions in small groups and a walk in the Burren. The place of art schools in contemporary socio-political contexts was a central question in all the sessions; this was augmented by a critical examination of how art schools prepare students for survival as global citizens. Another important topic of discussion was how such instititions engage with their place in rural or urban contexts, and how they can ensure their survival and validity against a backdrop of rising tuition fees and tentative career sustainability for their graduates. Underpinning the framework for these discussions were alternative models of education represented by Burren College of Art, Kaos Pilots (Denmark), Black Mountain College (North Carolina) and the Blekinge Institute of Technology (Sweden).

The idea of place was a reoccurring theme throughout the course of the symposium. In particular, the dichotomies between the periphery and the centre and between the rural and the urban served as catalysts for a critical examination of how art schools relate to their immediate environments. As a rural campus, Burren College of Art has long recognised and harnessed the power of place as a complex interlocking nexus of interests that is continually evolving and responding to the challenges of economic and environmental sustainability. Before it, the Black Mountain College saw the importance of the rural periphery as a place where experimentation is freed from the predetermined sets of expectations found in urban contexts.

Often the most interesting ideas are generated on the periphery, which in turn feed centres perpetually caught between atrophy and renewal. If rural campuses can harness the multi-layered context of their surrounding environment, can art schools, which are for the most part located in dense urban concentrations, do likewise?

Place-based learning in the urban environment does exist at a number of schools, but is by no means universal or prioritised. While public art, site specificity and intervention in the urban arena are well established, the current focus on social engagement has only recently highlighted the roles that art schools could potentially play in relating to their immediate environs. It is fitting that the title for the Burren College Alumni Exhibition, which ran for the duration of the symposium, was ‘The Middle of Everywhere’. The show emphasised that distinctions between the rural and the urban, the remote and the densely concentrated, are fluid than, and start to collapse into each other in the context of an increasingly globalised world.

Another key topic of discussion was the survival of small-scale, independent art schools in the current climate. While there is no doubt that larger institutions are better able to weather the storm of unpredictable enrolment patterns, the impact of the educational experience for students in smaller schools remains valuable and necessary – perhaps even more so through the provision of a more personalised, student centred, individually tailored alternative to the models offered by larger schools.

Flexibility, innovation and a radical and experimental approach to both pedagogy and practice can take place in smaller art schools, which have fewer timeconsuming procedural constraints. It is perhaps this flexibility and adaptability to change that can enable the survival and relevance of smaller innovative schools in uncertain and challenging times. The challenges are of course real, and the exception here is Black Mountain College (1933 – 1957), which had a limited life span in the mid twentieth century, but is continually cited as a radical example of what an art school could potentially be.

As we continue to negotiate a dual economic and environmental crisis, what are the survival tools needed for students who are parachuting into an uncertain world post graduation? And what about the art schools themselves? As the symposium drew to a close, two approaches to chaos and uncertainty were offered. One is to shore up pre-existing systems and deploy order to foster a sense of stability. The other is to embrace chaos, to not only produce change, but to produce flexible, alternative models of education.

Being a change-maker can be a lonely calling, and participants were urged to move beyond the discursive and agree to do something together. Post-symposium, networks have been established, resources shared and cross-instituional collaborations planned. The diversity of ideas and belief in the potential of art and education as vehicles for moving society forward highlight the importance of embracing change in a more open-ended and collaborative way, not only to ensure survival, but to adequately prepare students to be global citizens in the twenty-first century.

Conor McGrady, Dean of Academic Affairs, Burren College of Art

siriusartscentre.ie

House of Blindness

of light, the press release described, “the stars are used to represent both the present and the past”. The artist used the night sky and the landscape to explore ideas of temporality and place, emphasising the brilliance of the night sky in a remote location. butlergallery.com

An Answer is Expected

from 24 – 31 Oct. Whelan drew on the narrative structure of both Vladimir Nabakov’s novel Pale Fire and the film Hiroshima Mon Amour by Alain Resnais (which was screened daily throughout the exhibition). Her work, the press release noted, “investigates the tension between truth and fiction; the objective and the subjective; and between seeing, knowing and experiencing”. The show also featured a daily Twitter-based performance from the artist in response to the film and a display of archives of real and fictional events. thejoinery.org

Image from Vicky Smith’s ‘House of Blindness’

‘House of Blindness’ was a multimedia exhibition by Vicky Smith, which ran at Ps2, Belfast from 16 Oct – 1 Nov and featured a hospital bedroom, HD video, sound recording, photographs, text drawings and film footage. Smith’s work responded to particular pieces by the writers Edna O’Brien and Sylvia Plath, exploring, the press release stated, “aspects of identity, feminism and writing as a tool to think about notions of place, difference, surface and flow”. pssquared.org

WHITE – Lest We Forget

Susan MacWilliam, An Answer is Expected, 2014

Susan MacWilliam’s ‘An Answer is Expected,’ which included sculpture and film works, was exhibited at QUAD, Derby (23 Sept – 23 Nov). MacWilliam explores the Extra Sensory Perception and telepathy work of parapsychologist Dr JB Rhine “with a fascination in the researcher’s quest for answers and proof,” the press release stated. The exhibition reflected on the work, experimental apparatus, lives and personalities of those involved in parapsychology – a subject falling beyond the ‘normal’ fields of science and psychology.

Faint Echo Sarah Lincoln’s film Faint Echo was shown at Castlecomer Library, Kilkenny on 21 Oct. This new work explores the remains of the Castlecomer mines, both above and below ground. The screening was part of the project ‘Forecast,’ which invites people to contribute ideas for the future of five rural Kilkenny towns. forecastproject.tumblr.com

Disarticulation

derbyquad.co.uk

The Artificial Magic...

Emer Ní Chíobháin, ‘Disarticulation’, 2014

Exhibition poster for ‘WHITE – Lest We Forget’

From 25 Sept – 18 Nov ‘WHITE – Lest We Forget’ ran at Limerick City Gallery of Art and featured work by Rita Duffy (Northern Ireland), Jamal Penjweny (Iraq) and Lida Abdul (Afghanistan). To mark 100 years since the outbreak of WWI, the exhibition looked at how war continues now, and how the lives of ordinary people go on. gallery.limerick.ie

The Talking Earth

Amy Walsh, ‘The Talking Earth,’ 2014

Amy Walsh’s exhibition of video, photography and digital media, ‘The Talking Earth,’ ran at Butler Gallery, Kilkenny (18 Oct – 14 Dec). Walsh created two interrelated bodies of work that were photographed in artist residencies in New South Wales. “Drawing on elements of cartography, astronomy and the speed

Elizabeth McTernan, ‘The Artificial Magic...’

The Leitrim Sculpture Centre held an exhibition by Elizabeth McTernan (10 –30 Oct). The title, ‘The Artificial Magic of the Wondrous Effects of Optics Through Direct Vision,’ was translated from Jean-François Niceron’s treatise on perspective, La perspective curieuse ou Magie artificielle des effets merveilleux de l’optique par la vision directe (1638). The artist used ‘life-size’ drawings and installations to dissolve the space between map and territory. “Using geological and astronomical events as found footage of the world,” the press release stated, “artist Elizabeth McTernan constructs a space that is both literal and literary, staging reality in what she calls nonvicarious encounters”. astheworldtilts.com

#AndHerPaleFire Nicola Whelan, recipient of the Joinery, Dublin’s 2014 Graduate Award, exhibited a series of works in the gallery

Soma Contemporary, Waterford held the first solo exhibition of work by Emer Ní Chíobháin (16 Oct – 1 Nov). This new body of installation, video and photographic based work, the press release stated, focused on “desensitisation and violence realised through a series of unsettling anthropomorphic gestures”.

The central locus of the exhibition is the exploration of the pig as a “corollary for man’s self-cognisance, developing themes of vulnerability, death, objectification and abstraction”. somacontemporary.com

amid the deepening shades Group exhibition ‘Amid the Deepening Shades’ ran at the Deer Park Hotel, Howth (19 Oct – 16 Nov) and featured work by Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty, Hannah Fitz, Daniel Tuomey, Ella De Burca, Sally-Anne Kelly, Rob Murphy and Lily Cahill, and Matthew Slack. “Following divergent trajectories,” the press release noted, “works fill the recently emptied spaces of the Deer Park Hotel with visions of loss, physical residue, romance and indeterminacy, spilling into each other like television noise from the room next door”. cargocollective.com/ruthandniamh

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News NI CUTS Following the Northern Ireland Finance Minister’s recent announcement of an immediate in-year cut to all government departments (exempting Health and Education), the Arts Council of Northern Ireland met with clients in receipt of exchequer annual funding to discuss the possible implications.

37 organisations the Arts Council funds were asked to plan for a potentially reduced arts budget.

The cuts to the arts budget are inline with those passed on by the Department of Culture Arts and Leisure, that is, a 2.1 per cent immediate cut and a proposed further 2.3 per cent cut in October to in-year budgets.

As the reality is (at best) a cut of 4.4 per cent to budgets this year, the Arts Council is asking those clients affected (37), to plan for cuts of 5 per cent. They have been asked to outline what impact this will have on their programmes, staffing, services, audiences and participants.

In September the Board of the Arts Council will agree how it will finally implement these cuts after considering both the evidence from the sector and the savings the Arts Council itself proposes to make organisationally.

“It is important to state that the Arts Council will work to protect our core clients as much as possible by mitigating the impact of these cuts in any way we can. We will continue to make the case to DCAL and to the Northern Ireland Government of the value of the arts to the economy and to society.

It is not just about arts programming, as important as that is, but it is about the very valuable education and outreach work that these organisations undertake in order to help meet the NI Executive’s own Programme for Government priorities”.

ROI Arts funding The Minister for the Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Heather Humphreys TD, announced that she has secured a €4 million package for the commemorations programme as part of an overall budget allocation of €274 million for 2015.

Other Budget highlights include: €4 million package to roll out an integrated plan to commemorate 1916; funding for current expenditure has increased for the first time in six years; financial support for National Cultural Institutions has been protected, following several difficult years of cutbacks; Minister for Finance commits to explore measures to boost the film and TV sector; the Artist Tax Exemption is increasing by €10,000 from €40,000 to €50,000.

New Arts Council Director The Arts Council has announced the appointment of Liz Meaney as its new Arts Director to join its senior management team. Liz is an experienced arts manager, who has worked in both the

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

private and public sectors. Following graduation she worked with the Cork Film Centre, Cork Film Festival and was Development Officer with the Kino Cinema. She was Manager of the Galway Film Centre from 1997 – 2001. Returning to Cork in 2001 she took up her position as Cork City Council Arts Officer and was involved both in the bid for the nomination and the realisation of Cork as European Capital of Culture 2005. artscouncil.ie

Flax Art Studios 25 Years Flax Art Studios, Belfast has developed a year-long programme of events, which will culminate in an exhibition in the Golden Thread Gallery documenting the early years of Flax Art and the studio’s relationship with the city of Belfast, the network of international artists who have participated in the international residency programme, and the work of current studio holders.

Alongside the exhibition a 25th anniversary publication will be launched.

The exhibition will run from 6 – 27 and will coincide with a ground breaking symposium on future models for sustainable and affordable studio provision in Belfast to be held on 6 – 7 November at the Black Box. A programme of artist led talks will also take place (Tuesdays 11, 13, 18 and 25 and Thursdays 13 and 27 November), and will feature Alastair MacLennan, Flax Art Studios International resident and renowned art critic, independent curator and performance artist Guy Sioui, Ryan Moffett, Barbara Freeman and Johanna Leech. The symposium will also feature a sound art performance from Helena Hamilton.

cross-disciplinary collaboration, improvisation and ideas around community, be it geographical or ideological.

toring awards. They are Danny Aherne, Mary Nugent, Orla Burke, Sighile Hennessy and Niall Stokes.

siriusarts.ie

adiarts.ie

Arts in Education Portal Kids’ Own is leading the development of a brand new national initiative – the Arts in Education Portal, in partnership with the Department of Education and Skills and the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. The portal is being developed as part of the implementation of the Arts in Education Charter, which was launched by both departments in early 2013.

The portal will be a new national digital resource for teachers, artists and anyone working in the field of arts in education. It will provide a dedicated space where good practice, research, resources and inspirational case studies can be shared and accessed online.

Kids’ Own is delivering a series of consultations nationwide, in partnership with the ATECI, and invite suggestions for how the portal could support you in your work. More information for how to contribute can be found on the Kids’ Own website.

Block T / Fingal Graduate Award Block T and Fingal County Council Arts Office are delighted to announce the new collaboration as part of FUEL, Block T’s visual arts programme dedicated to the support and professional development of recent graduates. As part of an ongoing commitment to professional artists Fingal County Council’s Arts Office are offering a one-year Graduate Studio Award in Block T with a solo exhibition in the Block T gallery in 2015. The successful applicant was Kerry Guinan.

kidsown.ie

O’Malley Art Award Green On Red Gallery has announced that the recipient of the Irish American Cultural Institute O’Malley Art Award 2014 is Fergus Martin. The award is given annually to an Irish artist of choice by a selection committee composed of curators and museum directors in Ireland. The award is sponsored by the Irish American Cultural Institute on behalf of the Ernest O’Malley family. Martin’s work will be shown by Green On Red Gallery next in VUE, National Contemporary Art Fair, RHA Gallery from 31 October – 2 November and will feature in Tulca Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, 7 – 23 November. Please contact the gallery for complementary passes to VUE or for further information on the artist.

Hennessy / National Gallery Portrait Award Finalists Hennessy and the National Gallery of Ireland have announced the 12 finalists chosen for the Hennessy Portrait Prize 2014. Selected by an esteemed panel of judges, which included Dr Declan Long (NCAD), Donald Teskey RHA, Cristín Leach Hughes (The Sunday Times), Janet McLean (NGI), and chaired by the Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, Sean Rainbird, the 12 finalists were chosen from more than 400 entries from artists living in Ireland and Irish artists abroad.

The short-listed artists for the Hennessy Portrait Prize 2014 are: John Beattie, Comhghall Casey, Gavan McCullough, Cian McLoughlin, Nick Miller, Hugh O’Conor, Geraldine O’Neill, Mandy O’Neill, Helen O’Sullivan-Tyrrell, Erin Quinn, Una Sealy and Saoirse Wall.

The short-listed artists’ works will be exhibited in the National Gallery of Ireland from 8 November – 8 February.

On Tuesday, 11 November, one artist will be announced as the winner and will receive a prize of €15,000. The winning artist will also be awarded a commission worth €5,000 to produce a portrait of an Irish sitter for inclusion in the National Portrait Collection.

greenonredgallery.com

nationalgallery.ie

sirius arts director appointed Sirius Arts Centre has announced that Miranda Driscoll has been appointed to fill the position of Artistic Director.

Miranda has established a national reputation as a multi-disciplinary cultural producer, venue programmer, educator, photographer and is the director and co-founder of the Joinery art space in Dublin. Her broad ranging curatorial practice has an emphasis on the event,

Disability Connect Recipients Arts and Disability Connect is a new scheme designed to support artists with disabilities to make new and ambitious work. In this first year of the awards, seven artists have been awarded €25,000 under three strands: New Work, Mentoring and Training. Actor Conor Madden and visual artist Darragh O’Callaghan have received the two New Work awards. Four artists have received Men-

blockt.ie

rha president elected The Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), which operates one of the nation’s largest exhibition galleries, elected the painter Mick O’Dea as the 23rd President of the Academy at its recent Annual General Meeting. rha.ie

VAI News 2014 Valerie Earley Residency Visual Artists Ireland and The Tyrone Guthrie Centre are delighted to announce that Aoife Flynn has been award the 2014 Valerie Earley Residency Award.

In 2013 Visual Artists Ireland put in place a commemoration of our late friend and colleague Valerie Earley, who worked with us as Membership Manager for over 17 years. We wanted to provide a lasting memory of Valerie and hope that this award is one way that Valerie’s care for our artist members will continue into the future.

The Valerie Earley Residency award is open to all members of Visual Artists Ireland and takes the form of a two-week residency in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre.

The Tyrone Guthrie Centre is set in a tranquil, beautiful setting amid the lakes and drumlins of County Monaghan. The residency is self-catering and includes accommodation and a studio facility.

Aoife Flynn a visual artist and curator from Wicklow, Ireland. BA LSAD 2008, MA IADT Dun Laoghaire 2011.

She is currently on the curatorial panel for Galway County Council. Flynn was Art Education assistant at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane 2012 – 2013 and currently is on the Artist panel at the Gallery. She was part of an artist-led group that set up Occupy Space gallery in Limerick city in 2009. In 2010 she founded and edited Occupy Paper. As part of her role as editor for Occupy Paper she was invited to speak on the commissioning editors panel for Commissions+ in association with Fingal County Council, Dublin in October 2012.

Other writing and curatorial proj-

November – December 2014

ects include 2011 in_flux, artist-led art fair EXIT Limerick, Eva International 2012, Cork Midsummer Festival, Cork city, 2012, Market Studio Curatorial Award 2012 and the exhibition ‘which EU-topia’ 2013, ‘Just in Time’ 2013 with MART, Dublin in association with the Dublin Arts Office at The LAB. Dublin. www.aoifeflynnart.com www.tyroneguthrie.ie www.visualartists.ie

VAI@DAS Award Winner Dorothy Hunter has been awarded the 2014 Digital Art Studios / Visual Artists Ireland Residency. The award comprises a four month residency at at the Digital Arts Studios in Belfast. Hunter commenced her time at DAS in early October. Hunter’s plans for the residency including working on her ongoing project ‘Deconsecration,’ which explores former church buildings in Northern Ireland.

Commenting on this project, Hunter said: “When time has not progressed enough for that labelled ‘past’ to become ‘history’, unawareness is sometimes preferred to the potential of extending something negative”. dorothyhunter.com, digitalartsstudios.com

VAI Cafe – DOnegal and LimericK Visual Artists Ireland, in partnership with Artlink Ltd. and Donegal Arts Office, are delighted to announce the Visual Artists’ Café for Donegal Visual Artists. Join us on Saturday, 15 November for an afternoon of information and the opportunity to meet fellow artists working in the north west area and discover the supports that are available to you.

And Join us on Friday, 21 November for an afternoon of information and the opportunity to meet fellow artists working in Limerick and discover the supports that are available to you. Visual Artists Ireland, in partnership with the Limerick City of Culture Visual Art Legacy and Limerick Arts Office, are delighted to announce the Visual Artists’ Café for Limerick Visual Artists.

Belfast Open Studios Belfast Open Studios 2014, hosted by Visual Artists Ireland, took place from 22 – 26 October and featured 14 artists’ studios across the city. Belfast is a city of artists painting, drawing, performing, filming and creating. Behind closed doors, in nooks and crannies of the city, artists are at work developing the seeds of ideas that result in artworks often shown in galleries, museums and art centres nationally and internationally.

Belfast is a vibrant, creative city with hundreds of artists working in studios across the centre. For the first time, as part of the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queen’s, the public were given the opportunity to get an intimate look inside these creative hubs. belfastopenstudios.com

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2014

9

Causeway Coast & Glens: Resources & Activities More Than Flesh

Northern Exposure

Sara Cunningham-Bell, Evolution of Our Soul

My studio is like an upturned boat in its design. It’s made from tree trunks that we selected, cut down and bent over to create the initial roof structure. It is insulated with various materials including the neighbour’s sheeps’ wool. The studio is divided into different areas for sculpture and painting, then an exhibition space with chill out area for client consultation time. The tree trunks run horizontally throughout the whole length of these rooms. There are arching front and back entrances, a bit like a hobbit’s front door. It is based on my husband’s old post grad architecture designs, which we finally got to use. At the moment it’s a bit like an upside down boat on the inside too! I have a variety of different projects on the go at the moment, hence the organised mess.

Working on the North East coast of Ireland you can watch the weather change from miles away as it advances over the sea waters and grasses before dispatching its weight over my roof. An advance warning if working outside! In July I sculpted everyday outside on my life size dogs (running Irish wolfhounds and labs), appreciating the fact that my concrete dust can fly away.

My solo show at the Engine Room Gallery (located at the back of the City Hall, Belfast) has just finished. ‘The Evolution of Our Soul’ explored the physical limitations of the human body – how it has evolved alongside the soul. The installation sought, in a small way, to wake us from our dogmatic slumber and return us to a new, sheer freshness each day.

The exhibition featured a sculpted life size Irish wolfhound made from welded rebar and aluminium, which was later clad by fat cut-offs from our lovely local butcher Mr Mullan (he was saving them up for a few months). Every morning for three weeks during my sons’ Easter holidays I got up at 5.45am, everyone else still asleep, and took a time-lapse of the sculpture. Each day various animals came walking, eating, chewing, laying eggs into its fleshy fat. Thank goodness we are so much more than flesh. Overall the project took 10 years from conception to hanging, with a mad flurry in the last year. (I waited three years just to get our nextdoor neighbour’s bull to perform in the right way!) A book accompanying the show is still available from my website.

I have an interesting client at the minute from New York, who viewed my Bull series (oil on

canvas), which is about the need for migration of ideas to bring home economic strength. My client, who works in finance, has commissioned a piece along the same lines. I’m exploring the importance of bull (upward) vs. bear (downward) market trends on Wall Street (its symbol is the bull) and how we see the market as binary: fear / greed, negativism / positivism, security / insecurity – a battle of ideologies. Economic growth has become a kind of morality in itself. It’s a delight to paint large and bold on a sturdy canvas. The working paint-ups are finished, and I await the arrival of the canvasses from London.

A Belfast gallery told me recently that I should stick with one medium, but I find that suffocating and often move between 2D and 3D. I recently finished the design up (maquette, CAD drawings, photo-montage) for a 6.8 metre wide steel sculpture.

The work uses a couple of different materials and is horizontal with a linear element like a sundial.

I love responding to the local area and creating site-specific work. It’s quite different in creating and producing work for a solo show; to me the latter is more of a visual essay.

I have also just won the commission for a sculpture at the new National Kingspan Rugby Stadium, Belfast. This will feature larger than life size figures on its linear, 90 metre site and will be made from three different types of metal. I am really excited about this piece.

I also show with a few galleries in Glasgow and with Henry Gilmore in Holywood, County Down.

Between these elements of my studio work, I am painting a charity piece for our local Bann Rowing club, which has a heap of energetic teenage rowers wishing to be the best in Ireland. Three present Olympians – fabulous, local rowers – encourage them on. How could I not create for them?

I think that no matter where you create there should always be order and a self-ascertaining timeframe to work within. Saying that, it does mean missing those offers of coffee or trips to the pub, and I often end up working beyond my set time due to family commitments. Nonetheless I’m determined not to get distracted further. Onwards to my 90metre-long sculpture site! Here’s to blessings and creativity in your life.

Sara Cunningham-Bell irelandartist.co.uk

Flowerfield Arts Centre, Portstewart, poised on the bracing Causeway Coast, enjoys a dramatic vista in a part of the world rich in historical associations. Three miles away in Coleraine sits Mountsandel, the earliest known site of human habitation on the island of Ireland. Further along the coast lies Lacada Point at Port na Spaniagh: the spot where one of the grandest ships of the Spanish Armada foundered, with the loss of some 1,300 souls. The Giant’s Causeway, formed 60 million years ago, now provides one of the most iconic and popular visitor attractions in Ireland.

Flowerfield Arts Centre opened in October 1980 as Northern Ireland’s very first arts centre, and is housed in a beautiful listed period building that dates back to the 1830s, built on the site of a seventeenth century grange farm of the same name. The centre has since been increased to four times the size of the original building, with substantial support from Arts Lottery funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 2003.

The centre’s main galleries remain in the old part of the building. Elegant high ceilings and tall windows add a touch of period style to exhibitions of contemporary work. A large and a smaller gallery space are intersected by a long corridor exhibition space. The rooms have fully functioning shutters, which offer total blackout suitable for projected digital media. A high level track with a nylon purlin hanging system offers us the opportunity to hang large works such as full size quilts.

The building is set back from the main Coleraine Road in five acres of attractive parkland and the galleries look out onto stands of trees and a popular children’s play area.

Flowerfield delivers in four main in areas of operation: visual arts; music and performance; craft development; and – most significantly – creative learning for adults and younger people. The education delivery is seen as a way to increase participation, develop individual creativity and invite the public to engage with professional artists.

Visual arts and craft have always been at the core of the education programme, which operates over three terms per year, with classes starting in January, April and September. Hot crafts in the form of ceramic and glass have been particular specialties at Flowerfield. The extension to the building in 2003, influenced by the success of the Kilkenny Design Centre, provided an opportunity to integrate four studios for professional craftspeople. Strangely, until relatively recently there were fewer craft business along the North Antrim and Derry coast than any other part of Ireland, but we are pleased to say that this is now changing.

Craft Northern Ireland has played a very important role in our recent craft development programme, particularly with the Making It scheme

and the ongoing success of August Craft Month.

Over the last eight years the Making It scheme has provided two-year business start up opportunities in Flowerfield to four makers. Kirsty Martin, a jeweller working in laser cut plastics, is currently engaged on the scheme, while two previous participants, Adam Frew (ceramics) and Catherine Keenan (glass), remain in rented studios with us.

The top-end teaching and inspiration provided by these artists has spawned a proliferation of ambitious makers, selling work from market stalls, popups and other galleries.

There are a number of visual arts groups in the area, the oldest being Coleraine Arts Society, now in its fourth decade. While Causeway Coast Artists and the Firsty? group (North Coast) are relative newcomers to the sector, they have hit the ground running and are engaged in various creative ground breaking projects. Despite recent lean times, a number of privately owned galleries in the area continue to provide commercial opportunities to artists.

The borough includes a number of deprived areas but has, overall, a higher than average income level. The coastline and seaside atmosphere has made this a popular retirement destination, and the campus of the University of Ulster in Coleraine also brings a younger vibe to the area. Many students have decided to settle, attracted by the relatively laid-back lifestyle.

The university’s annual degree show, featuring 90 students from the school of Media, Film and Journalism, will be held at the centre during the first two weeks of June 2015. Students working with moving image will see their work projected on to our 20-foot cinema screen in the auditorium.

The galleries show a mix of contemporary art, photography, printmaking, sculpture and creative craft as well as amateur group shows and work by young people. The rest of the building has hanging rails on all vertical surfaces to accommodate work from emerging artists, impromptu shows and exhibitions from sectoral organisations.

Flowerfield is a local authority arts facility, owned and run by Coleraine Borough Council. Local Government Reform in Northern Ireland means Coleraine will shortly be joining our neighbors in Moyle, Limavady and Ballymoney to become Causeway Coast and Glens District Council – one of 11 new councils in Northern Ireland. This is set to happen on 1 April 2015 and we hope it will bring better opportunities for collaborative activities across the sector.

Flowerfield Arts Centre, outside view

Flowerfield Arts Centre, inside view

Malcolm Murchison, Arts Officer and Centre Manager, Flowerfield Arts Centre (Causeway Coast and Glens District Council). www.flowerfield.org

10

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Modern Legends Once upon a time there was a young man who had a very special teacher. The teacher was a mentor and friend to the young man in his student years and they remained close as time passed. The teacher did not have children and when he was dying he spoke with the now not-so-young man and told him that he had to pass on a secret before he died.

Intrigued, the young man waited for a story of misdemeanor or lost love but instead the teacher told him of a place, the knowledge of which had been carefully guarded in his family for generations. The teacher was the only living member of his family to know this secret and he wanted to entrust his former student with the knowledge. The teacher had been commanded by his father that the place must be held in living memory, and the student was the nearest to a son that the older man had.

The place was identified by a particular tree near the man’s family home. Oddly, the teacher could not say why the place was important; he had never been told. He only knew that the location was a deep secret held only by his family and that the knowledge had to be passed on before he died.

After the teacher left the world of flesh and blood the student went in search of this place and found the tree just as the teacher said. Being of a curious mind the student decided to do a bit of investigating in the form of old fashioned digging. He received a proper shock when the spade hit something that was not earth and was not a large rock either. Buried under the tree was an ancient chest.

After quite a lot more (now quite careful) digging the chest was unearthed. What was inside? A box fit for an Irish king – oddly shaped except to the eye of a historian or archaeologist, who would recognise it instantly as a shrine for a bell. And inside this breathtaking vessel, well what would you expect? A bell! Quite rusty and crudely fashioned, especially compared to the elaborately decorated box containing it.

Once it was finally handed over to appropriate authorities it turned out to be an extremely special bell, blessed by St. Patrick himself. Some historians argue that it is the bell named Sweet Sounding that was buried with the bones of the saint for years before being unearthed and entrusted to a particular family (of Cathalan Ua Maelchallain, know now as Mulholland) aka the ‘Keepers of the Bell’, who were to guard it with their lives.1, 2 The rediscovery of the St. Patrick’s Bell and Shrine took place in the early 1800s. It is a modern fairytale from County Armagh, told to me by art

November – December 2014

Roe Valley Arts & Cultural Centre / Limavady Sculpture Trail historian Deborah Logan when I was preparing to teach a workshop for St. Patrick’s Day at Flowerfield Art Centre. This is just one of the stories of treasure buried and discovered that have passed into legend in Northern Ireland.

Legend, folklore, mythology and their connection to a sense of place are the ideas fueling my imagination as I seek to learn the stories of the saints, scoundrels and ordinary folk who have walked the sand of the Downhill strand in front of my door and climbed the hill of Binevenagh that I see through the window. There are stories everywhere along this coast, where the wild beauty of bog and basalt cliff meets the churning North Atlantic Ocean. My way of telling those stories is through sculpture, fused glass panels and paint.

In my love of folklore I am walking a road well trodden before me. And like many others I aspire to record and interpret the stories which remain primarily in the oral traditions of the people of my area: Magilligan, Binevenagh and the Causeway Coast.

With this purpose in mind I am curating a mixed media exhibition based on the modern legends and fairytales of the North Coast. Working with a variety of local artists the exhibition is planned for August 2015 to coincide with the Eddie Butcher Festival, a celebration of music, songwriting and oral storytelling tradition in the Magilligan area. The work will then travel to venues along the North Coast. Depending on funding, I hope to run a series of workshops alongside the exhibition to encourage young people in the area to ask the older generations in their families for stories – the stories their grandparents may have told them – then create new artworks with the participants based on the tales gathered.

McCall Gilfillan is an artist and sculptor based on the North Coast in Downhill, County Derry.

Her work explores the landscape and mythology of the Binevenagh and Causeway Coast areas.

For updates and more information on the ‘Modern Legends and Folklore of the North Coast’ 2015 exhibition or to submit a venue or piece of work for consideration please contact McCall via email: mccall@elementsstudio.com or visit her blog at elementsstudio.com.

Notes 1. See Royal Irish Academy publication, TRANSACTIONS VOLUME XXVII 2. An image can be found on the National Museum of Ireland website museum.ie)

McCall Gilfillan, Irish Birlinn in Lough Foyle, fused glass panel, based on Medieval graffiti at Dunluce Castle, Co. Antrim

John Darren Sutton, Manannán mac Lir, 2014

Maurice Harron, Lig-na-Paiste, 2014

The development and opening of the Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre in Limavady, County Derry in late 2010 has stimulated substantial cultural activity in the town and surrounding area. Roe Valley is the first arts venue to be built in the borough, and the capital scheme stipulated that the existing arts service should also be developed.

Since its launch, the award-winning arts centre has established a dynamic rolling programme of visual arts and heritage exhibitions, theatre, music and film, enhanced by a varied creative learning programme consisting of talks, workshops and demonstrations.

Roe Valley houses a 221 capacity auditorium, a dance studio, multiple workshop and meeting rooms, three dedicated gallery spaces, a storytelling and family zone, an external performance space (which is effectively the town square), as well as a gift shop promoting contemporary crafts and the area’s Tourist Information Centre. It has become a community hub for many of the area’s voluntary arts groups as well as a major visitor attraction.

An emphasis of the centre is nurturing awareness of the rich cultural heritage of the borough through combined arts, heritage and tourism services. This is mainly delivered through public storytelling sessions, local author readings and community arts initiatives; a specific visual arts and tourism project was brought to fruition in 2013.

Limavady and the Roe Valley’s stunning landscape, with its spectacular Atlantic coastline protected by majestic mountains, act as both the muse and setting for the unique Limavady Myths and Legend Sculpture Trail. Funded by the NITB Tourism Development Fund, the trail depicts an iconic representation of the ancient stories of Limavady, allowing the visitor to access its rich heritage in through tangible forms. In total, the trail features seven public sculptures created by five artists commissioned through public tender.

Philip Flanagan’s sculptural representation of the Jane Ross / Danny Boy story is the first sculpture on the trail. The melody for this famous song was first noted down on a market day in 1851 in Main Street, Limavady by Miss Jane Ross, as she heard the haunting air played by blind fiddler Jimmy McCurry. Music collector George Petrie published the music in 1855 and Fredrick Weatherly wrote the world famous lyrics in 1913. Flanagan’s artwork translates the essence of these words.

Limavady derives its name from the Irish Lèim an Mhadaidh meaning ‘leap of the dog’. Legend tells that the O’Cahans, under siege by their enemies, the O’Donnell clan from County Donegal, sent for reinforcements across the River Roe via a faithful wolfhound, who leapt across the river to deliver the message. 400 years later, celebrated sculptor Maurice Harron commemorates the famous story

through his sculpture The Leap of the Dog located in Roe Valley Country Park.

Maurice Harron’s next creation brings to life a monstrous creature, the Paiste, at Feeny. It is said that when St Patrick was driving all the snakes out of Ireland and into the sea, an enormous serpent in Banagher was overlooked. Local holy man St. Murrough O’Heaney tricked it into putting on three bands of rushes, praying that they would become bands of iron. The serpent was thus trapped and banished.

In the town of Dungiven, renowned for its rich culture and heritage, Maurice Harron created Finvola, after local legend, Finvola the ‘gem of the Roe’.

Her story is interpreted in his bronze statue of the legendary beauty.

The origins of Danny Boy and the Lament of the O’Cahan Harp are explored in Eleanor Wheeler and Alan Cargo’s stainless steel harp, located at Dungiven Castle Park. The bronze musical notes, which form part of the sculpture, were created by local school children.

One of the most photographed sculptures is Manannán Mac Lir, Celtic god of the sea at Gortmore Viewing Point, Binevenagh Mountain. Local tradition tells of a sea god in Lough Foyle and in Celtic times it was widespread practice to make votive offerings to Manannán, who was regarded as the Irish Neptune. The new clay and resin sculpture, created

by John Darren Sutton, overlooks Lough Foyle, still seeking the votive offering of the Broighter Hoard that was denied to him.

Close by, the notorious highwayman Cushy Glen waits at Largantea Picnic Site on Windyhill Road, between the towns of Limavady and Coleraine. Maurice Harron has crafted an uneasy and eerie representation of Cushy lying in wait in his den for passing travellers…

The Limavady Sculpture trail has been an extremely successful project, combining contemporary public art with local myths and legends to provide a stimulating cultural experience, whilst encouraging trail visitors to visit all corners of the Roe Valley, an area of stunning natural beauty.

In assessing artist proposals, we considered how the aesthetics of each piece would complement the natural landscape. Each of the five artists has created public works that seamlessly enhance the surrounding environments whilst harnessing the essence and drama of the inspirational local myths and stories for all to enjoy.

Desima Connolly, Arts and Cultural Services Officer / Manager, Clare Quinn, Tourism Development Officer roevalleyarts.com

The Visual Artists’News Sheet

November – December 2014

11

rESDENCY

The Curfew Tower, Cushendall

The Curfew Tower, Cushendall

Ask for Zippy

1

BILL DRUMMOND TELLS THE TALE OF HOW AND WHY HE ESTABLISHED ANRTISTS’ A RESIDENCY IN A TOWER ON THE ANTRIM COAST. Anyone who has ever driven up the Antrim Coast thus through the small town of Cushendall will have remembered seeing the imposing presence of a red sandstone tower at the very heart of the town. This four sided, five floored, battlement-adorned tower goes by the name of the Curfew Tower. It sort of looks medieval, as if maidens were locked up in it for passing princes to rescue or something, but that look just reflects the vanity of the man who wanted it built.

The Curfew Tower was built in the early-ish years of the nineteenth century by the local landowner Francis Turnley. This Francis Turnley was concerned that ‘his’ local people were somewhat unruly, especially when under the influence. So his plan was to build a tower at the heart of the community containing a cell to lock up the local unruly until their unruliness had ebbed away. Turnley hired a veteran of the Napoleonic wars by the name of Dan McBride to be the live-in constable at the tower. It was Dan McBride’s job to capture and lock up the local unruly and riotous.

Fast forward 150 or so years and this corner of Ireland now has different methods and places for locking up the unruly and riotous rendering the tower out of work. But the citizens of Cushendall have taken the tower, now known as the Curfew Tower, to their hearts. The Curfew Tower is on the school badge, emblazoned across the local hurly teams strip and on nearly every postcard sold to passing tourists. In fact the Tower represents the town and its people. Despite this, nobody wanted to live in it. It had no use other than to stand there and pose for photographs while it gradually crumbled.

Fast-forward a few more years, November 1992 to be precise, and somewhere in the Arctic Circle. Mark Manning (aka Zodiac Mindwarp) and I are trying to get to the North Pole. We are travelling with a hand made icon (in the Greek Orthodox tradition) featuring Elvis Presley. The plan was that we would leave this icon at the summit of the earth so that it would leak out love and good vibrations down the longitudes and out across the latitudes and world peace would break out. In fact we never got further than Nordkapp – an island off the north coast of Norway – before we discovered that the Arctic Ocean was not frozen and we could not get any further. Nonetheless, on an unruly and riotous night out on the island we did meet up with the lighthouse keeper of the most northerly lighthouse in the world, who was having a bit of shore leave. We handed over the icon to him on the promise that he would hang it in his lighthouse galley. We somehow thought its power would seep up the lighthouse and be scattered across the world via the beam of its revolving light. We are still waiting for peace to break out.

On our return journey south Mark Manning and I decided to write a book about our journey to the North. Arriving back in London

I bought a newspaper and in it read an article about something called the World Wide Web. The article explained how this World Wide Web was going to change everything, how we were no longer going to need books because by next year we could read everything on this World Wide Web. This sounded brilliant to me. But the trouble was I liked books as much as I liked new things that scared me. So we decided to do both. We decided that our book, when it was written, could be on this World Wide Web, and that we would also make a huge one-off hand written book that people would have to travel hundreds or even thousands of miles to read. The words in both books would be exactly the same.

So we had this big hand made book made out of hand made paper that would last a thousand years (or so we were told) and it is was bound in reindeer skin found on a sunken ship on its way from Finland to Venice with a cargo of reindeer skins before it was sunk off the coast of Cornwall 200 years ago (or so we were told). All we needed to find was a perfect building to keep the book in, a building that people would travel half way around the world to get to in order to read the book (even though they could read it just where they were on the World Wide Web).

Early on a Sunday morning in 1994 Mark Manning phoned me.

He had seen an advert for a tower that was for sale. He thought it was the perfect building to house our book. I went out and bought the paper (the Independent); the advert had a small photo of the tower, a phone number and a price. The price seemed incredibly attractive. For some reason there was no information about where this tower was, but it did look like the perfect place for our book to be.

On the Monday morning I phoned the number on the advert and discovered that the tower was in the north of Ireland. In my head this was its perfect location: a tower built on a fault line of the human soul.

It also helped that I have many childhood connections with this corner of the world and that it was a difficult place for people to get to.

This all mirrored my dreams about what this World Wide Web would be about. By the end of that week we had shaken hands on a deal.

So we had a tower. We had a big empty book. We had plans to write other books in this Curfew Tower. But then Penguin Books came along offering us thirty pieces of silver, if only we would give them the rights to publish our book. We took the silver and they published a book called Bad Wisdom – Lighthouse At The Top Of The World.

At the time I had a new young family, as did Mark Manning, and neither of us ever got to the tower. So I thought I should sell it. But the reason it was cheap, I soon discovered, was that nobody else wanted to buy it. I thought about renting it out as a holiday home, but to do that I would have had to put a fire escape down the side, which is impossible

in a listed building.

During an EasyJet flight back from Belfast to London I came up with the idea of using the tower for an artist’s residency. Artists from around the world could stay there for up to a month at a time. In exchange they had to make work that was somehow informed by the place and locality and leave something of their work behind. To ensure the project was a success I formed a sort of trust with a couple of other people and called it In You We Trust.2 So that is what has happened and has been happening since 1998 or sometime around then. Almost as soon as artists started staying in the Curfew Tower, they found the big book bound in reindeer skin with paper that would last 1,000 years. These artists started to write and draw and stick things into it. Last year the book was finally full, and I think it’s brilliant. Lots of great work has been done in the Curfew Tower over the years and much of it has involved the community in all sorts of ways, but this big book, crammed with the work of over 100 artists, is maybe the best thing there. It’s a testament to what has been done and is still being done.

Since 2009 different artist-run collectives or similar organisations have curated each year at the Tower: Void, Derry (2009), Catalyst, Belfast (2010), Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2011), Static, Liverpool (2012), Spike Island, Bristol (2013), Seamus Heaney Centre, Belfast (2014).

Each year we have an open day at the Curfew Tower, where we exhibit the work created by artists in residence from the previous calendar year. This is always on the first Wednesday of August, bang in the middle of the local Heart of the Glens Festival.

We invite all the locals to vote for what they think is the best work of art on display. Everybody gets a vote (whether they’re 2 or 92 years old) and that night we have a bonfire in the back garden and make a big vat of curry. Just before midnight we open the ballet box, count the votes and announce the winner of the Curfew Tower Award.

The winner gets a small bronze cast of the tower made by Belfast-born but Cushendall-based artist Raymond Watson. You are invited to be there next August to cast your vote and eat the curry. Bring a bottle.

Bill Drummond is a musician, writer and artist. He was a cofounder of 1980s avant-garde pop group The KLF and its 1990s media-manipulating successor the K Foundation. curfewtower.com

Notes 1. If you are ever passing through Cushendall and you want to know more go into Kearney’s Flesh and ask for Zippy.

2. In You We Trust comprises Marcus Patton (architect, Belfast), Susan Philipsz (artist, Berlin), John H (artist, Alaska) and Bill Brummond (currently in London).

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The Visual Artists’News Sheet

November – December 2014

Festival

Laura Angell,Keep it Pheasant, 2014

Cecilia Danell,All The Change is in Me, 2014, 132x157cm oil / acrylic on canvas

Speeds of Life AISLING PRIOR DISCUSSES HER APPROACH TO CURATING TULCA 2014, ‘NEUTRAL’.1

Bedwyr Williams,Hotel 70

The Visual Artists’News Sheet

November – December 2014

13

Festival I was plagued by doubts about my own credibility and agency as an arbiter. I wondered about the legitimacy of my motivation. Was I selecting work simply according to my own’ taste’ and terms of reference? And if so, was that OK? Was I swayed by the knowledge that perhaps a certain artist deserved a break? Did I want to ‘design’ an exhibition where each work spoke to the other works? Was I composing an exhibition, or was I more interested in the individual artists or in my own ideas? In the end, I selected 18 artists from the open call, augmented by 9 invited artists.

One thing I’m certain of is that I like to mix it up and show lots of different kinds of practices – senior artists, emerging practitioners and people who wouldn’t even consider themselves artists at all yet. I did that in ‘Art in the Life World’ in Ballymun in 2008, showing Santiago Sierra, Jota Castro, Mattieu Laurette, Jesse Jones, Cecily Brennan and Seamus Nolan alongside Ballymun artists Hugh O’Neill and Janice Feighery.

JO: The generational issue is interesting…

AP: The whole process of ageing and the questions it prompts about the meaning or purpose of life fascinates me. Artists’ lives refute the cliché that young people are more productive, creatively challenging and vibrant. I am real admirer of the writers Saul Bellow, Diana Athill, Philip Roth and Tove Jansson, and of the artists On Kawara, Maria Lassnig, Hans Haacke, Matisse, Louise Bourgeois, Pat Scott and Yayoi Kusami all whom worked, or still are working, into their eighties. At some point I’d like to do a show exclusively featuring work by older artists.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy IndustriesThe Art Of Sleep

Jason Oakley: You’ve developed several ideas for Tulca 14 (various venues, Galway 7 – 23 November): solitude vs engagement; the frenetic quality of contemporary life; tensions between the urban the rural. How did those form?

Aisling Prior: There’s a climate at the moment that’s critical of curatorial constructs and themes. But in my experience, I’ve found sharing that what really concerns and matters to you makes for a more reciprocal and generous relationship between artist and curator. It helps the artist select or make works that either contribute to or deviate from the brief in interesting ways. So I took Richard Sennett’s statement (tweeted by Hans Ulrich Obrist on 18 March 2014) as an initial way to proceed. “The most difficult thing to learn is how to dwell without anxiety.”

And I also really believe there is no such thing as an original thought. The novelist Thomas Wolfe has recounted how he often wakes up in the morning excited by a great idea for a new chapter, only to open the newspaper see that exactly what he has in mind has just happened in real life. Every time I thought I had a vaguely original frame for Tulca, I’d see in eflux, Art Monthly or VAN that such-andsuch an artist or curator was embarking on something similar.

JO: Would you say the show is concerned with ambivalence and subtexts?

AP: Exactly. I want Tulca 2014, which I’ve titled ‘Neutral’, to celebrate distraction, hyper-connectivity, immediacy and quick-wittedness as much as the attractiveness of a quiet, examined, sometimes idle life.

While I have concerns about the frenetic and anxiety-inducing nature of contemporary culture, I’m happy to live in a busy metropolitan context. I really enjoy and increasingly rely on social media, as I’m not as physically mobile as I used to be. I have two older teenage kids, so I’ve seen first hand the advantages that social media has on their lives: seemingly infinite access to knowledge and stimulation, real possibilities for self-organisation, sustaining casual and old friendships, creating imagery and sound etc.

JO: Which venues will be used?

AP: Galway has no purpose built exhibition spaces. But the Tulca team and partners have been terrific in securing spaces. The main venues will be the old Connaught Tribune printing works, the Galway Arts Centre in Dominic Street and Nun’s Island. 126 are giving over their space and work will be also be made for Galway University Hospital.

I’d originally been really keen to move Tulca to Salthill, the edge of Galway, where the urban meets the coastal. Salthill is just so rich with material for someone like me who loves to work in non-art contexts. I’d hoped to use one of the old hotels or guesthouses in Salthill and show one work in each room and a collection of works in the corridors, reception and dining areas. But in the end it would’ve been too costly in terms of fit-out.2

JO: What are some of the highlights of ‘Neutral’?

AP: There are works being shown by Brendan Earley, the Project Twins, Cecilia Danell, Anita Groener, Fergus Martin, Mark Garry, Oisin Byrne, Katharine Lamb, Conor McGarrigle, Lucy Andrews and Jennie Guy. There is also work by relative newcomers Steven Maybury, Aileen Conroy, Marielle MacLeman, Saoirse Wall and Juliette de la Mer, among many other brilliant Irish-based artists.3 I’m delighted that world-renowned artist Mark Wallinger is also showing in ‘Neutral’. We’re presenting Sleeper, a film of the artist dressed in a bear suit, pacing around the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin at night when the building is empty. The bathos of that film stays with you forever. We may also show Construction Site as part of a double feature, which is a more recent work featuring construction workers erecting scaffolding in real time, on a beach – it’s a touch Beckett-like.

Another important work was to be Bedwyr Williams’s magnificent visual and aural feast Echt, which was highly regarded during this year’s Glasgow International. It’s funny and nightmarish in equal measure. Of course, just when I’d discussed showing this with Bedwyr, I discovered IMMA will be showing it later this year too. This type of mirroring or repetition occurs all the time in art, as we all know. Originality is impossible, over-rated even. We are showing a different work now, Hotel 70, made about a former Welsh hotel built at 70 and 20 degree angles that Bedwyr partly reconstructed as an installation in the Mostyn Gallery last year.

I’m also thrilled to be featuring four digital works by Seoul-based Young-Hae Chang, titled Heavy Industries: noisy, beautifully-produced text and jazz based work that should be seen and heard.

Padraic E. Moore is writing the exhibition essay and we’re working with Domestic Godless and Mobile Art School on various projects.

JO: Education has always been strong element of Tulca…

AP: Tulca’s education programme aims to appeal to teenagers this year, encouraging them to make digital artwork of their own – sound, text or image based – using technology like smart phones that they’re already expert in. This will provide them with the opportunity to give their own perspective on the omnipresence of digital media.

JO: What was the response to the open call?

AP: It elicited over 550 submissions. I went through each artist’s submission several times, as each applicant more than deserved proper time and respect. At one point I’d considered including all the artists who applied, but time and resources couldn’t possibly allow for this.

What’s more, I guess this strategy wouldn’t be considered proper curatorial practice.

I did lots of studio visits, locally and elsewhere, with individual artists and artists groups, where I met amazing people of all ages at various stages in their careers.

JO: What about Tulca’s national / international elements?

AP: I often say (only partially tongue-in cheek) that Ireland is really not at the centre of things. It is on the edge. You can feel this in Galway.

It is even further to the West of Europe than Dublin is. There’s a feeling that Galway doesn’t belong entirely to the rest of the country. It has a certain identity as an autonomous renegade place. Ballymun had that same quality. I’d imagine that the recent Scottish elections would have stoked great interest in Galway.

I’ve had many conversations with artists over the years about ‘being international’ i.e. getting our artists abroad and inviting international curators to come here. For Tulca I thought hard about whether it was important to include international artists. At one point I wasn’t so sure. Irish artists make work that is more than equal to practices that receive global attention, so why not just celebrate that? What is happening abroad is happening here.

I want Irish people to see what Irish artists are making in 2014.

But I was also deeply tempted to invite just one amazing artist back to Ireland to do a solo show in Galway: Wolfgang Laib, whose work I saw at the Douglas Hyde way back in 1991, which was a defining moment for me. Alas, maybe another time.

JO: To close, could you expand a bit on your motivations as a curator?

AP: Having worked with a lot of artists – and many on a long-term basis – I have admiration for their integrity and commitment to making work against all the odds. I find it a real pleasure and honour to be able to give artists opportunities, and for them to either make some money through a commission or get exposure through an exhibition.

I’m especially interested in lesser known or emerging artists and people on the peripheries – the outsiders if you like. That’s where I get a bit of a curatorial high, if you like. I’m not interested in the ‘scene’ per se; I’m interested in the individual who is making the art, the artist’s motivations and what they have put themselves through.

Notes 1. Aisling Prior is based in Dublin. A founder of the original Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, where lived from 1983 to 1987 and the Galway Film Centre in 1988, she was director of the Sculptors’ Soci of Ireland (now VAI) from 1991 –1997. As curator of Breaking Ground, the art commissioning -p gramme in Ballymun (2001 – 2008), Aisling produced over 40 projects including Seamus Nolan’s ‘Ho Ballymun’ and major new works by Jochen Gerz, Sarah Pierce and Ultra Red, Adam Chodzko, Stephen Brandes’ ‘Superbia’, Grace Weir and Graham Parker, Andrew Kearney, Paddy Jolley and others. She Visual Art Curator for the Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2009 and has produced commissions with Nick M Atsushi Kaga, Joy Gerrard, Alan Meredith, and Beth O’Halloran in the recent past.

2. The artists exhibiting in Tulca 2014 are: Lucy Andrews, Laura Angell,Oisin Byrne, Aileen Conroy, Ce Danell, Juliette de la Mer, Jeanette Doyle, Brendan Earley, Mark Garry, Anita Groener, Stephen Gunn Jennie Guy, Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Kayarne Kirkebo, Katharine Lamb, Elaine Leader, Sop Loscher, Marielle MacLeman, Steven Maybury, Conor McGarrigle, Fergus Martin, Project Twins, Sao Wall, Mark Wallinger, Bedwyr Williams and Keef Winter. Exhibition essay and after party sounds: Pád E Moore. Other ‘Neutral’ events are by Domestic Godless, Mobile Art School with Galway County Lib ies. The ‘Footfall’ artist-run spaces and collectives seminar is by 126 and the patient centred projec

by Jennie Guy with Galway University Hospital. Curatorial visits and seminar are by Bea de Souza and Galway County Council.

3. Prior has suggested that some time in the near future, the Tulca team might consider the notion a seaside biennale for Salthill akin to the UK’s celebrated Folkestone and Whitstable events. It is noteworthy that Caroline Cowley, Fingal Co. Council Public Art Co-ordinator has just curated Resort’ ‘ , a series of a fascinating artist / curator / theorist residencies in the eastern seaboard resort, Portr in Co. Dublin.

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The Visual Artists’News Sheet

November – December 2014

internship profile

Studio Olafur Eliasson, Berlin, photo by Fiona Gannon

Studio Olafur Eliasson, Berlin, photo by Fiona Gannon

Studio Olafur Eliasson website

Quasi Objects & Shooting Hoops RECENT GRADUATE FIONA GANNON DESCRIBES HER TIME AS AN INTERN AT STUDIO OLAFUR ELIASSON, BERLIN. My graduate exhibition was in June 2013, and I remember not quite knowing what I would do next. I knew I wanted some experience before heading into a master’s programme and a break from education for a year. So I decided to look for a job. While researching online, I intermittently checked my email and Facebook accounts. Facebook can sometimes lead to time wasting, but on this occasion it was incredibly useful. The course I’d just completed, Visual Arts Practice at IADT, Dun Laoghaire, had just posted a link about internship opportunities at Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin. A college friend had tagged my name in a comment below the post, so I clicked on the link.

For the initial application, I sent an up-to-date CV, a letter of interest and a reference. This was fol-lowed by a Skype interview with Geoffrey Garrison and Anna Engberg-Pedersen from the Studio Olafur Eliasson archive. They gave me a topic – the use of ‘borrowed views’ in Chinese and Japanese gardens – to write a short text on. I also had to write about an Eliasson work relating to this topic. Both assignments were short, as the idea was to demonstrate my ability to condense and clarify information. I had four days to research the topic and write the two pieces.

I was incredibly lucky to get the placement, but it is also worth saying that my interests fell exactly in line with Olafur Eliasson’s work – it was no half-hearted application. It was the only internship I applied for, because it was the only team of people I could picture myself working with. I think it is important to apply for exactly what you want, and to take time and care doing so.

The internship was paid, which was fantastic and rare. The stipend covered my rent and most of my groceries, which are very affordable in Berlin, and I used a bike to cut down on travel costs. I did look into Dublin City Council grants, specifically the Travel and Training Award, but this no longer covers art internships. So I saved money working full time in an outdoors shop until I left in February.

My internship began on 2 March 2014. I was given a quick tour around the studio and introduced to the team. I was also told about some of the ongoing projects and shown the different parts of the building. The basement and ground floor of the studio building were construction spaces. The first floor was divided into various zones for: the archive, exhibition planning, research, press and communications, as well as space for architects, financial workers and receptionists. The ground floor also housed a communal kitchen area, where all the staff could meet for lunch or coffee breaks.

My desk was situated between the archive team and the research /

Studio Olafur Eliasson, Berlin, photo by Fiona Gannon

press team. On my first day I was referred to Biljana Joksimovic-Große, the studio archivist, who tasked me with scanning Olafur Eli-asson’s drawings, which would be uploaded to the studio website. I also documented some dummies of upcoming books to send off to the artists for feedback. It was suggested that I familiarise myself with the various books about and produced by Olafur Eliasson. I wasn’t actually sure how long to spend reading, as it seemed like there were a lot of people around me who were incredibly busy. I figured I would let the work at the studio guide me and then ask around if there was any-thing I could get involved in.

After asking Anna Kreutzträger if I could give her a hand, I was given an introduction to the studio database, which is archived on a server on the premises. As Geoffrey Garrison put it, this is the “meat and potatoes” of the Olafur Eliasson archive. All of the images documenting any work or event, text materials or books from the library are stored in the database. Each image or file is archived into folders on an internal server and linked to the database by its file path.

Eliasson’s website works through this database. During my time at the studio the staff were preparing for the launch of a new website, so there was a big push to get things done. The project really needed all available hands and eyes to proofread and edit each page, check for glitches and generally keep things moving.

I spent most of my time at the studio working on this project. The site contains a WebGL based ar-chive called your uncertain archive, which is an artwork in itself. The uncertain archive can be navigated by ‘swimming’ through a space full of material, where you can stumble upon things, or use the tag view, which sorts works into a network of relationships. The tags work as categories for works grouped togeth-

er under common characteristics. For example, a tag such as ‘slowing down’ would contain material that addresses ideas around changing pace.

The most interesting part of creating this system was our tag meetings. Each week we would come together to discuss the tags and decide which ones were working and which seemed to be too ex-pansive or too narrow. We would discuss which works should be allocated to each tag and which works should be left out. Often the borders of these groupings were quite blurred and there was much discussion about where to draw lines. The formulation of tags is a dynamic process and the tags will evolve and change over time. The drawings that map these networks of relationships are quite beautiful.

In between the tag meetings and proofreading I also conducted some light research. I looked up relevant material that related to the work being done at the studio. I collected quotes and condensed information down to a few short paragraphs, so that I could email them around the various office departments. During these times I found myself reading theorists I hadn’t encountered before. One of these was Michel Serres. I read his essay Theory of the Quasi-Object, from the 2007 book The Parasite, which sparked my interest, as I had noticed Eliasson’s use of the term – most notably for his Quasi-Bricks.

Serres’s essay discusses the shift between being an individual subject and being part of a collective. Passing a ball during a game, he writes, is the locus point of change. The ball is an object through which the ‘we’ is woven – a quasi object that exists through relations between people. In Serres’s view, when you have the ball you’re an individual subject; when you no longer have the ball, you return to intersubjective ‘we’. In passing the ball ‘I’ is exchanged for ‘we’.

Outside the studio, in a space that acts as a mix between a parking lot and a semi-courtyard, there is a basketball net. During the week people take cigarette breaks here and have coffee outside if the weather is good. After work on Friday evenings people from each section of the studio gather to play basketball: the department heads, architects, technicians, archivists and interns. After working in our various zones, on very different projects, the ball is passed between us. We think through our bodies, orbit the ball, take it, pass it, watch, weave.

Fiona Gannon fionagannon.wordpress.com olafureliasson.net

The Visual Artists’News Sheet

November – December 2014

15

seminar

The Return of History KRIS DITTELREPORTS ON THE METAMODERNISM Marathon, recently HELD AT THE STEDELIJK MUSEUM, AMSTE RDAM

As the speakers inside the Stedelijk debated the subject of metamodernism, actor Shia LaBeouf embarked upon an actual (#meta) marathon around the perimeter of the museum. Photo by Ernst van Deursen, courtesy of Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

On the 25 September the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam organised a 12hour symposium event entitled The Metamodernism Marathon. This non-stop talking shop aimed to reflect on the particular discourse of the ‘millennials’: the generation born after the 1980s who have known no other context for adult life than the terrain effected by events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 9/11 terrorist attack and the financial crisis.

The Metamodernism Marathon was subdivided into four panels, respectively considering the years 1989, 2001, 2008 and 2011. Running from 11am – 11 pm the event featured, among others, Francis Fukuyama, Michel Bauwens, Hassnae Bouazza, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Nina Power, Cally Spooner, Jonas Staal, Adam Thirlwell and Camille de Toledo.

Cultural theorists and researchers Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker coined the concept of metamodernism in 2009, founding the webzine metamodernism.com in the same year. As outlined during their opening talk, metamodernism is an idea that seeks to surpass postmodernism as a response to and reflection upon the present, which is dominated by urgent and multiple crises: economic, ecological, political and ideological. Crucially, Vermeulen and Van Den Akker see metamodernism as something of a return to the pragmatic idealism of modernity and its faith in imagining a better future.

Talking from their personal perspectives as ‘millennials’, Vermeulen and Van Den Akker contrasted the present with the politics of compromise that characterised the 1990s: the era of political handshakes and big gestures; Western domination of the geopolitical system; and endless economic growth as the status quo. Given the circumstances of the 1900s, the theories advanced by Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 book The End of History served as a kind ideological comfort zone. Nothing, he argued, could threaten the prevailing Western neoliberal order. 1 At no point during The Metamodernism Marathon did Vermeulen and Van Den Akker seek to provide a definitive or exhaustive explanation of the concept of metamodernism. Instead, they stressed that the notion was best understood in terms of a loose ‘structure of feeling,’ ie various current modes of cultural phenomena, practices and thought that can be broadly characterised by the return of modernist ideas – especially in terms of an interest in ‘grand’ historical narratives and a desire to surpass postmodern irony and pastiche.

Appropriately enough, the first keynote speaker of the day was Francis Fukuyama – he who had famously declared the ‘death of history’ in 1989. Of course now it’s all too apparent that history has risen from the dead in a zombielike manner. But back in that year, as the Berlin Wall fell, mankind’s ‘ideological evolution’ appeared to some to be reaching an end point. Western capitalist liberal democracy had triumphed and was set to be the prevailing global status quo.

Fukuyama’s talk was dominated by a linear and Western perspective of history and referred to Denmark as the example of a prosperous democracy that represents the perfect utopia for ‘developing countries’.

Fukuyama gave Iraq and Nigeria as examples of countries where, in his view, corruption, hierarchy and religious dogmas stand in the way of prosperous development.

Unfortunately Fukuyama didn’t consider the role of the West in these struggles and seemed wilfully blind to the problems of contemporary Western society (broadening income gaps, xenophobia, unemployment). In Fukuyama’s view what stands in the way of this development is that “nobody wants to be the last man”; rather, people want to engage in great struggles and strive for something that gives them the feeling of belonging, ie identity politics.

Dutch artist Jonas Staal presentation filled in some of these gaps by pointing out the impossibility of not admitting the West’s responsibility in the destabilisation of these countries and colonial history.

The following keynote speaker, writer and artist Camille de Toledo, introduced his opera piece Fall of Fukuyama, which was staged at an airport shortly after 9/11. De Toledo presented an antidote to Fukuyama’s views and proposed that art and cultural resistance play a role in countering an ‘end of history’ as such. They constitute history, he

argued, by reopening the world to other worlds, to other futures.

The 2001 discussion was dominated by the topic of 9/11 and preceding events – including again the fall of the Berlin Wall, when people were “rushing towards the global airport”. Yet only a few words were spoken about the climate before 2001, which culminated in the attack on the twin towers and subsequent war on terror.

Speaking on this panel the writer and journalist Jelle Brand pointed out that the fall of the Berlin Wall was neither a positive or welcome event for all Russians and that many people are now willing to trade their ‘freedom’ for a more economically prosperous society.

The conversation continued in a passionate manner about the possibilities of democracy. In Brandt’s view, it is only a matter of time before countries stabilise themselves and create conditions for democracy – a view that Jonas Staal vehemently opposed. He does not accept the idea that liberal democracies will naturally appear following Western intervention and neocolonialist action. He proposed the reconsideration of our views on Western democracy in light of recent happenings, when, for example, young Western citizens are joining ISIS in Syria, arguing that this is a product of our failing democracy.

The 2008 panel focused on the financial crisis of that year and its consequences. The overall view was little had really changed: deregulation of financial markets continues unchecked and capitalist apparatus imposes a ‘politics of temporisation’. Nina Power explained how neoliberal capitalism “weaponises time” and turns it against us. We live in a present where not everyone is provided with the same future (if any at all), and where the time we give is measured up to our personal debt, which dictates whose finitude counts and whose doesn’t. Time has become the measure of politics, the way we measure success or failure.

Indeed earlier in the day Hassnae Bouzza (panel 2001) referenced cynical dismissals of the recent Arab revolutions as ‘failures’ only a few weeks after they had begun. Seemingly we have no patience or attention span left. All the panellists appeared to agree that we are now constantly bombarded with information, which prevents us from developing a thorough analysis of events, or maintaining a focused practice.

The novelist Adam Thirlwell’s refreshing keynote presentation (panel 2011) broke with the gloomy atmosphere of the previous panel and reminded us that revolutions are not an event but an epoch.

Thirlwell spoke about his recent projects: testing the possibilities of collaboration through the fixed and old-fashioned format of a novel.

During the 2011 panel discussion a small light of hope shone through in the strategies and approaches of its participants. Birgitta Jónsdóttir (artist, writer and member of the Icelandic Parliament for the Pirate Party) described herself as a ‘poetician’, not a politician. Jónsdóttir considers her position in the parliament as that of a pragmatic anarchist who challenges and hacks the system from within. Another panelist, writer and theorist Michel Bauwens, compared the previous discussions about ideological beliefs to a romantic relationship that can only exist until the parties involved have something to argue about. Bauwens sees a real possibility in commons and shared knowledge that already creates a considerable 6% of the US GDP. The Metamodernism Marathon ended on a remarkably short endnote, offering neither fixed conclusion nor final thought to take home. Ultimately, the event was an assembly of brilliant thinkers with many ideas. During the course of the day it was easy to become overwhelmed by all the information. Thus, the symposium left us in a place between modern sincerity and postmodern irony, between prospects and melancholy, and very much in a state of limbo – where the known problems are repeated again, yet still glued to the past.

Kris Dittel is an independent curator based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Note 1. Francis Fukuyama,The End of History and the Last Man, 1992. This book expanded on Fukuyama’s 198 essay of the same name published in the international affairs journal The National Interest. In the b Fukuyama argues that the advent of Western liberal democracy may signal the endpoint of humani socio-cultural evolution and the final form of human government.

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The Visual Artists’News Sheet

November – December 2014

Art in public: CASE STUDY

Re-framing theRingroad YVONNE CULLIVAN DISCUSSES HE R PUBLIC ART PROJECT ‘IN THE CURRENT’, COMMISSIONED FOR BELTURBET, COUNTY CAVAN.

Yvonne Cullivan,In the Currrent

Yvonne Cullivan,In the Currrent

Yvonne Cullivan,In the Currrent

The brief for the Belturbet Per Cent for Art commission was circulated in February 2013. It included a list of key words that had arisen out of a community consultation, expressing aspirations that the proposed artwork be: “contextual, interactive, experiential, original, enduring, educational, imaginative, energetic, connecting, functional, entertaining”. The document also specified an interactive element that would respond to Belturbet’s unique geographical position and rich cultural life, addressing the wider public in a meaningful and imaginative way.

The brief categorically stressed that the artwork should have an enduring legacy; they did not want submissions of ‘road-side art’.

The refreshingly open nature of this brief grabbed my attention.

My practice is interdisciplinary and involves the use of photography, audio, video, text, and drawing to observe, record and respond to a given place at a specific moment in time. I’m particularly interested in states of transition and the acclimatisation that follows. The fact that the commission arose from the construction of a new bypass around Belturbet suggested ideas about observing and responding to a particular moment of social and economic change in the area. The location of the commission was also relevant. I have previously worked on projects in rural Leitrim, Cavan and Roscommon, and the reframing of rural and marginal community contexts has become central to my practice. My work often includes a strong participatory approach, which informs the work and produces outcomes that are communally shaped and collectively responsive, so the invitation to engage with the public was an additional attraction.

A site visit was organised by Cavan Arts Office, who managed the commissioning process. I have found that attending site visits is essential to developing a proposal such as this, in order to establish a

more informed sense of place. On the day, a number of community representatives shared their individual knowledge of the area. While imparting facts, dates and deaths, a local historian shared a childhood memory of waiting on a Sunday afternoon for the only motorised boat in Belturbet to come upstream. He and his brothers would run barefoot down to the Erne and step into the water to feel the waves that the motorboat left in it’s wake around their ankles. In addition, many of the locals that I met on that day, and subsequently, expressed the view that the bypass provided a window of opportunity for a reframing of the town and its environs.

My response to the site visit and to the context of the commission was to propose an exploration of marginal aspects of the place.

I wanted to obtain knowledge that was borne of intimate familiarity and sensory experience not otherwise widely shared, witnessed or noticed, and to do this through direct engagement using documentary style media. Mindful of the scope of the budget, I suggested a range of outcomes that could include audio / visual, site-specific, physical and / or ephemeral works, which might be portable or publicly accessible / visible, and sited in one or numerous locations. I scheduled a yearlong duration, incorporating a four-month period for on and off site research, which in reality was an ongoing process.

The intense research that followed was grounded in aspects of sensory ethnography, psycho-geography and cartography, and included exploration of the Folklore Archives and local history archives.

Cavan Arts Office had put a steering group in place and its members became my first line of inquiry for grassroots information and connection. In time, I established a network of specialists and local residents with whom I engaged on a more regular basis. I began to select cer-

tain aspects of the information for further research and exploration, pulling more marginal and peripheral contexts into focus. Multiple site-visits were a central part of the process and development of the project, and were most frequently conducted in the company of said locals and / or specialists. I worked closely with a botanist, a forager, a food producer, an historian and an educator. I also met with a number of sub-communities of place and / or interest, while also consulting specialists in the areas of environment, archeology, social history and natural history. I spent many months wading through bog, lake and marsh, kayaking the Erne waterway, walking the town to learn the layers of names, buildings and events, tracing the dismantled railway tracks, crossing the border by land and by water and sitting at kitchen tables, always with a field recorder, notebook, Ordinance Survey map and camera to hand.

In the studio, this information was gathered, edited, connected, expanded and mapped on a continual basis. The experiential and sensory nature of the interaction with Belturbet and its environs led me to concentrate of field recordings and filming at a number of sites of interest. Additional elements of intervention and / or constructed narrative were developed in each case. I finally selected eight interconnecting aspects of the gathered information to respond to through the medium of film. Given the scale of the budget, I was able to contract an editor, a field recordist, a performance artist, an electronic composer and a poet to work with me over the following months. These collaborations were without a doubt the most enjoyable, enriching and informative aspects of the project. As a result I have strengthened my skills and knowledge in each of these areas, expanded my experience of subcontracting and micromanagement within a commission, and formed a valuable network of like-minded and competent creative professionals.

Throughout the lifetime of the project three steering group meetings were arranged. At each one I presented an update on the development of the project. It was a challenge to succinctly explain the work in progress, but forced me to organise and reorganise my documentation and research on a regular basis, which resulted in a clear charting of the process in visual and written form. The steering group was, on the most part, open to the work as it developed. Rhonda Tidy, then Public Arts Coordinator with Cavan County Council, was very active in her role as mediator between artist, steering group and community.

Her support facilitated the experimental nature of the work and the further development of my skills in the processes of film and documentary for future work. As always this kind of on the ground support and co-maintenance of the agenda i.e. the production of new artwork, is vital for artists working in public contexts.

The project was launched on Culture Night to an audience of approximately 80 locals. The films remain on view in a large-scale multiscreen installation in the recently opened Civic Centre in Belturbet town until 6 October. On opening night they were screened in succession, interspersed with readings from the poet Tom Conaty, whose long, narrative poem Field Notes was written in response to the project.

To help distribute the work more broadly, and also as a means of collating all of the elements of the project, I worked with Mobanode Ltd. to develop a custom designed app for In the Current. This is an iPhone and iPad app (now available in App Store) that is designed in keeping with the nature of the work and process. It contains the films, the contextual research, further reading, information about the artist and the project, and Field Notes in both written and audio form. A crossplatform micro site also exists. The decision to disseminate the work in app format harks back to the original proposal of an audio-visual, multi-sited and portable work, and takes the work beyond both a localised and a gallery context. Two iPads will be permanently installed in Belturbet Library, with the additional effect of serving as an alternative navigational and educational tool for visitors to the town.

On the ground the response to the project has been extremely positive. The app and micro-site will be launched in late October, and I will also be seeking opportunities to screen the films in gallery and festival contexts. yvonnecullivan.com/inthecurrent.htm facebook.com/YvonneCullivanInTheCurrent

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2014

17

ADVOCACY

Without the ability to strategically

... in some respects the flurry of calls

While we brace ourselves for as yet

plan, how can we articulate robust

for accountability and emphasis on

unknown questions around public

responses to calls for accountability

offering the public value for money, is

accountability for arts funding

and financial efficiency? Is money the

a case of putting the cart before the

decisions, where do we stand in terms

only answer?

horse.

of supports that we feel are essential?

Twenty Twenty Vision JASON OAKLEY OUTLINES VAI’S THINKING ON THE NEED FOR A VISONARY STRATEGY FOR SUPPORTing visual artists.

Allegedly ‘austerity’ might be easing. Benign property polyps (not bubbles, of course) are supposedly growing. There are calls for tax cuts to encourage consumer spending and talk of the Celtic Phoenix. But the arts sector in the ROI and NI has been offered no such hope, and has been told to stay braced for further cuts. As a consequence strategising for a better future for artists is hampered. Arts councils and other local and national government departments and organisations have ongoing programmes. There contain both short-term and long-term ideas, which place the individual artist at the core of their thinking.

This article seeks to form the beginning of a conversation about devising strategic policies and ambitions for the benefit of individual visual artists in the ROI and NI by gathering together a range of aspirations and points of view about areas of focus and resources that are required to begin the process. In particular this article is based on Visual Artists Ireland’s solid history in supporting the individual artist and sharing its knowledge and experience of best practice models, developed and tested over years of experience with the ROI and NI arts councils.1 Back in the September / October edition of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet Cliodhna Shaffrey stated that we must “fight, argue and advocate for a better-resourced Arts Council”. The Arts Council of Ireland’s 2013 Strategic Review is summarised in the document Inspiring Prospects (2014). The publication argues that the Arts Council needs to be more strategic and should look at other forms of investment and support (including supporting / endorsing artists that they don’t fund in other ways). In addition the public should be placed at centre of what they do – the Council shouldn’t just concentrate on the ‘supply side’ of their prevue. The report also states that the Arts Council should develop a spatial and temporal strategy.2 The Arts Council has whole-heartedly welcomed the findings of report, noting how the review “ provides a compelling and challenging series of proposals that will be used by the Arts Council to inform strategy in the years ahead”.3 The report signals some significant changes.

“Being the lead agency in this field requires the Arts Council to make choices… being selective is not only about reducing the number of investments but also exploring how changes in the nature, level and strategic purpose of grants may lead to new outcomes including new behaviours by some organisations which may have become overly dependent on the Arts Council”.4 The Arts Council should be commended for commissioning such a searching review.

This is all well and good, but it begs the question: exactly what financial resources are actually available – or will be made available – to fulfil all of these aspirations and ambitions? How can the visual arts sector in the ROI become more strategic, selective and developmental in order to better support artists? In all likelihood cuts to publically funded agencies will continue apace.

In Northern Ireland the situation is also fraught. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) recently received an in-year cut, which it has to pass on to around 30 visual arts organisations, which in turn has dire

consequences for individual artists. It is a development that stifles the sector and Council’s own budgetary and strategic planning. ACNI has stated that it will work to protect its core clients “…by mitigating the impact of these cuts in any way we can,” and that it will “continue to make the case to the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL) and to the Northern Ireland Government of the value of the arts to the economy and to society”.5 What then is our response as those who are most effected by this new economic reality?

... the arts have been colonised by the viewpoints and ideology of the commercial sector. According to this credo everything can and should supposedly be run as a business, with the imposition of rigid metrics ... taken as the sole measures of success.

Globally the arts have been colonised the viewpoints and ideology of the commercial sector. According to this credo everything can and should supposedly be run as a business, with the imposition of rigid metrics, including financial turnover and footfall, taken as the sole measures of success. There’s no place for nuanced and subjective ideas of quality, risk, innovation, profundity etc. All this is compounded by a growing trend for recommending amalgamations and reductions in the numbers of arts bodies and venues – all in the name of efficiency and cost savings that already affect the support of artistic diversity and innovation.

These are by no means mitigating circumstances that get artists ‘off the hook’ in terms of accountability or what our ‘fair share’ should be. It’s most likely that ‘turbulent times’ will be the status quo for the foreseeable future. But in some respects the flurry of calls for accountability and emphasis on offering the public value for money is a case of putting the cart before the horse. For example, in the Republic of Ireland, the attentions of the Auditor General have not yet hit all government departments. Much of the ‘accountability’ work that we face is in response to a spectre / straw man. We don’t yet know what the criteria / policy will be. While we brace ourselves for as yet unknown questions around public accountability for arts funding decisions, where do we stand in terms of supports that we feel are essential?

Fundamental problems arise from these inhibitors to the development of visionary strategies to benefit artists. Without the ability to strategically plan, how can we articulate robust responses to calls for accountability and financial efficiency? Is money the only answer?

Our aspirations for supporting visual artists are very simple to articulate: developing and supporting risk, innovation, opportunity, publicity, fair employment conditions, public access and awareness. In short, creating a fully functioning visual arts ecology. These are shared goals across the visual arts sector, but what is currently missing is the detail and specifics. What measures, buildings, bodies, funds, schemes etc. need to be in place? Where and when? Artists need more than statements of good intention. As the National Campaign for the Arts maintains there is also need to support the aspirations of the visual arts sector with planned programmes of research in order to provide concrete support for future policy. 6 Visual Artists Ireland wants to bring together voices that are not currently being heard. We see an urgent need for artists and the wider visual arts sector to assist both arts councils in their work developing a strategy for the benefit of visual artists, with strong goals set out along a detailed timeline for inspiring goals within the sector.

2020 – six years from now – seems like a reasonable and significant way-marker. Visual Artists Ireland is currently planning an event to bring together as many voices as possible together in order to make this a reality. Details will be announced soon.

Jason Oakley (b East Anglia UK 1968) is an editor, educator and art writer. He is the Publications Manager for Visual Artists Ireland and has lectured in visual culture and contemporary art theory and practice at IADT Dun Laoghaire and NCAD, Dublin. He is a member of AICA the international association of art critics; and has served on curatorial steering committee of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin; and the external advisory panel for the BA in Visual and Critical Studies at The School of Art, Design and Printing, Dublin Institute of Technology.

Notes 1. Visual Artists Ireland is briefing both arts councils on an ongoing basis, with regard to: artist payment balancing; the development of an independent cultural exchequer based on the exploitation of secondary market sales and licence reprography; and new forms artist supports based on existing revenue programmes available to other sectors.

2. In summary, the recommendations in the review are that the Arts Council should: serve as the development agency for the arts, focused on the public good; make policies and strategies that are explicit and connected; change its investment strategies and behaviours; be well informed and evidence-based; strengthen its own capability and that of the arts sector; engage widely and communicate openly. The full strategic review can be downloaded from artscouncil.ie 3.artscouncil.ie/News/Arts-Council-publishes-report-from-Independent-Strategic-Review-Group 4. ‘Inspiring Prospects – Arts Council Strategic Review 2014, Report of the Steering Group’ Pg15, Arts Council, 2014 5. On 31 July, Northern Ireland’s finance minister announced immediate, in-year cuts of 2.1 per cent to all government departments (except health and education) with a further 2.3 per cent cut to come in October. On 8 August the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure passed this straight cut on to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, which asked its clients, including around 30 visual arts organisations, to present reports by 21 August detailing how they would each apply 5 per cent reductions to their in-year budgets – effectively a 10 per cent cut to what is left of the current financial year’s budget. To compound this already fraught situation, the government has warned that there be further cuts in 2015 – 2016 at least.

6. “The NCFA believes that a programme of dynamically planned research with practical policy goals is urgently needed to ensure the funded arts sector continues to serve its social, economic, and cultural function. This is desirable as soon as possible. Everyone should know how the funded arts sector is governed, what it achieves, and who benefits.” ncfa.ie

18

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2014

Media sure our TV arts output is balanced across as wide a variety of artforms as possible and that we are ready to mark any significant anniversaries or events. How much we commission around any single art form depends on the quality of the ideas coming in from producers and the need to cover specific anniversaries or events in any given year.

Our policy at RTÉ Television is to transmit arts programmes, where possible, during peak-time. (RTÉ is one of the few remaining public-service broadcasters in Europe that plays arts documentaries and programmes at peak-time on its main television channel.) This means that Irish arts output on RTÉ TV has to work hard to compete against popular programmes and series on other channels.

We also get a lot of ideas for documentaries but it is very difficult to sustain content across 52 minutes. Only the strongest stories will last the distance and keep an audience engaged for the full hour. But there are other equally effective ways of having your work featured: often, a short item on a very popular programme can be more effective in terms of reaching a wide audience.

RTé presented John Kelly (left) and artist Richard Mosse, on the occassion of coverage on The Works of the artist’s exhibition ‘The Enclave,’ RHA, Dublin (30 January – 12 March 2014), photo courtesy of RTé

Art on the Box An interview with SARAH RYDER of RTÉ Jason Oakley: What’s your role in relation to visual arts coverage at RTÉ?

Sarah Ryder: I’m Assistant Commissioning Editor for RTÉ Factual, with responsibility for the arts, and my role is to manage commissioned and in-house arts programming across RTÉ Television. As well as dedicated arts programmes – eg The Works, Instrumental, Choir of the Year – and our slate of post-watershed arts documentaries, the arts is very much part of the lifeblood of all daily TV output, from the news and Nationwide to children’s and young people’s programmes. The financial crisis hit RTÉ hard; the challenge in television has been to not just maintain but try to grow dedicated arts output in a difficult financial environment. Part of my job is to reach out to other public service broadcasters, funders and corporate partners for co-funding to enable us to further develop our arts coverage. I also manage big, national campaigns like Ireland’s Favourite Painting or the A Poem For Ireland initiative, which are aimed at engaging a broader audience with an individual art form.

All programmes must fit the channel brief. Commissioning editors work with in-house producers and production companies to find the strongest ideas; the shortlisted ideas then go forward to the Channel Controller, who makes the final decision as to what projects actually make it to air.

In terms of the visual arts, teams across television cover the visual arts in a variety of ways, from news items and review / preview of exhibitions to features on The Works and one-off documentaries on individual artists.

JO: Would you have any general advice for those seeking coverage on RTÉ for visual arts events / projects in terms of contacting researchers / formulating press releases?

SR: Television needs a longer lead-in time than radio or news, so let weekly programmes like The Works or Nationwide know about your event well in advance. (The teams often receive press releases too late to do anything about them.) Remember that there are lots of interesting events and stories vying for airtime every week, so make sure to outline any unique or newsworthy elements in your press release. Watch, listen to and familiarise yourself with RTÉ programmes: get to know the content and tone of the different programmes so you know where best to pitch your idea. Look at the closing credits or on each programme’s dedicated homepage on rte.ie to see who the Researcher and Series Producer are and address your release directly to them. Follow up with a call or mail to gauge interest.

JO: You’ve mentioned before that there are opportunities for the visual arts to be included in all sorts of programmes – not just dedicated arts shows – as a means of gaining exposure and giving the public access to the visual arts. Would you say then that there is an openness and curiosity across the programming spectrum at RTÉ?

SR: The Works is our flagship arts show on television and airs every Friday at 8.30pm on RTÉ One. Nationwide (on air three nights a week) also

covers arts stories as a core part of its remit. The arts is very much part of TV content on programmes like Daily Edition, Today and in our young people’s programmes. RTÉ News’ Arts Correspondent Sinead Crowley covers arts stories for both television and radio news programmes. RTÉ Ten on rte.ie has a huge audience and a dedicated arts correspondent, Paddy Kehoe, who is always on the lookout for interesting stories. And as well as dedicated arts programmes like Arena, The Book Show and Arts Tonight on RTÉ Radio One, the arts is also part of the lifeblood of all daily radio schedules: programmes like The John Murray Show or Today With Sean O’Rourke view the arts very much as part of their remit. Finally, RTÉ Lyric fm is a dedicated arts and music radio station. So there are many outlets across RTÉ for arts stories.

JO: What kind of feedback did you received from the public and the visual arts sector after the The Works was moved to an earlier slot? (I attended the Richard Mosse show at the RHA the day it was covered and the venue was very busy.)

SR: Moving The Works to its new peak-time slot was welcomed very warmly by everyone in the arts community and qualitative audience feedback about the content has been very positive. However, challenges remain: we did some audience research after the first run in the new slot and were surprised that, despite two major publicity campaigns to promote the show’s new Friday 8.30pm slot, awareness of the new slot remains low. So we know there’s work to do to build awareness of the new time-slot and audience loyalty to the programme in its new peak-time position. We’ll continue to publicise it as widely as we can, and would very much welcome the support of the arts community in this regard.

JO: In your opinion what have been some of the highlights of RTÉ’s visual arts coverage over the last couple of years?

SR: It’s hard to single out any one programme or artist, but one project that stands out was Ireland’s Favourite Painting. This was a major RTÉ TV, radio and digital campaign aimed at fostering awareness among a general audience of the huge variety of art that is available to be enjoyed, for free, in Ireland’s public collections. The National Gallery reported a 240% increase in footfall during the campaign and overall there was an 11% national increase in attendance at visual arts venues / events that year.

We’d like to think that the campaign contributed to that!

JO: Broadly speaking the needs of the visual arts sector in terms of television coverage can be summed up as ‘more and better’. This is all well and good, but of course RTÉ only has a certain capacity for arts programming. Could you give me a simple indication of the budget for or number of new visual arts shows that there is realistically scope to make or commission?

SR: Television is expensive, and budgets and airtime are limited. TV is also a very unforgiving medium: multiple channels vie for the audience’s attention, particularly at peak viewing times, so my job is to filter the strongest ideas from independent and in-house producers. We then make

JO: Can you outline some future developments for RTÉ visual arts coverage – specific programmes or broad ventures? Did any programmes emerge from VAI’s Documentary and Film pitching event held as part of the 2014 Get Together? (The broadcasters and independent producers that took part were: Atlantic Film Alliance, Loopline Film, Network Ireland Television, Poolbeg Productions, Red Pepper Productions, South Wind Blows, Yellow Asylum and RTÉ Factual.)

SR: We have a number of interesting television arts projects in development, but sadly I can’t speak about development projects until they become reality! The Works will continue to feature interviews with artists, and stories on forthcoming exhibitions and visual arts events.

Look out for extended / uncut interviews and items from The Works on RTÉ’s YouTube channel. Other imminent visual-arts-specific projects include: a beautiful documentary by award-winning director Neasa Ní Chianáin on Neal McGregor, a British artist who lived and died in Donegal; a crowd-sourced documentary on photographer Arthur Fields who photographed passers-by on O’Connell Bridge for over 50 years and whose archive, slowly being re-assembled by the Man On Bridge project, paints a fascinating portrait of a changing society; and a new presenterled project on outsider art which is due to air in late 2015.

JO: Personally, I’d like to see RTÉ television making ambitious thematic programmes about the visual arts – as many as the regular panel-based review shows – that have an educational and entertainment remit. I’m thinking along the lines of the kinds of polemic documentaries made by Jonathan Meades or Matthew Collings for the BBC, or the series’ made by David McWilliams or Eamon De Buitlear for RTE: programmes with a charismatic / opinionated, yet informed and informative presenter / writer at the helm. There’s a world of fascinating social, historical, economic and human interest stories relating to the visual arts, architecture and design that tell the story of contemporary Ireland. The ‘Building Ireland’ series comes to mind as praise worthy in this regard.

SR: Yes, finding knowledgeable and charismatic personalities, from within and beyond the art world, who are great communicators and passionate about the arts is always on the agenda for us in RTÉ Television.

Our own John Kelly is a brilliant communicator: as well as fronting The Works, he also presented a wonderful doc on the history of the Irish in film – From Hell’s Kitchen to Hollywood – in 2012 and will present a landmark project on the history of Irish poetry which airs in early 2015 as part of the Poem For Ireland initiative. Film and TV actor Adrian Dunbar who played Brendan Behan onstage has spent the past year delving into the life and legacy of Behan for us too. The result is an insightful, and very personal, documentary on Behan which airs in early December. One of our 2015 projects is an authored piece on outsider art – fronted by a presenter most people will know in a completely different context. So we are always open to authored docs on any subject – but the pre-requisite is a genuine knowledge of or passion for the arts.

We are always on the lookout for ambitious themed arts series too.

Play Next Door (2014) was a landmark TV project that opened up the world of creative writing for a general audience and was exceptionally well received by audience and critics alike. (It has also received very positive attention internationally.) We always welcome ideas for programmes or projects that give the general audience an insight into a specific art form and we would love to find other arts formats that are as engaging, revealing and enjoyable as this series was.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Critique Supplement Edition 16: November – December 2014

Emma Donaldson, Paul Gaffney, Michael Wann ‘In a Landscape’ 5 September – 11 October Solstice Arts Centre, Navan Tranquility, contemplation, meditation, dreamlike; these are a few of the words that come to mind when listening to John Cage’s composition In a Landscape (1948). A recent exhibition at Solstice Arts Centre borrowed this title and drew together three artists to form a show that was well positioned to elicit similar responses from visitors.

Paul Gaffney’s sequence of unpopulated photographs, all untitled, provided a glimpse of a 3500 kilometre walk across rural Spain, Portugal and France, undertaken by the artist in 2012. The photographs alternate between images of wooded land-

Paul Gaffney, Untitled #8, 2012, archival pigment print, 61x49cm

Michael Wann, Tracks, 152 x 122cm, 2014

Emma Donaldson, Untitled (thought), 2013,179 x 39 x 35cm

scapes and more barren, rocky terrain, but function as more than mere documentary-style records. Gaffney’s images invite viewers to share in his quest for self-discovery via an immersion in the landscape.

The images depict both the natural and manmade obstacles that Gaffney met along his way, including large piles of rocks and fences. Some of the scenes are only partially visible through veils of mist. Human interventions into nature are apparent both in scenes featuring bridges and tunnels that traverse difficult terrain, and in those that show discarded debris such as plastic or cardboard.

The works were selected from Gaffney’s photobook We Make the Path by Walking (2013). Included is a beautiful short poem by Antonio Machado titled Wanderer There is No Path (1912), which sums up the key concept explored through these works.

“By walking one makes the path and upon glancing back one sees the track that must never be trod again.” Gaffney forged his own route for the journey, rather than following a predetermined itinerary. Echoing this his works were hung in irregular groupings and at alternating heights, recalling Gaffney’s organic and sometime uncertain progress. A sense of stillness and quietness, reflection and introspection pervaded the imagery.

Emma Donaldson’s contribution to the exhibition was two-fold: large posters of dense text with accompanying images on the walls and three sculptural installations, which filled the middle of the space. The text comprised accounts of two journeys made by the artist that fuse descriptions of place, sensations and memories conjured by these encounters. Donaldson’s narratives explore the impact of time on place and the role of the observational mind in memory. Of a particular encounter she noted “...it’s our constantly shifting reality involuntarily connecting with and reawakening the past”. In the work she also makes several allusions to lines or being ‘on a line’. This could refer to either time or direction. The line is reflected and captured in the images, two of which show the movements of traffic on the streets as blurred streaks of light.

The press release referenced Donaldson’s partiality to “drawing with cotton and linen”. The line of her written journey, a line we have to piece together in our mind’s eye, is then transferred to the physicality of these sculptural installations.

Donaldson’s three sculptures possessed somewhat biological forms. Body recalled an all-seeing eye composed of layer upon layer of soft material, built up over time. Untitled (thought) was a tangled form, not unlike the models you might see in a science lab showing a cellular-level structure. Untitled 2013 suggested a ‘soft ooze’ via the form of a duvet trying to escape a skeletal-like casing. The artist’s playful approaches to line-making and juxtaposition of soft and hard materials suggest journeys with no clear beginnings that circulate as endless cycles.

Michael Wann’s charcoal drawings evoked a bucolic landscape, one laced with a sense of nostalgia. The drawings evoked childhood memories of the countryside – sun-dappled paths lead through lush forestry. Above all, the dynamism of Wann’s mark making and mastery of drawing seemed his most direct response to his environment.

Some common threads were apparent in the three artists’ practices. Both Gaffney and Wann seemed concerned with inviting the viewer to focus on the scenes portrayed as a means to consider broader questions about how journeys and landscapes parallel mental meanderings. Both artists presented scenes depicting crossroads, suggesting a preoccupation with the choices that govern physical and psychological jaunts. Gaffney and Wann’s rural landscapes enable viewers to filter the imagery through their own experiences, memories and meditations. Donaldson’s urban-based text works invited similar identifications, but perhaps with less freedom, due to the intricate detail provided.

Overall, Donaldson’s text pieces encouraged us to play closer attention to the people, places, buildings and objects encountered in our daily lives. The old saying ‘it’s the journey, not the destination’ comes to mind in relation to all three artists’ practices. For Gaffney, Wann and Donaldson, to greater and lesser degree, ‘the journey’ is a central theme.

Roisin Russell is a writer based in Dublin and her work has featured on Paper Visual Art Journal, Vulgo and Circa.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet Critique Supplement

November – December 2014

Tristan Barry ‘Recent Works’ 26 August – 26 September Ards Arts Centre, Down

Leanne McDonagh Reminiscence 3 – 20 September Origin Gallery, Dublin

Tristan Barry, River and Fields, Cahard, 20 x 20cm

Tristan Barry, Lough and Trees at Twilight, 20 x 20cm

Recent works by Tristan Barry are currently displayed at the Ards Art Centre in County Down.

These works were created in a wide range of media, including graphite on paper / board, linocut prints and ink, acrylic and graphite on canvas.

Barry presents two distinct and overlapping enquiries in this body of work. For the most part the works depict scenes of rural and / or urban scapes across Ulster. This choice of subject matter is not surprising when we consider that Barry’s hometown and current place of residence is the small rural town of Comber in County Down, which is only a 15 minute commute from his secondary studio in Belfast city centre.

The presentation of the two contrasting elements of the Belfast landscape is not a new one. It is a juxtaposition that has long been the subject of poetry. Derek Mahon wrote, “…keeping an eye on the hill / At the top of every street, for there it is / Eternally, if irrelevantly, visible”. (Spring in Belfast). The city is hemmed in within a horseshoe formation of hills. The industrial cityscape comprises empty warehouses and statues that memorialise the industrial revolution expressed through shipbuilding and linen. The surrounding countryside has its own less recognised wealth of history. Jonathan Swift is said to have found inspiration for Gulliver’s Travels in the rock formation that looks like a skyward face and is visible across the city. Furthermore, the United Irishmen congregated on Cave Hill to take vows before the 1798 rebellion. After the rebellion’s failure Henry Joy McCracken was captured in the same hills.

Two graphite-on-board images induct us into the exhibition. These display the Belfast Harbour area of the city. The compositions feature the industrial landscape constructed of both steel and brick buildings flanked by foreboding clouds and hills.

In other graphite works – portrayals of Sheephaven, Donegal – the obvious industrial features are absent. Although the urban aspects are not physically present in these images Barry’s technique manages to imply their presence. Softly shaded mountains in the background are overshadowed by abstract hard vertical lines, which imply trees, foliage and exposed rock, but seem reminiscent of the harsh verticality of city buildings. This is not a landscape of deepest rural Ireland; a town with amenities is a short walk away.

This dualism becomes even more evident in the two sets of black and white linocut prints. Of particular note are the two prints that create the Skyline Series portraying the skyline of Belfast and

Comber. The impact of the linocut effect requires that neither the foreground of roof tops with their prominent chimneys, nor the thick cloud-emboldened sky, can be interpreted as the main character.

Any hope of distinction between rural and urban has been further disrupted by Barry’s use of harsh cross hatch, which dominates both the representation of the manmade and the natural. This is particularly evident in the skyline of Comber. Here the sharp black silhouette of a thin church steeple is mimicked by a sky constructed from a collision of hatch and cross hatch imposed on black ink, creating the effect of a shattered mirror. Traditional perspective has been effectively diminished in this work, with the whole scene becoming 2D. Barry’s practice gains both a technical and conceptual complexity in the mixed media paintings. His use of ink, acrylic and graphite on canvas creates a deep flat-layered effect in a deliberate monotone. Some of the same inquiries are present in these works, but the final product is more pleasing. In five larger pieces, part of the Skyline Series, a more abstract presentation takes hold: dark silhouettes and reflections of silhouettes. Yet these are not the same bold sharp silhouettes seen in the print series. The boundaries between buildings and sky have been blurred with thick brush strokes of ink and acrylic. Furthermore, there is very little distinction between skyline and reflection, which creates a huge mass of structure reminiscent of the hills that have featured so heavily in the rest of the exhibition. If it weren’t for the name of the series this could easily be mistaken for another rural scene.

It is difficult to be entirely sure if the artist’s intention is to display a catalogue of final product works or to show a development of his practice.

Some of the more straightforward pencil works seem more appropriate for inclusion in the exhibition if the latter is the case. This assumption is supported by the exhibition title, but made doubtful by the fact that all of the works are for sale.

In contrast to Barry’s previously exhibited subject matters the enquiry of this exhibition seems to marry a fine painterly skill set with a methodical conceptual framework. What at first seems to be a regurgitation of landscapes that play on the viewer’s familiarity and romanticisation of the local quickly reveals itself to be a concentrated enquiry.

Iain Griffin is a visual artist and writer based in Belfast. Iain studied at NCAD and has exhibited locally in exhibitions including trueprod2k11, PS Squared, Belfast (2012) and Alternative Histories, Ulster Hall, Belfast (2013).

Young Irish artist Leanne McDonagh (born 1990) used a crowd funding campaign to support the making of her new body of work ‘Reminiscence’, which also includes a selection of earlier mixed media works. This distinctly modern and entrepreneurial approach illustrates the versatility of her practice.

As well as being featured in an upcoming RTÉ series about Traveller women and business, she is a qualified art teacher and is often called on to speak to students about her experiences continuing to third level education and pursuing a career as an artist.

As a member of the Traveller community McDonagh is all too aware of the prejudices and misconceptions that her background invites, and she is astute in realising that her work provides both an insight into her life and an opportunity to tell her own stories. It is not flippant to speculate that current perceptions of Traveller womanhood are influenced by the often unpleasantly ethnographic reality TV vehicles portraying the spectacle of life events such as weddings and communions, which inevitably focus on the bruises gained by wearing a 20 stone wedding gown, or scantily clad tweenage wedding guests gyrating on the dance floor. The ostentation of these showy events is completely at odds with the subtle, contemplative work McDonagh makes, though it too explores events and traditions embedded in the Traveller way of life.

The elusive nature of memory, and its unreliable tricks and ruses, is the subject of the principal work in this exhibition, exhibited in the elegant former drawing room of the Origin Gallery’s Georgian townhouse. Using manipulated photographs, fragments of distorted and partial images are layered on top of one another, creating a dreamlike, whimsical quality evoking the ghostly pictures created by the double exposure of camera film. Printed as C-type Lambda prints or on rich Hahnemühle paper, these are presented as gleaming objects, slickly mounted in liquid acrylic like memories captured in aspic.

McDonagh creates fleeting glimpses of an event central to her culture, the annual Cahirmee Horse Fair held at Buttevant in County Cork, where generations of Travellers have gathered to buy and sell horses, socialise and reunite with friends and family. But these palimpsests, like recollections, are open to question. McDonagh concedes that the works “suggests a story about a past seen from the perspective of time,” and are not actual recollections, but the idea of recollections. Her subject matter is an appropriate vehicle for exploring the fickle nature of memory, with its rich mythology, a largely undocumented history, and its links to famous historical figures including Napoleon and the

Leanne McDonagh, Trading, 2014

Duke of Wellington, both of whom owned famous horses that were bought at the fair as colts.

The series features ghostly images, predominantly in colour, of jockeys, details of extravagantly garbed women and, of course, horses. Occasionally these glimpses are overlaid with simple line drawings in ink, as with Pride and Joy, where a stable boy carries buckets, or with the diptych Trader, where the sketch of a small caravan is paired with a pastel vision of a small girl. Though indistinct with swirls and dragged lines, there is no ambiguity in the reading of these reveries. Their haziness and the bleached summery light conjures up the staccato slideshow of the mind’s eye where decades-old remembrances reside, with locations, people and objects jumbled together. Over and over again, the images restage memory, adding and subtracting the players and backgrounds.

The movement in each work not only plays on the very personal nature of recall, but questions the extent to which we can trust memories. As if to fuel this uncertainty, one image appears in monotone, not unlike our dreams: sometimes in colour, sometimes in black and white. This grey image, Mischievous Play, depicts a young woman glancing back over her shoulder, and is sharper than those with washes of pigment. It is literally and figuratively darker in tone.

In the second gallery an earlier body of work, clearly a precursor to the more recent works, feels very much like the preparatory sketchbook. With these smaller, more tentative works McDonagh also employs layers, but these are formless and abstract. Creating texture with impasto and paper collage, they are in their original state or reproduced as a photograph, making yet another layer. They are awash with gothic, muted tones, occasionally stuck with the occasional flare of pale light, like sunbeams breaking through clouds.

If ‘Reminiscences’ were a mid-career survey or a retrospective the inclusion of this earlier work could be warranted, but in the context of this debut solo exhibition they seem superfluous, a distraction from the delicacy of the more accomplished photographic series. As this is McDonagh’s debut solo it may be that this was seen as an opportunity to be exploited to the limit. Yet perhaps a paring back of material would allow the more mature work space to breathe, and added scope for the viewer to reminisce.

Anne Mullee is a Dublin-based writer, curator and filmmaker

November – December 2014

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet Critique Supplement

Maria Simonds-Gooding ‘A Retrospective’ 5 September – 25 October RHA, Dublin Maria Simonds-Gooding, an artist whose output has long been a reassuring presence on the Irish art scene, is the subject of the latest retrospective at the RHA. The exhibition charts the evolution of a paredback visual language concerned with the physical interface between humanity and its habitat.

As a prophetic taster of what is to come, recent works on aluminium are arranged in the downstairs hallway. Hung in a meditative atmosphere enhanced by the soundtrack from a neighbouring exhibition, their place in her overall oeuvre can be better understood after the entire selection is viewed. Nearby, looped video and TV material offers glimpses of the artist’s processes and her living / working environments.

The main thrust of the exhibition is on the first floor, where the combination of open expanse and partitions allows works created in different mediums to breathe independently of each other while engaging in dynamic cross-talk. Visitors can trace the artist’s steady withdrawal from extraneous colour and detail: the elimination of the particular in favour of simplicity and essence.

The chronology is fluid, commencing with comparatively small works on paper dating from 1969. These include Enclosed Ring Fort (1970) – which features in the promotional material – and utilise an earthy palette drawn directly from the landscape surrounding the artist’s home in Dún Chaoin on the Dingle peninsula. A common feature of these early paintings is the dark spaces inside round enclosures that suggest frogspawn or other egg-like entities. These are primeval shelters, safe but foreboding, which offer little comfort to the cosseted twenty-first-century visitor.

Together with fields rendered as elemental forms, these enclosed spaces feed effortlessly into the early plasterworks, which expand scale, swop oil and gouache for fresco pigment and engage the new medium in sculpting protective inclines around the dwellings. In Habitation III (1969) a texture reminiscent of oil impasto conjures up an inhospitable slate rock face onto which tenacious structures cling. Discreet framing supports the notion that this and similar works are fragments of a larger landscape.

Moving around the walls of the gallery, perspective shifts and tilts before flattening out to produce a proliferation of map-like works. Overt texture recedes to the level of mild but eventful imperfections in otherwise uniform surfaces, contours evolve into descriptive scored lines and built structures become shorthand calligraphic marks.

Colour comes and goes again, shrinking back to the level of small occurrences, generating meaning through its absence.1 Inspired by bleached Greek landscapes and the blackened monochrome of Lanzarote Simonds-Gooding’s later palette yields just minor note changes among neutral colours. At times this is achieved by juxtaposing plaster with subtly differentiated grogged clay, best seen in The Bright Fields (1996).

In documenting this process of reduction and the artist’s increasing ease with the space around forms, the retrospective echoes the trajectory of William Scott’s visual enquiry. Indeed, works such as Cliff Dwelling (1999) recall his quirky vessels while suggesting an altogether different kind of container – this time of the means of human survival.

Mark Clare ‘I Belive In You’ 13 September – 1 November Crawford Gallery, Cork Like Scott, Simonds-Gooding has developed an empathy with line. She taps, not into representation, but rather the emotion or spirituality of a place, which may explain why, despite associations with Minimalism, she avoids the coldness which can result from that aesthetic. For her, this redemption lies in the pursuit of personal expression and adherence to a path that always leads back to the referent.1 In the second room of the exhibition, etchings, carborundum prints and tapestries show further diversity within the artist’s creative arsenal. The inclusion of printing plates is an inspired move first made in 2000, which led to the subsequent use of aluminium as a medium. The etchings are the most representational of her output, and marry black line with texture and colour to invariably pleasing effect. Deliberate pairings of, say, Cominéol (1977) and Skellig Rock (2007), allow for comparisons between works separated by large tracts of time and reveal surprising consistency within this medium.

Returning to the recent aluminium works, such as In a Himalayan Valley I (2009), it is clear that, here, formal properties have been limited still further. Compared with Earth Shelters (2007) (seen previously at IMMA), which used clay to ground the elusive material qualities of brushed metal, they rely for effect on nuances of light that shift with the time of the day. Ethereal and somewhat fugitive, they replace the perpetual with the contingent, which is an interesting change of emphasis for this artist.

Working a restricted vocabulary to the point of retained difference the Maria Simonds-Gooding retrospective testifies to the inexhaustible potential of very little. These are not the wild dreamscapes of Jack B. Yeats, the rugged shorelines of Donald Teskey, or the controlled chaos of Charles Tyrrell, each of which evoke impermanence and change.

They are, in the main, quiet and timeless presences that offer a meaningful expression of humanity’s commitment to place and its ongoing struggle for order.

Notes 1. Maria Simonds-Gooding, interviewed by Colm Tóibín, 2010, A Retrospective, RHA, Dublin, 2014, 18 2. Maria Simonds-Gooding, interviewed by Colm Tóibín, 2010, A Retrospective, RHA, Dublin, 2014, 33

Susan Campbell is an artist and art writer.

Simonds-Gooding RHA,The Bright Field II,2011,image courtesy of the artist

Simonds-Gooding,Enclosed Ring Fort,1970, collectionTerry Fitzgerald

Mark Clare, I Believe In You

The role of the artist in society and the function of the artwork are core concepts in this exhibition. As a result, the position of the viewer engaging with the exhibition becomes occasionally contested.

Other themes include concerns about the environment, technological advancement and political issues. There is a tendency in the artworks and the accompanying interpretive text to focus on the potentially negative aspects of technological progression. This introduces a need for the viewer to negotiate some of the tensions that emerge, deciding whether to take a stand, to agree or disagree.

For All Mankind (2011) is an immersive work, where the viewer must pick their way carefully around the splayed legs of numerous columns sprouting from the floor. There is a cyborg element in the contrast between the bottom half of the columns, which are manufactured and machined, and the handmade silver foil disk placed on top of each to form a flower-like organic apex. The clustered columns and pools of light cast elegant shadows onto the walls.

There are associations in the piece with lunar and space explorations, referenced by the title and the white and silver aesthetic. It also suggests a plant room, a busy but unpopulated node or control centre. A ticking timer is attached to each column of the sculpture. The sound is soothing yet has a sinister undertone: domestic kitchen timers and also ‘ticking time bombs’. The technology that benefits us in our comfortable homes may also be harnessed for destructive effect.

For All Mankind is a highlight of the exhibition, with a deceptively simple aesthetic. It’s a clever use of everyday, accessible materials with sophisticated content that works on multiple levels.

An animation of black line drawings and shapes, DemocraCity (2011), balances both white starkness and occasional whimsy. There is a sense of isolation; the unfolding narrative and landscapes are devoid of people. Speedy leaf symbols dart across the screen; architectural modernist sugar cube houses materialise, occasionally with Bauhaus-style coloured rectangles, followed by a busy rush into cityscapes. An Arvo Part soundtrack imaginatively complements the patterns and visual rhythms.

Towards the end of the animation, however, there is a lack of clarity. The supplied interpretive text for the exhibition describes the Onkalo nuclear waste depository site its long-term implications.

I watched the animation several times trying to understand the final apocalyptic or ice age finale through the visual information. The role of the text as a means of mediation, ideally to accompany and complement the individual artworks, became particularly problematic here.

Mark Clare, Remote Control

Displayed in animation format, the artwork does not feel off-putting or overly menacing and successfully presents sophisticated messages. The 3D modelling programme Google Sketchup, which was used to produce the piece, provides interesting parallels between medium and content that act to reinforce the overall point.

Myths about creativity are alluded to in Outopia (2009). This triptych presents at its centre a print-out for a cut-out version of a make-your-own writer’s retreat cabin, inspired by Thoreau and complete with a writer’s desk. It represents the highly appealing ideal of a retreat into the woods, a return to nature with the time and peace to create.

Clare took the two accompanying photographs of a mysteriously destroyed hut during a residency in Norway. There is a balance between the playful aspects of the artwork and a variety of more serious content: philosophies of work, romantic beliefs about the nature of creative work and a consideration of the supports and habits that are actually effective for a robust creative process.

I Believe in You (2014) comprises silver heliumfilled, letter-shaped balloons hanging along the line of the ceiling in the upper gallery. They seem to reference our own self-obsession and perhaps, slyly, Warhol’s Silver Clouds and vacuous fame-fixated world. Slightly battered, tatty and beginning to deflate, they offer a tired reality rather than a shiny, super-saturated futuristic ideal. The choice of materials themselves supports the polarisation of possibilities between a hollow, sinister ideal and throwaway party frippery.

Anthropocene Marker (2014) projects elegant structural compositions of fragile pine twigs with slim, nubby outlines. They are quietly shocking, radically altered through the use of a pencil sharpener, exposing interiors and naked points. Here, Clare seems draw on the site-specific environmental tradition epitomised by Andy Goldsworthy, yet the twigs seem, in contrast, to represent a snapshot of a captured microcosm. Tiny, delicate and probably entirely un-locatable, they will decay and disappear in the forest. Again there is a dualism: precious nature represented by loathed pine tree plantations.

The exhibition presents materials that engage with weighty issues concerning the presence of humanity on the planet. The most successful artworks function on several levels and leave the final interpretation to the viewer.

Note Three of the artworks were not functioning when the review visited (Saturday 20 September). The gallery has since explained that an electrical difficulty in the gallery put the works out of action for 48 hours and apologises for the inconvenience caused.

Dr. Pippa Little is a curator and arts manager based in Limerick.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2014

23

Media / art business

The Reality Show NOEL KELLY DIRECTOR / CEO OUTLINES his RECENT INVOLVEMENT WITH a REALITY-STYLE BUSINESS MENTORING TV SHOW.

asked the programme makes some questions and from the answers that we received it appeared that Norah’s Business Academy would actually be a very good way to get Visual Artists Ireland’s message out to a wider world – even if some of the language used didn’t really capture the way that artists actually work.

I followed up with a meeting and a request to see the 12 stage process that the artist would be brought through. We were happy to see that the programmers makers plans included introductions to galleries, fellow artists, funding organisations and marketing – all a step the right direction. After all, if our own community was involved then we were not going to be alone.

But the funny bit was yet to come. After a couple of meetings I agreed to be involved, including an outline daily rate that Visual Artists Ireland would charge for my participation. This appeared to change things and I was asked to consider a different role. How would I feel about providing a one-off interview commentary for the half-way point of the series, looking at where the artist was at in the whole

Leanne McDonagh, Horse & Harness, C-type lambda print

process and providing some sage advice in that one hour programme?

As part of my work as the CEO / Director of Visual Artists Ireland

Frankly I was relived; this would be an easier task than committing

I’m occasionally called upon to provide comment and analysis about

to be on each episode of the show. So the day was set for shooting the

the realities and challenges of life as a professional artist via various

episode...

mainstream media channels. So it was with some interest and curiosity that I took a call a few months ago asking for my involvement in a

At this point I’ll have be ‘specifically vague,’ as I don’t want to give

forthcoming RTE reality-style programme entitled Norah’s Business

away too much in terms of the programme’s contents. But working

Academy.

with Norah Casey proved to be very worthwhile indeed. I found that she shared many of VAI’s concerns about arts funding and business

As the caller explained, an artist had been chosen as one of the

models. (You’ll have to see the show to get the details!) Art world

participants of programme devised by the entrepreneur Norah Casey,

viewers might baulk at some of the language used – price point,

founder of the Harmonia publishing company. The programme, which

product, positioning. Nonetheless the broad concepts are valid for

will air on RTé Two in November, brings five women from the Traveller

artists. At VAI we talk about many of the same things, using slightly

community through a 12 step process to help them develop the skills

different terminology, during Professional Development events

needed to make their various endeavours into viable businesses. The

and workshops such as Presenting Yourself, Costing Your Work and

participants were also given access to experts with relevant insight

Getting Your Work Out There. During the course of the filming I

and knowledge to impart in their respective areas of interest.

found it enormously useful to be able to direct the artist to VAI’s online resource The Manual: A Survival Guide for Visual Artists. The questions I

Initially, the programme makers wanted to invite me to be involved in

put to the artist on the day were quite straightforward and I hope that

a mentoring capacity on behalf of Visual Artists Ireland. I have to admit

they come across well on television. I did actually leave it to the other

the call prompted something of an office huddle between my colleagues

specialists to talk about price point and positioning!

and I in order to discuss this intriguing and somewhat daunting

Leanne McDonagh, Chloe 2, C-type lambda print

invitation. Myself and the VAI team had some concerns: would the

The programme airs quite soon and, taking into consideration some

realities of the contemporary art world match the programme makers’

of the conceits of television making, I feel that the artist will have

expectations for engaging and interesting viewing? Personally I wasn’t

learned a lot. My only hope is that it is not too much too early for the

sure I wanted to become a media ‘talking-head’. I also had the profile

artist and for the other budding entrepreneurs involved. When offered

and reputation of VAI to bear in mind. No pressure then! And more

access to so many key experts, it can be hard to filter out what you

importantly, how realistic were the programme makers’ expectations?

need from them. So keep an eye out for… cue drum roll… coming soon:

I consulted artists and arts organisations and received quite varied

Norah Casey’s new show, featuring Crawford College graduate Leanne

responses, spanning from ‘don’t do it all’ right through to ‘do do it!’

McDonagh and yours truly from VAI.1

It took me some length of time to make the decision, as I was very

Noel Kelly, CEO / Driector Visual Artists Ireland.

aware that sometimes outside experts think that the visual arts sector is rife with ‘head in the clouds’ dreamers who just need a really good solid kick up the proverbial to be a success. The reality of course is that our sector comprises engaged and highly informed people.

Furthermore, our definitions of success are complex and diverse. We

Note 1. Leanne McDonagh’s show at Origin Gallery, Dublin (3 – 20 September 2014), which will be featured in Norah’s Business Academy is reviewed in the Critique section.

24

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2014

performance / seminar profile

Pushing Ideological Walls ÁINE PHILLIPS REPORTS ON ‘THESE IMMOVABLE WALLS’, A LIVE ART EVENT AND SEMINAR ON THE EMBODIMENT AND PERFORMANCE OF POWER.

Pauline Cummins, The Spy at the Gate, image courtesy of the artist, photo by Joseph Carr

Sandra Johnstone, Entitlement, image courtesy of the artist, photo by Joseph Carr

Pauline Cummins, The Spy at the Gate, image courtesy of the artist, photo by Joseph Carr

Walls are steadfast, fixed and resolute. They divide up space and mark borders. They contain or limit the flow of people and as such can be political tools for both the expression and enactment of power.

From 11 – 12 June 2014, Michelle Browne curated an international live art exhibition and seminar event, ‘These Immovable Walls: Performing Power’, to explore these ideas.1 The event was held at Dublin Castle, funded by the Arts Council and in partnership with the Office of Public Works.

Dublin Castle provided a rich context for a series of provocative presentations on the topic of power and performance, both in theory and in practice. The live performances comprised a series of vivid aesthetic and experiential encounters exploring the manifestations and machinations of power, while the seminar, ‘Performing Power’ (11 June), aired a range of theories and perspectives relating to the site and broader issues concerning the communication and enactment of power.

At the seminar Irish historian Denis McCarthy offered a vivid account of the history and legacy of Dublin Castle.2 McCarthy’s narrative spanned Viking times, the medieval era, the Norman invasion and the period from British occupancy in the 1600s onwards. He talked about the Irish suffragettes imprisoned for breaking the windows of the Ship Street building in 1912, and the three individuals shot and killed during the 1916 rebellion for trying to raise the tri-colour flag at the gates of the Castle.

McCarthy’s presentation examined the ways in which Dublin Castle functioned during its 800-year history, both as a site and symbol of power. It was used variously as a prison, an army barracks, the seat of government and the focal point of many rebellions. Latterly Dublin Castle’s symbolic and functional resonances have included various tribunals and state occasions that signal Ireland’s place within the matrix of European and international politics.

Seven performances took place throughout the grounds of Dublin Castle, addressing various political, operational and historical features of the site. It felt as if a group of artists had staged a seizure of power in an especially effective coup d’état.

London-based artist Carey Young performed Still Life, a formally staged reading of a fictitious will. Young’s performance explored ideas of succession and legacy, economics and circulation associated with

the Castle.

First Class, a work by Czech artist Katerina Sedá, subverted the conventions of the guided tours provided at historical sites. Sedá worked with Dublin Castle’s tour guides, customising their usual itineraries with options for audiences to engage in unorthodox behaviour, such singing while seated on the sovereign throne or dancing in the state apartments.

Philip Napier’s Soon took place in Dublin Castle’s central cobblestoned courtyard. Napier’s work featured a vintage jaguar car, painted with magnolia emulsion. The State Apartment bedroom was decorated with this colour for British PM Margaret Thatcher’s infamous visit in 1980. On day two of the event, Napier drove the car in tight circles around the courtyard. The hypnotic repetition of this action was suggestive of an endless reiteration of political dogma and inaction.

In The Spy at the Gate Pauline Cummins took on the identity of eighteenth-century aristocrat Emily Fitzgerald, Duchess of Leinster.

During a series of engagements with the site Cummins explored and revealed alternative histories of female power and presence.

Dominic Thorpe has been working for some time on issues of power and powerlessness. His recent series of works addressed institutional abuse in Ireland. Proximity Mouth, Thorpe’s work created for Dublin Castle, featured a group of co-performers who are currently asylum seekers living in direct provision. The piece uncovered the harsh conditions those seeking asylum in Ireland are subjected to.

Sandra Johnson’s Entitlement comprised an intricate set of gestural actions enacted in the state drawing room. During the performance Johnson grappled with a mound of one-cent coins, creating an arresting image that spoke of economic greed and avarice set against stark need.

Maurice O’Connell, originally from Ireland but now living in Cornwall, creates performances that insert seamlessly into everyday social exchanges. O’Connell’s Audi Vide Tace took the form of an alternative tour of the premises (reminiscent of Andrea Fraser’s Museum Highlights, 1989) pillorying structures of power and privilege through an absurdist wit, activist intent and institutional critique.

Professor Shirin M. Rai, based at the University of Warwick, was keynote speaker for the seminar. Rai’s research focuses on gendered ritual and ceremony in political performance. She presented a number

of examples of how politics is performed in India, South Africa and the UK. Rai showed how such performances can embody or disturb dominant modes of political interaction. Ria showed images of Indian parliamentary ceremonies, dominated by crowds of white-clad men, which reminded me of similar images featuring predominately male black-suited Dail Eireann TDs. Rai was especially interested in the staging and rehearsal processes behind spectacles of state grandeur: scripting, dressing the part, enunciation, deportment, context and location. She also emphasised the ways in which gender, race and class play a role in announcing power or marginality.

Rai concluded by stating that power is itself a performance that needs a compliant audience to function. Thus, for Rai, mocking or refusing to pay attention to these performances is a way to challenge those in power and hold them accountable.

Maurice O’Connell’s seminar presentation outlined his modus operandi and the research he conducts in preparation for his live work. O’Connell collects and learns modes of behaviour and communication within particular social situations. For example, he recently trained as an emergency services responder and as a security guard.

O’Connell uses this type of training to empower members of the public to engage with the ‘performance of power’ when they encounter it. Overall O’Connell’s aim in exposing and absurdly exaggerating the strategies used by those with authority and dominance in society is to encourage a public of sense of power and agency.

Fiona Whelan introduced her long-term collaborative work with Rialto Youth Project, which began in 2004. Whelan focused on What’s the Story Collective, a project that commenced 2007 and considers issues of power and social agency in the group’s local context. From the outset of this project Whelan sought to establish non-hierarchal and horizontal working relationships between the participants, based on a clear analysis of power within the group. Participants then gathered 60 stories about the use and abuse of power in their day-to-day lives.

Whelan saw the process as seeking to “develop a new power for ourselves”.

Whelan cited Hannah Arendt’s theories about public space as a world of shared interests, which had been particularly illuminating in helping the group relate their private experiences to the public realm.

For one event, the group decided to read their stories aloud but anonymously in a public space. The readings were choreographed and performed to other group members and an invited audience. This led to a second project in 2009 that explored the relationship between group members and An Garda Siochana, which participants felt was particularly complicated by power inequalities. A new performance entitled The Day in Question was developed. Participating Gardaí read stories written by the group to community members and to the authors themselves. For Whelan this project allowed “experiences of power to be felt in new ways”. This unfamiliar form of engagement allowed for a beneficial exchange of power.

The seminar and performance programme of ‘These Immovable Walls: Performing Power’ produced a lively context for crossovers between academic research and performance practice. It is clear that the forms of analysis and strategies deployed by both artists and theorists are often comparable and compatible. ‘These Immovable Walls: Performing Power’ emphasised how various forms of performance in everyday life are tools for the communication and exchange of meaning, framing legitimacy, asserting power and marking territory, both physical and aesthetic. Áine Phillips has made performance and video art in Ireland and internationally for more than 20 years. She is Head of Sculpture at Burren College of Art, Co. Clare and is currently producing a new book on the history of performance art in Ireland to be published in 2015. www.ainephillips.com Notes 1. ‘These Immovable Walls: Performing Power’ at Dublin Castle was curated by Michelle Browne, with Assistant Curator Ciara McKeon. Produced with the support of The Arts Council of Ireland and The OPW. 2. Historian Denis McCarthy was Marketing Manager at Dublin Castle for 22 years. He has published two editions of Dublin Castle at the Heart of Irish History, 2004, the Stationery Office, Dublin.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2014

25

VAI Event

seminar profile

The Rise & Rise

Freelancers Unite!

adrian colwell DESCRIBES THE EVOLUTION OF THE VAI’s SHOW & TELL.

BERNADETTE BEECHER REPORTS ON CULTURAL FREELANCERS IRELAND.

Show & Tell audience members at MART Studios, Dublin, 2014

Claire Bonnie speaking at the MART Studios Show & Tell

Through my role as Membership Manager at VAI I became aware that many artists across Ireland experience feelings of isolation. It seemed important that VAI provide more informal social events to help members meet each other, network, share ideas and feel like more of a community.

In November 2012 we held the first Show and Tell event at our offices in Dame Court, Dublin 2. I wanted the event to remain informal and not feel like a peer critique session, which is a format many artists are already familiar with. It was important that both the attendees and speakers feel relaxed in order to learn more about each other and enjoy themselves. The event was not intended to facillitate critical feedback. The high-paced format brought an element of fun to the evening and ensured that no one lingered for too long on one topic.

This first event featured emerging, mid-career and established artists, all VAI members, who spoke for five minutes each on their respective art practices and recent projects.

The Show & Tell was initially intended to be a one-off event, but proved to be so successful that we have since held over 20 different iterations around the country. Host venues to date include: 126 Gallery, Galway; Ormston House, Limerick; and the Market Place Theatre and Arts Centre, Armagh.

Since its inception, the event has evolved into three different formats: General –VAI works with artists and arts officers in local areas to help them host Show & Tell events. There is an open call for participants in our eBulletin and through our Facebook and Twitter accounts. The event is free for VAI members with a small charge for non-members that goes towards refreshments for the evening.

Studio / Artist-Led Initiatives – VAI works with specific studios and artist led initiatives to help them host Show & Tell events for their members and / or a general audience. This is a free service to VAI Organisation Members, with a flat rate for organisations who are not members of VAI. Entrance to the event is free for VAI members, studio artists and members of the host artist-led group. There is a small charge for non-members that goes towards refreshments for the evening.

Gallery / Studio Patrons or Friends Scheme Members – Galleries and studios can offer Show & Tells as one of the benefits for their patrons or friends scheme members. Studio / gallery artists present their work to the invited audience. It is also

possible for the studio / gallery to put out an open call for artists to participate if they wish. This is a free service to VAI Organisation Members, with a flat rate for organisations who are not members of VAI. Recent events have taken place in each of these formats.

In August 2014 VAI partnered with MART Studios, Dublin to present a Show & Tell featuring speakers that were either MART studio artists or VAI members. Participant and VAI member Claire Bonnie stated, “As an attendee to a previous Show and Tell showcasing artists from Belfast, and a speaker at one of the more recent events, I really am impressed at how clean and quick the formula is for showcasing such a broad range of artistic practices in Ireland. It really is such a wonderful opportunity to see the variety of talent that is abundant at the moment”. MART Co-Director Matthew Nevin, said, “It was a fun and informative way for an audience to grasp a snippet of a group of artists work. The speed and energy behind the talks gave a great vibrancy and enthusiasm from the speakers, including myself”. Partnerships like this expose our member artists to new audiences, artistic groups and networks.

The Show & Tell has also become an integral part of the new VAI Cafes, which began in September of this year at the Damer House Gallery, Roscrea. Initiated by VAI Director Noel Kelly, the Cafes are primarily an afternoon of information, but also give attendees the opportunity to meet fellow artists working in their local area and discover the supports available to them. This first Cafe, and a subsequent event held at West Cork Arts Centre, proved very popular. VAI has plans to roll them out to various other arts centres and venues around the country.

From its inception in 2012, the Show & Tell has gone from strength to strength, becoming an important part of the VAI programme. It has also helped to raise the profile of the organisation and the services that we offer. After two years of hosting these events, the demand for them is consistent.

There are even plans for a few international Show & Tells in the pipeline… Information on upcoming Show & Tells and VAI Cafes will be listed on our website, in the eBulletin and via social media.

Adrian Colwell is the Membership Manager / Listings Editor for VAI. He organises a range of events including Show & Tell, screenings and graduate evenings.

As part of Dublin Tiger Fringe 2014, Cultural Freelancers Ireland held a breakfast meeting on 18 September 2014 in the Irish Theatre Institute, Temple Bar. This was my first time attending one of their events and I was very impressed with the informative, relaxed atmosphere, where cultural practitioners from various art forms could meet and discuss their various practices.

The breakfast meetings were initiated as part of the International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts (IETM) 2013 Conference, held in Dublin in April 2013. Though this was intended as a one-off event, it proved very successful, and attendees were keen to repeat the experience, feeling the need for regular, meaningful contact with peers. Priscilla Robinson and Michelle Read set up Cultural Freelancers Ireland in response to this. The stated aims of the organisation are to provide a peer to peer support network for freelance arts workers through the provision of fortnightly meetings in Dublin where participants can network, contribute and problem solve.

Members of the CFI team run each session and everyone is encouraged to participate fully and engage with the topics. The organisational structure of the meetings is simple, allowing freelancers the opportunity to spend between one and two hours together sharing information, inspiration and experience on a regular basis. There was a diverse range of cultural practitioners at the session I attended, working in film, literature, comedy, theatre and the visual arts. As normal, there were approximately 20 practitioners at the meeting and each spoke for 3 minutes on one of the pre-decided provocations. There was time allocated at the end to cross-pollinate ideas and share responses. The provocations for the meeting I attended were: What edges have you been pushing for yourself?

Politics: does your work intersect with your politics?

Home and Away: how sharing and making

work on the road influences your work.

Disciplines mix: new collaborations you’ve developed recently...

Having these set provocations allowed for an energetic and meaningful exchange of information and experience. As each person is allocated time to speak, it created an investment by each individual to the group. It was very interesting to hear how practitioners from differing art forms reacted to the provocations. This cross pollination enriched and extended the conversations within each group and sparked different thought processes. The structure is open and friendly with a focus on building up trust and interaction between people. Sometimes individuals who work as freelance artists have little or no interaction with other professional cultural workers, therefore these sessions can have the function of ‘kick-starting’ the working week and allow for some ‘water-cooler’ chat.

The core CFI team hope that these meetings

will allow for networking opportunities and assist those participating in talking about their practices in an atmosphere of trust. The format also allows for participants to hear information concerning professional development and other courses they might be interested in.

As Priscilla Robinson stepped down as part of the organisational team, Amy Fox joined the core team, with Deirdre Lennon and Gráinne Lynch, who were co-opted in summer 2014. All core team members, including Aoife Courtney and Michelle Read, give their time voluntarily.

The team draws on arts support organisations to supply meeting spaces for free. It has built up relationships with a number of organisations either through membership or through the organisation’s interest in what the CFI meetings can offer their membership. CFI has used various cultural spaces, including Irish Theatre Institute, DanceHouse, the Tiger Fringe Festival, Create Ireland and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios. The meetings are free to attend and those participating are asked to bring along light breakfast foods like croissants, fruit, muffins, juice etc. Tea and coffee is provided.

CFI has also started to run some specially curated events for festivals or to address specific needs in the arts community. As well as participating in Dublin Fringe, they hosted a panel of artists from literature, dance, film and theatre in March 2014. The artists spoke about their experience as recipients of the Arts Council Artist-in-Residence Scheme. In October CFI also hosted a specially curated session as part of Dalkey Creates Festival.

If you wish to attend a session contact the CFI team by email and book a place. They can also be found on Facebook and Twitter. After a recent survey of attendees, they are now alternating between morning and evening sessions and making the meetings shorter. These changes are aimed at making the sessions as accessible as possible and to facilitate those coming from and heading to work.

Bernadette Beacher, Office Manager, Visual Artists Ireland. A member of Market Studios, her artistic practice deals with the perception of how public space is used and how legal and cultural frameworks have profound influence on the development of the public / private sphere. She sees the role of the artist as a praxis of change which allows for challenging and changing perceptions. She has recently participated on a working group that published ‘To Work with Purpose: Best Practice Guidelines for Internships’. These guidelines are published on VAI’s website.

Note Cultural Freellancers Ireland’s November / December Meeting schedule are as follows: 3 November, 9.15am – 10.30am, Temple Bar Gallery & Studios 17 November, 6.15pm – 7.30pm, DanceHouse 1 December, 9.15am - 10.30am, Temple Bar Gallery & Studios 15 December, 6.15pm – 7.30pm, DanceHouse @ArtsFreelanceIE, facebook.com/culturalfreelancersireland

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2014

project profile

Dark History, Dark Expression ALAN COUNIHAN describes his recent project ‘PERSONAL EFFECTS: A HISTORY OF POSSESSION.

Alan Counihan, The Bound Man, all images courtesy of the artist

In 2011, the late Mary Raftery’s television documentary Behind the Walls – which dealt with the dark history of some of Ireland’s psychiatric institutions – revealed that several hundred volumes had been retrieved from an attic in what was then St. Brendan’s Hospital, Grangegorman. The attic trove also included a great pile of pigeon-spattered handbags and small cotton sacks containing the ‘personal effects’ and private histories of some hundreds of patients who had died within the institution over the past century.

I was profoundly moved by this discovery, having spent time within the grounds of St. Brendan’s as a child and as a nurse attendant in a Swiss psychiatric institution. In May 2012 I enquired about the fate of those personal effects, which led me to the retired Director of Nursing and the retired Hospital Chaplain, who had been primarily responsible for retrieving the archives and belongings from the attics of the institution. With permission from the Health Service Executive and guidance from the National Archives I assisted both men over the course of the next 18 months in their attempt to sort through and organise an enormous pile of hospital records, correspondence and personal belongings. I also researched widely into the history of institutional care for those diagnosed with mental illness in Ireland. It proved a profound and often shocking experience. The question was: how might I respond to this material and research both as an artist and a citizen?

My practice over the last 25 years has mostly comprised the creation of small works born of personal urgencies and large-scale works fashioned from stone or metal in response to the histories of landscapes or the needs of communities. It was clear from the outset that such an approach would be completely inappropriate in this context. If my intention was to reveal the human histories that lay within those boxes and handbags, I would have to develop a means of expression outside my usual practice.

I faced several questions: How might I create a work of art that had at its core the histories of anonymous persons who lived, and were cared for, within the institution? How could I devise a presentation that would allow the possessions of others to express their own charged presences? How would I offer insight into the lives and minds of the objects’ owners while protecting their identities? The work would have to respond to those belongings discovered within the hospital complex, but also engage with the harsh fact that their erstwhile possessors had in turn been possessed by the institution for the duration of their care. In some instances, those who should have had responsibility for these individuals had abandoned them.

Much of my best work has been conceived in an instant, coming into my mind completely formed, as though it already existed in some other realm. It proved so in this instance: a dark history finding dark expression. From the ceiling of a blacked-out room I would hang

Alan Counihan, detail of installation at the Long Stores, Grangegorman

Alan Counihan, details of installation at Axis, Ballymun

a number of upended handbags and suitcases. The contents of each container gut-strung below, so it would seem as if they were falling to the floor. The only light source within the space would come from low voltage LEDs within each up-ended bag, illuminating the suspended contents below. A looped soundtrack would allow the recorded voices of actors to inhabit the darkness as they read from correspondence found within the containers, from case notes and hospital management records.

By early 2013 my intentions had earned the support of some fine individuals working within the Health Service Executive and the National Archives. However, after almost a year of research, no personal resources remained with which I might realise the work. I submitted grant applications to the Arts Council and the Wellcome Trust to no avail. It was hard to recover from those disappointments and by late 2013 I felt that they might be insurmountable.

Although financial support was not forthcoming, my intentions for the project’s realisation received such a positive response that I never really considered abandoning the process. I was fortunate to receive a Tyrone Guthrie Bursary Award from the Arts Office of Kilkenny County Council. This allowed me to plan the installation in all its technical details. The Grangegorman Development Agency, which now has responsibility for the old hospital campus, provided me with rooms within the old asylum where I could present the work: a sitespecific location where the exhibition truly belonged.

Dublin City Arts Officer Ray Yeates offered Culture Box in Dublin’s Temple Bar for a further installation of the work and also put me in touch with the wonderfully resourceful Mark O’Brien and Niamh Ní Chonchubhair at the Axis Centre, Ballymun, who made available the centre’s recording studio along with technicians and actors so that

Alan Counihan, photgraph found in personal effects

I might create the soundtrack.

Support from the public was also heartening. I launched a successful Fundit campaign to meet the costs of fabrication and installation of the work. Alé Mercado designed the project’s website for the dissemination of my research. All of this support was provided probono, making the process a collaborative one. Right at the final stage financial support to meet outstanding costs of the exhibition was generously provided by the Health Service Executive, to great relief.

The first installation of ‘Personal Effects: a history of possession’ took place during Phizzfest 2014, almost 200 years to the day after the asylum admitted its first inmate. Located in the resonant and decrepit architecture of the old hospital’s Long Stores, metres from where those belongings of forgotten lives were once stored, the installation seemed remarkable to all who engaged with it, as evidenced from the poignant testimonies and personal histories described in the visitors’ book and in recorded conversations. After two long years of work this proved an immensely satisfying and rewarding experience.

In June 2014 the work was installed in the smaller and more neutral space of Culture Box, Temple Bar. In August it was shown within the theatre space at Axis, Ballymun where, with all seating withdrawn and the full panoply of audio and lighting effects made available, it received perhaps its most effective visual realisation. It was also at Axis that the work received a great deal of coverage in the national media.

Dermot Bolger wrote a wonderful article and discussed the project on RTE’s Today with Sean O’Rourke. That the work, and the message it contains, has reached so effectively into print and radio makes all the struggles of negotiation, the stresses of financial constraint, the hundreds of unrecompensed hours of research feel worthwhile.

In late November a documentary tracking the development of the exhibition will air on RTE Radio’s Documentary on One series.

The programme is based on interviews that explore the serious issues raised by the project concerning the history of institutional confinement, the compromise of personal dignities by the state or individual families, the nature of self and of mental frailty.

In 2015 I will develop an illustrated publication with Lilliput Press that offers an even deeper expression of this very nuanced and challenging subject. I hope to bring this installation to those cities and towns around the country that were also once home to asylums, mental hospitals, and similar houses of confinement so that the work’s core message – respect for the dignity of each and every citizen of this republic, regardless of their social categorisation – will be further transmitted. alancounihan.net personaleffects.alancounihan.net

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2014

27

VAI Northern Ireland manager

organisation profile

Flux & Success

Welcome to the Art of Our Time

ROB HILKEN OUTLINES HOW DERRY’S KEY VISUAL ART SPACES ARE COMMITTED TO EXPANDING THE LEGACY OF DERRY CITY OF CULTURE 2013.

In July this year, I travelled to Derry with 16 artists from Belfast to hear from Matt Packer, the new director at CCA Derry-Londonderry, Maoliosa Boyle and Damien Duffy from the Void Gallery and Art School and Stephen Lewis of Creative Village Arts.

All these organisations are pushing themselves and the city of Derry to fulfil the promise of a cultural legacy, following the millions invested during the 2013 City of Culture.

Void and CCA are galleries that any city in the world would be proud of, exhibiting challenging programmes of contemporary visual art. Void has two exhibition programmes: one featuring established Irish and international artists curated by members of a curatorial committee; and another, Void Community Gallery, which supports local artists and community groups. CCA has an exhibition programme that reflects the artistic interests of its director through a series of solo and group exhibitions in its smaller and more integrated exhibition spaces.

One element of the Derry’s City of Culture legacy has been the expansion of Void’s main exhibition programme into the City Factory Gallery, located above their original premises. Under the supervision of technician Kieran Ferris, the exhibitions are produced to impeccable standards.

The City Factory Gallery is a venue capable of exhibiting collections of large-scale works at an international standard. Maoliosa Boyle stated that Kelly Richardson’s recent exhibition ‘Haunted’ (24 May – 18 July) was “unquestionably one of the most ambitious exhibitions that Void has ever delivered. The installation featured Mariner 9, a 13m life size projected panoramic view of a Martian landscape set hundreds of years in the future”. Sally Murphy coordinated a programme of participation activities to run alongside the show, which inspired a large local audience of all ages to respond to this spectacular and engaging work.

Throughout November and December Void will house an exhibition looking at the Black Civil Rights movement and its impact on civil rights across Northern Ireland. Curated by Maoliosa Boyle and Lynette Yiadom Boakye, the gallery will host a large body of work that includes the Black Panther Collection and work by Kara Walker, Ellen Gallagher, Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon and Adam Pendalton.

The Void Art School is unique in Northern Ireland and helps young local artists to develop their work in a professional studio environment under the supervision and mentorship of Damien Duffy. With the absence of an art degree programme in Derry, the Void Art School provides a rigorous learning environment that is essential in developing the city’s future artists.

Void Art School is currently engaging in a three-year exchange with the Istituto Superiore di Fotografia e Comunicazione Integrata in Rome, which recently facillitated eight young Derry-based artists on an intensive photography residency and successful exhibition. One of the exchange artists, Joe Carlin, progressed directly from the Void Art School into the second year of the NCAD sculpture degree programme, demonstrating the quality of work being produced there. Joe described how his

experience at Void changed his “entire approach to creativity”. The Void Art School is both inspiring and successful and is a model for what an independent art school can be.

Ryan Gander’s first solo show on the island of Ireland is currently running at the CCA. It is an intimate exhibition that invites the audience to engage with the artist on a deeply personal level, yet ultimately leaves you questioning the authenticity of that engagement. The exhibition is perfectly suited to the venue; the works have space to assert their individual presence whilst at the same time working in conversation with each other. CCA follows Void’s lead in producing exhibitions to the very highest standards. Make every show like it’s your last runs until the end of November.

During the City of Culture, Creative Village Arts (CVA) ran the London Street Gallery that attracted over 9,000 visitors to 14 exhibitions, featuring 500 artists. They currently operate from the Pump Street Visual Arts Centre that also houses four artist studios and the newly formed Derry Print Workshop.

Artist Janet Hoy described how the London Street Gallery brought her into contact with a lot of local artists, helping to form a new community.

“CVA aims to help maintain these informal networks and cultivate support structures in the coming year,” she stated, “in order to help local artists further their careers”. With only 10 artists’ studios in Derry (including six at Void) it is clear that studio provision for artists is not adequate.

CVA is working hard behind the scenes to secure new studio spaces for the city.

When it was announced in 2003 that the Orchard Gallery was to close and that the city would be left with just one contemporary art gallery – the Context Gallery – many were concerned. Fast forward 10 years and thanks to the energy and vision of the city’s artists Derry has hosted UK City of Culture and the Turner Prize, Void gallery has risen to the challenge of replacing the Orchard Gallery and the Context Gallery has transformed into the CCA. Despite recent successes, Derry is still a city in flux: the Gordon Gallery closed its doors this year leaving Derry without a serious commercial fine art gallery; the 12 artists based at Studio 6ix were forced to vacate their studio premises on Pump Street; Creative Village Arts closed the Reflect Gallery due to lack of funding; and Void are unsure whether the City Factory Gallery will become permanently available to them for exhibitions. Derry City Council’s Visual Arts Strategy is due next spring but until that time there remains a great deal of uncertainty for artists and organisations in the city.

As Visual Artists Ireland’s Northern Ireland Manager, Rob Hilken is responsible for the implementing and further development of Visual Artists Ireland’s Northern Ireland programme. Contact: rob@visualartists-ni.org Rob is based in the Digital Arts Studios in Belfast every Wednesday between 10am and 5pm.

Visual Artists Ireland, Northern Ireland Office, Digital Arts Studios, 38-42 Hill St, Belfast, BT1 2LB

GOLDEN THREAD, GALLERY BELFAST.

Sandra Johnston,GTG Belfast

Ursula Burke, GTG Belfast

Cian Donnelly, GTG Belfast

Nicholas Keogh, GTG Belfast

Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, is recognised for its engagement with recent histories and re-imagined futures. Founded in 1998, the Golden Thread Gallery is a medium-scale, not-for-profit, publicly funded, charitable-status, contemporary art gallery.

It provides a welcoming space for the public to engage with contemporary visual art, and has grown steadily since it was founded in 1998.

The gallery was initially conceived as an artists’ project, located in a former linen mill on a contested ‘peace line’ in North Belfast. In 2007 the gallery moved to its current premises on Great Patrick Street, at the edge of the Cathedral Quarter.

Over the years we have developed a reputation for delivering an innovative and exciting exhibition programme that combines the interests of the local with the international.

Golden Thread Gallery is driven by two key objectives: to increase public access to the contemporary visual arts through exhibitions and relevant participatory projects; and to support the development of contemporary Northern Irish art and artists. Since its inception, Golden Thread Gallery has worked with many major Northern Irish artists. These have included Willie Doherty, Paul Seawright, Locky Morris, Susan MacWilliam, Sandra Johnston and Colin Darke. In addition the gallery has worked with and shown work by many internationally renowned artists such as Oscar Munoz, William Kentridge, Steve McQueen, and most recently Shirin Neshat and Susan Hiller. To date, Golden Thread Gallery has realised over 150 exhibitions.

Golden Thread Gallery also facilitates touring exhibitions worldwide, representing the North of Ireland as far afield as China, the USA and across Europe. Most recently, the gallery co-produced Voices Travel, a group exhibition of Northern Irish and Taiwanese artists in Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

One of our core aims is to develop, support and promote the work of the region’s contemporary artists. By establishing a Project Space in 2008,

the gallery provides a space for emerging artists and curators to experience the process of exhibiting and working with a gallery. The Golden Thread Gallery functions as an artistic resource for the region, tailoring its projects to the identified needs of artists.

We currently facilitate an Artists’ Career Enhancement Scheme, funded by the Esmeé Fairbairn Foundation.

The gallery has a 10 year history of participating in national and international art fairs, such as SCOPE, New York, Berliner Liste and the London Art Fair. By participating in these art fairs, the gallery is able to promote artists from the region within the context of the market. It should be noted that we focus this initiative on profiling artists, not profit.

Though we are always delighted to sell works on behalf of artists to private and public collections.

Much of Golden Thread Gallery’s work is undertaken partnership with communities and adheres to the mantra ‘nothing about us without us’.

Best known to date is Draw Down the Walls, a collaborative project between the North Belfast Interface Network, the Lower Shankill Community Association and the Golden Thread Gallery. Comprising community engagement and visual arts activities, the project focuses on re-imagining the city without barriers. Since its inception in 2009, the partnership has realised a range of participatory events, outreach and educational activities, community consultations temporary public artworks, interventions and public provocations. As part of the London 2012 festival Draw Down the Walls commissioned Ambulatorio Belfast, a seminal temporary public artwork created by renowned Colombian artist Oscar Munoz.

Golden Thread Gallery constantly strives to offer a welcoming space to contextually experience the visual art of our time.

P. Richards, CEO, Golden Thread Gallery goldenthreadgallery.co.uk

28

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2014

Festival Profile

Domestic Godless (Stephen Brandes, Mick O’Shea, Irene Murphy) Canaliculus Purgamentorium

Ruth Lyons, The Pinking of the Sea

Domestic Godless (Stephen Brandes, Mick O’Shea, Irene Murphy), Canaliculus Purgamentorium

Impish & Intelligent SARAH KELLEHER profiles THE 2014 KINSALE ARTS FESTIVAL (19 – 28 SEPTEMBER).

Ruth Lyons The Pinking of the Sea

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2014

29

Festival Profile

Kathy Prendergast Chimborazo 2013 watercolour on printed paper

This year marked the tenth anniversary of the Kinsale Arts Festival. Marie McPartlin, organiser and curator of the visual arts strand, marked this milestone with an ambitous programme of events and exhibitions. The programme drew together an impressive roster of contributors including established and high profile Irish artists based in the UK, artists from the UK showing in Ireland for the first time and young Irish artists producing impressive and technically demanding work.

Kinsale festival is notable for working outside of traditional cultural spaces. During the festival various places and spaces throughout the historic town – churches, boats, halls and harbours – are transformed into temporary homes for theatre, music, literature, food, film, dance and visual art. Presenting local artists alongside established artists of international standing is integral to the festival’s mission, and they seek to provide a platform for supporting emerging talent throughout the programme. During this time of funding constraints and cuts the festival does well to provide opportunities within its modest budget, in order to bring new work to Ireland and to commission new projects.

Mel Bromfield’s ‘Quantum Foam’ was a case in point. The 2014 Kinsale Arts Festival was the first time that the artist’s complex and densely layered work has been shown in Ireland. Bromfields Death and Dumb – Parts 1 and 2 (2013) comprised a film installation sited in two shipping containers, placed end to end in the town’s central car park.

In each container, a projection filled the back wall of the long space, and showed a single performer taking on a series of roles to deliver increasingly hysterical monologues. An estate agent described a bizarre property development with surreally fluctuating features, roaring brand names – Breville! Dyson! Hotpoint! – with increasing fury; a preacher or minister gleefully intoned the torments awaiting us in hell; a political candidate made improbable promises to a reluctant electorate. The performer’s face is reduced to a single baleful eye floating over an unsettlingly wet and fleshy mouth, the change of persona signaled by a change in the colour of the face paint, from red to green to blue, each thick, greasy and vivid.

Death and Dumb – Parts 1 and 2 is dense with association – referencing Beckett’s Not I by way of bawdy 1970s humour like Morcambe and Wise or Tony Hancock – and mixes the high and low brow to pungent effect. The salty, off colour humour, and the lurid, almost obscene fleshiness of the physicality is hugely effective, and made all the more satisfying by its seaside location, and because it jarred so fantastically in refined, tasteful Kinsale.

Similarly the gleeful culinary abberations of the Domestic Godless (Stephen Brandes, Mick O’Shea and Irene Murphy) were given

extra piquancy when set against Kinsale’s reputation for fine dining, as their bizarre (yet delicious) concoctions played with the audience’s capacity for revulsion or curiosity. Canaliculus Purgamentorium comprised intricately arranged amuse-bouches in petri dishes, which bobbed along a canal deftly fashioned from sewage piping – a fantastically grotesque reimagining of the sushi conveyer belt.

In comparison, some of the larger commissions were less satisfying, although these failures were largely due to technical problems rather than the quality of the work. The promised opening spectacular You Are Lost, by Heather and Ivan Morrison, was rather too effective in its pyrotechnics. The plan was for the 10 oak letters of the title to be set alight, its message visible across the town from the James Fort site.

The charred remains would then form a sculptural trace of the event.

However, the fire burned too high, the phrase was illegible and the piece utterly destroyed.

In contrast Daphne Wright’s work Evelyn was almost too quiet and reserved to be compelling. Situated in the uber masculine stronghold of the Charles Fort, Evelyn is a pale bust of an elderly woman, with eyes closed, placed at an angle to the viewer. The intimacy of the work was undermined by its enforced distance from the viewer, roped off in a stone out-building. The film component I know what it’s like promised to be a rather more visceral and powerful experience, but unfortunately it was closed during my visit due to a technical glitch.

One of the festival highlights was ‘The Furthest Place from the Centre of the Earth,’ an exhibition presented at the Mill, Kinsale spanning 10 years of Kathy Prendergast’s characteristically quiet and contemplative work. The works in the Pendergrast’s Black Map Series appear at first to be star charts or constellations, tiny white dots floating in an inky sea. The artist works directly onto ordinance survey maps, circling areas of habitation and patiently inking out everything in between. The black expanse isn’t flat or dead, however, but oddly shimmering and opalescent, with the whorls and notations on the surface beneath still faintly visible. They are both graphically gorgeous and intellectually intriguing, her laborious process revealing how we structure, interpret and colonise the planet by patiently obliterating information.

In comparison, Pendergrast’s Black Globe (2013) is less successful because it is too literal, the globe blotted out with matt black paint, it seems obvious or even trite in comparison to the subtlety of her works on paper. Elsewhere, Prendergast’s work erupts into hyper color, filling in the contour lines on an ordinance survey map to create a vivid, psychedelic pattern as in Chimborazo (2013), or an off kilter chequerboard of orange in Red Vein – Human Nature (2013), which highlights the sterile geometries inscribed on the landscape by human habitation.

There is a lovely sympathy between Prendergast’s concerns – geographical knowledge and systems of information – and the sculptural and filmic investigations by Ruth Lyons, who explores the functional systems we impose upon our environment. Housed in the portico of Kinsale’s old musuem was one half of the multi-dimensional artwork The Pinking of the Sea. The part on show in the museum was a video taken from the artist’s underwater sculpture located in the harbour.

It’s a gently hypnotic piece; a loop of footage captures tiny fish and plumes of rising bubbles, clouds of drifting plankton shot through by shafts of sunlight. Unfortunately, it was not best served by its location, where the ambient light meant that the projection was only fully visible at night.

The sculptural component of Lyons’s work was located in the water below Charles Fort. A work of ‘underwater architecture’, it comprises a circle of buoys anchored on metal chains, while the video was shot from within the frame of the structure 10 meters below the surface of the water. Technical ambition notwithstanding it was a quiet work, almost camoflaged by its presence among other similar markers, the circle formed by the bright pink buoys announcing itself as an unexpected symmetry among other buoys randomly dotted about the cove.

Similarly deceptive was the commision The Sweat Oratory by Something and Son. From a distance it is utterly convincing as an ancient stone hut, a cousin to the Gallurus Oratory picturesquely sited on the shoreline below the fort. As you approach, however, the structure is revealed as an elaborate sham – a printed facsimile like some kind of stone patterned contact paper glued to an aeroboard shell. The hut was a recreation of an eighteenth century Irish sweathouse, allowing visitors an opportunity to experience an unfamiliar yet home grown spa tradition, sweating it out in the tinfoil lined space before cooling off by swimming in the bay.

Among the glamorous art world ‘names’ and new commisions, there was also a welome platform for emerging practitioners. ‘Now Wakes the Sea’, curated by Tessa Fitzjohn, was an open submission show selected by an impressive panel of Irish and international artists and curators. The panel this year included: Kathy Prendergast, Ingrid Swanson (PEER UK), Helen Carey (Limerick City Gallery of Art) and Trish Brennan (Head of Fine Art and Applied Art, CIT Crawford College of Art and Design). The selected artists included: Collette Egan, Seán Guinan, Luke Sisk, Elizabeth Lyne, Miriam O’Connor, Rita O’Driscoll, Joan Sugrue and Mandy Williams. This year’s winner, Laura Smith, presented a video piece, The Alternative Is…, a sophisticated meditation on early pirate radio stations located at sea. Smith poses these itinerant, raffish ventures as the embodiment of a lost utopian moment, when a section of society took control of the channels of information. Each year an artist is selected from the open submission and receives a solo show in the CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery in Cork City, which runs concurrently with the Kinsale festival.1 Given that Cork City’s own Midsummer festival has suffered catastrophic recent funding cuts, the Kinsale Arts Festival fills an increasingly important countywide role within regions visual art landscape.

The Kinsale Festival provides important opportunities for artists to produce new work, exposes the work of emerging practitioners to some important curators and brings ambitious and sometimes challenging new practices to Cork.

This year’s curatorial strategy was especially notable for its occasional touches of anarchic humor, but also by its lightness of touch.

Subtle and lyrical connections revealed themselves between the works. The ill fated You Are Lost of Heather and Ivan Morrison chiming with the diminutive Lost Compass (1999) featured in the Prendergast show, or the broader sympathies between Prendergast and Ruth Lyons and pre-occupations with systems in and on the landscape. At its best moments, the festival made inventive use of the specific geography and heritage of the area, while McPartlin designed a programme that in subtle, intelligent and sometimes impish ways, responded to and played with the town’s seaside heritage.

Sarah Kelleher is an independent writer and a PhD candidate in History of Art, University College Cork.

Note 1. Last year’s Kinsale Open Submission winner was Doireann Ní Ghrioghair. Her show for CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery in Cork City, ‘Kingdom Come’ took the form of a witty reimagining of architectural forms such as columns and plinths, undermining these objects’ association with an aesthetic of power by employing vivid and unexpected colour. Ní Ghrioghair’s collection of totemic structures were built from modular forms in cast concrete and painted in sugary pastels.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2014

Institution Profile

Twists & Turns DOROTHY HUNTER PROFILES R-SPACE GALLERY, LISBURN.

Installation view from Toshinobu Takamitsu, ‘Weaving Image, Making Art’

Installation view from Toshinobu Takamitsu, ‘Weaving Image, Making Art’ (with Eamonn Higgins and Matthew Whiteside) at R-Space, 26 April – 17 May 2014

The R-Space gallery occupies a kind of hinterland, sitting outside of the Belfast-centred arts scene in Northern Ireland. It’s an unexpected sight between two derelict buildings in Lisburn’s historic quarter, a stone’s throw away from the manicured lawns and flowerbeds of Castle Gardens. The environmental duality of the location is in some way fitting for the gallery, which showcases a broad and eclectic programme of visual culture.

R-Space has been described as a chameleon venue, changing with each show to embrace a diverse range of artistic practices. Since opening it has hosted around 30 different events, averaging six or seven exhibitions a year alongside short-term activities that take place between shows or off-site.

The gallery recently celebrated its third birthday, but has a legacy that long precedes this. Through the collaborative efforts of directors Robert Martin and Anthea McWilliams, R-Space is the manifestation of many years’ work.

Robert and Anthea’s contrasting art backgrounds were assets to the gallery’s conception. Robert’s ceramic and glass background led to a career in England and Japan that encompassed a variety of roles. He worked as a maker, teacher and arts officer for the Arts Council of England, also starting up a studio and co-founding a glass furnace during this time. Anthea has a background in dance and cultural management, with experience promoting the arts within Lisburn as a dance facilitator and freelance practitioner. She also established Art Act, a gallery dedicated to Irish emerging art, in the Castle Street property that was once her family home.

The directors met four years ago, when Robert was planning to establish a gallery in England. The Castle Street property, which had housed Art Act for eight years, followed by various retailers, was empty at the time, and Anthea proposed using it for a new art space. “I had the building, and not only that, but the track record of developing at a grassroots level, which is where my interest lies,” said Anthea. “He had the international connections, the networking, the experience in the UK and beyond, and bingo, all it needed was hours and hours of hard work!”

The space became a major personal and financial investment for both directors, and in time came to receive some additional funding through ACNI and the Association of Independent Volunteer Centres.

Over the past four years the directors forged a collaborative vision of a gallery that focused less on the categorisation of media and disciplines in art but on the things of that form its makeup. Starting with an ethos of ‘create, exhibit, perform,’ materiality and action has been a strong ele-

ment for many of the exhibitions, which often meld the worlds of fine art and contemporary craft.

The latest show, an open-call exhibition titled ‘Materials, Messages and Meaning’, typifies this approach, and the resulting exhibition is both intriguing and approachable for new and experienced art audiences. “It’s about materials – what I find in conversations with people is that a material is something that they can understand more easily than a conceptual idea,” Robert stated. “With materials there’s an immediate connection with the work. That’s what I’m into as a curator: work that people can relate to”.

Though easy to relate to, the gallery’s programming is not to the detriment of artistic quality, and emphasis is placed on exhibiting reputable Irish and international artists. ‘Weaving Metal, Making Art,’ a collaboration between Japanese artist Toshinobu Takamitsu, Belfast Blacksmith Eamon Higgins and Glasgow / Lisburn sonic artist Matthew Whiteside, was a particular highlight for the gallery, as was the street art event ‘Sooper Sweet’ that attracted an audience from as far as Dublin, presenting a medium that is often marginalised in traditional gallery settings.

‘Sooper Sweet’ took place in the building’s yard, and the directors’ long-term aim is to expand their activities to utilise the whole building and its smaller rooms outside. The intention is to create a new cultural hub in Lisburn with live / work spaces for artists, a kitchen café and education facilities. A tour of the building reveals captivating old rooms where short-term interventions, accommodation, artist banquets and events have taken place and are planned for the future. “I’m anti-studio spaces,” said Robert, “because sometimes they become artists ghettos – artists just interacting with artists. I’d like to have a variety of creative activity going on here that allows people to feed off and influence each other; we’d like to facilitate fluidity in the space”. “Although the rest of the building is not R-Space, it’s complimentary to it,” added Anthea. “We see this developing into a destination for cultural consumers.”

Whilst the spaces are charming, and have proved useful for several short-term projects, their current condition prevents long-term use. Expansion and improvement of these spaces is an exciting prospect that would greatly diversify the gallery’s activities.

With just the directors, administrator Rob Hilken and a small number of volunteers at work in R-Space, the expansion is a massive undertaking. Working towards this, the directors are seeking to build the infrastructure of the gallery through the establishment of a board and an application to the ACNI ACES programme in order to expand their

R-Space, Lisburn exterior

team. Meanwhile, the directors remain open to artists’ input in staging events and helping with the gallery groundwork that’s required at this early stage in R-Space’s life.

Both Anthea and Robert welcome proposals from artists for selffunded events that use the venue, and believe in collective artist contribution to the gallery’s development. One volunteer, for example, is a guest co-ordinator for R-Space’s November / December show ‘Festive Focus,’ while artists Helen Lavery and Sandra Robinson were aided in securing funding for their forthcoming show and outreach programme at R-Space, with the gallery acting as facilitator for their project. “It’s a model we’ve nurtured,” says Anthea, “and available to anyone who wants to discuss that with us”.

Another value held by R-Space is the need for the role of artist to be legitimised through payment. Both Anthea and Robert’s roles are currently unpaid, but they are resolute about the payment of their exhibitors. “It’s about trying to professionalise the sector; we pay artists through the support from ACNI. We’re trying to professionalise the career, to get respect for artists as equal to anybody else,” says Robert. “One thing I’m passionate about is trying to get artists within the community and showing the value of art. Everything around us has been designed or created with imagination, and we need to encourage that creative thinking. And that’s what we try to do, to give people an opening to a new kind of thinking.”

The activities at R-Space are complemented by the directors’ active involvement with those who visit the gallery – both Anthea and Robert take time to show visitors around and discuss the work. Furthermore, the use of the building’s wider, surrounding space is paired with an interest in a fresh look at the gallery’s locale. In 2015 artist David Littler will do research into an alternative large-scale art event building based upon Lisburn’s lost linen heritage. Inventive exhibitions will follow, such as Nora Fok’s ‘Project Linlon’ and ‘Sampler-Cultureclash Lisburn,’ where Littler will look at the history of linen folk songs.

In supporting continuous artistic initiative, the resulting twists and turns of R-Space’s activities mark it as a gallery not content to sit in a pre-defined niche. By straddling so many different aspects of creativity it connects and democratises the work of its artists, building upon a legacy that is helping to develop a cultural and material revival in the city through art.

Dorothy Hunter is an artist and writer based in Belfast. She is a co-director of Platform Arts and works from QSS, Belfast.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2014

31

career development

Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, Grievous angel, 2012, Fujifilm Finepix F30 VGA, 05:06, dimensions variable, image courtesy of the artist

Potential for Damage CIARÁN Ó DOCHARTAIGH DECRIBES HOW HE IS MAKING A CAREER AS AN ARTIST. A patron of the arts proceeds to frantically signal at me to cut off my performance. It was taking place on the ground floor of his dental surgery.

Unfortunately the water damage I’d just caused to the brand new under floor heating effectively prevented me from doing any future projects in this space. This first stab at professionalism was indicative of my early career. A tutor on my MFA course at Goldsmith’s compared it to a looped slapstick routine, usually ending with a pie in your face and a silent audience stare-down (assuming you have an audience at all).1 Like me, you might at some point be consumed by that black hole of doom: the applications, the open submissions, essay generators advising you to use words like ‘transformative’, ‘echoing’ and ‘mirroring’, the inevitable rejections from unknown virtual bodies and the acceptance from organisations you don’t necessarily want to be associated with but applied to anyway.

EVA was my first experience of an international exhibition.2 The curator Apinan Poshyananda awarded me a residency in Singapore. I never went. An irrational fear of the SARS epidemic prevented me from accepting the invitation. Friends say I suffer from the Ciarzyweirzies, an extreme ailment that also left me convinced I had frost bite on my left foot in the freezing cold London winter of 2012.

A few years before this, I convinced a few colleagues to help fulfil a Ciarzywerzie-fuelled fanatical obsession with catching an Arctic Char.

For several years I searched dozens of lakes in Donegal. A journey in a hybrid Canadian canoe ensued. It was adapted with trawling equipment for fishing, and was decoratively inlaid with locusts, mealworms and a frog – lures to aid the expedition. Lough Fad, a glacial mountain lough in Donegal, was purportedly one of the rare places left to encounter these post-glacial colonisers – although it had never been confirmed. The piece took the form of a staged arctic expedition. 3 On the day of arrival we were met with some extreme weather conditions, as the lake had frozen over for the first time in living memory. The bog road, inaccessible at the best of times, now had a fresh layer of snow and ice.

After watching the locals’ lack of regard of the elements – throwing their Berlingos and transit vans from the end of the road to the other with ease – we thought it should be safe enough to venture onto this terrain.

After extensive research, we chose the Ford Ranger double cab. We finally manoeuvred the canoe, touched down onto the ice and dragged it to the centre of the lough with a rope anchored to shore in case of unforeseen

circumstances. The ice was about 10 to 15 inches thick; we obtained this precise depth confirmation with the aid a Husqvarna 435 tree surgeon’s petrol chainsaw. When I finally caught a particularly beautiful specimen a small problem arose: a moral crisis of conscience manifested itself in the aforementioned Ciarzyweirzies. We agreed that I should put it back in case it was my father re-incarnated. You could describe an aspect of this condition as Research Tunnel Vision.

In 2007 I embarked on an ambitious project propagating and growing opium poppies. The project, ‘Somni,’ developed into a site-responsive installation in the foothills of Slieve Snaght. First I had to overcome problems flying the seed propagators, due to the Donegal winds: poly-tunnel and polycarbonate greenhouse overload. I manufactured elaborate structures made from fence posts and timber cemented into the ground to fight the elements. Late that summer the crop yielded a wash of pastel colours, whites with the odd purple or black peony. Some of the more successful varieties included the pharmaceutical grade hen and chicks.

The highest alkaloid varieties were undoubtedly the Giganteums, the Persian Whites and the Afghan Pinks.

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland have funded most of my projects. I have also invested a substantial amount of my own funds. A considerable number of these events a have taken place in off-site urban and rural settings, mainly on the periphery of the established gallery system.

One such commissioned project was the ritualistic cleaning of Big Fish

by John Kindness, as part of the Arts Council’s five-year plan. I methodically cleaned this piece of public art and then hosed it down with water pumped out of the River Lagan.

Projecting costs, proposals for projects and productions is a learning curve. Usually the project comes close to the initial planned expenditure but there’s always some deviation from the initial plans. In my experience the ACNI are usually quite accommodating, as long as you clearly communicate any changes and developments with the assigned member of staff.

When making work internationally I try to limit a core amount of materials and equipment to one or two suitcases and then expand from there, sourcing materials and communicating as much as possible in advance with the host organisation. For example, a new version of the customised canoe had been designed to fit economically into international luggage allocation, with some basic tools and equipment needed to fin-

Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, Upward Inflection, 2014, installation view, dimensions variable, ‘Concerning The Bodyguard’, The Tetley, Leeds, co. curated by Laura Morrison, image credit: Richmond County Sheriff’s Office

ish the piece at the other end. This was by far the most challenging aspect of the project, deciphered and designed by Nicholas Keogh.

I live in London now. My studio at V22 is funded through an art swap scheme, V22’s Art Tab initiative.4 The organisation acquires an artist’s work for their collection and the artists have access to a studio for a pre-determined amount of time.

A lot of my work is project-to-project based so, rather than spending extended time in a studio space, I tend to spend a lot of the build-up to a project, like most people, researching online, contacting fabrication companies and specialist suppliers. In the past few years I have been part of charitable initiatives in London, which allow artists to occupy buildings (usually disused institutions) for a period of time, which is usually very cheap or free. However, these premises are often off the beaten track and the owner has the power to terminate the lease with a month’s notice, so the contract is on a month-to-month basis.

I currently spend most of my time script writing, working with copywriters and voice actors in a recording studio sound booth. The work integrates sculpture / objects with script-driven narratives and performances. Most of this work is for a few upcoming exhibitions next year, primarily a solo show at Nurture Art in New York. This methodology largely stems from a work titled Smokey thing not a crack den (2012). It’s an ongoing script-driven piece that channels my father’s spirit through a plastic 7up bottle, re-animating him through automated, rhythmicallypatterned smoke rings and an animated version of his hospital room, which is dubbed over by my mother giving me directions to where the bottle used to lie.

Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, born in Derry, is currently based in London.

He has received an individual artist award for the City of Culture Derry 2013 and Catalyst Arts Belfast. Recent shows include ‘Instances of Agreement,’ Kao Yuan Art Center, ‘21st Century Program’, Chisenhale Gallery and ‘Young London’ at V22. ciaranodochartaigh.org Notes 1. Goldsmith’s, University of London, MFA 2010-2012 2. EV+A 2002 3.‘Sub Arctic Expedition’, solo show at Context Gallery, 2010 4. v22collection.com

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2014

Public Art ROUNDUP

Art in Public public art commissions, site-specific works, socially engaged practice and other forms of art outside the gallery.

In the Stillness Something Moves

the present, Dillon states, is actually based in the future – something does not technically exist. The aim was to make work that takes into account the fluid versatile nature of our perceptions, art that reflects more on territory and on the future.

Connolly for Connolly

Community Spirit

Artist’s name: Lisa Fingleton Title of work: In the Stillness Something Moves Commissioning body: Claremorris Open Exhibition Date advertised: May 2014 Date sited / carried out: 10 –12th September 2014 Budget: €500 Commission type: Socially engaged drawing project Project Partners: Claremorris Open Exhibition / Kerry County Council Arts Office, Mayo Organic Centre and various farmers and growers in the Claremorris area Brief description: Artist Lisa Fingleton proposed a drawing project to the Claremorris Open Exhibition (COE) that involved visiting organic growers and people trying to live more sustainable lives in Mayo (including an inspiring couple who are creating an edible forest in a bog). Over four days she created 20 new line drawings on the farms, which were exhibited at the COE opening. During these four days, Fingleton also spoke with inspiring people and to develop the connections between art and farming. The artwork created is part of a bigger project, supported by the Creative Work Bursary Award from Kerry County Council Arts Office.

Artist’s name: David McClelland Title of work: Community Spirit Date sited: September 2014 Budget: Approximately £1000 Project Partners: Down Community Arts, Downpatrick Community Collective, Housing Executive and County Down Rural Community Network Brief description: Down Community Arts invited David McClelland to design a mural for the Marion Park Estate in Downpatrick, Co. Down. After consultation with people in the local area David came up with a vibrant artwork representative of the close knit community in the, area which is rich in history and culture.

Artist’s name: Tadhg McGrath Title of work: Connolly for Connolly Date sited: August 2014 Commission type: Self initiated project Brief description: Amiens Street Railway Station in Dublin was named after James Connolly in 1966, yet there has never been a portrait of Connolly in the station. To redress this strange anomaly, this artwork was placed in the central pedestrian entrance of the station. This was the first time a picture of the union organiser and revolutionary has been displayed at the building named after him. One of the purposes of this work is to examine what it means to have a public building named after someone, and what that adds up to in the public and private consciousness.

Death at Tomb St.

Beuys at Sandycove

2063 – A Better Place

Artist’s name: Patrick Dillon Title of work: 2063 – a better place Commission type: Self-initiated project Date sited: May 2014 Budget. €250 Project Partners: Fellow artist John Moloney Brief description: ‘2063 – a better place’ is an ongoing project designed to focus attention on the year 2063. It consists of political posters, wall drawings and spoken word. During the European and local campaign of May 2014 Dillon put up several posters and placards across Dublin from Balbriggan to Bray. These election posters feature fictitious candidates from rival parties. Edoardo Bran, for example, is “willing to represent us, now and in the future”. He is standing on the FFF ticket.

He promises “honesty, jobs and fully integrated bio file formats”. We are often told to “live in the present,” but much of what we think of as

Artist’s name: Tadhg McGrath Title of work: Beuys at Sandycove Date sited: August 2014 Commission type: Self initiated project Brief description: To make a gesture about the resonance of the visit

by Joseph Beuys to the bathing space at Sandycove, and particularly the outdoor urinal there, a photograph was placed at the site. Beuys is considered one of the most influential artists of the second half of the twentieth century. He visited Dublin in September 1974, and was photographed using the outdoor urinal at the Forty Foot. Urinals have a somewhat hallowed place in the history of conceptual art. This artwork was placed at the site, which is no longer in use, to mark the connection between Beuys, social sculpture and the psychogeographic claims that knowledge of spaces like this can make on us.

Artist’s name: Israel Kessler Title of work: Death at Tomb St. Date sited / carried out: 3 – 30 November 2014 Budget: £2650 Commission type: Self-initiated project Brief description: Israel Kessler created a site-specific billboard project depicting death as a low-paid production line worker (played by John Costello). Throughout November 2014 the face of death loomed out from two adjoining billboards over the city streets in Belfast city centre underneath the towering Royal Mail building. John Costello, a casual mail worker, was the manifestation of death in the form of a clown. The original event, which took place at the National Returns Centre (the dead letter office for the United Kingdom, located in Royal Mail Tomb Street depot in Belfast), was re-presented in a photographic series. Giving expression to the famous black humour of the Belfast people and of the low-paid production line worker, ‘Death at Tomb St.’ is a sinister and knowing work direct from the factory floor.

Visual Artists Ireland operates a wide range of professional development training events throughout the year. The delivery of this programme is greatly supported by our relationship with local and international visual art professionals and partner organisations throughout the island of Ireland. VAI works in partnership with local authorities, visual arts venues and others, combining resources to support the professional development of visual artists at regional level.

Autumn Winter 2014 Republic of Ireland Dublin Arts Council Funding Information Session with Kate O’Donnell Wed 5 Nov (11.00 – 13.00) @Visual Artists Ireland Places: 20 – 25 Developing Creative Proposals with Annette Moloney Wed 19 Nov (10.30 – 16.30) @ Visual Artists Ireland Places: 12 – 16 Cost: €80 / 40 visualartists.ie/professional-development

Galway Events in partnership with Galway City and County Councils Arts Council Funding Information Session with Kate O’Donnell Thur 6 Nov (14.30 – 16.30) Menlo Park Hotel, Headford Rd, Galway Places: 20 – 25 Curators Talk - Bea de Souza / Director, The Agency Gallery In association with Tulca and Galway Arts Centre Tues 11 Nov (11.00 – 12.30) @ Galway Arts Centre Places: 20 – 25

Meath Events in partnership with Meath County Council Arts Office Developing Opportunities for your Work with Elaine Grainger and Elaine Leader Tues 11 Nov (10.30 – 16.30) Places: 15 – 20 Cost: €50 / 25 (VAI members) Dun Laoghaire Event in partnership with Dun Laoghaire Artists’ Network Documenting your Work with Tim Durham Sat 28 Feb 2015 (10.00 – 17.00) The Lexicon Library, Dun Laoghaire Places: 10 – 12 Cost: €40 / 20 (VAI members)

Roscommon Roscommon Arts Centre.

Event in partnership with Roscommon Visual Artists Forum

Curating Vacant Spaces with Jonathan Carroll Fri 21 Nov (10.30 – 16.30) @ Roscommon Arts Centre Places: 10 – 15 FREE to visual artists based in Roscommon Bookings / Information Monica Flynn, Professional Development Officer, Visual Artists Ireland, Central Hotel Chambers, 7 – 9 Dame Court, Dublin 2 E: monica@visualartists.ie T: 01 672 9488 www.visualartists.ie

Tell us about your training Needs!

If you are interested in training please do get in touch with us directly or forward an expression of interest in a topic/s through the Professional Development Training web page. We often repeat workshops when there is a strong demand for a topic. Full descriptions of all sessions will shortly be available online, for info contact Monica Flynn.

Artists & Tutors Panel Visual Artists Ireland has an ongoing open submission process for artists and arts professionals interested in being part of an available panel of tutors contributing to the VAI Professional Development Training Programme. For details go to our training registration page and click on Register for the PDT Artists Panel.

Northern Ireland BELFAST Visual Artists’ Cafe Alternative Curatorial Practice Vagabond Reviews & Michelle Brown Belfast Exposed Sat 1 Nov 11am – 4pm Non-members £10 VAI / DAS members Free Visual Artists’ HelpdesK Marketing Advice for Artists Audiences NI, the Carnegie Building Wed 19 Nov 13.00 – 17.00 Non-members £25 VAI / DAS / audiences NI members free Visual Artists’ Cafe Participation & Socially engaged practice Karen Mirza & Brad Butler Golden Thread Gallery Tues 2 Dec 11.00 - 16.00 Non-members £10 VAI / DAS members free Visual Artists Helpdesk Accountancy & financial advice with Harbinson Mullholand Digital Arts Studios Wed 10 Dec 13.00 – 17.00 Non-members £5 VAI / DAS members free Please email rob@visualartists-ni.org if you wish to get involved as a volunteer or an artist, or if you wish to arrange a studio visit for your group. We also welcome curators and can provide a structured studio visiting programme.

Bookings / Information Rob Hilken, Northern Ireland Manager Visual Artists Ireland, Digital Arts Studios, 38-42 Hill Street, Belfast, T1 2LB E: rob@visualartists-ni.org www.visualartists-ni.org

Tell NoIrking events & w o h S etw lls are n tists.

Te ased ar Show & eland b Ir rn e th inute for Nor ive five-m ctices in g ts n a Particip their pra t tions on ers mus presenta context. Speak al of VAI. an inform embers m t n e rr be cu ontact: cipate c g To parti ts-ni.or ualartis is v @ b ro

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

November – December 2014

opportunities

Opportunities commissions Museum of Free Derry The Bloody Sunday Trust (BST) is now calling for expressions of interest from experienced and suitably qualified artist(s) or design teams for two pieces of integrated artwork to be produced as part of the forthcoming redevelopment of the Museum of Free Derry. The total budget available for each artwork is £48,500 (excluding VAT). BST invites expression of interest applications with outline concepts, from which a suitably selected and qualified panel will shortlist artists to work up detailed design proposals. Please note that copies of the brief will only be issued via email. Late submissions will not be accepted.

Deadline 4pm Friday 28 November Email mofdartwork@yahoo.com Cork City Council Public Art Cork City Council has a number of public art opportunities arising in 2015 and 2016. As part of its research phase for these projects Cork City Council is seeking a registration of interest from artists, particularly those with an interest and experience in socially engaged practice of the highest quality. Please forward the following information: an artistic statement about your arts practice; a CV including details of previous public art work you have undertaken; some documentation of your work. Preferably all documentation material is received on CD. ( USB sticks are not accepted).

Deadline 5pm Friday 21 November Contact Sarah Levy Email sarah_levy@external.corkcity.ie Address Arts Office, Corporate Affairs, Cork City Council, Anglesea Street, Cork Bailieborough Building Peace Through the Arts: Re-imaging Communities Bailieborough BPttA Steering Committee is now inviting expressions of interest from artists or groups of artists for a public artwork to be sited at the Market House, Bailieborough, County Cavan.

The theme for this artwork is ‘Forging Ahead’ – From Bailieborough’s Divided Pasts towards our Shared Future’, which acknowledges the segregation that once affected Bailieborough’s communities, its industrial craft heritage and the determination of the community to shape a positive future. There is no payment to artists submitting the initial Expression of Interest (Stage 1). No more than three artists will be selected to proceed to Stage 2 and will be asked to develop

a full proposal with sketches and a maquette. £500 is available for each artist selected for Stage 2. The total value of the commission will be up to £40,000 (including VAT). This figure must also allow for all necessary design, treatment of surfaces, installation, erection and all fixings to secure the feature etc. There will be a six month timeframe for delivery of the artwork. Completed Expressions of Interest should be sent (hard copy only) to the address below.

Deadline 4pm Tuesday 11 November Contact Catriona O’Reilly Email catrionaoreilly@cavancoco.ie Address Bailieborough BPttA Committee, c/o Catriona O’Reilly, Arts Officer, Cavan County Council Lurgybrack Per cent for Art Lurgybrack National School, Co. Donegal, which has recently undergone major renovation works, wishes to commission an artist through the Department of Education and Skills Per Cent for Art Scheme. The budget for this commission is €16,300 inclusive of all costs, expenses, VAT, insurance and any other charges. The successful artist will be asked to provide a full budget for the commission and must provide a tax clearance certificate. The school is interested in receiving proposals that will reflect the school’s ethos and that places a distinct emphasis on local landscape and historical heritage. Please visit the website below for further information.

Deadline 12 noon Friday 7 November

courses / workshops / training Classical & Stop-Motion Animation Lorg Printmakers hold a course in animation that will appeal to participants of previous introductory workshops and anybody who has interest in animation / film who would like to learn how to enhance their video through picture editing and sound. In this course the participants will try out new techniques, learn to animate more complex movements and have an introduction to various tools. There will also be an introduction to sound production and sound editing.

Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 November.

10:00 – 13:00 and 13:30 – 16:30 (both days). Cost: €70 members / €100 non members. (There is a a once off payment of €30 for non-members, which covers insurance for a year of class participation with Lorg Printmakers) Email lorgprintmakers@gmail.com Web

lorgprintmakers.com Address Lorg Fine Art Printmakers Ltd., Unit 8, Ballybane Enterprise Centre, Ballybane, Galway Bronze Pour Leitrim Sculpture Centre hold a bronze pour workshop on 22 – 23 November.

Tutors: Kate Oram and Keith Seybert.

Duration: 1 day. Participants: 8. Cost: €340. Students from refractory mouldmaking and those with existing moulds ready to be poured are brought together for different bronze pour days. Techniques in preparing moulds and pouring hot bronze are demonstrated and the safe operation of the bronze furnace and cooling and opening casts is covered. Students should come with sturdy boots.

Web leitrimsculpturecentre.ie Address Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Manorhamilton, Co. Leitrim Drawing masterclass The Ballinglen Arts Foundation present a Drawing Master Class by Arno Kramer from 4 – 12 April 2015. A maximum of 10 artists will be accepted for this 9 day workshop. All facilities of the Foundation will be available to the participants including 24/7 access to a shared studio for independent work. A fully stocked art reference library and archive of over 500 works of art will also be available for viewing. Besides working in the studios there will be two excursions included and a lecture Arno Kramer will give about contemporary drawing in general. Cost: €1,150, which includes tuition, shared accommodation and collection/ delivery in Ballina. Applications, with a selection of about 15 images, will be judged on basis of quality before 1 December. It is necessary that your work must focus on drawing.

Email baf@iol.ie, kramars@hetnet.nlphone.

Telephone 096 43184 Address The Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Main Street, Ballycastle, Co. Mayo Gallery of Photography The Gallery of Photography, Temple Bar, host a series of workshops in November.

1. Framing and Mounting Workshop with Pete Smyth. Cost: €30 (gallery members €10). Saturday 8 November, 11.30 – 14.00. This workshop will demonstrate custom alternatives to buying readymade frames., using equipment and materials that are widely available.

2. Cyanotype Day Workshop. Cost: €95 (gallery members €85). Sunday 2 November, 11.00 – 17.00. This hands-on workshop will introduce you to one of the earliest ways of creating an image with light. 3. Wet Plate Collodion Day Workshop. Cost: €145 (gallery members

€135). Saturday 22 November, 11.00 – 17.00.

Web galleryofphotography.ie Digital Illustration Fumbally Exchange hold a workshop in digital illustration across three Saturdays: 8, 15 and 22 November. This intensive course aims to give students the fundamentals of using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop for adapting and enhancing hand-drawn images as well as learning how draw from scratch digitally. Along with drawing, participants will learn how to add and manipulate text, select parts of a photo for collage, and save images for print and web formats. You will be provided with detailed notes to ensure you fully understand the exercises and get the most from the class. The workshop is unique in that you get to practice and explore both practical and creative applications of the techniques you learn and the small class size (max. 5) means everyone gets lots of attention. Full class outline and how to book can be found online. This class is suitable for people who love drawing and who have some computer experience.

Web goradiate.ie/training/digital-illustration Address Fumbally Exchange, 5 Dame Lane, Dublin 2

job vacancies

Harnessing Creativity Tender proposals are invited for delivery of the Harnessing Creativity Project Exhibition and Seminar Coordinator 2015.

Copies of the terms of reference can be requested from the email below. A budget has been allocated for this activity to take place in March 2015. (There is an upper total contract limit for delivery of the service of: €7,500).

Deadline (By hand or post): 12 November Web harnessingcreativity.eu/opportunities

studio space Laois Arthouse Studios and apartment now available at the Laois Arthouse, Court Square, Stradbally, Co. Laois. Facilities include: artists studios, exhibition space, rehearsal space, kiln, garden, digital facilities and public library.

Contact Muireann Ni Chonaill, Arts Officer, Laois County Council Email artsoff@laoiscoco.ie Web arthouse.ie

Telephone 057 8664109 / 8664033

funding / awards / bursaries Alliance Francaise Photography Award Submissions are now open for the 5th Alliance Française Photography Award in collaboration with the Fondation Alliance Française, Paris. Submissions are sought from photographers, aged 18 and over, of all nationalities but living in Ireland or Northern Ireland, to enter a national and international photography competition. The theme of the competition is ‘Climate, state of emergency’.

Participants are asked to submit photographs that illustrate the main climate issues faced in their home countries, such as the real or perceived evolutions of climate change and its effects on people’s lives and the solutions implemented, or imagined, by public or private bodies to address the impact of climate change. Submissions should include: 3 – 5 images of exhibition-ready artworks (paper, CDs, DVDs, etc.);personal statement (max. 100 words); contact details (including email and phone number); technical details of the picture (size of the exhibition-ready prints, framing or mounting details, camera’s reference, speed, aperture, etc.)

Deadline Saturday 15 November 2014 Web alliance-francaise.ie Light Work Artist in Residence Each year Light Work invites 12 – 15 artists to participate in its residency programme, including one artist cosponsored by Autograph ABP and one artist in conjunction with the Urban Video Project (UVP). Artists selected for the residency program are invited to live in Syracuse for one month. They receive a $5,000 stipend, an apartment to stay in, a private digital studio, a private darkroom, and 24-hour access to our facility. Participants in the residency programme are expected to use their month to pursue their own projects: photographing in the area, scanning or printing for a specific project or book, and so on. Artists are not obligated to lecture at the facility, though it is hoped that the artists are friendly and accessible to local artists and students. Work by each artist-in-residence becomes a part of the Light Work Collection and is published in a special edition of Contact Sheet: The Light Work Annual along with an essay commissioned by Light Work.

Deadline 1 July 2015 Email lab@lightwork.org, air@lightwork.org.

Web lightwork.org/lab

Watergrasshill National School

ask!

Has the Artist Been Paid?

PertheCent for inArt Commission For first time Ireland, venues and artists can now calculate equitable levels of payments, as well as properly budget for their programmes and for the variety of work that The Arts Development Committee on behalf ofspaces. the Board professional artists undertake in not-for-profit

of Management of Watergrasshill N.S. Co. Cork invites proposals from artists for the commission of an original Visual associated Artists Ireland collaborated artists, artwork with the has construction of a newwith extension toorganisations the school premises. and our international partners to create the

Payment Guidelines for Professional Visual Artists

The budget for the commission is â‚Ź28,000 and is funded basedthe upon practice. are scalable under Perinternational Cent for Artbest Scheme.

A They site visit may befor scheduled for the beginning 2014. organisations of week different sizes as 24th. well asNovember for the experience/

reputation of individual artists. The guidelines also take into

Details of the brief are available on the school website: www. consideration the different work undertaken by artists within watergrasshillns.ie.

Please email office@watergrasshillns. iethe or phone to register your attendance context021-4889163 of exhibitions and supporting services.and for further enquiries.

The Payment Guidelines for Professional Visual Artists are available at:

www.visualartists.ie

Closing date: Monday 15th December 2014

help desk

FAQ / information / advice

E: info@visualartists.ie T: +353 (0)1 6729488

The Higher Bridges Gallery Presents

RepResentational instabilities Ursula Burke 17 October – 8 November, Opening Friday 17 October @ 7pm

cRossing lines Wilma Vissers 13 November – 6 December Opening Thursday 13 November @ 7pm

the seventh 1 Ft sQ Xmas aRt eXpo (Group expo with 60+ artists) 12 December – 17 January Opening Friday 12 December @ 7pm

higheR bRidges galleRy The Clinton Centre, Belmore St., Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh diane.henshaw@fermanagh.gov.uk, 028 6632 5050 Open Tues – Fri 10am – 4pm,, Sat 11am – 3pm, closed 24 Dec – 3 Jan

Bailieborough Building Peace through the Arts: Re-imaging Communities

The theme is ‘Forging Ahead - From Bailieborough’s Divided Pasts towards our Shared Future’. To submit an Expression of Interest for this public art commission please read details on www.cavanarts.ie.

Deadline 4pm on Tuesday 11 November 2014

‘This project is part financed by the European Union’s Programme for Peace and Reconciliation (PEACE III) managed by the Special EU Programmes Body; the Arts Council of Northern Ireland; and the International Fund for Ireland’

Arts Council of Northern Ireland Developing the arts in Northern Ireland Culturefox.ie is the definitive online guide to Irish cultural events, giving you complete information about cultural activities both here and abroad.

To find out what’s on near you right now, visit Culturefox.ie on your computer or mobile phone.

Download the FREE App available now for:

Arts Council of Northern Ireland, MacNeice House, 77 Malone Road, Belfast BT9 6AQ. T: +44 (28) 9038 5200. W: www.artscouncil-ni.org. E: info@artscouncil-ni.org

Image: Brendan Jamison, Green JCB bucket with holes. Arts Council Collection

iPhone | Android | Blackberry

local area groups VAI’s local area groups initiative brings visual artists together to communicate and share ideas, skills and knowledge, and to discuss issues of common interest and concern.

The events offer: networking opportunities, professional development, presentations by artists and key experts, information and support.

VAI CAfe DonegAl Visual Artists Ireland, in partnership with Artlink Ltd. and Donegal Arts Office, are delighted to announce the Visual Artists’ Café for Donegal Visual Artists. Join us on Saturday, 15 November.

Format for the afternoon: • Introduction to Artlink (2pm) • Forthcoming Supports & Arts Structures for Artists in Donegal – Donegal Arts Office (2:45pm) • Update on VAI support services including: How to get noticed…

(3:30pm) • 4:15pm BREAK FOR TEA • Show & Tell – 10 Donegal Artists speak about their work in quick fire presentation… also open to a general audience (4:30pm) (register if you wish to present your work or ideas during the Show & Tell) • Finish (5:30pm); launch of No Jury No Prize 2014 exhibition (6pm) (€3 for Non-Members of VAI, Free for VAI members). Visual Artists Café, Artlink is a Visual Artists’ Ireland Local Area Groups initiative supported by Donegal County Council.

VAI CAfe lImerICk Visual Artists Ireland, in partnership with the Limerick City of Culture Visual Art Legacy and Limerick Arts Office, are delighted to announce the Visual Artists’ Café for Limerick Visual Artists. Join us on Friday, 21November.

Format for the afternoon: • Introduction to Visual Art Legacy Project (2pm) • Forthcoming Supports & Arts Structures for Artists in Limerick – Limerick Arts Office (2:45pm) • Update on VAI support services including Payment Guidelines for Visual Artists (3:30pm); 4:15pm BREAK FOR TEA • Show & Tell – 10 Limerick Artists speak about their work in quick fire presentation… also open to a general audience (4:30pm) (register if you wish to present your work or ideas during the Show & Tell) • Finish (5:30pm) (€3 for Non-Members of VAI, free for VAI members) Visual Artists’ Café for Limerick Visual Artists is a Visual Artists Ireland Local Area Groups initiative supported by: Limerick City of Culture and Limerick City and County Councils.

Visual Artists Ireland A: Central Hotel Chambers 7 – 9 Dame Court Dublin 2 T: 01 672 9488 W: www.visualartists.ie

Weekly trips from Dublin to Liverpool, Birmingham, London, Bath and Bristol; Monthly trips from Dublin to Paris, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Brussels and Amsterdam.

The lab, brought to you by Dublin City Council, is pleased to present

Vera Klute, Commotion, tapestry, 2014

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No ual r t ar ti he st r n s ir Ire ela la nd nd

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Aisling O’Beirn’s Quaternion Quest continues until 15 November 2014.

Mel Brimfield, screening and discussion, 11 December 2014, in association with Kinsale Arts Festival.

The lab a: Foley Street, Dublin 1 T: 01 222 5455 e: artsoffice@dublincity.ie w: www.thelab.ie F: facebook.com/TheLABGalleryDublin T: @LabDCC

The Manual: A Survival Guide

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Preview: Thursday 27th November 2014, 6pm – 8pm, introduced by Anna O’Sullivan, Director, Butler Gallery Exhibition runs until: 10 January 2015

V

new work Vera Klute

The Manual provides information on all aspects of professional development. Here you will find information guides on topics such as Exhibiting with Galleries, Preparing Proposals, Tax and Self Employment, Copyright and much more. http://visualartists.ie/the manual-a-survival-guide-for-visual-artists/