Visual Artists' News Sheet - 2015 March April

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet issue 2 March – April 2015 Published by Visual Artists Ireland Ealaíontóirí Radharcacha Éire

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

Editorial

Contents

Welcome to the March / April edition of the Visual Artists News Sheet. As ever, our columnists provide an opening salvo of urgent and informed comment. Treasa O’Brien considers Irish attitudes to protest and civil disobedience; Amy Kieran explores new data on visual arts audiences in Northern Ireland; and Matt Packer ponders post humanism and curation.

Public art, in a range of forms and contexts, is a focus in this issue. Cliodhna Shaffrey interviews Marie Brett about her project ‘Amulet’ (2009 – 2015), exploring infant loss. Hollie Kearns and Rosie Lynch profile ‘Forecast’, their yearlong project focused on planning and environmental issues in Kilkenny towns, and Amanda Ralph discusses the re-installation of her public artwork Paper Boats.

Artists’ films are another strong thread. Michaële Cutaya profiles Wild-Screen / Scáil-Fhiáin, an event in Connemara featuring contemporary artists’ films. Alice Butler profiles the various incarnations of the Experimental Film Club, which is now part of the monthly programme at the IFI, Dublin.

Louth is the subject of our regional focus; various artists and institutions give us the low down: Louth Arts Office, Brian Hegarty, Creative Spark, Declan Kelly, Droichead Arts Centre and the Highlanes Gallery.

Details of upcoming sessions in VAI’s Professional Development Programme – workshops, peer reviews and seminars etc. – can be found on page 34. VAI’s regional reach is further explored by our West of Ireland Representative Aideen Barry, while Northern Ireland Manager Rob Hilken reports on the growth of printmaking facilities in the region.

Our career development features look at the experiences of curators – the thinking being that these occasional forays over to the ‘other side’ offer artists useful insights. Miranda Driscoll, Co-founder and Director of the Joinery, Dublin, discusses its closure and her move to the Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh. Ben Crothers discusses curating ‘Glumba Skzx’, an exhibition featuring artists from Northern Ireland held at Ex Elettrofonica, Rome.

Reviews in the Critique section are: Teresa Gillespie, Wexford Arts Centre; Thomas Brezing, Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda; Sabina Mac Mahon, Belfast Exposed and Queen Street Studios; Hugh Frazer, Doorway Gallery, Dublin; ‘Cosmic Dust’, Visual, Carlow.

We are delighted to again announce the Valerie Earley Residency Award. Other residency reports come from Clea van der Grijn, who discusses time spent in Mexico exploring attitudes to death, mourning and identity, and Dorothy Hunter, who describes her experience of the VAI / Digital Arts Studios Award.

Don’t let it be said that we ignore the fundamentals of human life. Food is addressed by Stephen Brandes in his article on the Domestic Godless, a group of artists who explore the potential of food as a vehicle for artistic endeavour. The cultural substance of future generations is covered in Anne Bradley’s interview with Jennie Guy about projects exploring the role of contemporary artists and curators in schools.

Gallery profiles include Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown’s new Municipal Gallery housed in the LexIcon Library and Cultural Centre, and Ards Arts Centre.

The conference report in this issue comes from Vanessa Daws, who describes her participation in the Babel Working Group Conference 2014, titled ‘On The Beach: Precariousness, Risk, Forms Of Life, Affinity And Play At The Edge Of The World’, held in Santa Barbara, USA. The March / April VAN has all this and more: exhibition and public art roundups, news from the sector and various current opportunities.

1. Cover Image. Amanda Ralph, Paper Boats, River Brosna, Clara 2000. Public Art Commission for Offaly Co. Council. Re-installed at Lough Boora in 2014.

5. Roundup. Recent exhibitions and projects of note.

5. Column. Treasa O’Brien. Roads of Least Resistance: Irish Attitudes to Protest and Civil Disobedience.

6. Column. Amy Kieran. Exploring Visual Arts Audiences in Northern Ireland.

7. Column. Matt Packer. Dimishing Agency.

8. VAI News. Research, projects and campaigns.

9. Regional Focus: Louth. Arts Office, Brian Hegarty, Creative Spark, Declan Kelly, Droichead, Highlanes.

12. Residency. A Beautiful, Evocative Place. Clea Van Der Grijn details her recent residency in Mexico.

14. VAI / DAS Residency. New Monuments. Dorothy Hunter describes her project for the VAI / DAS award.

15. Project Profile. The Food, the Bad and the Ugly. Stephen Brandes details the whys, whats and hows of the Domestic Godless, a group of artists who explore the potential of food as a vehicle for artistic endeavour.

16. Art in Education. Overlapping with Young Minds. Anne Bradley interviews Jennie Guy about Mobile Art School and other projects exploring the role of contemporary artists and curators in schools.

17. Gallery Profile. Capturing Creator Participants. Kenneth Redmond talks to VAI about DLR Arts Office’s new Municipal Gallery housed in the LexIcon Library and Cultural Centre.

18. Public Art Case Study Risk and Trust. Cliodhna Shaffrey interviews Marie Brett about her project ‘Amulet’ (2009 – 2015), which explores infant loss.

19. Critique. Teresa Gillespie, Wexford Arts Centre; Thomas Brezing Droichead; Sabina Mac Mahon, Belfast Exposed & QSS, Belfast; Hugh Frazer, Doorway Gallery, Dublin; ‘Cosmic Dust’, Visual, Carlow.

23. Public Art Case Study. The Future of Place. Hollie Kearns and Rosie Lynch profile ‘Forecast’, a project focused on Kilkenny towns Callan, Castlecomer, Graiguenamanagh, Mooncoin and Thomastown.

24. Conference. Psychoswimography: Santa Barbara. Vanessa Daws on her participation in ‘On The Beach: Precariousness, Risk, Forms Of Life, Affinity And Play At The Edge Of The World’, Santa Barbara, USA. 25. Festival. Retrieving the West. Michaële Cutaya profiles Wild-Screen / Scáil-Fhiáin, a contemporary artists’ film event organised by Una Quigley and Louise Manifold, which took place in Connemara (7 – 8 March).

26. Career Development. The Joy of Collision. Miranda Driscoll, Co-founder and Director of the Joinery, Dublin discusses its closure and her move to the Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh.

27. Career Development. Dialogue with Space. Ben Crothers discusses curating ‘Glumba Skzx’, an exhibition featuring artists from Northern Ireland held at Ex Elettrofonica, Rome.

29. Public Art Case Study. Submergence & Resurgence. Amanda Ralph discusses the re-installation of her public artwork Paper Boats.

30. Project Profile. Re-opening Experience. Alice Butler profiles the Experimental Film Club.

31. 2014 Valerie Earley Residency Award. Details of this year’s award and announcing Aoife Flynn as the 2014 Valerie Earley Residency Award recipient.

31. Institution Profile. Creative Peninsula. Lauren Dawson profiles Ards Arts Centre.

32. Vai West of Ireland Representative. More More More … Aideen Barry reports on the Claregalway Visual Artists’ Café (5 February).

32. Vai NI Manager. Big Impressions. Rob Hilken discusses printmaking facilities in Northern Ireland.

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

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

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

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Contributors: Jonathan Carroll, Treasa O’Brien, Amy Kieran, Matt Packer, Brian Harten, Brian Hegarty,

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

Column

Treasa O’Brien Roads of Least Resistance: Irish Attitudes to Protest and Civil Disobedience

5

Roundup

Crawford Gallery, Cork presented The

inside out

Last Diary (23 Jan – 30 Mar), a film work

by Brian Duggan. The film focuses on the Johnson County War, which took place in Wyoming in 1882. The press release

French new wave cinematographer Raoul Coutard shot Rocky Road to Dublin (directed

by Peter Lennon, 1968) while he was in between shooting with Godard and Truffaut. A mix of journalistic essay film, visual anthropology and new wave expressionism, it asked the question ‘what do you do with your revolution once you have it?’ The answer for the Republic of Ireland, it seemed, was to sit in the seats of your former oppressors and become them yourselves. Ireland’s parochial and conservative attitude was put under attack and the Catholic Church more than implicated as the reason for its failure to imagine itself differently.

According to Peter Lennon, the Irish censor at the time said he couldn’t ban the film because there wasn’t any sex in it, but it was prevented from being shown by the government and through official channels in public places including on RTE, who said it was backed by ‘communist money’. According to Lennon, it was funded by an American friend of his.

It was selected for Cannes in 1968 but not screened – for that was the year that Godard and co. shut down Cannes Film Festival in solidarity with the students’ revolution. As a result Rocky Road to Dublin did get screened informally in the Paris student communes in 1968 as a warning about what not to do with your revolution.

Soon after it was shown at Cork Film Festival and secured a seven-week run in a Dublin cinema. After that, apart from occasional screenings by the Irish Film Institute in Dublin, it was not shown in Ireland publicly until 2005 when, following restoration and production of a ‘making of’ complementary short by Loopline Films, it was finally broadcast by RTÉ.

As we approach the centenary of Ireland’s revolution, Rocky Road to Dublin marks a mid point between then and now. A new film, Eat Your Children, which I made in collaboration with Mary Jane O’Leary, considers revolution, or the lack thereof, in Ireland in our current times of austerity. The title, Eat Your Children, also refers to another historical provocation: Jonathan Swift’s satire essay of 1729, A Modest Proposal, in which he proposed that Ireland should eat its young as a solution to poverty. It suggests recipes for fricassee and ragout for the Irish aristocracy to dine on, so that the working class can be rid of its burden. Its subheading is: ‘For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being A Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public’. Sounds familiar, hmmm? Emigration Once Again.

Eat Your Children follows two friends who left Ireland in 2008 during the crash as they return home on a road trip to find out why the Irish are not resisting and are content to be the obedient poster child of Europe. It is divided in chapters: ‘The Good Child’ details the boom to bust story of the Celtic Tiger and austerity; ‘Too Good to Resist’ asks if the Catholic Church is still the major moral force in Irish society; ‘Dead and Gone’ and ‘Troublemakers’ look back at the history of Irish resistance and ask how they affect us now.

Paul Krugman, the American economist, made this comparison in 2010 between Ireland’s debt agreements being the equivalent of eating the next generation in an article in the New York Times called ‘Eating the Irish’. However it was when Mary Jane O’Leary showed me a protest on the streets of Athens with Greeks chanting ‘We are not Irish; we will resist’ that it provoked us into making a film.

Eat Your Children is an inside out activist film. It begins by asking why people do not resist, and goes about trying to film something that is not happening.

Of course, there are those in Ireland who do resist and we don’t want to alienate or insult the good work that they do against the odds, especially now that the anti water charges movement is growing. We mean it in the spirit of the bad taste of A Modest Proposal, or the condemnation of a nation in Rocky Road to Dublin – a dystopian vision employed to critique current times and a call to its audience to change the course of the future so that it does not happen. The cynic is the most idealistic of us all – she believes that by focusing on the negative, change must come.

The film is as much about an identity crisis as it is about an economic one; it asks questions about what our society wants and values. The film begins with an indictment of Irish apathy and focuses on the disempowerment of modern democracy in our late capitalist times, but it weaves into its tapestry the fledgling movements that are the exceptions to the rule: Shell to Sea, Ballyhea Bondholder Bailout Protest and the movement against water charges: a tax to pay off dead banks.

Now that Greece has risen with the election of the Syriza party to a place of empowerment, while Ireland’s leaders continue to swallow EU sleeping pills and pay the debt with the doublespeak of exit and recovery, a wake-up call is needed more than ever.

I am often asked, ‘can film or art really change the world?’

I answer, no. Only people can.

Treasa O’Brien, Director / Writer of ‘Eat Your Children’, which premieres on Sunday 22 March at 2pm in the IFI as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. vimeo.com/treasaobrien eatyourchildrenfilm.com

stated: “The film is a powerful but contemplative, and draws parallels with contemporary issues of immigration and

Image of Keogh’s Model Bakery

power, and the situations and pressures

Image for ‘Homeland Security’

between those with land and those with-

occult patchwork wall hangings and an

out”.

architectural model of a barricaded crawfordgallery.ie

Gypsy Ray exhibited a series of portraits at KCAT Art and Study Centre in Callan,

house”, the press release noted, appearing like the abandoned remains of a national celebration. “The occult, bleak

An Ulaid

County Kilkenny (11 – 22 Dec) featuring

atmosphere in Homeland Security char-

the centre’s 14 studio artists as part of

acterises a recurring theme of national

Inside Out Global Projects. Ray teamed

self-understanding. What in many other

up with the KCAT artists, staff and others

contexts is perceived as pleasant or fes-

at the Kilkenny Collective for Arts Talent

tive, in the work of the artist duo takes a

and along with the broader community

threatening, unapproachable twist that

of Callan and launched the project at the

questions the way nationality is often

Abbey in Callan. These larger than life size portraits were then shown in various windows along Bridge Street in the town.

practiced”.

Sabina Mac Mahon, Jesus walking on water as a young man, 2010, photograph on fine art paper

Sabina McMahon’s exhibition ran at insideoutproject.net

platformartsbelfast.com

Soundings

Queen Street Studios and Belfast Exposed (15 Jan – 28 Feb) and presented an imag-

The Crystal Palace

ined history of the South Down Society of Modern Art, founded in 1927.

McMahon’s practice, the press release noted, “involves the creation, appropriation and alteration of images and objects that are (re-)presented as primary sources of historical value”. The exhibition is a “speculative exercise, which playfully

‘Soundings’ at DLR LexIcon

explores photography’s relationship to

Linda Shevlin, crystal teapot lid from ‘The Crystal Palace’

truth and its role in the illustration and

‘Soundings’, the inaugural exhibition

imagining of history”.

held at DLR LexIcon, Dun Laoghaire, ran

belfastexposed.org, queenstreetstudios.net

13 Dec – 14 Jan. It was curated by Michael McLoughlin and featured work by Gary

Linda Shevlin’s exhibition ‘The Crystal

Coyle,

Invented Tradition

Anthony

Haughey,

Emma

Palace’ ran at Breezeblock, Sydney (12 –

Johnston, Sabina MacMahon, Julie

21 Dec) and referenced London’s Crystal

Merriman and Lisa Reburn.

Palace, erected for the Great Exhibition in 1851 to some 100,000 objects relating to culture and industry, which was

I have to say, I have to say

destroyed by fire in 1936. For the exhibition, Shevlin presented objects, detritus and debris collected from a ruined mansion in Ireland, which were are housed behind glass in the gallery at Breezeblock,

Gareth Kennedy, image from ‘Invented tradition’

“addressing both the site’s relationship to

Galway Arts Centre held an exhibition

the nineteenth-century arcade-like struc-

by Gareth Kennedy titled ‘Invented

ture and the semiotics of exhibition and

Tradition’ (16 Jan – 7 Feb), which com-

shop display … Exposed to a physically

prised three bodies of work that “collec-

transformative process these crystallised

tively investigate the social agency of the

objects are akin to the processes by which

handcrafted in the twenty-first century

monuments or relics are historicised,

and generate ‘communities of interest’

memorialised and mythologised”.

around the production and performance

breezeblock.com.au

The Last Diary

Ciara McKeon, image from ‘I have to say, I have to say’

of new material cultures”, the press release stated. In ‘Post Colony’ (2014),

Ciara McKeon’s ‘I have to say, I have to

which covered the top floor of the gal-

say’ ran as part of the First Fortnight festi-

lery, Kennedy explored the natural,

val at the Octagonal Gallery, City

industrial and colonial histories of

Assembly House, Dublin (2 – 14 Jan). The

Killarney National Park, Co. Kerry.

exhibition, which comprised sculptural

galwayartscentre.ie

work, video and performance, explored issues around migrant suicide and the

Homeland Security

connections between Poland and Ireland

Multimedia Danish artist duo Hesselholdt

following the death of McKeon’s house-

& Mejlvang exhibited at Platform Arts,

mate, a Polish woman, several years ago.

Belfast (9 – 31 Jan). The work in ‘Homeland Still from Brian Duggan’s The Last Diary

Security’ included “veiled ceramic plates,

firstfortnight.ie

6

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Column

ROUNDUP

Amy Kieran

Transferrals

bition, IMMA hosted an evening of live

Transferrals, an NCAD MA Graduate

performance, installation, video and

Exploring Visual Arts Audiences in Northern Ireland

show by Art in the Contemporary World

music by multi-disciplinary artists Jenny

(ACW) alumni John Busher and Aisling

Brady, Sandra Davoren, Elaine Leader,

Ní Chlaonadh, ran at Pallas Projects,

Eoghan Ryan, Smilin’ Kanker and Przem

Dublin (29 – 31 Jan). The title was a refer-

SHREM Zajac. IMMA also launched the

ence to the unknown, how this is marked

Primal Architecture publication, which

with both uneasiness and hesitation. The

includes contributions from Rachael

exhibition explores the shared concerns

Thomas, Maeve Connolly, Doug Harvey,

of both artists, the press release noted,

David McConnell, Séamus McCormack

which range from a “preoccupation with

and exhibiting artists Linder and Bedwyr

the role of photography within contem-

Williams.

Did you know that 76% of people in Northern Ireland were able to recall a piece of public art on display without being prompted? Or that one in every two people has viewed visual art somewhere within NI over the last three years? That’s around 922,469 people.

These statistics are new information for the visual arts sector, and are available thanks to an exciting research initiative that Audiences NI (ANI) has been working on since early 2014. The project, which will continue throughout 2015 / 16, first came about through discussion with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI), who had identified the development of the visual arts sector as a key priority and invited ANI to work with them to deliver this.

Around the same time, ANI was invited to be part of the Belfast City Council Visual Arts Forum, which was designed to provide an open platform to discuss points of interest and to identify and pursue collaborative initiatives intended to further strengthen and develop the sector.

Both the Forum and ACNI were confronted with a lack of knowledge about the audience for visual art. Who is engaging with the sector? And what is stopping those who aren’t? Despite a substantial amount of work undertaken to capture information and monitor trends, there was no means of collating this data for collective analysis or for organisations to reliably benchmark their performance. Likewise, there was no baseline data exploring public attitudes towards visual art and no definitive sense of audience engagement with the visual arts.

Without a sense of its audience, the sector was at a clear disadvantage – how could organisations consolidate their relationships with those already engaged while also working to encourage new audiences? More crucially, how could the sector convincingly demonstrate its value to the people of Northern Ireland while negotiating for recognition within an increasingly precarious funding climate?

As Northern Ireland’s development agency for the arts, we accepted the challenge to increase the sector’s understanding of its audience and, ultimately, to increase the audience for visual art. An audience development sub-group was established and managed by ANI – with representation from across the sector, including Deirdre Robb from ACNI and VAI’s Rob Hilken – and a three-step project was devised.

The first phase was to establish a reliable baseline of public attitudes and behaviours from which subsequent activity could be benchmarked. Following this, work will be undertaken to further probe existing audiences with more detailed in-venue surveying.

Finally, a sector-wide audience development plan will be developed.

Collaboration was key to the project’s success – both between ANI and the key stakeholders, ACNI and Belfast City Council, but also in the wider sector. Working closely with the research team at ANI, the steering group devised a questionnaire which considered public attitudes, attendance and engagement behaviours, and participation across three key areas: public art, craft and visual art within galleries, studios, art centres, festivals and non-traditional venues. ANI partnered with fieldwork provider Perceptive Insight to carry out 1,512 face-to-face interviews with members of the public in early Autumn 2014. Using the data provided an audience segmentation model for visual art was produced, providing for the first time a clear framework of how the Northern Irish population perceives and engages with visual art.

The results are extremely positive! There’s a strong awareness of public art, with more than three-quarters able to name a piece without being prompted. The Big Fish in Belfast, The Tinnies in Strabane and the Hands Across the Divide in Derry-Londonderry featured in the ‘top 10 most recognisable’ list, while 18% named murals as a form of public art. Attitudes towards public art are equally encouraging, with 7 in 10 considering the art to be of a high quality, and 6 in 10 keen to see more art on display. Exactly half of the adult population had viewed some form of visual art within Northern Ireland over the last three years in an arts centre, as part of a festival, in dedicated visual arts space or in other commercial or civic space.

While audiences are most likely to visit visual arts exhibitions to satisfy their own interest, it is also considered a source of enjoyment or wellbeing, with many visitors using visual arts as a means of spending time with family or friends. However, a high proportion of adults in Northern Ireland are time-poor and cite this as a reason for nonattendance. Other barriers include a lack of information about visual art or, perhaps, a wealth of misinformation: many are unsure what is on or where to find exhibitions.

There’s a common misconception that engagement with visual arts requires some degree of prior knowledge, something that’s potentially off-putting.

By unpacking these barriers, we can now mitigate against them. Much of what’s been reported can easily be tackled by improving public understanding of the sector.

While this survey marks a crucial moment for visual art in Northern Ireland, there’s still a lot to be done. The steering group continues to meet regularly and has been designing a follow-up questionnaire for the in-venue work of phase two, which will take place throughout Northern Ireland during 2015. ANI remains firmly invested in the project, and with the backing of the Arts Council and the City Council, will work with the sector to ensure that appropriate action is taken to consolidate, strengthen and grow visual arts in Northern Ireland.

Dr Amy Kieran, Research & Development Manager, Audiences NI. audiencesni.com

porary painting discourse, to the explora-

imma.ie

Vicki Sutherland,

dermy under glass domes. Her ‘Memento Mori’ series celebrates the fleeting nature of life, with ghostly floral porcelain

tion of phenomenological interests that inform their respective practices”.

March – April 2015

Snaring Bewildered Birds

arrangements under glass domes”. signalartscentre.ie

pallasprojects.org

sign:symbol:sigil

Wild Cries of Ha-Ha

‘sign:symbol:sigil’ was an exhibition by Sarah Lundy that took place in the Custom House Studios, Co. Mayo (Jan 22 – Feb 15). The press release stated, “Through the use of moving image, Mark Healey, detail of image from Higher Bridges

Mark Healey’s first solo exhibition ‘Snaring Bewildered Birds’ took place in the Higher Bridges Gallery, Fermanagh (22 Jan – 21 Feb). The press release noted

assemblage of quotidian objects and ephemeral performance materials, the works endeavour to negotiate provocative arrangement and question autonomy in the face of innate and applied homogenisation.” customhousestudios.ie

that “Healey’s methodology in approach touches on sociopolitical inquiry and Richard Proffitt, image from ‘Wild Cries of Ha-Ha’

‘Wild Cries of Ha-Ha’ by Richard Proffitt

applies that to the critique and analysis

PLASTIK Festival

of the development of capitalism and systematic change.”

ran at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin (8

fermanagh.gov.uk

Jan – 6 Feb). The title is the translated name of one of eight great charnel

Navigating the Public Space

grounds described in Hindu and Buddhist spiritual texts. The press release described Anita Delaney, You, Me and It, 2014

Proffitt’s work as “atmospheric assemblages and installations … eerily accurate

PLASTIK Festival 2015 was the inaugural

representations of the sanctuaries and

international festival devoted entirely to

relics used by cults, tribes, hippies and

artists working with the moving image

loners in their attempts to communicate

and was the first of its kind in Ireland.

with otherworldly energies”. kevinkavanaghgallery.ie

PLASTIK developed a new platform for

Leah Smith performance

this area of practice and featured a broad

Leah Smith was the winner of Talbot

/portals/

Gallery & Studios Most Promising Graduate award 2014 for her performance piece at IADT graduate exhibition. As part of her residency Smith’s performance project ‘Navigating the

selection of works. The festival took place over the course of three weekends in February with venues in Galway, Cork and Dublin. Jenny Brady, Daniel Fitzpatrick, Sibyl Montague and Fifi Smith curated PLASTIK. plastikfestival.com

Public Space’ will take place in three different locations. The first took place on 20 Feb in Connolly Station. Performance

Repeat Patterns

artists Amanda Coogan, Dominic Thorpe and Ciara McKeon worked in collaboration with Smith, exploring the theme of Ella de Burca, image from GOBO, 2015

negotiating a public space. The performances are hosted by The LAB Gallery,

/portals/, a play by Ella de Burca, took

Talbot Gallery and Studios, ArtBox,

place at Artbox, Dublin (5 Feb – 14 Mar).

Oonagh Young Gallery and Design HQ

/portals/ was an integral part of de Burca’s

and Fire Station Artists’ Studios.

solo exhibition ‘GOBO’, which was held

talbotgallery.com

at the gallery. It starred Jill Harding, Bob Kelly and Aine Ní Laoghaire. artboxprojects.wordpress.com

Memento Mori Signal Arts Centre, Bray recently hosted ‘Memento Mori’ by Vicki Sutherland (16

ROADKILL

Feb – 1 Mar). The press release noted that

From 12 Feb – 1 Mar, programmed in

the artist is “fascinated by the Victorian

parallel to the ‘Primal Architecture’ exhi-

habit of placing remembrances and taxi-

Lesley Cherry, Repeat Again, 2014

Lesley Cherry’s exhibition ‘Repeat Patterns’ was held in the Golden Thread gallery (5 – 28 Feb). ‘Repeat Patterns’, the press release stated, saw Cherry using “wallpaper and text, which are recurring materials and themes in her practice …

Cherry draws on issues raised through

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

7

Column

ROUNDUP

Matt Packer

domestic settings: nostalgia, memory,

‘DemocraCity’ was a solo show by Mark

LOBBY PART II

language and class”.

Dimishing Agency

Clare held in 126 Gallery, Galway (5 – 21 Feb). The press release explained that the

goldenthreadgallery.co.uk

title ‘DemocraCity’ comes from an aniThe Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) takes place in the remote Lofoten Islands, off the North Western coast of Norway, approximately 170 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. It takes four flights to get there from Dublin, with a 50-seater propeller plane on the last leg of the journey from Bodø to Svolvær. LIAF might exemplify the ‘biennialisation’ that has occurred in the far stretches of the world with ever increasing frequency over the last decade, but LIAF dates back to the early 1990s and remains Norway’s longest-running biennial. It’s perhaps for this reason that it’s called a ‘festival’, pre-dating the more fashionable term ‘biennial’. In January 2014, following a process of proposals, shortlisting and interviews, Arne Skaug Olsen and I were selected to curate the 2015 edition. Although it’s a small project by the standards of many international biennials, LIAF is the largest-scale single curatorial project I have ever been involved with.

Since being appointed Arne and I have been researching and meeting with artists, looking at possible venues (LIAF has no fixed venue), and developing our curatorial approach. We have never worked together before and, although we both come to the project with certain critical priorities and artistic preferences, it was important to us both from the very beginning that we would allow the curatorial process to be shaped by conversations with artists and encounters with Lofoten itself. With about eight months left to go before LIAF opens (28 August 2015), we have 85% of our artist list complete (of approximately 25 artists in total), pretty much all newly-commissioned work in motion; we have the venue confirmed (an old furniture warehouse in the centre of Svolvær); graphic designers have been appointed and a host of funding applications are pending. As with other kinds of curatorial work, it’s a question of balancing something that still has a lot of uncertain and contingent outcomes.

The 2015 edition of Lofoten International Art Festival is titled ‘Disappearing Acts’.

It’s a title that reflects our curatorial interests in technology, ecology and history as processes that have impacted (displaced and diminished) our sense of human agency.

We commonly speak about the disappearance of traditions or certain kinds of encounter, but in recent years there has also been a critical-philosophical emphasis on the ‘de-scaling’ of humankind in relation to the environment and the inanimate, hallmarked by writers such as Donna Harraway, Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton.

‘Disappearing Acts’ operates against that backdrop and the stakes that it raises for artistic practice in particular.

The Lofoten Islands is an interesting place for these kinds of speculations. It’s a place with a long history of working with and against the climate, and maintains a delicately balanced relationship to the environment in terms of its economy of fisheries and tourism. Type it into Google Images and you’ll get a catalogue of sublime landscapes, snow-capped mountains and dramatically situated villages. It seems to be strangely self-aware of its own ‘mediability’. I’ve heard the experience of being in Lofoten described as a Windows 95 screensaver and an HD screen. Before these technologies and back in the nineteenth century, the Lofoten Islands were a point of fascination for Nordic landscape painters who would travel there to actualise their pictorial fantasies. The Lofoten Islands are built upon a remarkable set of relationships that connect the precarities of the environment with the precarities of representation, each with different implications for human experience.

Despite the small population (c. 25, 000) and relative inaccessibility, the Lofoten Islands have quite an advanced arts infrastructure. There is an arts centre (the North Norwegian Arts Centre), a private contemporary art museum (Kaviar Factory), a host of major sculptural projects (Dan Graham, Dorothy Cross) and an art school (with tutors that include Lene Berg, the Norwegian representation at the last Venice Biennial).

It’s also home to major international artists such as AK Dolven. That’s all aside from LIAF itself, which generates an audience of approximately 3800 over its one-month period.

We’re going to release the artist list at a special event during the opening week of this year’s Venice Bienniale, but I can mention something about our working priorities with artists. Firstly, that we wanted to use LIAF as an opportunity to produce new work and new commissions. Secondly, that we wanted to give room to artists that are not part of the blue-chip biennial brigade, those of different generations and profiles.

Thirdly, that we used our existing networks as starting points and worked outwardly from there, so that there are artists who we’ve worked with before and others that are entirely new conversations. There are also crossovers between the artists in LIAF and those in CCA’s upcoming programme, as a way of extending the conversational momentum between one project and another.

I have worked as a curator in a number of regional and contexts, and LIAF only confirms the host of artistic opportunities and exhibition platforms that exist confidently outside of the so-called cultural centres.

Matt Packer, Director, CCA Derry.

Note Disappearing Acts (Lofoten International Art Festival 2015) take places from 28 August – 27 September 2015, Jern & Bygg / North Norwegian Art Center, Svolvær, Norway

LEVEL

mation produced by the artist using the

LEVEL was a group show held in MART,

3D modeling program Google Sketchup.

Dublin (4 – 14 Feb). The exhibition

“It takes the contradictory ideologies of

included photography, drawing, video,

B.F. Skinner and Theodore John Kaczynski

installation and performance pieces, and

as its starting point and an edited version

featured the work of Roisín Bohan, Dave

of Arvo Part’s Fratres for violin and piano

Mathúna, Bren Smyth, Kevin O’Shea, Peta

as its soundtrack.”

Beagan, Hayden O’Donnell and Elouise Flannery. mart.ie

126.ie

Tamsin Snow and Srah Tynan at Oonagh Young Gallery

Oonagh Young Gallery recently exhibit-

Unfixed Landscape

ed ‘LOBBY PART II’, the second of a twoCasting Territory

part installation by Tamsin Snow and Sarah Tynan (29 Jan – 12 Feb). The press release read, “Following on from LOBBY PART I, where the artists transformed the gallery into a tableau alluding to vacant commercial spaces with displaced and abstracted advertisements, ‘PART II’ delves deeper into the transience of des-

Ruby Wallis, Polytunnel at Night, 2014

ignated spaces where particular activities are commonly ascribed. A fabricated

The Gallery at Burren College of Art

lobby built in the gallery presents the

recently presented ‘Unfixed Landscape’

viewer with a reconstruction of an imag-

by Ruby Wallis (28 Jan – 28 Feb). The

ined space, and draws attention to the

press release explained that, in her prac-

‘Casting Territory: A Contemporary River

very materials that create the artifice

tice, Wallis “argues for a return to the

Keepers’ Index of Lesser Known Patterns’

through exaggerated pattern paintings

senses by engaging with the landscape

was a collaborative project by artist

mirroring the surfaces of their original.”

through the ‘haptic’ experience film can

Martina O’Brien, image from ‘Casting Territory’

Martina O’Brien and the Dodder Anglers

oonaghyoung.com

Club, Dublin (4 – 28 Feb). The exhibition was held in various locations throughout

provide”. She chose Coolorta, a small alternative community in the West of

A Day in the Life

Ireland where she lived as a child, for the

Dublin including Rua Red’s pop up exhi-

location of her research. Three artworks,

bition space, the Royal Dublin Society

Autowalks, Moving Stills and Turlough

Library and Archives, and the Waterways

Swim “explore the boundary between

Ireland Visitor Centre. The press release

empirical and phenomenal forms of

explained that the collaboration “utilises

research”.

the art of fly-tying to explore the angler’s

burrencollege.ie

inherent knowledge of flora and fauna, physical geography and role as guardians

Lonely Planet

of the River Dodder”. martinaobrien.ie

Virtually There

Billy Dante, Forever Asleep to Always Dream, 2014

‘A Day in the Life’ was an exhibition of new works by Billy Dante held by the

Pauline Keena, watercolour and pencil on fabiano paper

Backwater Artists’ Group, Cork (5 – 26 Feb). Dante is currently in the process of

The Luan Gallery, Athlone held a group

completing a nine-month awarded grad-

exhibition titled ‘Lonely Planet’ (16 Jan –

uate residency with Backwater Artists.

27 Feb), which featured work by Ester

‘Virtually There’ was a touring exhibition

The press release describes how the exhi-

Barrett, Mary Clifford, Frances Crowe,

by artists, children and teachers created

bition showcases Billy’s interest in ‘life

Eileen Ferguson, David Fox, Cathal

through online residencies held at Void,

drawing’ and also “challenges what it is

Gallagher, Jacinta Guinan, Anne Harkin-

Derry (31 Jan – 21 Feb). Demonstrating

to practice in the traditional form of life

Petersen, Allyson Keehan, Pauline Keena,

the use of virtual technology to connect

drawing in today’s fast-paced world of

Jo Killalea, Frances McGonigle, Noel

studio and classroom, ‘Virtually There’

instant media”.

Molloy, Anne Rigney, Alexey Romanenko,

Image from ‘Virtually There’ at Void, Derry

showcased work created by children and

billydanteart.wix.com/billydante

teachers in collaboration with artists Ann Donnelly, Julie Forrester, Ann

Anna Marie Savage, Leonard Sheil, Lorraine Wall, Chanelle Walshe and Ian

DemocraCity

Wieczorek. The guest speaker on the

Henderson, Sharon Kelly and Andrew

night of the launch was Brian Lynch,

Livingstone. The exhibition is based on a

poet, playwright, screenwriter, art critic

unique model of arts in education led by

and novelist, who was introduced by

Sligo-based arts organisation Kids’ Own,

Gabrielle McFadden TD.

which has been running in Northern

athloneartsandtourism.ie/luan-gallery

Irish schools since 2007. ‘Virtually There’ will tour to six venues until April 2015. kidsown.ie

Mark Clare, image from ‘DemocraCity’, 126 Gallery

8

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

VAI News Transparency & Governance NI Transparency and Governance are terms that are being thrown around a lot lately.

But they are not just words hanging in the air waiting to land. Everyone who is part of an artists group, collective, artist led initiative, studio programme etc. will find themselves subject to them at some stage in their career. Even being a member of a studio programme has implications.

So, to remove the anxiety and to provide some clear knowledge of what it all means, Visual Artists Ireland have organised an afternoon event on Wednesday, 11 March 2015 (2pm – 5pm) upstairs in the Ulster Hall, that is designed to provide you with the knowledge to consider whether you, your studio, your venue or your gallery comply with current legislation and guidelines. The event, entitled ‘Visual Artists’ Café Northern Ireland: Transparency & Governance for Artists and Arts Organisations’, is free.

At the end of the day participants will leave with a high-level organisational health check and guidance on what to do next.

The programme includes presentations by Noel Kelly (Visual Artists Ireland), Deirdre Robb (ACNI), Eimear Henry (Belfast City Council) and Tanya Carlisle (Arts & Business).

The day is designed with both individual artists who are part of artists groups or programmes as well as for organisations. Book your place now. visualartists-ni.org

Get Together Call for Curators Get Together 2015 will take place in IMMA on Friday 15 May 2015. This year we are making some changes to our popular Speed Curating event based on feedback from last year’s event. In 2015 this will be making this a ticketed event with a nominal charge for the artist. To make this affordable we are lowering the overall ticket price so only artists who will meet a curator will pay extra. Artists will be given the opportunity to book specific times with curators so that we can avoid the confusion of previous years. It’s also important that artists understand that it is in their interests to match their practice carefully. We will do this by providing a brief biog of each curator. There will be two sessions: one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

Both will an hour long and will allow for a 15-minute meeting to take place. If you are a curator and wish to have a place on the day, then contact noel@visualartists. ie with your details.

Payments for Artists In 2012 VAI created the campaign ‘Ask! Has the artist been paid? Since then much has happened. Guidelines have been implemented and funding bodies such as the Arts Council, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Dublin City Council have clearly stated their support

for the equitable payment of artists. The positive overall response and commitment to the payment of artists has been overwhelming. Organisations that have paid artists are now joined by organisations that have used the Visual Artists’ Payment Guidelines to implement the policy in their own programming.

We have also been humbled by the response from artist-led spaces, which are self-funded and not in receipt of public funding, as well as organisations in receipt of minimal funding that have adopted the guidelines as part of their everyday work. For this reason we have come up with a way to celebrate and offer organisations a form of recognition.

We have created a simple image that organisations can place on their websites to clearly show their commitment to paying artists equitably.

We hope that this can be our way of saying thank you for your support and also allow organisations due recognition from artists and from the general public.

The image will provide a first visual cue that indicates the long-term commitment made to providing equitable conditions for artists and a clear commitment to social and corporate governance.

News Create Director Create, the national development agency for collaborative arts, announced the appointment of a new Director / Chief Executive, artist Ailbhe Murphy in January 2015. Artist Ailbhe Murphy has over 25 years’ experience in collaborative arts practice. Her work has traversed a wide range of situated practice, including community development, new neighbourhoods, urban regeneration processes and institutional networks where questions of agency, knowledge production and representation have always been central. create-ireland.ie

TBG+S Recent Graduate award Hannah Fitz is the recipient of the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (TBG+S) Recent Graduate Residency Award 2015. The TBG+S Recent Graduate Residency is a professional development opportunity aimed at recent graduate artists in Ireland.

Now in its second year, the residency offers a 12-month studio at TBG+S with added professional development supports. The 2014 recipient of the Residency was Conor Mary Foy. Hannah Fitz will take up residency in studio 16 in mid February. Fitz was selected for the residency following an open call, by a five-person panel, on the basis of her strong and confident emerging practice and her clear articulation of how she would benefit from the opportunity. templebargallery.com

ACNI Individual Artist Award Glenn Marshall is one of three artists recently presented with a Major Individual Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the highest honour bestowed by the development agency.

The awards, worth £15,000 each, were presented to musicians Michael McHale and Cathal Hayden as well as Marshall, an experimental computer artist, in recognition of the contribution each artist has made to creative life in Northern Ireland. With funding received through the Arts Council Major Individual Award, Glenn will produce a definitive body of work, which consolidates 15 years of pioneering methods with 3D animation, experimental computer art and software programming. Initial artworks will be created using 3D graphics and software coding, spinning off further into animation pieces and interactive virtual reality experiences. The project will be developed in Belfast and New York. artscouncil-ni.org/news

ACNI ACES Award The Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) have announced 22 recipients of the Artists’ Career Enhancement Scheme (ACES) award, a funding award bestowed upon Northern Ireland’s most talented emerging artists to allow them to develop their profession artistic careers. In addition to receiving a bursary up to £5,000 each, many of the 22 artists have been partnered with a professional organisation to help each of them to deliver a major new creative work. The visual artists awarded under the Scheme are: Jiann Hughes, John Rainey, Ryan Moffett, Helena Hamilton, Kevin Killen, Ben Crothers, Tonya McMullan and Helen Sharp. artscouncil-ni.org

Model Niland Collection On the occasion of Yeats 2015, the yearlong celebration of W.B. Yeats and his family, and on the recent new appointment of Model Director Megan Johnston, The Model has announced ‘Shared Visions: The Model Collects’, a new semipermanent re-installation of the prestigious Niland Collection, opening on Saturday 21 February 2015. The exhibition aims to clearly re-position the Niland Collection as a major artistic asset of the institution. Selected by Megan Johnston, and co-curated with Emer McGarry, the Niland Collection will expand into three large gallery spaces. The Niland Collection is one of Ireland’s most significant public art collections. Started by librarian Nora Niland in 1959, the Collection features work by many of Ireland’s most acclaimed twentieth-century artists. The Collection has a particular focus on the north west of Ireland and features many artists who are linked to the area through birth, family or subject matter including Jack B. Yeats, Patrick Collins, Sean McSweeney, Patrick Hall and Nick Miller. themodel.ie

Arts Audiences Arts Audiences undertook a major report on attendance rates at arts events and on attitudes towards the arts in Ireland. The research was commissioned by Arts Audiences on behalf of the Arts Council and carried out by Kantar Media. The presentation of the report was one of the most commented on sessions at the recent ‘Focus On Audiences’ day at Dublin Castle. artsaudiences.ie

Paper Visual Art In 2015, Paper Visual Art (PVA), the journal of contemporary art criticism, will launch an innovative programme of events around Ireland, aiming to rejuvenate art writing and connect artists, writers, and audiences around the country.

PVA has been in operation since 2009 and has been involved in a number of projects aiming to generate art writing in response to the vital activity taking place in the visual arts around Ireland.

With this regional programme, the organisers hope to revitalise debate, providing a crucial supplement to the visual arts infrastructure. A series of workshops will take place in conjunction with exhibitions at a number of galleries and arts centres around the country: the Galway Arts Centre, VISUAL, Carlow and the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) Derry-Londonderry. papervisualart.com

Limerick City Gallery Director Limerick City and County Council has announced that Úna McCarthy has been appointed as Director/Curator of Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA). A native of Charleville, Co Cork, Úna McCarthy has worked as Head of Festivals with the Arts Council since 2004. McCarthy has worked in arts management since the early 1980s in Ireland and the UK. Prior to joining the Arts Council, she was Director of the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo and held positions at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol and the Old Museum Arts Centre in Belfast. gallery.limerick.ie

ACNI Troubles Archive The Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s online archive of art relating to the Troubles offers a vivid and compelling picture of artists’ responses to this darkly defining chapter in Northern Ireland’s history. From celebrated artists such as Seamus Heaney and F.E. McWilliam, the archive is interactive and engaging, includes artists’ biographies, authoritative essays, contextual analysis, poetry, film clips and a timeline of key events.

The archive covers most areas of the arts, including visual art, literature, theatre, music, TV and film. The archive in its current state is a work in progress and further artists and work will be added over time. troublesarchive.com

March – April 2015

Burren College Residency Burren College of Art (BCA) has announced the artists selected for its first annual Emerging Irish Artist Residency award. This initiative is being carried out in collaboration between BCA and 126 Gallery in Galway. It involves a joint residency for the four selected artists at BCA in February 2015, with a group show to be concurrently in 126 and BCA from 11 – 26 September. A panel representing both institutions selected four artists, following an open call, which took place in September of this year. The four selected artists are Amanda Rice, Joanna Hopkins, Noelle Gallagher and Yvette Monahan. burrencollege.ie

The Good Hatchery The Good Hatchery is happy to announce an exciting group of new members: Siobhán Clancy, Jacki Hehir, Emma Houlihan, Ciarán Kavanagh, Andreas Kindler von Knobloch, Kathryn Maguire, Claire McCluskey, Lucy McKenna, Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Margaret O’Brien, James Ó hAodha, Charlie Stewart-Liberty, Miriam Thorpe and Tom Watt. Following an open call 13 artists were selected for 12-month membership.

Membership operates as an extended residency during which time each member can book use of facilities on a democratic basis. Membership offers artists access to the support, work, accommodation, facilities, insurance and the chance to work alongside one another in the development of site responsive works.

The Good Hatchery is a collaborative and expansive art project directed by artists Carl Giffney and Ruth E. Lyons since its foundation in 2007. Along with the open call one recent graduate was selected for the annual ALLOY prize. This year the award went to Ciaran Kavanagh from Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork. thegoodhatchery.com

Harnessing Creativity Six creative entrepreneurs from the border region will be launched to the marketplace in 2015 with the assistance of Harnessing Creativity, a unique threeyear programme established to revitalise the border region. A total of 400 participants from counties Leitrim, Tyrone, Fermanagh and the wider region have to date received assistance from Harnessing Creativity, the largest creative enterprise the North West has ever experienced.

Participants have availed of master classes in new and emerging digital technologies, mentoring and business development training. The visual arts creatives selected were Seamus Dunbar, Kate Oram, Rebecca Strain, Teresa Poyntz and Ann Louise Breshnan. harnessingcreativity.eu

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

9

Louth: Resources & Activities Louth Arts Office

Fertile Ground

Neil White, image for ‘Grinding Out Transcendence’, Highlanes, 2013

Adrian and Shane, Ice Cream Van, 2011

It may seem odd to begin an overview of the visual arts in Louth with a reference to the cover of Time magazine last December. The reason for this unusual connection is that it was Louth-based fine-art photographer Jackie Nickerson who contributed the images for the magazine cover, which focused on the health workers combating Ebola in Liberia, named as Time’s ‘People of the Year’.

Nickerson demonstrates the job flexibility required of so many visual artists these days, as she moves from her own project work to Percent for Art commissions, from mentoring community groups to supplying images to a magazine with a circulation of over three million per issue.

Nickerson was also an integral part of the photography exhibition ‘Grinding Out Transcendence’, the fruit of a collaboration between the artist and the members of Mid-Louth Camera Club, a rural photographic society based in Dunleer.

The exhibition, which takes as its subject matter the rehearsals of the Irish Baroque prior to its performance at the Ardee Baroque festival, has just finished a run at Drogheda’s Highlanes Gallery.

‘Grinding Out Transcendence’ was one of a number of exhibitions hosted simultaneously at Highlanes, which is continuing its development as a visual arts venue with a regional remit. Indeed, Highlanes Gallery has become a standard-bearer for excellence in practice and programme, initiating travelling exhibitions such as Louth-based Abigail O’Brien’s ‘With Bread’.

As well as being home to Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda also boasts the cultural power station that is Droichead Arts Centre. Droichead has played a pivotal role in supporting visual arts culture in Louth for 26 years, and continues to show challenging and inspiring work by both regional and national artists. At the other end of this small county, Dundalk’s An Táin Arts Centre manages and programmes the Basement Gallery, which has been the springboard for many artists’ careers.

Caroline McCarthy and Katie Holten, both Louth artists and both AIB Prize winners, had their first solo shows in the Basement Gallery, and the new management at An Táin are continuing this exhibition support for early and mid-career artists in their ongoing programme. Drogheda-based Brian Hegarty will show ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ there in March, transferring from the Cartridge Gallery in Finland, and prior to its exhibition in the RHA in 2016. Louth has close links with Lapua in Finland, and Hegarty is one of a number of Louth artists who have travelled there to exhibit, talk and sell.

Brian Hegarty is also represented in Taisce Lú, the art collection of Louth County Council.

Purchased from galleries and from artists directly, the collection now numbers nearly 200 pieces. It has an online searchable database at createlouth.ie and the works themselves are used in the rolling out of the project ‘Irish, Alive, and Mostly Female’ across schools in the county. The title refers to the make that foreign, dead male artists dominate most corporate and public collections. For ‘Irish, Alive and Mostly Female’ schools select pieces from the website, which are then brought to the school by educationalist Lynn McGrane. The engagement between the students and the artwork can be either curriculum-based or extra-curricular, and the approach taken negates the need for schools to travel to see contemporary art, which is increasingly expensive and problematic for them.

Creative Spark provides a regional focus for the creative industries. Housed in a purpose-built facility in Dundalk, Creative Spark offers workspaces, training and community engagement, all specifically tailored for the creative industries.

With support from the Arts Service, Creative Spark has established a Residency Programme, which will see Irish and international artists working out of its new print studio with a personal studio space for the duration of the residency. The first artist to avail of this opportunity was Barry Finnegan, who created Riastrad, one of Dundalk’s most iconic outdoor murals. While Riastrad was not commissioned under the Per Cent for Art scheme, like many other counties Louth has utilised the scheme to its full potential, with over 40 artworks commissioned in 18 years, the majority of them created by visual artists.

Also in the business of commissioning new work is Nexus Arts, the Drogheda-based collective who have curated a series of visual arts events, happenings, exhibitions and installations, often in collaboration with Drogheda Arts Festival. Bridge Street Studios are a longer established group, founded by four ceramic artists in 1996. Located in an eighteenth-century building in Dundalk, Bridge Street Studios functions primarily as a workspace for individual members, sharing resources.

So, in a very small nutshell, and with undoubted omissions, there it is. Louth’s visual arts community is characterised by a positive and supportive ethos; it is outward looking and vibrant, supported by an infrastructure which has developed and grown in response to the needs of our artists and our community. Though it’s far from perfect, there is, nonetheless, much to be positive about.

My earliest engagement as an artist with the Louth region came with my first solo exhibition ‘Time minds’ at Droichead Arts Centre in 2000. I’m originally from Dublin and moved to Drogheda permanently a year later. In 2004 I took my first tentative steps into the world of curation, again in Drogheda, with a show entitled ‘Ten Years After’, also at Droichead. This was a group show of artists that I had previously attended college with, which showcased their practice 10 years after graduating. That same year I was selected for a group show entitled ‘Iomha’, a showcase of Louth artists curated by Cliodhna Shaffrey and Ruairí Ó Cuív.

Drogheda itself is fortunate to have two art galleries in its town centre: Droichead Arts Centre, which is not only a gallery but also a centre for the arts, with theatre, cinema and live music; and also the Highlanes Gallery, a modern, high end space showcasing national and international contemporary exhibitions.

Highlanes holds Drogheda’s muncipal collection, which i’m proud to say I’m a part of. My piece Wall sculpture was bought for their collection when I had a solo exhibition ‘Then and Now’ in Droichead in 2011. In 2014 Wall sculpture was shown in Highlanes as part of a group show curated by Aoife Ruane, Amanda Coogan and Dr Jane Humpries entitled ‘Reframing the Domestic in Irish Art’. It does no harm to see your work hang alongside such luminaries as Alice Maher, Diane Copperwhite, Paddy Jolley and Willie McKeown, among others.

Create Louth is the arts funding body in the Louth area and I’m fortunate enough to have been selected for numerous awards from them over the years to aid my practice. In late 2014 Create supported the travel of my solo exhibition ‘I’ll be your mirror’ (the album sleeve project) to Lapua, Finland.

The exhibition has now returned and is currently on show in the recently re-opened Basement Gallery in Dundalk until 4 April. This body of work is an ongoing project of re-appropriated record sleeves that will end in a penultimate show in the Ashford Gallery, RHA in 2016.

I believe in the notion that art and culture doesn’t or shouldn’t always have to be city centric and for three and a half years I was co-curator with a local arts collective, Nexus Arts. During my time with Nexus we worked vigorously to get artists of interest to come to our town. I believe we co-ordinated and curated some great projects that really added to the fabric of the arts in Drogheda.

In 2011 Nexus received the Arts Council’s Curator in Residence award and worked closely with the Droichead Arts Centre, Highlanes and Create Louth on projects such as the first solo exhi-

bition in Ireland of work by Gee Vaucher, visual artist with 1980s punk collective Crass. We also facillitated a wall mural by renowned Italian street artist Erica il Cane, which is now a permanent fixture on the side wall of the Droichead Arts Centre.

On Culture Night 2013 we did a site-specific collaboration project with the Highlanes Gallery of London-based Irish artist Alan Magee entitled ‘Gap fill - More Beauty - More Happiness’. We also did an A/V exhibition of international artists entitled ‘Insight-in sound’.

Probably the highlight for me during my tenure with Nexus was a ‘Sleep Concert’ with Steven Stapleton aka Nurse with Wound. (Yes, it was as crazy as it sounds.) The event was a ‘bed and breakfast’ concert in the beautiful environs of Townley Hall, where 50 lucky participants got to sleep while sonic artist Steven Stapleton manipulated his own music throughout the night in an ambient lullaby complete with projections by the late Paddy Jolley … oh and there was breakfast in the morning.

I’m currently back working on my own practice and have initiated a new collective project called ‘Thirty three – 45’, a collaborative project that works with artists from a wide range of media.

The first project we will present in partnership with and for this year’s Drogheda Arts Festival in May is a evening with the legendary MC5 guitarist and social activist Wayne Kramer. Wayne will play acoustically, discuss his career and life and introduce his ‘Jail Guitar Doors’ project. Later in the year we will be working with Canadian media and sound artist Mark Templeton.

Overall, Drogheda has proved very fertile ground for me to work in and develop as an artist, and has allowed me contribute, participate and engage positively in a vibrant artistic community.

Brian Hegarty, In your mind, 2013, collage on record sleeve 12 x 12”

Brian Hegarty, We shall overcome, 2014, acrylic on record sleeve, 12 x 12”

Brian Hegarty, brianhegarty.com, facebook. com/groups/Thirtythree45, droghedaartsfestival.ie

Brian Hegarty, Wall sculpture, 2011

Brian Harten, County Arts Officer.

10

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Creative Spark Creative Spark, Louth Creative Community Hub, Dundalk, launched in October 2012 with the aim of providing a dedicated creative training and workspace facility in County Louth. Creative Spark was established with a clear focus on the development of the creative enterprise sector in this region and the use of creative practice to promote social engagement. We believe the centre is unusual as it places an equal emphasis on enterprise and community development while maintaining its overarching aim to support all forms of creativity. We have 20 small business units for creative enterprises and a suite of meeting and training rooms, which are also available for community groups to hire. We try to create an informal atmosphere at Creative Spark where work gets done and connections are made. Many of the creative businesses based here have begun to work together on projects or pitched for business together, learning from each other’s skills and experience.

Over the last two years we have delivered high quality, exciting and original creative projects, courses and one-off workshops to Muirhevnamor and the wider community of Dundalk and County Louth. We have undertaken some very successful community projects including Travellers’ Stories Through Craft, Ethnic Women’s Stories Through Ceramics and the Road to Hell, a drama project focusing on the history of the Battle of the Boyne and its impact. We also run training programmes, networking events and community open days, and participate in national events like National Drawing Day, Culture Night, Design Week and the Bealtaine Festival.

Where possible we aim to provide free access to projects and events in order to increase participation and broaden our audience base. Creative Spark is currently the only developmental arts agency in Dundalk to offer this calibre of training and to such a broad demographic. Our aim is to become a regionally-recognised centre for the delivery of creative participation and the provision of art facilities embedded in the community. Creative

Keep Pushing Spark has been engaged with local primary and secondary schools, with community youth groups such as Muirhevnamor Youth Centre, Craobh Rua, The House in Cox’s Demesne and the Dundalk Youth Centre. We have also worked with community groups including Bush & Grange Partnership, Men’s Sheds and RehabCare. Links with Dundalk Institute of Technology further expand Creative Spark’s potential to deliver projects and programmes linking the arts, science and technology, which have particular appeal for our teenage and young adult audience.

The new fine art Print Studio facilities at Creative Spark became fully operational in early 2014, offering screen-printing, etching and digital printing facilities to established artists, schools, youth and community groups. We also have a kiln room with equipment for the production of ceramics, glass and enamelling.

In 2014 we launched our residency programme with support from Create Louth, Louth County Council Arts Service. We have five artist residencies planned over the course of the next year and look forward to having both Irish and international artists based in Creative Spark. Our first artist-inresidence is Barry Finnegan, who has been developing new screen-printed artwork in the Print Studio and also plans to run a workshop in the community using graffiti and printmaking techniques.

In 2015 we have a full schedule of classes, courses and one-day workshops in disciplines including ceramics, painting, film, textiles, weaving and several forms of printmaking. Social media and business start-up training events will also take place in association with Louth LEO. We hope to continue to provide CPD opportunities with the Design and Crafts Council of Ireland and VAI. In the summer we will run our popular Spark@Us summer camps for children and the Woodshop project for teenagers. We are excited to be part of ID2015 with a community print day, ‘Spaces, Places & Faces’, on 20 June and a five-day symposium on 3D printing and its applications taking place in October.

Creative Spark is a social economy project run by a voluntary board and a dedicated team of staff who believe that creativity is a catalyst for selfconfidence and self-empowerment and that it enriches relationships and helps build strong bonds within the community. The increased sense of ownership by the community is demonstrated by local people returning regularly to take part in events at Creative Spark.

Sarah Daly, Executive Director, Creative Spark. creativespark.ie @creativesparkie facebook.com/creativesparkie

Workshop at Creative Spark

Creative Spark exterior

March – April 2015

Declan Kelly, Abyssal Denial, mixed media on paper, 2014

Declan Kelly, The Artifice Paradox, mixed media on paper, 2014

My art career has so far been an eventful one. It began on the far side of the country in the early 2000s, followed by a semester spent studying in Belgium through the Erasmus Student Exchange programme which marked the culmination of my art education at the National College of Art & Design. Probably the best lesson I have learnt from these years in college is that art is rough and, as the man in black says, “you gotta be tough”.

After graduating I returned to my home town of Drogheda, where I’ve been working as a visual artist for the past eight years. The experience is difficult to describe: it has been daunting, but also exhilarating. Drogheda, like many places in Ireland, was hit pretty hard by the collapse of the economy.

The towns of County Louth have a somewhat colourful reputation, but I would argue that the ‘wee county’ is a bit of a sleeping giant with a great deal to offer. It still has an incredibly high unemployment rate, but in a strange way I believe that this probably helped establish a new wave of visual artists making some truly challenging work. The toughest seem to have held their ground; I know that, in my case, the crisis gave me the focus to see opportunities and to chase my childhood dreams of being an artist.

Working as an artist in Drogheda has allowed me to develop my own voice, much like singing at home alone or in the shower. There is a safety to allow yourself the time and distance to develop that voice, to really descend into what you are doing and why. The artwork I make is inspired by my travels and journeys both figuratively and literally. With the aid of several trusty cameras over the years I have been able to collect and catalogue a library of thousands of images that serve as waypoints in my practice.

Typically these images represent corridors, gateways and conduits, but they are often much more ambiguous. This is very important to me because every destination is usually the genesis of a new adventure elsewhere. Consequently my own art practice has been a tactile response to many years of research about the transit of memory and place, about how we constantly move from one conduit to another in our lives. These trajectories impact us not only in physical and psychological ways but also beyond into unknown places. My work is typically based in painting, drawing and mixed media, but I also make etchings and prints when the opportunity arises.

In the early days of my art practice I was renting a coffin-sized studio space in the town centre.

There was another artist I knew called Els Borghart who was also struggling with the constraints of the working space and so we decided to strike out and collaborate on the development of a new studio. We tapped up some connections to develop a studio together, which would become SmallDoorStudio.

This was to be the first of many collaborations that we would embark upon. We converted and redeveloped the building into a proper working studio ourselves in just over six weeks using some basic building skills and a reasonable budget for the refit.

Being based in Drogheda has been a gift in many ways, but chief among them was the development of my curatorial practice, again in collaboration with Els Borghart. NeXus Arts (nexusarts.eu) is an artist-led independent curatorial duo initiated in June 2009, which continues to today. We work in a local, national and international context while based in Drogheda. We have had the pleasure of working with some amazing artists, curators and partners hailing from all over Ireland and beyond while exploring a wide spectrum of art forms.

Much of what I have done both as an artist and as a curator has been made possible with the support of Create Louth. Create Louth is headed up by County Arts Officer Brian Harten. His sterling work has kept the wolves from many an artist’s door and his vision has encouraged and forged a rejuvenated attitude towards the arts within the county.

The development of SmallDoorStudio and NeXus Arts with Els Borghart has coincided with a remarkable improvement in my art practice and even encouraged several collaborative residencies internationally (Nucleo Vzw, Gent, Belgium) and nationally (Tyrone Guthrie). For the first time we will exhibit together in Gallery De Wandelgangen, Nevele, Belgium. This exhibition kicks off a busy year for me as I will also be showing work in the Courthouse Gallery in Ennistymon, the Toradh Gallery in Ashbourne and in a few surprise exhibitions in 2016. The work keeps moving and I keep pushing to see where the art will bring me next.

Declan Kelly smalldoorstudio.com nexusarts.eu

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

Droichead Arts Centre

11

Highlanes Gallery

Aisling from The Secret of Kells, 2009

Thomas Brezing, The Road, 2014

Droichead Arts Centre celebrates 25 years in 2014 / 2015. In this period it has presented over 175 exhibitions by emerging and established artists.

At the beginning of March we host the final days of Thomas Brezing’s large installation The Road of Good Intentions. Road-kill acted as a catalyst for Brezing’s inquiry into the speed of contemporary life. He recorded several animals killed on the roads decaying over a period of time and explored how a combination of vehicles and the elements caused them to disappear completely. He was perplexed to find that more than 20 rabbits were hit by vehicles on a 100-yard stretch of tarmacked road while running from warren to warren. Brezing kept paper logs recording their decay, which formed the baseline for the exhibition.

For Brezing, the road is the stage where it all happens. “It’s a love / hate relationship and we live or we die by it”. This installation fully embraces Droichead Arts Centre’s large exhibition space, inviting the viewer to interact with works made from found objects and recycled materials including teddies, dolls, teabags and egg cartons. As part of the exhibition, Brezing introduced his alter ego the Carpet Man (created in 2011) in a performance and literary piece with writer Christodoulos Makris. In 2013, Brezing produced a film documenting the journeys of Carpet Man in collaboration with Makris.

For this performance, he engaged the Carpet Man by responding to the variously discarded material he encounters or manipulates on his journeys.

Following on from The Road of Good Intentions, the gallery will feature an exhibition of prints by the critically-acclaimed animation studio Cartoon Saloon from Kilkenny. Their feature film The Secret of Kells will also be screened. This exhibition of delicate original prints draws heavily on the ornate and richly-textured Irish medieval art and tells the enchanting story of Brendan, the Vikings and the Book of Kells. It has gained millions of admirers across the world due to the significant success of the animation film and its Oscar nomination. This exhibition is highly anticipated in Drogheda, because Director Tomm Moore gave young viewers an insight into the making of his recent film, Song of the Sea during a ‘GAME ON’ artist-in-the-community project in 2014. Song of the Sea was also nominated for an Oscar this year. This exhibition will feature an extensive outreach programme and specialised animation workshops by Cartoon Saloon.

The third exhibition we are hosting this season is a commissioned piece called Pilot Light by artist Ruth E. Lyons. This new work is intended to resonate

with the feast of Bealtaine and the tradition of burning fires on hills around Ireland in celebration of the beginning of summer. It draws on the origins of the name Louth and its historical associations with light, going back to the Celtic sun god Lugh.

This is an expansive project that explores the subjugation of landscape by industry through the creation of touring sculptural works and practical research in the form of collaborative workshops. The project explores the global phenomenon of industrialised landscape through site-specific works that begin on a local scale. Pilot Light is being produced in parallel with a new commission that the artist is developing with an organisation called Pavilion in Leeds for exhibition in UK landscapes and the Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield.

Pilot Light will have a simultaneous manifestation in Leeds and Louth, which will involve two sister works: each a large mobile sculpture in the form of a parabolic reflector. This large sculptural object is designed to concentrate and direct rays of light across distances in the open air. There will also be a performance element to this work, which will be witnessed at close proximity by an invited group of collaborators and guests, but its light will also communicate to a widespread incidental audience.

A key part of this project is that the light for the performance actually emanates from burnt limestone derived from the landscape. This form of lighting is known as ‘limelight’ and was originally invented in the nineteenth century by Thomas Drummond as an aid in the triangulation of Ireland.

The limestone and the directing of light will form the crux of a series of collaborative workshops that will accompany the work. The first was hosted in The Good Hatchery, where artists from the UK and Ireland collaborated in the construction of a limekiln for the production of quicklime. The workshops in Drogheda will revolve around handson engagement with the method of triangulation and mapping. Using reflective materials participants will be invited to create their own reflector and experiment with reflection to create lines of light on the landscape. This exhibition will be officially opened on 29 April as part of Drogheda Arts Festival.

At Highlanes Gallery we have just opened a new exhibition by established Irish artist Janet Mullarney.

‘My Mind’s I’ is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in five years and features sculpture, installation and works on paper.

Mullarney’s show has been consciously presented within a series of exhibitions looking at sculpture and installation, which began last September with ‘Parallel Visions: Sculpture and Installation from the IMMA Collection’ (which also ran concurrently at our cross border partner the F.E. McWilliam Gallery & Studio, Banbridge) and ‘Holes’

by Tracy Hanna.

‘Parallel Visions’ took as its starting point a vision for presenting modernist and contemporary sculpture and installation from IMMA’s collection in two parallel sites; the scope of the exhibition offered audiences a unique insight into how concepts and materials have been used and have informed artistic practice in relation to contemporary sculpture and installation.

Across the two galleries, works by 28 artists, Irish and international, covering a period from the 1930s to 2009, were presented and included pieces

by Stephan Balkenhol, Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, John Burke, Christo, Michael CraigMartin, Marcel Duchamp, Rebecca Horn, Brian King, Liam O’Callaghan, Brian O’Doherty, Vivienne Roche, Kiki Smith and Richard Wentworth.

Exciting emerging artist Tracy Hanna’s sitespecific solo exhibition ‘Holes’ followed in November.

Hanna explores video as sculpture, presenting video footage that captures the textural and tactile qualities of objects and materials, combined with found and hand-made objects. This exhibition negotiates a shift in the artist’s practice: a dialectic concern within each artwork relating to materiality and representation. The exhibition, though consisting mainly of projected imagery, was presented for the most part in the light-filled gallery space, something Tracy has never attempted before.

Tracy Hanna and Janet Mullarney’s exhibitions also continue a strand of solo site specific exhibitions for Highlanes Gallery which, in the gallery’s seven years, have included exhibitions by Gereon Krebber,

Anthony Haughey, Brigid McLeer, Noel Brennan, Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh, Diana Copperwhite, Thomas Brezing and Abigail O’Brien.

The title of Janet Mullarney’s exhibition, ‘My Mind’s I’, refers not only to the idiom ‘mind’s eye’, but also the human ability to experience visual mental imagery, and the power of the psychic imagination to communicate complex subliminal codes. In the exhibition, small fragile sculptures are placed against simple backdrops within a heightened lighting scheme, allowing mysterious theatrical scenes to unfold.

Many familiar with Mullarney’s practice might expect to see large scale sculptural work, especially considering the magnificent main gallery space, but she has chosen, she states, “to take the capital ‘S’ out of sculpture” and to avoid the monumental. Instead, Mullarney, while continuing her deep interest in matererialty (using plaster, clay, wood, papier maché, card and paper), plays with seemingly insignificant small sculptures, together with light and shadow, and to consider scale and space differently.

‘My Mind’s I’, though site specific, has also being conceived for partner venues the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny and Wexford Arts Centre, where it will travel in October 2015 and 2016 respectively.

The exhibition received an Arts Council Touring Award, which has enabled the large format exhibition concept, including the engagement of lighting designer Marcus Costello and an accompanying public programme with special links between the artist, facilitator Lynn McGrane and several schools.

A catalogue, which will include texts by Manchán Magan and William Gallagher, will be published later in the Spring.

This is the second Touring Award that the gallery has received and it has helped us to work with artists to make ambitious, long-running exhibitions and to build strong partnerships with collegiate galleries. In late January Abigail O’Brien’s ‘With Bread’, our first exhibition to receive the grant, opened at Limerick City Gallery of Art, where it will continue until 13 March, having toured to The Dock in Carrick on Shannon in 2014.

Highlanes Gallery is a municipal art gallery for Drogheda and the North East, and home to the Drogheda Municipal Art Collection, which was initiated by artist Bea Orpen and her husband Terry Trench in 1946. The Collection dates from 1755, comprises over 100 works, and, though finance is limited, maintains a commitment to continue to collecting work. Acquiring work made by artists exhibiting at the gallery is important and we have just purchased two pieces by Anthony Haughey, which are now on view, and were first exhibited as part of his 2011 Highlanes exhibition ‘Citizen’.

Highlanes Gallery is located in the centre of Drogheda, in the heart of the Boyne Valley, on the M1 corridor between Dublin and Belfast. The area has many artists and much artistic activity throughout the year. Next up is the Drogheda Arts Festival, which falls over the May Bank Holiday Weekend, at which we will present a group exhibition looking at painting, curated by artist Colin Martin, curator Cliodhna Shaffrey and me. It will open on Monday 27 April.

Aoife Ruane, Director, Highlanes Gallery.

Marcella Bannon, Director, Droichead. droichead.com facebook.com/droichead.artscentre @Droichead_Arts Janet Mullarney, My Mind’s Eye and Another Mind, image by Ros Kavanagh

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

Residency

Clea Van Der Grijn, Sayulia at a grave wearing irish victorian dress, film still, 2014

A Beautiful, Evocative Place

Family celebrating their dead loved ones, Dia De Los Muertos 2014, photo by Clea Van der Grijn

CLEA VAN DER GRIJN DISCUSSES A RECENT RESIDENCY IN MEXICO, WHERE SHE EXPLORED IRISH AND MEXICAN ATTITUDES TO DEATH, MOURNING AND IDENTITY.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

13

REsidency

Bang Bang Filming Van der Grijn learning to paint a skull for Dia De Lis Muertos

Grave in Saya Ulita Mexico, photo by Clea Van der Grijn

Sayulita is a small coastal village of 4000 inhabiants situated in the heart of thick jungle in Bahia de Banderas, Mexico, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. This is where, on 31 September 2014, I took up a 10-week residency with my family.

My aims for the residency were to explore rational, social and emotional constructs around death and loss, in order to make a body of work showing the disparities and similarities between Irish and Mexican cultural attitudes to death, focusing on Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and Samhain.

I’d visited Sayulita back in February and become enchanted with its graveyard – a beautiful evocative place. It nestles amongst the thick of the jungle, balancing precariously on the hilltop that leads down to the small bay, Playa de los Muertos (Beach of the Dead). Each brightly painted grave has a candle that is lit every night.

Since the death of my brother Ruriko in 2008, I have been working extensively on the challenges and perceptions around the culture of death. I was artist in residence at the North West Hospice in Sligo (northwesthospice.ie) for nearly three years and my practice to date has investigated themes of loss and death.

Coming across the graveyard in Sayulita affected me so strongly that I knew somehow I must return. When I got back to Ireland in March I looked up the Mexican Ambassador to Ireland, Carlos de Alba, and we subsequently met a number of times to discuss my project and funding possibilities. I also contacted the Irish Ambassador to Mexico, Sonja Hyland. She too was interested in my work and informed me that Ireland and Mexico were celebrating 40 years of diplomatic relationships and that there could be funding for a cultural project such as mine.

De Alba and Hyland nominated me for an AMEXID scholarship, which would cover flights and provide a stipend to cover costs.1 The Irish Embassy also offered to host a solo show in an established gallery in Mexico City to coincide with Dia de los Muertos 2015. Flights to Mexico for myself and my family proved to be very expensive, but my rationale was that the AMEXID scholarship would contribute greatly.

In May 2014 Catherine Marshall opened my exhibition ‘ambivalence (conflict)’, which ran at Ballina Arts Centre 5 – 31 April. I gave a 25-minute interview to RTE’s The Works about the show. In the same month I attended the Get Together and met Sarah Ryder, Commissioner for Arts / Factual at RTE. Ryder expressed an interest in sending a film crew to Mexico with me. This was followed by a 40minute interview which was aired by Sky191.

Over the next few months I completed applications for the AMEXID residency and Arts Council Project Award. For AMEXID, applicants must name a host, so I nominated the Irish Embassy in Mexico. I also sent a huge amount of supporting material, which the Mexican embassy kindly translated into Spanish. Prior to travelling I booked a house with a studio in Sayulita, as an arts centre or residential studio couldn’t facilitate my young family. This cost a fortune, but I remained confident that with the backing of two embassies and the commitment from RTE, I would be fine.

Shortly afterwards I got some upsetting news: the time frame was too short for RTE to gather funds and send their film crew to Mexico.

However, they wanted to support the project in whatever way they could and got independent production company Bang Bang Teo interested in the project. I met with them and we agreed that they would follow me to Mexico if we could raise some money between us.

Encouragingly, Bang Bang Teo started filming me straight away.

They came to my studio and home in Sligo and spent many hours interviewing me. They also followed me to the foundry in Dublin where I made a ‘death mask’ for the Mexican ambassador. I personally raised €5000, which only touched on their expenses and equipment, but we were all in so deep that the only way was forward.

There were a few more glitches. I was informed that embassies do not qualify as ‘hosts’ for residencies. The Director of AMEXCID, Juan Valle Perena, told me that I needed to be hosted by an institution. I tried to explain that I needed to be located in the village of Sayulita – and not in an institutional context – in order to work closely with the community. A compromise was finally made: if I found a valid cultural host who would monitor my work on an ongoing basis then that would suffice. I emailed every museum and director near Sayulita explaining my project and eventually Pilar Perez, Director of Culturales Centro de Arte Puerto Vallerta, agreed to be my host.

In September I was informed that AMEXID could not give me a residential scholarship in support of my project, as I would not be ‘resident’ at their facility, the Cultural Centro de Arte. It seemed rather unfair. Perhaps residential scholarships are only for childless artists or those who are willing to leave their children behind for three months?

Do art institutions think that artists won’t get any work done if their family is with them? It seems that few long-term residencies are tailored for artists with families.

My partner, Martin and our boys Maximillian and Orlando arrived in Sayulita on 31 September, after more than 24 hours of travel. It was dark, hot and humid. Our house was in the jungle, less than 100 meters from the warm soupy sea and white sands. The air, along with everything else, was wet, and there was a cacophony of sea, surf, jungle life and bird sounds. My studio was on the first floor, smaller than my studio in Sligo, but with glass doors that opened onto a balcony and a window that looked straight out onto banana and coconut trees. And there was Wi-Fi. My initial task was to gain the trust of as many locals as possible, so that they wouldn’t feel inhibited when the film crew arrived. I set myself the goal of rising at 5.30 to film the sky at the jungle graveyard turning from pitch black to morning light. I also filmed at night, when the candles were lit and the afternoon sun faded to evening light and then to pitch black again, with the constant twinkling of the candles.

I became familiar with the gravestones and family names and also I got to know the various family members who brought me to the graves of their loved ones and shared their stories. Through this process my ideas became multifaceted. My focus shifted from direct

representations of death, in an objective abstract sculptural format, to a more subjective understanding. This became especially clear after I learned about a tradition called Dia de los Santos Inocentes, where the souls of dead children are recognised.

Through film and photography, I re-imagined the return of a dead child revisiting her grave. This fictionalised Mexican child developed as a catalyst to inform me, in some ways, as a projected image of myself, and created many questions concerning childhood, identity, selfhood and loss. What began as an objective observation of Day of the Dead traditions developed into something much more complex.

Bang Bang arrived three weeks after our arrival. At this that stage I was settled into a routine of early morning filming, yoga, green juices, beach walks, hard work and early nights. I had begun filming a young local girl at a graveside, who was to become central to my project. Bang Bang followed me around night and day for two weeks while I interviewed locals and participated in graveyard activities.

I worked in the studio for four or five hours each day while the boys were in school, but the nightly monsoon rains, humidity and intense heat made everything a little bit difficult. Paper would curl and slide off the damp walls and the boys struggled with schoolwork.

We travelled to different villages and towns as I investigated the build up to Day of the Dead. Men and women young and old told me their stories around the celebration. They sang and laughed and there were tears. I was humbled by the honesty and generosity of all these wonderful people who allowed me share in their private celebrations.

Midway through the residency, Maximillian and I got Dengue fever. We were very sick and I began to lose heart. Orlando also got perforated eardrums from spending too much time in the sea and, with a month still to go, was told not to swim any more. We decided that a week of rest and a break from the jungle was necessary. So we visited museums and old towns, churches and galleries in the area. We stayed in beautiful colonial buildings and saw the most extraordinary architecture in Puerta Vallerta, Guadalajara, Compostella, Tequilla and El Tuito. We drove the back roads through sleepy villages and volcanic mountains and got drunk on Raicillia (moonshine) at a hacienda in the mountains. And of course we went to every graveyard along the way.

Revitalised, with the film crew gone and three weeks left, I worked day and night making sure, without doubt, that I had done all I could to explore the Mexican perspective on death.

Following our return in December, big boxes of artwork, including dozens of skulls, antique water bowls (to give water to the dead after their long journey home to visit their living family) and other artifacts, arrived back home in Sligo completely broken. Customs had opened the shipment and not repacked it. Initially I was heartbroken, but my spirits were lifted by an invitation to show at the Luan Gallery, Athlone in 2015 and a major touring solo show for 2016, initiated by the Model, Sligo.2 Megan Johnston, Director of the Model, suggested that I use the next 12 months to critically reflect, edit and further develop my ideas, creating a carefully contextualised set of plans and a poignant new body of work. I’m currently going through all my film / photographic work and notebooks, deciding what I am going to ship to Mexico City for my show in October 2015. Will it be photographic prints or will I send a whole installation? Will my film be edited in time? I have to seriously think these issues through. The Department of Foreign Affairs are covering all the shipment expenses, but I still need confirmation on budgets before I start casting works. I have spent so much money to date and, realistically, without funding I’d be unable to continue with the project. The Luan show will include work from ‘ambivalence’ and possibly a new work, if there is a budget to do so.

At the time of writing Bang Bang are due to return to film some more and the pre-production footage from Mexico has been sent to RTE. I’ve been looking over the work I made in Sayulita and realising that I have done so much more than I could have imagined. All of this is encouraging and I’ve reapplied for an Arts Council Bursary in the hope of getting support to carefully contextualising the material this year.

My life is my art. Despite facing financial restrictions and hurdles, having to school my children all over the world, dragging them from culture to culture, nothing will stop me.

Clea van der Grijn cleavandergrijn.com Notes 1. The Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation: amexcid.gob.mx/index.php/en 2. Clea van der Grijn is also co-curating ‘Liminal Spaces’, which will run at the Model, Sligio (August – September 2015) and features invited artists Maurice O Connell, Corban Walker, Felicity Clear, Michele Horrigan, Fergal Mc Cabe alongside her own work

14

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

VAI / DAS Residency

Dorothy Hunter, Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 – Palestine

New Monuments DOROTHY HUNTER DESCRIBES HER project for THE VAI AND DIGITAL ARTs STUDIOS AWARD. The VAI and Digital Arts Studios (DAS) residency award could not have been more timely for me. I was due to finish a two-year co-directorship at Belfast studio and gallery space Platform Arts just as my four-month stay at Digital Arts Studios was due to commence. With newfound time to commit to my practice and winter coming, what could be better than a fresh setting in which to work, with equipment, classes and support available and the added bonus of central heating?

Upon commencement of the residency I would not have considered my practice to be especially ‘digital’, which was partly why I applied in the first place. While my installation work has included digital aspects (as it is often rooted in regeneration, political histories and gathered and compared information), I had never properly explored this side to my practice. In my proposal I stated that I’d like to spend my time at DAS exploring the use of digital media in my work in a more forthright way, using equipment and sources that have their own information-based subtext.

I also wished to use the time to consider a long-term archival project I have been making, called ‘Deconsecration’. I had been travelling around Northern Ireland to take photographs of former churches that were now employed as businesses or private homes, and, having built a collection of images, I wished to find an appropriate platform for a notquite-photography project.

I was one of five new residents that joined DAS, each of us hosted in the group studio with our own workstations, and each with an iMac fully equipped with all the relevant software an artist could want. I spent the first months of the residency researching and absorbing, playing with the software and free-to-hire equipment to see what could come about. The workshops were also free for residents, and so I attended as many as possible, covering Steadicam, Processing, Adobe After Effects and Final Cut Pro. I found the workshops in After Effects and Final Cut Pro, by David Haughey and Barry Cullen respectively, to be particularly enlightening; learning about specific software in a small window of time helped me to understand the ways they mirrored each other and also ways to intuit certain actions. It also allowed me to learn a lot of the finer details of filmmaking, such as codec and managing media.

The other residents, as well as DAS powerhouses Catherine Devlin and Jenny Atcheson, were also extremely helpful in this respect.

Everyone helped to fill the gaps when anyone had a problem, fostering a culture of skills sharing and constructive critique within the shared studio. The attitude of collective DIY, humour and perseverance within DAS made for a relaxed yet hard-working environment, perfect for

Dorothy Hunter, Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 – Ukraine

maintaining concentration when staring at a screen for hours.

Whilst trying to gain as many technical skills as possible, I was also researching ways in which I could expand and redevelop the ‘Deconsecration’ project. I added some new photos to the collection but found it difficult to make any real steps with the project; any method of changing or re-presenting it felt like an afterthought tacked on to the archive itself. I became frustrated with the repeated dead ends in this area but I knew that being overly prescript with the residency could not end well, so I decided to focus my attention elsewhere and follow other interesting leads that I had come across.

Having toyed with ideas around open licensing, reconstructions and backgrounds for 3D design software, I came across a photo competition held by Wikimedia titledWiki Loves Monuments. It was a worldwide and web-based competition where users submitted images that would become part of the Wikimedia collection, and thus open source. The entries were then judged as a whole and listed by country.

I was interested in how these images interpreted the word ‘monument’, taking in structures, buildings and public art, and the ways in which they made for striking images, often including impressive landscapes or reminders of past and recent events. In many cases the photograph and the structure were increasingly or decreasingly relevant. I started choosing images from Wikimedia’s selection, removing all traces of the surrounding environment from the

photographs and repositioning the isolated structures to form a new collection.

This became the foundation for work I made for the DAS residents’ show, which was kindly hosted in the Exchange Gallery of Belfast Exposed in January 2015. I made physical prints of the work and hosted the collection online to be downloaded for use by others, as per the “share alike” clause of Creative Commons licensing structure.

In many ways I feel that this project is related to the ‘Deconsecration’ project, which I could not quite package up, yet I feel it brought together more fluidly an ongoing dichotomy in my practice: research-based work and more playful, intuitive creation. I feel the irreverence of the series prevented the work from being dry and was therefore more malleable. While I won’t be abandoning ‘Deconsecration’ just yet, it wasn’t meant to be – at least this time around.

Alongside this, I made a two-channel film installation using old personal footage of the repurposing of Tempelhof in Berlin, playing with the focus of the image by projecting onto a curved pillar and the wall behind. The manipulated image was very interesting to me, and so in the final weeks of my residency I am gathering more footage to create a film, following this more intuitive approach again to hopefully make something new.

With five artists in one space, the show came together in a surprisingly uncramped and harmonious way. The private viewing of the exhibition was a success; that night we raised ‘dark and stormy’ cocktails in tribute to our shared time and work, as well as the driving wind and rain outside.

The VAI and DAS residency has been a great experience and ended up being essential in helping me reconsider my approach to my practice. I found that digital media was very compatible with processbased work and wasn’t nearly as disciplined and restrictive as I had anticipated ‘technology’ would be. It instead permitted me greater freedom to play within my practice, and I intend to make the last few days count for as much as possible. I wish to extend my thanks to all on the panel from Visual Artists Ireland and Digital Arts Studios for allowing me to have this experience, as well as to tireless DAS stalwarts Catherine and Jenny (for whom there is thankfully no question too stupid), and my fellow residents from winter 2014 / 15.

Dorothy Hunter is an artist and writer living and working in Belfast. She is based at QSS Bedford Street, Studios and Gallery. dorothyhunter.com digitalartsstudios.com

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

15

Project profile

The Food, the Bad and the Ugly STEPHEN BRANDES DETAILS THE WHYS, WHATS AND HOWS OF THE DOMESTIC GODLESS, A GROUP OF ARTISTS WHO EXPLORE THE POTENTIAL OF FOOD AS A VEHICLE FOR ARTISTIC ENDEAVOUR.

The Domestic Godless group portrait, Kinsale Arts Festival, 2014

The Domestic Godless, Cananliculus Purgamentorum, Tulca, Galway Arts Centre, 2014

Summer 2003, and I have just moved to Cork from Dublin. Members of the Cork Artists’ Collective (CAC) have been asked by curator Grant Watson to prepare work for a show called ‘Artists / Groups’ for the Project Arts Centre in Dublin. Having worked with Grant a year earlier I am invited to join them. Together we establish a multimedia installation built around a carbon copy of CAC member Irene Murphy’s studio.

In a public house in Cork we are working on plans. Fellow CAC veteran, Mick O’Shea, produces cured meat from an inside pocket of a dirty raincoat and a small light is ignited…

Weeks later Mick and myself find ourselves cooking at ‘Artists / Groups’, having prepared and assembled the strangest and most challenging foodstuffs we could muster. The gable wall of the replica of Irene’s studio is covered in blackboards, each with a hand drawn recipe for invented dishes that defy logic. The cooked fare included a fricassee of Vietnamese swamp eel and a farci of rabbit, stuffed with the ferret that caught it.

And so the Domestic Godless were born – to be joined a little later by the prodigious talents of Irene Murphy.

We have now been together for 12 years. Our joint practice has incorporated installations, banquets, public performances and published recipes which draw a fine line between reality and fiction.

Much of what we do together involves intense planning and preparation; nevertheless, the Domestic Godless is very much a side project to our own individual disciplines.

Mick O’Shea, while having a very diverse and established practice, has been involved with many experimental and improvisational sound art projects both here and internationally, including Strange Attractor and the Quiet Club. Likewise, Irene, whose work is grounded in process, collaboration and the broader concepts of creative activity, has also been continually active both here and abroad. Both were also instrumental in running Cork’s Guesthouse (theguesthouse.ie). I have had a steady work schedule that includes drawing, painting and collage rooted in image, language and narrative, alongside a handful of public interventions and several curatorial episodes.

For the Domestic Godless we exploit these individual skills and interests to varying degrees. Mick is responsible for the sound elements in our performances, for example, and I designed the website. What

The Domestic Godless, Fag ash and seaweed anti-cupcake, 2014

unites us is a sincere interest in food, the sensory experience of eating it and the often-contradictory ways that – in its presentation, taste and complex cultural meanings – it can be exploited like any other artistic medium. Frequently our ideas conflict with one another, but to us this can only make the audience’s experience of what we do more interesting, confounding, even troubling.

We do not have a manifesto and we are not political activists. We all know that certain practices in the food industry need to change, not least to improve the quality of the food, but personally I’m sick of being preached at and it’s certainly not our job to do that either. We do, however, delight in making mischievous digs at both self-righteous gastro-Nazism and mainstream food culture alike. Consequently we have on occasions come face to face with controversy. 10 years ago we submitted a monthly recipe column to this very publication, one of which enraged an Irish animal rights campaigner (and can now be seen on our website thedomesticgodless.com). The recipe in question contains a photo, which depicts a rabbit about to be dispatched by a blow to the neck. This was a found image by the way, further enhanced by the fact that the implement being used to kill the animal is a Santa Claus dildo.

We admit that we are sometimes creative with the truth concerning our produce. (At other times we are happy to be brutally honest.) We do, however, maintain that our audiences have enough intelligence to exercise the suspension of disbelief. At the 2008 West Cork Food Festival in Skibbereen, for example, we built a menu around the idea that we had bred an aquatic rabbit. The local Food Safety Department were soon on our case to inform us that anyone serving food to the public must list the ingredients in detail. It is not enough to warn people in advance with a verbal disclaimer. Luckily Google Translate came to the rescue so in the event of a raid, we could provide a list of our ingredients – in Serbian.

Inspiration comes from many places: personal dining experiences, historical sources, medical cabinets, other chefs’ recipes that we intentionally sabotage by using the wrong ingredients and not least the varied contexts in which we operate. My personal favourite being a rubbish skip parked at the gates of City Hall in Belfast in which we served a set dinner for two of Atlantic seabirds.

It works to our advantage that food culture has generally

blossomed over the past couple of decades, and has currency across a broad swathe of society. It means we get invited to participate in food festivals and other events where we are introduced to people who have no prior experience of our practice as artists. The boundaries are consequently blurred and we certainly do not soften our approach to appeal to the common denominator. We definitely do not, under any circumstances, do catering.

Food porn is everywhere. The TV channels and Sunday supplements were full of it 12 years ago when we started, and they still are. As a result, the public are vulnerable to passive voyeurism, yet more aware of exotic ingredients and are no longer easy to shock. The TV and celebrity chef phenomenon is the equivalent of ‘The Academy’ to us. We acknowledge its existence as a parallel universe. The big difference between us is that chefs and their kitchens are commercial operations and first and foremost they need to please people. We are not shackled by this and willfully wander into the realms of utter absurdity with impunity. Recently, on a project in Scotland with an artisan oat miller, I tried making porridge with Irn Bru. Needless to say it was rather unpleasant (though deep-frying it in batter made it slightly more palatable), but the ridiculousness of the idea alone was reason enough to make it.

Having said this, a very high percentage of our produce, even though it looks wrong on paper, is absolutely delicious! (To us, anyhow.) Ultimately, it is this, alongside the complex interweaving of hospitality, repulsion, strangeness and humour that has contributed to our success to date. But it doesn’t always work and our biggest challenge is to remain unpredictable.

Even after 12 years we have an inexhaustible bucket list which includes: making a 12-course gourmet gobstopper, designing a dish that dissolves Tom Doorley’s teeth live on television, inventing pork scratchings that contain the same nutritional value as one kilo of goji berries and successfully entering a chicken into the Rose of Tralee competition as a marketing stunt for our new line in deep-fried spicy bantam feet.

Our next outing on these shores will be at the Galway Food Festival during the Easter bank holiday weekend…

Stephen Brandes stephenbrandes.com, thedomesticgodless.com

16

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

Art in Education to collaborate with Sven to compose different soundscapes outside of their school every few weeks. I don’t know of any other schools with something like this integrated into their surroundings. It challenges the students to consider the act of listening so attentively. The feedback from students, the art teacher and the principal was so positive that I feel this type of process could be a real game-changer for an artistic discipline that is somehow seen as a fringe thing here in Ireland. The level of knowledge that the students gleaned from working with Sven was very sophisticated.

Sven Anderson Working with transition year students using prepared vinyl to create an audio collage out of locked grooves. Records sourced from St. Vincent de Paul on Sean MacDermott Street and prepared with blades and electrical tape

Perfomance installation during Rhona Byrne’s residency, ‘The Artist Stays’, St Catherine’s NS, Rush, Co. Dublin, photo by Presley Kgaflea, sixth class

Overlapping with Young Minds ANNE BRADLEY INTERVIEWS JENNIE GUY ABOUT MOBILE ART SCHOOL AND OTHER PROJECTS EXPLORING THE ROLE OF CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS AND CURATORS IN SCHOOLS. Anne Bradley: How and why did you create Mobile Art School ? 1 Jennie Guy: I work in the art world and I’m also a parent. Another answer is that I’ve always been interested in – and critical of – education systems, since I was a teenager going through the system, up to when I was studying on my contemporary art MA and witnessing the ‘pedagogical turn’ in the contemporary art world. I think the overlap of artistic experience and younger minds is a winning combination. From the very beginning I could sense how substantial Mobile Art School might become, as education systems will always be in constant need of attention and reinvention, both from inside and outside the system.

AB: How do you approach schools and foster partnerships?

JG: Sometimes just cold calling. All it takes is one person – a principal or a teacher, for example – to provide a foothold for the project to be welcomed into a school. I’ve also been introduced to schools via arts festivals, other curators, arts practitioners and arts organisations. A project’s success can generate momentum. Wicklow County Council have been incredibly supportive of the vision and we are now formalising plans for our partnership to move forward from one school into another later this year.

AB: You’ve described your approach as being ‘triadic’: based on relationships between curator, artist and student. How does this differ from established artist-in-residence programmes in schools?

JG: My aim is to experiment with how the role of the curator can encourage a mutually beneficial conduit between students and artists.

The goal is a sharing of processes that highlights vital links between artistic research and students’ potential as inventive learners. The way that I run my projects is based on my own professional interests in contemporary art practices, generally emphasising a sustained level of research and experimentation along with output. When the students engage – not only with an artist but an artist in relation to a curator (in an active working dynamic) – they begin to understand the real world of artistic production and all the relationships that make up our professional community. It dispels the notion of artists in the ivory tower.

AB: Can you cite a specific example?

JG: ‘The Artist Stays’ was a strand of the Mobile Art School that comprised a kind of artist’s residency. Working with Rhona Byrne in St Catherines National School in Rush, Co. Dublin was the first instance of this programme. During 2013 and 2014, over 30 weeks Rhona developed a close relationship with over 60 students through conducting research, building a studio and producing work both through the studio and within a temporary outdoor sculpture garden.

Rhona was chosen because of her approach to materials, site and context, and the variety of forms of practice in her work, which can be both playful and quite formal. Rhona really challenged the students to think through concepts and processes that were rooted in the day-to-day forms of practical work that they explored together.

As Rhona expressed to me in some of her feedback, the impact of the project is still sinking in. Working with Rhona was an amazing experience; her confident approach to working with the school allowed me to devote some of my time to developing sensitive strategies for evaluating the residency via a series of short films. These are proving

quite formative in moving my work on to the next stage.

AB: Watching the film of the students working with Rhona it’s evident that they are engaged not only in the art curriculum but also in cross-curricular learning. The students describe how their investigations require the use of maths for measuring, or the observation of plants and animals when engaging with land art projects …

JG: There are inherent links between artistic research and various elements of existing school curriculum. I witnessed this through almost every stage of the development of the Mobile Art School project and received confirmation from principals, teachers and students. I think it’s interesting to think of how these existing elements of the curriculum in turn prepare the students to think about art in different ways. I think it is important to emphasise not only art for art’s sake, but art as a subject matter and mode of expression through which students’ existing skill sets (and individual interests) might evolve well beyond the opportunities provided in the core curriculum that they experience as a given.

AB: ‘The Artist Visits’ project, with Stephen Brandes, moved away from emphasising technical drawing skills towards discovering creative ways of problem solving when shaping an artwork …

JG: ‘The Artist Visits’ was a workshop programme that Mobile Art School initiated initiated in two schools. The first iteration in 2012 explored various artistic media and featured workshops with Sven Anderson, Michelle Browne, Felicity Clear, Mark Garry, Emma Haugh, Vera Klute, Ruth Lyons, Isabel Nolan and Tamarin Norwood. The second instance , titled ‘The Thinking Hand’, was based on different approaches to drawing and included workshops with John Beattie, Stephen Brandes, Gabhann Dunne, Jane Fogarty, Vanesa Donoso-Lopez and Vera Klute.

Stephen’s workshop focused on breaking rules and what makes things humourous. One of the activities in his workshop was using pins to poke tiny holes in the skins of bananas – turning a familiar object into a new surface through which to discover a new form of drawing.

AB: Your most recent project involves two artists working with transition year students at Blessington Community College, Co. Wicklow…

JG: I invited Sven Anderson and John Beattie to take part in two parallel six-week residencies in Blessington Community College as part of the Thinking Visual programme initiated by Wicklow Co. Council and supported by the Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray – that commenced in September 2014. At the outset the residencies were designed to encourage participating students to re-imagine the potential of their school as a site for artistic research and production.

John worked with the students to explore the apparatus of the camera, developing a film where the students took roles as the producers, directors, cast and crew. The output was a really beautiful two-minute film made collaboratively with the students and shot all over the school.

Sven worked with the students through a series of projects and interventions based on sound art. This led to a collaboration where an outdoor sound installation was created and mounted overhead in the passageway connecting two school buildings. The sound installation will be active for several months, providing the students with a chance

AB: How are your projects funded?

JG: I’ve been fortunate enough to develop funding in collaboration with participating schools, county councils, arts festivals (such as TULCA) and through various Arts Council awards. My definition of support extends beyond financial backing to include establishing meaningful opportunities for exchange. How these projects are evaluated and what they represent in relation to shared art-in-education goals is important.

To this end, I’ve been working towards developing more formal links to teacher training education, (sometimes collaboratively, for example with independent educational curator Katy Fitzpatrick and Dr Aislinn O’Donnell, Lecturer in Philosophy of Education, Mary Immaculate College (University of Limerick), as well as securing a research residency through Rua Red, which will begin in the near future. I’m also looking to develop more substantial long-term partnerships through initiatives such as the Creative European Cooperation Projects.

AB: The Arts Rich School initiative, launched in 2013 by the Department of Arts Heritage and the Gaeltacht, plans to incentivise and recognise primary and secondary schools which make the arts a key part of school life. Kids’ Own’s Arts in Education Portal will aid the sharing of quality resources and information. Do you see initiatives like these providing more opportunities for your projects?

JG: Yes, any initiative – be that governmental or grass-roots – that is looking to reflect the voices of schools, teachers, artists or cultural practitioners should be listened to. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the Portal develops. I would love to get more involved in these discussions as they emerge.

AB: Are there any international projects that have contributed to the evolution of Mobile Art School?

JG: I’d certainly cite elements of the Room 13 residential programme developed in Scotland or the Reggio Emilia approach developed in Italy.

I’ve also been influenced by various artists’ practices. Recently I found resonances in projects by Stine Marie Jacobsen, Adelita Husney-Bey, Priscilla Fernandes, Simon Starling’s Mobile Academy and Olafur Eliasson’s Institut für Raumexperimente. There’s always something going on; for example I should be in Berlin right now at the ‘Artists’ Organisations International Conference’ as it has such a strong educational focus. Later this year, Node Centre, also in Berlin, is running a curatorial programme focused on developing strategies that put art thinking to practical and beneficial uses in the educational field.

At the same time, I feel that what I’m working towards here in Ireland is quite unique. The strength of Mobile Art School and my other projects is that it’s free – there is no other example for something that works this way. It seeks to remain mobile and fluid within a group of active, practicing artists. I believe in ensuring that this platform is used to enable artists who might not have any interest in art-in-education or teaching on a more formal level, to discover a forum for interfacing with this younger audience. And the curatorial framework provides the school with a secure format, leaving the participating artists free to work naturally. The artist is not placed as a teacher – they are placed as an artist, as themselves.

Jennie Guy is a curator and an artist whose practice has recently focused on developing new modes of arts in education. Anne Bradley is a primary school teacher with a background in art practice. She is interested in how artists as self-directed learners can influence teaching and learning and in how the diversity of current art practice can enrich cross-curricular learning.

Note 1. Together with curator Cleo Fagan, Jennie Guy founded and curated Mobile Art School between 2011 and early 2015, a framework that explored different forms of residency and workshop-based programmes, placing contemporary artists within primary and secondary schools. Jennie is now developing a new project structure that extends from and beyond Mobile Art School, by complementing these existing methods with an increased focus on research and publication, emerging through a series of partnerships in 2015.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

17

Gallery profile

Installation view ‘Soundings’ Gallery space at DLR LexIcon, 2015

Capturing Creator / Participants KENNETH REDMOND talks to VAI about DLR ARTS OFFICE ABOUT THE NEW DÚN LAOGHAIRERATHDOWN COUNTY MUNICIPAL GALLERY HOUSED IN THE LEXICON LIBRARY AND CULTURAL CENTRE.

Installation view ‘Soundings’ Gallery space at DLR LexIcon, 2015

DLR LexIcon, photo by Dennis Gilbert

dlr LexIcon, Dún Laoghaire’s new library and cultural centre has been widely hailed as an architectural masterpiece. The 6,520m2 building, designed by Cork-based architects Carr, Cotter & Naessens, is stunning inside and out. Oriented perpendicular to the coastline, the LexIcon’s external form is an imposing wedge-like shape, surrounded by crisply-executed hard and soft landscaping that meld it seamlessly into the town’s urban context. Inside, it’s no exaggeration to describe its lofty spaces as cathedral-like. Massive v-shaped concrete roof beams – spanning up to 15m – have all the drama of the sweeping vaults of gothic edifices like Chartres.

The building hasn’t been without controversy – many baulked at the €36.6 million build cost in these times of austerity. However, its defenders cite the sheer bravura and excellence of the architecture and the fact that it is a public resource dedicated to accessing knowledge as a rebuttal to the critics.

DLR LexIcon houses a new visual arts venue, the Dún LaoghaireRathdown County Municipal Gallery, programmed by the DLR Arts Office. I recently met with Kenneth Redmond, DLR’s Arts Officer, to discuss the programming, facilities and policy relating to the space, and to explore how the gallery stands in relation to the context of the LexIcon.

We began by talking about the technical specifications of the gallery and how they compared to national and international best practice guidelines. In 2006 DLR Arts Office commissioned Visual Artists Ireland to produce Visual Arts Exhibition Space Design Considerations, which covered in detail subjects such as: the shape and form of the space (including floor and wall treatments), environmental controls, security, lighting, storage / handling and access.

While Redmond stressed that the Arts Office don’t see the gallery as a stand alone pristine ‘white cube’ cut off from the library, the space

is none the less impressive, and holds its own within the body of the leviathan-like LexIcon. It is a long rectangular white space (approximately 27 x 5.8m), utilitarian and flexible. Visual distractions, where possible, have been kept to the minimum. Data and power cabling are discreetly ported in the floor and an integrated PA system for talks and for video and sound works will be soon be installed.

The VAI document specified a continuous poured concrete floor, but, as Redmond explained, it wouldn’t have been possible to implement this due to weight loading considerations. Instead the gallery floor is consistent with the wooden floor treatments in the rest of the building, but with the addition of a tough and washable surface. Lighting is a mixture of wall washing and spot illumination. A neighbouring project room of similar size also augments the Municipal Gallery. The Arts Office’s own workspace is located just below the project room.

One small niggle is that the gallery floor is punctuated by a number of circular manhole covers. They’re subtly indicated and when they occur elsewhere in the voluminous building they are hardly visible. But in this space for focused visual contemplation, they seem more obvious. Their inclusion was unavoidable, unfortunately, as they provide essential service access. On the plus side, I was intrigued to learn that there was almost standing room in the manholes – perhaps an artist could use them to address the sub-strata of the gallery?

A learning-based ethos is integral to the venue’s exhibition programme. For each show a bespoke learning programme will be planned and designed in tandem with the aims and themes of the exhibition. For example, ‘Soundings – Collective memories of the sea’ (13 December 2014 – 24 January 2015) – curated by artist Michael McLoughlin and featuring work by Gary Coyle, Anthony Haughey, Emma Johnston, Sabina Mac Mahon, Julie Merriman and Lisa Reburn – was animated by talks, workshops, screenings and performances

offering further opportunities to explore and engage with local maritime themes. For the project room, Dún Laoghaire RNLI crew members created a video piece and a series of photographs.

Returning to the technical aspects of the gallery, Redmond pointed out that the building’s architects had sensitively and sensibly addressed delivery and storage issues. The gallery’s loading bay, which can accept works up to 2.30m high x 1.9m wide, is directly adjacent to the gallery and its storage area. While the gallery and storage area don’t offer conservation levels of climate control, they share the same environmental conditions as rest of the LexIcon building. Professional technicians are hired in for the handling and installation of each show, and standard museum procedures such as condition reports are followed.

The policy document for the Municipal Gallery outlines how the venue will host a diverse annual programme, planned up to 18 months in advance, comprising on average 6 exhibitions a year: half derived from open-calls and half originated from the arts office. The programme will encompass commissioned exhibition programmes focusing on the county, its culture and sense of place, and touring exhibitions of national interest. Panels of peer selectors will judge the open calls (artists, curators and arts office staff). Unsolicited exhibition proposals will not be accepted.

Following ‘Soundings’, the next exhibition will be the ‘Home’ open submission show, which has been selected by Mark St. John Ellis of Nag Gallery, Dublin. After this there will be an exhibition showcasing the work of senior RHA artists based in the county. Over the summer months, the venue will feature a touring presentation of Matisse lithographs and a curated exhibition exploring the county art collection.

The autumn slot is for an exhibition selected from open submission; the callout to artists, curators, institutions, local groups and other interested parties will go out soon. 2015 will close with a show drawing on the Office of Public Works (OPW) State Art Collection, derived from a collaboration between artist-curator Claire Halpin and older people from Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County. This open call opportunity was advertised in October 2014. The exhibition is a partnership between the Arts Office and the OPW. Looking further ahead, in early 2016 the gallery will host the first of what is hoped will become a regular series of commissioned exhibitions, offering artists the opportunity to create a new body of work with curatorial support. This will also be advertised as an open call opportunity.

Above all, Redmond stressed that the Arts Office’s priority is to work with communities of interest to create exhibitions. As the gallery policy document puts it, “... the aim of the Municipal Gallery programme at DLR LexIcon is to provide opportunities for people of all ages to engage with the arts as creators, spectators and participants”.1 Ongoing audience / attendance research and consultation with relevant stakeholders will also further inform programming and policy development for the venue.

Crucially, with such an emphasis on learning-based programming, Redmond underlined DLR Arts Office’s commitment to paying artists a good rate for exhibition fees and for additional work such as talks and workshops, a policy that DLR Arts Office has always maintained.

While the DLR Arts Office team has a variety of experience and collectively devise and manage the programme, Redmond explained that they do not see themselves as curators, but programmers. As the policy document for the gallery states, “curators, artists, cultural partners, national cultural institutions, key partner organisations and arts education specialists will be consulted as required”.2 The gallery’s location, in the pulsing heart of the LexIcon, is for Redmond is a vital plus point. It offers great opportunities to ‘capture’ audiences via the host venue’s footfall. In this way, the Municipal Gallery is a physical manifestation of the core tenents of the Arts Offices policy: to reach and develop new audiences in a non-didactic and open way. It seems so far to be a very successful strategy. The preview opening of the inaugural exhibition ‘Soundings’ attracted 1400 visitors on Culture Night (19 September 2014) and by the close of the show on Saturday 24 January, it had attracted 23,752 additional visitors.

Jason Oakley, VAI Publications Manager.

Notes 1. Municipal Gallery Programming Policy 2015 – 2016, dlrcoco.ie/arts 2. Ibid.

18

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

PUBLIC ART: CASE STUDY

Risk & Trust CLIODHNA SHAFFREY INTERVIEWS MARIE BRETT ABOUT HER PROJECT ‘AMULET’ (2009 – 2015), WHICH EXPLORES THE EXPERIENCE OF INFANT LOSS.

Marie Brett, ‘Anamnesis’, The LAB Gallery, Dublin, 16 January – 28 March 2015. Photo: Nic Piper

Cliodhna Shaffrey: Loss and human suffering is the subject you explore in the ‘Amulet’ project. Here, you directly involved a group of bereaved parents who have suffered pregnancy and infant loss.

You have described the overall project as one “that exists on the pivot of risk and trust”. How do you enter this difficult territory as an artist? How do you begin?

Marie Brett: I’m interested in how artwork can make space for new thinking and conversations about this difficult territory. For ‘Amulet’ I began with this question: how do we make the ethereal concept of loss physical? I was researching amulets at Oxford University Pitt Rivers Museum and was invited to lead a research residency at Cork University Maternity Hospital (November 2009 – March 2011). Questions arose about memorial markers and Ireland’s death rituals surrounding infant mortality. I invited bereaved parents to further inform and influence me in the making of a new work exploring these questions. An invitation such as this demands clarity of intent and acceptance of the inherent pivot of risk and trust, as the stakes are high on both sides.

CS: In the LAB, Dublin, which is currently hosting this exhibition (as part of a visual arts touring award), a round table session brought together a range of people involved in the project.1 Cathy Quinn, Consultant Midwife in Perinatal Bereavement, spoke of ‘Amulet’ as being “more than an artwork”. Clearly she was as moved by the whole process (in which she played an important supportive part), as much as by its outcome as an artwork. But how might you respond to this comment – do you see ‘Amulet’ as more than an artwork?

MB: I don’t claim that ‘Amulet’ is ‘more than an artwork’; you’re right though, many others have said that it possesses a cathartic agency, educational influence and insight for change (inherent in both process and outcome). As an artist, I’m aware of the need to be cognisant and mindful of such complexities in my practice, while not aligning with therapeutic or healing agendas, or modes of empowerment, pedagogy or campaign.

CS: ‘Amulet’ is an artwork that involves a whole participatory process. Can you perhaps describe some of the challenges that were faced and decisions that were made in creating this work?

MB: I was always clear that I would hold authorship, and negotiated this decision with participants at the onset. For the artwork, it was really important to adopt a neutral and factual viewpoint; I was aware of the potential to overwhelm or patronise and the need to be mindful of sentimentality. I continually pared back and prioritised a minimal, almost austere aesthetic. It was important that the artwork had a rawness without being sensational. A key challenge was to include something from each parent’s gifted material. Also, each family didn’t know what form the artwork would take, meaning that there was always the potential that they would ask to withdraw their contribution even once the work was made. I had to think very carefully about honouring

Marie Brett ‘Anamnesis’ The Atrium, Cork City Hall. 13 Oct - 28 Nov 2014. Photo: Jedrzej Niezgoda

the bereaved families’ participation in balance with my needs as an artist and equity in the artwork. This is interesting but tricky territory to tread.

CS: I am interested in how you have realised the final work: as photographic images representing the amulets, rather than presenting the objects themselves. These are accompanied by audio clips of the parents speaking and elegantly presented on small, neat white desks. I am interested in the interplay you have set up, which asks for an intimate engagement by the viewer / listener, where the artwork itself acts as representation or translation of grief.

MB: I realised early on that to borrow the actual objects (the families’ amulets) wouldn’t work for several reasons. Not only is the ‘ask’ too invasive in an already charged and highly sensitive context but ‘Amulet’ isn’t an archival repository for precious originals; neither is it reaching for a physical resonance. Rather the work is about trace and ideas of a signifier. I was interested in the photographic images as abstracted signifiers to lure the viewer into a close interplay, inviting an intimate engagement where the viewer would sit and listen (using headphones) to an unknown element: the bereaved parent’s voice talking about the ‘amuletic’ object and its relation to their loss.

CS: The work draws us into someone else’s personal and sad story, and in doing so seems to have the capacity to go beyond the individual stories and provoke consideration of how this topic – miscarriage and infant death – has remained a hidden subject, not freely discussed in Irish society. Can you discuss the responsibilities you felt in bringing this often-private subject into the public arena?

MB: It was important for ‘Amulet’ to go beyond the individual’s story, to move from the intensely private into a collective public arena. I aimed for the artwork to take the viewer to a new place of thinking, of new conversation, to break taboos and ask questions, but not to provide answers. While the subject of pregnancy and infant loss remains hidden and stigmatised in Irish society, ‘Amulet’ isn’t a campaign tool.

CS: ‘Amulet’ was a huge undertaking by any standard. It involved a number of partners around Ireland: Cork University Hospital, University Maternity Hospital Limerick, Waterford Regional Hospital, CREATE, Waterford Healing Arts Trust and the Social Health Education Project. It has gained support from the Arts Council through bursaries and a Visual Arts Touring Award.2 These bring in another tier of partners in the exhibiting galleries. What have you learnt about organising and undertaking a project of such scale? How were you supported through the process?

MB: I’ve learnt to accept that time is a vital component, especially when partnering with a number of organisations each juggling differing agendas and needs. I also realised the importance of leading, be flexible, voicing my artistic needs, to negotiate and not to be so shy in asking for

help. Other professionals have been very generous with their advice, which has been a great support. Producing a project of such scale was a huge organisational undertaking, supported partly by an advisory steering group and freelance specialists. Funding enabled me to produce and present the work to high standard, to be able to document it well and to invite other artists to make creative responses to the work, which was brilliant. A structure of in-kind support facilitated counselling as needed, developmental discussion of the ‘what ifs’ and time for reflection.

CS: At the start, did you imagine that ‘Amulet’ would become such a large-scale project, or did it develop momentum over time?

MB: ‘Amulet’ developed its own momentum over time. It started in Cork and spread nationally.

CS: At what point did you decide to tour the work?

MB: To coincide with the first exhibition of ‘Amulet’ at Sirius Arts Centre (7 March –1 April 2013), I organised a seminar at the Crawford Art Gallery to discuss the work from a variety of perspectives. During this event I met people from various settings and different parts of the country who had an interest in the work. This sowed the seed, as I realised there was potential to develop new partnerships for a tour and also means to exhibit the work in different contexts.

CS: How has the work changed when it’s been shown in different contexts? Has the touring led to adaptation or new elements at the different gallery sites? For example, at the LAB on the opening night, you invited a number of performance artists to respond to the work with new performance pieces.

MB: Yes the work has changed quite a bit during the tour, both physically and in relation to the different contexts. At Galway Arts Centre (1 – 29 August 2014), the work was shown in darkness – adapting each piece to include an individual spotlight. At University Maternity Hospital, Limerick (25 – 26 September 2014) the work included a ‘response / chill space’ staffed by hospital personnel. At Cork City Council’s atrium (13 October – 28 November 2014), the work was positioned in front of a large glazed wall facing the street, inside an extremely busy public foyer.

This bustling civic context shifted the work from an intimate and elective viewing experience to a highly public and potentially unintended viewing experience.

Alongside these distinct elements in each different exhibition site, a number of artists responded to the work with written and live performance pieces. These new works in turn prompted further questions, conversations and entry points to ‘Amulet’, providing new layers of meaning to the work. amulets.ie / mariebrett.ie Notes 1. ‘ The Amulet: Exploring Infant Loss’ (16 January – 28 March 2015), The LAB Gallery, Dublin, with round table discussion (16 January) 2. The ‘Amulet’ exhibition tour is funded through the Arts Council Touring and Dissemination of Work Award 2014

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Critique Supplement Edition 18: March – April 2015

Teresa Gillespie ‘below explanation (clocks stop at 3pm and existence continues)’ Wexford Arts Centre 12 January – 7 February 2015

“Phenomenology fails to provide a guaranteed tether to the world and its things. The relationship between consciousness and content remains to be worked out.”

Arthur C. Danto1

The annual Emerging Visual Artist Award (EVAA) is one of the most sought-after visual art opportunities in the country. The winning artist is awarded €5,000 and a solo show at Wexford Arts Centre (WAC). As the 99% majority of visual artists in Ireland could be categorised as ‘emerging’ the profile of artists who do

Teresa Gillespie, below explanation (clocks stop at 3pm and existence continues), mixed media with found objects and video, 2014/15

Teresa Gillespie, below explanation (clocks stop at 3pm and existence continues), mixed media with found objects and video, 2014/15

Teresa Gillespie, below explanation (clocks stop at 3pm and existence continues), mixed media with found objects and video, 2014/15

apply is most likely very colourful.

The profiles of EVAA recipients suggest that the term emerging applies to new and relatively young artists. Since 2006, when Seamus Nolan was the inaugural winner, three male and six female artists have taken home the award. Yes, strange to see the gender imbalance swaying the other way for a change in an art context. The last five artists to win the award have been female. A turning of the tide perhaps?

Just over a year after receiving the award in 2013, Teresa Gillespie’s resulting solo exhibition at WAC is a sprawling shag pile of heavily textured and layered materialism. The theory behind the art is derived from Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical novel Nausea (1939), a makeshift narrative delivered as a series of diary entries by a protagonist who one day pulls the scab off existence to find nothingness underneath. This old existential chestnut (a chestnut tree root being the main visual maker of nausea in Nausea) originates in Sartre’s proposition that “existence precedes essence”. In one particularly existential moment the protagonist, Roquentin, observes that “the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses”.2 And this is what Gillespie gives you in both galleries at WAC. Downstairs in the main gallery, among visual impressions of sinuous intestines and monastically draped and bound bodies, floor-bound

monstrous masses the size of a Pilates ball are hermetically sealed in an insert cast of folded material.

Throughout, the artist’s stagecraft alternates between hard representational props and soft sculpture: Gillespie’s art is the love child of Claes Oldenburg and Eva Hesse. In another memorable instance, a chair peeks out from underneath a red velvet curtain attached to a confessional-like timber compartment.

Standing on one leg, the chair bears the weight of a pregnancy bump made of hardened clay. Amongst these stillborn manifestations of swollen beginnings or endings (depending on your existential bent) a projected film work shows the camera lens drunkenly scanning and fondling up-close textures. If inanimate objects could make sex tapes then this is how they would look.

There is more of the same upstairs in gallery two, where the windowless and artificially-lit ambience lends itself better to Gillespie’s formalism.

Further, the smaller and more intimate space seems to foster greater consideration with regard to display, where wall decoration comes in the form of a framed primordial ‘mud-scape’.

However, what held my attention for repeated viewings upstairs is the single film work. It comes closest to what, in many respects, is Gillespie’s visual re-description of Nausea, especially how Danto describes the book as “a series of almost philosophical still lifes, the nearest artistic predecessor being, perhaps, Chardin, where the humblest objects – a pitcher, an egg – are rendered eloquent in their ordinariness and metaphysical in their presence”.3 Gillespie’s art positions the body and consciousness, the terrestrial and the celestial, the real and the representational in close proximity.

These intimate embraces of opposites collaborate to elicit a perceived density to her art objects. This may also explain why the language and the references that the artist uses to theoretically situate her work are equally dense. Frustratingly, this density creates a verbal impasse for the observer, like those experienced

by Roquentin in Nausea: “things are divorced from their names”.4 Overall, there is nothing attractive or repulsive, spectacular or banal at WAC. The mind’s eye wanders over the manifold textures that both conceal and give shape to the mutable floor-bound furniture. However, the exhibition as a whole is insidiously latent, waiting in hiding for the observer to activate the landscape with their own psychological baggage. Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘the fold’ comes to mind: “the coils of matter, and the folds of the soul”. There are also visual nods to that other philosophical chestnut ‘abjection’ at WAC. That said, Gillespie’s art is not the tomato and chocolate sauce abjection of Paul McCarthy. Rather, it is between beauty and the beast that Gillespie leads the observer, down the rabbit hole of existential angst and phenomenological blockage.

James Merrigan is an artist and art critic at billionjournal.com.

Notes 1. Arthur C. Danto, Nausea and Noesis: Some Philosophical Problems for Sartre, October, Vol. 18 (Autumn 1981), p. 18 2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, (trans.) Lloyd Alexander, New Directions, New York, 1969 3. Danto, op. cit., p. 6 4. Sartre, op. cit.

5. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, (trans.) Jonathan Strauss, Yale French Studies, No. 80, 1991, p. 227

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet Critique Supplement

March – April 2015

Thomas Brezing ‘The Road is Paved with Good Intentions’ Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda 15 January – 28 February

Thomas Brezing, installation view of The Road is Paved with Good Intentions, Droichead Arts Centre

There are coincidences at play in my encounter with Thomas Brezing’s exhibition at the Droichead Arts Centre. The central topic is roadkill, and both this and its location have personal resonance. In 2007, when my father was in his final weeks, I decamped to nearby Duleek, driving in and out of the hospital in Drogheda. Returning to base one evening, the headlights fell on the aftermath of an encounter between a car and a dog, the flattened remains serving each subsequent day to portend impending loss.

I take the familiar route to Drogheda, braving the associations. As it happens, any apprehension about the exhibition is misplaced. Instead of a weighty treatise on the dangers of driving too quickly, what unveils itself is something altogether quirkier, and, in its union of art, craft and social conscience, life affirming. The gallery seems smaller and more intimate than it did on my last encounter. In it, Brezing has created a world made of recycled materials fashioned into building blocks from which to materialise his vision. There are 10 individual entities, some with outlying elements that help to forge a cohesive whole. Like a family, each is distinct, yet they share genetic features.

The main focus is The Road Road. Fabricated from recycled, compressed newspaper bricks, it traverses the floor towards the incoming visitor, widening to accentuate perspective and double as a stage setting for a scattering of bizarre artifacts. These include three composite creatures representing animals striving to evolve fast enough to respond to the revved-up pace of the humans around them. A ‘stag’, with mannequin hands for feet, cowers, awaiting annihilation; a comic ‘sheep’ teeters on splayed legs that terminate in toddler shoes, while a suspended figure with a bird’s beak nose evokes the sacrificial.

Bouquets of weathered synthetic flowers in baskets, pots and randomly strewn, forge connections to graveyard paraphernalia, while crushed fragments of cuddly toys – mainly bunny ears and faces – bear testament to a consequence of our speedy lifestyles.

Brezing invests time in an idea, whether expressed in layers through paint, as in the diptych Breathing My Father In, or by a growing variety of other means. The Road had its inception on a family holiday in 2010 during which a stretch of tarmac brought multiple encounters with the remains of rabbits killed trying to cross. They are captured in grizzly photographs on the artist’s website, but are not part of this exhibition.1 Instead he has mounted a

response that hints at its message rather than rams it home. (There is a possible example of roadkill in The Blind Rush of Time Time: a disheveled blackbird encased in resin alongside a mobile phone. The victim of a preoccupied driver perhaps?)

The Road also features mini versions of Brezing’s alter ego Carpet Man, a creation inspired by the experience of sleeping rolled up in carpet in his studio; a sort of ‘anti-hero’ response to boom-time extravagance. Donning a carpet tube, head in, limbs out, carrying a battered suitcase, he takes art to rundown, abandoned places, fostering an aesthetic influenced by the writer Cormac McCarthy. On opening night, he contributed a performance piece, issuing forth hundreds of plastic bottle tops that now form a coloured mound alongside the other exhibits.

Mini Carpet Men also appear in At Night I Sleep, During the Day I Dream, with its sepia patchwork painstakingly constructed from hundreds of used square teabags, the varied washes of tea-stain conspiring to beauty. Round teabags are assembled into forms reminiscent of sea urchins, the totality embodying, for Brezing, all of the conversations whetted by the drinking of tea.

In Her Loneliness Begins to Cry Out Out, newspaper brickwork is fringed with birds’ nests crafted from a palette of fishing-net fragments and populated by golf-ball ‘eggs’. In their midst a painted mannequin sprouts twigs adorned with nesting birds, while a dead seagull lies prostrate, its belly and mouth stuffed with colourful debris – a comment on the cost to wildlife of discarded plastic. These disparate elements are linked by a book attached low to the wall, falling open on passage about the wound caused by fathers who fail to validate their sons. This is responsibility as another road paved with good intentions, but falling short with devastating results.

This latest offering by Thomas Brezing is an earnest and lovingly wrought showing from an artist with a strong and established aesthetic and an admirable lightness of touch. It reaffirms the importance of the act of making and the validity of personal vision. Trained in metalwork and self-taught in the visual arts, his work oozes freedom. Long may it last.

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

Note 1. thomasbrezing.weebly.com/family-on-the-road.html

Sabina Mac Mahon ‘An Ulaid – South Down Society of Modern Art’ Belfast Exposed and Queen Street Studios, Belfast 16 January – 28 February

Sabina McMahon, ‘An Ulaid – South Down Society of Modern Art’ installation view, QSS Gallery, photo by Tony Corey.

Maimie Campbell, The Death of Cúchulainn, 1929, tempera on board 67 x 55 cm

SABInA Mac Mahon’s research project, An Ulaid – South Down Society of Modern Art, is displayed in two different venues in Belfast: Belfast Exposed Photography and Queen Street Studios & Gallery.

Belfast Exposed’s downstairs gallery bears all the familiar hallmarks of a museum-based show, in which factual information and a collection of artefacts are utilised to construct characters and tell a story. The open layout – vitrines, free-standing and wallmounted display cases, framed archival photographs and an abundance of wall panels – provides detailed information on a group of seven artists: Maimie Campbell, Pauline Doyle, Edward Hollywood, Sarah Leonard, Iris McAragh, Heber O’Neill and Thomas Pettit, who co-founded the South Down Society of Modern Art in rural Northern Ireland in 1927.

Mac Mahon has included an incredible amount of detail in the texts incorporated in the exhibition, which appear to be thoroughly researched and chart the formation of the group, their inspirations, travels, influences, styles, output and eventual decline in 1930. Hand-written postcards, aged and frayed, contain correspondence between the members whilst abroad. Black and white photographs show a group of smiling young artists and the spaces and places where they grew up and in which their meetings and art making took place. Even the biscuit tin in which Mac Mahon found the memorabilia that initiated her research project sits on a plinth under a protective case.

None of the actual artworks made by the Society are displayed at Belfast Exposed, but are presented separately at Queen Street Studios: paintings and drawings inspired by Fauvism, Cubism, Pointillism and other styles that the group’s members encountered when travelling and studying on the continent. In Mac Mahon’s own words, “[their work] generally speaking, approaches the standard of enthusiastic amateurs rather than that of professional artists”. The works produced in the three-year lifespan of the group are unexceptional and their story, though wellillustrated, is largely uneventful – no doubt mirroring the trajectory of so many other groups that didn’t quite make art history: wealthy middle class artists who, after a grand tour, became inspired to replicate the famous works and styles they so admired, but never quite managed to surpass them.

Mac Mahon has faithfully recounted their tale and the layout of the show at Belfast Exposed guides you clearly around the displays and objects as they unfold from beginning to end. The gallery’s printed material, however, subtly hints at a different story. It does not present a standard archive show of a group of Northern Irish artists that nobody (remarkably, really) has ever heard of, but also states that the exhibition is

“a speculative exercise, which playfully explores photography’s relationship to truth and its role in the illustration and imagining of history”. Alarm bells may be triggered by these words in the average viewer. In fact, none of it is real.

What happens after the ‘unveiling’, when fact turns into fiction, and when the curtain is drawn back and the wizard behind it is revealed? Some will view it and leave without discovering the truth. Others will feel deceived, or forced to ask the exasperating question: ‘So what now?’ Some, like me, may have already realised in their initial experience of the show that something was amiss (before it had even opened, in fact, when those ‘warning bell’ words stood out in the press release and triggered a suspicious feeling of construct).

If you like being fooled, and enjoy the deftness of Mac Mahon’s writing and replication, you will have found the unveiling amusing and clever. If you are interested in how galleries and other arts institutions present history, fact and truth, then Mac Mahon’s thorough knowledge of museum and gallery displays (she is currently undertaking an MA in Museum Studies) evidenced in this show will impress.

For me, this exhibition really started to function as a result of the conversations I had with others about it. These included: questions surrounding belief systems present in the everyday and how we are sometimes convinced by ‘evidence’ that supports them. The power of museums when presenting history as entertainment and the responsibility that galleries have when knowingly ‘misleading’ their viewers (something that Belfast Exposed have been careful about: all the clues are presented clearly, and the gallery invigilators have been advised to discuss the fictional elements of the show when engaging with visitors).

Mac Mahon is no doubt acutely aware of the specific context of Northern Ireland, and its plural histories. After all, this is a place where, in 2010, the then culture minister Nelson McCausland publicly urged the Ulster Museum to put on exhibits acknowledging that the world was made only several thousand years ago, in order to “reflect the views of all the people in Northern Ireland in all its richness and diversity”. 1 Take from it what you will, but Sabina Mac Mahon’s research project ‘An Ulaid – South Down Society of Modern Art’, above demonstrating the careful fabrication of an imagined history of art, has also provided sufficient food for thought.

Alissa Kleist is a Belfast-based curator. note 1. Henry McDonald, ‘Northern Ireland minister calls on Ulster Museum to promote creationism’, the Guardian, Wednesday 26 May 2010

march – April 2015

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet CriTique SupplemeNT

‘Cosmic Dust’ ViSuAl, Centre For Contemporary Art, Carlow 21 January – 17 may

Hugh Frazer ‘Connect’ The Doorway Gallery, Dublin 5 – 26 February What is the purpose of a title? We give people titles, ostensibly to proclaim their professional status, possibly to endow or command prestige. We give books titles to attract readers, encapsulate the story, indicate the genre. We attach titles to works of art, to identify them (Untitled Untitled II; Untitled II II), to help the viewer make sense of them (Sunset Sunset over Sandymount Sandymount), to suggest a response (Melancholy), to provoke (What’ya What’ya looking at? at?).

All 16 works in Hugh Frazer’s solo exhibition at the Doorway Gallery are entitled Meditation, each distinguished simply by a Roman numeral. The works themselves share a considerable degree of identicalness. In every case they show a collection of everyday – or what was once everyday – crockery: jugs, bowls, bottles, a box, earthenware jars. In each painting, a number of these is placed in a formal arrangement on a plain surface suggesting a table, with a plain background suggesting a wall. Light comes from one side – mostly left, occasionally right – casting shadows across the table and wall.

The palette is limited, subdued. The table, if it is a table, is almost always in the blue-purple hues; the wall, if it is a wall, in the ochres. Once or twice, these colour combinations are transposed. The items are in earthy tones, with some blue, green, grey, off-white.

There is a strong sense of similarity, bordering on sameness.

This is risky. Will the viewer be bored, put off, alienated by repetition? Will they stop looking after the third or fourth painting on the basis that, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all? All solo exhibitions must face this challenge, this possibility of the very essence of the creator’s uniqueness becoming a recurring, and therefore potentially overworked, motif. Frazer’s body of work in this exhibition seems, at first glance, to invite such a reaction more overtly than usual, an impression reinforced by the repetitive titles of the individual paintings.

Those who themselves paint may understand this compulsion to go back to the same theme. There is often something unresolved that drives an artist to dig deeper into their subject matter, a gut feeling that to push a theme to its limits is no longer a matter of choice, but of absolute need. But that imperative is not always obvious to the viewer – nor it is automatically acceptable to them.

Frazer’s work allows something a little more subtle to happen. Instead of resisting the repetition, the viewer may find themselves being intrigued by it.

‘Oh, there’s the little bowl I noticed earlier.’ ‘Oh, yes, that’s the same bottle, it’s just at a slightly different

Hugh Frazer, Meditation XV, oil on canvas, 50cm x 76cm

angle.’ ‘Hmm, the tones of the wall and the table are darker in this piece – maybe it was painted at a different time of day?’ Whether they verbalise it as such or not, the viewer becomes awakened to the fact that the painter is exploring, rather than merely representing – that in this group of paintings, the artist is examining, in depth and in detail, the demands of composition.

This in itself is interesting. It makes fundamental statements about the practice of painting. Shape, colour, form, light, contrast, tonal harmony – any one of Frazer’s Meditations could be a useful starting point for an exploration of these basic aspects of putting paint on canvas. But there is more to Frazer’s work than simply technique.

Because of, rather than despite, the repetitiveness of the subject matter and the limitedness of his palette, Frazer presents an entity in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The points he is making, albeit indirectly, about the artist’s practice are only discernible through careful comparison between the individual pieces. There is coherence but no linearity; the viewer can look at whichever piece or pieces they like, in whatever sequence they like. The reading of one painting is enhanced by the experience of another, but does not depend on it. The overall effect is strangely calming.

Now the issue of the titles takes on a new dimension. Now Meditation suggests a call to action rather than a description, a request that the viewer engage with the works in a more subjective way. The exhibition is like a secular stations of the cross, without a narrative element, but with the repetition that characterises ritual.

The implications are startling. Does this mean that any one of these paintings alone is not ‘enough’, that to fully appreciate the artist’s objective, the viewer needs to experience the body of work as a whole? And going further, what then is the purpose of a solo show? Is it to demonstrate range or restriction through a set of related, possibly interdependent, pieces, or a random selection of current work?

To return to an earlier theme, the clue in Frazer’s case may be in the exhibition title: ‘Connect’. Even more than ‘meditation’, this is a direct invitation to the viewer to participate. It tells them that true experience is not a matter of looking, distancing, removing oneself. To enjoy, understand and be edified by art, any art, not just Frazer’s, we have no choice but to engage.

Mary Catherine Nolan is a Dublin-based artist with a background in linguistics.

martin Healy, Aether, 2014, HD video, 11 minutes, installation view from ‘Cosmic Dust’ , ViSuAl, Carlow

“i’m getting nowhere with my prototype. This has not in the least hindered the outpouring of my imagination.” paul Scheerbart.1 Visual, Carlow comprises an assembly of glazed volumes raised on a concrete plinth. The designated ‘Centre For Contemporary Art’ contains gallery spaces of an uncommon scale and grandeur. In taking advantage of this setting curator Emma-Lucy O’Brien demonstrates an admirable restraint. A show of relatively subdued, minor key pleasures, ‘Cosmic Dust’ is consistently thought provoking, and one work in particular is outstanding.

The show also feels curiously anachronistic. It explores how art, science, and philosophy can “combine to offer a deeper understanding of the metaphysical nature of existence”, but the combination here straddles an evident time-lapse, with a selection of present day artists responding to, or being presented in the light of, intellectual innovations that are already a century old.2 Projected onto a foyer wall, the astronomers in George Melies’s La Voyage dans la Lune (1902) may push against gravity, but it is the filmmaker’s contemporaries, Austrian polymath Rudolf Steiner (1861 –1925) and German writer Paul Scheerbart (1863 – 1915), who do most of the show’s heavy lifting. Steiner is perhaps best known as the originator of the Waldorf (Steiner) education system, but his enthusiasms also included philosophy, architecture and social reforms. Scheerbart’s works include The Perpetual Motion Machine – The Story of an Invention (1910) and an influential architectural treatise, Glass Architecture, published in 1914.

A group of large coloured chalk drawings occupy too much of the gallery space here, but do provide a visual context for the remarkable Steiner and the cosmic thoughts he promoted. Opposite the bank of drawings, neatly slotted into the seat of a wooden bench, five small books contain examples of his esoteric writings. Book one includes a lecture on cosmosophy, followed by one on the even grander sounding, The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution. In contemporary parlance Steiner might be referred to as a bit of a nut-job, but he was a counterculturalguruofgenuineinsightandaccomplishments, though drawing, unfortunately, wasn’t one of them.

In the form of printed foldouts standing on small wooden shelves, Chris Fite-Wassalick presents correspondence between members of the intriguing Crystal Chain group, who were contemporaries of Paul Scheerbart influenced by his writings. I couldn’t decide if this was an actual correspondence or a fiction constructed by Fite-Wassalick and written in the guise of these long dead individuals. Extended

sequentially through separate locations in the gallery space, the work’s final excerpt complicated the issue further by suggesting that the documents were being held in a future archive, the historical records of ‘Garden Globe Allobeous in orbit of Harren’, circa 2122.

The Perpetual Motion Machine – The Story of an Invention is also something of a conundrum, variously described as a work of fiction in diary form, or a record of Scheerbart’s real attempts to invent the said machine. In Martin Healy’s video projection Aether, a model of Scheerbart’s device was placed inside a purpose-built set and filmed with meditative attention. A voice-over intoned, “We can never see the thing itself, only the effect it has on other things”, as a lone figure strides across a rocky shoreline. The figure stands and looks outwards (aa la Casper David Friedrich) contemplating “the ocean of universal energy” while the ‘aether’ in question remains out of sight, beyond the terrestrial sphere.

The titles of Mark Cullen’s diagrammatic pencil drawings refer to mandalas and star systems. Though precisely drawn, their variously coloured or monochromatic patterns feel curiously vague, as though caught between the priorities of function and art. Several of Brian King’s bronze and metal sculptures are arranged on a nearby plinth. Looking simultaneously ancient and futuristic, their totemlike forms also have a provisional air – despite their smooth heft – as if standing in for something rather than being the thing itself.

Ruth Lyons’s bowls carved from industrially mined salt could stand in for the tableware of a deity.

Arranged here and there, on the floor and on low platforms, their humble origins belie a relic-like demeanor. On the back wall a large painting by Anita Groener depicts lines of circuitous energy. A tiny monitor plays her delightfully animated drawing Somewhere Else. From its vantage point the earth could be glimpsed briefly through a dark ground of iridescent motes.

Unchurning contains thousands of sticks of white chalk arranged in a large band on the polished concrete floor. Perhaps four meters in diameter, Remco de Fouw’s work is reminiscent of similar works by Richard Long but is more complex. The sticks of white chalk stand upright, leaning against each other for support and tumbling over at the circle’s edges. Carrying allusions to science, art, myth and impermanence, this perfect blend of geometric entropy gives the exhibition its resounding note.

John Graham is an artist based in Dublin.

Notes 1. paul Scheerbart, Perpetual Motion – the Story of an Invention 2. ViSuAl programme, January – may 2015, p7

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

23

Art in public: profile

Seoidin O’Sullivan, Floating Dialogues, Graiguenamanagh, October 2014

The Future of Place HOLLIE KEARNS AND ROSIE LYNCH PROFILE ‘FORECAST’, THEIR YEARLONG PROJECT FOCUSED ON the KILKENNY TOWNS of CALLAN, CASTLECOMER, GRAIGUENAMANAGH, MOONCOIN AND THOMASTOWN. On an unexpectedly fine day in mid October 2014, along the banks of the river Barrow in Graiguenamanagh, Co. Kilkenny, artist Seoidin O’Sullivan and Graig Scouts Club launched ‘Floating Dialogues’, a temporary swimming platform built to facillitate a weekend of events concerned with future proofing and environmental change. The events were a response to the theme ‘Protect’ and in direct relation to Graiguenamanagh and its future as a town located along a river.

This series of events – a foraging walk with Mary White of Blackstairs Ecotrails, a riverside picnic, fantastical raft models made at the workshops with the Scouts – was part of our yearlong project titled ‘Forecast’, which aimed to “look anew at five towns in Co. Kilkenny … and explore our common landscape and built environment”.1 We were invited to produce a project encouraging participation in the planning process by Kilkenny Leader Partnership (KLP)2 and Kilkenny County Council Forward Planning Department, with whom we have been developing a working relationship for the last few years.3 A concern of ours has been acknowledging that the patterns of activities which occur in place are a powerful way to determine the future of these locales, and the current public consultation processes available and used by planning authorities in Ireland.

New planning documents are currently being drafted by the Forward Planning Department with plans to be finalised in 2015 through a series of public ‘town hall’ style consultation meetings. Our project was in part initiated to develop positive ideas-based conversations, which the communities we’ve worked with can bring to these formal meetings.

Seoidin O’Sullivan designed the swimming platform, which consisted of three diamond-shaped wooden forms that can be moved around and connected in different formations. These acted as a metaphor for three interconnected concerns about the future of this town on a river: the delicate ecology of the river; the people who live and make their lives on or beside it; and the infrastructure of buildings, boathouses and roads that enable a sustained community in a town like Graig.

Forecast began in 2014 under the shadow of a mounting controversy and a summer of protests around the Central Access Scheme in Kilkenny City.4 Other failures of public consultation and public exclusion in civic decision making became apparent across the country in 2014, including the restriction of seaweed harvesting rights, the renewal of the waste water treatment scheme at Poolbeg in Dublin and the widespread protests against Irish Water.

Forecast is a modest project, which cannot begin to address these complex crises of democratic process, but we determined to find dynamic ways to collaborate with Kilkenny communities to activate citizenship and engage with the processes that shape our environment and communities. We realised that this was an opportunity to position critical artistic practice as co-research in developing our locality.

The strong and critical network of contemporary artists working with communities of interest and place in Ireland can and should be one useful layer in the translation of community activities and opinions into the language necessary to have impact at a decision-making level.

Processes like the Per Cent For Art scheme, however, which do acknowledge the value of artistic input at community level, can be frustrating as a lost opportunity for critical community collaborations to critique or inform the process of public development or infrastructure which have already taken place.

Five themes, ‘Move’, ‘Explore’, ‘Protect’, ‘Play’ and ‘Gather’, were chosen as focal points for research relating to the future of our small towns. Each theme was assigned to one of the five identified ‘strategic’ towns – Callan, Castlecomer, Graiguenamanagh, Mooncoin and Thomastown – through visits to the towns and discussions with community members. Our aim was that, although projects were focused on one town, each of these themes could be related to each of the towns concerned.

‘Move’ was chosen as a theme for Callan. Projects at the annual town festival – the Abhainn Ri Festival of Participation and Inclusion – along with community-led research groups had all identified traffic and pedestrian issues on the historic Bridge Street in the centre of the town.

The theme was devised in order to facilitate a conversation in Callan about the future of this street, which extended beyond traffic into ideas around atmosphere, light and security.

London based architects Studio Weave developed a series of urban design workshops for sixth class students of Bunscoil MacAuley Rice, including learning old fashioned chalk pavement games as a way to understand scale and movement and in turn encourage spatial agency.

On Sunday 29 July, the sixth class students invited the people of Callan to join them on a temporarily closed Bridge Street to play chalk pavement games and celebrate the finale of the festival with food, live music, a children’s disco and festive decorations. The event was titled ‘Children at Play’.

A new film, Access, Accessibility, was also made by KCAT artist Evelyn Morrissey, with artist John Conway, who was then based in Callan, highlighting Evelyn’s experience as a wheelchair user there.

As an immediate outcome, Studio Weave and Rosie Lynch are carrying the impulse of Children at Play further through a new theatre and architecture project led by KCAT’s Equinox Theatre, Corcadorca Theatre, Devious Theatre companies and Fennelly’s. This is part of a community-led plan to concentrate on revitalising this almost derelict street. Multifaceted and multi-locational art and architecture projects, which rely on active participation, can be notoriously slow moving. In our view, this is a positive, as it allows ongoing self-reflection and a pace that will encourage wider participation.

Most recently, Michelle Browne has faced the challenging task of

considering two towns, Thomastown and Mooncoin, through the themes ‘Gather’ and ‘Play’. ‘Gather’ concerns public space and ‘Play’ considers recreation. They are somewhat overlapping themes, but the two towns have opposite characters. Thomastown has a strong artistic community, intimate streets and lies in the heart of a valley; Mooncoin has a main road splitting it down the middle and is something of a commuter town for Waterford. Michelle Browne decided to consider both towns and themes through an exploration of what makes the ‘heart’ of a town. Michelle Browne’s Mooncoin research has drawn upon the strong community groups that exist in the town to propose an orienteering game that navigates its fractured and unconnected landscape.

An event called ‘Bring your own chair’ took place in Thomastown on Saturday 7 February. Browne and a group of Thomastown-based musicians, including a community choir, a teenage rock back and traditional musicians, invited people from Thomastown to gather with them for an ambulant jam session, moving around Market Street and the town centre. Eadaoin Walshe, a Thomastown-based chef, and a collaborator on all of the Forecast projects, created a special bread that we can tear off and share with the assembled troupe.

Eadaoin’s seasonal cooking has enabled informal conversation and reflection to take place after or during each of the prior Forecast events, and has been a really valuable way to get feedback on the ideas and the activities proposed by each of the project’s practitioners and how these might become proposals for both the upcoming county plans and potential KLP-funded projects.

Initially, ‘Forecast’ had been planned as a project with five simultaneous events occurring in the five towns. As the lead artists and architects were invited to develop projects in each of these five towns, what emerged was a staggered and overlapping series of events. The practitioners in each town identified the elements of community understanding and relationships that were necessary to ensure that the projects were both embedded and meaningful.

Sarah Lincoln was invited to consider Castlecomer, responding to the theme ‘Explore’ and to the rich mining heritage of the town. The specificity of this heritage has a synthesis with Lincoln’s recent work, which has been concerned with the intricate and complex knowledge of a landscape by those who navigate it through work.

Faint Echo, a film which Lincoln made with ex-miners and their families from Castlecomer Mines, highlights a significant underground network of mining roads and pathways, flooded in the 1960s when the once infamous mines were closed and the pumps keeping the mines dry were shut off. Working with an older generation this work also questions the means by which oral history is both archived and disseminated.

This film details the men’s knowledge of a labyrinthine subterranean landscape almost totally inaccessible today. It tracks the traces of this landscape on ground level and evokes the realisation of a way of life that was lost with the closing of the mines. For KLP and the Forward Planning Department this project may be a catalyst to bring the heritage of the mines from the well-developed Castlecomer Discovery Park on the edge of the town, to a more informal, yet complex, information system for the town and its hinterlands. Lincoln has decided to continue her body of work in Castlecomer, and thus the network she is building up in the town, beyond the confines of the Forecast project.

‘Forecast’ will come to an end in 2015 with the launch of a publication that details the project and allows communities and individuals to access and inform plans for their own towns and environments. We hope to see the threads of this project develop in the upcoming plans and development of Kilkenny towns.

Independent curators Hollie Kearns and Rosie Lynch work collaboratively from Callan Workhouse, Co. Kilkenny, where they are engaged in developing a new facility with shared artistic, design, research and community facilities, to launch in Spring 2015. They are currently coordinating Nimble Spaces (2013 – 2014), a long-term process of collaboration between artists, architects and adults with intellectual disabilities. Recent projects include Workhouse Assembly (2013) and Landing Place (2013). They were co-founders, with Tara Kennedy and Jo Anne Butler, of Commonage, (2010 – 2014).

Notes 1. forecastproject.tumblr.com 2. cklp.ie 3. kilkennycoco.ie 4. The CAS scheme has given permission for the construction of a new bridge across the river Nore in a historic area of Kilkenny city and lengthy public protests over the year cited fears that the new road will create a fissure between two halves of ‘Irishtown’, destroy the archaeological and historical landscape and come at a cost of €10.5 Million in tax payers’ money.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

Conference

Psychoswimography: Santa Barbara VANESSA DAWS DESCRIBES HER PARTICIPATION IN THE BABEL WORKING GROUP CONFERENCE TITLED ‘ON THE BEACH: PRECARIOUSNESS, RISK, FORMS OF LIFE, AFFINITY AND PLAY AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD’, HELD IN SANTA BARBARA, USA IN OCTOBER 2014.

Swimming through the Kelp Forest off Santa Cruz Island, Santa Barbara, 2014, photo by Vanessa Daws

The Ocean Ducks’ Breakfast Table, Santa Barbara, 2014, photo by Vanessa Daws

The Cruise Ship Off Leadbetter Beach, Santa Barbara, 2014, photo by Vanessa Daws

“Psychoswimography: To explore place through the art of swimming.“1

applications and got the responses, many months had gone by and by then I was too invested in the project to let it go. I got to Santa Barbara by saving, scrounging and a lot of luck.

Before setting out I had made contact with the Ocean Ducks, a group of local sea swimmers. During my three weeks in Santa Barbara they took me under their wing and played a crucial part in the work I made for BABEL. They meet every Sunday at Butterfly Beach. I had arrived on a Saturday and catching this swim was crucial for determining how the rest of the first week would go.

I hired a mountain bike for the three weeks. After many gruelling uphill 10km bike rides to my accommodation in searing heat (Santa Barbara was experiencing a heat wave and has suffered a drought for five years), I discovered that buses take bikes on racks at the front – genius.

I swam every day, cycled, filmed and interviewed. A flywheel momentum gathered with the project. I spoke to many people, including the Santa Barbara Channel Keeper, Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Ocean Futures and Alice Alldredge, head of Marine Biology at UCSB, who told me about marine snow. Marine snow is made up of small particles of debris that creatures latch onto and feed upon. These particles can be up to 1cm large and consist of whole colonies of species. They can take weeks to finally drift down to the bottom of the ocean, where they become a vital source of food for the plankton. These interviews became the soundscape for my film.

19 days after arriving in Santa Barbara I had most of the film made, postcard invites printed and a swim event planned. BABEL encourages sessions that take the audience out of the lecture hall or use alternative ways of presenting. “And thus we propose to comb the beach – not straighten out, nor even to mine, but to entangle while also pondering.”6 On the first day of the conference I got up at 4am to meet Ben and Morgan from Santa Barbara Channel Keeper. We went out into the bay on their boat, about 10km out, to meet a huge cruise ship and to politely remind them that they were now entering a no dumping zone. Straight after this I made it in time to catch Steve Mentz’s bodysurfing session – an ‘immersive practicum’ – at Hendry’s Beach. The highlight for me was getting to meet in person (and better still in the ocean) the writers Steve Mentz and Stacy Alaimo, who were both plenary speakers at BABEL and whose work I admire. After our initial bodysurf we went – seaweed in hair – to the opening plenary session, the first of many fascinating events at BABEL. My swim event was held on the final day at lunchtime. The idea was to allow the participants of BABEL and the Ocean Ducks a chance for a shared experience of the Pacific and the potential to view the rest of the day from a more fluid perspective. Every Sunday at Butterfly Beach Rami and Emilio from the Ocean Ducks bring a fold up table and after their swim the swimmers have a breakfast of homemade cakes, oranges and passion fruits picked from their gardens, and Emilio always brings a bag of 12 bagels. I asked if we could replicate this for the BABEL swim. The Ocean Ducks brought their table and put on a great picnic to compliment the post swim conversation.

Steve Mentz commented: “Splashing in the green Pacific last October I spied two opposed ideas. The first, the familiar one, was escape. When land mammals enter the ocean, buoyancy makes things possible. Swimming is almost flying and I love its singular touch. What I remember most about Santa Barbara is how artistic practice made swimming into community. We were surrounded by swimmers: Ocean Ducks, surfers, scholars of pre-modern literature and critical theory, all together in the ocean. To be in that translucent alien world but not alone in it: the gift of art.”7 For Stacy Alaimo the swim “felt like an experiment with becoming a medium for art. To be ourselves in interchange with the ocean, to be aesthetically overcome by the blues and greens of the water … what is most beautiful to me is to think of how swimming – the immersion of the human in water – releases us from transcendent perspectives, unmoors us as terrestrial creatures, allows us to hover in other ways of being that are, perhaps, less separate from the substances of the world”.8 The work I made in Santa Barbara was created from chance meetings, which were rooted in the generosity and friendship of strangers. I set out with a rough idea of what I wanted to achieve, but I allowed the flow and ebb of the Pacific to guide the work; this took the project on a journey I could never have planned.

On my way home to Ireland I ‘escaped’ – swimming from Alcatraz Island at dawn. After Santa Barbara, apart from being lean, fit and tanned, I walked around with pep in my step and a new-found confidence that my work can stand up on an international platform and make a difference to a wider community.

A month later in Dublin, along with the swimmers from Malahide, I created ‘Uncharted’, a culminating art event for the Artist in the Community Award 2014. The event created an aural myth of the Lambay Swim, which we had undertaken as a group earlier in the year.

We also invited the audience to enter the sea and, as the sun rose, we ate barbecued Lambay wallaby burgers. A pattern of practice seems to be emerging.

“Planktos: Drifting.”2 “This art of swimming, it being so profitable a thing as it is towards the preserving of man’s life when as he is at any time distressed in the greedy jaws of the swelling sea, destitute of any other help, although it be praised by no-one, yet is it praiseworthy in nature.” 3 I stand at a dusty crossroads with instructions on how to get to my accommodation typed into my phone. Ed, my ‘couch surfing’ host, has left the key under the mat, as he’s away coaching at a volleyball tournament. This is my first afternoon in sunny California.

A bit lost, sweaty and frazzled, I go into the nearest shop to ask directions and buy a drink – it’s hot! Inside, I’m met by a smiling shopkeeper. We strike up a casual conversation and just because I can’t help myself, I ask him if he swims at all. He answers “no because my grandfather did all the swimming for me”. Then he tells me that his grandfather was one of the few hundred survivors of the RMS Lusitania that sunk in 1915. Hearing this story, which instantly connected Ireland and America through the ocean, was a great way to start my project in Santa Barbara.

I’m a visual artist and avid open-water swimmer living in Dublin.

My art practice uses swimming as a starting point. I work in a range of art forms including video, sound, animation, drawing and publications.

Through journey, encounter, conversation and swimming, my work investigates where this drive to immerse oneself in water comes from.

Is it the sheer thrill of the unknown? Or the desire to feel the water on our skin, the cold on our head, adapt our breathing and feel we exist?

In February 2014, eight months earlier, Michael O’Rourke, writer and member of the BABEL Working Group, visited me in my studio at the RHA. We had met the previous year at the ‘(((O)))’ event at Clonlea Studios in Blackrock, Dublin and kept in touch.4 As we discussed my research and how my work is completely driven by swimming and all things aqua, he told me about BABEL and the theme for their third biennial meeting, which would be held in Santa Barbara in October and was titled ‘On the Beach: Precariousness, Risk, Forms of Life, Affinity, and Play at the Edge of the World’.5 I emailed Eileen Joy, co-founder of BABEL, and asked how I might go about being a part of the conference. In the proposal that I subsequently submitted – entitled, Psychoswimography: Santa Barbara – I suggested that I come to Santa Barbara a few weeks prior to the BABEL event to meet sea swimmers, marine biologists and members of the local aquatic community and create new site-specific work. This work would be realised in the form of a printed handout, a film and, if logistics and the ocean allowed, a presentation in the sea: a shared experience of the water. Eileen replied that my work sounded perfect for the conference and she thought I could exhibit my work in a group exhibition as part of the event.

I was unsuccessful in securing any funding to assist me on this trip, having tried three different funding bodies. By the time I had sent off

Vanessa Daws graduated from NCAD with an MA Art in the Digital World 2013. Daws has had seven solo exhibitions in Ireland (2009 – 2011) and was Artist in Residence, KilkennyArts Office (2010). She has since had a research residency at Studio 468 (2013), followed studio residency at the RHA (2014). Daws was a recipient of the Artist in the Community Award 2014 and has just been awarded the UCD Art in Science Residency 2015. vanessadaws.com Notes 1. A term coined by Daws, from compounding psychogeography and swimming 2. The word Planktos is Latin for drifting / wandering 3. Everard Digby, De Arte Natandi, 1587 (trans. Christofer Middleton) 4. clonleastudios.com 5. The BABEL Working Group was founded in 2004 and describes itself as “a global alliance of scholars, researchers, artists and others situated in institutional and para-academic spaces who are interested in creative risk taking, unconventional co-disciplinary collaboration, and the cultivation of productively ‘dissensual’ conversations about Big Questions” (babel-meeting.org) 6. Eileen Joy, On the Beach, ‘Preamble II: Conference Precis’, 2014 7. From correspondence (stevementz.com) 8. From correspondence

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

25

festivaL

Louise Manifold, Time-Machines, 2015

Aoife Desmond, Paris Dreaming/Paris Burning, 2014

The Inagh Valley Hatchery Building

Retrieving the West MICHAËLE CUTAYA PROFILES WILD-SCREEN / SCÁIL-FHIÁIN, A SCREENING EVENT SHOWING CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS’ FILMS, ORGANISED BY UNA QUIGLEY AND LOUISe MANIFOLD, WHICH TOOK PLACE IN CLOONACARTON, CONNEMARA (7 – 8 MARCH).

If there was one idea that led artists Una Quigley and Louise Manifold in their development of the Wild-Screen event, it was that of pilgrimage: the desire to bring an audience to the heart of Connemara to experience artists’ films together. Manifold speaks of this vast expanse north of Galway as one that often registers only as a tourist destination, with its artistic relevance overlooked. Her wish was to make something happen there.

Wild-Screen follows on from a series of discussions that took place in Galway over the last couple of years. At 126 Gallery in 2013 Sylvere Lotringer and Luke Gibbons spoke about how to retrieve the west of Ireland from its romantic and touristic clichés and to reinvigorate it with the cultural and social dynamic of the peripheral.1 During Tulca that same year Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith and his guests discussed the Gaeltacht, the complexity of Irish language movements and their relevance for contemporary artists and beyond.2 Within this context, a film art event brings its own potential and challenges. Artists’ films have little legacy in the culture that is typically associated with the Gaeltacht; thus they offer a particularly suitable medium for opening up different ways to think about the area. On the other hand, films have long feasted upon images of the West of Ireland and the wildernesses at large, and have been instrumental in the commodification of the landscape. The films selected by Quigley and Manifold engaged and questioned representations of the wild, the West, landscapes and the sublime.

Wild-Screen aimed to bring alternative representations of the wild to the wilderness itself. Thus, the setting was particularly important and proved to be a difficult part in the organisation of the event.

Quigley and Manifold started developing the project after receiving seed funding from Údarás na Gaeltachta, which helped them to acquire a projector. The core funding came from the Arts Council Project Award. Quigley and Manifold found that a ‘virtuous cycle’ was created: gaining backing from both the Arts Council and Údarás made it easier in turn to get support from other partners. Galway County Council Arts Office supported Quigley and Manifold’s project with a Per Cent for Art award, which enabled their plans for a publication. Support in kind was also of strategic importance: CastlePrint covered printing costs and Galway Arts Centre extended their insurance to cover the event (insuring art-related events can be difficult and pricey). Galway City Council provided transport from Galway over the two days of the event

– a vital part of the logistics of an event in a remote location. No less precious was the information and leads they received from Údarás, Galway County Council Art Officers and Connemara residents.

Participating artist Dorothy Cross pointed them to the site that hosted Wild-Screen: the Inagh Valley Hatchery in Cloonacarton offered the perfect combination of industrial modernism and epic wilderness they were after. It is the site of a hatchery building and was designed by the modernist architectural firm Scott Tallon Walker as a land-based salmon hatchery in 1989. The building is now being used as bioresearch centre by Koral Sea. Aside from its modernist aesthetics, the setting brought into the event the often-overlooked industrial and scientific activities of the Connemara region.

After they were offered a space in the building, the organisers set out to construct an auditorium with the help of art technician Laurence Fitzgibbon and carpenter Anthony Cording. It was their wish to have the best possible viewing conditions with the highest technical specs possible. The resultant space was not quite a cinema, nor was it a gallery setting. Many of the works in the programme had been shown more often in gallery contexts than in theatrical screening conditions. This situation raised a number of discussions around the respective advantages of each mode of display. Gallery settings don’t offer the communal experience of the cinema – a feature that attracts an increasing number of artists to cinema contexts. In her introduction to The Place of Artists’ Cinema, Maeve Connolly points to a shift of emphasis as cinema becomes increasingly attractive to contemporary artists who value the “collective and social dimension of reception”, as the cinema seems to “offer models or prototypes for collectivity”.3 The remoteness of the location also set the Wild-Screen location as a ‘place apart’. In his essay Open Circuit, for the accompanying publication, Maximillian Le Cain highlights how relevant such a project is to the way we currently view images: “In a time when moving images are almost too readily available, when even the rarest treasures of cinema can be called up at will on devices small enough to fit into our pockets, a project which situates film viewing in relation to place and to spatial voyaging is to be valued. It cannot but reveal new dimensions to the work presented, dimensions that can exist only in the thrillingly ungovernable vortex between film and viewer.”

Viewing images has become an increasingly indivisualised and placeless experience, where all formats and mediums are reduced to the

same inches of digital screens. Perhaps this is the price we pay for endless availability of images, but one can’t help yearning for a more exclusive moment.

Wild-Screen presented a series of screenings over a weekend.

Unlike a festival, Quigley and Manifold were keen to insist, the event was thoughtfully curated and brought together specifically chosen short-to-medium length films. Artists from different generations and countries, well known and emerging artists and artists from Galway or from further afield, were all part of the selection. Well established artist / filmmakers such as Werner Herzog, Derek Jarman and Vivienne Dick were presented alongside a younger generation such as Le Cain and Vicky Langan, Aoife Desmond and Cecilia Danell as well as Quigley and Manifold. The films were regrouped under different headings such as ‘Mirror Displacements’ or ‘Anxious Mountains’.4 The films shown were shot in a variety of mediums, but all were transferred to digital HD for projection.

The publication All Mountains Begin on the Ground was launched on Saturday 7 March. With specially commissioned essays by Katherine Waugh, Conn Holohan, Rod Stoneman and Le Cain, the publication furthered the ideas the event engaged with. To close the event on the Sunday, a discursive panel took place with artists, academics and representatives from the local community. The session aimed to foster discussions and conversations and to tease out convergences between artists, their works, local histories and contested perspectives on the West of Ireland. Perhaps the most significant challenge faced by the event was to take its place in the local context and not be aloof. To this end Quigley and Manifold forged contacts with local radio and other media. If different perspectives to the Wild Atlantic Way are to be developed, they need to involve those living in the locale, as well as those based elsewhere. Wild-Screen provided a unique opportunity to experience experimental filmmaking in an exceptional setting, which may serve to change our idea of ‘the wild’.

Michaële Cutaya is a writer on art living in County Galway.

Notes 1. ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ was a symposium curated by Katherine Waugh that took place in May 2013 at 126 Gallery, 126.ie 2. ‘Tonnta agus Réimsí / Waves and Fields’ took place on 10 November 2013 as part of the Golden Mountain programme with Nuala Ní Fhlathúin, Kasia Kaminska and Jeannine Woods, tulcafestival.com 3. Maeve Connolly, The Place of Artists’ Cinema, Space, Site and Screen, Intellect Books, 2009, p.10.

4. Full programme at wildscreenireland.com/programme

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

Career development

The Joy of Collision MIRANDA DRISCOLL, CO-FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR OF THE JOINERY, DUBLIN DISCUSSES its closure AND HER MOVE TO THE SIRIUS ARTS CENTRE, COBH.

‘We all Live on the Same Sea’, curated by Rana Öztürk, from left to right: Gülsün Karamustafa, Bosphorus 1954, 2008, single channel video; Cliona Harmey, Maritime, 2014, photographic print, small naval flag signalling kit, audio track on cd; Cliona Harmey, Flag, 2014, Arduino micro controller, wire jumpers, TFT screen, sd card

The Joinery exterior, image by Sarah Finnegan

Deirdre Nelson exhibition, presented in celebration of 2011 Irish Year of Craft, Sirius Arts Centre

After just over seven years as an unfunded, ad-hoc art space, the Joinery in Stoneybatter, Dublin closed its doors last December. Having to face ever more difficult financial circumstances, I felt that I had done all I could do and it was time to move on. I am now the Director at Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, East Cork. The move from DIY arts to a rural arts context has been a strange and challenging one, but ultimately I’ve found that there are many similarities. Like the Joinery, Sirius operates on the fringe of a city (Cork) yet it is also located within a self-contained community. Similarly, Sirius is a multi-disciplinary space that hosts visual arts and music events in order to build audiences and reputation, and to generate revenue.

When Feargal Ward and I set up the Joinery in 2007 we had no agenda and didn’t much care what people thought of what we were doing. In fact I’m pretty sure that no one was watching. There was no mission statement, no five-year plan, no political claim, no real funding strategy. We didn’t really look to other spaces for inspiration, nor did we have much knowledge of the history of artist-led initiatives: the co-operatives of 1950s New York or the squats and independent art spaces of 1980s London. We were just interested in creating a space where conversations could be had and where art could be made and shown. I suppose that’s DIY. We found the building on Arbour Hill and worked out a way to meet the rent through the provision of workspaces and an exhibition space.

We soon learned that there was a hunger for this type of DIY sensibility – for artists to get on with making and showing their own work without too much interference from the organisation. So we sat back and watched. Along came a couple of improvising musicians also looking for a space to try things out without the heavy weight of expectation from an audience (there was none).

So far so fun. The rent got paid, the bills were met and we were self-sustainable. This, in our terms, was a success. Soon we began to put more of a structure on the public interaction with what went on there,

and gradually a programme evolved. We developed an interest in the crossover between art and ‘non-art’ disciplines and we tried to fit in as much of it as we could into 52 weeks of the year.

For me the change came about when we got a small amount of one-off programming money from the Arts Council, a nod to what we were doing. Granted, it did not happen again the following year but it felt a bit like an acknowledgement by the art world that we existed and with that came a certain level of self-awareness. It also increased our commitment to delivering a decent programme, building an audience and staying for a while.

And so it continued. Every year the budget staggered through the finish line in a precarious, unpredictable manner and with each year we grew more determined to make it ‘work’. Of course with an organisation like the Joinery, each year could be your last. This creates a sense of urgency and flux, which challenge perceptions of success and permanence. There was a feeling that we ought to do it ‘now or never’, which was ad-hoc and spontaneous. This can be exhilarating but also incredibly tiring. The burnout rate is high. Personal lives take a back seat. Volunteers are a vital and often not publicly or sufficiently acknowledged element to the whole machine. Collaborations, nonfinancial exchanges, big favours and strong friendships are the fuel that keeps the beast alive.

We experimented with different models of programming funding over the years, but never managed to find one that was sustainable for more than a year at a time. In 2013 we ran a successful Fundit campaign, which received the highest number of funders to date. I was astounded that 500 plus people stepped up to help us. This assisted us in keeping the Joinery programmed for a full year and it briefly shone a light on a community who believed in what we did and were willing to help. It felt like a little victory, a nod to the importance of alternative urban spaces in the ever-increasing commodification of culture and commercialisation of the city.

I wanted to develop more ambitious ideas for the Joinery and for my own career and it was becoming impossible to plan ahead. We made countless applications for funding and repeated rejection started to take its toll. The reality is that the Joinery doesn’t fit into the remit of what the Arts Council can fund. The Arts Council cannot take a risk on a small, grassroots organisation that looks like a disused shop front on a narrow street in Stoneybatter which is hard to find and strewn with litter.

We tried to support mostly emerging artists in developing their practices in ways that do not always take the most direct route. Most of them are working in a way that questions and challenges how art is shown and consumed, and many of them are blurring the lines between the event, the performance and the exhibition. Some are visual artists, some are sound artists, some are musicians and many are all three.

Some choose not to be defined by any of the above. Many are recent graduates and others have been playing, performing and producing work for decades, mostly without recognition outside of their own small circles and almost certainly without much financial support.

The Joinery was a project with a finite life cycle. It was an idea, an ideology that was briefly housed in a building. That building, the people that came through it and the things that happened there shaped its ideals. It was about a community – both ideologically and geographically – that tried to stand outside of the market and that, in a way, made it a political beast, albeit an accidental one. While the organisation itself has closed some of these ideologies might yet find their way to Cobh and beyond.

During those years we programmed well over 400 events in Dublin and beyond without funding. A conflict arises when you try to remain underground yet occasionally pop your head above the parapet, expecting to be noticed and thrown a few scraps. Closing the door was never going to be easy but it came with a certain sense of relief too. I feel confident that I will take these experiences from the Joinery and bring them to my new role at Sirius. My predecessor Peggy-Sue Amison did a remarkable thing by establishing a place with an excellent reputation in the photography community both nationally and internationally through both the programme and the residencies. That’s no mean feat in a small town, which is a far cry from West Cork, its wealthier and more frequently visited cousin.

For me one of the roles of an arts centre is to act as an intermediary between art and the public. So while it is still early days, many of my plans for Sirius over the next year or two revolve around building, widening audiences and developing an environment for artists to feel supported and encouraged. Sirius is on the periphery, so collaboration will be paramount. Building trust is hugely important; if the audience trust your programming then they are more likely to take a gamble on something new or unknown, which in turn provides a positive space for artists to experiment. I have inherited a programme that will run until early 2016. This gives me time to make an assessment of the organisation and to work out its potential. It’s an very beautiful space right on the edge of the water in Cork harbour. It holds a great legacy: artists like Brian O’Doherty, James Turrell, Roger Ballan and Richard Mosse have done their time there. New ideas are brewing that will impact both the artistic programme and the organisation as a whole.

Suffice to say changes are a coming, for Sirius and for me.

So when I reflect on the Joinery in years to come, I’d like to hope that I’ll think of it as a place that was open, accessible, yet welcome to experimentation and improvisation. To quote one Dublin-based improviser: it’s about the “joy of successful collision and the effort to maintain an energy that is always poised on the brink of collapse”.1 The audience was small but listened hard and I’d like to think they knew that what they were witnessing to was a one-off. As with all improvisation, it’s important to know when it’s time to end, to make space to reflect on what has just happened. Harmony, rhythm and melody have left the building. Time to fly south.

Miranda Driscoll, Director of the Joinery, 2007 – 2014, Director of Sirius Arts Centre since October 2014, siriusartscentre.ie.

Note 1. David Donohoe in conversation with Miranda Driscoll, August 2014

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

27

Career Development

‘Glumba Skzx’, Ex Elettrofonica, Rome,13 January – 7 March 2015, image courtesy of M3Studio, Rome

Dialogue with Space BEN CROTHERS DISCUSSES CURAting ‘GLUMBA SKZX’, AN EXHIBITION FEATURING ARTISTS FROM NORTHERN IRELAND, HELD AT EX ELETTROFONICA, ROME. January 2015 marked a significant chapter in my curatorial career, when I was given the opportunity to expand my practice outside of Northern Ireland, travelling to Rome to curate ‘GLUMBA SKZX’ at Ex Elettrofonica, Rome (13 January – 7 March). The exhibition formed the first part of the gallery’s ‘BE MY GUEST’ series, a project conceived by Italian curator Manuela Pacella, for which she will invite a number of curators to deliver group exhibitions within Rome.

Pacella has been a strong supporter of my work since 2012, when we both curated exhibitions at Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast. Pacella opened an exhibition of Italian artists titled ‘Patria Interiore – Inner Homeland’ (March 2012) in the gallery’s Project Space, while I curated one part of ‘Interplanetary Revolution’ in the main gallery, an exhibition divided into three separately curated spaces. Pacella has been extensively researching Northern Irish art within her own practice and has made many research trips to the city since her initial visit, even partaking in Flax Art Studio’s prestigious international residency programme in 2013. On her visits to Belfast I spent time with Pacella, discussing my curatorial interests and guiding her around my exhibitions, and it was soon suggested that I expand my practice internationally.

When Pacella first approached me to curate an exhibition in Rome she discussed different galleries that could be of potential interest. One such space was Ex Elettrofonica, a visually striking contemporary gallery run by Beatrice Bertini and Benedetta Acciari, situated a short walk from St. Peter’s Basilica. From the moment I first saw Ex Elettrofonica I was excited by the challenge of such an unusual and dominant exhibition space. I felt truly inspired, and very much wanted the show to have a dialogue with the space.

Federico Bistolfi and Alessandra Belia, who had the vision to design a gallery that is simultaneously a neutral container for art and a space that stimulates the imagination, developed the gallery’s spatial concept. The vagueness of forms and the absence of sharp edges or corners produces a strange spatiality – an organic white limbo, which is a delight for visitors to navigate. A physically continuous skin envelops the existing structure of the building, creating a fluid space that forms an intimate relationship with the artworks it contains.

I am a huge science fiction enthusiast and the gallery immediately brought to mind Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, the planet Hoth from

Star Wars and a whole host of sci-fi films. My initial reaction was to curate an exhibition deeply embedded in all of this and the aesthetics of the space seemed to align perfectly with my own interests and curatorial portfolio – specifically ‘The M-Machine’ (2010), ‘Interplanetary’ (2012) and ‘Psychic Driving’ (2013). Always one to challenge myself, however, this all seemed a little too perfect, and I tried to approach things differently. This was an opportunity to curate a sci-fi-inspired exhibition in arguably the most ideal space imaginable, but instead I wondered how the banal and everyday would work in such a striking space, with plastic banana holders and second-hand denim jackets taking the place of alien encounters and stunning starscapes. In this sense, I feel that I simultaneously responded to and reacted against the space in the development of ‘GLUMBA SKZX’.

This certainly presented challenges, however, as I had never set foot in the gallery, and even with photographs and plans, it is always difficult to understand the nuances of a specific space until it has been seen in person. Through detailed conversations with Pacella, Bertini and Acciari, I gained a better understanding of the space. I also eagerly anticipated my first site visit, which would mark the first day of the ‘GLUMBA SKZX’ install. This was not ideal but was a practical constraint determined by funding. Italy’s arts infrastructure works very differently to the structures we are familiar with in the UK and Ireland: publicly funded spaces are a rarity and commercial galleries form the vast majority of exhibition spaces. Many of the same problems still exist, however, and any kind of funding across the arts is limited.

In curating the exhibition I had to develop a project of artistic merit, significance and impact, whilst also keeping in mind a range of financial constraints that made the international transportation of large works impossible. Capitalising on my interest in video and artists’ books I feel that I have been able to develop an exhibition that travels easily, but by no means feels slight. The financial support of Ex Elettrofonica was the only way of realising ‘GLUMBA SKZX’ and I am so grateful for the confidence which Bertini and Acciari had in my practice to not only offer me the use of their gallery, but also to fund this project.

Something that I was mindful of when developing the exhibition was its associations with Northern Irish history and politics. Although

it is an important part of the country’s art history I feel that all too often international exhibitions featuring the work of Northern Irish artists are rooted in the politics of a post-conflict society, where Troublesrelated artwork is exported from the region most readily. With ‘GLUMBA SKZX’ I was keen to exhibit the work of artists from Northern Ireland outside of a Northern Irish context, showing their work alongside artists from around the world, exploring themes within their individual practices not so obviously tied to their geography. Many of these artists’ practices most definitely have their roots within Northern Ireland, but the specific works in the exhibition are not necessarily tangled up in its political history.

To discuss the exhibition in more detail, my curatorial practice is hugely informed by film, television, comic books and pop culture. I have never approached the gallery as a space simply for art in the traditional sense, but rather an environment in which I can explore and present a wide range of interests and media. I have always had an interest in everyday objects and through my curatorial projects I have placed as much emphasis on the display of magazine articles, CDs and books as I have on sculpture, video and photography. ‘GLUMBA SKZX’ is my most obvious exploration of all of this, where I have truly embraced the work of artists who also find value in everyday objects, insignificant events, purposeless actions and the beauty of the coincidence.

All of the exhibiting artists reinterpret and re-evaluate pre-existing material or explore elements of everyday life which may often be overlooked: reimagining water as a luxurious, decadent beauty product (Adham Faramawy); purposefully enacting a series of common mistakes (Michael Hanna); video-recording a small wooden crate’s journey through the postal delivery system (Shiro Masuyama); writing and illustrating a comic series based on a teenager’s diary found in a gasstation bathroom (Esther Pearl Watson); expensively documenting items of low value (Theo Simpson); creating sculptures from childhood toys and household objects (Ben Craig); inventing a fictional gang based on an encounter on the New York subway (Fiona Larkin); photographing a fleeting moment in which the aesthetic cross-associations between a dog and a plastic garden chair become apparent (Locky Morris); and drawing inspiration from a children’s book to create an adult-themed comic strip about a witch, her cat boyfriend and an anthropomorphic owl (Simon Hanselmann).

There is undoubtedly work of true artistic merit here by a range of artists who I consider to be at the very forefront of their respective media, but the exhibition incorporates work not so ordinarily considered within a gallery context, something which Roman audiences seemed intrigued by and receptive to.

In addition to expanding my curatorial practice and providing local artists with an opportunity to exhibit internationally alongside a varied selection of contemporary practitioners, ‘GLUMBA SKZX’ exposed me to Rome’s contemporary art scene, from major institutions such as MAXXI and MACRO to the perhaps less well-known venues which Pacella introduced me to. These included: T293, The Gallery Apart and Monitor, all of which presented confident and engaging exhibitions. In particular, I must thank the directors of The Gallery Apart, Fabrizio Del Signore and Armando Porcari, for the time they took to show me around their space and for the interest they showed in ‘GLUMBA SKZX’ and my wider curatorial practice.

Another highlight of the trip was a visit to the offices of NERO, an influential contemporary culture magazine and publishing house, which specialises in the production of artists’ books, editions and catalogues. With my own interest in artists’ books, zines and comic books, the activities of NERO were very inspiring to me, as were the conversations I had with several Rome-based artists and curators who attended the exhibition opening.

‘GLUMBA SKZX’ has been a successful and thoroughly worthwhile project, and I hope that the continuing and dedicated work of Manuela Pacella to strengthen the link between Rome and Belfast’s contemporary art scenes will lead to more opportunities for collaboration and exchange in the future.

Ben Crothers is a Belfast-based curator and writer. Throughout 2015 he will be working in collaboration with NURTUREart, Brooklyn through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s ACES Award for Curatorial Practice. bencrothers.com exelettrofonica.com

28

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

public art case study

Amanda Ralph, Paper Boats, Lough Boora, 2015

Submergence & Resurgence AMANDA RALPH DISCUSSES THE RECENT RE-INSTALLATION OF HER PUBLIC ARTWORK ‘PAPER BOATS’.

Amanda Ralph, Paper Boats

Amanda Ralph, Paper Boats

5 May 2001 Tribune

March – April 2015

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

29

public art case study

Condition of Paper Boats stored at Clara depot

Amanda Ralph, Sea Area Forecast, Project Arts, 1998

Council employee Dominic Fleming at Clara depot

Note 1. The total value of the Clara commission (including materials, labour, insurance and transport) was £19,000. An independent panel comprising of nominees from the Arts Council, the Artists’ Association of Ireland, Offaly County Council and the National Sculpture Factory judged the submissions. An Offaly County Council engineer attended as technical advisor. In the unlikely event that the commission did not proceed after the commission was awarded the selected artist would receive a cancellation fee of £1000 from Offaly County Council. The National Sculpture Factory recommended that the selected artist prepare an artwork maintenance schedule for the local authority.

On 7 August 1998, the National Sculpture Factory, Cork announced an open submission competition for three public art projects that they were running on behalf of Offaly County Council for locations in Tullamore, Clara and Banagher. Attendance at the site meeting was not mandatory but highly recommended, as “jury members tend to take into account the extent to which the proposed piece interacts with the site”.1 The engineer for the project would be available for questions and transport was made available from Tullamore to all sites. Additional information, should it arise, would only be sent to those who had registered. I applied for the commission for the site at a public park along the bank of the River Brosna at Clara.

I was fortunate enough to be awarded the commission on 11 December 1998, three months after it was advertised. A contract was agreed on 23 June 1999, with an additional proviso that after one year “the maintenance and repair of the sculpture is the responsibility of the Council. Major alterations and repairs to the sculpture during the artist’s lifetime are subject to the artist’s approval”. The payment schedule agreed in the contract was 50 per cent on commencement of the work, 25 per cent during the work and the remaining 25 per cent on installation. The first payment was drawn down on 19 July 1999, the second on 3 July 2000 on demonstration of a working prototype and the last on 20 November 2000.

Earlier in 1998 Maurice O’Connell had scheduled me into his ‘No Opening Just Closing Demolishing Project’ for the derelict Project Arts Centre on Essex Street, which was about to be rebuilt on the same site.

For the two day slot, I’d created Sea Area Forecast, a work comprising a blue acrylic bath with oars and filled with water, starboard and port shipping lights, a suspended cube of hundreds of strings of paper boats and an audio track of the radio announcement of marine weather forecast around Ireland. The work had been informed by my reflection on Ireland as an island, after returning from spending five years studying and teaching at the University of Arizona in Tucson, a desert region in the US South West. The installation was more formally explored in a solo show at Signal Arts Centre in Bray later that year. These exhibitions were the origin of the motif for the Clara commission.

From 1990 –1992 and again in 1998 I’d been a board member of the Sculptors’ Society of Ireland and became familiar with the 1983 Arklow Steel Symposium during which work by 14 artists was fabricated at Arklow Engineering and temporarily sited as an outdoor exhibition along the then newly completed East-Link Bridge in Dublin. Now known as Arklow Marine Services, this company have been involved in boat building in Arklow since 1864. The technical requirements for converting a paper boat to a craft designed for sustained buoyancy anchored in a fast flowing river were significant and I felt sure – due to their familiarity working with artists – that this was the marine engineering and fabrication company I wanted to develop the project.

In preparation for stage two of the competition I’d made three fullscale (1m-length) cardboard boats to demonstrate their size and relation to one another. Arklow Marine worked from one of these to prepare CAD drawings, which were then outsourced to the UK for modification in relation to buoyancy relevant to the weight of the material used.

Model calculations were based on stainless steel and marine grade aluminium. ‘Freeboard’, the height of a ship’s side between the waterline and the deck, now entered my vocabulary and determined my decision that the boats would ultimately be made in aluminium with a white industrially-applied finish. Additional modifications included a keel and two drain holes from the deck to the base of the boat to prevent the deck filling.

In 1998 a lot of business was conducted through post and fax, and the letter that arrived to award me the commission also let me know that “the jury would like you to make a prototype and see how it survives in the water for a period of three months. All going well you can then proceed to make the additional seven boats”. As most of the work was in the design and prototype stage I couldn’t agree to this if it meant that the payment schedule was any different from initially outlined. So I suggested that we keep to the payment schedule and that the contract function to secure their concerns, along with providing video documentation of the working prototype prior to drawing down the second of the three payments. Representatives from Offaly County Council were present at the installation of the work, entitled Paper Boats, and final payment was drawn down on 20 November 2000.

In May 2001 a relative living in Tullamore posted me the Tribune newspaper article, which declared that “12 months after installation it looks like the publicly funded art works are heading for a watery grave!”. The article included a photograph of the boats on the river,

choked with reeds and being pulled underwater.

2001 was a sad time in the art world for those of us who knew Noreen O’Hare, curator at the Crescent Arts Centre and at the Orchard Gallery, and the first director of Ormeau Baths Gallery, who had taken over as the Arts Officer of Offaly County Council in 2000. Noreen had been battling cancer and died that year. So after reading the article I didn’t contact the Arts Office but dragged my brother to Clara to stand on the riverbank and hold an inflatable boat in place while I cleaned the surface of the sculptures and removed debris that had collected. I wrote a cryptic note in my files from this time “vandalism – Offaly County Council have the boat”, which seems to indicate that I’d had a phone conversation with someone about a missing boat. In August 2001 I was awarded a residency to the International Studio Programme at PS1 MoMA in New York and wasn’t back in Clara after that. It has subsequently emerged that, again in 2002, the boats became entangled in debris and this prompted their removal.

In May 2014, after attending the panel discussion ‘Public Art: Is it in Crisis?’ organised as part of VAI’s Get Together at IMMA, I decided to send photos of the work to Offaly County Council Arts Office and enquire about what had happened. I knew from several people that the sculptures were no longer installed. Within two days I got email confirmation that five of the seven had been found stored in a council depot in Offaly. It turns out that just before my letter landed, another had been received from a member of the public asking the Arts Office what had happened to the sculpture. This uncanny synchronicity impelled the speedy investigation.

The story uncovered by the Arts Office during their 2014 enquiry was that “in 2002 the river rose considerably after a storm and debris swirled around the chained anchors, dragging some of them under. The OPW were called to dredge the river, and Offaly County Council employee Dominic Fleming spotted the machine hauling the boats onto the riverbank. Rescuing five of the seven, he placed them in storage in Clara, waiting for someone to claim them”. From the condition of the boats it seems more likely that four boats were rescued at this time and that one had been taken out of the water much earlier.

The good news is that five boats have just been restored by Arklow Marine Services and in January 2015 were installed by Offaly County Council at Lough Boora Discovery Park. For the record, the work is there as an Offaly County Council commissioned public artwork under the Per Cent for Art scheme.

It’s a tremendously rewarding experience for an artist to be involved in a public art commission, but sometimes for the artist it’s also a heart-breaking one. Eilis O’Connell’s The Great Wall of Kinsale (1988) was initially attacked and called a public safety hazard, and Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981) was removed after much debate following a lawsuit. For an artist a public art commission is never ‘job done, money taken’. Artists invest a lot of themselves and their artistic reputation can’t be extricated from the outcome of a project – yet somehow responsibility for the contract of ownership does not carry the same reputational weight.

For a number of years, there has been a significant body of easily accessible material informing both legislation and government and local authority best practice for public art in Ireland. The Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000 is available on VAI’s website. This automatically protects the artist’s moral rights, which include “the right to prevent mutilation, distortion or other derogatory alteration of the work, which would prejudice the artist’s reputation”. The 2004 Per Cent for Art Scheme National Guidelines, published by Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism, articulates the importance of documentation and inventory by the commissioning body, as does the 2009 Policies and Strategies for Managing Public Art and the Policy for Decommissioning of Public Art, written for Dublin City Council by Public Art Manager Ruaíri Ó Cuív.

All are available online.

Now that the work has been restored and reinstalled a maintenance schedule is being developed for Offaly County Council Arts Office specific to the conditions at Lough Boora and informed by an increased knowledge of what the work needs to be protected against, so the public can enjoy the work for some time to come – well, that is until it needs to be officially relocated, stored or deaccessioned!

Amanda Ralph is an artist whose practice is based on ideas generated through consideration of material in the public realm.

She has an M.Sc. from Trinity College Dublin, an MFA from University of Arizona Tucson, a Fulbright Scholarship and an International Studio Programme Residency PS1, New York.

30

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

project profile

Maya Deren, Ritual in Transfigured Time, 2946

James Benning, RR, 2007

Reopening Experience alice butler profiles the experimental film club, which is hosted monthly by the IFI, dublin.

The Experimental Film Club (EFC) is a curatorial committee that programmes screenings of what can broadly be described as artist and experimental film at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin, where it first took up residence in 2010. The original EFC group was formed in 2008, shortly after the Dublin Film Festival brought co-founder of Anthology Film Archives and independent filmmaker Jonas Mekas over to Ireland.

Alongside a screening programme of his films, Mekas was also invited to participate in a public discussion, which, in keeping with his request for an informal setting, took place at the Ha’penny Inn pub in Temple Bar. A busy crowd gathered to hear Mekas speak to Maeve Connolly, Aoife Desmond, Moira Tierney and Pip Chodorov about experimental film traditions and film collectives, which prompted the idea that this kind of work should be screened more regularly in Dublin.

In March 2008 visual artist and filmmaker Aoife Desmond approached filmmakers Alan Lambert, Esperanza Collado and Katie Lincoln (who was only involved for a short time) to form EFC. Collado, the only member with experience as a film curator at that stage, then invited Donal Foreman, also a filmmaker, to join them. For a long time, it was this core group of four people who organised regular screenings of work by seminal experimental filmmakers and contemporary visual artists – both Irish and international – in an effort to open up a dialogue between these different practices and explore the possible trajectories and qualities that connect them.

For the first year after its inception EFC events took place at the Ha’penny Inn pub. This was a natural choice after the success of the Mekas event, but there was also a precedent for the venue to play host to avant-garde screenings. The pub had done so once before for the Ha’penny Film Club, which was based there from October 1983 onwards and showed works such as Bob Quinn’s Cloch (1978), Joe Comerford’s Emtigon (1972) and the Belfast Film Workshop’s Acceptable Levels (1983), as well as films by Vivienne Dick, Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton.1 Lambert saw that the EFC was picking up in spirit from the Ha’penny Film Club, which itself was a kind of follow up to the formidable Project Cinema Club (1976 – 1980) led by Kevin Rockett at the Project Arts Centre. This club, as Maeve Connolly recounts, “introduced Irish audiences to structural-materialist work and European avant-garde traditions, screening films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Jean-Luc Godard, as well as Peter Gidal, Malcolm le Grice and Michael Snow”.2 As Desmond explains, there was no professional business plan when EFC started out. The group shared the equipment they needed between them and they used Collado’s own 16mm projector to screen prints. The original committee was simply driven to show this rare kind of work in Dublin. “In those venues, it survived hand to mouth, so to speak, literally on what came in at the door,” Lambert states. “I have very fond memories of those incarnations of the club as they were very personal and immediate – and very much in the tradition of informal artist gatherings”. From early on, some of the EFC screenings also incorporated live acts: John Porter gave a Super8 performance at the Ha’penny, Desmond invited The Forms to do a live accompaniment to

her ‘City Symphonies’ programme and Lambert asked 3epkano to perform a soundtrack for an innovative and silent re-edit of Tron.

Despite an atmosphere of informality, a covenant that EFC adhered to – following Maeve Connolly’s advice – was to ensure that artists were paid screening fees. Ticket sales went toward covering this cost. But in advance of this, the curators had to pay the artists’ fees from their own pocket, in the hope that they would make it back on the night. While the cost to rent films was just about manageable, the real expense came from shipping prints over from international distributors by courier.

The group often devised ways for the films to be picked up by friends in Paris or New York, packed in a suitcase and then brought over to Dublin by someone returning home for a visit. This kind of resourcefulness and the EFC organisers’ access to a far-reaching network of artists and filmmakers ensured that the screenings continued to happen regularly.

In May 2009 Peter Kennedy from the Odessa Club approached Desmond to ask if EFC would consider presenting their screenings there. The set up at the Odessa was much more suited to screenings than the Ha’penny, as they had better equipment and technical facilities.

EFC moved and ran events there up until June 2010, at which point Sarah Glennie, then Director at the IFI, invited the group to curate regular programmes of experimental film for what was at that time the cinema’s brand new third screen. By this stage both Foreman and Collado had moved away from Ireland and consequently Desmond and Lambert opened EFC up to film curator and academic Daniel Fitzpatrick, whose first programme ‘The Train, The Cinema’ was screened to a packed house and featured a rare 16mm print of James Benning’s extraordinary RR (2007).

Desmond stresses that running EFC would not have been sustainable had Sarah Glennie not invited the group to curate programmes for the IFI, thereby providing them with a professional cinema set-up, a wider platform for publicity and a budget for fees and transport. EFC was beginning to wind down, she claims, until Fitzpatrick joined the group and articulated how important it was to keep the screenings going. It was also at this point that I became involved with EFC, facilitating their events as part of my role in the programming department at the IFI. I attended every monthly screening and found that I always left feeling exhilarated and I happily joined the curatorial committee in the summer of 2014.

‘White Noise’ was one of the earlier programmes I saw that really stood out. It was an event guest curated by Florian Wüst, which brilliantly drew out interconnected themes and ideas expressed by a range of filmmakers including Wilhelm and Birgit Hein, Wolf Vostell and Sharon Lockhart. This was one of many examples that underlined the particular skill it takes to successfully bring discrete films together to form a programme that will work in a cinema setting rather than a gallery space. Another recent highlight was a programme of Nathaniel Dorsky films, curated by Collado and Lumière Magazine, which provided audiences with the unique opportunity to see works that are only available on 16mm prints and have to be screened at the slow, meditative rate of 18, rather than the standard 24 frames per second.

Sharon Lockhart, Khalil, Shaun, A Woman under the Influence, 1994

Critical engagement has always been an integral part of EFC events. From the beginning, the idea was to bring filmmakers over. If this isn’t possible, programmes have been introduced either by the curator or a guest speaker. Laurie Uprichard, then Director of Dublin Dance Festival, introduced Desmond’s ‘Dance Play Ritual’ programme, which included films by Maya Deren, Yvonne Rainer and John Porter.

Hugh Campbell, Professor of Architecture at UCD, introduced ‘Street Films’ and Tony Hill, Pip Chodorov and Ed Atkins have all recently presented their work at EFC screenings, the last of which came about as a result of a partnership with Temple Bar Gallery + Studios.

Printed essays on the films are often handed out to the audience to provide them with as much context as possible and to promote the validity of work that, in terms of scale and means of production, is much smaller than what most audiences are accustomed to. EFC maintain a website that records every screening, uploads the poster designed for each event and includes any texts written about the programmes. In this way, EFC is both a curatorial and educational endeavour, filling the gap that exists in film education in Ireland on material that is perceived as being too ‘experimental’and often slighted.

EFC’s approach to what constitutes experimental film is, as Fitzpatrick puts it, “quite expansive”. It is closely aligned to esteemed film critic and programmer Nicole Brenez’s thesis that, while a more conventional cinema “standardises emotions, sensation, perception and belief”, experimental cinema “re-opens the entire field of experience … exploring all possible conceptions, which don’t pre-exist the exploration itself.”3 This is something that is examined and brought to light in ‘Absences and (Im)possibilities: Traces of an Avant-Garde Cinema in Ireland’, an international touring programme of Irish experimental film works commissioned by IFI International and curated by Collado, Desmond, Foreman and Lambert.

The intention with EFC is to consider what this cinema has to offer both formally and conceptually, rather than force it to conform to some preconceived notion of what experimental film should look or sound like. The objective is also to excite discussion amongst what is typically a very cross-disciplinary audience made up of filmmakers, painters, musicians, dancers, curators, writers and designers in order to develop a degree of criticality about films that are complex and sometimes unapologetically oblique.

In April 2015, EFC will present its fiftieth projection. Plans for the next series of programmes at the IFI include screenings of work by Swedish filmmaker Gunvor Nelson, video artist George Barber and an exciting collaboration with the Project Arts Centre. It is a considerable achievement for a group who all work to curate and manage EFC voluntarily. This is something that the group is looking to redress, so that EFC can actively develop its contribution by continuing to show examples of cinema that risk being neglected and film work “of resistance and formal invention, explicitly opposed to the medium’s dominant, industry-centric narrative”.4 Alice Butler is a writer, researcher and film curator.

Notes 1. Maeve Connolly, ‘Sighting an Irish Avant Garde’, maeveconnolly.net 2. Ibid.

3. Nicole Brenez, quoted in Donal Foreman ‘Experimental Conversations: Ourselves Connected?’, estudiosirlandeses.org, 2006 4. Donal Foreman, ‘L’art Le Plus Politique’, brooklynrail.org, 2012

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

31

2014 V VALERIE EARLEY ARLEY RESIDENCY AWARD AWARD

INSTITUTION PROFILE

Valerie Earley Residency Arts on the Peninsula AOIFE FLYNN, RECIPIENT OF THE 2014 V VALERIE EARLEY ARLEY RESIDENCY AWARD AWARD.

Aoife Flynn, Tranmission, ‘Hexagon’, Mermaid Arts Centre 2014

ViSual Artists Ireland and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre are delighted to announce that Aoife Flynn is the recipient of the 2014 Valerie Earley Residency Award. Flynn will take up her residency from 1 – 15 June. A report on the artist’s time at Tyrone Guthrie Centre will appear in a later edition of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

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 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. She has a BA from Limerick School of Art and Design (2008) and an MA from 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 is currently on the artist panel at the Gallery. She was part of an artist-led group that set up Occupy Space 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 in association with Fingal County Council, Dublin in October 2012.

Other writing and curatorial projects include in_flux (2011), artist-led art fair EXIT Limerick, EVA International (2012), Cork Midsummer Festival (2012) and Market Studio Curatorial Award (2012).

Exhibitions include ‘EU-topia’ (2013) and ‘Just in Time’ (2013) with MART, Dublin in association with the Dublin Arts Office at The LAB. Dublin. aoifeflynnart.com tyroneguthrie.ie

2015 Valerie Earley Residency Award Previous Recipients:

Jill Christine Miller (2013 award) Aoife Flynn (2014 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 Visual Artists Ireland members 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.

The application process is subject to the standard terms and conditions of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. Contact: Tyrone Guthrie Centre Annaghmakerrig, Newbliss, Co. Monaghan 00353 47 54003 info@tyroneguthrie.ie www.tyroneguthrie.ie

CloSiNG daT da e: Friday 26 JuNe 2015

LAUREN DAWSON PROFILES ARDS ARTS CENTRE.

Matisse exhibition in the Georgian Gallery, Ards Arts Centre

Ards Arts Centre exterior

Located in the beautifully restored Georgian Town Hall in the centre of Newtownards, Co. Down, Ards Arts Centre delivers a jam-packed programme of visual arts exhibitions, creative classes and workshops, performances of live music, dance and drama. This also includes the annual festivals Ards International Guitar Festival and Ards International Puppet Festival. Ards Arts has taken a proactive role in the development of an arts programme to increase the quality and accessibility of the arts within Ards Borough Council. Housing two galleries for temporary exhibitions – the Georgian Gallery and the Sunburst Gallery – Ards Arts hosts a thriving and diverse visual arts programme of monthly exhibitions.

The Ards Peninsula is home to a large concentration of professional visual and applied artists attracted by the region’s designation as an area of outstanding natural beauty. With this wealth of creativity Ards Arts is never short of inspiring exhibitions by local artists, as well as national and international artists, touring exhibitions and community initiatives.

One highlight of the visual arts programme is the annual ‘Creative Peninsula’ exhibition, which features a diverse range of mediums and styles from local professional artists. The Creative Peninsula is Northern Ireland’s premier arts and crafts open studio event attracting around 10,000 visitors in August 2014. Now in its fifteenth year, the 10-day event organised by Ards Borough Council’s Craft and Arts Development Services promotes the strong tradition of professional arts and crafts produced in the Ards area.

The Creative Peninsula acts as a driving force behind cultural tourism and economic development in the area and saw over 70 professional arts and crafts practitioners participate in 2014. The annual event showcases some of the finest talent Northern Ireland has to offer, with a unique programme offering free demonstrations and bookable workshops, indoor and outdoor exhibitions, professional development seminars, creative cafés and open studios.

Ards Arts also promotes emerging artists and recent graduates, with staff visiting the annual University of Ulster Degree Show to invite graduates to exhibit their work. This provides graduates with the opportunity to put on their own solo show and to develop their professional CV.

One such graduate who experienced his first solo show at Ards Arts Centre in 2013 is Donaghadee artist Michael Geddis. Geddis recently returned with a joint exhibition ‘Dwindling Abundance’ with his past tutor, Doris Rohr, in February 2015. Michael stated: “I was thrilled to have my first solo professional exhibition on my ‘home turf’ at Ards Arts Centre.

Their decision to offer me a solo show in the large Georgian Gallery was a major boost to my confidence and the high ceiling and diffuse natural light was an ideal space for showing my drawings. I will never forget the opening night of my first solo show at Ards Arts Centre as a new graduate and I really appreciate the encouragement and support that I received from the staff”.

Recent graduates and local artists share the visual arts programme with touring exhibitions; in 2014 Ards Arts were delighted to host the Hayward Touring Exhibition ‘Matisse: Drawing with Scissors’ from the Southbank Centre, London. This exhibition

by Henri Matisse, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, was undoubtedly the highlight attraction at Ards Arts Centre last year, with over 1800 visitors. The exhibition featured 35 lithographic prints of the famous cut-outs produced in the last four years of the artist’s life (1950 – 1954).

To coincide with this landmark exhibition, Ards Arts invited participants in our Creative Classes to take inspiration from Matisse’s work to create their own masterpieces showcasing the skills they had developed at Ards Arts, which were then exhibited in the Sunburst Gallery. Over 200 school children also took part in workshops lead by ARUA artist Betty Brown. They had the opportunity to visit the exhibition and then create their own ‘miniMatisse masterpieces’ using the famous Matisse cutout technique.

Ards Arts Centre looks to continue taking an active role in delivering a diverse visual arts programme throughout 2015.

Lauren Dawson, Arts Admin Assistant, Ards Arts Centre. facebook.com/ArdsArts @ArdsArts ardsarts.com Note If you would like to exhibit at Ards Arts Centre, please contact the gallery for an Exhibition Submission Pack by emailing arts@ards-council.gov.uk or telephoning (+44) 028 9181 0803.

32

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

vai west of ireland representative

March – April 2015

VAI Northern Ireland manager

More More More aideen barry discusses the CLAREGALWAY VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFÉ (5 FEB 2015) AND THE IMPORTANCE OF SUPPORTS and NETWORKING RESOURCES.

Lisa Malone, Chapter one, photopolymer intaglio

Printmakers at Belfast Print Workshop

Big Impressions Rob Hilken discusses PRINTMAKING FACILITIES IN NORTHERN IRELAND.

Louise Manifold, Time Machines, 2015, 16mm transferred to HD

VAI Visual Artists’ Café events have become victims of their own success in recent months. Attendance numbers have shot through the roof and visual arts communities across the country have been calling for ‘more!’ These flexible format events have been designed to provide artists with a space to learn, share information and meet with fellow artists and those working in the sector in an open and convivial atmosphere. My colleagues Monica Flynn and Adrian Colwell are to be applauded for their valiant work in responding to the needs of artists based all over Ireland for professional development workshops, presentations and visiting curator tours.

The VAI Visual Artists’ Café held at the Claregalway Hotel, Co. Galway (5 February 2015) was kindly supported and enabled by James Harold and Marilyn Gaughan of Galway’s County and City Arts Offices. Participation exceeded all expectations.

We even had to turn a few folks away.

For those who couldn’t get in, further VAI events will take place over the next few months across the county and beyond – including a VAI Café event in Connemara, planned with the help of Áisitheoir Ealaíon Muireann Ní Dhroighnéain of Udaras na Gaeltacht. Details will be announced soon. Check the VAI ebulletin and website. Book early to avoid disappointment.

The Show & Tell element of the Claregalway VAI Visual Artists’ Café featured artists Marie Hannon, Jojo Hynes, Katherine Halford Greene, Jennifer Cunningham, Philip Lindy, Gianna Tasha, Ruthie Le Gear and Ruby Wallis. The group represented a wide and varied selection of practices and approaches, which reflected the scope and depth of the region’s visual arts community. The diverse needs of local artsts were also aired, which is inevitable in such a broad community. Concerns ranged from the need for studio provision to post graduate research supports. Alongside this, it was made clear that supports – whether financial or practical – can have a positive impact on the trajectory of an artist’s career.

The day began with a presentation detailing the opportunities offered by the City and County Arts Offices and the Arts Trust at NUIG Hospital.

These talks also helped to demystify the process of applying for awards and residencies.

The afternoon session comprised presentations by curators, practitioners and instigators of multistrand practices. Megs Morley talked about devising Plastik, a new annual international festival of artists’ moving image, the first of its kind in Ireland, which ran in Galway, Cork and Dublin during February. Morley is also curator-in-residence for

Galway City and also spoke about taking a sociopolitical approach in her programme, entitled the ‘Para Institution’. She describes it as “a platform for developing and sharing a body of independent curatorial research, working in parallel to the existing institutions in the city” (parainstitution.ie).

Louise Manifold and Úna Quigley, artists with established moving image répertoires, profiled their project Wild-Screen / Scáil-fhain, another example of inventive artist-film programming, which take place during the first week of March in Connemara.2 More details can be read in the profile on page 25.

Morley, Manifold and Quigley are riding on the crest of a particular wave of moving image in the region, after Galway was awarded UNESCO status as a City of Film. One can only hope that the future 2020 European Capital of Culture bid will complement and support these inventive contributors, as well as developing strands to support individual artists.

Architect Aoife Considine was the last presenter of the day. Considine’s practice has led her to a particular vein of curatorial questioning, looking at civic and social responsibility in terms of planning and provision within Galway City. Considine has a history of curating projects that interrogate the notion of space and ownership, and was recently appointed as a research associate to Galway’s 2020 bid.

Overall, the day in Claregalway added up to a very interesting snapshot of where Galway is at, as well as how arts policy can be directed to support artists working in film, moving image, design, architecture, lens-based media, sculpture, paint and traditional approaches.

Finally, a word of praise for Clare County Council Arts Office and their new Resource Room touring project, instigated by Will O’Kane. An artists’ screening event inaugurated the project, held at the Ennistymon Courthouse (29 January 2015). Future events are planned for Tulla Studios and Glor. The first event was particularly special, featuring a special screening of Cecily Brennan’s 2007 16mm film Unstrung. Not only was the artist generous enough to loan them the work but Brennan travelled to the Courthouse to introduce it. A magical evening was had by all accounts and the event has resulted in a particularly positive outcome, with future screening nights planned for later in the year.

Aideen Barry, VAI West of Ireland Representative.

Notes 1. plastikfestival.com 2. wildscreenireland.com 3. galway2020.ie

Printmaking is continuing to develop in Northern Ireland and there are more opportunities than ever to get involved. Belfast, Bangor, Derry and Omagh all have print studios that are open for anyone to use either as a member, on one of their residencies, or by attending one of the many workshops hosted by the organisations. Print continues to thrive as an expressive medium for artists. It is an affordable way for people to own original art and printmakers are finding exhibition opportunities across the country.

August 2014 saw Belfast Print Workshop (BPW) initiate a collaborative exhibition, ‘Images of Ulster’, with the five print studios of Ulster: Derry Print Workshop (DPW), Seacourt Centre of Contemporary Printmaking (Bangor), Strule Arts Centre (Omagh) and Cló Ceardlann na gCnoc Teoranta in Donegal.

The exhibition opened in Omagh in August 2014 with Stuart Cannell’s image of Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness kissing – causing controversy and a great deal of publicity for the exhibition. It travelled to Derry in October and recently finished at Cló. Its tour will continue throughout 2015 and 2016.

‘Images of Ulster’ has been particularly significant in welcoming the Derry Print Workshop to the printmaking community in the North. DPW moved into their current premises in Pump Street Studios alongside Creative Village Arts in July 2013 as part of the Derry-Londonderry City of Culture celebrations and remain one of the highlights of its legacy.

In the last year DPW have significantly expanded the facilities available at the workshop, which now include professional etching, relief and archival digital printing equipment as well as a gallery space where members can exhibit and sell their work. The workshop is large enough for six printmakers to work side by side and they welcome printmakers of all levels of experience. DPW have run numerous introductory workshops allowing beginners to make use of the facilities and have completed 12 placements in collaboration with the Inner City Trust. Their social enterprise work has also seen them work with Artscare, the Texaco Children’s Art Competition and the Holywell Trust.

Derry Print Workshop plan to expand their workshop offerings throughout 2015 and have become a major asset in the creative offerings of the city.

Seacourt in Bangor continues to go from strength to strength. A recent exhibition at the Island Arts Centre in Lisburn saw the results of their collaboration with the Armagh Planetarium – with 18 members responding to images taken with the Hubble Telescope. This is an example of their continued programme of collaborations with nonarts organisations, such as the Ulster Museum and the Queen’s Marine Lab. This initiative seeks to open printmaking to new audiences and potentially new

buyers, as well as providing members with new creative challenges.

Seacourt also has its own gallery at the workshop. The offering in February was billed as three solo exhibitions from Donall Billings, Robert Peters and Angela Darby. The most striking work on show is Billings’s full-scale working pinball machine, constructed using plywood, printing plates and found glass from bus shelters. The walls feature prints taken from the glass in the sculpture, while the random marks of wear in the glass echo the random movements of the game. The gamblingthemed exhibition from Robert Peters, ‘Could Be’, offered prints for sale in editions of 13, priced at £13 each. These could be ‘bought’ with valid lottery tickets or scratch cards. Seacourt lives up to its moniker of being a centre for contemporary printmaking, as its members push the boundaries of the medium into sculpture and beyond.

The members of Belfast Print Workshop are also achieving success across Ireland. Lisa Malone’s solo exhibition ‘Rainbow For Sale’ at the prestigious Graphic Studio Gallery in Dublin ran for the month of February and saw her create prints using a wide range of techniques including mezzotint, photopolymer intaglio, steel etching, mono and screen-printing. The largest work is a site-specific, composite screenprint over six sheets, which was designed as an artistic response to the gallery space.

The artist uses her deceptively simple line drawings to tell stories of how we create, inhabit and change our world through the structures we build and the imprints we leave behind.

Seacourt and BPW both run several funded residency programmes throughout the year for people of all levels of experience. BPW are currently hosting Portstewart-based glassmaker Catherine Keenan in their residency for non-printmakers. The residency is designed for artists of all disciplines to experiment and feed printmaking into their own practice. Catherine will be exhibiting her colourful optical works in the BPW gallery during April 2015, which she will then translate back into her glass practice.

As well as running residency programmes, all of the print studios offer workshops that include introductions to a wide range of techniques as well as more in-depth classes on individual printing methods. BPW also offer editioning and commissioning services. Each studio has a thriving, growing community of members that include professional artists, hobbyists, textile printers and graphic designers, who provide support and advice to each other in these relaxed, creative environments.

Rob Hilken, Northern Ireland Manager, Visual Artists Ireland.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

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Public Art ROUNDUP

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

Upholstering a Black Taxi

viewpoint. A line of hardwood curves stretches around the site and coloured glass fills subtle canopies, providing a notional shelter to the people seated below. Arcs and circles, sometimes glazed, sometimes simply demarking the basic shapes of apertures (neither doors nor windows) float against the heavy concrete. O’Malley stated that the bench is intended to provide “a meeting place, a place for a breather or a point of solidity in a building of light and air with references to furniture both in form and function”.

Sounding Lines

Educational Psychology Part 2

Artists: Charlotte Bosanquet and Deborah Malcolmson Title: Upholstering a West Belfast Black Taxi Commissioner: Upper Springfield Development Trust Dateadvertised: December 2014 Date sited / carried out: December 2014 Budget: £2000 Project Partners: Upper Springfield Development Trust, St Vincent de Paul, Newhill First Steps Description: A West Belfast cross-generational project group were asked to think about the transport and movement around a city.

Thinking about the phenomenon of the West Belfast taxi, the group made drawings examined things lost and gave the taxi new properties: wings and speed. These drawing were incorporated into a fabric pattern that were then industrially printed and used to upholster a black taxi. This taxi’s route passes by the houses of the participants. (Photo

by Simon Mills.)

Canopy

Artist: Pat Curran Title: Educational Psychology Part 2 Commissioner: Ballyfermot Library Date sited / carried out: 10 January 2015 Description: Pat Curran created work for Ballyfermot Library using old hardback book covers glued together to create canvases of great colour to paint on. Curran describes this method as a “new language”, which provides a means of expression – the text adding a further dimension to the work. The paintings are autobiographical, documenting Ireland in the 1960s and 70s, when the artist was growing up, but also relevant today. Through the use of text alongside painting, the viewer is encouraged into a dialogue with the works.

Artists: Claire Halpin and Maree Hensey Title: Sounding Lines Commissioners: South Tipperary County Council Arts Service and forms part of an INTERREG IVB programme entitled Green and Blue Futures. South Tipperary County Council is one of the partners of this European Partnership Project.

Date advertised: March 2013 Date sited / carried out: August 2013 – August 2014 Budget: €24,000 Description: Sounding Lines was a collaborative visual art project by Claire Halpin and Maree Hensey which encouraged participants to navigate and encounter the River Suir in an innovative and unexpected way. The artists engaged with local schools, a local day care centre, Workman’s Boat Club, Suir Dragon Paddlers and local fishermen through workshops, meetings and creative engagement. The yearlong project concluded with a multimedia artwork trail along the towpath at Kilsheelan, Co. Tipperary. This one day event gave participants the opportunity to experience artworks from the community workshops, sound recordings from the natural environment of the river, oral recordings, archival recordings, video projections, installations and artworks that evolved from Maree and Claire’s creative collaboration installed in the natural and built environment of the riverbank.

Hidden Presence

Bassline Murals

Artist: Niamh O’Malley Title: Canopy Commissioner: Blackrock Further Education Institute Commission type: Per Cent for Art Date advertised: August 2013 Date sited: November 2014 Description: Artist Niamh O’Malley created a work for Blackrock Further Education Institute and Library’s new building, a dynamic contemporary space. O’Malley worked with a professional cabinetmaker and steelworker to make a sculptural artwork from wood, glass and steel. The sculpture includes a bench, with its own canopy and

Artist: Shona Shirley Macdonald Title: Banchory Bassine Murals Commissioner: Dufi Art / Banchory Town Council Date advertised: 2 August 2014 Date sited / carried out: 7 – 10 October 2014 Description: Banchory Town Council commissioned Dufi Art, a team of two artists – Fin Macrae and Alister MacInnes – to refurbish the town of Banchory in Scotland, especially the little square behind the main street. This project was called Banchory Bassline and is ongoing.

Waterford-based artist Shona Shirley Macdonald was commissioned

by Dufi Art, along with four other artists, to paint murals in the town, leading from the main street along a back street towards the square, drawing people towards it. The other artists commissioned were FiST, David Faithfull, Fraser Gray and Natasha Todd.

Artist: Mary-Ruth Walsh Title: Hidden Presence Commissioner: Logan Sisley, Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane Date sited: 29 November 2014 – 29 March 2015 Budget: Artist fee inclusive of three sculptures and a film Commission type: Gallery commission as part of the ‘Phoenix Rising, Art and Civic Imagination’ exhibition Project partners: Dublin City Council and the Hugh Lane Brief description: Mary-Ruth Walsh was commissioned to make a sculpture subtly positioned above the main entrance portico on the outside of the Hugh Lane building. This proposed habitation maneuvers itself into an unmapped area of the city and the Hugh Lane. It appears to grow organically out of the building, referencing the haphazard alongside the planned city. Hidden Presence appears integral to the building yet its organic growth is in opposition to the beautifully refined and ordered Charlemont House.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

Visual Artists Ireland operates a wide range of professional development training events throughout the year.

Spring / Summer 2015

The delivery of this programme is greatly supported by our relationship with local and international visual art professionals and partner organisations throughout the island of Ireland.

Visual Artist ireland works in partnership with local authorities, visual arts venues and others, combining resources to support the professional development of visual artists at regional level.

Republic of Ireland

Northern Ireland

Galway

Limerick

Belfast

Towards Sustainability – Mapping your Career with Patricia Clyne-Kelly In partnership with the Design and Crafts Council of Ireland, Galway City Council and Galway County Council Arts Offices Thur 12 & Fri 13 Mar (10.30 – 16.30) @ Galway venue tbc Places: 25 – 35 Cost: free to artists based in the Galway area

Writing about Your Work with Áine Phillips In partnership with Limerick City and County Councils, Limerick City of Culture, Clare County Council and Tipperary County Council Wed 25 Mar (10.30 – 16.30) @Limerick (venue tba) Places: 10 –12 Cost: €10 /€5 (VAI members)

Visual Artists’ Helpdesks Every second Wednesday of the month at the Digital Arts Studios, Belfast, support and advice for artists is available on a range of subjects, including: general arts careers advice, website and social media, networking, marketing and working with galleries. Cost: free

Dublin Documenting your Work with Tim Durham Thurs 19 Mar (10.00 – 17.00) @Visual Artists Ireland, Dublin 2 Places: 10 – 12 Cost: €40 / €20 (VAI members)

Meath Writing about Your Work with Patricia Clyne-Kelly In partnership with Meath County Council Sat 21 Mar (10.30 – 16.30) @ Headford Arms Hotel, Kells, Co. Meath Places: 10 – 12 Cost: €40 / €20 (VAI members)

Bo ok NOW AN D dis avo ap id po i nt me nt

Fingal The following topics are being developed in partnership with Final County Council Arts Office for Spring 2015: PR & Social Media for Visual Artists, Copyright, Fair Use, Appropriation and Collaboration Issues; Positioning Yourself & Your Work.

Further details and topics to be announced.

Look out for further training topics to be announced in Jan 2015 including: Presenting Yourself and Your Work; Finance & Budgeting for Visual Artists; Collaborations and Partnerships (a seminar looking at cross disciplinary projects); Peer Critique Drawing and more.

We look forward to delivering training in Dublin and other regions in 2015 in conjunction with partners: Fingal County Council, Limerick City of Culture, Limerick City Council, Limerick County Council, Galway City Council, Galway County Council, Tipperary County Council, Clare County Council, the Design & Crafts Council of Ireland and the Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Artists’ Network.

Bookings / Information Monica Flynn, Professional Development Officer Visual Artists Ireland, 7 – 9 Dame Court, Dublin 2 T: 01 672 9488 E: monica@visualartists.ie W: visualartists.ie

One-on-One Helpdesks Individual 30-minute appointments.

Wed 11 Mar, Wed 8 Apr, Wed 13 May 13.00 – 17.00 @DAS, Belfast. Cost: free.

Visual Artists’ Café: Transparency & Governance NI 11 March 2015 (2pm – 5pm) @Ulster Hall. Cost: free Programme: Welcome (Noel Kelly, Visual Artists Ireland); Setting the Context for Future Funding (Deirdre Robb, ACNI); Governance strengthening the sector (Eimear Henry, Belfast City Council); Legal Realities and the Solutions Available (Tanya Carlisle – Arts & Business); VAI Case Study (Noel Kelly - VAI).

Visual Artists’ Café: Belfast EXPOSED Programme: Art books; Show & Tells; Read That Image – self publishing workshop March (date tbc). Venue: Belfast Exposed.

Cost: free (VAI members), £10 (non-members) Visual Artists’ Café: Research Support & Discussion with a research Project Clinic Apr 2015. Belfast (venue TBC).

Cost: free (VAI members), £10 (non-members)

Derry-Londonderry Visual Artists’ Café: Artist Show & Tell May 2015. Derry-Londonderry (venue TBC).

Cost: free (VAI members), £10 (non-members) 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 Please email Rob 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.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

35

opportunities

Opportunities commissions ST ANGELA’S PER CENT FOR ART St Angela’s College Cork City intend to commission a site-specific public art work/s under the Per Cent for Art scheme funded by the Department of Education and Science on the occasion of its significant redesign and redevelopment by architects O’Donnell + Tuomey. Work is currently underway. The budget of €50,000 is inclusive of all artists’ fees and costs, installation, VAT, insurance etc.

The selected artist will be linked in with the architectural design team to support the artist where possible and ensure efficient delivery of the project. Please mark all correspondence ‘St Angela’s College Commission’.

Deadline 5pm 20 February Email elma@nationalsculpturefactory.com Connswater Greenway Connswater Community Greenway are commissioning an artist for a public artwork at C.S. Lewis Square, Holywood Arches, Belfast. Belfast City Council invites submissions of a completed ITT for the provision of a public art installation. The Contracting Authority seeks to commission an artist (team) to design, procure, fabricate, construct and install a high quality, permanent, innovative and original piece of physical public-realm art within the civic square. Artists are invited to submit proposals for a piece of public art to a total value of £270,000 excluding VAT. All associated costs are to be included within the allocated budget.

Deadline 12 noon 20 March Web belfastcity.gov.uk Innisfree Submissions are invited for conceptual interpretations of W.B. Yeats’s poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree. This is an international architectural competition open to regional, national and international prac-

titioners of architecture and art. It proposes a poetic architectural intervention for the island of Innisfree, which will mediate between Yeats’s poetic vision and contemporary architectural ideas.

The Institute of Technology Sligo in association with the Model, Sligo, Yeats 2015, Hazelwood Demesne Ltd and Sligo County Council presents the competition. The winning design will be constructed on the island for 13 June 2015, as a realisation of Yeats’s vision – a gift on his 150th birthday. The award value is €30,000.

Deadline 5pm 12 March Web yeats2015-architecture-competition.com

OPEN submission ÉIGSE OPEN SUBMISSION The 36th Annual Éigse Open Submission is now open. The selector will be Lewis Biggs, a freelance curator and writer. The Éigse Award for visual arts (of €5000) will be presented for the ‘most outstanding work in any medium’ at the opening of the Carlow Arts Festival on 29 May. The selected finalists will be exhibited in VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art until 30 August.

Deadline 30 August Web carlowfestival.com PIGTOWN SCRATCHINGS Pigtown Scratchings is accepting proposals from artists, performers and musicians working in any media or discipline for inclusion in its 2015 live performance event at Dance Limerick, at 7pm on Thursday 7 May 2015. Prior experience is not a condition of acceptance. Please refer to and read the guidelines before submitting your proposal. Pigtown Scratchings is an occasional series of experimental music and performance events curated by Softday (Sean Taylor and Mikael Fernström).

Deadline 5pm 27 March Web pigtownscratchings.wordpress.com FORM OUTDOOR SCULPTURE Applications are now open for artists to submit works for consideration for the 2015 edition of ForM, an outdoor sculpture exhibition being held in Bangor Castle Walled Garden, Co. Down. Artists are invited to propose site-specific works or pieces inspired by the surroundings.

Deadline 12 noon 23 March Web northdown.gov.uk/Events/ForM-WalledGarden-Exhibition Email artsadmin@northdown.gov.uk DÚN LAOGHAIRE LEXICON Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council invites proposals for its 2015/2016 exhibition programme for the new Municipal Gallery, DLR LexIcon.

The callout is open to professional artists, curators and arts organisations. Proposals for solo, two-person or group shows are welcome. Three separate exhibitions will be programmed. At least one will specifically feature the work of artists connected to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County.

The three exhibitions will be shown between October 2015 and December 2016.

Deadline 12 noon 20 March Web dlrcoco.ie/arts Email arts@dlrcoco.ie LUAN GALLERY Athlone Arts and Tourism is currently seeking expressions of interest from artists and arts groups both professional and amateur that wish to exhibit in Luan Gallery, Athlone in 2016. Exhibitions proposals relating to the 1916 Rising centenary are welcome in all mediums. A document detailing the submission process and requirements, which must be adhered throughout proposal, can be downloaded from the website.

Deadline 12 noon 27 March

Web athloneartsandtourism.ie

calls for papers IRISH JOURNAL The editorial board of the Irish Journal of Arts Management and Cultural Policy is seeking submissions of research articles and proposals for book reviews by academics and practitioners for Volume 3 of the Journal. Submissions should address topics concerning Ireland or Northern Ireland. Further topic details can be found online. Email a brief abstract and article title. Final submissions of 4,000 – 5,000 words will be due on 1 June 2015.

Deadline 1 April 2015 Web culturalpolicy.ie Email info@culturalpolicy.ie DECADE OF CENTENARIES The MA Festive Arts programme at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick and TRIARC: the Irish Art Research Centre at Trinity College Dublin will host a conference titled ‘Designing Commemoration: performance, process and participation’ and seek proposals. Papers should explore and reflect on the experience of designing and creating commemorative events, works of art or places, as well as the experience of participation in commemoration in visual and material culture. This conference will take place on 8 and 9 October 2015. Abstracts of 300 words for 20-minute papers should be submitted via email.

Deadline 5pm 30 March Email designingcommemoration@gmail.com Web designingcommemoration.wordpress. com

AWARDS

PROJECT AWARD The Arts Council Project Awards support specific project activities under several art form/arts practice areas: The guidelines for each award can be downloaded from the available funding section of the Arts Council website. Applicants who have not previously used the online services site must register in advance. It may take up to five working days for your registrations to be confirmed so it is very important that you register as early as possible.

Deadline 5.30pm 19 March Web artscouncil.ie ACNI SMALL GRANTS The Arts Council of Northern Ireland has designed the Small Grants Programme to encourage organisations to develop and deliver ideas linked to artistic needs and to their future plans. ACNI wants to support activities which benefit the people of Northern Ireland or that help arts organisations in Northern Ireland carry out their work. The Small Grants Programme is flexible in order to suit a wide range of programmes across all art forms in the community and at professional level.

Deadline Ongoing Web artscouncil-ni.org ARTIST IN THE COMMUNITY Twice yearly, the Arts Council offers grants to enable artists and communities of place/or interest to work together on projects. The Artist in the Community Scheme is managed by Create, the national development agency for collaborative arts. The projects can take place in a diverse range of social and community contexts, e.g. arts and health, arts in prisons, arts and older people, arts and cultural diversity. Details of the two phases can be found online.

Deadlines Round 1: 19 March, round 2: 29 June Email support@create-ireland.ie Web www.create-ireland.ie/about-the-artistin-the-community-scheme.html

Artists’ Summer Project Studios @ Dublin School of Creative Arts, DIT Grangegorman The Dublin School of Creative Arts in DIT Grangegorman is inviting applications from artists for its Summer Studio programme. The successful applicants will be given a rent free studio space in our superb North House studio complex from 20 June to 1 September 2015. Successful applicants will be expected to give three master classes to our Fine Art undergraduate and postgraduate students over the 2015/2016 academic year. One space will be reserved for a curator.

These project studios are solely for the purpose of assisting artists/ curators to consider or complete a body of work for exhibition.

Applicants must have a developed professional practice. Applications should be made by email and contain: • • • •

a project plan for the specified work period (July – August 2015) a letter of confirmation/invitation from a venue for exhibition curriculum vitae. portfolio of images (max. 10) submitted as Jpegs or a link to the artist’s website.

Deadline: 6 April 2015 Contact: brian.fay@dit.ie, adp.dit.ie

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

All transportation fully insured Largest Private Art Storage Facility in Ireland

  

   

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        

    

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March – April 2015

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2014 V VALERIE EARLEY ARLEY RESIDENCY AWARD AWARD

INSTITUTION PROFILE

Valerie Earley Residency Arts on the Peninsula AOIFE FLYNN, RECIPIENT OF THE 2014 V VALERIE EARLEY ARLEY RESIDENCY AWARD AWARD.

Aoife Flynn, Tranmission, ‘Hexagon’, Mermaid Arts Centre 2014

ViSual Artists Ireland and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre are delighted to announce that Aoife Flynn is the recipient of the 2014 Valerie Earley Residency Award. Flynn will take up her residency from 1 – 15 June. A report on the artist’s time at Tyrone Guthrie Centre will appear in a later edition of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

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 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. She has a BA from Limerick School of Art and Design (2008) and an MA from 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 is currently on the artist panel at the Gallery. She was part of an artist-led group that set up Occupy Space 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 in association with Fingal County Council, Dublin in October 2012.

Other writing and curatorial projects include in_flux (2011), artist-led art fair EXIT Limerick, EVA International (2012), Cork Midsummer Festival (2012) and Market Studio Curatorial Award (2012).

Exhibitions include ‘EU-topia’ (2013) and ‘Just in Time’ (2013) with MART, Dublin in association with the Dublin Arts Office at The LAB. Dublin. aoifeflynnart.com tyroneguthrie.ie

2015 Valerie Earley Residency Award Previous Recipients:

Jill Christine Miller (2013 award) Aoife Flynn (2014 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 Visual Artists Ireland members 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.

The application process is subject to the standard terms and conditions of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. Contact: Tyrone Guthrie Centre Annaghmakerrig, Newbliss, Co. Monaghan 00353 47 54003 info@tyroneguthrie.ie www.tyroneguthrie.ie

CloSiNG daT da e: Friday 26 JuNe 2015

LAUREN DAWSON PROFILES ARDS ARTS CENTRE.

Matisse exhibition in the Georgian Gallery, Ards Arts Centre

Ards Arts Centre exterior

Located in the beautifully restored Georgian Town Hall in the centre of Newtownards, Co. Down, Ards Arts Centre delivers a jam-packed programme of visual arts exhibitions, creative classes and workshops, performances of live music, dance and drama. This also includes the annual festivals Ards International Guitar Festival and Ards International Puppet Festival. Ards Arts has taken a proactive role in the development of an arts programme to increase the quality and accessibility of the arts within Ards Borough Council. Housing two galleries for temporary exhibitions – the Georgian Gallery and the Sunburst Gallery – Ards Arts hosts a thriving and diverse visual arts programme of monthly exhibitions.

The Ards Peninsula is home to a large concentration of professional visual and applied artists attracted by the region’s designation as an area of outstanding natural beauty. With this wealth of creativity Ards Arts is never short of inspiring exhibitions by local artists, as well as national and international artists, touring exhibitions and community initiatives.

One highlight of the visual arts programme is the annual ‘Creative Peninsula’ exhibition, which features a diverse range of mediums and styles from local professional artists. The Creative Peninsula is Northern Ireland’s premier arts and crafts open studio event attracting around 10,000 visitors in August 2014. Now in its fifteenth year, the 10-day event organised by Ards Borough Council’s Craft and Arts Development Services promotes the strong tradition of professional arts and crafts produced in the Ards area.

The Creative Peninsula acts as a driving force behind cultural tourism and economic development in the area and saw over 70 professional arts and crafts practitioners participate in 2014. The annual event showcases some of the finest talent Northern Ireland has to offer, with a unique programme offering free demonstrations and bookable workshops, indoor and outdoor exhibitions, professional development seminars, creative cafés and open studios.

Ards Arts also promotes emerging artists and recent graduates, with staff visiting the annual University of Ulster Degree Show to invite graduates to exhibit their work. This provides graduates with the opportunity to put on their own solo show and to develop their professional CV.

One such graduate who experienced his first solo show at Ards Arts Centre in 2013 is Donaghadee artist Michael Geddis. Geddis recently returned with a joint exhibition ‘Dwindling Abundance’ with his past tutor, Doris Rohr, in February 2015. Michael stated: “I was thrilled to have my first solo professional exhibition on my ‘home turf’ at Ards Arts Centre.

Their decision to offer me a solo show in the large Georgian Gallery was a major boost to my confidence and the high ceiling and diffuse natural light was an ideal space for showing my drawings. I will never forget the opening night of my first solo show at Ards Arts Centre as a new graduate and I really appreciate the encouragement and support that I received from the staff”.

Recent graduates and local artists share the visual arts programme with touring exhibitions; in 2014 Ards Arts were delighted to host the Hayward Touring Exhibition ‘Matisse: Drawing with Scissors’ from the Southbank Centre, London. This exhibition

by Henri Matisse, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, was undoubtedly the highlight attraction at Ards Arts Centre last year, with over 1800 visitors. The exhibition featured 35 lithographic prints of the famous cut-outs produced in the last four years of the artist’s life (1950 – 1954).

To coincide with this landmark exhibition, Ards Arts invited participants in our Creative Classes to take inspiration from Matisse’s work to create their own masterpieces showcasing the skills they had developed at Ards Arts, which were then exhibited in the Sunburst Gallery. Over 200 school children also took part in workshops lead by ARUA artist Betty Brown. They had the opportunity to visit the exhibition and then create their own ‘miniMatisse masterpieces’ using the famous Matisse cutout technique.

Ards Arts Centre looks to continue taking an active role in delivering a diverse visual arts programme throughout 2015.

Lauren Dawson, Arts Admin Assistant, Ards Arts Centre. facebook.com/ArdsArts @ArdsArts ardsarts.com Note If you would like to exhibit at Ards Arts Centre, please contact the gallery for an Exhibition Submission Pack by emailing arts@ards-council.gov.uk or telephoning (+44) 028 9181 0803.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

vai west of ireland representative

March – April 2015

VAI Northern Ireland manager

More More More aideen barry discusses the CLAREGALWAY VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFÉ (5 FEB 2015) AND THE IMPORTANCE OF SUPPORTS and NETWORKING RESOURCES.

Lisa Malone, Chapter one, photopolymer intaglio

Printmakers at Belfast Print Workshop

Big Impressions Rob Hilken discusses PRINTMAKING FACILITIES IN NORTHERN IRELAND.

Louise Manifold, Time Machines, 2015, 16mm transferred to HD

VAI Visual Artists’ Café events have become victims of their own success in recent months. Attendance numbers have shot through the roof and visual arts communities across the country have been calling for ‘more!’ These flexible format events have been designed to provide artists with a space to learn, share information and meet with fellow artists and those working in the sector in an open and convivial atmosphere. My colleagues Monica Flynn and Adrian Colwell are to be applauded for their valiant work in responding to the needs of artists based all over Ireland for professional development workshops, presentations and visiting curator tours.

The VAI Visual Artists’ Café held at the Claregalway Hotel, Co. Galway (5 February 2015) was kindly supported and enabled by James Harold and Marilyn Gaughan of Galway’s County and City Arts Offices. Participation exceeded all expectations.

We even had to turn a few folks away.

For those who couldn’t get in, further VAI events will take place over the next few months across the county and beyond – including a VAI Café event in Connemara, planned with the help of Áisitheoir Ealaíon Muireann Ní Dhroighnéain of Udaras na Gaeltacht. Details will be announced soon. Check the VAI ebulletin and website. Book early to avoid disappointment.

The Show & Tell element of the Claregalway VAI Visual Artists’ Café featured artists Marie Hannon, Jojo Hynes, Katherine Halford Greene, Jennifer Cunningham, Philip Lindy, Gianna Tasha, Ruthie Le Gear and Ruby Wallis. The group represented a wide and varied selection of practices and approaches, which reflected the scope and depth of the region’s visual arts community. The diverse needs of local artsts were also aired, which is inevitable in such a broad community. Concerns ranged from the need for studio provision to post graduate research supports. Alongside this, it was made clear that supports – whether financial or practical – can have a positive impact on the trajectory of an artist’s career.

The day began with a presentation detailing the opportunities offered by the City and County Arts Offices and the Arts Trust at NUIG Hospital.

These talks also helped to demystify the process of applying for awards and residencies.

The afternoon session comprised presentations by curators, practitioners and instigators of multistrand practices. Megs Morley talked about devising Plastik, a new annual international festival of artists’ moving image, the first of its kind in Ireland, which ran in Galway, Cork and Dublin during February. Morley is also curator-in-residence for

Galway City and also spoke about taking a sociopolitical approach in her programme, entitled the ‘Para Institution’. She describes it as “a platform for developing and sharing a body of independent curatorial research, working in parallel to the existing institutions in the city” (parainstitution.ie).

Louise Manifold and Úna Quigley, artists with established moving image répertoires, profiled their project Wild-Screen / Scáil-fhain, another example of inventive artist-film programming, which take place during the first week of March in Connemara.2 More details can be read in the profile on page 25.

Morley, Manifold and Quigley are riding on the crest of a particular wave of moving image in the region, after Galway was awarded UNESCO status as a City of Film. One can only hope that the future 2020 European Capital of Culture bid will complement and support these inventive contributors, as well as developing strands to support individual artists.

Architect Aoife Considine was the last presenter of the day. Considine’s practice has led her to a particular vein of curatorial questioning, looking at civic and social responsibility in terms of planning and provision within Galway City. Considine has a history of curating projects that interrogate the notion of space and ownership, and was recently appointed as a research associate to Galway’s 2020 bid.

Overall, the day in Claregalway added up to a very interesting snapshot of where Galway is at, as well as how arts policy can be directed to support artists working in film, moving image, design, architecture, lens-based media, sculpture, paint and traditional approaches.

Finally, a word of praise for Clare County Council Arts Office and their new Resource Room touring project, instigated by Will O’Kane. An artists’ screening event inaugurated the project, held at the Ennistymon Courthouse (29 January 2015). Future events are planned for Tulla Studios and Glor. The first event was particularly special, featuring a special screening of Cecily Brennan’s 2007 16mm film Unstrung. Not only was the artist generous enough to loan them the work but Brennan travelled to the Courthouse to introduce it. A magical evening was had by all accounts and the event has resulted in a particularly positive outcome, with future screening nights planned for later in the year.

Aideen Barry, VAI West of Ireland Representative.

Notes 1. plastikfestival.com 2. wildscreenireland.com 3. galway2020.ie

Printmaking is continuing to develop in Northern Ireland and there are more opportunities than ever to get involved. Belfast, Bangor, Derry and Omagh all have print studios that are open for anyone to use either as a member, on one of their residencies, or by attending one of the many workshops hosted by the organisations. Print continues to thrive as an expressive medium for artists. It is an affordable way for people to own original art and printmakers are finding exhibition opportunities across the country.

August 2014 saw Belfast Print Workshop (BPW) initiate a collaborative exhibition, ‘Images of Ulster’, with the five print studios of Ulster: Derry Print Workshop (DPW), Seacourt Centre of Contemporary Printmaking (Bangor), Strule Arts Centre (Omagh) and Cló Ceardlann na gCnoc Teoranta in Donegal.

The exhibition opened in Omagh in August 2014 with Stuart Cannell’s image of Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness kissing – causing controversy and a great deal of publicity for the exhibition. It travelled to Derry in October and recently finished at Cló. Its tour will continue throughout 2015 and 2016.

‘Images of Ulster’ has been particularly significant in welcoming the Derry Print Workshop to the printmaking community in the North. DPW moved into their current premises in Pump Street Studios alongside Creative Village Arts in July 2013 as part of the Derry-Londonderry City of Culture celebrations and remain one of the highlights of its legacy.

In the last year DPW have significantly expanded the facilities available at the workshop, which now include professional etching, relief and archival digital printing equipment as well as a gallery space where members can exhibit and sell their work. The workshop is large enough for six printmakers to work side by side and they welcome printmakers of all levels of experience. DPW have run numerous introductory workshops allowing beginners to make use of the facilities and have completed 12 placements in collaboration with the Inner City Trust. Their social enterprise work has also seen them work with Artscare, the Texaco Children’s Art Competition and the Holywell Trust.

Derry Print Workshop plan to expand their workshop offerings throughout 2015 and have become a major asset in the creative offerings of the city.

Seacourt in Bangor continues to go from strength to strength. A recent exhibition at the Island Arts Centre in Lisburn saw the results of their collaboration with the Armagh Planetarium – with 18 members responding to images taken with the Hubble Telescope. This is an example of their continued programme of collaborations with nonarts organisations, such as the Ulster Museum and the Queen’s Marine Lab. This initiative seeks to open printmaking to new audiences and potentially new

buyers, as well as providing members with new creative challenges.

Seacourt also has its own gallery at the workshop. The offering in February was billed as three solo exhibitions from Donall Billings, Robert Peters and Angela Darby. The most striking work on show is Billings’s full-scale working pinball machine, constructed using plywood, printing plates and found glass from bus shelters. The walls feature prints taken from the glass in the sculpture, while the random marks of wear in the glass echo the random movements of the game. The gamblingthemed exhibition from Robert Peters, ‘Could Be’, offered prints for sale in editions of 13, priced at £13 each. These could be ‘bought’ with valid lottery tickets or scratch cards. Seacourt lives up to its moniker of being a centre for contemporary printmaking, as its members push the boundaries of the medium into sculpture and beyond.

The members of Belfast Print Workshop are also achieving success across Ireland. Lisa Malone’s solo exhibition ‘Rainbow For Sale’ at the prestigious Graphic Studio Gallery in Dublin ran for the month of February and saw her create prints using a wide range of techniques including mezzotint, photopolymer intaglio, steel etching, mono and screen-printing. The largest work is a site-specific, composite screenprint over six sheets, which was designed as an artistic response to the gallery space.

The artist uses her deceptively simple line drawings to tell stories of how we create, inhabit and change our world through the structures we build and the imprints we leave behind.

Seacourt and BPW both run several funded residency programmes throughout the year for people of all levels of experience. BPW are currently hosting Portstewart-based glassmaker Catherine Keenan in their residency for non-printmakers. The residency is designed for artists of all disciplines to experiment and feed printmaking into their own practice. Catherine will be exhibiting her colourful optical works in the BPW gallery during April 2015, which she will then translate back into her glass practice.

As well as running residency programmes, all of the print studios offer workshops that include introductions to a wide range of techniques as well as more in-depth classes on individual printing methods. BPW also offer editioning and commissioning services. Each studio has a thriving, growing community of members that include professional artists, hobbyists, textile printers and graphic designers, who provide support and advice to each other in these relaxed, creative environments.

Rob Hilken, Northern Ireland Manager, Visual Artists Ireland.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

33

Public Art ROUNDUP

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

Upholstering a Black Taxi

viewpoint. A line of hardwood curves stretches around the site and coloured glass fills subtle canopies, providing a notional shelter to the people seated below. Arcs and circles, sometimes glazed, sometimes simply demarking the basic shapes of apertures (neither doors nor windows) float against the heavy concrete. O’Malley stated that the bench is intended to provide “a meeting place, a place for a breather or a point of solidity in a building of light and air with references to furniture both in form and function”.

Sounding Lines

Educational Psychology Part 2

Artists: Charlotte Bosanquet and Deborah Malcolmson Title: Upholstering a West Belfast Black Taxi Commissioner: Upper Springfield Development Trust Dateadvertised: December 2014 Date sited / carried out: December 2014 Budget: £2000 Project Partners: Upper Springfield Development Trust, St Vincent de Paul, Newhill First Steps Description: A West Belfast cross-generational project group were asked to think about the transport and movement around a city.

Thinking about the phenomenon of the West Belfast taxi, the group made drawings examined things lost and gave the taxi new properties: wings and speed. These drawing were incorporated into a fabric pattern that were then industrially printed and used to upholster a black taxi. This taxi’s route passes by the houses of the participants. (Photo

by Simon Mills.)

Canopy

Artist: Pat Curran Title: Educational Psychology Part 2 Commissioner: Ballyfermot Library Date sited / carried out: 10 January 2015 Description: Pat Curran created work for Ballyfermot Library using old hardback book covers glued together to create canvases of great colour to paint on. Curran describes this method as a “new language”, which provides a means of expression – the text adding a further dimension to the work. The paintings are autobiographical, documenting Ireland in the 1960s and 70s, when the artist was growing up, but also relevant today. Through the use of text alongside painting, the viewer is encouraged into a dialogue with the works.

Artists: Claire Halpin and Maree Hensey Title: Sounding Lines Commissioners: South Tipperary County Council Arts Service and forms part of an INTERREG IVB programme entitled Green and Blue Futures. South Tipperary County Council is one of the partners of this European Partnership Project.

Date advertised: March 2013 Date sited / carried out: August 2013 – August 2014 Budget: €24,000 Description: Sounding Lines was a collaborative visual art project by Claire Halpin and Maree Hensey which encouraged participants to navigate and encounter the River Suir in an innovative and unexpected way. The artists engaged with local schools, a local day care centre, Workman’s Boat Club, Suir Dragon Paddlers and local fishermen through workshops, meetings and creative engagement. The yearlong project concluded with a multimedia artwork trail along the towpath at Kilsheelan, Co. Tipperary. This one day event gave participants the opportunity to experience artworks from the community workshops, sound recordings from the natural environment of the river, oral recordings, archival recordings, video projections, installations and artworks that evolved from Maree and Claire’s creative collaboration installed in the natural and built environment of the riverbank.

Hidden Presence

Bassline Murals

Artist: Niamh O’Malley Title: Canopy Commissioner: Blackrock Further Education Institute Commission type: Per Cent for Art Date advertised: August 2013 Date sited: November 2014 Description: Artist Niamh O’Malley created a work for Blackrock Further Education Institute and Library’s new building, a dynamic contemporary space. O’Malley worked with a professional cabinetmaker and steelworker to make a sculptural artwork from wood, glass and steel. The sculpture includes a bench, with its own canopy and

Artist: Shona Shirley Macdonald Title: Banchory Bassine Murals Commissioner: Dufi Art / Banchory Town Council Date advertised: 2 August 2014 Date sited / carried out: 7 – 10 October 2014 Description: Banchory Town Council commissioned Dufi Art, a team of two artists – Fin Macrae and Alister MacInnes – to refurbish the town of Banchory in Scotland, especially the little square behind the main street. This project was called Banchory Bassline and is ongoing.

Waterford-based artist Shona Shirley Macdonald was commissioned

by Dufi Art, along with four other artists, to paint murals in the town, leading from the main street along a back street towards the square, drawing people towards it. The other artists commissioned were FiST, David Faithfull, Fraser Gray and Natasha Todd.

Artist: Mary-Ruth Walsh Title: Hidden Presence Commissioner: Logan Sisley, Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane Date sited: 29 November 2014 – 29 March 2015 Budget: Artist fee inclusive of three sculptures and a film Commission type: Gallery commission as part of the ‘Phoenix Rising, Art and Civic Imagination’ exhibition Project partners: Dublin City Council and the Hugh Lane Brief description: Mary-Ruth Walsh was commissioned to make a sculpture subtly positioned above the main entrance portico on the outside of the Hugh Lane building. This proposed habitation maneuvers itself into an unmapped area of the city and the Hugh Lane. It appears to grow organically out of the building, referencing the haphazard alongside the planned city. Hidden Presence appears integral to the building yet its organic growth is in opposition to the beautifully refined and ordered Charlemont House.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

Visual Artists Ireland operates a wide range of professional development training events throughout the year.

Spring / Summer 2015

The delivery of this programme is greatly supported by our relationship with local and international visual art professionals and partner organisations throughout the island of Ireland.

Visual Artist ireland works in partnership with local authorities, visual arts venues and others, combining resources to support the professional development of visual artists at regional level.

Republic of Ireland

Northern Ireland

Galway

Limerick

Belfast

Towards Sustainability – Mapping your Career with Patricia Clyne-Kelly In partnership with the Design and Crafts Council of Ireland, Galway City Council and Galway County Council Arts Offices Thur 12 & Fri 13 Mar (10.30 – 16.30) @ Galway venue tbc Places: 25 – 35 Cost: free to artists based in the Galway area

Writing about Your Work with Áine Phillips In partnership with Limerick City and County Councils, Limerick City of Culture, Clare County Council and Tipperary County Council Wed 25 Mar (10.30 – 16.30) @Limerick (venue tba) Places: 10 –12 Cost: €10 /€5 (VAI members)

Visual Artists’ Helpdesks Every second Wednesday of the month at the Digital Arts Studios, Belfast, support and advice for artists is available on a range of subjects, including: general arts careers advice, website and social media, networking, marketing and working with galleries. Cost: free

Dublin Documenting your Work with Tim Durham Thurs 19 Mar (10.00 – 17.00) @Visual Artists Ireland, Dublin 2 Places: 10 – 12 Cost: €40 / €20 (VAI members)

Meath Writing about Your Work with Patricia Clyne-Kelly In partnership with Meath County Council Sat 21 Mar (10.30 – 16.30) @ Headford Arms Hotel, Kells, Co. Meath Places: 10 – 12 Cost: €40 / €20 (VAI members)

Bo ok AND NOW dis avo ap id po int me nt

Fingal The following topics are being developed in partnership with Final County Council Arts Office for Spring 2015: PR & Social Media for Visual Artists, Copyright, Fair Use, Appropriation and Collaboration Issues; Positioning Yourself & Your Work.

Further details and topics to be announced.

Look out for further training topics to be announced in Jan 2015 including: Presenting Yourself and Your Work; Finance & Budgeting for Visual Artists; Collaborations and Partnerships (a seminar looking at cross disciplinary projects); Peer Critique Drawing and more.

We look forward to delivering training in Dublin and other regions in 2015 in conjunction with partners: Fingal County Council, Limerick City of Culture, Limerick City Council, Limerick County Council, Galway City Council, Galway County Council, Tipperary County Council, Clare County Council, the Design & Crafts Council of Ireland and the Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Artists’ Network.

Bookings / Information Monica Flynn, Professional Development Officer Visual Artists Ireland, 7 – 9 Dame Court, Dublin 2 T: 01 672 9488 E: monica@visualartists.ie W: visualartists.ie

One-on-One Helpdesks Individual 30-minute appointments.

Wed 11 Mar, Wed 8 Apr, Wed 13 May 13.00 – 17.00 @DAS, Belfast. Cost: free.

Visual Artists’ Café: Transparency & Governance NI 11 March 2015 (2pm – 5pm) @Ulster Hall. Cost: free Programme: Welcome (Noel Kelly, Visual Artists Ireland); Setting the Context for Future Funding (Deirdre Robb, ACNI); Governance strengthening the sector (Eimear Henry, Belfast City Council); Legal Realities and the Solutions Available (Tanya Carlisle – Arts & Business); VAI Case Study (Noel Kelly - VAI).

Visual Artists’ Café: Belfast EXPOSED Programme: Art books; Show & Tells; Read That Image – self publishing workshop March (date tbc). Venue: Belfast Exposed.

Cost: free (VAI members), £10 (non-members) Visual Artists’ Café: Research Support & Discussion with a research Project Clinic Apr 2015. Belfast (venue TBC).

Cost: free (VAI members), £10 (non-members)

Derry-Londonderry Visual Artists’ Café: Artist Show & Tell May 2015. Derry-Londonderry (venue TBC).

Cost: free (VAI members), £10 (non-members) 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 Please email Rob 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.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

March – April 2015

35

opportunities

Opportunities commissions ST ANGELA’S PER CENT FOR ART St Angela’s College Cork City intend to commission a site-specific public art work/s under the Per Cent for Art scheme funded by the Department of Education and Science on the occasion of its significant redesign and redevelopment by architects O’Donnell + Tuomey. Work is currently underway. The budget of €50,000 is inclusive of all artists’ fees and costs, installation, VAT, insurance etc.

The selected artist will be linked in with the architectural design team to support the artist where possible and ensure efficient delivery of the project. Please mark all correspondence ‘St Angela’s College Commission’.

Deadline 5pm 20 February Email elma@nationalsculpturefactory.com Connswater Greenway Connswater Community Greenway are commissioning an artist for a public artwork at C.S. Lewis Square, Holywood Arches, Belfast. Belfast City Council invites submissions of a completed ITT for the provision of a public art installation. The Contracting Authority seeks to commission an artist (team) to design, procure, fabricate, construct and install a high quality, permanent, innovative and original piece of physical public-realm art within the civic square. Artists are invited to submit proposals for a piece of public art to a total value of £270,000 excluding VAT. All associated costs are to be included within the allocated budget.

Deadline 12 noon 20 March Web belfastcity.gov.uk Innisfree Submissions are invited for conceptual interpretations of W.B. Yeats’s poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree. This is an international architectural competition open to regional, national and international prac-

titioners of architecture and art. It proposes a poetic architectural intervention for the island of Innisfree, which will mediate between Yeats’s poetic vision and contemporary architectural ideas.

The Institute of Technology Sligo in association with the Model, Sligo, Yeats 2015, Hazelwood Demesne Ltd and Sligo County Council presents the competition. The winning design will be constructed on the island for 13 June 2015, as a realisation of Yeats’s vision – a gift on his 150th birthday. The award value is €30,000.

Deadline 5pm 12 March Web yeats2015-architecture-competition.com

OPEN submission ÉIGSE OPEN SUBMISSION The 36th Annual Éigse Open Submission is now open. The selector will be Lewis Biggs, a freelance curator and writer. The Éigse Award for visual arts (of €5000) will be presented for the ‘most outstanding work in any medium’ at the opening of the Carlow Arts Festival on 29 May. The selected finalists will be exhibited in VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art until 30 August.

Deadline 30 August Web carlowfestival.com PIGTOWN SCRATCHINGS Pigtown Scratchings is accepting proposals from artists, performers and musicians working in any media or discipline for inclusion in its 2015 live performance event at Dance Limerick, at 7pm on Thursday 7 May 2015. Prior experience is not a condition of acceptance. Please refer to and read the guidelines before submitting your proposal. Pigtown Scratchings is an occasional series of experimental music and performance events curated by Softday (Sean Taylor and Mikael Fernström).

Deadline 5pm 27 March Web pigtownscratchings.wordpress.com FORM OUTDOOR SCULPTURE Applications are now open for artists to submit works for consideration for the 2015 edition of ForM, an outdoor sculpture exhibition being held in Bangor Castle Walled Garden, Co. Down. Artists are invited to propose site-specific works or pieces inspired by the surroundings.

Deadline 12 noon 23 March Web northdown.gov.uk/Events/ForM-WalledGarden-Exhibition Email artsadmin@northdown.gov.uk DÚN LAOGHAIRE LEXICON Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council invites proposals for its 2015/2016 exhibition programme for the new Municipal Gallery, DLR LexIcon.

The callout is open to professional artists, curators and arts organisations. Proposals for solo, two-person or group shows are welcome. Three separate exhibitions will be programmed. At least one will specifically feature the work of artists connected to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County.

The three exhibitions will be shown between October 2015 and December 2016.

Deadline 12 noon 20 March Web dlrcoco.ie/arts Email arts@dlrcoco.ie LUAN GALLERY Athlone Arts and Tourism is currently seeking expressions of interest from artists and arts groups both professional and amateur that wish to exhibit in Luan Gallery, Athlone in 2016. Exhibitions proposals relating to the 1916 Rising centenary are welcome in all mediums. A document detailing the submission process and requirements, which must be adhered throughout proposal, can be downloaded from the website.

Deadline 12 noon 27 March

irish bronze Dedicated to the faithful reproduction of the sculptor’s vision

Web athloneartsandtourism.ie

calls for papers IRISH JOURNAL The editorial board of the Irish Journal of Arts Management and Cultural Policy is seeking submissions of research articles and proposals for book reviews by academics and practitioners for Volume 3 of the Journal. Submissions should address topics concerning Ireland or Northern Ireland. Further topic details can be found online. Email a brief abstract and article title. Final submissions of 4,000 – 5,000 words will be due on 1 June 2015.

Deadline 1 April 2015 Web culturalpolicy.ie Email info@culturalpolicy.ie DECADE OF CENTENARIES The MA Festive Arts programme at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick and TRIARC: the Irish Art Research Centre at Trinity College Dublin will host a conference titled ‘Designing Commemoration: performance, process and participation’ and seek proposals. Papers should explore and reflect on the experience of designing and creating commemorative events, works of art or places, as well as the experience of participation in commemoration in visual and material culture. This conference will take place on 8 and 9 October 2015. Abstracts of 300 words for 20-minute papers should be submitted via email.

Deadline 5pm 30 March Email designingcommemoration@gmail.com Web designingcommemoration.wordpress. com

AWARDS

PROJECT AWARD The Arts Council Project Awards support specific project activities under several art form/arts practice areas: The guidelines for each award can be downloaded from the available funding section of the Arts Council website. Applicants who have not previously used the online services site must register in advance. It may take up to five working days for your registrations to be confirmed so it is very important that you register as early as possible.

Deadline 5.30pm 19 March Web artscouncil.ie ACNI SMALL GRANTS The Arts Council of Northern Ireland has designed the Small Grants Programme to encourage organisations to develop and deliver ideas linked to artistic needs and to their future plans. ACNI wants to support activities which benefit the people of Northern Ireland or that help arts organisations in Northern Ireland carry out their work. The Small Grants Programme is flexible in order to suit a wide range of programmes across all art forms in the community and at professional level.

Deadline Ongoing Web artscouncil-ni.org ARTIST IN THE COMMUNITY Twice yearly, the Arts Council offers grants to enable artists and communities of place/or interest to work together on projects. The Artist in the Community Scheme is managed by Create, the national development agency for collaborative arts. The projects can take place in a diverse range of social and community contexts, e.g. arts and health, arts in prisons, arts and older people, arts and cultural diversity. Details of the two phases can be found online.

Deadlines Round 1: 19 March, round 2: 29 June Email support@create-ireland.ie Web www.create-ireland.ie/about-the-artistin-the-community-scheme.html

Artists’ Summer Project Studios @ Dublin School of Creative Arts, DIT Grangegorman The Dublin School of Creative Arts in DIT Grangegorman is inviting applications from artists for its Summer Studio programme. The successful applicants will be given a rent free studio space in our superb North House studio complex from 20 June to 1 September 2015. Successful applicants will be expected to give three master classes to our Fine Art undergraduate and postgraduate students over the 2015/2016 academic year. One space will be reserved for a curator.

These project studios are solely for the purpose of assisting artists/ curators to consider or complete a body of work for exhibition.

T: 01 454 2032 e: irishbronze@eircom.net W: www.irishbronze.ie

Willie Malone: Casting Sculpture for over two decades

Applicants must have a developed professional practice. Applications should be made by email and contain: • • • •

a project plan for the specified work period (July – August 2015) a letter of confirmation/invitation from a venue for exhibition curriculum vitae. portfolio of images (max. 10) submitted as Jpegs or a link to the artist’s website.

Deadline: 6 April 2015 Contact: brian.fay@dit.ie, adp.dit.ie

Kilmainham Art Foundry Ltd t/a Irish Bronze, Kilmainham Rd and Griffith College, Dublin 8

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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

Arts Council of Northern Ireland Developing the arts in Northern Ireland

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

All transportation fully insured Largest Private Art Storage Facility in Ireland

Hi Lily, I’ll take a quarter page, top of back outside.

Please attach QR Code that is above.

Dublin to Paris, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Brussels, Amsterdam Monthly Dublin to Liverpool, Birmingham, London, Bath, Bristol weekly Edit at will Lily, Regards, Joe

RHA_TotallyDublin_Feb2015_Layout 1 20/02/2015 15:32 Page 1

Robert Gober, Untitled, 1997, Cast plastic, painted bronze, paper, silver-plated steel, wood, Edition of 2 with 1 AP, 43.8 x 33 x 33cm, Private collection, Image courtesy of the artist, Private collection, Photography Erma Estwick.

Spring at the RHA 13 March – 26 April Admission free

The Untold Want, artists include Vija Celmins, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin and William McKeown Joe Dunne RHA Nick Miller, Vessels: Nature Morte Michael Cullen RHA, Studio Scene with Elephant – Study after Velázquez RHA New Acquisitions, until 5 April

GAllAGhER GAllERy / 15 Ely Place, Dublin 2 +353 1 661 2558 / info@rhagallery.ie www.rhagallery.ie