Visual Artists' News Sheet - 2015 September October

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet issue 5 September – October 2015 Published by Visual Artists Ireland Ealaíontóirí Radharcacha Éire

Anna Macleod, Water Conversations – Alberta, 2015, documentation of performative walk at Lake Miniwanka, Banff National Park, Alberata, Canada; photo by Alex BishopThorpe, digitalised medium format black and white photograph, dimensions variable

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Editorial

September – October 2015

Contents

Welcome to the September / October 2015 edition of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet. The opening of our Belfast office is the big news at Visual Artists Ireland. Details are outlined in the News section and in Rob Hilken’s VAI [NI] column. Also in this issue, Aoife Flynn, winner of the VAI Valerie Earley Residency 2015, profiles her time at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre.

Our Career Development articles comprise interviews with painter Conor Walton and with Peter Morgan, recently retired from LCAD, who reflect on their pasts and futures.

Reviewed in this edition’s Critique section are: ‘El Lissitzky: The Artist and the State’ IMMA; Laura Gannon, WCAC; Anna McLeod, The Dock; Ruth E. Lyons, Mermaid; Jan McCullough, Belfast Exposed. Sue Reid of The Place Art Collective introduces the group and their recent collaborations with The LAB And Visual Artists Ireland.

Ealaín Na Gaeltachta and the development of the visual arts in the Gaeltacht is a focus in this issue, while Wexford is the subject of our Regional Focus. Wexford Arts Centre, Cow House Studios, Gerda Teljeur, Michael Fortune and Aileen Lambert discuss the region’s visual arts resources and activities.

Kim Macaleese’s column focuses on her experience working as Associate Curator at Grand Union, a gallery and studio space located in Digbeth, Birmingham. Fifi Smith, in her column, introduces MExIndex database of Irish artists’ moving image / film works.

A diverse selection of exhibitions, projects and institutions are profiled in this edition. Dara O’Leary, RDS Arts Programme Manager, discusses the RDS Annual Student Art Awards. Colin Martin, RHA School Principal, outlines the aims and activities of the RHA School. James Merrigan reflects on 10 years of The LAB, Dublin. The aims and activities of Arts and Business NI are profiled. Tanya Kiang and Trish Lambe discuss the aims and activities of the Gallery of Photography, Dublin. Jonathan Carroll talks to Vaari Claffey, curator of ‘Magnetism’ (28 June – 27 September), held at the Hazelwood Estate, Sligo. Elaine Grainger reflects on 10 years of directing and curating Talbot Gallery & Studios, Dublin. The re-launch of Void, Derry is considered in detail and Start Studios, Mohill, Co. Leitrim, introduce themselves.

In a How is it Made? Miguel Martin offers insights into his drawing processes and methodologies, while Michelle Browne reports from the ‘Motherhood and Creative Practice’ conference, held at South Bank University, London, 1 – 2 June 2015.

Reflecting on issues around best practice and governance for visual arts organisations, Noel Kelly, CEO VAI and Tania Carlisle, Learning and Development Manager at Arts & Business NI, discuss the implications of new corporate governance requirements.

And there’s our customary ‘much more’: details of upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public art roundups, news from the sector and current opportunities.

Cover. Anna Macleod, Water Conversations – Alberta, 2015, documentation of performative walk at

Lake Miniwanka, Banff National Park, Alberata, Canada; photo by Alex Bishop-Thorpe, digitalised

medium format black and white photograph, dimensions variable.

5. Column. Kim Macaleese. Forward.

6. Column. Fifi Smith. The MExIndex.

8. VAI News. VAI projects, campaigns and events.

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

10. Regional Focus. Wexford’s visual art resources and activity outlined by Wexford Arts Centre,

Cow House Studios, Gerda Teljeur, Aileen Lambert, Rosie O’Gorman and Michael Fortune.

13. VAI Valerie Earley Residency. Freedom of Thought & Space. Aoife Flynn details her time on the VAI

Valerie Earley Residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre.

14. Career Development. A Balanced Life. Mary Catherine Nolan profiles Conor Walton and the

development of his art career.

15. Profile. Self Directed Peers. Sue Reid profiles The Place Art Collective.

15. Profile. Rewarding & Showcasing. Dara O’Leary introduces the RDS Annual Student Art Awards.

16. Career Development. Don’t Rock the Boat! Peter Morgan reflects on multiple pasts and futures.

17. Profile. Against The Binary. Colin Martin profiles the Royal Hibernian Academy School.

18. Profile. Promoting Partnerships. Tania Carlisle introduces Arts & Business NI. 19. Critique. ‘El Lissitzky: The Artist and the State’ IMMA; Laura Gannon, WCAC; Anna McLeod,

The Dock; Ruth E. Lyons, Mermaid; Jan McCullough, Belfast Exposed.

23. How is it Made? Obscuring & Revealing. Miguel Martin describes and discusses his drawing process.

24. Profile. Experimental Decade. James Merrigan looks at 10 years of The LAB, Dublin.

26. Confernece. A Mother World. ‘Motherhood & Creative Practice’, South Bank University, London.

27. Profile. Building on Potential. Tania Kiang details the aims and activities of the Gallery of

Photography, Dublin.

28. Profile. Brilliant Trees. Jonathan Carroll talks to Vaari Claffey, Curator of ‘Magnetism’, (28 June –

27 September 2015) held at Hazelwood Estate, Sligo.

30. Profile. Room Upstairs. Jackie Barker profiles Void’s new gallery space.

31. VAI Regional. Visual Narration. Muireann Ni Dhroighneain details visual arts in the Gaeltacht.

31. VAI Northern Ireland. Northern Exposure. Rob Hilken, VAI’s Northern Ireland Manager, profiles the

new VAI [NI] Office and the recent ‘Introducing Belfast Galleries’ event.

32. Profile. A Good Start. Carmel Daved profiles Start Studios, Mohill, County Leitrim.

32. Public Art Roundup. Public art commissions, site-specific works, socially engaged practice and

Join

33. Profile. Doing & Not Doing. Elaine Grainger reflects on 10 years of directing and curating Talbot

Gallery & Studios, Dublin.

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

35. Best Practice: Governance. The Benefits Of Accountability. Noel Kelly, CEO Visual Artists Ireland, and

Tania Carlisle, Learning and Development Manager at Arts & Business NI, discuss the implications

of new governance requirements for visual arts organisations.

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

Visual Artists Ireland provides practical support, services, information & resources for professional visual artists throughout their careers.

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other forms of art outside the gallery.

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Production: Editor: Jason Oakley. Assistant Editor: Lily Power. News / Opportunities: Emer Marron, Adrian Colwell. Invoicing: Bernadette Beecher. Contributors: Kim Macaleese, Fifi Smith, Catherine Bowe, Rosie O’Gorman, Gerda Teljeur, Michael Fortune, Aileen Lambert, Aoife Flynn, Mary Catherine Nolan, Conor Walton, Sue Reid, Dara O’Leary, Peter Morgan, Colin Martin, John Graham, Carissa Farrell, Anne Mullee, Gemma Carroll, Kathryn Nelson, Miguel Martin, James Merrigan, Michelle Browne, Tanya Kiang and Trish Lambe, Jonathan Carroll, Vaari Claffey, Elaine Grainger, Jackie Barker, Nuala Ní Fhlathúin, Rob Hilken, Carmel David, Noel Kelly, Tania Carlisle.

A: Visual Artists Ireland, Ground Floor, Central Hotel Chambers, 7–9 Dame Court, Dublin 2, D02 X452 T: 353(0)1 672 9488 E: info@visualartists.ie W: visualartists.ie A: Visual Artists Ireland, Northern Ireland Office, 109 –113 Royal Avenue, Belfast, BT1 1FF W: visualartists-ni.org Board of Directors: Linda Shevlin (Chair), Naomi Sex, Mary Kelly, David Mahon, Maoiliosa Reynolds, Niamh McCann, Donall Curtin, Richard Forrest. Staff: CEO / Director: Noel Kelly. Office Manager: Bernadette Beecher. Publications Manager: Jason Oakley. Assistant Editor: Lily Power. Advocacy Programme Officer: Alex Davis.

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Northern Ireland Manager: Rob Hilken (rob@visualartists-ni.org). West of Ireland Representative: Aideen Barry (aideenbarry@gmail.com).

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

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

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

Column

Kim Macaleese Forward Ask a stranger what they know about Birmingham and the response is all too familiar: the Bull Ring, all those motorways, New Street Station (possibly the worst designed station in all of the UK), perhaps the New Central Library. The list is hardly inspiring, and doesn’t shed light on any of the rich history that this place holds. Bubbling under the surface is a past boasting a wealth of industry, a city that flourished with engineering and manufacturing, a dedicated quarter for the largest concentration of jewelers in all of Europe and the Cadbury chocolate factory! But what about the creative culture flourishing in Birmingham?

Intrigued by what the city could offer, I moved to Birmingham in August 2014. I accepted the position of Associate Curator at Grand Union, a gallery and studio space located in Digbeth, at the heart of the city’s burgeoning ‘creative quarter’. Prior to this I was based in Belfast, working on freelance projects after serving as a director at Catalyst Arts and as co-curator of domestic space Satis House and of Household Collective, with whom I still collaborate frequently.

Grand Union has followed the same trajectory as many artist-led spaces: it sprouted in 2009 out of a shared sense of dissatisfaction among a group of artists and creative practitioners in Birmingham who were fed up with the lack of available studio provision and space for showing contemporary work in the city.

The organisation is unique within the UK in its focus on platforming curatorial practice in the form of a rolling Associate Curator scheme. The Director, Cheryl Jones, recognises that these opportunities are scarce and rarely within any larger institution would curators be given freedom to test out processes and ideas with the support given at Grand Union. This results in an experimental and rich diversity of exhibition making and public programming.

I have been largely responsible for Grand Union’s summer programme, working with two artists in two different locations. In the gallery space we have Fay Nicolson’s ‘OVER AND OVER PURE FORM’, featuring large canvases covered in rhythmical screen prints. I also invited Alice Theobald to undertake a residency at Focal Point Gallery in Southend. This will culminate in a closing performance with singers and musicians.

Within my practice I am always drawn to investigating place and site, which I do frequently with Household Collective, so researching this in Birmingham was a natural progression. Earlier this year I invited Glasgow-based Aideen Doran to Grand Union to undertake a period of research into the city, wanting to understand myself how it operated. This resulted in an exhibition of rotating curated materials, investigating the city as a space for artistic, economic and ideological production. For me, this project provoked a period of deep contemplation about Birmingham and its shifting fabric as Aideen wanted to critique its contemporary urban culture of regeneration through research into the archival traces of the city’s urban past. She invited residents to feed into this process, and had a researcher in residence for the six-week period gathering information and testimonials about the shape of things to come for UK’s ‘second city’.

In the early 2000s, attempts were underway to try and create a new identity for Birmingham, as they were for many post industrial cities in the UK. Shortly after, the ever-encroaching regeneration schemes began in an attempt to transform the city into a hub of many things: a retail centre, a destination for financial conglomerates and an ever-expanding business district. It has become an interconnected patchwork of many identities clashing against one another. Birmingham, the stronghold of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, is a city which, at some point in the early twentieth century, decided that it wanted to abolish its past. The city coat of arms proclaims: “Forward”. This is written all over the architectural landscape and local governmental policies for the future.

Birmingham is a city more interested in tomorrow than today, the old making way for the new, the future erasing more and more of the past.

Where does that leave art making and creative activity in the city? Beyond Grand Union is a constellation of projects and self-organised creative spaces in Digbeth – among them the inimitable Eastside Projects, Capsule (Supersonic Festival), Flatpack Festival and Fierce Festival – all contributing to the richness of the city’s cultural offerings. Projects continue to emerge and grow, looking beyond Birmingham’s back yard towards international practice.

Birmingham is thirsty for acknowledgement and perhaps there is an argument to be made for shouting louder. Nevertheless, with the Arts Council of England’s recent shift of focus from London to the regional areas, it is on the cusp of notoriety. Birmingham is supportive and diverse, and I implore you to visit and experience it for yourself.

Kim McAleese is Programme Director at Grand Union. She is also co-founder of Household Collective in Belfast, who are working towards ‘Out in the Open: Artistic Explorations in the Public Domain’, a three-day project of public interventions and discussions in September in Belfast. grand-union.org.uk, Twitter: @grandunionltd, Instagram: @granduniongallery

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Roundup Out There, Thataway

(18 Jul – 12 Sept) and featured work by Bieke Depoorter, Irina Popova, Jane Romanova and Nadia Sablin. The press release described how the artists employed a documentary aesthetic and revealed aspects of their subjects’ everyday lives, scrutinizing “notions of home, family and love from four

Kevin Gaffney, still from Our Stranded Friends in Distant Lands, 2015, Korean with English subtitles

‘Out There, Thataway’ was a group exhibition (8 Aug – 26 Sept) featuring work by Stephen Brandes, Kevin Gaffney, Rana Hamadeh Merlin James, Fergus Feehily Aleana Egan and Nathan Coley. The exhibition was curated through dialogue between Francis Halsall, Declan Long and CCA, and takes its title from the last words spoken at the end of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The press release describes the curators’ conceptual starting points: “First, a concern with imagining or navigating territories that are ‘beyond knowledge’; and second, an interest in ways that metaphors of geography shape thinking and behaviour”.

Image from ‘A Many Splintered Thing’, 2015

distinct perspectives”. All the featured photographers are Russian or have spent extended amounts of time in the country and the exhibition provides a “glimpse of contemporary Russia from within and without”.

Art & Agritculture

Shifting Perspectives

Image from ‘Art & Agricuulture’, 2015

Roscommon Visual Artists’ Forum (RVAF), supported by Roscommon Arts Office and Boyle Arts Festival, presented ‘Shifting Perspectives’ at the Herald Building, Boyle, an exhibition of new work by Roscommon artists, curated by Linda Shevlin and Joanne Laws (23 Jul – 1 Aug). The featured artists were: Adam Burthom, Danika Casey, Siobhán Cox-Carlos, Frances Crowe, Padraig Cunningham, Angie Duignan, Margo McNulty, Marie Murray, David Pierce, Marcin ‘Bon’ Pliszka, Gavin Porter, Katrina Regan, Niall Sheerin and Jolanda van Herk.

The press release stated that the connection between the works was the “artists’ commitment to maintaining contemporary art practices away from urban centres, thus forming a dialogue on cultural production in rural contexts”.

A Many Splintered Thing Group show ‘A Many Splintered Thing’, curated by Susanne Stich and Gregory McCartney, ran at Void, Derry

economic migrants”.

derryvoid.com

cca-derry-londonderry.org

Image from ‘Shifting Perspectives’, 2015

The Limerick City Gallery of Art held an exhibition of work by Daphne Wright 16 – 28 Jul. The exhibition featured sculptural installation and video works that explore ideas of childhood and children. The press release described Wright’s work as “the result of a relentless curiosity into the way in which a range of languages and materials can create an involvement with often unspoken human preoccupations”.

Vanessa Donoso Lopez’s exhibition ‘Eye Before E Except After See’ also ran at the gallery (16 Jul – 28 Aug) and was based around what Lopez describes as “Persistent Immigrant Homesickness”.

Through “material experimentation, play and repetition”, the press release noted, the artist emphasises the ways in which the examination of homesickness might prove “an important tool for developing strategies needed to improve the quality of life for those who are forced to travel as refugees or

Leitrim Sculpture Centre presented ‘Art and Agriculture’ (25 Jul – 6 Aug), which emerged from two residencybased research projects relating to agricultural contexts. In The Milk Well and the Tea Well Pauline O’Connell explored, the press release, noted “memory / preservation in relation to the historical significance and value of local co-operatives or creameries to current rural economies set in the context of north County Leitrim”. While in Wilderness In Modified Landscapes Simon Carman and Helen Sharp developed “a conversation of art works in stone, text and electric fencing” based around the limestone agricultural lands of the River Suck, following their residency at the Roscommon Arts Centre. leitrimsculprurecentre.ie, roscommonartscentre.ie

Daphne Wright & Vanessa Donoso Lopez

Silver House Laura Gannon’s exhibition ‘Silver House’ ran at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre (18 Jul – 10 Aug) and comprised a series of new works, including the film work Silver House, which was made on location in Goleen, West Cork. The film was made in collaboration with composer Susan Stenger and features Eilish Lavelle, who created a unique environment, designing and modifying her house and garden over a 40-

Laura Gannon, 2015

year period. “Modernist design references,” the press release explained, “are transported to a rural, coastal environment to articulate a dialogue between nature and culture”. Gannon also created three large sculptural drawings that occupy the double height gallery wall; a nine-paneled screen sculpture demarcates the space between the film and the drawings. In addition a white fur bench, from which the film can be viewed, responds to the fur bedroom created by Adolf Loos in 1903. westcorkartscentre.com

Daphne Wright at Limerick City Gallery, 2015

Constant Companions Eve Parnell’s exhibition ‘Constant Companions’ ran at the National Maritime Museum, Turku, Finland, 30 May – 30 Aug. The port-hole-format

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Column

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

ROUNDUP Anna McLeod’s exhibition ‘A State of Land’ ran at Leitrim Sculpture Centre 21 Aug – 3 Sept. McLeod used the 1840s – 1850s Geological Survey of Ireland, which were mapped during the Famine, as a starting point to explore, the press release noted, “historical and contemporary attitudes to rural landscapes in a time of climate change uncertainty”. Local residents and visitors were invited to contribute their own stories about land in contemporary

Fifi Smith The MExIndex In early 2014 I organised ‘MEx: Maynooth Experimental’ at ‘Maynooth Film for All’ film club in Maynooth University, with the support of Kildare County Council Library and Arts Service, in partnership with the School of English, Theatre and Media Studies at the university. We screened a series of experimental short films, followed by the main art house feature. Each screening was followed by a brief, moderated discussion with the audience. This created great interest. In looking for suitable short films for the programme, I discovered that there is no easy way to find past or current Irish experimental films in Ireland. They were there, but it took dedication and persistence to track them down. By March 2015, I had identified 280 Irish artists’ moving image works. My research had, in fact, resulted in the creation of a database. I consider this to be a critical tool for the visual arts in Ireland and I’ve subsequently developed this as the MExIndex database.

I also discovered that Irish experimental moving image works were underrepresented in international film festivals and art galleries. After making enquiries I found that this is largely due to the absence of a central reference for international curators to use when looking for Irish moving image work. At present curators – and especially international curators – must rely mainly on word of mouth to find Irish works of this kind. I firmly believe that the creation of the MExIndex will address this information lacuna.

Up until the end of the twentieth century, Ireland had not developed any strong tradition of experimental filmmaking, certainly not in the way that the rest of Europe or the USA had done. Film was expensive to use as a medium at that time. So while the avant-garde was in its heyday, a combination of an impoverished population and a hugely conservative consensus made this kind of experimentation in film almost impossible in Ireland. Some brave pioneers such as Vivienne Dick, Moira Tierney and Bob Quinn managed to work in this medium, but there was nothing like a movement in the struggling Ireland of that time.

In 2013 the Irish Film Institute (IFI) presented a programme of screenings focusing on the history of Irish experimental film. Its curators noted that, “from the existing literature on Irish cinema, one would be hard pressed to find evidence of an Irish experimental cinema”.1 However, there has been a distinct change over the last couple of decades, with a growing current of creativity among artists working with experimental moving image in Ireland. A body of work is emerging and the signs are promising. Two experimental film festivals were very successful this year: the Plastik Festival in Dublin, Cork and Galway, and the Wild-Screen / Scáil-Fhiáin Festival in Connemara.

A small but growing audience is evolving and, more encouragingly, a number of independent groups interested in experimental film have sprung up: the Experimental Film Society (2004), the Experimental Film Club (2010) and Critical Forum Dublin (2012) and possibly others. This is a clear indication to me of the vigour of this area of visual art in Ireland today. However, as of yet, there is little knowledge of this form of work among the general public. In addition, the genre has one foot in visual arts and one foot in cinema, which makes it difficult for the institutions to categorise it. This ambiguity is part of what makes it the ‘wild child’ of the arts. The MExIndex will try to balance this contradiction while building the database.

The Film School within the English, Media and Theatre Studies department at Maynooth University funded the launch event for the MExIndex in April 2015 and Kildare County Arts Service funded the initial costs of the website (mexindex.com).

NIVAL at NCAD Library, the School of Creative Arts IADT and the IFI have all been very encouraging and positive about this initiative. The website is now up and, pending further funding, I am planning a series of events, writings and promotions at relevant festivals and symposiums to bring attention to the MExIndex and make Irish artists’ moving images more accessible and visible. In addition the site will encourage quality, pithy essays on the genre and the works within the index. In this way I hope an active critical debate will test the works’ strength. As Rosaland Krauss said: “An emerging generation of artists needs its own generation of critics”.2 There is a lot of work out there and the only way to find out just how much there is, is to catalogue it. At present my minimal resources are focused on ensuring that information on Irish artists’ moving images are accessible. The object is not only to build a comprehensive database but to create a network of contacts to promote the exposition of Irish artists’ moving images (experimental film) both nationally and internationally. I hope that this will encourage curators to widen their search for such work, and in doing so give artists access to new audiences and vice versa.

Fifi Smith originally practiced architecture and has worked as a visual artist for the last 20 years. She is the director of the MexIndex and a board member of the Plastik Festival. fifismith.net Notes 1. Text from the launch of ‘Absences and (Im)Possibilities, a programme of Irish Experimental Film works’, presented by IFI and Experimental Film Club, November 2013 2. Rosaland Krauss quoted in Scott Rothkopf, ‘Krauss and the Art of Cultural Controversy’, The Harvard Crimson, 1997

September – October 2015

man desire to harness the physical world”. galwayartscentre.ie

Dwelling in Time

Ireland. leitrimsculpturecentre.ie

Eve Parnell, image from ‘Constant Companions’, 2015

drawings were shown inside a sail training ship and, in attempt to avoid clichéd images of the sea or ships, featured dead pigeons that Parnell photographed over a number of years.

In the press release, Dr John Turpin described how the “precise detailed monochrome drawings are in the north European tradition of realism rooted in Netherlandish art from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries [and] softened by a highly sensitive use of light and shade to model the forms of the birds”.

The Artist and the State

What is painting?

Image from ‘Dwelling in Time’ ,2015

Marc Guinan, image from ‘What is Painting’, 2015

Marc Guinan’s exhibition ‘What is painting?’ ran at Draiocht, Blanchardstown (24 Jul – 3 Oct) and explored the materiality of paint through a series of “schematic sculptural environments”, the press release stated. Guinan’s work presented painting away from the traditional canvas, in order to “question the space in which painting is shown” and reconsider the differences between painting and illustration. draiocht.ie

El Lissitzky, Klinom Krasnym Bej Belych / Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge

IMMA presented ‘The Artist and the State’ (30 Jul – 18 Oct), which explored, the press release noted, “the artistic and cultural community who gave voice to a new image for the emerging state and a visual language for its politics” in the context of the upcoming Easter Rising commemorations. The work of artist El Lissitzky (1890 – 1941) was presented alongside archival material from Alice Milligan and Maude Gonne, with contemporary reflections by artists Rossella Biscotti, Núria Güell, Sarah Pierce and Hito Steyerl.

Jaja Studios Jaja Studios, a new studio and community space in Dublin 7, hosted their inaugural visual art exhibition, which ran 16 – 25 Jul. The exhibition featured work in a range of media by artists: Joel Jacobs, Lorcan Mandolin Works, Andy Wielens, Kevin Cooper, Fergal Cooke, Vici Waterstone, Phionna Convey, Stephen McGaver, Vaiva Ona Baltakyte,

‘Dwelling in Time’ was a presentation of research from a recent residency on Inis Oírr, which took place in the Red Couch Space, Courthouse Gallery, Ennistymon, Co. Clare (Aug 14 – 3 Sep).

The title for the residency theme arose from the collective’s consideration of the essay Creative Intelligence by Fiona Woods, commissioned by Ground Up Artists. Through a series of meetings in 2014, this text served as a blueprint to explore the theme of ‘dwelling’ and what it spoke to in terms of a collective practice, which connected with the individual interests of the artists involved. Artists participated in and supported some island community groups and the collective was joined by groups with specific interests from outside of the island: MA candidates from Social Practice and Creative Environment programme in Limerick School of Art and Design, and collaborative team Kanelli & Smit from Freysland, whose project, EBB & FLO, took place over 10 days. guac.ie

Here and Now 2

Giulia Canevari and Stephanie Deady.

Terrain

imma.ie

Staid na Talún – A State of Land Sarah O’Flaherty, Reminiscence, 2015

Martin Healy, still from Terrain

Anna McLeod, detail from ‘A Stae of Land’, 2015

Galway Arts Centre exhibited Martin Healy’s film and photography works titled ‘Terrain’ (13 – 26 Jul). “Ruminating on the point where fact and fiction have coalesced,” the press release noted, “the work considers the multiple conflicts and consequences of the hu-

‘Here and Now 2’ was a group exhibition held in the Town Hall Gallery, Macroom, Co. Cork (Aug 25 – Sep 18).

It was the second of two exhibitions showing new work by artists who live and work in the Lee Valley area and who exhibited in ‘Time & Place’ in 2006. A catalogue accompanied the exhibition and featured an essay

by Peter Murray, Director of Crawford Art Gallery.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

7

ROUNDUP Those Who Swim (in) The Forest

Image from ‘Those Who Swim in the Forest’, 2015

The Project Arts Centre, Dublin is currently showing work by David Claerbout (14 Aug – 10 Oct). The press release noted that “Claerbout (BE) is a master of visual ambiguity, presenting scenes built from a complex association between photography, film and sound. Claerbout’s multiple video installation at Project Arts Centre will challenge conventions of exhibitionmaking, attempting to further our efforts to perceive what it is to exhibit while exhibiting”. The show was curated by Tessa Giblin. projectartscentre.ie

‘Those Who Swim (in) The Forest’ was a group show by three Irish artists held in Y Gallery, Tartu, Estonia (15 – 30 Aug). The artists featured were: Alan James Burns, Ross Cochrane and Michael Holly. The press release noted that the exhibition was initiated in the context of the Estonian forest. “Using the Irish relationship with forest as a metaphor, and the mapping of cognition, history and landscape as a methodology, this work identifies the hidden treasures and the hidden dangers in the human psyche, in national identity and in sites where people and landscape interact”.

IRL

ArtBox Process Residency

Richard Forrest, image from ArtBox Process Residency

ArtBox, Dublin recently presented the work of Richard Forrest, who was the first Process Residency artist at ArtBox, working in the gallery space for the month of August. Forrest created a unique site-specific installation for the gallery documenting his process as the work evolved. artboxprojects.wordpress.com

Amanda Rice

Lee Welch at TACTIC, Cork

TACTIC, Cork held the group show ‘IRL: In Real Life’ (20 Aug – 3 Sep). The featured artists were: Niamh Riordan, Darren Caffery, Lee Welch, Ian Griffin, Liing Heaney, Leonard Traynor and Emily O’Flynn. The exhibition investigated, the press release stated, “the many ways these artists interpret our relationship to objects and images inspired by the infinitely variable culture of the net”. Emily O’Flynn curated the show.

David Claerbout

The Sea, The Sea

antain.ie

Bridget O’Gorman, image from ‘Telling the Bees’

Ruth Lyons, Zechstein - Antrim (Ire), 2014, Irish rock salt, dimensions variable, image courtesy of Paul Tierney

‘The Sea, The Sea’ was a solo show by Ruth E. Lyons held in the Mermaid Arts Centre, Wicklow (31 Jul – 5 Sep).

The press release noted: “There is a geological seam of salt deep in the earth that stretches from Ireland to Russia, it is the remains of the Zechstein Sea, a body of water that became landlocked around 230 million years ago. Somewhere in outer space astronomers have detected the largest body of water in the universe whose volume is enough to fill the earth’s oceans more than one hundred trillion times.” The exhibition featured works in sculpture, film and photography.

Saw Dust MART Project Space, Dublin held ‘Saw Dust’, a group show featuring the work of eight artists (21 – 24 Aug). Employing a range of media, the artists used Project Space MART as a platform to engage with the life of Rathmines, past and present. The artists included were: Sam Bachy, Neil Dunne, Lisa Freeman, Bryan Gerard Duffy, Brian Gregory, Riin Kaljurand, Sharon Murphy and Derick Smith. The show was curated

by Francis Fay.

Foaming at the Mouth

‘Telling the Bees’ by Brigdet O’Gorman was held in Galway Arts Centre (28 Aug – 3 Oct). The press release noted that O’Gorman’s work for the show was “a meditation upon alternative forms of remembrance”. Her recent research is concerned with “linking poetic, philosophical and historical accounts with contemporary sites”.

O’Gorman’s exhibition will respond to the Georgian townhouse and former domestic space of Galway Arts Centre. galwayartscentre.ie

Delicate Matter

mermaidartscentre.ie

mart.ie/projectspace

Liz Nilson, image from ‘Delicate Matter’

Luan Gallery, Athlone held the group show ‘Delicate Matter’ (3 Jul – 30 Aug), which featured the work of Karen Donnellan, Jennifer Hickey and Liz Nilsson. The sculpture and installation works in glass, porcelain and textiles were inspired, the press release noted, by the “delicate matters concerning human existence”.

Third Bridge

Promotional image from Foaming at the Mouth

Visual art spoken word night ‘Foaming at the Mouth’ took place at the Club Polo House, Phoenix Park, Dublin (11 July and 15 Aug) and Mezrab, Amsterdam (6 Aug). The performers were: Sue Rainsford, The Lads’ Society, Claire Potter, Michael Fitzgerald, Shane McCarthy, Eoghan Ryan, Daniel Reardon, James Moran, Ruth Clinton, Niamh Moriarty, Michael Hill, Angharad Williams, David Fagan, Daniel Tuomey, Richard Proffitt, Mary-Jo Gilligan, Emma Haugh, Kate Heffernan, Tanad Williams, Naomi Sex, Katherine McBride, Phillip Napier, Padraic E. Moore. ‘Foaming at the Moth’ was curated by Tracy Hanna and Emer Lynch. fatm-dublin.tumblr.com

Identity

athloneartsandtourism.ie

Amanda Rice, Krakatoa Dust, 2015

Otherworldly ‘Notes on the (Microscopical) Character of Krakatoa’ was a solo show by Amanda Rice held in the Clonbullogue Community Centre, Co. Offaly (11 – 31 Aug). Rice was artist in residence in Trinity College Dublin as part of an Offaly County Council commissioned public art project engaging with artefacts and objects bequeathed to the college by the Offaly scientist and geologist John Joly (1857 – 1933).

Commissioned as part of the ‘Secrets of Offaly’ public art project, Rice presented an interactive public artwork which focused on one particular aspect of John Joly’s research: the Indonesian volcano of Krakatoa which first erupted in 1883. jolyarchive.net

Promotional image for ‘Identity’

Image from ‘Third Bridge’, Ormston House

Andrew Kearney and Deirdre Power presented ‘Third Bridge’ at Ormston House, Limerick (20 Aug – 18 Sep). The archival project stemmed from collective student action at Limerick School of Art and Design by the first students at the college, who formed a collective called DUSAA 5. The exhibition was launched by Mike Fitzpatrick, Director of Limerick’s 2020 European Capital of Culture bid. ormstonhouse.com

David Claerbout, The Quiet Shore, 2011

images “exist in juxtaposition to modern life and consumption” and embrace “the beauty of the natural world, expressing its atmosphere of magic and enchantment while drawing influence from sacred art, mysticism, surrealism and fairytales”.

Telling the Bees

Orla Barry, image from ‘Otherworldly’

Orla Barry’s exhibition ‘Otherworldly’ ran at the Basement Gallery, An Táin Arts Centre, Dundalk (1 Jul – 15 Aug).

Barry works with acrylic paints and paper on canvas and explores symbolism through nature and animals. The press release described how Barry’s

Artist group Qualia Dublin presented their second group show. ‘Identity’ was held at Steambox, Dublin, 21 – 29 Aug. The press release stated the concerns of the exhibition: “How we identify with society, as artists, as citizens, with our cityscape and with the digital world are all questions raised within Qualia Dublin’s second group show.” The artists exhibiting were all currently Fine Art students entering their final year at The School of Creative Arts, DIT Grangegorman: Laura Skehan, RoseAnn McKinney, Paul Rosser, Sarah O’Keeffe, Ciara Donnelly, Michael Mangan and Emily Mc Gardle. qualiadublin.wix.com

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

VAI NEWS

Visual Artists [NI]

Suzanne Lyle, David-Lee Badger, Noel Kelly

Deidre Robb, Noel Kelly, Suzanne Lyle

Visual Artists Ireland [NI] opened a new dedicated Northern Ireland office on Friday, 3 July, located at 109 – 113 Royal Avenue, Belfast BT1 1FF. The office is a focal point for the advocacy and support of Northern Ireland’s visual artists and is managed by Rob Hilken, VAI’s Northern Ireland Manager, reporting directly to Noel Kelly, Chief Executive Officer, who will also have a base there.

The opening of the Visual Artists Ireland [NI] office was accompanied by the launch of three exciting new initiatives: Suki Tea Art Award – sponsored by Suki Tea and facilitated by Arts & Business NI. The Suki Tea Art Award will be open to all visual artists in Northern Ireland, and Visual Artists Ireland members in the South. The award sees a main prize of £2000 and will include a smaller prize of £250 for each of the short listed artists.

The award will culminate in the announcement of the first recipient in an exhibition of the short listed works in Stormont later this year.

Free Visual Artists’ Combined Liability Insurance – sponsored by Standard Utilities. This insurance will provide Visual Artists Ireland members with combined liability insurance to facilitate them in their professional lives.

New Northern Ireland Visual Arts News Service – based on the highly successful Visual Artists Ireland eBulletin service. The new Northern Ireland Visual Arts Service will provide sectoral news, exhibition and events announcement, as well as jobs and opportunities that are available to Northern Irish artists both at home and in other parts of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

The service will be provided weekly and is an addition to the other news services that Visual Artists Ireland offers to artists and the arts community, as well as to journalists / media and the general public.

Visual Artists Ireland [NI] will provide this broad range of services that support visual artists and continue the activities that VAI have undertaken across Ireland. These include: acting as an advocate for the visual arts; advisory and help desk products; discounts schemes; membership of international representative bodies; professional development; and the ever popular Visual Artists’ Cafés that take place across Northern Ireland and the South on a monthly basis.

Deirdre Robb, Visual Arts Development Officer at the Artists Council of Northern Ireland, commented: “The Arts Council Is proud to support Visual Artists Ireland with their new dedicated Northern Ireland office and package of innovative initiatives designed to support the professional development of our artists.

It is imperative that we support our artists in order to be able to develop, grow and sustain a strong, vibrant arts sector in the region and this new focal point of services and information for use by our talented artists is most welcome indeed.

Congratulations to all involved.”

Speaking about the new office and the launch of new services, Noel Kelly, Chief Executive Officer of Visual Artists Ireland said: “This day is the culmination of many years’ work supporting the visual artists of Ireland both North and South. It is a proud day for Visual Artists Ireland as we open the doors of our new office. We see this as a clear expression of our confidence in the visual artists of Northern Ireland.”

He continued: “Visual artists in Northern Ireland may not have the same face recognition of other cultural workers, but behind the scenes in studios, homes and workshops, Northern Ireland’s visual artists work away to provide us with our visual identity. Without our visual artists, Northern Ireland would be without colour and would not have the vibrancy that we see evidence of on a daily basis as we walk through the streets. We are grateful to our supporters who are enabling us to launch these new services as well as the support that they, our funders, and our members provide us with.”

Visual Artists Ireland [NI] – Listen, Advocate, Support, Advise It is the Mission of Visual Artists Ireland [NI] to provide visual artists with the services and knowledge that support all stages of their careers. Our friendly, knowledgeable and professional staff listen, advocate, support and offer information and advice to visual artists, arts organisations and other interested parties.

Visual Artists Ireland, the all-Ireland representative body for professional visual artists, is showing confidence in the future of the arts sector here with the opening of their Northern Ireland office and the launch of Visual Artists Ireland [NI] offering a range of new services and opportunities for visual artists. visualartists-ni.org

Deepa Mann-Kler, Nóirín McKinney, Rob Hilken

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

9

NEWS

News Funding for Irish Arts Abroad The Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht announced funding for the promotion of Irish arts abroad.

Under its Summer 2015 grants round, Culture Ireland has awarded €321,500 to 85 applicants, including individual artists and arts organisations, to support the presentation of their work globally. This funding will provide considerable opportunities for the promotion of Irish arts and culture around the world throughout the remainder of 2015 and into 2016. Successful projects cover all art forms and involve presenting in 27 different countries including Australia, Brazil, China, India and Paraguay, as well as various European countries, the United States and Canada.

Projects being supported include the screening of innovative Irish films at international film festivals, Irish publishers attending Bologna Children’s Book Fair next May, traditional Irish music tours in India and New Zealand early next year, the Irish Chamber Orchestra touring the United States in November and the exhibition of dynamic new work by Irish artists at leading art fairs and international galleries.

Artists continue to attract new as well as committed audiences and their international work has become a critical factor for many in sustaining their careers and ensuring the ongoing viability of many arts companies.

The travel support offered by Culture Ireland helps ensure that Irish artists can continue to reach global audiences and maintain international awareness of Ireland as a country of strong creativity and artistic excellence.

Re-Imaging Communities News Update Summer 2015 The Building Peace Through the Arts Programme was launched in February 2013. Since then 47 stage-one awards have been made, which have enabled communities north and south of the border to address issues around sectarianism and racism with 31 of the projects progressing to the next stage.

Stage two has seen artists’ concepts being brought to life in a variety of spectacular schemes. Projects recently competed as part of the programme include: Alex Pentek’s sculpture Forget Me Not at Belfast City Cemetery, new public art installations in Fermanagh and The Harvester in Cootehill.

2015 Galway International Human Rights Summer School Maurice Gunning was chosen as winner of the 2015 Galway International

Human Rights Summer School Photographic Competition. Maurice is a documentary filmmaker and photographer currently working on projects for the Galway Film Centre.

As part of the Summer School, the 1949 UNESCO photographic exhibition illustrating the then recently adopted Universal Declaration of Human Rights was also mounted at St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church in Galway City, from 10 to 24 of July. This exhibition will tour from Galway to be shown at UN headquarters in New York.

National Cultural Policy Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Heather Humphreys TD, has stated that she wants to kick start a nationwide conversation on the development of Ireland’s first ever national cultural policy. Minister Humphreys has published a discussion document and launched a consultation process that will inform the development of Culture 2025, a national policy which will set high level aims for the arts and culture sector over the next decade.

A series of regional meetings will be held over the next two months to facilitate debate and discussion amongst stakeholders and interested parties in the arts and cultural sector. A one-day symposium will be held in Dublin Castle in early October to close the consultation process. It is envisaged the final policy will be published in early 2016.

Minister Humphreys stated: “If we want to protect and promote our unique and varied culture, and encourage new cultural forms to flourish, we need to aim high. Culture 2025 will be Ireland’s first ever national cultural policy. It will set out high-level aims for the next decade and reflect the important role that culture plays in our lives. I hope Culture 2025 can help create a platform for bringing together the numerous local, regional and national cultural entities, so they can share best practice and look at new ways of working together. As a high level document, the policy will set a framework for future strategies and plans in specific areas. It will be underpinned by the principle of upholding and supporting artistic freedom.”

Seamus Hanrahan: Jarman Award Northern Irish artist Seamus Harahan has been short-listed for the 2015 Jarman Award. The Jarman Award recognises and supports artists working with moving image and celebrates the spirit of experimentation, imagination and innovation in the work of emerging artist filmmakers. The award is inspired by visionary filmmaker Derek Jarman and presented in partnership

with Channel 4 and in association with the Whitechapel Gallery.

Now in its eight year, previously shortlisted artists include Duncan Campbell, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Luke Fowler, Elizabeth Price and Laure Prouvost, all of whom went on to be shortlisted for or win the Turner Prize. The award will be announced at the Whitechapel Gallery on Monday 30 November, where the winner will receive £10,000 prize money and support from Channel 4 to produce a new film for their Random Acts arts strand.

The 2015 shortlisted artist are Adam Chodzko, Seamus Harahan, Gail Pickering, Bedwyr Williams and Andrea Luka Zimmerman.

2016 Venice Architecture Biennale The Arts Council and Culture Ireland are now seeking expressions of interest from an architect, architectural practice, curator or commissioner who wishes to represent Ireland at the 2016 Architecture Biennale and who can demonstrate the appropriate level of knowledge and skill to manage and deliver a presentation on such an important international stage.

Submissions must be received by noon, Friday 4 September 2015. For further information go to cultureireland. ie/resources or contact John Knightly, Culture Ireland, Room 315, 23 Kildare Street, Dublin 2 (016313917, info@cultureireland.gov.ie) Ireland at Venice is led by Culture Ireland in partnership with the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

Culture Ireland and the Arts Council are committed to Ireland’s participation in the Venice Architecture Biennale, with the aim of increasing opportunities for, and the profile of, Irish architects internationally. As well as serving as a global showcase for Irish architecture, the Venice Architecture Biennale offers Irish architects the opportunity to engage with international audiences, influence future trends in architecture and explore their individual practices.

Ignite Touring Award Following the successful commissioning of new work in the area of arts and disability in 2014, under the Ignite initiative, the Arts Council of Ireland is pleased to announce that Silent Moves,

by Aideen Barry, the artists of Western Care’s Ridgepool Training Centre and Scannán Technologies, presented by Ballina Arts Centre, has received the Ignite touring award.

Inspired by the classic black and white silent films of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, Silent Moves is a 28-minute silent film,

with a strong emphasis on movement and mime. Using stop-motion animation techniques and slapstick motifs, the film has a unique aesthetic and is accompanied by an inspired live soundtrack. Shot on location in Ballina, the film carries a strong message about attitudes towards disability while being funny, moving and beautiful to watch.

Silent Moves will tour to the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, as part of Cork Film Festival, and the Irish Film Institute, Dublin in autumn of this year.

Silent Moves was commissioned

by Mayo County Council as part of Ignite. Ignite is a new platform designed to generate Ireland’s most ambitious showcasing of talent from people with disabilities, led by international and Irish artists and performers with disabilities, with projects taking place in 2014 and 2015 in Cork, Galway and Mayo.

These commissions each represented an investment of up to €60,000.

This Silent Moves tour will mark the conclusion of this initiative in November 2015. Ignite is managed by a unique partnership involving the Arts Council, Arts and Disability Ireland (ADI), Cork City Council, Galway City and County Councils, and Mayo County Council.

VAI News

Talbot Gallery & Studios most

Budget 2016 Letter:

promising graduate Award Talbot Gallery and Studios announce Sean Grimes (NCAD) as the winner of Talbot Gallery and Studios Most Promising Graduate Award 2015. This is the sixth year of the award. Graduates were selected based on the work in their degree shows from DIT, NCAD and IADT. This opportunity facilitates a graduate to continue their practice and to be nurtured in a supportive environment. The winner receives the keys to a studio space free for a year and a solo exhibition in the gallery space in 2016.

The shortlisted artists were: Alex De Rock (NCAD), Gemma Fitzpatrick (DIT), Ronan O’Reilly (DIT), Paddy Joe Rickard (IADT) and Colm Weakliam (IADT).

Sean Grimes’s practice is centered on modes of collection. He gathers and arranges images and objects both physically and with the use of photography and drawing. Arrangement and sequencing of the collected materials presents a large scope for narrative development. Grimes attempts to draw out or focus attention on these sequences by overlaying a secondary visual language, such as the use of bespoke frames.

Belfast Open Studios 2015 Belfast Open Studios 2015 is scheduled to take place on Friday 23 and Saturday 24 October. Part of the series of events will be a specific programme for visiting curators. Last year over 54 curators visited Belfast during Open Studios and were given unique access to the studios and to events such as Show & Tells, information and background packs, and networking opportunities.

This year we plan to have another packed programme. Wednesday 21 October will be the starting point with a visit to Derry to visit their gallery spaces. On Thursday 22 there will be a chance for curators to speak about their work and their interests as well as a chance to meet each other and other artists. The day will finish with the announcement of the winner of the Suki Tea Art Prize at the Open Studios launch event in Stormont. The curators will visit studios on Friday 23 and Saturday 24. Participating curators will receive a full information pack with details of all of the studio programmes and their participating artists. This will allow for forward planning. The pack will only be available to curators who are participating in the events.

Tax Exemption VAI CEO Noel Kelly has written a letter Minister Heather Humphries (Department of Arts, Heritage, and the Gaeltacht) and Minister Michael Noonan (Department of Finance) outlining some of the current concerns for visual artists. The letter begins: “With the advanced stages of planning under way for the 2016 budget, I would like to bring to your attention the need for the continuance of the Tax Exemption on Creative Works and the support of the arts sector in a meaningful way as part of your departments planning...”

The letter can be read in its entirety on the VAI website.

Has the Artist Been Paid?

At VAI it is a core belief that equitable payments for visual artists are of vital importance for the sustainability of visual artists in Ireland.

Visual Artists Ireland’s campaign Ask! Has the Artist Been Paid? has been a great success. We ask you now to to show your support for the campaign by signing a petition that will be published and circulated to show the extent of the support, and to guide those organisations and individuals who are still to be convinced. The petition can be found on the VAI website.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

Wexford: Resources & Activities Understanding & Engagement

David Begley, Breathe, 2014, drawing for animation, driftwood charcoal on fabriano

‘Wasteland’ at Wexford Arts Centre

Wexford Arts Centre (WAC) is situated in the centre of Wexford town, in a building which dates back to 1776 and was originally a market house built by the Corporation. It opened its doors as the Wexford Arts Centre in 1974 and has been providing art and entertainment for the local community and visitors to the area ever since. In 2014, the Centre celebrated its fortieth anniversary.

On a year-round basis, the Wexford Arts Centre operates a three-tiered approach in terms of delivering its visual arts programme. This involves providing exhibition opportunities for recent graduates, emerging and established artists, and originating and producing exhibitions and programmes for touring to other venues.

We work closely with the Arts Department of Wexford County Council on a number of initiatives, including our annual Emerging Visual Artist Award. This initiative supports promising visual artists in Ireland with a monetary award and a solo exhibition at the Arts Centre. It is aimed at recognising and supporting the development of committed emerging artists to kick start their careers and gain professional recognition. Recent winners of this award have been selected due to their exceptional talent, and with the consideration that this award will aid the development of their careers and practices.

WAC is always open to receiving exhibition proposals from artists but we are also interested in generating / curating our own exhibitions and developing partnerships with other arts organisations in order to share resources and undertake larger projects. We are currently working on a national tour of work by Orla Barry and recently hosted the exhibition ‘Wasteland’, which is part of a Project Arts Centre tour funded by the Arts Council’s Touring and Dissemination of Work Scheme. Through an upcoming collaboration with Cow House Studios and the curatorial practice of Rachael Gilbourne and Kate Strain (RGKSKSRG), visual artists were invited to apply and participate in a thematic residency entitled I like to eat with my hand. I am delighted that the exhibition will be presented in September 2016 at Wexford Arts Centre, curated by RGKSKSRG.

Mind Space

‘Wasteland’ at Wexford Arts Centre

This year, we have also managed two major exhibitions for the county buildings, strengthening our relationship with the Arts Department of Wexford County Council. ‘This Lasted until Dawn…’ drew from the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and featured the work of many notable painters. In October we will also host an exhibition of selected work by Nick Miller. Not only has this connection strengthened a key relationship with Wexford County Council, it has allowed us to consider exhibitions comprising large-scale works.

Wexford Arts Centre has a strong connection to the local arts scene and each year showcases work by Wexford-based artists including Mary Ruth Walsh, Aileen Lambert, Gerda Teljeur and Michael Fortune, to mention a few. Running through August and early September we are delighted to host a solo exhibition of drawings and animations by artist David Begley.

Our education programme runs in tandem with the exhibitions in order to encourage active participation in the analysis of contemporary visual arts practice. Established in 2013, the Living Arts Project has become a fundamental part of our creative calendar, strengthening our connection to Wexford County Council, local schools and artists in the Wexford area.

The aim of this collaborative project is to make the understanding of and engagement with the fundamentals of contemporary art more attainable for a local audience. In order to facilitate this development, the scheme comprises an artist in residence programme for primary schools and practicing artists resident in the county, while also offering a mentorship process for participating artists.

Earlier this year, we were approached by artists Kate Murphy and Jonny Murphy with a proposal to set up a gallery / shop and studios in our annexe space. With the shop / gallery on the ground floor and the studios above, ArtPanther showcases the work of local, national and international contemporary artists, designers and makers. The Saturday Gallery is also an artistled initiative and relatively new addition to the Wexford art scene. Run by artists John Renwick, Declan Cody and Helen Gaynor, the latest exhibition, which will run through August and September, is an installation of postcard-sized pieces, entitled ‘Wish You Were Here’. This show has been assembled using work submitted in response to an open call and is as interesting as it is diverse.

My studio in Ballymurn, Co. Wexford faces North East; beyond the trees and fields in the background in a blue haze are the Blackstairs Mountains and above that a huge stretch of ever-changing sky. While writing this I witnessed a combine harvester demolishing the beautiful golden field in front of my studio. Fortunately the bright yellow ochre stubs are still left. First thing this morning I went for a walk, because the light was so beautiful, instead of going to my studio as is normally the case. I love the silence on my walks; it gives me mind space. I discovered some fungus, boletus and puffballs on the banks, all half eaten, and a dying bumblebee that had been run over by a car. Last year I sprinkled poppy seeds all over the village and now the double pinks and reds are popping up everywhere. After checking my own garden, I went to my studio for the rest of the day, drawing, as is my daily routine.

After living almost a lifetime beside the sea in Monkstown, in 2005 I moved to rural Wexford.

Why? As so many people found, house prices anywhere near Dublin had become prohibitive, so I had to go further afield. I went from being a 15-minute DART commute from Dublin to facing a two-hour journey by car. You need a car even to reach the public transport links. Thankfully the new N11 shortens the trip considerably.

I landed in Ballymurn, a small village 10 minutes from Enniscorthy, 15 from the sea and 20 from Wexford town. To find my bearings, Wexford Art Centre (WAC) was my first port of call. Their exhibitions, openings and talks are important in themselves but are also a way to meet fellow artists and people interested in the arts. Catherine Bowe, Visual Arts Manager at the Centre, was and is always there, however busy, to help or lend an ear. I found this invaluable. The County Council Arts Officer and ArtsLink were also very helpful.

I wondered at first whether there were more opportunities available in the city than in the country, but this has not been the case for me. I made new contacts in the county and instant access through phone, email, Internet and social media has proved a great help. In 2007 I took part in the curated show ‘Surface Tension’, alongside Jane Jermyn and Juliana Walters. My large-scale drawings were shown in WAC ‘s spacious pillar

Catherine Bowe, Visual Arts Manager, Wexford Arts Centre. wexfordartscentre.ie Gerda Teljeur, Big Drawing Nos 9 and 6, 2007, Wexford Arts Centre

room. Subsequently, the show was selected to travel as part of the Catherine Marshall-initiated and Arts Council-funded touring experiment, and travelled throughout Ireland. Later I had solo shows in the Sligo Arts Gallery (2007) and Stone Gallery, Dublin (‘Line Layers and Light’, 2010). In 2013 I showed ‘Like Life Itself’ in the upper gallery at WAC with 200 of my 300 diary drawings.

The pen and ink drawings were produced over a period of one year.

168 of my diary pages were shown last year in the exhibition ‘Schitterend Isolement’ at the Drawing Centre, Diepenheim, Netherlands, curated by Arno Kramer. In 2011 I took part in ‘All About Drawing’ at Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, where the work of 100 Dutch artists provided an overview of drawing in the Netherlands over the last 50 years. Other recent exhibitions of my work have taken place at Greenacres Wexford and Newtownbarry House Gallery, Bunclody. These examples demonstrate that opportunities are not location bound.

However easy it is to order my materials digitally, I can buy most of what I need locally. There is a good art material shop in Wexford town and a smaller one in Enniscorthy. At the moment I am working towards shows in Greenacres, Wexford and the newly formed Dutch Artes Foundation, of which I am a member. Our next shows are this autumn and spring 2016 in the Netherlands.

On the whole there seems to be a new creative energy around town. No doubt the Wexford Campus School of Art and Design students have something to with this. Life in the country is different, the pace more relaxed. It took me a while to get used to this. People are very welcoming; with a small community everything is more personal – a lot of driving has to be done to see family, friends or exhibitions. You have to make choices. I prefer to have long almost solitary periods to get down to work, broken up with short spurts of traveling to see people and exhibitions.

It seems I have the best of both worlds.

Gerda Teljeur is a Dutch artist living and working in Ireland. Her work features in the Royal Irish Academy’s publication ‘Art and Architecture of Ireland’ (volumes 3 and 5). thedrawingsuite.com gerdateljeur.com

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

Bringing People to a Place to See Nothing Apparently my people have been living in Wexford since the fifth century, when one of St Patrick’s first converts, a young Foirtchearn, a bellmaker from Meath who later became a Bishop of Trim, moved to the Blackstairs. There he set up a small cell and as a result the surname developed: O’Fortchern, O’Fortin, Forkan, Fortune.

So here I am, over 1500 years later, perched on the side of a hill just a couple of miles away from his ancient site. I’ve always had an interest in people, story, song and place, and these are central to what I do.

Far from a bellmaker I am. I came through Limerick School of Art with a BA and an MA from IADT. I’ve been invited to do a Phd in Folklore for years now, but with project work and three wee ones I can’t get to it. In many respects, I prefer to do the work than write about it. I’m not caught up with the idea of having ‘Dr’ in front of my name, though I’m sure I’d be taken more seriously if I did.

I always have five or six projects on the go at any one time. Thanks to plenty of project work and saving hard, we built our own home / studio five years ago and since then we’ve had three little girls. Now there’s a participatory, collaborative, socially-engaged, youth arts, art-in-a-public-context project for you.

I feel privileged to be able to undertake the project work I do; one day I’ll be in a kitchen in Mayo photographing a dresser, the next working with a group of older singers in the National Library in Dublin or filming a drive-in bingo in Wexford.

As my own work straddles a string of boundaries, I find it hard at the best of times times to articulate exactly what I actually do. It’s certainly not pure visual art. Over the years Aileen and I have found that we don’t actually have conversations about this thing called ‘art’. We’d prefer to talk about tunes, songs, accents, haysheds, anything else. To me there is more to life than producing work for a gallery or art audience. Am I allowed to say God doesn’t really exist?

I carry all my artistic sensibilities with me on project work, but I also use many other things: my personality, my knowledge, my irreverence, my respect. I tend to work with other people: singers,

historians, farmers. I don’t do openings or knock around with other artists, and I’m not a Facebook user either, as I have enough distractions going around this head of mine.

Recently a Venice Biennale curator couldn’t understand why I hadn’t wanted to move to Berlin or New York in the ‘noughties’. I’d no real interest in being around other artists and living in an international art bubble. I might have enjoyed the lifestyle – flaking around Berlin on an old bike and drinking nice coffee – but I was happy with my 93 diesel Golf doing the same around villages and towns in Ireland.

So why did I make a decision to live in Wexford? It was fairly easy. This is the place where we grew up and now the place where our little ones will grow up thinking, singing, lying, playing.

Moving back home, the Wexford Opera Festival seemed to be the monolith through which people engaged with art and culture in the county, but it promoted aspirational notions of art and culture that were far from the local intangible and traditional cultures I grew up with. After working in nearly every county on the island, I know that in Wexford we have incredibly rich traditional and contemporary cultures. Aside from the beaches for the Dubs and the opera for the well dressed, a small bit of digging and searching will reveal rich streams and veins to excite and explore. Sub-cultures, intangible cultures.

I’ll end on this. A few weeks I did a loose ramble through some fields with a group of men on a project to where 17 Cromwellian soliders were buried, followed by the site of a dried up holy well, and to another where a standing stone once stood. One of the men commented: “You’re bringing people to a place to see nothing”. He was right.

Wexford is one of those counties where there is more hidden than on show. But it’s there, alive and well in its people. They are our assets, they are our keepers.

Luke Cheevers performing at The Bird Song Project 2015

The Dodie Tree from the My Tara publication

Image from ‘The Dresser Project’

St Patrick’s Hand from the My Tara publication

Michael Fortune lives in works in rural North West Wexford with his partner Aileen Lambert and their three young children. thebirdsongproject.com, manwomanandchild.ie, thewildbeesnest.ie, asirovedout.ie, aboutthisplace.ie, thedresserproject.ie, mobileirishpub. com, homespun.ie, folklore.ie, grovestreet.ie, michaelfortune.ie, grovestreet.tv, the1916songproject.com, mytara.ie, mypeoplemyplace.com

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Past Journeys

Aileen Lambert in collaboration with sixth class girls from Ballindaggin NS, Hair, 2014, photographic print

I have a diverse arts practice and I often describe my role in very different ways depending on who I’m taking to: performance artist, video artist, festival organiser, arts facilitator, coordinator etc.

I’ve presented work in a variety of venues and contexts, including: a residency at Yale University, international video art shows, solo exhibitions in Triskel / Droichead / Wexford arts centres, performance work at the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow, and work with communities of place and interest from Bekan, Co. Mayo, to my own locality, the Duffry, an old Gaelic stronghold in northwest Wexford.

As a traditional singer I also work in primary schools as part of the Heritage in Schools scheme, and devise and facilitate traditional song projects with my partner Michael (Mick) Fortune such as The Bird Song Project (commissioned by Age and Opportunity) and As I Roved Out (supported by the Arts Council, NLI and ITMA). I’m delighted to have been invited to appear as a guest at the Frank Harte Traditional Singing Festival at the end of September 2015.

Whether working with a room full of traditional singers on a themed song project or walking an old route in the landscape with a group remembering past journeys, my interest is in connecting with stories and lived experience, and facilitating and mediating that expression. The skills needed to turn a concept into a realisable project idea, devise the process, work with people and connect them with each other are the same whatever the art form.

Here in County Wexford I’ve undertaken numerous participatory projects supported by the Artist in the Community Scheme, a Wexford County Council Arts Department scheme. This has supported me in working with the Irish Wheelchair Association, clients of St Aidan’s Training Centre in Gorey and the Traveller Youth Group in Taghmon. I am about to commence a project with the Community Workshop in Enniscorthy.

A couple of years ago I was one of four visual artists paired up with primary schools in the county as part of the Living Arts Project, an artist-in-residence programme supported by the Arts Department of Wexford County Council and administered by Wexford Arts Centre. This was a lovely opportunity to work collaboratively with a group of young people over an extended time. I was particularly happy about working in my local primary school in Ballindaggin, the school I attended as a child and which my eldest daughter is currently settling into.

Using my performance-based video practice as a starting point, fifth and sixth-class pupils en-

gaged in a wide range of activities in order to explore their relationship with the school environment. Working in small teams, they came up with ideas, devised movement sequences, and shot and edited material. Using primarily lens-based media – stills photography and video – they investigated the everyday school environment using the form of video documentary, stop-motion animation and photography to record their performative engagements with the school’s interior and exterior. A selection of the work was included in an exhibition in Wexford Arts Centre in April / May 2014.

I have also put my knowledge and experience of schools and Per Cent for Art commissions to effective use acting as a Coordinator of Per Cent for Art commissions for local schools. I am currently working with a large primary school in Enniscorthy and a small secondary school in the heart of County Wexford to manage the application and selection process and oversee the installation of new visual artwork. This work involves advising the school’s Per Cent for Art Committee, devising the brief, coordinating the selection process and liaising with artist, architect, school and builders in the delivery and installation of the works.

My work, whether solo or collaborative, involves connecting with place in some way, and recording and mediating that experience. One means of achieving this, which I have utilised in a number of participatory projects in recent years, involves walking. As a performative practice and participatory research strategy I have used this in public art projects such as The Soft Edge (commissioned by Wexford County Council, 2008) and En Route (commissioned by Mayo County Council, 2010).

For 2016, Mick and I are currently developing a project entitled ‘Backroads to the Rising’, which will involve communities from County Wexford retracing journeys undertaken by those involved in the different localities to Enniscorthy during Easter week in 1916. This project will culminate with a walking event taking place on Easter Monday 2016, where groups of walkers from various locations in the county will descend on Enniscorthy for the noontime televised commemorations.

My current project couldn’t be closer to home: exploring the local landscape where I was born and reared – overlooking the Blackstairs Mountains – and where I now live with Mick and our three little girls. The Duffry will feature a walk event and videos hosted on the project website, which will be launched later this year.

Aileen Lambert

12

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Continuous Exchange

Cow House Studios, photo by Frank Abruzzese

Students at Cow House Studios, photo by Frank Abruzzese

My husband Frank Abruzzese and I established Cow House Studios at my ancestral home. We both graduated with MFAs from San Fransisco Art Institute in 2004 and shortly afterwards Frank, originally from Philadelphia, moved to Ireland. In 2005, plans to transform two farm buildings were put in motion. Between November 2006 and June 2008 we renovated them both into a studio space and accommodation, taking care to maintain their structural integrity. Today Cow House Studios coexists alongside my father Michael’s 200-acre farm at the foothills of the Blackstairs Mountains.

At Cow House Studios our aim is to support contemporary visual arts practice. We hope to foster a deep curiosity for one’s surroundings and encourage further engagement with the creative process as a catalyst for independent thought. To this end we run residency programmes for professional artists, an education programme for teens during the summer months, and collaborative programming in conjunction with schools, artists and other cultural institutions. It was crucial that we develop a self-sustaining model and so today our education programme compliments and supports residencies for professional artists. As practicing artists we are fortunate to share our studio with artists and students from around the world, where the continuous exchange of ideas has deeply influenced the way we work.

Since our autumn residency began in 2008, artists have had the opportunity to spend eight weeks at Cow House, exhibiting their work at Wexford Arts Centre the following autumn. In 2015, with additional support from Wexford County Council and our continued collaboration with the Wexford Arts Centre, our programme now partners with an Irish curator to provide a crucial context for both the selection of the artists and exhibition of their work. For this year’s residency RGKSKSRG, the paired curatorial practice of Rachael Gilbourne and Kate Strain, are our first collaborators, and they have titled this year’s residency I like to eat with my hands.

In contrast to previous years, there is no fee for the 2015 residency. Wexford County Council and Cow House Studios generously support this programme. Artists are responsible for food, materials and travel expenses. Cow House Studios provide shared accommodation, transportation to nearby towns for groceries and materials twice

Blackstairs Mountain, Co. Wexford, photo by Frank Abruzzese

weekly, and 24-hour access to the studio and facilities along with a €500 stipend. Successful artists will be announced in August 2015. I like to eat with my hands will take place over eight weeks from 14 September to 8 November 2015. The exhibition will be presented the following year in September 2016 at Wexford Arts Centre, curated by RGKSKSRG. Another programme central to our studios is Art on the Farm. Along with the autumn residency we have hosted teen students for three-week intensive courses since we opened our doors in 2008. Art on the Farm presents a unique opportunity to study painting, drawing and photography alongside practicing visual artists in a focused and rigorous studio environment.

During Art on the Farm we host two artists for a hybrid residency and part-time teaching position. This is a fantastic opportunity to spend extended time at our studios, gain experience teaching young people and make new work. In exchange for their time artists receive full room and board, materials and a stipend. This programme has proven to be highly beneficial for our students and our visiting artists alike.

This past spring we were thrilled to host a residency for three artists in partnership with the Bealtaine Festival. During this 13-day programme residents were provided with accommodation, meals and studio space. Frank was available for extensive technical support and assistance in the digital lab and darkroom, resulting in the production of new work by all three participating artists.

This residency brought together three visual artists – Tina Keane, Grace Weir and Kevin Atherton –with different relationships to Ireland, having respectively chosen to leave Ireland, to remain and to make Ireland home. The residency culminated in a public presentation and discussion with the artists, which was facilitated by curator Catherine Marshall and cultural director Tara Byrne.

Another recent collaboration this past spring was with Agnes Irwin School near Philadelphia, PA. This was the fourth time we have hosted a group from this school. In collaboration with art teacher Keri Farrow, Frank and I designed a twoweek curriculum focused on book making and Ireland’s cultural heritage. This course included museum visits and gallery tours in Dublin, trips to points of interest in Kerry and Cork and projects developed at Cow House Studios.

As the studios continue to grow, Frank and I have many plans to develop our programming and look forward to future collaborative opportunities. We feel incredibly fortunate to have established Cow House Studios as a place that sustains the heritage of my home while promoting and supporting contemporary visual arts practice.

Rosie O’Gorman, Director, Cow House Studios. cowhousestudios.com

September – October 2015

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

13

VAI Valerie Earley residency

Freedom of Thought & Space AOIFE FLYNN DETAILS HER TIME ON THE VAI VALERIE EARLEY RESIDENCY AT THE TYRONE GUTHRIE CENTRE, 1 – 14 JUNE 2015.

Aoife Flynn, Flourite, watercolour on paper Aoife Flynn, Industry, collage and ink on paper

Aoife Flynn, Bismuth, linocut on paper

Aoife Flynn, Hive Mind, collage and ink on paper

Tyrone Guthrie print studio

Tyrone Guthrie print studio

One of the first people I met at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre told me that I would get four days work done in one day there – and she wasn’t wrong. The centre is the kind of place that is at once bucolically tranquil and frantically buzzing with people working. Everyone keeps their own hours, conscious that they are there to accomplish something they wouldn’t normally have the time and space to do at home.

I applied for the Valerie Earley Residency last year and was awarded two weeks at the centre, which I was delighted to take up this June.1 Having had no permanent studio space for almost three years, the thought of spending two full weeks in a space was incredible. I had also briefly worked with Valerie several years ago and I think the residency is a great way to remember her.

I had heard good things from friends about the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (especially the food!) but, coming from Dublin, I was a little worried about how my urban-based practice would translate into such a rural setting. I was also worried about the isolation and the fact that I had no means of escape should it prove to be an Overlook Hotel-type situation. My dependence on technology was also a huge factor and the prospect of limited Internet access for two whole weeks was daunting. As it turned out, the lack of distraction was a blessing and I came away having made great headway into a new project. Although a lot of my previous work has included sculpture and 3D elements, I decided to concentrate on 2D work for this residency and reacquaint myself with painting in oils.

Coincidentally, the Centre didn’t have a painting studio to offer me for the full two weeks, so I was offered use of the print studio.

I say it was a coincidence since I have recently been incorporating elements of print into my work. Following a residency at Cork Printmakers last year with the Hexagon project, I have been using lino prints and other techniques as part of my drawings and collages.

The facilities in the print studio were great for many printing techniques but I stuck to what I knew and made a few lino prints using the smaller press.

For this residency I wanted to start a new project using a particu-

lar folder of images that I have been collecting for the past two years.

All of my work is influenced by an interest in science fiction and architecture, especially retro visions of future architecture. I have collected a range of images online, from 1960s buildings to natural mineral formations. At the Centre I spent a few days making drawings of each image and choosing a process to suit each image – either watercolour, oils, print, collage or a combination.

One group of images I was working from was a collection of meteorites and mineral stones, in part inspired by a recent rereading of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Colour Out of Space. The story tells of a meteorite crashing to earth in rural Massachusetts and disturbing the natural world around it, causing vegetation, animals and people to behave abnormally. The meteorite is never described in the story; it never cools down and begins to melt away before it can be studied.

I liked the connection between that story and my rural surroundings at Annaghmakerrig. The images I created are speculations on what the meteorite might have looked like. Several of the mineral samples I depicted in my works look like they house another galaxy inside – especially a luz opal crystal and a piece of chrysocolla in malachite – reinforcing the idea of connections between the earthly and the otherworldly.

Another aspect I concentrated on was the representations of futuristic architecture that I had collected. The images I used tended to be constructions made in America in the 1950s and 60s that were built to look futuristic. In previous works I have used images of Soviet architecture, which was similar in its intention. For years I’ve been interested in the Cold War and the Space Race, and how these were dealt with in science fiction writing from that period. Using this imagery I created a series of mixed media ‘drawings’ using collage and prints of wood off-cuts. I use a lot of found materials such as this wood, as well as cardboard, newspaper and magazines. For two paintings of spherical constructions I used circular cake boards that I had found and for others I used pieces of square plywood – anything different from the standard rectangle.

The Tyrone Guthrie Centre is a beautiful setting to work in.

There are huge grounds that I walked each day – down to the lake at the front of the big house. I was staying in one of the farmhouses nearest to the studios, a lovely cottage with everything you might need, including a bright study and big desk of which I made very good use.

Once a week residents of the farmhouses are invited up to the big house for dinner. I got to meet some fascinating people and the reports on the food were not wrong.

The residents of the Tyrone Guthrie are a diverse bunch: writers, playwrights, poets, musicians, dancers and artists – and I got to meet them all over my two weeks. Some of them were on their first visit and some on their tenth. During my time there I met people from Canada, America, Australia, Spain and the UK. The Australians were particularly taken with the summer light in Ireland and the fact that the sun didn’t set until nearly 11pm some evenings. There’s a great sense of community at the Tyrone Guthrie. The old hands encouraged everyone to come to the house as often as they could for coffee and a chat and once a week there would be studio visits and readings.

The residency offered me freedom of thought and space in which to develop my project, as well as the freedom to make mistakes and carry on, which I did several times over the two weeks. The isolation that I had initially feared actually gave me time to really immerse myself in the project and to achieve results and make work that I hadn’t expected. All in all, the residency at the Tyrone Guthrie gave me space to engage with my work in a way that is often difficult to achieve in the busy city, with so many other demands and the distractions of everyday life pushing in.

Aoife Flynn aoifeflynnart.com Note 1. The winner of the 2015 / 16 VAI / Tyrone Guthire Centre Valerie Earley Residency At The Tyrone Guthrie Centre will be selected in early September. Details will be circulated in the VAI’s E-Bulletin and website. The Valerie Earley Residency Award is a commemoration of our late friend and colleague Valerie Earley, who worked with Visual Artists Ireland 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.

14

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

Career development

Conor Walton, Lego Mondrian, 2015, 25 x 35cm, oil on linen

A Balanced Life

MARY CATHERINE NOLAN PROFILES CONOR WALTON AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF HIS ART CAREER. Up the hill behind the main street of Wicklow town, Conor Walton lives with his partner and their three children in a former convent.

As a result of the building’s previous role, the house has an unconventional structure, albeit with a slightly conventual feel. You enter a wide foyer off which lead the reception rooms, while the bedrooms are organised linearly down a corridor. At the end there is an entrance to the annex, a large, two-storey-high box-like space created from four of the eight original bedrooms which Walton knocked together and now uses as a studio.

This is probably the dream of many artists: to have their studio not just close to home, but attached to it, so the daily ‘commute’ doesn’t even involve going outside. For Walton, this has the added benefit of allowing him to balance his professional and personal life to the optimum. Once he has brought the children to school, he can paint for as many hours as family commitments permit.

The workspace has everything you would expect of a working artist’s studio: storage for paints and other tools; music; paintings on and against the wall; easels, one with a jacket for a current portrait commission casually slung over it. In another corner there is a small ‘stage’ with all the elements of the still life he’s also working on, lit by strong light. Walton can take anything from a couple of days to several years to complete a piece. He also likes to revisit former works, to ‘improve with practice’ either by overworking them or by re-creating them, so he’s using a photo of the still life as previously rendered as a further aid.

Walton has been painting and drawing for as long as he can remember. He studied at NCAD (Joint Honours Degree in the History of Art and Fine Art, 1993), where he encountered some resistance the fact that he wanted not just to paint, but to learn the techniques and discover the tools that have been used by painters over the centuries.

Feeling that he hadn’t really achieved this aim, he decided to look further. Receiving a number of commissions to paint portraits on foot of his end-of-degree work helped him financially to do so. He headed to the University of Essex, where he studied art history (MA in Art History and Theory, awarded with distinction) out of interest, but also with the view that he would probably have to teach to supplement his income. At the end of this degree, he spent six months at a studio in Florence but the difficulties he was encountering in his desire to follow what others perceived as an outdated path resulted in his seriously considering giving it all up. Fortunately, help came from an

Conor Walton, Ceci n’est pas une blague, 2014, 60 x 75cm, oil on linen

unexpected corner. His father, who had often queried whether it was realistic to try to be a full-time painter, stepped in, sorted out a studio for Walton, and gave him a stipend to get him on his feet.

So he was back in the studio, now he just needed to get his work out there. A contact from college suggested the Ib Jorgensen gallery in Dublin. Walton brought his work there, was taken on, and had four solo exhibitions with them over a period of 12 years. However, as Walton points out, there was a downside to this. “With a solo exhibition every three years, there were usually two lean years for every fat one, and the year before a solo show was usually very lean as I had to hoard the work.”

What’s more, he could see that the rapid increase in the prices of his work was unsustainable. “Around 2003 I realised that my prices were a product of the Celtic Tiger boom and I could see the bust coming. So I consolidated my prices at that point and slashed them when the bust came in 2009, at the time of my last show with Ib Jorgensen.

My aim at that point was to continue earning a living from painting at all costs, and I feared that, given the grave situation, Irish art sales would simply cease. But lower prices made it easier to exhibit outside Ireland and I had five European solo shows in as many years.

These weren’t sell-out shows; I was lucky to sell 25%, but the other 75% could be moved on to the next venue. With a solo exhibition every year I found my cash flow was better than during the Irish boom years and more frequent events generated more publicity. What’s in-

teresting here is how it goes against the common wisdom that artists should never drop their prices. The decision to drop my prices was one of the best career moves I ever made.”

A key element in his independence has been the portrait work.

Walton doesn’t see himself as a portraitist, rather as a painter whose work includes portraits. But he admits that the commissions have been both financially beneficial and self-perpetuating. He is generally sought out, though he also applies for commissions in instances where that approach is appropriate. However, this doesn’t mean that the portraits are a side-line. For Walton they present a specific challenge, that of getting beyond the persona to the person. On his website he writes eloquently about his relationship with sitters, pointing out that most often portraits are commissions of people in public roles, at the pinnacle of their careers. For him as a painter the interest is in getting to the person and the passion behind that public image, that robe or those insignia.

The Sky Portrait Artist of the Year (2014) is one instance however where the impetus came from Walton himself. He thought it would be interesting to enter, applied and was accepted. He saw the format, where the artists have to paint a sitter’s portrait in just four hours in public view, as a challenge, and prepared by getting people into his studio over the course of a week to have their portrait painted in that short time. The ‘performance’ aspect also appealed. Painting for Walton is a form of communication, and he is not afraid to explore any means available to engage with his viewers. He will talk about his pieces, do demonstrations and post images of works in progress on Facebook. The irony of the Sky experience is that as far as he is aware, it hasn’t had any impact on his career, though he does remember being asked, “Was that you I saw on TV?”!

Walton’s European exhibitions came through direct contact from galleries. He now has work in the US as well, a development which came about after he was mentioned in an article in a New York arts magazine – the writer had found his work online. He has an exhibition in San Francisco coming up, and will give art classes and demos over there to fund his trip. On the other hand, he says residencies are not on the cards while his children are young.

Walton is fascinated by the tools of his trade. He would love to be able to grow the flax to weave the linen on which he paints. More realistically, he’s intrigued by the notion of making his paints, rather than simply squeezing them out of a tube. And yet this harking back to basics is balanced by a firmly twenty-first-century exploitation of technology. He uploads images to his Facebook page regularly, and it was through this medium that he got the sitters for his Sky practice portraits. His time-lapse video of himself painting a bunch of grapes has got over 40,000 hits. He uses the Internet to source materials that he can’t get in Dublin from Germany, Britain and elsewhere. In 2007 Walton bought a large format scanner to record his work digitally at the highest resolution and quality; he is “very concerned about recording and archiving as my paintings sell all over the world and I’ll never see many of them again after they leave the studio.”

Walton paints, which is considered outmoded by some, and, what’s more, his paintings could be called representational, though he would argue forcefully against them being labelled photo-realism.

His subject matter veers from the classic – the bunch of grapes – to the seemingly kitsch – a Toy Story figurine – often on the same canvas.

“I paint things that I care about, that concern me: everything I do as a painter is driven by strong personal beliefs and convictions.” Much of Walton’s work appears to be dystopian in outlook, and he freely admits that he is troubled by the world we live in. But, he says: “I’m what some people call a ‘doomer’; I believe we’re headed for ecological and civilisational collapse ... [but] my state of mind is generally cheerful, I love what I do, I think it’s a great time to be a painter.”

Walton’s way of living is orderly, structured, even conventional.

His studio is meticulously organised, and he works daily, solidly – with a family to support, he cannot afford to wait around for inspiration to strike. He wants to work in the ‘old ways’, but is no Luddite.

He is happy to talk about his work, indeed he is keen to ensure that it is understood. He is open to new experiences, such as the Sky programme, but doesn’t chase indiscriminately after opportunities. Walton is that rare creature, a successful artist leading a balanced life.

With commitment, support and a little luck, it can be done.

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

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

15

VAI Activity

Profile

Self Directed Peers

Rewarding/Showcasing

SUE REID introdcuces THE PLACE ART COLLECTIVE AND THEIR RECENT COLLABORATIONS WITH THE LAB AND VISUAL ARTISTS IRELAND.

DARA O’LEARY INTRODUCES UPCOMING CHANGES TO THE RDS ANNUAL STUDENT ART AWARDS.

Sarah Wiegersma, The Ambiguous Nature of Memory

Members of the Place Art Collective, participating in a VAI Show & Tell in conjunction with ‘Free Range’,’ 11 July, The LAB, Dublin

The Place Art Collective is a group of NCAD graduates who came together in order maintain their art practices and continue their education. The group is diverse in terms of educational experience and art backgrounds. We felt that the existing college structures were no longer providing us with what we needed to progress, so we took the initiative and built our own educational model, tailored for peer and self-directed learning in a cost effective way.

We succeeeded in our funding application to Dublin City Council Arts Office, receiving both an incubation award (at The LAB) and a studio space award (at Unit 4, James Joyce Street). This allowed us to develop our model and practice art in a progressive environment.

Having varied commitments – family, work, education programmes and health issues – to take care of, reaching consensus was not always easy. We needed flexibility in time and learning. The groundwork began with meetings, emails, research and feedback, with co-operation and support from the group. It quickly became clear that there was passion, drive and a strong work ethic within our circle.

There is a core group of between four and six artists committed to all activities and another eight to ten artists who commit their time where possible. Pooling our working skills we created a moving energy of learning and art.

The group sought out successful art practice models and art professionals, attending lectures, exhibitions, courses and artists’ talks in NCAD, the RHA, the Kerlin Gallery, IMMA, Visual Artists Ireland, NAG, Fire Station Artists’ Studios and DIT. We accumulated information, bringing it back to our base, and sharing everything. We wrote reports, circulated them and discussed the learning outcomes.

The opportunity to invite gallery owners, MA students, established artists and educators to the incubation space helped further our insight into the contemporary art world. As a collective it is our ethos to both learn and share information.

This brought us in contact with Visual Artists Ireland. The sessions VAI conduct for their Professional Development Programme feature professional educators, who offer advice and help artists as they navigate their way through the minefield of paperwork and opportunities in the art world. Collective members attended events on professional development, marketing, PR and writing proposals.

As a result of the information gleaned, three members had submissions accepted for solo shows and

one member confirmed a residency in Cill Rialaig.

We’ve hosted two events at The LAB in collaboration with VAI’s Show & Tell programme. The first took place on 14 March. On 11 July we ran a Show & Tell in conjunction with ‘Free Range’, an exhibition by work by collective members. VAI’s Show & Tells are an excellent way to present yourself and your work, while reaching a new audience, and are free to attend and participate in.

Some members of the collective attended VAI’s 2015 Get Together at IMMA (15 May), a very worthwhile event. A number of us participated in the Speed Curating sessions and talked to curators who had their own valuable contributions to make.

The curators challenged us to think about our process and presentation, helping us to find a common thread in our work, which resulted in a greater clarity of direction. The artists’ talks held at Get Together are always enjoyable and this year’s presentations were no exception. Overall, the whole day was educational and we connected with many people from the art world. This also resulted in a solo exhibition for one of our members.

We’ve developed our own programme of education through commitment and hard work, and by giving respect to each other’s ideas. For example, the group have run and facilitated regular life drawing sessions, a web-building skills workshop and portrait-painting and ideas-developing workshops.

We’ve also visited a foundry, where we received a tour and an introduction to the process of bronze casting. We hosted an art trip to London and have visited The Good Hatchery and the National Craft Galleries of Ireland and Scotland for courses.

In addition to all of this The Place Collective members have managed to continue thier individual art practices, supported by scheduled critique sessions and culminating this year with our exhibition ‘Freerange’, in Unit 4, James Joyce Street, which, we are delighted to say, was a huge success.

So much of this would not have been possible without The LAB and its excellent support staff. We offer all those who supported us through the year our heartfelt thanks. We are sad to say that our time in The LAB finishes at the end of July 2015. However, we are looking forward to our future as a collective and we are presently searching for new premises in which to work and exhibit. Thank you from the artists of The Place Art Collective!

Sue Reid, with the support of The Place Art Collective.

Rachel Doolin, Promethean Illusions, 2015 (detail), mixed media

The 2015 Awards Spanning three centuries, the RDS Student Art Awards are one of Ireland’s most important visual arts accolades. Roderic O’Conor, Walter Osborne, Louis Le Brocquy, Dorothy Cross and Isobel Egan are just some of the illustrious past winners. All of them were financially supported by the RDS as they started out on their artistic careers, and today the RDS continues this support with this year’s winner receiving €10,000. The RDS is one of the world’s oldest philanthropic organisations and its primary aim is to see Ireland flourishing culturally and economically, with the arts as a key component of this vision.

The 2015 RDS Student Art Awards comprised a total prize fund of €20,000 and followed the long-standing RDS tradition of supporting emerging Irish artistic talent. The competition was open to students graduating from degree and postgraduate courses enrolled in all Irish art colleges, as well as Irish art students studying overseas, and is judged by a panel of visual art experts nominated by the RHA, IMMA, the National Gallery of Ireland and the RDS. Works of excellence, along with the prize-winning works, are included in the RDS Student Art Awards exhibition in the RDS Concert Hall, which features a diverse selection of exciting work across a range of art forms and media. The 2015 judging panel was chaired by Kim Mawhinney, Head of Art at National Museums Northern Ireland, and included professional artists Maeve McCarthy and Carolyn Mulholland, as well as Cliodhna Shaffrey, Director of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, and Karen Sweeney, Assistant Curator at IMMA. Rachel Doolin was the winner of this year’s €10,000 RDS Taylor Art Award, announced at the launch of the RDS Student Art Awards Exhibition on 28 July. A graduate from CIT Crawford College of Art & Design, Doolin’s winning installation, entitled Promethean Illusions, references technology, production and science. It comprises three interconnecting elements – weeds, sponges and nests – which lure the viewer into an illusionary world that strives for perfection in its manufactured form. Doolin will be the last winner in the current awards format which, from next year, will change from an open competition to a curated shortlist of invitees.

Sarah Wiegersma won the R.C. Lewis-Crosby

Award, the next most valuable prize at €5,000, for her ceramic sculptural installation called The Ambiguous Nature of Memory, which explores the role of the object in relation to memory. A recent NCAD MFA Design graduate, Wiegersma is a former winner in the RDS National Craft Awards and was also the recipient of the Golden Fleece Award 2013.

Estonian-born NCAD graduate Riin Kaljurand was awarded the RDS Monster Truck Studio Award, which comprises a free studio for one year in Monster Truck Studios on Dublin’s Francis Street and a €2,000 stipend courtesy of the RDS. Kaljurand treats paint as a material that is as tangible and formable as clay and manipulates it as a sculptural material. She produces paintings by collaging dried layers of acrylic and household paint, which give the finished piece a three dimensional depth. Peter Prendergast and Davey Moore of Monster Truck Studios will provide mentoring support throughout the year.

New Format from 2016 The RDS Student Art Awards provide a platform for artists transitioning from being a student to undertaking a professional career. In order to ensure that the awards remain relevant to the most talented graduating students next year, the RDS will change the way the RDS Student Art Awards are run. From 2016 they will be known as the RDS Visual Art Awards. Instead of being an open competition, the RDS will send a team of independent curators around the country to view the end of year degree shows and select a shortlist of the best artists, who will then be invited to apply for the 2016 awards.

The applicants are pitching for space in a high profile, curated exhibition to be shown in the RDS Concert Hall across five days in late October 2016, as well as the opportunity to win a share of the €20,000 prize fund. The judging panel will assess these online entries and images and select the final artists for inclusion in the show. They will also select the winners of the RDS Taylor Art Award, the R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award and other prizes which, as usual, will be announced at the launch of the exhibition. Exhibiting artists will work with a professional curator to select work for and install the exhibition. Fewer artists will be included in the show but each will show a body of work and have more space to show their work. This new RDS Visual Art Awards Exhibition will be the show to visit for the very best and most exciting work coming out of Ireland’s art colleges in any given year.

Dara O’Leary, RDS Arts Programme Manager. rds.ie/arts

16

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

Career Development

Peter Morgan, Exploded in Space, 2015, hand painted nuts and bolts, dimensions variable

Don’t Rock the Boat PETER MORGAN REFLECTS ON THE PAST AND IMAGINES MULTIPLE FUTURES. I was thrown out of my first art class when I was about 12 for being a disruptive influence. We were supposed to be drawing an arrangement of flowers in a vase. I don’t remember what constituted disruption! I moved into the first aid class, which was the alternative option to art, and after about three weeks I was thrown out for holding hands with a girl.

When I was 17 I decided to study Art A-level and the first class was life drawing, so I drew the model fairly quickly and then added the plinth she was sitting on followed by the sea she appeared to be floating on. The teacher looked at my drawing and said, “That’s not what you can see”. I thought, how on earth does he know what I can see? I left that class never to return.

It was at about this time that my mother told me my father was leaving the next day. I remember watching him driving away in our VW Beetle and I never saw him again. I spent the next five years travelling and working odd jobs. I worked as a motorcycle messenger in London, living in a squat with bikers next door who drilled holes through the walls and heroin addicts upstairs, their used needles dripping with blood. I saw a young girl jump out of the building and survive the fall. I worked as a hospital porter dispatching the dead to the mortuary, then on an oil terminal in the Orkney Islands.

My travels began when I bought a one-way ticket to Bangkok with no intention of ever returning home. There was no home to return to. I travelled in Thailand, Malaysia and Australia, where I worked many jobs: picking grapes; at a home for alcoholic Aborigines in Perth; in a retirement home for geriatrics; and in a sheepskin factory, where at the end of each day I was splattered in blood. I lived on a commune with my new mantra: ‘Baba Nam Kevalam’ (my most beloved is the only one), bought a car and disappeared to a job at a gas station in the outback, a hundred miles from anywhere. I left that job before I even started.

I returned overland through India, Nepal, Pakistan and Iran until I reached the famous pudding shop in Istanbul and hitched, in two lifts, back to England. I was 23 and decided to study for a degree in photography and film. After about five weeks I was called into the head of school’s office and told that I was on the wrong course; I should be studying fine art. Fortunately I then met a teacher who believed in me, who gave me the confidence to continue and believe in myself. When I had finished the course they offered me a one-day-aweek teaching job, with the proviso: don’t rock the boat.

I was living in London on a narrow boat on the Grand Union Canal, with a cat called Oberon, teaching and working as an illustrator. One art director asked me if I had done a particular drawing with my left hand because it was so good / bad. I said, “no, that is as good / bad as I can do”. To think I got paid for that! Anything was possible. I moved into a warehouse studio overlooking the River Thames and continued working for magazines, advertising agencies and record companies, even photographing ‘this charming man’ Morrissey.

After several years I left London for romance and rural Ireland. I was travelling on the train from Rosslare when suddenly there was an enormous bang. I thought we had been bombed. Then the emergency cord spewed out all over me and two old men in cloth caps sat opposite me laughing their heads off: “Ah sure, Neddy’s broken the reins!” they said in unison. I knew then that I was in a foreign country where policemen not only rode bicycles, but also exchanged atoms with bicycles.

I was interviewed for a full-time job at Limerick School of Art and Design and was asked how I would deal with discipline in the classroom. I thought for a moment and said, “If there is a problem with discipline, I’ll shoot them!” Almost immediately I regretted saying that, but after a long pause everyone laughed; they offered me the job and I never shot anyone.

Sometimes I feel like the fish that slipped the net. It was never my intention to teach or to make art, but a strange trajectory and good fortune led me in that direction. Joseph Beuys said that the greatest artwork he ever made was being a teacher. Teaching in an art college is not about imparting information but about developing students’ creative potential, encouraging their ability to question the status quo, to rock the boat, change direction, make milkshakes (er … mistakes) and believe in themselves. Teaching is a two-way process. If, as a teacher, you’re not also learning, then there’s something wrong.

As an artist I have worked in the same studio, a converted stable, usually in silence, for nearly 30 years, making books, collages, photographs and videos. I tend to choose the long and winding road, a serendipitous or poetic approach, where the end is not in sight but there is a sense of adventure. I do not, and probably never will, make what they call signature artworks. That would be like working in a factory. Being an artist is a way of life, it just goes on and hopefully something surprising happens if you are lucky and open.

A long road trip from Ireland to Italy with writer Judy Kravis resulted in Rough Diamante, the first of many Road Books productions. After finishing a book for the Lilliput Press, Lives Less Ordinary: Thirty Two Irish Portraits, I thought I was falling into a black hole, so I rang RTE and was commissioned to make a performance video, Balance (Five Easy Pieces). A few years later, lying on the beach in Italy, I had an idea for a film, which became Eyes Half Shut, a very slow tracking shot of a crowded beach, with a script drawn from art, literature, gossip and dementia. I sold five golden loaves in the Tate Modern, and then made a little sculptural piece, PLEASE, which sold so well I thought it would go on forever. I suppose nothing goes on forever.

When I gave in my notice at Limerick School of Art and Design, where I worked for many years, floating between departments, I wrote a one-liner: “I’m leaving on the 31st August 2015, but wanted to wait until after the Angelus”, a reference to the show I curated with three students, ‘A Mass Communication’. As a farewell to teaching, I curated an exhibition in my now-vacated office, half way down the fire escape, consisting of artworks that I had bought exchanged or been given by students during my tenure in Limerick.

‘What will you do now?’ everyone is asking.

Recently I met a retired doctor who was studying fine art, which was something he had always wanted to do. Maybe I should become a doctor. He smiled and said, “It’s easy, just nod your head and say yes!”

Or maybe I should become a stand-up comedian, but that’s a joke. I would really like to learn Italian so that I can discuss with my Italian builder where to hang the chandelier in my house in the hills just above San Remo in Italy, but that’s a fantasy. I would love to learn to play the electric guitar and set it on fire, like Jimi Hendrix, or smash it to bits on stage like Pete Townsend, but I guess that’s not going to happen. Maybe I could go back in time and sell candy floss on the beach as I used to when I was a child, but that would be ridiculous.

Or maybe I should just swing from that chandelier in San Remo and as it comes crashing down to the floor relive my past in slow motion.

Or I could just rock that boat, which, of course, I have been meaning to do for quite a while, and see who falls overboard. Perhaps I should try to live in the moment, like the Zen master who said all roads lead to paradise; or I might aim for the moon and if I miss I’ll reach the stars.

Peter Morgan was born in England, and is an artist living in Co. Cork. He lectured at Limerick School of Art and Design 1987 – 2015. With writer Judy Kravis he runs Road Books. petermorgan.ie roadbooks.ie

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

17

Profile

Garrett Phelan, from ‘NEW FAITH LOVE SONG – Radio, 2012’, courtesy of the artist

Brian Fay, X-radiograph Rembrandt - Self portrait bare headed 1633, 2014, courtesy of the artist

Cian Mcloughlin, Blue Dancer,chalk on paper 33 x 22 inches, courtesy of the artist

Against the Binary COLIN MARTIN, RHA SCHOOL PRINCIPAL, OUTLINES THE AIMS AND ACTIVITIES OF THE RHA SCHOOL. Starting in 1823 the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) operated an art school based in premises on Abbey Street, Dublin. These were burnt down during the 1916 rising and the School subsequently moved to St Stephens Green, where it operated until 1942. In 2008 the RHA School was re-established, in conjunction with the development of the RHA building at Ely Place.

The new RHA School is committed to instructing and encouraging artists in the traditional skills associated with visual art. The school is for professional artists who wish to up-skill or re-engage with their practice, third level students who wish to develop and practice skills in drawing, painting and materiality, as well as professional artists who wish to learn specialised technical knowledge.

The terms ‘academy’ and ‘academic’ can have a pejorative sense, conjuring notions of the prescriptive and deadening approach to artmaking. That’s anachronistic and doesn’t fit the purpose of current art production. So it is important to note that the RHA School does not take a reactionary position and aims to link with other institutions and assist artists developing their skills for the shifting landscape of today’s art world. Often a mutually exclusive binary argument has been typified by ‘skill versus concept’. The reality is that artists need a holistic skill set to make their art. The RHA School provides a dedicated skill-based programme, which offers students multiple approaches to drawing and painting. These skills need to be rooted in today’s art world and the school provides a point of access should artists and students wish to learn and develop the appropriate skills for their practice.

The RHA School’s development was a catalyst for the wider development of the building in 2008 and fulfils some of the central values of the academy: creating an artist-led exhibition platform through the annual exhibition and a skills programme where knowledge and experience can be passed from artist to artist. The politics of skill based education can be traced to the 1970s were a fault-line developed between academic and creative approaches to art production among NCAD students. The students argued strongly that academia had stifled creativity and art education discourse subsequently moved on, but a residual deficiency remained. Drawing and painting skills were increasingly difficult for students to access.

Mick O’Dea PRHA and Stephen McKenna PPRHA were instrumental in establishing the initial philosophy of the school, based on practice and making.

Mick O’Dea PRHA became the first school principal for a fiveyear period steering the school through its design stage and quickly establishing an active space. Drawing groups of committed professionals and undergraduate students with an interest in observational

drawing were invited to participate. Joe Dunne RHA then took over as principal and diligently put in place many of the procedural and operational structures for the School. Both worked tirelessly and voluntarily on progressing the agenda of the School. I am the current School Principal and the role is now a paid position. Blaise Smith ARHA is the current Vice Principal. The school has a new and committed board, with Frances Ruane as Chairperson, which acts as a vital driver for the School’s programme and its vision. These are significant steps in professionalising the School’s structure.

The new facilities in Ely Place, which are an addition to the existing gallery spaces in the RHA, consist of two large open-plan spaces, four studios, a communal kitchen and a library. All spaces have north facing light and are designed specifically for the purpose of working artists. The original intention was for the open plan spaces to be available for skill based learning while the studios would accommodate funded postgraduate studios. Artists in the studios could access and participate in all learning activities on the floor.

The establishment of the School corresponded with the financial crash, making some aspects of the vision difficult to implement. The studio programme was originally intended to incorporate funded scholarships but has since functioned through studio rentals, with a strong line up of artists including Mairead O’hEocha, Donald Teskey RHA, Alan Butler and Margaret O’Brien. In 2016 we will roll out funded post-graduate residencies through partnerships with Fingal Arts and private donors.

The RHA School programme currently consists of masterclasses and workshops, artists’ public talks, drawing groups and a tutored programme. A central aspect of the programme is the life-drawing group, who meet and draw each Thursday. This has proved to be a valuable space for artists. Two structured courses will start in September 2015. The drawing course covers topics such the organisation of space, sight size observation and a component on anatomical study, which is delivered with Professor Clive Lee HRHA from the Royal College of Surgeons. The painting course will cover the technical aspects needed for painting from making supports, the physical and chemical rules for building and applying paint, and advanced colour theory. Experienced practitioners such as James Hanley RHA, Una Sealy ARHA, Blaise Smith ARHA, Damien Flood, Geraldine O’Neill ARHA, among others, will teach these classes.

Masterclasses and workshops offer a more specialised focus on materials and practice. This year we have held a tempera workshop with Joe Dunne RHA, and an anatomy workshop with Una Sealy ARHA and the Royal College of Surgeons. Joe Dunne RHA facilitated a three-day masterclass in tempera painting, where students learned

David Kassan, public drawing demonstration, 2015, RHA School

recipes for rabbit skin glue grounds and binding pigment with egg yolks – old school learning that can be difficult to access. In 2015, the American painter David Kassan gave a popular class and public demo in his exacting painting methods and returned in 2015 to give one in drawing. Eithne Jordan RHA gave a masterclass in May, which provided an insight into her working practice. Jordan is a painter who has arrived at a judicious and economical use of paint and forms part of a lineage that includes Katz and Morandi. The class gave participants a chance to work directly with the artist, demystifying the working process and the critical choices made in her practice. Upcoming workshops include Mick O’Dea RHA, Blaise Smith ARHA, Sean Molloy and Garrett Phelan. It is important that the school supports and preserves traditional methods as well as innovative and contemporary approaches to drawing and painting. This ethos is central to the RHA. In October Garrett Phelan will give a masterclass in animated drawing, working collectively with a group, using Flash and Final Cut Pro to produce a short animated film that will be uploaded on course completion.

The RHA School has invited ‘Gum Collective’, a group of 13 recent graduates from the NCAD Print Department to take up a three-month residency. The members of the group represent a range of diverse practices including print, assemblage, sculpture, painting, video and performance; the central activity that underpins the group’s activities is drawing. Gum will install a drawing hot desk where they will work and draw collectively, sharing ideas and methodologies.

The public lecture series provides a public forum for artists to talk about their practices. Previous artists have included Brian Fay, Claire Kerr and Mollie Douthit. The forthcoming programme centres on artists from the ‘Futures’ series, with Aoibheann Greenan, Vera Klute, Peter Burns, Alan Butler and Sheila Rennick giving talks on their practices. The School intends to build on contextualising and positioning drawing and painting within contemporary practice and is currently working towards a seminar on drawing in partnership with DIT and The Drawing Project, IADT in 2016.

Internationally, there have been precedents for non-accredited educational bodies such as HBFK Stadelshule Frankfurt and Turps Bananna London. These have established their reputation on the quality of the discourse available to students. Currently, the RHA School is non-accredited but hopes to build links and partnerships with other institutions, giving students access to the facility’s offerings. We currently offer an access programme where a free place on any course is awarded to a student if they are registered at any third level course in Ireland. In addition to this, due to the generosity of a donor, we will offer a free place on workshops to an artist at any stage in their career. This is a competitive process and places are offered on the basis of the merits and needs of the applicant’s practice.

Colin Martin, RHA School Principal. rhagallery.ie/school

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

Profile

Promoting Partnerships TANIA CARLISLE OF ARTS & BUSINESS NORTHERN IRELAND INTRODUCES THE ORGANISATION AND ITS WORK. Arts & Business NI are the leading source of fundraising advice, training and resources for not-for-profit arts and cultural organisations seeking partnerships with the corporate sector in Northern Ireland. We deliver governance programmes on behalf of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and our investment programme helps leverage business investment in the arts.

Arts & Business NI promotes, develops and sustains mutually beneficial partnerships between business and the arts. We have 106 arts members and 65 business members in Northern Ireland and almost 30 years experience bringing the arts and business sectors together across a wide range of projects and programmes.

We offer our arts members free access to our annual master class programme and free or discounted access to our programme of training, workshops and one-to-one fundraising consultancy. Members can submit sponsorship proposals to us for advice, get advance access to our sector-leading research, reports and fundraising toolkits, and receive our quarterly members’ e-newsletter featuring business news, articles and regional updates.

Fundraising A&B NI runs an annual programme of training and events that seek to inform and support the many ways in which arts organisations can engage with the private sector through sponsorship, crowd funding, corporate donations, individual giving, and trusts and foundations.

Our annual ‘Trusts and Foundations Symposium’, in partnership with the Association of Charitable Foundations (ACF) took place on 3 September at the Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast. In the morning session invited arts organisations shared their views on how recent arts funding changes will affect the arts sector in Northern Ireland in the long term. The Paul Hamlyn Foundation presented its new funding strategy, including details of programmes suitable for arts organisations. The afternoon session gave attendees the opportunity to have a one-to-one surgery with a representative from trusts and foundations, including: Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Ireland Funds, Lloyds Bank Foundation for Northern Ireland, BBC Children in Need, Ulster Garden Villages Ltd and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

In partnership with our business member, Harbinson Mulholland, we have developed The Art of Giving, a tax guide to demystify the tax incentives that exist for donors in Northern Ireland. Harbinson Mulholland’s tax specialists have created a guide that will inform and inspire strategic giving to the arts. The Art of Giving is a practical guideline for both arts organisations and those who donate to them.

In today’s changing economic climate, private giving can provide vital support to the cultural sector. However, many arts organisations and their potential donors are unsure of the tax benefits of efficient giving to the arts and culture sector. It is hoped that The Art of Giving will start conversations that will grow into exciting, inno-

vative and powerful collaborations, allowing the arts to prepare for future opportunities.

for an exhibition mounted and displayed at the RUA’s new premises at River House.

Investment Arts & Business NI’s investment programme is an open application scheme designed to support businesses and the arts organisations they sponsor to try something new, or to broaden and deepen an existing partnership. We are keen to encourage inspirational, sustainable partnerships between commerce and culture to maximise the benefits of working together. At the heart of our work is supporting arts organisations to develop sustainable relationships with business.

A recent successful project was the strong partnership between Suki Teahouse Ltd and Visual Artists Ireland. Suki Teahouse Ltd has developed a brand with a strong aesthetic quality, but as a growing business they were keen to develop their profile. Sponsorship of Visual Artists Ireland’s Belfast Open Studios project helped Suki to enhance their brand, by associating with Northern Ireland’s leading contemporary visual artists. An investment from Arts & Business NI has enabled Visual Artists Ireland to push this brand association even further through the creation of the Suki Tea Visual Artists Ireland Art Prize. This is a unique opportunity for Suki to promote their brand while also supporting and developing the local visual arts community.

The Arts & Business NI Investment Programme is a competitive application process. The key criteria we look for in potential projects is the demonstration of: potential to develop a clear sustainable relationship between both parties value for money an ability to manage and deliver a partnership a focus on delivering business objectives appropriate plans for project evaluation.

Governance Arts & Business NI provide training for boards and individuals, and also offer one-to-one support for the chairs of our arts member organisations. Within our annual training and events calendar our C-Suite Sessions offer specific governance-focused events for chairs, board members and senior managers on topics such as ‘Dealing with Difficulty’ and ‘Fundraising for Boards’.

In addition, A&B NI work with business volunteers to bring new skills and fresh perspectives to arts organisations through our professional development programmes. We find business volunteers who want to bring their time, energy, advice and knowledge to local arts companies, either through a short-term project or by joining a board.

One such volunteer was David Croft of Danske Bank, who joined the board of Golden Thread. The gallery’s director, Peter Richards, noted: “David has brought a fresh perspective to our board. He asks the right questions – and difficult questions – and his objective support and listening ear have been invaluable”.

Further details on A&B NI’s activities relating to governance can be found in the article ‘The Benefits of Accountability’ on page 33 of this edition of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

An example of a long-term relationship between a visual arts organisation and the private sector is KPMG’s sponsorship of the Royal Ulster Academy (RUA), which is now in its eighth year. In recent years, the RUA’s education programme has complimented KPMG’s wider corporate social responsibilities. In 2014 – 2015 the partners wanted to expand the programme beyond the time frame of the Annual Exhibition by introducing a new activity to broaden and deepen the relationship. The ‘Night at the Museum’ residency programme saw three experienced educators from the Academy work with one class from each of 3 chosen schools over 10 weeks. The workshops were themed around the 2006 film of the same name. Starting with a day trip to the museum the pupils took in the Academy show and a number of other highlights from the museum collection before bringing the art, artefacts and stories to life through different media

IRISH BRONZE Dedicated to the faithful reproduction of the sculptor’s vision

T: 01 454 2032 E: irishbronze@eircom.net W: www.irishbronze.ie

Willie Malone: Casting Sculpture for over two decades

Kilmainham Art Foundry Ltd t/a Irish Bronze, Kilmainham Rd and Griffith College, Dublin 8

Awards In January every year we celebrate the best of arts / business partnerships from the previous year with the Allianz Arts & Business Northern Ireland Awards. This year sees our tenth year of partnership with Allianz. Six awards will be presented to businesses, celebrating the best examples of arts and business creative partnerships and the outstanding achievements of these collaborations throughout Northern Ireland. Arts Board Member of the Year Award will be presented to an individual who in a voluntary capacity has added outstanding benefits to an arts organisation in a governance role. The Arts Award, worth £3,000, will be presented to a local arts organisation which has consistently looked to develop and pioneer new ideas, while demonstrating a progressive and creative approach to a business partnership. Allianz will also present an additional Community Arts Prize to the amount of £2,000, awarded to a local community project with a cultural emphasis that has been nominated by an Allianz staff member. There is an open call for nominations of arts sponsorships, partnerships, arts-based training or distinguished board members.

Applications have just recently closed, so we will be announcing the nominees soon.

Tania Carlisle, Learning and Performance Manager, Arts & Business NI artsandbusinessni.org.uk

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Critique Supplement Edition 21: September – October 2015

Anna McLeod ‘Water Conversations – A survey of works, 2007-2015’ The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon 3 July – 12 September Water Conversations is an ongoing research project by artist Anna MacLeod. Over the past eight years MacLeod has travelled internationally to conduct research and engage in dialogue with artists and communities around the global and local issue of water as a precious and endangered resource. By focusing on material from four or five locations the artist has successfully negotiated the risky transition of her vast repository of works and projects

Anna Macleod, ‘Water Conversations, A Survey of Works 2007 – 2015’, installation view, The Dock, Galley 2., photo by Garry Holden

Anna Macleod, Oh Alberta: Bewildered in Banff, 2015, digital photograph, dimensions variable, photo by Anna Macleod.

Anna Macleod, detail from ‘Water Conversations’, Alberta, 2015, documentation of performative walk at Lake Miniwanka, image by Alex Bishop-Thorpe

into a visually effective and conceptually engaging representation of her practice at the Dock, Carrickon-Shannon.

In dealing with such an urgent and pressing issue, MacLeod opts for a narrative thread that is low key and prosaic – rather than catastrophic or overtly political. The show pivots around a range of hand-made apparatus and found objects purposed for various water-related functions. They are displayed alongside documentation of their use in performative and site-specific events from many of the locations. For a work made in the Canadian Rocky Mountains MacLeod fashioned an elaborate rubber and aluminium umbrella that resembles a miniature glassless Victorian botanic house.

In Colorado the artist assembled an umbrella from triangular planes of smooth plywood that rises and falls in peaks and valleys like a portable mountain range. From Almeria, Spain MacLeod has brought a series of poignant fan-like dew catchers made from folded wax paper. The pieces of apparatus are each wonderfully sculptural and esoteric, and bear direct and obtuse connections to a multitude of references that have impacted on water conservation globally. Mining, the commodification of resources, intensive agriculture and tourism are touched upon and counterpointed by the low-tech, sustainable, hand-crafted methods used

by MacLeod.

As sculptural / functional hybrids it is not easy to decipher the ‘use’ of these objects. MacLeod leads the viewer to decode their cryptic purpose and operation while creating a psychological space in which to think laterally about water conservation while enjoying the fine elegance of her sculptural forms.

Also included is a striking film made in collaboration with filmmaker David Bickerstaff, which features MacLeod walking through a Canadian landscape with her rubber and aluminium um-

brella. Projected onto the wall of a small annex off the largest gallery space, it sits alongside various props from the film. MacLeod awkwardly walks over terrain of Canadian lake ice and shoreline, mountainside and industrial roadside, while carrying the cumbersome and dysfunctional apparatus.

The framing is deliberately sublime as MacLeod’s diminutive form traverses enormous backgrounds of jaw-dropping Rocky Mountain beauty. Somehow her peculiar and absurd activity (she also melts lake ice with a blow torch) is utterly sobered by powerful elements in the frame, the cold winter light over the transcendent landscape, the threat of melting lake-ice underfoot and the partially visible profile of an industrial complex puffing out smoke.

Underlining the gravitas, an uneasy soundtrack of outdoor silence is broken by raspy footsteps, passing cars and the hiss of the blowtorch.

Hanging on the wall of the annex of the gallery space is a commemorative ceramic plate, which bizarrely celebrates past mining activity in the Rocky Mountains. Back in the larger space two museum / heritage-style still images from the film are reproduced in large format on opposing walls, with a battered 1970s canoe appearing as though it has run aground on the floor between them. There is a suggestion of re-writing history / archaeology from an alternative viewpoint in opposition to the sentiment of the commemorative plate.

In a second gallery space, MacLeod has brought research conducted in the desert regions of Almeria, Spain and the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. There is a shift in mood from the permanence and relatively tolerable nature of the Canadian mountains to these vast sterile landscapes that persist in holding out against sustainable habitation. On one wall the fragile paper dew catchers are accompanied by a heartrending song / lament to water in Ireland and Almeria. On the opposing wall a solitary monochrome work in matching script simply spells the word ‘AGUA’ over a hail of painted raindrops. They have a haunting plaintive quality that echoes the dream-like optimism of the modest dew-catching paper works.

On two opposite walls hang a series of botanical drawings etched into glass and hung out from the wall on hinges. The plants that are depicted were used in solar stills constructed by MacLeod to yield water in the Gobi Desert. These are exquisite works made in the finest tradition of forensic botanical drawing made all the more alluring by the glinting glass. As outlandish as it might seem, these wax-paper works and etched glass overcome their diminutive status through sheer beauty and bridges the extreme disproportion between MacLeod’s hand-made efforts and the gargantuan global need to conserve water. It is as though through purity, integrity and intelligent thinking that change can be effected through art and ideas.

Outside the main gallery spaces there is a wealth of additional material displayed in summary form through photographs and text. It gives a taste of the scale of MacLeod’s research and indicates the need for a second chapter of the ‘Survey of Works’. Particularly exciting is the portable water shrine from India and the solar stills from Mongolia. Anna MacLeod’s Water Conservations is a bighearted project executed by modest means, and all the more powerful for it.

Carissa Farrell is a curator based in Dublin.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet Critique Supplement

September – October 2015

Jan McCullough ‘Home Instruction Manual’ 3 July – 22 August, Belfast Exposed

‘El Lissitzky: The Artist and the State’, with Rossella Biscotti, Maud Gonne, Núria Güell, Alice Milligan, Sarah Pierce & Hito Steyerl Irish Musuem of Modern Art, 30 July – 18 October 2015

Jan McCullough, ‘Home Instruction Manual’ ,installation view, Belfast Exposed Futures, 3 July – 22 Aug 2015

Jan McCullough’s project ‘Home Instruction Manual’ developed from the artist’s interest in traditional instruction manuals. Typing “how to make a home” into Google, she soon found an online chat forum where the participants gave instructions on how to transform a ‘house’ into a ‘home’. McCullough subsequently rented an empty property in Belfast for two months, putting into practice the advice she had gathered online. The photographs and objects on show at the exhibition ‘Living Room’ – presented in the Belfast Exchange gallery space at Belfast Exposed – document various elements of this project.1 A large, white plastic rug lies diagonally across the exhibition space. Printed onto the rug is the text from a series of online conversations, including the quote “not too clean but not super cluttered – just ‘lived in’ I guess!” (Molly Bdenum, 12.53, 7 August 2014). The rug dominates the room, but other twodimensional domestic elements – a light switch, a window, a sofa and a fireplace – form part of the work’s narrative. McCullough uses black plastic tape to render these as flat life-size pictures. The tape is applied intermittently, which creates a rhythmical pattern. These stark, monotonous, graphic configurations are analogous to the binary code of the digital realm.

Overall the installation evokes emptiness. The images are harshly lit with pop-up flash, which recalls the amateur aesthetics of the family album.

Panel pins have been hammered in to secure photographs. Their dull silver metal seems somehow important in this world of near-monochrome images.

There are traces of colour in a series of small photographs assembled between the taped utilitarian images. A close-up shot features a window and provides some context. The lens has captured a white, plastic double-glazed frame and in the distance there are two suburban houses. Their dull brick walls and garages are plain and universal in their architectural style.

One image shows scatter cushions, apparently precariously balancing on a metal chair. But the image is ambiguous. Perhaps it’s a metal ladder, not a chair. Either possibility does not quite suggest a ‘comfortable’ home.

In another photograph, an outstretched white female hand holds a plant with heart-shaped leaves in a simple terracotta pot. The hand belongs to the artist; her fingernails are clean and well groomed.

Out of shot she may be sitting or possibly lying on the sofa, which is covered in a cream throw. Commenting on this self-reflexive device, McCullough stated: “I included my hand in a few images to remind the viewer that what they’re seeing is con-

structed. This also harked back to images in old instruction manuals where you can see someone demonstrating something.” 2 A wooden bookcase is recorded. Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat sits close to an anthology by William Golding. On the same shelf is The Tale of Tom the Kitten. There appears to be no logic to the selection of books, just an ad-hock or random collection. Another ephemeral object in the same shot is a photograph of two smiling children. They sit next to the book Our Life in 7 Days. The artist in fact sourced all the items through a house clearance company, adding a further layer of arbitrariness. Another print includes a framed photograph showing a young couple situated next to a television. Overall the image is eerily devoid of emotion.

A final image returns to McCullough’s hand; it is out of focus and she is again holding a plant. This time the leaves have crimson veins, which match the colour of the diagonal strips in the background textile of the picture. In the centre of this photograph is a masking-tape cross stuck to the fabric. Its reason for being is unclear. Perhaps it alludes to a sticking plaster, an attempt to make this illusionary home feel more real?

Internet chat rooms are places where strangers appear to become friends, their advice and suggestions accepted. These online forums have echoes of ‘over the garden fence’ conversations, but instead of neighbours chatting in real physical proximity, our day-to-day social sphere is one of text messages filling the void.

Forum contributor Molly Bdenum’s words, it seems, were not heeded in McCullough’s interventions into the vacant house or her subsequent documentation of the process. McCullough’s representation of a home doesn’t feel comfortable or lived in. But perhaps that isn’t the point of the exercise.

Rather, ‘Home Instruction Manual’ prompts consideration of how reality has been replaced by illusion and truth by deception. The project has a number of philosophical layers, but peel them away and stark certainties emerge. McCullough’s photography plays with notions of societal distortion: amateurs and experts, strangers and friends, illusion and reality are becoming digitally identical. The World Wide Web entangles McCullough’s work in a realm of pretence and illusion.

Curatorial practices require imaginative conceits, while considerations of funding and timing require pragmatic ones to boot. All of these appear activated in an exhibition that finds unexpected but stimulating connections between the co-development of abstraction and political ideology in post revolutionary Russia, and a desire for national sovereignty enacted on Irish bohereen in the years before 1916. The show is co-curated by Director of IMMA, Sarah Glennie, and Annie Fletcher, Chief Curator at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, from where the El Lissitzky material comes. The work of four contemporary artists, reflecting on “the position of the artist within our society now” adds fresh fuel to these retrospective fires.

In Room 1 three computer monitors, vertical and side-by-side on the white wall, glow a uniform red. They sit in an alcove built into a false wall angled within the room’s normal dimensions. This wedge-like ingress alludes to another work in the show, but that’s not apparent at first; for now it’s just peculiar but nice. Red Alert (2007), by German artist Hito Steyerl, refers to Homeland Security Red, the red of imminent danger, the colour of fear. Deceptively serene, the softly glowing monitors also refer to Russian Constructivism and in particular to Aleksandr Rodchenko’s ‘end of painting’ icon Pure Yellow, Pure Red, Pure Blue (1921). Rodchenko’s triptych is boiled down to a single colour and slogan, a uniform ‘red or dead’.

Steyerl’s other work can be found upstairs.

Surveillance: Disappearance (2013) ingeniously recalls the work in Room 1. Whether this is sleight of hand by the artist or curator is not clear. It insinuates itself simultaneously into both you the viewer and into a framed print of El Lissitzky’s famously partisan Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919).

(Clearly simulating the dynamic of the graphic image, the wedge-like alcove downstairs assumes its pictorial and architectural point). Fitted out with ‘camouflage software’, Steyerl’s work upstairs is a computer / monitor that simultaneously records and plays whatever is placed in front of it. It is hung on the opposing wall and as you stand between it and Lissetzky’s graphic image you become a digital apparition, a ghost in the machine of dialectical

El Lissitzky, Proun. Street Celebration Design, 1921, gouache on paper and painted photograph collage mounted on cardboard buitenmaat: 53.8 x 71.5 x 0.3cm, Collection Van Abbemuseum, photo by Peter Cox, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Kathryn Nelson is a visual artist based in Co. Tyrone.

Notes 1. Jan McCullough is the most recent artist to take part in the Belfast Exposed Futures Programme, which supports the development and presentation of new work by six artists a year in a series of solo shows and is generously supported by the Foyle Foundation, the Arts Council Northern Ireland and The Directory 2. Gemma Padley, Jan McCullough photographs the Internet’s most desirable home, thespace.com, 16 July 2015

El Lissitzky, Klinom krasnym bej belych, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, (1919 – 1920), reprint 1966, offset on paper 48.8 x 69.2cm, Collection Van Abbemuseum, photo by Peter Cox, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

materialism!

Unlike Steyerl’s brilliant How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. Mov File (2013) (available online) her two works here insinuate rather than instruct. Spanish artist Núria Guell leans more towards the latter. Stateless by Choice. On the prison of the Possible (2015) presents a laborious account – endless videos and documents – of her attempts to eschew her national identity (in favour of ‘Planet Núria’ perhaps – population one!). The Italian artist Rossella Biscotti offers a more oblique take on identity issues. Her tapestry 10x10 (Dead Minorities) (2014) extends for several metres across the gallery floor. Woven patterns of coloured squares are reminiscent of a pixilated image, and incidentally similar (though perhaps deliberately placed) to nearby charts illustrating the rate of collectivisation in Soviet Russia. At the bottom of the work a text key relays information about Belgian citizens in the dry accounting style of a census. Made using the Jacquard-weaving system, Biscotti’s tapestries – there’s another in the basement – make complex allusions to systems of representation and information gathering through their own complex technology.

“Arís! Arís!” the crowds roared as Alice Milligan and her collaborators – including the likes of Roger Casement, James Connolly and Maud Gonne – staged their roadside tableaux vivants. Illustrations and texts unfold across the walls of Room 5, presenting a historical display of Milligan’s nationalist zeal.

In her exhibition notes Dr Catherine Morris writes: “It was through the ‘power of the mind’ – the collective imagination – that decolonization was first achieved”. Milligan’s scenarios of collective longing provoked a taste for more of the same while setting the scene for something entirely different.

Threaded through several rooms of the exhibition, a series of El Lissitzky’s geometric ‘prouns’ describe transitional points between painting and architecture. El Lissitzky fused artistic vision with social pragmatism, applying a suprematist idealism to forms of civil and social engineering – an exemplary ‘engineer of human souls’. Jointly commissioned by the Van Abbemuseum and IMMA, Sarah Pierce’s installation Gag (2015) takes cues from Alice Milligan’s DIY aesthetic and from the display mechanisms of Constructivism. A low stage is strewn with timber off-cuts, cardboard tubes and plastic sheeting, while in the background a similar mess is roughly fashioned into a slapstick collection of suprematist motifs. Framed and propped on spindly poles, archive images of the first Constructivist exhibition in 1921 fraternise with recent photographs of the El Lissitzky material ready for transport to Dublin (the recent photographs are not identified so I’m supposing the latter). Scheduled performances promise to unlock these frozen energies and provide an opportunity for Milligan, among other spectres, to haunt the here and now once again.

The dead hand of Socialist Realism would eventually smother the innovations pioneered by El Lissitzky and his contemporaries. They continued to evolve nonetheless, particularly through their influence on movements like De Stijl and the Bauhaus, and provide a timely example of how states, institutions and artists adapt in order to survive.

Driven by imperatives often mutually antagonistic, evidence of these machinations, with their conflicts and accommodations (hidden or otherwise), make fascinating viewing.

John Graham is an artist based in Dublin.

September – October 2015

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet Critique Supplement

Ruth E. Lyons ‘The Sea, The Sea’ 31 July – 5 September , Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray I first encountered the great chunks of rock salt that appear in this exhibition at the artist’s rural Co. Offaly studio, a former hay loft located in a soft and yielding bog land landscape far from the ancient sea where these salty boulders originated.

The rock salt is a remnant of the long lost Zechstein Sea, a landlocked body of water that once stretched from North West Europe to the East.

Mined in Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim, it is now commonly used for de-icing roads.

Historian Mark Kurlansky has written extensively about the immense historical and social importance of salt (Salt, A World History 2002), associated with everything from human sexuality to trade, wealth and power. The search for salt has had an impact on landscapes across the globe, from the development of salt mines to the otherworldly appearance of salt refineries. Salt has been a highly valuable commodity for thousands of years.

Landscape and the changes wrought upon it, both naturally and through the actions of mankind, is a recurring theme in Lyons’s work, which often explores how industry has altered and shaped our domestic landscape.

Here, though, the ocean is the focus, with the exhibition ‘The Sea, The Sea’ offering a mini survey of sorts, drawing together a collection of five recent works. The rock salt chunks I first encountered in Offaly have been worked and sculpted.

They’ve been transformed into bowls and vessels to create Zechstein – Antrim (Ire) (2014), a collection of receptacles resembling alabaster or marble. The quartz-like translucence of the salt contrasts with veins of dark red clay marled through it. Smaller pieces retain their natural forms and have been allowed to crystalise into brilliantly white frothy forms.

Presented throughout the show on small wallmounted shelves, these smaller parts of the work are proffered as items of value and status. The larger pieces, laid out on the floor, have neatly hollowed-out hemispheres – like fonts waiting to be filled. These objects are in a temporary state, where changes in atmospheric humidity will either cause them to dissolve or reconfigure into yet more crystals.

The interconnected issues of a disrupted landscape and its resources are joined in Learning to Swim with the ESB (2015), three spalted (moss / lichen encrusted) beechwood structures, each topped with a pool of water suspended in a sheet of tautly-stretched PVC. Standing beneath and looking up, the trapped water creates a crude lens that reflects the viewer and the wooden frame like a kaleidoscope, this interaction activating the

piece to become an outsized scientific apparatus of indeterminate purpose.

The third new work included in the show is Stormglass (2015), a recreation of a type of early barometer that was developed by Admiral Robert Fitzroy, a contemporary of Darwin’s who joined him on the famous Beagle voyages. Composed of a glass case filled with water and a chemical solution, crystals form in response to the temperature.

These were thought to forecast the weather according to their density and position. On the day of my visit the crystals formed a dense layer on the bottom of their small glass tank, indicating ‘frost’ according to the key – not exactly accurate, but perhaps a wry comment on the Irish summer.

Amphibious Sound (2012) is a carpet of neoprene fashioned from decommissioned wetsuits. It acts as a kind of link between the works in the way that the ‘sound’ of a body of water does. The final piece is a series of photographs, titled The Pinking on Sea (2014). These document an installation of bright pink buoys held by chains on the seabed.

The work was commissioned as part of the Kinsale Arts Festival in 2014 and was a re-visioning of an earlier, gallery-bound piece, where the buoys were suspended from a ceiling.

In the 2014 iteration of The Pinking Lyons made a video work of the view from the middle of the buoys’ anchor up to the surface, where the light can be glimpsed meters above. This suggestion of a portal, or a gateway to another realm, is an idea she revisits often, infusing the examination of the industrial and the scientific with a sense of the otherworldly.

There is a sense with Lyons’s work that she is pursuing a greater truth or an answer, almost in the way that that scientists of the enlightenment in the eighteenth and nineteenth century sought to find a balance between religious beliefs and the growing body of scientific experiments that indicated forces beyond the divine. Despite their explorations in ‘natural theology’, thinkers such as eighteenth-century scholar Reverend William Paley saw advances in scientific discovery as evidence of the existence of God, not the opposite.

In ‘The Sea, The Sea’ this same feeling of wonder at the natural world is coupled with bids to push its boundaries and see what else it might have to tell us, even through the interference of human endeavour. But in the secular context as offered by Lyons, this power does not need the caveat of being both natural and divine, when this duality is already present.

Anne Mullee is an independent curator, art writer, filmmaker and researcher .

Ruth E. Lyons, ‘The Sea, The Sea’ 2015, exhibition view, image courtesy of Paul Tierney

Laura Gannon’ ‘Silver House’ West Court Arts Centre, 18 July –12 August

Laura Gannon, ‘Silver House’, nine-panel screen, oil on linen with cut-outs, aluminium and oak frame, 214 x 1017cm, photo by Johnny Savage

Commissioned for Uillinn, Gannon’s exhibition comprises a new body of experimental largescale architectural drawings and a new film work, Silver House. The film was shot locally in Goleen, West Cork, during the Spring of 2015. The work is a collaboration with the sound composer Susan Stenger and features Eilish Lavelle and her home as the subject and the site of the film.

Lavelle has spent the last 40 years designing her home and garden in line with the ideals of high modernism, transporting the early-twentieth century avant-garde to the coast of rural West Cork.

The house was once a horse stable, transformed

by Lavelle in the 1970s with floor-to-ceiling windows, glass and chrome furniture, and bathroom walls covered in mirrored silver paper. However, the passage of time has softened the clean modernist lines.

The audience are seated on a white fur bench – a reference to the fur bedroom created by Adolf Loos in 1903 – which provides a tactile but also comfortable vantage point. The fur suggests the intimacy of being invited into the comfort of someone’s home before the film even begins. Silver House opens with the specific – a deadpan close up of the intricate organic design of the rich red wallpaper – before cutting to the exterior of the property where the ancient trees sweep down to the Atlantic Sea. This cutting continues throughout the film, shifting between interior and exterior, the inanimate and intimate portrait of Lavelle, the purely visual and Lavelle’s personal stories about her home.

Like the house, the film borrows techniques from early avant-garde film, using montage to juxtapose fast and slow paced shots in a way that compresses and fractures space, time and information.

We are presented with pieces, never a whole narrative. In fact when Lavelle speaks it is so unexpected that it takes time before the ear can understand what she says. Gannon has described her work as an “ongoing process of exploring ways to convey fragility, the female body within architecture and non-dominant narratives which emerge in geographical margins”.

The film is supported by Susan Stenger’s soundtrack, which incorporates the sounds of the West Cork landscape and the house where the work was filmed to create a new audio composition. Stenger uses the associative meaning of the basic principles of music, melody, rhythm, metre, volume, etc. to heighten, suspend, slow down and interrupt. However, the score neither works simply

in parallel with or as a counter-point to the visual image. It is not mere commentary. It responds to what’s not always evident in the image as the aural and visual share the power to create meaning.

Accompanying the film is a series of large-scale experimental drawings. A nine-panelled screen sculpture demarcates the space between the film and the drawings. Responding to the gallery space and the floor to ceiling windows Gannon has created three large sculptural drawings which occupy the double height gallery wall. The basis of these drawings has been in conceptual development for the past three years. Prior to this Gannon has mainly exhibited film work and undertaken live art performance projects where she used drawing to develop and inform her film work.

Her intent now is to bring a focus to the drawings themselves by exhibiting them with a film in one coherent exhibition space. The screen sculpture is a double entendre, acting as both division and projection. Both film and drawing work as a trace and Lavelle’s home and the page are both a site. Gannon has not used a pencil as her tool of inscription but, instead, in a similar manner as she employed in the film, she has cut through the surface. Random rectangular and triangular incisions litter the screen like a foreign landscape.

These large environmental drawings cascade down the two-storey drop, unfurling onto the gallery floor. They are produced on high quality paper and canvas covered with inks and oil paints.

You can see the grain of the paper and the mark of the brush echoing the striations of the trees projected onto the other side of the gallery. Here, imperfect circles are cut from a mass of paper flowing down the expanse of the gallery walls. The scale is monumental and their physical presence is imposing. Like unwound scrolls, the downward pull of gravity upon the paper suggests movement.

As a structure ‘Silver House’ has softened into the landscape over time, the clean modernist lines faded. Temporality is projected differently in the mediums of film and drawing but nevertheless they are both processes of duration, inscriptions of process on fragile surfaces, the lines of the incisions jagged. Both Gannon’s film and drawing are rooted in temporality and duration; by capturing the passing of time and its fragility they reveal the complexities that time and life produce.

Gemma Carroll is an art writer based in Cork.

Note 1. Laura Gannon in conversation with Katherine Waugh, 126 Gallery, Galway (126.ie)

Belfast Open Studios Friday 23rd and Saturday 24th October 2015 “A chance to see how art is made and meet the people who make our city an internationally-recognised centre for visual arts!”

belfastopenstudios.com #BelfastOpenStudios

Visual Artists Ireland [NI] First Floor 109 – 113 Royal Avenue Belfast BT1 1FF Belfastopenstudios.com Visualartists-ni.org #BelfastOpenStudios @4VisArtsNI

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

23

How is it made?

Miguel Martin, Lost and Found, 2015, Indian ink on watercolour paper, 84cm x 59cm

Obscuring & Revealing MIGUEL MARTIN DESCRIBES HIS DRAWING PROCESS. My studio is in complete darkness. I’ve blacked out both my windows, switched on a very dim, energy-efficient Ikea lamp and have pointed it directly towards the ominously-shaped polythene dustsheet in front of me, which I’ve spent almost an hour adjusting. I needed the dust-sheet to offer just the right amount of transparency – to both casually obscure and reveal the object peering out from underneath. This approach is a prerequisite for all my still life compositions, generating unease by striking a delicate balance between what is visible to viewer within the drawing and what is concealed from the artist within the room.

The polythene was a discarded leftover from another artist’s projected video installation. I was captivated by its physicality, its weightless and ghostly presence. The slightest breeze would send ripples through its surface, which is why I attended to its arrangement with such forensic detail. I knew I would be drawing this composition for the next three months at least. I knew that, from the moment I began making marks on paper until the very last brush stroke, the object in front of me would remain completely untouched, frozen in time.

I used only one medium throughout the entire drawing process: Indian ink. It is a black, permanent ink, combining a variety of fine soot particles, water and a gelatine to bind them. I use only one brush, a short-handled acrylic, size one round Galeria brush by Winsor and Newton. The bristles are bouncy, resilient and strong. Although typically used for fine acrylic painting, I’ve found its resilience very useful when covering a 90cm x 60cm surface area over a three-month period. The paper is a smooth 350gm sheet of hot-pressed Arches watercolour paper, and is about £7 per sheet. They are simple materials, but refined to my requirements.

The composition itself is broken down into four components: the background setting, the object I choose to conceal, the element I choose to act as the concealer and the surface which everything is resting upon. The foregrounded object is usually centralised like a classic still life composition and does not tail off into the edges of the page. Each new drawing will introduce a new variation on these four components, allowing me to maintain a consistent signature format while exploring the potential of new content each time.

I typically begin my process by mechanically measuring and lightly pencilling in the composition by eye to fit the entire page.

Once I am satisfied with the outline, I begin methodically toning in

Making of Lost and Found, photo by Miguel Martin

the contours of the objects with a light ink wash. I then slowly build up layer upon layer of darker washes to create shaded areas until finally I use the ink in its purest form as total black where necessary.

Indian ink on paper is permanent, like a tattoo on skin. Unlike painting, where marks can be covered, once a mark is made with ink there is no possible way to tone it back down. I don’t use white ink to add highlights; the whitest part of the drawing will be the untouched parts of the page itself. This process is slow and delivered, and deeply satisfying when it goes to plan. There is no intentional implication of abstraction or photo-realism; I simply depict to the best of my ability the textures, shadows and depth of the objects in my direct line of vision. I equate this process of drawing to a term in chemistry called stoichiometry, where levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen must be balanced in order to create a satisfying reaction. Any more detailed and the drawing would become stale; any less skilful and it may appear somewhat amateurish. The finish lies somewhere in between.

Although I could choose to draw the composition from a photograph, I feel a deeper relationship to the process and site specificity of drawing through the format of real observational still life, rooted in the present. The final image is dictated by this format. The placement of each object and its distance from the ground represents my own presence within the space. The strict routine of needing to create the work in a particular space also adds depth to the experience.

In my piece entitled Dead Shoes (2013), I set up shop in my own bedroom. My curtains provided the backdrop and a collection of my

own shoes, which were no longer functional due to wear and tear, provided the element of concealment. I had committed to living with this set up in my bedroom for as long as it took to complete the piece. With my curtains no longer in operation, my room remained in semi-darkness for the entire summer. It took almost three months to complete.

Back in 2012 five Belfast-based curators with a proposition to manage a one-off visual arts festival approached me and many other artists residing in the Ormeau Road area of South Belfast. The event was named Household. They invited each of us to create some kind of artistic intervention within our own homes for the public to experience throughout the festival. I had never before thought about using the architecture of my domestic surroundings as a means of creative research, but felt incredibly excited by the prospect. During this particular time I was living in a five-bedroom house with a spacious living room and kitchen area that possessed a rather Lynchian aesthetic. By Lynchian of course, I’m referring to the American film director David Lynch of surreal 1990s TV drama Twin Peaks fame.

The entire bottom floor was covered top to bottom in dark mahogany wood: the floors, the walls, the ceiling. The air was cold and damp and the fridge emitted noises not dissimilar to those I imagine a drowning goat might make. The house was creepy, which made it the perfect space to showcase a new body of work exploring an array of themes I was yet to uncover.

Most visual art investigating subjects of a creepy domestic nature almost always points me in the direction of Freud’s 1919 essay The Uncanny. Reading through this text I was engrossed by his psychoanalytical approach to various interpretations of this term, including sensations of domestic unease, the coming to light of secrets that ought to have remained secret, and objects of familiarity displaced in an unfamiliar context. The text also considers the uncanny effect of inanimate objects such as dolls and offers insight into analysis of the double, repetition and mortality. These concepts directly inspired me to produce a new body of work revisiting unusual objects of familiarity within my own domestic environment, which began with a traditional still life drawing entitled Cape.

Cape (2012) is a drawing depicting an amorphous black form seemingly draped over another. The dark form you see is in fact a length of black satin fabric, sewn together by my mother back in 1989 to become the centrepiece of my Dracula costume for a crisp Halloween night. The object underneath shall, for reasons pertaining to my conceptual integrity, remain anonymous. I am compelled by the interplay between what I choose to present as the dominant subject of the drawing and the concealed component, which always remains the truer subject of each piece. My selection of objects is also motivated by a deeper autobiographical connection, often referencing childhood memories, domestic rituals and phobias. More recently they have become symbolic manifestations of mortality e.g.

Dead Shoes (2013), where I am alluding to momento mori and the sixteenth-century still-life Vanitas paintings from Flanders and the Netherlands. This approach continues to penetrate the format of my research today.

I have finally completed my latest drawing, Lost and Found (2015). I can now remove the black-out blinds taped to my studio windows, dispose of that polythene dust-sheet I have meticulously kept untouched for the last three months, and return the object peering out from underneath back to my bookshelf. I found this object while walking through a construction site on my way to the studio many years ago. It was badly damaged, but I picked it up anyway and took it with me. I’m still not sure what drew me to it that day, but it’s been watching me in my studio ever since.

Miguel Martin (b. 1985 Belfast, UK) BA Fine and Applied Art at the University of Ulster, Belfast (2005 –2008) lives and works at Platform Arts, Belfast. Solo shows include: ‘Out of Site’, 16 April–16 May 2015 University Art Gallery. Recent Group shows: 2014 ‘PVIX’, Platform Arts, Belfast; ‘The FarAway Nearby’, FE McWilliam Gallery, Banbridge; ‘Jerwood Drawing Prize’, Plymouth Arts Centre, Plymouth. Awards 2014 –2015: Esmee Fairborn Artist’s Career Enhancement Programme; 2014 Prince’s Trust Enterprise Program; 2012 and 2011 Arts Council of Northern Ireland Support for Individual Artist Award; 2008 Northern Bank Toradht award. miguelmartin.co.uk

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

Profile

Exhibition opening at The LAB

Alan Phelan, ‘Bio Bits’ photomontage, photo by Michael Durand, 2006

Experimental Decade JAMES MERRIGAN REFLECTS ON 10 YEARS OF THE LAB, DUBLIN.

Aisling O’Beirn, installation view at The LAB

Sam Keogh, installation view,‘NINE’ 2013, photo by Michael Holly

Amanda Coogan and Aine Phillips, ground floor gallery, ‘LABOUR’ (curated by Amanda Coogan, Chrissie Cadman and Helena Walshe), The LAB, 10 March 2012, photo by Paddy Cahill

Mark Cullen, ‘I See A Darkness’, installation photo by Michael Durand, 2009

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

25

Profile

‘Making Do’, LAUNCH graduate exhibition, 2006, curated by Paul O’Neill collaboration with FOUR and VAI, photo by Michael Durand

It is all the more remarkable then that an experimental project like The LAB should find the oxygen to survive in the city, and from the city.

Mick Wilson, The LAB 2006 – 2008 Dublin’s art scene was greatly affected by the seesaw growth and recession of the Irish economy in the last decade. On the one hand artists had to deal with the inflated value of ‘space’ during the housing bubble, and then funding cuts during the economic recession on the other. The aspirations of establishing a space, an art publication or a career as an artist seemed fugitive in an environment that was in continual economic flux. No one was safe, especially the establishment: Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (TBG+S) was inactive during the height of the summer in 2010, and Circa Art Magazine ceased production in 2011 due to successive funding cuts.

Somehow, innovative and brave artists and curators, with the support of Dublin City Council Arts Office and the Arts Council of Ireland, formed collectives and shared resources, managing to transform the remaining nooks and crannies of the property market into alternative art spaces. Alongside the artist-run studio / gallery model, some enigmatic and independent art spaces like Pallas Projects, FOUR and thisisnotashop supplied further alternative spaces and hope for artists.

In this 10-year period the Dublin art scene intensified and expanded. Emergent alternative and commercial spaces established themselves within the psyche of the local art community, and we also saw the development of ‘the curator’ and a growing intellectualism promoted by such academic arts research programmes as MAVIS (IADT), Art in the Contemporary World (NCAD) and PhD arts research through GradCAM. Leafing through what is a one of the most impressive publications in design and content from the boom era, a relic of the Celtic Tiger some might say, the first LAB publication documents the 40 exhibitions that took place there between 2006 and 2008. The tail end of the boom era of Dublin’s art scene folds out across the pages. I am struck by the artists that have come and gone (and come again), and reminded us that the art scene forges ahead with an unforgiving amnesia.

In the same volume, curator and art critic Joseph R. Wolin celebrates The LAB as a weird hybrid that is both “alternative” and municipally-funded, an institution that would be “nearly unthinkable” in the US. Wolin’s definition of the alternative art spaces goes some way, but not all the way, to defining what the The LAB supports in the Dublin scene: “Historically, alternative spaces have filled an important niche by presenting art deemed too minor, experimental, immature, ephemeral, unsellable, offensive or incendiary to show elsewhere. This art, of course, has often been forgotten during ensuing years, but it has also often become the art that defines its moment”.

Barrett recalls that “when The LAB was being built by Dublin City Council there were very few opportunities for recent graduates to show in Dublin. Dublin City Arts Office’s remit was to support artists in the development of their practice, but also to provide opportunities for people living, working in or visiting the city to engage with the arts”. In her first few months on the job in 2006 Barrett describes how Valerie Connor, then Visual Arts Specialist at the Arts Council, talked about “showing a mixture of artists at different stages

in their careers, largely emerging, but sometimes more established artists trying out new things ... to build The LAB’s own ‘reputational economy’, as Mick Wilson describes it”.

Maeve Connolly, in her capacity as an IADT lecturer and as a researcher / writer, discussed the “longstanding and very productive relationship between The LAB and the MA in Visual Arts Practices (MAVIS)”. From 2006 / 2007, when MAVIS moved to The LAB, she continued, “students developed several exhibition and event programmes at The LAB within the framework ‘Public Gesture’, and we benefitted directly from Sheena’s input as a curator with a specific focus on emerging art practices and engaged publics”.

The LAB “has enabled several very interesting research-based projects by curators (or artists working curatorially). I’m thinking here of the ‘Culturstruction’ show from 2009, and more recently ‘The Geneva Window’ by Isobel Harbison (2011) and ‘Tonight you can call me Trish’ by RGKSKSRG, which was the outcome of the Emerging Curator award 2013 / 14. So the programme has been quite open to curatorial experimentation. I would also see the exhibition ‘Nine’ (2013), a collaboration with Liz Coman and Lynn McGrane, as part of this investigative current.”

Barrett herself pointed me in the direction of artist and educator Brian Fay, whose solo show at The LAB, and concurrent group show that he co-curated with Barrett in 2007, was a model of exhibitionmaking that The LAB would use time and again. Fay told me how he was working with Siún Hanrahan on DrawingLab at DIT at the time. “The LAB were completely open to working with us as part of this, which manifested into a weekly, short-talks series which accompanied and opened-out the conversations for the exhibitions”.

Fay concluded that “The LAB really provides a platform to extend the standalone exhibition model”.

Artist Alan Phelan shared a similar experience of the “can-do attitude” (Fay) of staff at The LAB, but this time involving compression rather than extension. In 2007 Phelan was given the possibility of “squishing” his planned multi-location artwork, Bio, into the atrium of The LAB as one fantastic sky-rise scaffold of self-curation. “The LAB is about the only place in the country where something like that was possible. I think the place is special because there is a different kind of curating at work – a lighter touch, less ego, less ownership, more generous ... non-auteur”. The curators there trust the artists to get on with their work and produce the best show possible, supporting when appropriate.”

Alan Butler, an artist who has shown at The LAB several times through independent curators, told me: “The LAB is so open to new experimental stuff – it’s in the name. The first time I exhibited there, I was basically doing a post-Internet art show, but that term didn’t exist back then. There was no validation of the concerns of the work and practice in a ‘global discourse’ sense, but The LAB had the capacity to take a chance on an inexperienced artist like myself.”

The main criticism flung at The LAB gallery is the architecture.

In a review of Mark Durkan’s impressive solo show at The LAB in 2013 for Visual Artists’ News Sheet, I wrote: “Having the architectural personality of those transitional spaces in airports where they plonk the vending machines, The LAB is a challenging gallery to theatricise.” Artist Vera Klute, who has also been a regular feature at The LAB and worked as a technician there from 2007 – 2011, shared how she “almost fell into the trap [most artists do] of wanting to block out the huge window front to show a video projection in the main space in an attempt to convert the space for my needs rather than work

Vera Klute ‘The Grand Scheme’ 2014, exterior view

with it”. She continued, “Thankfully Sheena stopped me from doing so, which made the show look so much better”.

Patrick Murphy, Director of the Royal Hibernian Academy, shared his thoughts on the The LAB with regard to visibility and continuity of art practice: “The LAB has proved itself really essential as a first show space. I think The LAB’s programming has been outstanding, and it has introduced me to many emerging artists. The is a certain imprimatur to having a show there, a true commencement of a practice that will endure and hopefully be nurtured and grow.” From personal experience, I can vouch that the opportunities that Dublin City Council Arts Office (DCC) and The LAB have created in partnership with other institutions, such as Red Stables Irish and International Residencies, and more recently, the DCC / Visual Artists Ireland Art Writing Award, are priceless, creative experiences for personal and professional growth for the aspiring artist and art critic.

In the same way that art spaces generate art making, Clíodhna Shaffrey, Director of TBG+S, suggests that The LAB has acted as an example, a magnet and a shoulder for “a cluster of arts spaces in the MONTO area: Oonagh Young Gallery, ArtBox Projects and FLOOD”.

Oonagh Young told me about the desire she shares with The LAB to “promote artists, create good quality exhibitions and increase the audience”. “So we started trying to align our openings,” she explained.

“This has recently expanded into setting up the MONTO group with Artbox Projects, Talbot Gallery & Studios and Fire Station Artists’ Studios”. Young makes a point of mentioning that “it is no easy task to satisfy all the stakeholders in a non-commercial space [but] The LAB appears to do this effortlessly”.

With The LAB is currently embarking on a 10-year review, Mick Wilson’s call in 2008 for a more “robust climate of discourse”, and for the “community of stakeholders that gather around The LAB” to make it their responsibility to critically evaluate the institution so that it might “flourish”, resonates all the more today. Alan Phelan’s critical analysis is, for me, the robust evaluation that Wilson prescribes: “Boom or bust I reckon The LAB has remained consistent – never quite achieving epic-gallery status, but doing something unique nevertheless. It never tries to be super cool, on trend, bleeding edge, and maybe feels like it’s always catching up. That does not matter; the ideas it trades in are vast and un-nameable – there is not pattern or style, which is so evident in many other public spaces around Dublin.”

Barrett’s thoughts on the review and the future of The LAB are upbeat: “In terms of the review, I think it’s an exciting time for The LAB. 10 years in is an important time to take stock and reflect. We’re looking longer term in our education programmes, in particular our work with the early years and primary school sector through our five-year Project 20 / 20 led by Liz Coman. Our new Arts Plan continues to identify The LAB as a curated arts space and it’s important to understand how best to do that within a changing ecology.”

Above all, according to the people I contacted, it has been The LAB’s curatorial approach, “risk-taking” (Vera Klute), “openness” (Maeve Connolly), “support” (Bea McMahon), “insight” (Oonagh Young) and “an acute awareness of place and relevancy” (Jaki Irvine) that defines it as a vital interlocker of the Dublin art scene. I conclude that alternative art spaces and the people behind them transform not only how artists make and display their work, but also transform the mindset of the audience as to what art is and could be, white cube or no white cube.

James Merrigan is an art critic at billionjournal.com.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

Conference

Still from Griselda Pollock’s presentation at ‘Motherhood And Creative Practice’ South Bank University, London 1 – 2 June 2015

Faith WIlding speaking at ‘Motherhood And Creative Practice’

A Mother World

the ideological undercurrents at play in the rise of the fertility industry, including searches for a substitute for the female reproductive body – a mother machine. They noted four elements in this desire to enable “genesis somewhere else”: removing the maternal body (as an uncontrollable entity in the production line); a social desire to free women from the child birthing role; gaining access to and control of gestation, birth etc; bio-ethical reasons – it allows those who can’t have children to do so without the legal and ethical problems associated with surrogacy.

Wilding and Aristarkhova also highlighted the surrogacy industry’s relationship to class and labour, discussing international surrogacy / fertility tourism, where mostly poorer women in developing nations provide eggs or surrogacy to wealthy middle class couples from developed nations. They quoted Judith Butler, asking: “Who tends for the life of the child? … Who cares for the life of the mother, and of what value is it ultimately?” 6 It’s hard to do justice to a conference of such depth and breadth.

Other panels explored childlessness, grief at the loss of a child, single-parenting and the hetero-normalising of gay couples on TV, to name but a few subjects. Mary Kelly, although unable to attend, was a strong presence through the influence of her work on many artists who presented. A video of her keynote presentation highlighted her “interest in point of connection and separation between mother and child; domestic labour and ideology; between war and our limited capacity to prevent, and between duration, narrative and memory”.7 Rounding up, feminist art historian Griselda Pollock asked us to think about what meaning is given to our capacity in the maternalfeminine. Pollock invited us to consider this condition as not just about the mother-child relationship, but about our broader capacity for care and about how society is organised. Ultimately, she noted that there is a responsibility to make public these issues and theories to impact culture and imagine ‘an (m)other world’.

MICHELLE BROWNE REPORTS FROM THE ‘MOTHERHOOD AND CREATIVE PRACTICE’ CONFERENCE, HELD AT LONDON’S SOUTH BANK UNIVERSITY, 1 – 2 JUNE 2015.

The ‘Motherhood and Creative Practice’ conference, held at London’s South Bank University in June 2015, considered all things relating to motherhood through theory and art practices. Luminaries such as Bracha Ettinger, Griselda Pollock, Mary Kelly and Faith Wilding addressed the event. However, there was some unease about the focus of the conference. In her recent Art Monthly article, ‘Mother and Child Divided’, Jennifer Thatcher argued that the conference was “too much about sexual difference”.1 Certainly the impact of lingering patriarchal ideology on the ways in which women are viewed and how they view themselves, along with a focus on rigorous feminist critique and theory, was the preoccupation of several papers.2 For example, the opening keynote was by artist, theorist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger, who over the last 20 years has developed a complex theory of the feminine – one that challenges the pervasiveness of the ‘phallic order’ as proposed by Freud and Lacan.

In her essay Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial Encounter Event Ettinger proposed the birth-giving mother as the potential site for a new interpretation of human relations, analysed as a “poetics of event and encounter”.3 Ettinger proposes a reading of the “womb space” and the “event-encounter” of childbirth and pregnancy as a space where we experience trans-subjective links. She argues that there is a border-link between the living (the mother) and the nonliving (the child). This offers a space to rethink our inter-subjective ethical relationships. Ettinger notes that the “matrixial” or womb is a symbolic space and can also be accessed by the male.

In her paper Ettinger furthered her argument, outlining the concept of “carriance”. She stated: “I am, hence I carry. I am, thence I am carried”. Through this she explored an ethics of “being in the world together”, again an idea accessible to both male and female. Ettinger continued by discussing what she calls the “shock of maternality”, which combines a number of stages from the desire to have a child, fertility, pregnancy and birth, and maternality (pregnancy and birth being the only stages that are not also related to male experience).

Ettinger also noted the tendency in psychoanalysis to position the mother as a “ready-made mother monster” – “the basket for the disposal of toxic psychic material”, and a cause of self-loathing, selfblaming guilt, casting the maternal shock as a psychological abnormality. Ettinger’s work aims to re-normalise these states and claim them as positive moments where certain “invisible experiences are made available for thought”.

Many of the presentations that followed this address sought to reclaim and make visible the experiences of motherhood / parent-

hood in ways akin to Ettinger’s approaches. In panels such as Everyday Life, Art and Parenthood, Performing Mothers Baby and Practicum of Mothering issues around the practicalities of having a child and maintaining an art practice were explored.

Townley and Bradby, an artist duo who are parents to three children, spoke about the effort to maintain space to create within the domestic space, focusing on the repetitive nature of family life. The Invisible Spaces of Parenthood, a collaboration between Andrea Francke and Kim Dhillon, focused on their work engaging with the politics of motherhood and the often invisible act of caring for children.4 Francke had created a nursery for her graduate show to highlight the closing down of the existing nursery in Chelsea College of Art – where she was studying – in 2009. Francke pointed out that the student body and academy saw childcare as a private responsibility, albeit one which impacted mostly women. Similarly, Dhillon noted that the Royal College of Art, where she is currently a PhD candidate, has no childcare provision for students. Back in 1974 / 1975 facilities had been made available at the RCA, as a result of student mobilisation. Dhillon is from Quebec, where highly subsidised childcare is provided by the state. Francke also outlined her research into the Danish model of childcare and highlighted the fact that childcare is provided in Denmark, in order to allow children to learn to participate in a democracy.

Chicago-based Christa Donner of Cultural Reproducers and UKbased Martina Mullaney of Enemies of Good Art mirrored this focus on childcare provision in their presentations.5 Both have examined the area of childcare provision at art institutions and how this affects their ability to access exhibitions as professional members of the art community. Donner asked: If IKEA and certain gyms can provide childcare to access their facilities, why can’t large art institutions?

It was noted that motherhood becomes a moment of radicalisation for women, a point echoed in many of the panels. As part of the childbirth panel, Emma Finucane and Mia Oshin of Project Afterbirth and UK artist Rosalind Howell all spoke of their experience of the over-medicalised model of childbirth. In their work they are interested in exploring real experiences of childbirth, rather than medicalised accounts and processes – which are far removed from an innate faith in the body’s ability to give birth – or saccharine representations of pregnancy and childbirth as gentle, painless and stress free experiences.

Faith Wilding and Irina Aristarkhova further explored fertility and technologies of reproduction in their keynote. They questioned

Michelle Browne is an artist and curator based in Dublin and she has a five-year-old daughter. She is a member of the Mothership Project, a network of Irish parenting visual artists and arts workers. themothershipproject.wordpress.com Notes 1. Art Monthly, Issue 388, July – August 2015, 11 – 14 2. The role of the ‘woman in the home’ is still enshrined in Article 41 of the Irish constitution. Valerie Connor, referencing Julia Kristeva, has noted that “materialising the image of ‘woman’, precisely to fill an ideological space, renders the figure symbolically static and its meaning fixed.The maternal figure becomes an index of symbolised social relations and community’ Feminism, Democratic Politics and Citizenship, Third Text, Vol.19, Issue 5, September 2005, 511 3. B. Ettinger, Weaving a Woman Artist With-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event’ Theory, Culture & Society, Sage, London, 2004, Vol. 21, 69 4. The 2013 Irish census found that “more than 98% of those who were looking after home / family in 2013 were women, with close to half a million women looking after home / family compared to only 8,700 men” 5. culturalreproducers.org 6. J. Butler, Undoing Gender, Routledge, New York, 2004, 205 7. Dr Lisa Baraitser in response to Mary Kelly’s keynote screening

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

27

Profile

Building on Potential TANYA KIANG AND TRISH LAMBE, CO-DIRECTORS OF THE GALLERY OF PHOTOGRAPHY, DUBLIN, PROFILE THE AIMS AND ACTIVITIES OF THE INSTITUTION.

Gallery of Photography exterior at Meeting House Square

Panel discussion at the Gallery of Photogrpahy

Exhibition opening at the Gallery of Photography

From 1839, when photography was invented, Ireland was at the forefront of developments in the medium and its avid early supporters included George Bernard Shaw. Despite this, Ireland was slow to embrace and recognise photography as an art form. Independent artists in the twentieth century, such as Fergus Bourke and Bill Doyle, worked largely without support or recognition. One turning point came in the 1980s, when the first photographic artists began to receive Arts Council funding.

John Osman established the Gallery of Photography in 1978.

In 1996 the Gallery moved to a purpose-built space, designed by O’Donnell Tuomey, in Dublin’s Meeting House Square. The building, though modest in scale, had a much-improved gallery space and could now provide essential production facilities for artists.

Since then the Gallery has become the national centre for contemporary photography in Ireland. With over 60,000 visitors a year it is a popular cultural attraction. The Gallery is committed to the development of photography and the promotion of Irish artists nationally and internationally, initiating major projects and touring exhibitions, publishing photo books and providing a platform for critical debate and discussion. In 2006 Access II funding from the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism enabled us to add a new floor to our building, providing essential digital workshop and studio space.

Another key addition to the country’s photographic infrastructure was the opening in 1999 of the National Photographic Archive (part of the National Library) across from the Gallery of Photography. The archive’s exhibitions showcase the country’s vibrant photographic heritage and attract large audiences. This clustering of the two organisations and the adjacent DIT BA Photography Programme – which has since moved to DIT’s new Grangegorman campus – created the first sustained focus for photography in Ireland.

The Gallery of Photography aims to represent the depth and breadth of photography practices, from documentary through to conceptual. While showcasing Irish work is a primary concern, the Gallery also places this within a broader international context, bringing the work of many of the leading names in international photography to Irish audiences. Irish artists have included Noel Bowler, Simon Burch, Mark Curran, John Duncan, David Farrell, Anthony Haughey, Kim Haughton, Clare Langan, Mary McIntyre, Jackie Nickerson, Paul Seawright, Amelia Stein and Donovan Wylie.

International artists that have been featured at the Gallery (many for the first time in Ireland) include some of the leading names in the

history of photography: Eve Arnold, Brassai, Robert Capa, Doisneau, Henri Cartier Bresson, Evelyn Hofer, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Lee Miller and Sebastiao Salgado. Contemporary artists include Bruce Gilden, Chris Killip, Boris Mikhailov, Martin Parr, Taryn Simon, Laurie Simmons, Thomas Struth and Quingsong Wong.

The Gallery encourages critical debate through its talks and summer / winter schools, providing a forum for in-depth discussion of key issues among artists, critics, academics, curators, writers and audiences. As an artist-centred resource, the Gallery also supports established and emerging artists not only in its exhibitions but also through the ongoing development of their practical, critical and professional skills. This includes: Subsidised artists’ production facilities, such as access to professional digital scanners (essential for artists who would not otherwise have access to high-end equipment in a studio setting outside third-level facilities) Artist-led education workshops and photo courses providing access and training for people at all levels Developing creative approaches to specialist alternative photographic processes Professional training / up-skilling in traditional darkroom and digital photography techniques Professional development and promotion, mentoring, feedback, portfolio reviews and networking opportunities Promotion of events through social media networks.

The Gallery’s work programme includes three major initiatives: the Solas Prize, the Winter School and the Photo Album of Ireland.

The new Solas Prize brings together the Artists’ Award and the Source-Cord prize, creating a new Irish and international prize for contemporary photography. It will have an international jury of leading curators, with an individual first prize of $10,000, and second and third prizes of $1,000 and $500. The Irish winners will also take part in a three-person exhibition at Fotohof, Salzburg in 2016 and receive a travel and production bursary, and a three-month artist’s residency at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin.

The Gallery’s upcoming Winter School is centred on an exhibition curated from the archive of documentary photographer Eamonn Farrell, focusing on his work about the late Charles Haughey. The Winter School will include a programme of critical talks and discussions, bringing together leading cultural and political commentators and politicians to discuss the relationship between image, art and

politics, as well as the broader issue of political support for the arts.

As part of the Gallery’s research into photography’s role and broader cultural value, we are also examining the history of photography in Ireland through the family album. Initiated in 2013, the Photo Album of Ireland project invites people from around Ireland to share their family photographs in digital format. This growing archive is a celebration of everyday life and vernacular photographic practices, and will contribute towards wider research and exhibitions on the history of photography in Ireland.

The project is currently focusing on exploring issues of conflict and identity; themes that also resonate with the Decade of Commemorations. An application has been submitted to the EU cultural programme to develop the project with six European partner organisations and we have been invited to tour in North America.

Since the beginning of this century Ireland’s broader photographic landscape has changed dramatically. The establishment of degree, post-graduate and doctoral programmes – led by leading practitioners David Farrell, Sean Lynch, Paul Seawright, Anthony Haughey, and Donovan Wylie in Dublin, Belfast and Limerick – have made significant contributions to an emerging community of artists who are now attracting international attention. Source magazine has also played a key role in the development and promotion of photography as an art form in Ireland. Each issue includes features and reviews of the latest exhibitions and books from Ireland and the UK. The magazine is on a par with leading international photography titles such as Aperture in the US, Camera Austria and Katalog in Denmark.

The welcome addition of festivals such as PhotoIreland, the Belfast Photo Festival, the Remote Festival in Donegal and Cork Photo has also built upon this flourishing of talent. The emergence of the photo book is also notable as an art form that transcends limits of space and geography. These dedicated photographic activities and organisations have laid the foundations for an unprecedented period of growth.

Photography in the digital age is developing into a highly potent, dynamic and relevant artistic medium. Perhaps this is partly due to its unique ability to connect immediately with broad audiences across social media. In the digital era, a new generation of artists are less concerned about boundaries between art forms. Yet despite photography’s improved status within Ireland, much needs to be done to reach international standards. For example, there is no comprehensive collection of contemporary Irish art photography. With a few notable exceptions such as David Kronn’s collection at IMMA, there is an under-representation of Irish photographic artists in national collections.

Meanwhile the Gallery of Photography has clearly outgrown its current space in Meeting House Square. Though beautifully designed, the space is too small and no longer fit for purpose. The exhibition space can no longer accommodate the breadth and scale of contemporary photographic exhibitions; many art works are simply too big to get into the building. These space limitations also mean the Gallery is unable to curate long overdue retrospectives of established Irish artists.

Space problems also hamper the Gallery’s ability to expand the digital and studio facilities to meet the needs of artists and sustain the development of their projects. Nor can it comfortably accommodate the number of people who wish to attend its talks and events, which are often standing room only.

To build on the potential of the medium, the Gallery of Photography needs to grow significantly as an organisation – on a par with similar international organisations worldwide. We are actively researching development options that will allow us to expand and deliver landmark projects. We will also continue to build on photography’s unique ability to communicate creatively and effectively with large audiences, while raising awareness of the cultural importance of photography and securing its rightful place within the arts in Ireland.

Tanya Kiang Co-Director / CEO Trish Lambe Co-Director / Company Secretary galleryofphotography.ie

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

Profile

Brilliant Trees JONATHAN CARROLL TALKS TO VAARI CLAFFEY, CURATOR OF ‘MAGNETISM’ (28 JUNE – 27 SEPTEMBER 2015) HELD AT HAZELWOOD ESTATE, SLIGO.

Lucy Andrews, Dark Hours, 2015, photo by Denis Mortell

Siobhan Hapaska, Untitled, 2015, photo by Denis Mortell

Mikala Dwyer, Square Cloud Compound, 2010 – 2015, photo by Denis Mortell

Lucy Andrews, Floating and Sinking, 2015, photo by Denis Mortell

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

29

Profile spaces and to look towards secure, long-term solutions.

Aleksandra Mir, Plane Landing in Sligo, 2015, photo by Denis Mortell

Laura Morrisson, Trees Simplex 1-6, 2015, photo by Denis Mortell

‘Magnetism’ is a major contemporary art exhibition housed in the former Snia / SaeHan factory, located on the Hazelwood Estate, 4km from Sligo town. Curated by Vaari Claffey, the exhibition features works from Lucy Andrews (UK), Mikala Dwyer (Australia), Igor Grubic (Croatia), Siobhán Hapaska (UK), Aleksandra Mir (Sweden / USA), Laura Morrison (UK, Finland) and Garrett Phelan (Ireland).

‘Magnetism’ includes an accompanying screening programme, ‘PLAY, REWIND and FAST FORWARD’, to reflect the history of the factory as a producer of VHS tape.

artists I decided on first. Everyone except Igor Grubic did a site visit and some artists did several. In relation to your earlier question about the conditions, for me there were several things that aided the production of this show: the long install time; the extraordinary vastness and history of the space; the setting of the factory on the site of Hazelwood House and Lough Gill; and the ambition and support of the commissioners.

The fact that the factory had been used to make VHS was also a boon. I was excited to find magnetic tape dangling through holes in the ceilings and from the trees in the avenue on my early site visits.

This was why I decided to run a screening programme with input from other curators. I wanted to reflect the diversity and complexity of work that was created in this medium over the years that video was popular, during the years that SaeHan operated out of Hazelwood (1989 – 2005).

The specific layout of the show was developed relatively early on. I made the decisions about what kind of work I wanted in each space very quickly. Curiously, close to installing the show, which is affected by the available light, I realised that I had been picturing the works in monochrome for the purposes of planning the show and had mentally ‘coloured them in’ quite close to the actual install.

Jonathan Carroll: How long did you have to come up with the idea for the exhibition? And did the title of the show come after seeing the work the artists proposed?

Vaari Claffey: Hazelwood Estate was purchased in December last year and conversations about art on site began almost straight away.

However, the first conversations around this exhibition, which happened after site visits to the factory, didn’t begin until January this year. The title is refers to the magnetic VHS tape that was produced at the factory. I was also drawn to a line in Wikipedia entry for ‘magnetism’: “Most materials do not have permanent moments”. This was useful in describing my desire to create a show that avoided stasis: I wanted the works to be charged. This is obvious in the case of Siobhán Hapaska’s work (which is in a permanent state of agitation) but not so obvious (yet present nonetheless) in Garrett Phelan’s work for this show.

JC: The factory space at Hazelwood is so large that you could show work that would not fit into any gallery space in Ireland.

Did you feel that you had to take the opportunity to commission work of a vast scale and ambition to match the space?

VC: Yes, this was part of the very earliest discussions, but I also felt it was important not to be too bombastic. The commissioners, David and Sue Raethorne, really wanted to create the conditions for showing very large-scale projects. The works are a mix of new commissions and re-considered existing works. This mix was important as I was looking for both precision and dynamism in relation to the overall production.

JC: Do you think this project has benefitted from being a totally independent enterprise, with no committee or specific community to please?

VC: The project came together very quickly and this might not have been possible if we hadn’t been able to move through all the stages in a nimble way. Being able to make fast decisions helped a lot. But every situation has its own set of conditions and these can be very useful parameters to define the project; our main focus in terms of ‘pleasing’ was the viewership. The extraordinary support of the commissioners in terms of both, space, funding and other expertise was invaluable. It was a very positive experience.

JC: When did you choose the artists for the exhibition? Did all the artists get a chance to do site visits and to install their work?

VC: Some of the artists came to mind immediately; it was the Irish

JC: The installation and production of the exhibition is of a very high standard. How did you achieve this?

VC: The extremely capable Mary Cremin came on board early on as producer and we had an amazing tech team led by Antoinette Emoe with Ed Kiely on A/V. But another extraordinary factor is that Oliver Alcorn, the site manager at Hazelwood, was technical manager at the Model, and his team at Hazelwood were incredibly resourceful in terms of problem-solving and producing. We only had full on-site power a week before the opening, but everyone was calmly prepared to work from generators. The show only has as many power points as it needs and as much lighting as is necessary, as the cables had not been used for 10 years. A lot of invisible work was done by the team and SSA architects in making the space exhibition ready. I also have to thank Tommy Weir of IT Sligo who helped gather the team of invigilators. Grace Weir and Joe Walker were also immensely supportive and helpful.

JC: I noted that you have an enviable list of partners, both locally and nationally. Is the result of having built up a substantial network over you career as a curator? Could you speak a bit about how you use this network?

VC: It is true that I have had a lot of very good support on this show, but I often have a lot of very good support; the difference this time was the funding and the space. What this show has really demonstrated to me is that once resources are harnessed it is possible to make really strong exhibitions. Many exhibitions are simply underfinanced and this is a really big problem for the sector as a lot of great work is not happening or is hidden away. It’s easy to overlook the value of visual art in the short term when resources are tight and it feels difficult to justify expenditure, but that is how long-term damage is done. It’s very hard to safeguard spaces for production and exhibition, we need to be very careful to continue to protect these

JC: How do you see this exhibition in terms of your practice as a curator?

VC: I have intentionally worked outside of galleries for a long time – wanting to test audiences. But I feel it is necessary, when given an opportunity to work on this scale outside of the normal forum for contemporary art, to continue the same conversation you are having throughout your career. You curate something specific for a particular end without compromising. You maintain a certain language and certain formal and behavioral concerns. The commissioners had trust in my vision and mostly let me get on with developing the idea.

I never had to compromise my ambitions for the project. More specifically, I have always been interested in the social element of art.

Gracelands, for example, gathered a community to absorb work together and talk about it.1 That is what I wanted for ‘Magnetism’. You really have to visit the site to understand the value of the work.

I have also always been interested in the durational aspect in art.

This is obvious in the more performative nature of Gracelands, but there are many durational pieces in ‘Magnetism’. Hapaska’s Untitled (2009 / 2015), where olive trees are constantly and violently agitated, is a good example of this.

JC: Can you tell me about the budget for ‘Magnetism’? You’ve paid invigilators and technicians, and hired very high-quality equipment for quite a long running exhibition.

VC: It was funded properly, which allowed it to function. You could spread this budget between 20 or 30 artists but we wanted to exhibit substantial work, so we decided to concentrate on a small number of artists. We also had to invest in an immediate identity (with Language Visual Communications) for the exhibition as the overall Hazelwood identity has not yet been developed. In this case, the money came from the commissioners.

JC: I noted that a lot of work features trees – most obviously in Siobhán Hapaska and Laura Morrison’s work – but also in the work of Mikala Dwyer, who has a fantastic sound piece in the trees outside the factory space. Garrett Phelan’s work resembles metal trees and even Igor Grubic’s video piece shows a lot of trees. Was this all a happy coincidence?

VC: I selected Siobhán’s work at a very early stage and decided to show a version of it on a much larger scale. But then Laura Morrison and I had several exchanges about the place of trees on the estate.

Trees have lived alongside all the iterations of the estate and it is said that factory was moved to one side to avoid a revered ‘hanging tree’ still grows behind the house. Igor Grubic’s video piece explores the dynamic between disappearing concrete manmade structures and the trees that are growing around them.

JC: How did you choose the curators for the screening programme?

VC: I chose curators with a variety of interests and concerns and with whom I had an existing relationship. I also sought curators who work with moving image so that they could respond quickly to the call for involvement.

JC: Could you discuss the idea behind running two separate screening programmes that change half way through the run of the exhibition?

VC: I wanted to programme something that would add value for the repeat visitor (mainly locals).

JC: You have managed to put on an exhibition that is, in my opinion, a perfect fit for the space. Do you see this kind of contemporary art project being repeated at Hazelwood?

VC: It was commissioned as a one off and I’m not certain at this stage.

There’s a lot of interest locally and further afield for this to continue.

We will see. hazelwoodhouse.ie Note 1. Gracelands is a series of live outdoor visual arts events which take place over the course of one day and night and encompass commissioned sculpture, performance and film. Gracelands has run annually in Dromahair, Leitrim since 2008. In 2012, Gracelands took place at the Milk Market, Limerick as part of Eva International and in the formal Gardens at IMMA in 2014 as part of Summer Rising.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

PROFILE

From the launch of ‘A Many Splintered Thing’, July 2015, image courtesy of Void, Derry

From the launch of ‘A Many Splintered Thing’, July 2015, image courtesy of Void, Derry

Room Upstairs jackie barker profiles void’s new gallery space and looks at its role in the city following derry’s year as city of culture.

Over the past 10 years, Void has established itself as one of Northern Ireland’s leading contemporary art galleries. During this time, the gallery staff have worked with local, national and international artists from their basement home in an old shirt factory. The space in the floor above was developed and refurbished for Derry’s year as City of Culture in 2014. Investment had been made into the improvement of the space, which Derry City Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) were keen to maintain.

Over the last two years, Void had used the upper floor for various projects. Void managed to make the case to for a major increase in their Annual Funding Programme Grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to allow them to take on the lease of the upstairs space and to move in. After a short closure for refurbishment the gallery reopened on 18 July in its new home in the same factory building.

While there is no doubt that the basement location provided the institution with an edgy, somewhat underground feel, there were drawbacks in its physical accessibility. Disabled access, while possible, was difficult, and disabled patrons had to go around to the back of the building. Contemporary arts spaces in general face challenges in terms of attracting audiences over their threshold. This problem could only have been exacerbated for Void by the physical impediment of having to commit to going down the stairs without being able to see into the space.

The relocation has provided Void with three bigger, more flexible gallery spaces, better facilities, a new street-level entrance with disabled access, a light filled, welcoming reception area with sofas – and information on the exhibitions and copies of art magazines – new office space and the Process Room.

Maoliosa Boyle, Director of Void, welcomed developments and praised Void staff: “With a lot of hard work from Void they have secured the resources to develop the most exciting visual arts space in Northern Ireland and I am sure they will deliver a programme of visual arts exhibitions that will rival and be the envy of any contemporary gallery in these islands.” Speaking of long-term legacy, she added: “The citizens and visitors to the Derry City and Strabane District Council area will directly benefit from this new development at Void”.1 As well as the physical changes, there is a sense that the move has changed Void in terms of the way it addresses audiences. The addition of the Process Room is an attempt to enhance the overall visitor experience, encouraging and promoting audience engagement and further understanding of the work on show. Described by Sally Murphy, Head of Learning at Void, the Process Room is a “drop in open studio-style space, where people of all ages can come in and make art that is inspired by the themes of the exhibition”.2 The room is aimed at promoting a space to encourage audience dialogue and

providing a family-friendly aspect to the gallery. It is intended to allow space for community, youth, age-active and other groups to get creative by making their own work, providing access for all and creating a welcoming space within Void.

The physical provision of a space for audience participation and engagement, and the move to the larger, audience -friendly upstairs space, has meant changes to the previous facilities that existed within Void, such as the closure of the Void Art School and artist studios that were located in the downstairs space.

In a wider context, however, for the Visual Arts in Derry-Londonderry, the maintenance of the physical investment into the visual arts and the improvement of facilities is a very positive development. Director of CCA, Matt Packer, hopes the redevelopment of Void will mean an increase in energy and visibility for contemporary art in the city, which he feels will benefit CCA in terms of audiences as well as visiting artists and curators. Matt Packer said: “It’s a great boost for the city and for Northern Ireland as a whole, of course. At a time when arts funding is looking ever more precarious, it’s encouraging to see significant financial commitments to spaces like Void. I look forward to seeing what the enlarged premises means in terms of artistic presentations, whether in terms of larger-scale of work or allowing a depth of thematic enquiry.” 3 How does the refurbishment of Void fit into the wider context for the visual arts in Northern as a whole? In the future, the need to support, develop and maintain artistic infrastructure will rely on a number of measures, which will include the provision of exhibition space, but is not and should not be precluded by this. However, in terms of the way public funding decisions are made, galleries and art centres are important as the public face – and allow for the public ‘showcase’ of the work that is produced in Northern Ireland.

Continued public funding for the arts relies upon the development and maintenance of public support which will thereby result in ongoing political support for contemporary visual art in Northern Ireland. Therefore, it will become increasingly important for visual arts spaces to place audience engagement at the heart of their work and to enable and provide real avenues of entry into their wide range of high quality exhibitions and events.

This is not to forget the fact that, as well as their audiences and funders, visual arts venues serve their artists and the artistic community. The successful support of that community is pivotal to the range and quality of artwork that is produced and can be shown to audiences. The newly appointed chair of Void, Eamonn McCann, described how Void has been “presenting cutting-edge exhibitions and performances from all arts and parts, keeping Derry and the world abreast of one another”. He continued: “Void has now found new space where art and imagination can blossom and billow, transcending division, and abrasion at the interfaces of our society, spark new

From the launch of ‘A Many Splintered Thing’, July 2015, image courtesy of Void, Derry

ideas, understandings and syntheses”.4 Northern Ireland has high quality third level art education programmes, but these are limited. There is little provision for curatorial education and development, few artist residency opportunities for international artists and any available studio space is constantly under pressure from demand and funding cuts. Institutions that collect the work of established and emerging artists are also few in number and commercial opportunities for contemporary artists and the market for sales of such work within Northern Ireland need development. Added to this there are few outlets allowing a critical forum for potential arts writers to gain experience and provide the essential connections to international contemporary art discourse.

The change from three-year funding to annual funding has brought back a real sense of uncertainty for both established and smaller, emerging visual art institutions. In-year budget cuts have just been announced for the second year in a row by ACNI, which adds to the sense of uncertainty and impacts upon institutions’ abilities to programme even six months ahead with any certainty, let alone provide commitments to artists, whom this must surely impact the most. Going forward to the likely scenario of continued funding cuts over the next five years the arts sector as a whole is under pressure.

Nonetheless the visual arts in Derry-Londonderry is strong and the galleries showcase local, national and international art. Their programming and education and outreach work take art to a wide range of audiences. The opening exhibition at the new Void space, ‘A Many Splintered Thing’, curated by Greg McCartney and Susanne Stich, features works by Bieke Depoorter, Irina Popova, Jana Romanova and Nadia Sablin. According to McCartney the exhibition is, surprisingly, the first group photographic exhibition that has been shown in Void. Examining notions of love, life and family through everyday situations, the exhibition presents lives and relationships between the subjects, creating genuinely moving and intimate portraits of warmth, love, dependence and poverty. Three of the four artists were born in Russia, while the fourth has travelled extensively along the Trans-Siberian express. The show provides a thought provoking and sometimes-intimate look at life within contemporary Russia, but through the glimpses of home and family life provided in the work, the lives are presented, in most cases, as familiar to the viewer.

The exhibition is high quality in terms of presentation and content, and the curators have presented international artists working with universal themes, which are apparent and relevant to a local, Northern-Irish audience. The exhibition and the accompanying issue of Abridged magazine are thought provoking and again important in the context of collaboration between the local and the international.

In terms of an opening exhibition there couldn’t have been a better start to what will surely be a positive move for Void.

Jackie Barker Arts Director, Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown Notes 1. Maoliosa Boyle, artscouncil-ni.org/news/new-space-for-void 2. Sally Murphy, from an interview with BBC Arts Extra 3. Matt Packer, in an email to Jackie Barker 4. Eamonn McCann, artscouncil-ni.org/news/new-space-for-void

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

31

VAI northern ireland manager

profile

Northern Exposure

Visual Narration

Rob Hilken, VAI’s northern ireland manager, profiles the new vai [ni] office and the recent ‘introducing belfast galleries’ event.

EALAÍN NA GAELTACHTA AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE VISUAL ARTS IN THE GAELTACHT.

ON Friday 3 July, Visual Artists Ireland made a significant commitment to visual artists in Northern Ireland with the opening of our new Belfast office in the centre of the city. Located at the Cathedral Workspaces on Royal Avenue, the office sits within one of the citiy’s major creative hubs alongside Culture Night, the Arts and Disability Forum and several other music, literature and theatre organisations.

We encourage you to call in for a chat and see how our expanding list of services can help you in your professional art career. This includes individual mentoring, support through our popular helpdesks and information on our programme of professional development events. You can find our office opening times on our website (visualartistsni.org).

One of our new services for artists living in Northern Ireland is free public liability insurance included in your VAI [NI] membership. Artists are often asked to provide proof of public liability insurance when working in public or temporary venues, including public markets and other civic spaces. It is also extremely useful if you operate your own studio or artist-led space and offer access to visitors. Public liability insurance covers you for injury to third parties and damage to third party property, which may result from your activities as an artist.

The first major event at our new office took place in August and saw 65 people from across Ireland take part in ‘Introducing Belfast Galleries’ (Thursday 6 August). Artists from as far afield as Galway and Wexford visited the city to hear from the directors and curators of six of Belfast’s busiest city centre galleries. Peter Richards started the day with an insightful overview of Golden Thread’s history and how its series ‘Collective Histories of Northern Ireland’ has, over 10 years, attempted to tell a varied history of contemporary art in the absence of a permanent collection.

Hugh Mulholland and Eoin Dara welcomed us to The MAC. It is easy to forget that The MAC is only three years old, as it has already developed its own audience and established its place among Ireland and Europe’s best galleries. We had a sneak preview of the solo show by Belfast-based painter Paddy McCann, which opened that night, and the curators were proud that they are able to offer important local artists the same resources and visibility as artists of international renown such as Kara Walker and Adrian Ghenie, who have both shown there in recent months. Our group was also

given excellent advice on how to keep the curators informed of their work as well as to look out for MAC International, their open call exhibition with a prize of £20,000 that opens later this year.

Peter Mutschler at PSSquared talked to us about what it means to be an artist and curator in the community. Even though their ambitious programme of over 20 exhibitions and events per year leaves their modest resources stretched to the limit, they continue to reject being a just-anotherwhite-cube gallery and more than half of their programme takes place outside of the venue itself.

We met Ciara Hickey at Belfast Exposed, who talked about how the gallery attempts to depict landscape (physical and metaphorical) through photography and how Northern Ireland sits in an international context. Ciara discussed the new Belfast Exposed Futures gallery, which is currently profiling six emerging local photographers and representing them at an international level at events such as the Unseen Photo Fair in Amsterdam.

Lastly we visited two galleries in Belfast’s thriving artist-led scene: Platform Arts, a studio group with a large (3000 square foot) gallery that is currently closed for renovation but will be relaunching their exhibition programme in September; and Catalyst Arts, which is Northern Ireland’s longest running artist-led gallery. Catalyst Arts seeks to provide opportunities for its members all year round and in September will be hosting their annual salon-style members exhibition that anyone can show work in without going through a selection process. That evening artist-in-residence Paul Gwilliam presented a performance work at Catalyst Arts as part of his current residency exchange with Outpost in Norwich.

All the galleries generously gave us time to find out more about what they do, despite the fact that they were in the middle of setting up exhibitions for launch that evening. They each offered a way for artists to get involved, whether it was keeping the curators informed of their work, submitting to open calls, volunteering or even sending speculative proposals.

Moving forward, the launch of our Belfast office brings with it our most ambitious programme of professional development events in Northern Ireland yet. Following our recent ‘Introducing Bangor’ event, we will be hosting eight monthly Visual Artists’ Cafes in the Ards and North Down region, offering a chance for artists to network, gain new skills and opportunity in this active region of Northern Ireland. We will be hosting the second Belfast Open Studios event in October where over 15 studio groups will open their doors to the public and we will be announcing the results of the Suki Tea Art Prize with an exhibition and reception at Stormont. We also have a series of events coming up in Belfast beginning in October and you can find details of them in our e-bulletins and on our website.

Rob Hilken, Northern Ireland Manager, Visual Artists Ireland.

Attendees at ‘Introducing Belfast Galleries’

Nuala Ní Fhlathúin, Noli Me Tengere/ Touch Me Not, 2014

Bernadette Cotter, And the Greatest of These, 2005

Is ar mhaithe le forbairt na n-ealaíon dúchasach agus comhaimseartha sa Ghaeltacht a cuireadh tús le Ealaín na Gaeltachta i 1997, comhpháirtíocht idir Údarás na Gaeltachta agus An Chomhairle Ealaíon, mar thoradh ar an imní a bhí ar an dá eagraíocht faoi leibhéal forbartha na n-ealaíon sa Ghaeltacht. Tá cur chuige struchtúrtha, straitéiseach glactha ó shin agus infheistíocht suntasach déanta ag an gcomhpháirtíocht leis na healaíon a chur chun cinn ar fud na Gaeltachta.

Cuireann Ealaín na Gaeltachta scéimeanna éagsúla ar fáil d’eagrais agus d’ealaíontóirí mar aon le deiseanna oiliúna agus meantóireachta, i gcomhar le heagrais tacaíochta eile áitiúil agus náisiúnta. Ina theannta sin cuirtear seirbhís comhairle agus áisitheoireachta ar fáil ag leibhéil réigiúnach, d’ealaíontóirí agus d’eagrais ealaíona a gcuid tograí agus a gcuid cleachtais a chothú agus a chur i gcrích.

Tá toradh agus tionchar dearfach an infheistíocht idir an Chomhairle Ealaíon agus Údarás na Gaeltachta le feiceáil sa gcaighdeán fís-ealaín atá á chruthú ag ealaíontóirí, agus sna deiseanna atá curtha ar fáil don phobal a bheith páirteach in imeachtaí fís-ealaíona ar fud na Gaeltachta le breis agus ocht mbliana déag anuas. Freisin, tá infheistíocht déanta thar na mblianta i roinnt áiseanna caighdeánach ealaíona - stiúideonna agus gailearaithe, a chuireann deiseanna taispeántais, ceardlanna, tréimhsí cónaitheacha agus imeachtaí éagsúla ar fáil. Orthu siúd a fuair tacaíocht ó Ealaín na Gaeltachta thar na mblianta tá Cló Ceardlann na gCnoc, i Mín an Leá, Dún na nGall, barr ionad do na bhfís-ealaíon, acmhainn iomadúil do fhís-ealaíontóirí a thugann ardán agus deis d’ealaíontóirí as gach cearn den domhan, agus do phobal na Gaeltachta, a theacht le chéile lena gcuid smaointe agus inspioráidí cruthaitheacha a mhalartú agus a iniúchadh, An Gailearaí i nGaoth Dobhair, Dún na nGall, ina chuirtear dearcealaín chomhaimseartha den chéad scoth ar taispeántas don phobal agus a chuireann deiseanna agus tacaíocht ar fáil chun cuidiú le healaíontóirí a gcuid saothar a chur i gcrích agus a chur ar taispeántas, Áras Éanna Inis Oírr, Cuan na Gaillimhe, Ionad Ealaíona ar imeall na farraige a chuireann tréimhsí cónaithe ar fáil, a bhfuil stiúideo oibre agus cónaithe le deiseanna taispeántais mar chuid de.

Tríd an Scéim Sparánachta d’Ealaíontóirí agus scéimeanna eile, tá Ealaín na Gaeltachta tar éis tacú le iliomad fís-ealaíontóirí aonarach Gaeltachta a gcleachtas a chur chun cinn, agus le tograí fís-ealaín nuálach fíor-shuimiúil a chothú agus a chur i gcrích i gcomhpháirtíocht le healaíontóirí áitiúil eile, ealaíontóirí náisiúnta, idirnáisiúnta

agus leis an bpobal. Orthu siúd a fuair tacaíocht agus spreagadh thar na mblianta bhí Bernadette Cotter, Andrew Duggan, Ceara Conway, Seán Ó Flaithearta, Breandán Ó Súilleabháin, Louise Manifold agus Úna Quigley, An Meitheal Eitseála sa Daingean, Co Chiarraí, agus Nuala Ní Fhlathúin, i measc go leor eile. Ina theannta sin tugtar spreagadh do na féilte ealaíona Gaeltachta a fhaigheann tacaíocht ó Ealaín na Gaeltachta, le ardán agus deiseanna a chruthú d’fhís-ealaíontóirí lena gcuid saothar a chur os comhar an phobal.

Cuireann fís-ealaíontóirí na Gaeltachta braistint agus dearcadh faoi leith in iúil. Léiríonn an saothar go minic éagsúlacht i réimsí teanga, i dtéamaí sóisialta agus in eacnamaíocht chultúrtha na Gaeltachta, insint thíreolaíocht ar na daoine a bhfuil cónaí orthu sa Ghaeltacht ach atá faoi thionchar timpeallacht chultúrtha na hÉireann agus na healaíona náisiúnta agus idirnáisiúnta chomh maith.

Tacaíonn agus tuigeann Ealaín na Gaeltachta luach earnáil ealaíona uathúil na Gaeltachta atá bunaithe ar na traidisiúin agus na cleachtais a thagann ó chultúr saibhir faoi leith atá breá bríomhar i gceantair Ghaeltachta na hÉireann, earnáil a chuireann go mór le saibhreacht ealaíona na tíre. Baintear tairbhe as na healaíona comhaimseartha agus as na cleachtais chultúrtha agus is minic a théann oidhreacht agus timpeallacht uathúil na Gaeltachta i bhfeidhm go mór ar chleachtais atá nuálach agus fíor spreagúil, rud a chiallaíonn go bhfuil fás leanúnach ag teacht ar an earnáil de bharr go bhfuil tionchair thraidisiúnta agus chomhaimseartha fite fuaite trína chéile. Tá Ealaín na Gaeltachta suite go breá le leanúint ar aghaidh sa ról ceannaireachta seo ar mhaithe le tacaíocht agus cothú a thabhairt d’earnáil na bhfísealaíon sa Ghaeltacht chomh maith le nuáil agus uaillmhian a spreagadh san earnáil, ról atá dírithe ar chaighdeáin dea-chleachtais, atá aitheanta go náisiúnta agus go hidirnáisiúnta.

Má tá forbairt agus fás le theacht ar na bhfísealaíon sa Ghaeltacht, tá sé tábhachtach gréasáin chriticiúil d’ealaíontóirí a chruthú agus a chothú chun go ndéanfar na bhfís-ealaíon a spreagadh, a athghiniúint agus a athnuachan ar bhonn leanúnach. Teastaíonn tacaíocht agus infheistíocht a chur ar fáil trínar féidir le healaíontóirí Gaeltachta tógáil agus leathnú a dhéanamh ar an dúshraith atá cruthaithe acu dóibh féin le cabhair ó Ealaín na Gaeltachta le 18 bliain anuas.

Tá breis eolais le fáil faoi Ealaín na Gaeltachta thríd an suíomh www.ealain.ie.

Muireann Ní Dhroighneáin Áisitheoir Ealaín, Ealaín na Gaeltachta (Teo)

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

32

September – October 2015

profile

public art roundup

A Good Start

Public Art

carmel david profiles start studios, mohill, co. leitrim

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

Oppositions

StArt Studios, Mohill, Co. Leitrim

each other, accentuating the hallway and ramp of the Regina House Community Nursing Unit in Kilrush, Co. Clare. The concept process was collaborative, ensuring that the HSE and management were involved in creating the look of the art. By focusing on a colour scheme the artwork maximizes the healing and uplifting power of colour. The smooth curvilinear motif reflects the seas near Kilrush and the hills of Co. Clare, ‘bringing in’ the landscapes of Clare to remind patients / users of the environment it is situated in while softening the look of the interior space. It also highlights the fact that a healthy environment is essential for health and wellbeing.

the artist’s armada

Furniture at StArt Studios, Mohill, Co. Leitrim

Garden at StArt Studios, Mohill, Co. Leitrim

StArt Studios Ltd is a new arts venture in Mohill, County Leitrim, which offers attractive workspaces to professional artists, with residential and membership options. Rates are at subsidised levels, and include storage space and shared use of a large multi-purpose venue at no extra cost. There is workspace and accommodation for more than 10 artists. The studios are offered to professional artists and those developing their art careers.

The studio premises were purchased in February and superficial refurbishment works – cleaning and repairs – began in March to make the property ready. The building is 150 years old and had been largely vacant for the last 10 years. It possesses the charming character you might expect from a period property, offering artists stylish, spacious workspaces, filled with natural light. The workspaces are equipped with furniture that’s both stylish and very practical for artists’ purposes.

StArt Studios are located near Carrick-onShannon town, in the pretty town of Mohill, which is just off the main N4 road, the Sligo to Dublin route. It’s a comfortable two-hour drive from Dublin City. The studios are also easily accessible by train.

The premises were originally a national school, managed by nuns who developed a convent around the existing school. By all accounts the place had a relatively happy history, and the atmosphere there is very tranquil. In the Celtic Tiger years, developers, who intended to build over 60 apartments on the site, purchased the property, but the development never happened. StArt Studios have been fully embraced locally, and has already staged workshops and an art exhibition as part of the Mohill Arts and Cultural Festival.

There is still plenty of work to be done and, because the building is listed, the planning processes involved are more time consuming and must ensure that proper restoration takes place.

Spaces are available now and open days for artists interested in seeing the studios began in August. Visits and tours of the studios can be ar-

ranged by appointment.

The charming character of the studios is what makes StArt particularly attractive: the natural light, high ceilings and the element of a retreat: the mature gardens surrounded by large trees. These provide a combination of elements to nurture many artist lifestyles.

Leitrim is known as a very vibrant region for the arts, with an excellent arts office in Carrick-onShannon. Our studios would certainly be a good place to start for any artist considering relocation to a rural hub.

Mohill town features an impressive bronze monument by the sculptor Oisín Kelly, depicting the blind harpist Turlough O’Carolan (1670 – 1738), who lived nearby. Oisín Kelly is also famous for his striking monument of Jim Larkin, situated in O’Connell Street, Dublin.

StArt Studios Ltd has an impressive arts venue in the old chapel, which is shared by studio artists and can cater for all kinds of shows, with seating for 100 people. Further facilities will be developed to suit studio artists. We currently facilitate a textile artist who also works with ceramics and fused glass, and print artists who share a fine printing press.

There is no doubt that StArt Studios will go from strength to strength and provide artists with a unique workspace experience. It is a good time to consider visiting the studios and artists interested in working here will find us friendly and professional hosts.

Detailed information about everything the studios have to offer – including studio sizes, rental rates and an overview of our ongoing activities – can be found at startstudios.ie and on the StArt Studios Ltd Facebook page.

For artists who want to visit StArt Studios Ltd, please contact facilitator@startstudios.ie or phone 0719632583.

Carmel David Studio Facilitator, StArt Studios startstudios.ie

Artist: Ed Walshe Title of work: Oppositions Commissioning body: Longford County Council Partners: Longford Fire Station Date advertised: January 2015 Date sited / carried out: July 2015 Budget: €8000 Brief description: Walshe’s work comprises five pyramids, coated in ceramic tiles, depicting the age-old battle between fire and water. The angular, spiked profiles hint at the danger that fire-fighters face on every callout.

healing hills

Artist: Francis Lanuza Title of work: Healing Hills Commissioning body: HSE Estates, Limerick Date advertised: 2014 Date sited /carried out: May 2015 (completed in 3 weeks) Budget: €4,000 Commission type: Tender Project Partners: EMF Construction, Kilrush & The Kodak Store, Castlebar Brief description: The artwork, in acrylic, is a series of 12 x 76 x 61cm paintings that flow into

Artists: Seoidín O’Sullivan / Floating Dialogues, Carl Giffney, Andreas Kindler Von Knobloch & Ann Maria Healy / Bravo Seratonin, Barry Lynch & Conor Stafford / Skiff, Mark Redden & team from Cumann Currach Ath Cliath, Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair / Swandown, Kathryn Maguire / Us Again and Gareth Kennedy / Fan Nóiméad’ (Wait a Minute).

Title: The Artist’s Armada Commissioning body: Dublin City Council and Waterways Ireland Date sited: Grand Canal Dock, Dublin, 25 July 2015 Brief description: ‘The Artist’s Armada’ was curated by Anne Mullee. The project sought to unite works by artists working with boats, rafts and watercraft, whether through building, sailing or otherwise engaging with the element of water as voyagers and explorers. The artists formed a flotilla, the ‘Armada’, which took place at Dublin’s Grand Canal Dock, the confluence of waterways serving the interior and coastal areas of our island nation. ‘The Artist’s Armada’ offered an intersection for ideas to collide and exchange, sparking new dialogues and reclaiming this site for artistic endeavour.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

33

profile

Work by Jane Fogarty at Talbot Gallery & Studios

Incubator Residency series I, Claire McCluskey and Isadora Epstein

Doing & Not Doing Elaine grainger reflects on 10 years of directing and curating talbot gallery & studios, dublin.

10 years is a long time to be doing anything, but it’s also a long time to be not doing something. In 2005, I opened the Talbot Gallery & Studios in Dublin 1 and around the same time I stopped painting. It wasn’t just because of the gallery: I also had a four year old, Isabelle, and a newborn baby, Tate. I would have another child, Conor, four years later.

When the gallery’s 10-year anniversary began to approach, people asked me if I’d go back to painting. Initially I said no, but it’s not easy to let go of an idea like that. I thought, maybe it was the ideal time, but then I also knew what hard work it was. I was talking about it a lot – procrastinating – when Felicity Clear said to me, “you’ve just got to go and do it”.

I love painting, but in a lot of ways it’s easier to run a gallery.

Painting requires discipline, which isn’t to say running a gallery doesn’t, but there’s a momentum that comes out of working with other people, whether it’s the artists you encounter and decide to show, the interns that work with you or the buyers, writers and consumers that pass through your door on a daily basis.

Pretty early on, I realised that the gallery’s focus was going to be on showing recent graduates, artists that were just starting out.

There were two reasons for this: the first was that my husband owned the property that the gallery was located in, which is the first floor of a Georgian building on the corner of Talbot Street and Amiens Street.

We were also able to rent rooms above the gallery as studio space for reasonable rates. It gave me the luxury of not having a commercial imperative.

The second reason was tied up in the roots of the gallery. After I had Isabelle, and before I had Tate, I had another baby, Ewan. When he was three months old he died of cot death. It turned our world upside down. I think I was so lucky that Alan, my husband, said, “just go and paint”, which I did.

I went upstairs, used one of the rooms at the top of this beautiful building and started painting. It was like starting from the beginning; I was working it through as I went along. I also knew that it would be good to work towards something, but I was afraid: I didn’t want to go to galleries and say “I have a body of work”.

A friend of mine, artist Rhona Byrne, suggested that I show the work myself and use the large space on the first floor of the building.

So I decided to set myself a November deadline. I was painting and I was crying and I was sick (I was pregnant with Tate) but it was the most amazing time and I don’t think I’ll ever paint like that again. I pulled it together and had this exhibition.

All of the work sold and people spoke about how wonderful the

Garden at StArt Studios, Mohill, Co. Leitrim

space was. I had Tate the following January and decided I’d use the money from the exhibition and set up some studios and a gallery.

I suppose I was slightly naïve in focusing on showing new artists, but a lot of people had been very generous to me with their time and energy. I really felt that I wanted to do it, to be generous with my time and energy, and that new artists were the ones who needed this support the most.

I had a plan, but in the early days I didn’t always have the confidence to follow it through. In 2007 I attended the NCAD graduate show and saw the work of Genieve Figgis, amongst others. Genieve paints mischevious and macabre portraits. Portraiture is a hard sell, and these weren’t very beautiful by any means, but I was really drawn to them. In those days, however, I found that I didn’t trust my instincts.

A couple of years later, the gallery became more focused in its mission. With the crucial help of interns, I began the Most Promising Graduate Award in 2010. This provided the winner with a solo show at the gallery, but also a year’s free studio space.

Because I’m working with artists so early in their career, I don’t try and tie them to the gallery. My position is that I have to let them go off and do their own thing. I have to consider how much more I can offer them. If they stayed with me and showed every second year, I don’t know if that would be sufficient for their needs and I don’t think it would be good for the artist at that stage of their career. I also don’t think that’s what the gallery is about.

In 2013, I held an open submission. Genieve Figgis had just completed her masters and applied. I said yes immediately. Her show

‘One Year One Day’ graduate shortist group show installation

was reviewed by Cristín Leach Hughes in the Sunday Times.

I can’t take any credit for what she has done, but there was something about the timing of that show, not just for her, but for me as well. There was a point when it was sitting in the gallery and I said to myself: I’ve come this far. I am now sure of who I am and what I want to say.

That same year Ireland had the European Presidency and the Office of Public Works put together a show of Irish art which toured to Spain, Italy and Poland. ‘40/40/40’ was an exhibition of work by 40 Irish artists under 40 to mark Ireland’s 40 years in the EU. A quarter of those young artists had shown in my gallery.

Seeing the Talbot Gallery listed at the top of many artists’ CVs is satisfying. When it came to assessing the gallery’s position after 10 years, it was clear that the anniversary had to be marked, but how would we do it? A conventional retrospective simply wouldn’t have worked.

Instead I decided to open the space up to new experiences for the year. I began a series of Incubator Residencies: for a period of eight weeks, artists would have the gallery as a platform to research, develop and present new work. It began with Claire McCluskey and Isadora Epstein.

They led the way and it was exciting watching them working within the space. I was very open and free: they could do whatever they wanted; they didn’t have to have an exhibition, but in the end they decided to have a closing event and it worked. At the end of the day, it was exploratory work so the closing night was a nod to the work that had taken place and the potential work that can come from what they created and what they learnt from each other.

For the second in the series, I asked Brendan Fox of Foundation15 to help me choose the artists. Joe Scullion and Sinéad Onóra Kennedy were awarded the residency and their work will be shown beside 10 pieces of work from IMMA at Foundation15 in September.

This year has brought more collaboration with the creation of the Monto Arts Community, which is named after the part of Dublin that the Talbot is located in. Once the red light district of Dublin, the irony wasn’t lost on us that all of the galleries and studios within the area – ArtBox, The LAB Gallery, Oonagh Young Gallery, Fire Station Artists’ Studios and the Talbot – are all run by women. We are now sharing our resources in getting the message out that we are here and our work should be seen.

Meanwhile, I’m back in the studio. The work in my head has changed massively since I last took up the brush. I’ve consumed so much art over the past decade and I’ve learnt so much, but I suppose you can only go so far with that. At some point, you have to form your own self and style and decide what you actually want to say as an artist. This key point also applies to my role as a gallerist.

Elaine Grainger, Director / Curator, Talbot Gallery and Studios. talbotgallery.com

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

opportunities

Opportunities funding / awards / bursaries SMALL GRANTS PROGRAMME The Arts Council of Northern Ireland has designed this programme to encourage organisations to develop and deliver ideas linked to artistic needs and to their future plans. If you are a constituted group and you need between £500 and £10,000 to help you to run an arts activity, then the Small Grants Programme supported by the National Lottery Fund could be for you. Before making an application it is essential that you read the guidance notes.

Deadline Ongoing Web artscouncil-ni.org/funding/scheme/ small-grants-programme ARTS COUNCIL FUNDING The Arts Council of Ireland’s application window for its main revenue grant programmes (i.e. for Regularly Funded Organisations, Annual Funding and Annual Programming Grants) will open on 8 Sep and close on 8 Oct 2015.

Please note that the Arts Council is reverting to a calendar-year funding-application process for revenue funding programmes (RFO/AF/APG). This year’s application relates to funding sought for activities during the nine-month period 1 Apr 2016 – 31 Dec 2016.

Deadline 5.30pm 8 October Web newsletter.artscouncil.ie The Creative Europe Desk The Creative Europe Desk – Culture Office is planning a workshop for organisations preparing to submit a cooperation projects application, (deadline 7 Oct 2015). The workshop will take place on Tues 8 Sept in the Arts Council building.

Web artscouncil.ie Address 70 Merrion Square, Dublin 2 the Creative Europe Desk uk The Creative Europe Desk UK – Northern Ireland is hosting a step-by-step guide through the application writing process ahead of application deadline on 7 Oct 2015 for Creative Europe’s Cooperation Projects. The workshop will take place on 10 Sep 2015, 1:30pm – 5:00pm. The workshop is free but booking is essential, Web creativeeuropeuk.eu/events Address Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 77 Malone Road, Belfast BT9 6AQ

Fire station artists’ studios Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin are offering two awards and bursaries: Sculpture Workshop Award & Bursaries (six available) (Jan – Sept 2016). This award offers: free full time access to a bay in the sculpture workshop for two to five months; bursaries of between €200 – €500 each; technical support according to availability from Workshop Manager; full access to workshop equipment; the potential opportunity to exhibit in MART Gallery in Nov 2016.

Digital Media Award & Bursaries (six available) (Jan – Sept 2016). This award offers: free scheduled access to Fire Station’s Digital Centre for two to four months; a bursary of €100; technical support according to availability from Digital Media Manager; free access to all digital media equipment; the potential opportunity to exhibit in MART gallery in Nov 2016. As a new and exciting aspect of this award, Fire Station is delighted to partner with MART Studios, who will offer up to three awardees an exhibition opportunity for up to four weeks in the MART Gallery in Rathmines in November 2016.

Deadline 14 September Web firestation.ie, mart.ie Email artadmin@firestation.ie Telephone 018069010

submissions ROSE BUD Black Church Print Studio invited Alison Pilkington and Cora Cummins, founders of publication project The Fold, to curate Rose Bud. Artists are invited to submit a response to the following cluster of ideas: most great revolutions, rebellions, agitations or movements have been formed around published proclamations or manifestos such as The Communist Manifesto (1848), The Futurist Manifesto published in Figaro (1909), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), The Surrealist Manifesto (1924) and the Proclamation of the Republic (1916). The invention of the Guttenberg press democratised information, the freedom to reproduce information and images and to disseminate messages to a wider audience. The curators are seeking responses that reflect on the power of print.

Deadline 15 November Web print.ie Email workroomelsewhere@gmail.com

SOLAS Solas invites submissions from artists working in any discipline to participate in a curated group exhibition at the Ballinamore gallery space in October 2015.

Visual artist Amanda Jane Graham will curate the exhibition. There is no overriding theme for this submission.

Deadline 5pm, 21 September Email solassubmission@gmail.com Web solasart.ie Address Solas Art Gallery, Four Seasons Garden Centre, Main Street, Ballinamore, Co. Leitrim Telephone 071964 4210 ABRIDGED Art and poetry magazine Abridged is looking for poetry (up to three poems) and art (up to A4 size and 300dpi or above) for its its 0 – 43: Lethe issue, exploring memory and oblivion.

Deadline 1 October Email abridged@ymail.com Deadline abridgedonline.com DUBLIN INQUIRER Each week, the column ‘Curios About’ in the new Dublin Inquirer online publication will feature a single work by a Dublin-based artist and will be posted on the Dublin Inquirer and The Square in the Circle. If you would like your work to be considered for inclusion in the weekly ‘Curios About’, curated by Terence Erraught and Diarmait Grogan, please complete and submit the online form.

Web squareinthecircle.com, dublininquirer. com Email terenceerraught@gmail.com

studio space CLARKE STUDIOS Clarke Studios offers exhibition space to rent for the 2016 programme. Charges for rental of the space will be negotiated with selected artists. Interested artists should submit: CV, artist’s statement, an exhibition proposal and documentation images (web links accepted).

No group-show applications should apply for this round of submissions.

Deadline 31 October Email clarkestudios@gmail.com Telephone 0469240203 Address Clarke Studios, Suffolk Street, Kells, Co Meath

commissions ALLIANZ ARTS AND BUSINESS The Allianz Arts and Business NI Awards celebrate the best in creative partnerships between the business and arts sectors in Northern Ireland. Allianz Arts and Business NI Awards seek an artist to create and design the award pieces for 2016. The theme this year is ‘variety’. This invites us to explore not only the types of relationships that exist between arts and business organisations but also the breadth and diversity of the arts in Northern Ireland. We are looking for artworks that reflect this theme; however, the brief leaves it open for the artist to interpret it in their own way and medium based on the brief outlined below. The award pieces should reflect the three-way relationship between arts and business NI, business and the arts.

Deadline 2 October Web artsandbusinessni.org.uk Email a.connor@artsandbusinessni.org.uk Telephone 02890735151

conferences / lectures / talks Marc Guinan Draiocht, Dublin is hosting a closing discussion, with artist Marc Guinan and Maeve Connolly (Co-Director, MA in Art and Research Collaboration, IADT Dun Laoghaire) on 3 Oct, 1pm – 2pm.

Using Guinan’s current exhibition in Draiocht entitled ‘What is Painting …?’ as a springboard for discussion, Guinan and Connolly will explore the artist’s own practice, questioning the traditional and conventional ways of thinking about painting and its presentation within gallery spaces. Guinan will also touch on his experience of working with a publicly-funded gallery and the transition from being a recent graduate to a professional artist. The talk is free and booking is essential.

Telephone 018852622 Web draiocht.ie Email marketing@draiocht.ie Architect as patron The F. E. McWilliam Gallery, Banbridge, will hold a lecture by Dr Ellen Rowley of Trinity College titled ‘Architect as Patron: Modernist Architecture and the Production of ‘Public’ art in Ireland 1950 – 75’. The talk takes place 7.30 – 9.00pm on Thurs 10 Sept. Cost: £3.00 (friends of the gallery / members: free).

Email info@femcwilliam.com

Address Newry Rd, Banbridge, BT32 3NB

residencies CILL RIALAIG The Cill Rialaig Project invites applications for residency awards at their artist retreat on Bolus Head near Ballinskelligs, Co. Kerry. The selection panel sits twice annually.

Deadline 15 September Contact Mary O’Connor Email cillrialaigarts@gmail.com.

CURATOR RESIDENCY SCHEME The purpose of the Arts Council Visual Arts Curator Residency Scheme 2015 is to offer visual arts curators the opportunity to research and develop their practice, while developing a year-long work programme in partnership with an arts or non-arts organisation, such as a company, venue, festival, local authority etc. The specific content of the work programme will be designed by the curator in collaboration with the partner organisation. To encourage a coordinated approach between curators and organisations the maximum amount awarded to each successful application will be €20,000.

Deadline 5.30pm, 10 September Telephone 016180236 Email kate.odonnell@artscouncil.ie Web artscouncil.ie

courses / workshops / training photo plate lithography Conall Cary leads a photo plate lithography course at Galway Print Studio.

In this course images from a drawing or photograph are photo-exposed onto light sensitive photo-litho plates, developed in the dark-room, and then inked and printed using rich oil-based inks in the same manner as traditional stone lithography. See how the process of printmaking can extend and enrich your images. Some previous experience of computers is preferable but not essential, no previous experience of lithography required, but for those with previous experience in stone lithography, photo-plate lithography promises to expand and broaden your lithographic repertoire greatly. Date: 5 and 6 Sept. Time: 11am – 4pm. Cost: €100/members, €130/non-members.

Web galwayprintstudio.ie Address Galway Print Studio, Ballybane Enterprise Centre, Ballybane, Galway

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

September – October 2015

35

best practice: governance

Accountability

Good Governance NI

NOEL KELLY OUTLINESTHE SIGNIFICANCE OF NEW CORPORATE GOVERNAnCE REQUIREMENTS FOR VISUAL ARTS ORGANSATIONS AND INTRODUCES THE AVAILABLE SUPPORT RESOURCES.

TANIA CARLISLE, LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT MANAGER AT ARTS & BUSINESS NI, INTRODUCES CORPORATE GOVERNANCE REQUIRMENTS IN NORTHERN IRELAND AND OUTLINES THE SUPPORTS OFFERED BY THE ORGANISATION.

If you are currently involved with a studio group or other artist-led project, you’ve probably heard tell over the last while of term ‘corporate governance’. In both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in recent years there has been widespread recognition by government, cultural, voluntary and community sectors of a pro-active approach in to promoting good governance.

So what is corporate governance and what exactly does it mean? The term can be broken into one single concept: to give structure and clear lines of responsibility, accountability, and traceability.

You don’t have to be a large organisation or necessarily publicly funded for to find corporate governance useful. In fact, the most effective corporate governance is applicable to all organisations, no matter their size or indeed their area of focus.

Of course the question is: why has this suddenly become so important? Quite simply, it has always been important and for formally constituted organisations it has always been present both legally and as a condition of public funding.

What we are now seeing is a pressure on arts organisations to ensure that their houses are in order. It’s driven by both new revisions to company law in the Republic, the new Charities Regulatory Authority in the Republic and their equivalent in Northern Ireland. It is not new that all public funding comes with stipulations. Therefore, the arts are not actually being singled out for any negative purpose. In fact, the current impetus is trying to protect arts organisation, to make the sector stronger and more accountable, so that if any questions ever arise about the use of public money for the support of the arts the answer will be clear, open, transparent and supported by the structures that corporate governance bring.

It is about much more than accountability.

It concerns adopting good management practices and ensuring that the skills are in place so that organisations can survive into the future. Sometimes we in the visual arts sector may rail against the machine, as we see the arts as being ‘different’, and this is entirely our decision. But, if we wish to receive public funding, it’s vital to realise and accept that for arts organisations to survive, we have to understand that we are not apart when legal and compliance structures are being discussed and implemented.

In the ROI, a key context is The Companies Act

Recent requirements for organisations to demonstrate good governance practice have resulted from ongoing cuts to public sector funding. Arts organisations must now prove to key funders that they are strategic, sustainable and well managed.

Self-regulation should be built into your governance process and using a framework such as the DIY Committee Guide’s Governance Healthcheck to structure this will help you gather evidence to demonstrate your capability (diycommitteeguide. org/resource/governance-health-check).

Governance simply refers to the structured ways in which organisations carry out their work.

It includes the framework of policies, procedures and controls that ensure companies operate in a fair, transparent and accountable way. The overall responsibility for corporate governance sits with an organisation’s board of directors. They must balance the need for legal and procedural conformity with the drive for ambitious performance.

Arts & Business Northern Ireland knows that when business and the arts work together in a truly mutual partnership, both become stronger, with the results benefiting our society in far reaching and tangible ways. We facilitate creative partnerships between business and the arts through a wide range of programmes and services (artsandbusinessni.org.uk).

Funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, our governance programmes have been developed to respond to the practical needs of local arts and cultural organisations.

2014, which came into force commenced on 1 June 2015. The 2014 Act represents the largest overhaul of company law the state has seen in half a century, streamlining and clarifying 17 previously existing companies acts which date from 1963 to 2013 and introducing a number of reforms. The changes have been widely greeted as reforms from across the business community and there now exist a range of resources tailored for arts organisations that outline ways to comply with best practice and legal requirements.

The new requirements relating to corporate governance and company law encompass a range of organisational models that offer flexibility to visual arts organisations of various scales – including wholly voluntary groups, to those employing various numbers of staff.

The creation of the Charities Regulatory Authority has brought with it other forms of compliance. These have been made in consultation with between the CRA and the Revenue Commissioners. It has offered registered charities the option for simplified reporting and is therefore very important when considering the benefits of becoming a registered charity. The re-registration process in Northern Ireland for registered charities is underway and once again brings with it an amount of upfront work, but one that pays off in the end.

There is an added complexity to all of this. Compliance with company law and compliance with the various charities acts (ROI and NI depending on your jurisdiction) must necessarily be combined with compliance with stipulations laid down by funding bodies. Sounds complex? Well, by its very nature it is daunting, but by adopting a structured approach to ensuring corporate governance is in place, the path is a lot smoother.

Overall, it cannot be understated that the chief importance of corporate governance requirements is that they offer essential safeguards for visual arts organisations and the individuals who direct and work for them by setting out in clear terms the responsibilities and structures.

When corporate governance is done properly, it allows organisations to work smoothly due to the existence of a clear level of accountability and communication within the organisation, as well as people understanding what their roles and responsibilities are.

Noel Kelly, CEO Visual Artists Ireland

Resources ROI An Oifig Um Chlárú Cuideachtaí / Companies registration Office www.cro.ie The companies registration office explains the introduction of the Companies Act 2014: “the new act, modernisesd and simplifies company law, reduces the administrative burden and ensures good corporate governance”. The CRO website provides details information on many aspects of the Companies Act 2014.

Arts and Business Northern Ireland www.artsandbusinessni.org.uk In Northern Ireland Arts & Business Northern Ireland are funded by ACNI to offer a range of support programmes relating to corporate goverance.

Details are outlined in the article opposite.

‘The Governance Code for Community, Voluntary & Charitable Organisations: A Code of Practice for Good Governance of Community, Voluntary and Charitable Organisations in Ireland’ www.governancecode.ie The guidelines are described as allowing “organisations demonstrate their high standards of governance to their stakeholders … adopting the Code will: reassure current funders that their money is being managed by a well run organisation with good governance; increase transparency – in that everyone knows exactly how the organisation is being run; help you avoid bad risks; help you achieve your goals faster; and reduce costs.

Widespread adoption of the Code across the community, voluntary and charitable sector will help everyone involved – including the public and the

Board Bank & Young Professionals on Arts Boards Matching Programmes An effective board will offer a range of skills to your organisation, including expertise in finance, marketing and strategic business planning. These matching programmes provide access to a wide range of potential board members with specific skills, who understand what is expected of them.

Arts & Business NI recruit business volunteers who wish to serve on the board of an arts organisation. Volunteers undertake a thorough induction in good governance in the arts and are matched to our arts member organisations seeking support.

Governance Training Getting a board to meet during daytime hours can prove a challenge, so we offer a two-hour tailored

refresher session which updates the board on roles and responsibilities and which is available during the day or in the evening.

This is useful for: • developing and refreshing individual board members’ knowledge of best practice • helping empower boards to become more selfaware and more strategic in their leadership • providing the board with a collective starting point to begin a group process of change in governance procedures.

In advance of the session, Arts & Business NI will meet with the chair and chief executive for a ‘governance healthcheck’ to establish current procedures and to discuss the organisation in depth.

Fundraising for Boards One aspect of a board’s work is to address risk and one of the riskiest areas for their attention is the financial health of the organisation. This two-hour training session includes a pre-session meeting with the chair and CEO, and is a no-nonsense, unashamedly basic and thorough look at where the money comes from, the current arts funding landscape, the role of the board in fundraising and the basics of fundraising planning.

The main aim of the session is to inform and encourage board members to engage further in the fundraising process.

Introduction to Board Membership Seminar Being a board member is complex, challenging and rewarding. This seminar introduces new board members, and those who would like a refresher, to their roles and responsibilities, and how they can make a positive contribution to the board.

The workshop covers several topics: • the basics of board membership • the board’s legal and financial responsibilities • your responsibilities as an employer • how you can be an effective advocate for your company • the role of the board in strategic planning and policy making • the division of responsibilities between the board and executive staff.

For more details or to discuss governance in your organisation in confidence, contact Tania Carlisle, Learning and Development Manager, Arts & Business NI: t.carlisle@artsandbusinessni.org.uk.

beneficiaries of these organisations – but also the sector itself”.

‘A Practical Guide for Board Members of Arts Organisations’ Arts Council 2015 The newly updated A Practical Guide for Board Members of Arts Organisations incorporates recent and current changes in legislation, particularly through the Companies Act 2014 and establishment of the Charities Regulatory Authority under the Charities Act 2009.

Compliance and Governance Conference.

Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, 29 June 2015 http://www.artscouncil.ie/Initiatives/Compliance-and-Governance-conference The Arts Council hosted a compliance and governance conference in Smock Alley Theatre on 29 June 2015, which was attended by over 200 delegates. This conference was designed to inform organisations of compliance and statutory reporting obligations which are affected by three new developments: the establishment of the new Charities Regulatory Authority; the introduction of the new Companies Act; the introduction of a new financial reporting standard (FRS102) from 2015.

Presentations from the day (PDFs and audio) are available to download from the address above.

‘Corporate Governance for the Irish Arts Sector’ Penelope Kenny Price: €24.99 ISBN: 978-1-908199-28-7 Paperback, 192 pages Published by Charted Accountants Ireland, December 2014

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

36

September – October 2015

Visual Artists Ireland operates a wide range of professional development training events throughout the year. The delivery of this programme is greatly supported by our relationship with local and international visual art professionals and partner organisations throughout the island of Ireland.

Summer / Autumn 2015

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.

ROI Clare

Child Protection Training for Artists with Tom Kent In partnership with Clare County Council Arts Office Ennis. @County Museum, Arthur’s Row, Ennis, Co. Clare.

Saturday 5 and Saturday 12 September. Places: 18 – 20.

Cost: €10/5 (VAI members). Session 1: NYCI Child Protection Awareness Programme for Artists with Tom Kent – Ennis. Saturday 5 September (10.00 – 14.00).

Session 2: Update on new Child Protection Legislation & Policy. Saturday 12 September (10.00 – 12.00).

Carlow

Visual Artists’ Café In partnership with ArtLInks: Carlow, Kilkenny, Waterford and Wexford County Council Arts Offices. @VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art & GBS Theatre. As part of a day long event by VISUAL, examining models of exhibition programming, VAI and ARtL!nks will host artists’ talks by recipients of the ArtLinks Bursary awards 2015. Wednesday 25 November (10.00 – 16.00). Places: 25 - 35. Cost: FREE.

Dublin City

Managing Your Finances for Visual Artists with Gaby Smyth @Visual Artists Ireland, Central Hotel Chambers, 7– 9 Dame Court, Dublin 2. Friday 9 October (10.30 – 15.30). Places: 12 – 15. Cost: €50/25 (VAI members).

Artist’s Talk & Peer Critique: Sculpture & Installation with Hannes Brunner @Visual Artists Ireland, Central Hotel Chambers, 7 – 9 Dame Court, Dublin 2. Tuesday 6 October (10.30 – 16.30). Places: 6. Cost: €80/40 (VAI members).

Handling, Transport and Storage of your Art Works with Maurice Ward @Visual Artists Ireland, Central Hotel Chambers, 7- 9 Dame Court, Dublin 2. Wednesday 21 October 2015.

Places: 18 –20. Cost: €30/15 (VAI members).

Documenting Your Work with Tim Durham @Visual Artists Ireland, Central Hotel Chambers, 7– 9 Dame Court, Dublin 2. Thursday 5 November (10.00 – 17.00). Places: 10. Cost: €60/30 (VAI members). If booking both sessions with Tim, an additional discount is available €100/55 (VAI members).

Digital Image Formatting Basics with Tim Durham @Visual Artists Ireland, Central Hotel Chambers, 7 – 9 Dame Court, Dublin 2. Thursday 12 November (10.00 – 16.00). Places: 10. Cost: €60/30 (VAI members).

If booking both sessions with Tim, €100/55 (VAI members).

Writing about Your Work with Patricia Clyne-Kelly @Visual Artists Ireland, Central Hotel Chambers, 7 – 9 Dame Court, Dublin 2. Spring 2016 (date TBC) (10.30 – 16.30). Places: 10. Cost: €60/30 (VAI members).

Peer Critique Drawing Spring 2016 (details TBC).

Donegal

Writing about Your Work with Áine Phillips With the Donegal Artists Network. @Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, Co.Donegal. Saturday 14 November (10.30 – 16.30). Places: 12 – 15. Cost: €60/35 (VAI members).

Fingal

Making the most of Your Creative Work – Costing and Licensing for Artists, Illustrators and Designer Makers In parternship with Fingal Arts, Illustrators Ireland and the Design & Crafts Council of Ireland. Wednesday 14 October 2015. Places: 30 – 40. Cost: €10/5 to Fingal artists, VAI, DCCoI and Illustrators Ireland members. Aimed at visual artists, illustrators and designer/makers this session is relevant to anyone who wishes to reproduce aspects of their creative output, whether for commercial or fine art markets. VAI looks forward to a series of partnership professional development events with Fingal Arts. Further details TBA. Visual Arts Fingal Artists Soup Supper November 2015 (date TBC). Places: 30+. Cost: FREE to Fingal artists. Based on the crowd-funding Sunday Soup model of peer support: sundaysoup.org/about.

Positioning & Networking Your Practice February 2016 (details TBC). Cost: FREE to Fingal artists.

Galway Gaeltacht

Visual Artists’ Café Furbo In partnership with Galway County Council Arts Office and Udarás na Gaeltachta Gaillmhe. @Furbo, Co. Galway. Includes a morning Show & Tell event with afternoon artists’ talks from Nuala Ní Flathúin, Ceara Conway and Sheila Flanagan / ARTFarm. Friday 16 October (10.30 – 16.00). Places: 30+. Cost: FREE to Galway artists.

Galway

In partnership with Galway County Council and Galway City Council Arts Offices.

Writing about Your Work with Áine Phillips Collaboration & Partnerships for Individual Artists and Artist-Led Groups. Further details TBA.

Kerry

Developing Creative Proposals with Annette Moloney In partnership with Kerry County Council Arts Office. @ Siamsa Tíre, Tralee, Co. Kerry. Tuesday 22 September (10.30 – 17.00). Places: 15 – 20. Cost: €10/5 (VAI members).

Meath

Towards Sustainability with Patricia Clyne-Kelly In partnership with Meath County Council. Venue TBC. Spring 2016. Places: 15 – 18. Cost: TBC.

Portlaoise

Developing Opportunities for your Work with Geraldine O’Reilly and Sheena Barrett In partnership with Dunamaise Arts Centre and Laois County Council Arts Office. @ Dunamaise Arts Centre, Portlaoise. Friday 25 September (10.30 – 17.00). Places: 15 – 20. Cost: €40/20 (VAI members).

Sligo

Visual Artists’ Café In partnership with The Model. @The Model, Sligo. Including Show & Tell and professional practice session with writer Joanne Laws. Saturday 3 October (12.00 – 16.00). Places: 30+. Cost: FREE.

Tipperary

Visual Artists’ Café In partnership with Tipperary County Council. @Damer House Gallery, Roscrea. Including a morning Show & Tell event and afternoon talks by artist Alice Maher, independent curator Eilís Lavelle and gallerist John P. Quinlan. Saturday 19 September (10.30 – 16.00). Places: 30+. Cost: FREE. Fees VAI members receive preferential discount of 50% on fees for all VAI, training and Professional Development events. Fees range from €5 – 40 for VAI members.

Tell us about your training needs!

If you are interested in training please do get in touch with us directly or forward an expression of interest in a topic/s through the Professional Development Training web page. We often repeat workshops when there is a strong demand for a topic.

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

Bookings / Information Monica Flynn Professional Development Officer, Visual Artists Ireland T: 01 672 9488 E: monica@visualartists.ie visualartists.ie/professional-development VAI members receive preferential discount of 50% on fees for all VAI, Training and Professional Development events.

Fees range from €5 – 40 for VAI Members.

NI Visual Artists’ Cafe: Documenting your work @Bangor (venue TBC). 10 October 2015. 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm. Cost: FREE (attendance at this event is fully sponsored by Ards and North Down Borough Council Arts Office). The importance of good quality documentation of your work cannot be understated. Good photographs can make all the difference to your exhibition proposals, funding applications, curator visits and promotional materials. This afternoon event will be taken by professional photographer Simon Mills.

Simon documents exhibitions professionally for The

MAC, works on Freckle Magazine and was a founding member of online visual arts magazine Collected.

Belfast Open Studios 2015: Critical Engagement 23 – 24 October 2015. 9.00 am – 5.00 pm. Cost: FREE. Belfast is a vibrant, creative city with hundreds of artists working in studios across the centre. For the second year, as part of the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival visual arts programme, the public are being given the opportunity to get an intimate look inside these creative hubs. Last year’s programme saw 54 curators visit the studios in Belfast as part of a specially-designed programme. This year we are opening up the invitation. If you are a curator, a critic, an art writer, director or any other kind of arts professional, we are inviting you to join us for this event.

As part of the programme you will receive a detailed information pack about each of the studio programmes, the artists in each, and will have the chance to join us for a reflection and critical response to the visual arts in both galleries and studios in Belfast. We will have further details on this very soon, but we are now accepting pre-bookings as the number of spaces will be limited. This is a free event. If you are travelling to Belfast, there are many affordable accommodation options (belfastopenstudios.com).

Visual Artists Ireland Helpdesk with Rob Hilken @Bangor (venue TBC). 12 December 2015. 1.00 pm – 5.00 pm. Cost: FREE. This event comprises six oneto-one individual 30-minute appointments for artists to get specific support advice on a range of topics including career development strategies, networking advice, online marketing, financial systems and basic tax advice.

Visual Artists’ Cafe: Writing Proposals @Bangor (venue TBC). 7 November 2015. 11.00 am – 5.00pm. Cost: FREE (attendance at this event is fully sponsored by Ards and North Down Borough Council Arts Office). This session is aimed at artists who feel they need to gain an overview on how to put together proposals for a variety of contexts. Participants will look at how to target opportunities relevant to their practice and understand issues that artists may need consider when approaching different opportunities such as Arts Council / local authority bursaries or public gallery calls for submissions. The session will include: dos and don’ts; writing style; formatting; imaging and presentation; and examples of good and bad proposals. Curator Marianne O’Kane Boal brings her curatorial experience to bear when discussing the expectations that public venues and funding organisations have in relation to artists seeking their supports.

Bookings / Information Rob Hilken, VAI Northern Ireland Manager A: Visual Artists Ireland Northern Ireland Office 109 – 113 Royal Avenue, Belfast, BT1 1FF E: rob@visualartists-ni.org visualartists-ni.org

RHA_TotallyDublin_Aug2015_Layout 1 18/08/2015 14:06 Page 1

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Amanda Coogan, The Fall, 2009, Photographic still from live performance, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, Photographer Davey Moore, Image courtesy of the artist and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin.

RHA Autumn Exhibitions Showing from 4 September – 18 October Admission free

Amanda Coogan, I’ll sing you a song from around the town Selection from the Waterford Municipal Collection Gary Coyle RHA, Into the Woods John Noel Smith, Bilderstreit, A German Requiem Michael Quane RHA, Buoyed

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