The Visual Artists' News Sheet – January February 2024

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Fingal, A Place for Art

Fingal Artists’ Support Scheme 2024

VAN

Issue 1: January – February 2024

A Visual Artists Ireland Publication

Fingal County Council invites applications from artists for up to €5,000 of an award towards travel and professional development opportunities, a residency, or the development of work.

The award is open to practising artists at all stages in their professional careers working in music, visual art, film, drama, literature and dance.

To be eligible to apply, applicants must have been born, have studied, or currently reside in the Fingal administrative area.

The funding is for projects or initiatives which will take place between 1st May and 31st December 2024.

Closing date for receipt of applications: Friday 23th February, 2024 at 4.00pm For further information and to apply please visit: www.fingalarts.ie or www.fingal.ie/arts or email arts.office@fingal.ie

Inside This Issue IN FOCUS: TEXTILES COLUMN: RHA AT 200 PROFILE: AN GAILEARAÍ VAI GET TOGETHER 2023

www.fingalarts.ie ArtistsSS2024_VAI_HalfPage_161.354x255.32mm_FA131223.indd 1

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet January – February 2024 On The Cover

Cecilia Danell, The Primeval Sunset, 2022 [detail], hand-tufted rug, 100% wool yarn, 200 x 200 cm; image courtesy of the artist, Kevin Kavanagh, and Crawford Art Gallery.

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Page 20 Principal Funders

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First Pages

Roundup. Exhibitions and events from the past two months.

News. The latest developments in the arts sector.

Columns

The Painter’s Calendar. Cornelius Browne considers the temporal commitments of plein air painting.

Fullness of Being. For the first in a new series of columns on KCAT artists, Kate Strain introduces the work of Sinéad Fahey.

RHA at 200. Abigail O’Brien reflects on bicentennial celebrations at the Royal Hibernian Academy last year.

Masking / Unmasking. VAI Exchange Award winner Chinedum Muotto discusses recent developments in his practice.

In Focus: Textiles

True to Our Roots. Colm Kenny, Ceadogán Rugmakers Shapeshifting. Ciara O’Connor, VAI Member Loose Ends. Áine Byrne, VAI Member Slow Time. Contemporary Tapestry Artists Ireland Grand Land. Sinéad Kennedy, VAI Member Materiality and Meaning. Richard Malone, VAI Member

Page 15

Artist-Led

HERmetics in the Studio. Members of a new painting collective share their motivations and spaces of engagement.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet:

Member Profile

Slowly but Surely (I’m so fucking tired). Belfast-based visual artist Tara McGinn reflects on concepts of home.

Folded In. Aodán McCardle discusses the evolution of his work to date including various career highlights.

Editor: Joanne Laws Production/Design: Thomas Pool News/Opportunities: Thomas Pool, Mary McGrath Proofreading: Paul Dunne

Critique

Visual Artists Ireland:

Isabel Nolan, The Light Poured Out Of You, 2017.

‘Self Determination: A Global Perspective’ at IMMA ‘Following Threads’ at Crawford Art Gallery Diaa Lagan and Basil Al-Rawi, and Elaine Grainger at The LAB Maeve Brennan at VISUAL Carlow Victor Sloan at Belfast Exposed

Columns

Blissed. Maximilian Le Cain discusses his new film which expands the expressive palette of Irish cinema.

Artist-Centred Approach. Dorothy Smith outlines her ongoing curatorial residency at Droichead Arts Centre.

VAI Event

VAI Get Together 2023. Joanne Laws and Thomas Pool report on the annual networking event for visual artists.

Exhibition Profile

Cosmic Wetness. Day Magee speaks to Karen Donnellan about their recent exhibition at The RHA. Deferral | Echo. Kevin Burns discusses Kwok Tsui’s exhibition at CCA Derry~Londonderry.

Organisation Profile

Art for Patronage. Brian Mac Domhnaill reflects on the 60th anniversary of Cork Arts Society, now trading as Lavit Gallery.

A Gaeltacht Sensibility. Andrew Duggan interviews Úna Campbell, Director of An Gailearaí in County Donegal.

Festival / Biennale

Hospitality & Hidden Time. Lucy Elvis reflects on the learning of the TULCA Festival board in terms of access and inclusion.

Project Profile

Sentient Entity. Debi Paul talks about Glandwr, her home in Chapelizod, where she hosts exhibitions and projects.

Last Pages

VAI Lifelong Learning. VAI helpdesks, cafés, and webinars.

Opportunities. Grants, awards, open calls, and commissions.

International Memberships

CEO/Director: Noel Kelly Office Manager: Grazyna Rzanek Advocacy & Advice: Oona Hyland Advocacy & Advice NI: Brian Kielt Membership & Projects: Mary McGrath Services Design & Delivery: Emer Ferran News Provision: Thomas Pool Publications: Joanne Laws Accounts: Grazyna Rzanek Board of Directors: Michael Corrigan (Chair), Michael Fitzpatrick, Richard Forrest, Paul Moore, Mary-Ruth Walsh, Cliodhna Ní Anluain (Secretary), Ben Readman, Gaby Smyth, Gina O’Kelly, Maeve Jennings, Deirdre O’Mahony.

Republic of Ireland Office Visual Artists Ireland First Floor 2 Curved Street Temple Bar, Dublin 2 T: +353 (0)1 672 9488 E: info@visualartists.ie W: visualartists.ie Northern Ireland Office Visual Artists Ireland 109 Royal Avenue Belfast BT1 1FF T: +44 (0)28 958 70361 E: info@visualartists-ni.org W: visualartists-ni.org Safe to Create Safe to Create is a Dignity at Work programme looking to impact change on the culture and practices of the Arts and Creative sectors. If you or someone you know is facing bullying or harrasment please visit safetocreate.ie

16 Dec - 24 Feb

a solo exhibition curated by Anne Mullee Mermaid Arts Centre Bray, Co Wicklow, A98 N5P1

Research image, 1iing heaney, 2023.

3D digital scan, variable dimensions.

Douthit 27.01— 24.03.24

butlergallery.ie +353 (0)56 7761106

Evans’ Home, John’s Quay Kilkenny, R95 YX3F

Out West, Oil on linen panel, 45x35cm, 2023 (Detail)

When Worlds Collide Mollie

endlessness nessness Cecilia Bullo Ella Bertilsson Hannah Ní Mhaonaigh Curated by Julia Moustacchi 1 February - 23 March 2024 The LAB Gallery

Majella O’Neill Collins

Allegory of the MV Alta

Uillinn

West Cork Arts Centre

www.thelab.ie

13 Jan to 24 Feb

Monday to Saturday 10.00am - 4.30pm www.westcorkartscentre.com

Majella O’Neill Collins, Unnamed 8, oil on canvas, 90 x 90cm, 2023

Mahmoud Mokhtar, Nahdat Misr (Egypt Awakened/ Egypt Renaissance), 1928, Sculpture. Photo: Creative Commons.

SELF – DETERMINATION AN COMHTHÉACS DOMHANDA

28 DFÓ 2023 21 AIB 2024

Clár Deich mBliana na gCuimhneachán 2012–2023

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10 February – 13 April Upper Gallery An Uillinn National Touring Exhibition

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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

Exhibition Roundup

Dublin

Belfast

thedouglashyde.ie

Dublin Gallery Weekend The Contemporary Art Gallery Association (CAGA) represents private art galleries in Ireland which are committed to the exhibition of contemporary visual art, the promotion of artists’ careers, and the expansion of audiences. CAGA organised Dublin Gallery Weekend 2023, which took place from 10 to 12 November across multiple venues.

The three-day celebration showcased the vibrancy of Dublin’s commercial galleries through a special programme of exhibitions, events, artist talks, guided tours, performances, discussions and more.

Catalyst Arts The latest edition of FIX, Belfast’s longest running performance and live art biennale, took place from 9 to 25 November 2023.

FIX23 featured performances, workshops and events within Catalyst Arts, Portview Trade Centre, online, and in public spaces across the city. Exhibiting artists included: BBeyond, Bebeedeebe, Léann Herlihy, Lili Murphy-Johnston, Mal Parry, Matthew Wilson, Olivia Hassett, Sandra Johnston, Sinéad O’Donnell, Son Zept, Tara McGinn, and Venus Patel. FIX23 was funded by the Arts Council and Enkalon Foundation.

Engine Room Gallery Belfast-based artist Sam Fleming’s solo exhibition, ‘The Visit’ ran at Engine Room Gallery from 3 to 30 November 2023.

Fleming sees the presented works as a form of dialogue with his past. Inspired by a single found photograph, he returned to the environment of his youth to begin a conversation with an earlier self. The paintings explore what might have been and what was. They form arguments, ask questions, extract truths and correct lies. There are no answers and no conclusions but perhaps some form of reconciliation.

Hugh Lane Gallery ‘Andy Warhol: Three Times Out’ opened at the Hugh Lane Gallery on 6 October 2023 and continues until 28 January 2024. The gallery has been working on this unique exhibition for over five years, which includes more than 250 works borrowed from international museums and private collections. The exhibition celebrates Warhol’s artistic vision which saw him combine commercial processes with fine art production, to challenge conventions and dismiss traditional distinctions between fine art and popular culture.

Kerlin Gallery Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s first solo exhibition, ‘Interval Two (Dream Pool)’, continues until 6 January 2024. According to the press release: “The visual worlds created by Ní Bhriain are at once precise and enigmatic, drawing the familiar into a register of interruption and disorientation.” The exhibition features three large-scale, intricately woven, Jacquard tapestries, in which fragments of archival portraits merge with underground caves and architectural ruins, inhabited by creatures, summoning threats of extinction and ancient narratives of the underworld.

Naughton Gallery From 25 October to 21 December 2023, The Naughton Gallery presented ‘FOR LIFE’, a solo exhibition by American photographer Faith Couch. Couch’s work focuses on accessing the memory landscape of Blackness through the folklore and magic that lives within memories and archives created before her own practice began. She examines the Black body’s place in contemporary photography, its ties to historical narratives of existence, and a new future imagined and created by Black people.

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PS2 Paul Gaffney’s solo exhibition at PS2 (16 November – 15 December 2023) focused on experimentation with the medium of the photobook, and the sequencing and design decisions behind each of his publications, which were highlighted through the display of multiple work-in-progress. Gaffney’s practice-led PhD research challenges the tradition of ‘landscape’ and the way it is observed and represented. Gaffney applies landscape phenomenology, an approach that sees him seeking to translate an experience of the landscape as multisensorial.

NCAD Gallery From 3 November to 15 December 2023, NCAD presented ‘Bone of What Absent Thing’, a solo exhibition of artist Elaine Hoey, programmed and curated by Anne Kelly on the occasion of the BETA Festival of Art and Tech 2023. The exhibition featured a two-channel installation of Bone of What Absent Thing (2021-2022) – a contemporary retelling of the myth of Medusa, in which Hoey trains an artificial intelligence (AI) model with multiple narratives surrounding the ancient myth.

Pallas Projects / Studio Established in 2011, Periodical Review is a long-running curatorial project which sets out to consider, revisit and review current movements within contemporary art practices from around Ireland. Periodical Review 13, titled ‘Maslow’s Hammer’, featured a range of artworks selected by Kate O’Shea, Linda Shevlin, Mark Cullen, and Gavin Murphy. The exhibition continues until 27 January and is accompanied by an essay by Sara Damaris Muthi, published in collaboration with Paper Visual Art Journal, as part of the PPS/PVA Visual Art Writing Commission.

The MAC Continuing at The MAC until 7 April, ‘someone decides, hawk or dove’ is a commissioned work by artist Niamh McCann, presented as part of the Decade Of Centenaries programme, ‘ART:2023’. The exhibition title is a line from the poem, Hairline Crack, in Belfast poet Ciaran Carson’s 1989 collection, Belfast Confetti. Hairline Crack is also the title of a film central to this exhibition which comprises of three acts with two musical interludes. The exhibition is curated by Belinda Quirke, Director Solstice Arts Centre.

Douglas Hyde Gallery ‘Medici Lion’ is a newly commissioned sculptural work and major solo exhibition

by Irish-Parsee sculptor, Siobhán Hapaska.

This is her first major solo presentation in an institution in Ireland. Hapaska presents the figure of the lion – a universal symbol of power – to explore current crises, from the failures of democracy to ongoing conflict and wars, and the ever-present climate crisis. This exhibition continues until 10 March 2024 and is supported by The Henry Moore Foundation.

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Elaine Hoey ‘Bone of What Absent Thing’, installation view; image courtesy of the artist and NCAD Gallery.

catalystarts.org.uk

themaclive.com

@engineroomgallery

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Ulster Museum ‘Kelpra: Artists and Printmakers, Concepts, Conversations, Collaborations’ runs from 27 October 2023 to September 2024. This exhibition presents a selection of prints created at the pioneering Kelpra Studio, London, taken from both the Ulster Museum collection and private collections with additional prints from Advanced Graphics and other print studios across Europe. Kelpra combined the commercial techniques of screen-printing with fine art practice and was renowned for working in close collaboration with artists to produce daring and eye-catching original prints. ulstermuseum.org

Faith Couch ‘FOR LIFE’, installation view; image by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artist and Naughton Gallery.

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

Exhibition Roundup

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Marianne Keating, An Ciúnas / The Silence, installation view, The Showroom, London; image by Dan Weill Photography, courtesy of the artist and The Showroom.

Yvonne McGuinness, 'Rehearsals', installation view, 2023; image courtesy of the artist and Butler Gallery.

Regional & International

Butler Gallery ‘Rehearsals’ is a solo exhibition by Yvonne McGuinness, which continues at Butler Gallery until 14 January. McGuinness supports individuals and communities in using their voices to question systems of power and to ‘act out’ within them through public, performative interventions. Over a sixmonth period, she worked with Kilkenny school children to develop two new film works, Priory and Schoolyard. A series of wearable silk works, costumes and works on paper also hang throughout the gallery.

Galway Arts Centre Continuing until 28 January, ‘the branch, the fork, the harrow’ is a group exhibition curated by Alannah Robins and featuring work by artists Brett Sroka, Christine Mackey, Linda Schirmer, Noelle Gallagher, Helena Doyle, and Sarah Roseingrave. The exhibiting artists first met in November 2021, during a Woodland Symposium at Interface Artists Residency in Connemara, where artists and experts are invited to create slow-art that evolves with the changing ecology of the site.

Grilse Gallery ‘Heroines’ was a group exhibition featuring works by Geraldine O’Reilly, Mary O’Donnell, and Na Cailleacha which ran from 25 November to 24 December 2023 at Grilse Gallery – a screen print studio and artist-run gallery in Killorglin, Kerry.

‘Unlegendary Heroes’ is a folio of ten prints of watercolours by O’Reilly and ten poems

by O’Donnell. They were accompanied by a print portfolio made at Ballinglen by Na Cailleacha (The Witches) – a collective of eight mature women dedicated to exploring collaborative practice.

Mermaid Arts Centre Fintin Kelly’s debut solo exhibition, ‘A Story of Art’ at Mermaid Arts Centre (14 October to 2 December 2023), was curated by artist Dominic Thorpe, a regular collaborator with the inclusive art studio KCAT, based in Callan, County Kilkenny. Kelly has been a member of KCAT since 2017, having previously had a passion for art going back over two decades. His practice is an exemplary demonstration of creative flow that involves continually evading the parameters of initial intentions and methodological constraints.

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galwayartscentre.ie

Ormston House ‘Get Well Soon (prologue)’ is a group exhibition drawing a connection between human and planetary exhaustion. Curated by Lucy Lopez, the exhibition brings together works by Roo Dhissou, Kyla Harris & Lou Macnamara, Rowena Harris, Bint Mbareh, Harun Morrison (with Satpreet Kahlon), Jamila Prowse, Benoît Piéron, Lorenzo Sandoval, and Rehana Zaman. ‘Get Well Soon’ borrows its title from a 2020 text by Johanna Hedva, written in the midst of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. The exhibition runs until 3 February.

Solstice Arts Centre Grace Weir’s solo exhibition ran at Solstice from 30 September to 17 November 2023.

‘The history of light’ unfolds the fixing of a moment that occurs when taking a photograph, to write a text with light about time.

Consisting of a new series of painted works and a filmic installation, the works investigate the key tenets of photography, the nature of light and time to move away from linear, progressive conceptions of time and unsettle hierarchies of rational experience and theoretical abstractions.

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SIRIUS Frank Sweeney’s docu-fiction film, 2 Channel Land (2023), continues at SIRIUS until 27 January. It explores the history of analogue signals spilling across the borders of Ireland and Britain. Guided by a mysterious threshold deity, we take a journey through Ireland’s borderlands in search of community. The research for the film included several interviews relating to pirate television deflector systems in Cork, country music pirate radio stations on the Irish border, and the use of church bells as early forms of communication. siriusartscentre.ie

solsticeartscentre.ie

South Tipperary Arts Centre Moran Been-noon’s solo exhibition, ‘Here nor There’ (28 October – 2 December 2023), invited audiences to reflect on the connection between ethnicity (as a multi-layered and intricate theme) and our own ability to belong. The presented artworks, moving image and audio pieces, were a collection of the artist’s digital and physical thought experiments that respond to familiar concepts of settling down and feeling at home: putting down roots, building a nest, and understanding one’s place through the embodiment of objects and actions.

The Dock A Northern Soul night took place on 27 October at The Dock in County Leitrim.

DJ Carl Brennan played 60s soul music for an evening of dancing in Gallery 2, alongside paintings by exhibiting artist, Andy Parsons, who is interested in dance as an egalitarian space where people are free to express themselves. As an authentically working-class movement, Northern Soul has much in common with the rave scene of the late 80s and early 90s. The event was supported through the Night-Time Economy After Hours at the Museum scheme.

The Model From 22 September to 2 December 2023, The Model presented Emma Talbot’s ‘The Age / L’Età’. The exhibition comprised animation, free-hanging painted silk panels, three-dimensional work and drawings. The work explores themes of representation and ageing, power and governance, as well as attitudes towards nature. Talbot imagines a future environment where humankind encounters the disastrous consequences of late capitalism and must look towards more ancient and holistic ways of crafting and belonging to survive.

The Showroom ‘An Ciúnas / The Silence’, a solo exhibition by artist Marianne Keating, was an immersive, three-channel film installation. The exhibition brings together complex intersecting narratives addressing overlooked aspects of Irish migration during Ireland’s colonial rule by Britain, and their enduring legacies in the present. The exhibition will continue in Ireland with a tour throughout 2024-26, organised by SIRIUS, beginning at The Model, and including Galway Arts Centre, Rua Red, Limerick City Gallery of Art, and Wexford Arts Centre.

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theshowroom.org

mermaidartscentre.ie

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Void Derry Áine Mac Giolla Bhríde’s first solo exhibition in the UK continues at Void in Derry until 27 January. The presented works responds to the concrete architectural reality of Void’s recently restructured ‘white cube’ gallery spaces. The artist’s sculptural practice performs an investigation of space and self, exploring how a pronounced masculinity was fused with the canonical image of the archetypal male architect, as a reaction to the entry of women into the field of architecture. derryvoid.com

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News

RDS Visual Art Awards 2023 Winners of the annual RDS Visual Art Awards were announced on 7 December 2023 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art [IMMA], for the launch of this annual exhibition that celebrates emerging Irish artists. A glittering ceremony took place at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham with a live performance by artist Laura Grisard who is one of the 15 artists exhibiting work as part of the annual exhibition.

This year’s awards were announced

by Chair of the judging panel, Mary McCarthy, Director of the Crawford Gallery, Cork and presented by the Deputy Chief Executive of the RDS Foundation, Niamh de Loughry. The quality of this year’s applications was outstanding, and the 15 artists who were included in the exhibition went through a rigorous two stage selec-

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

THE LATEST FROM THE ARTS SECTOR

tion and judging process.

They are a real tribute to the professionalism and talent of the emerging artists coming into the visual arts sector. This year the RDS Visual Art Awards partnered with the Irish Museum of Modern Art for the 2023 exhibition and it runs at IMMA’s West Wing of the Main Galleries until 3 March 2024. The RDS Visual Art Awards applications were reviewed by a team of five professional curators: Mary Cremin (Head of Programming, IMMA), Eamonn Maxwell (visual art curator and advisor), Rayne Booth (visual art curator and producer), Sarah McAuliffe (curator, RHA) and Aisling Prior (visual art curator for schools and public buildings).

[Continued below]

Taïm Hailmet, winner of the RDS Taylor Art Award 2023; photograph by Leon Farrell Photocall Ireland, courtesy of the artist and the RDS.

RDS Visual Art Awards 2023 [Cont.]

Between them they longlisted 109 graduates to move forward to the second stage of the competition which was later shortlisted to the 15 artists who now exhibit their work in the exhibition, curated by internationally acclaimed artist Elaine Hoey. The 2023 prizes & winners are: RDS Taylor Art Award €10,000 – Taïm Haimet, who graduated with a BA Honors Degree in Contemporary Art from ATU Galway. Her work is about migrants crossing the sea to the shores of Europe. It is based on the haunting stories she heard as an Arabic interpreter for asylum seekers in Galway, as well as the conversations with her Syrian family members who have experienced this journey.

R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award €5,000 – Oisín Tozer, who graduated with a BA (Hons) Fine Art from the Technological University Dublin. He is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice draws upon materials, media and mechanisms to investigate our understanding of and relationship with ecology.

RDS Members' Art Fund Award €5,000 – Cian Handschuh, who graduated from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. He is a visual artist primarily working in sculpture and installation art. His current practice aims to examine links between body and land using the dwelling as a mutual space and as such an analysis point for their interaction.

RDS Mason Hayes & Curran LLP Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Award (value €8,000) – Christopher McMullan, who graduated from NCAD with a BA Honours in Fine Art, specialising in sculpture. Christopher’s practice draws from his decade-long career in avant-garde kitchens, where he learned to extract perfumes for luxurious plates and sommelier training.

RHA Graduate Studio Award €7,500 value – Asha Murray, who graduated from BA Fine Art in Limerick School of Art and Design. She is a multidisciplinary artist who creates experimental films in tandem with textile work of tufted collages. Mixing the two mediums, Asha creates a form of non-linear and non-conventional, experimental storytelling. Further details at rds.ie

VAI Experiment! Award 2023 Visual Artists Ireland are delighted to announce Noel Hensey as the winner of the Experiment! Award 2023. Experiment! provides an alternative form of residency.

Based on feedback from VAI members, it is clear that it can be difficult for the majority of visual artists to take time out of their lives to avail of residential opportunities.

Therefore, we designed this award in the form of research support, providing €5000 for the selected artist to experiment and undertake research, with the aim of bringing their practice to a new level. The opencall competition was launched in October 2023 and was open to VAI members at all career stages, working across any media.

Noel Hensey is a Kildare-based multi-disciplinary conceptual artist, working primarily in photography, sculpture, sound, video and installation. Between 2008 and 2010, he completed a PG Dip and MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, London. His art practice is inspired

by Buddhist practices and philosophies, comedy and humour, and by conceptual and post-pop art. Noel’s artistic methods include appropriation, specifically re-interpretation and re-contextualisation, interchanging mediums, and site-specific work.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Openness (2023) 36 Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne; Verloren Und Gefunden (2021) SomoS Art House, Berlin; Homage (2020) Peak, London; and So You’re Going To Die (2017) Eight Gallery, Dublin. Noel’s work has been presented in group exhibitions in: Gorey School of Art (Wexford), RHA (Dublin), a.topos (Venice), OUTPOST (Norwich), Site Gallery and S1 Artspace (Sheffield), 601 Artspace (New York), and The ICA, Unit 1 Gallery, APT Gallery, and Schwartz Gallery (all in London).

For the Experiment! Award 2023, Noel will take time out from family caring responsibilities to concentrate on his art practice. He will undertake a two-week, self-directed residency at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, where he will experiment with materials, such as jesmonite and bronze, and learn processes like mould-making and bronze-casting. He will use these skills to make more permanent versions of his ‘readymade’ sculptures.

Upon receiving the award, Noel stated: “I am honoured to be this year’s winner of VAI’s Experiment Award. VAI has played a huge part in my development as an artist, from discovering various opportunities through the eBulletin, and gaining confidence in presenting my work at Show and Tell events, to learning about the professional aspects of being an artist in webinars, and meeting other artists and art professionals at the annual Get Together event. I would personally like to thank the VAI staff, both past and present, for all their support over the years. The award will allow me to expand my practice in new creative directions through developing sculpture skills. Professionally, the prestige and recognition of being selected for this award will enhance the critical advancement of my career.”

2024 Funding Schedule A provisional schedule of Arts Council funding opportunities for 2024 has been announced. Funding will be offered through 27 award schemes, all within the context of an unprecedented level of demand. Some key points include: • Increases in Arts Grant funding; • Increases in the Workspaces Scheme; • Increased access costs for awardees; • Continuation of the Agility Award; • Two rounds of Project Awards for some artforms, including Theatre • Fixed-life projects Next Generation Artist Award, Open Call, Markievicz Award and Liam O’Flynn Award have now been completed • A review of the Capacity Building Support Scheme will be carried out with a view to the provision of future such supports For access assistance please contact the Arts Council Access Officer at vanessa.carswell@artscouncil.ie or calling +353 87 169 1155. For a full list of awards and deadlines please visit: artscouncil.ie/funding-opportunities-schedule/ Basic Income Early Research Findings The first Impact Assessment (six-month) of the Basic Income Pilot Scheme was published on 6 December 2023 by the Depart-

ment of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. It outlines changes to date that the BIA recipients have experienced within the first six months of receiving the payment. Similar reports will be published tracking the changes throughout the three-year pilot research scheme. Early research findings of Basic Income for the Arts pilot scheme show positive impact on recipients as follows: • Those in receipt invest more time and resources in their arts practice • Report a decrease in depression and anxiety • Work fewer hours in other sectors The pilot has been designed as a randomised control trial (RCT), where one group receives the payment (treatment group, or ‘BIA recipients’) and another group does not (control group). Comparing the differences in the outcomes of both groups over time allows researchers to examine the effects of the policy. All BIA participants, which include those in receipt of the payment and the control group, are required to engage in the ongoing data collection. Throughout the pilot research programme, participants will compile the same survey on their lives and creative practice every six months.

Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin TD, has welcomed the publication of the first reports compiled from data collected as part of the Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) pilot scheme.

Ormston House New Artistic Director Ormston House is excited to announce the appointment of Pádraic E. Moore as the new Artistic Director. Pádraic will step into the role in January 2024, taking over from Mary Conlon, who founded Ormston House in 2011.

Responding to his appointment, Pádraic said: “It is a privilege to be appointed as Artistic Director of Ormston House. Since its foundation in 2011 this organisation has distinguished itself as a vital resource and platform for cultural workers of all disciplines... Together we will develop an ambitious programme that resonates with local, national, and international audiences alike.”

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

Columns

Plein Air

KCAT Artists in Focus

The Painter’s Calendar

Fullness of Being

9

CORNELIUS BROWNE CONSIDERS THE TEMPORAL COMMITMENTS FOR THE FIRST IN A NEW SERIES OF COLUMNS ON KCAT ARTISTS, OF PLEIN AIR PAINTING. KATE STRAIN INTRODUCES THE WORK OF SINÉAD FAHEY. I GREET 2024 with a paintbrush in my hand,

366 boards primed, planning to paint a landscape on every day of the year. Other years have begun with mild notions of this undertaking rousing me from my sleep with the first breath of January. Many times, I have painted the newborn year and failed to reach its infancy. Last January, having reached the third week of the calendar, I stood painting a snowfall over the bay as darkness fell and the ground turned to ice.

I woke to chilblains on my toes that were agonising. Days went by unpainted. My new winter painting boots are several sizes too large, roomy enough to accommodate padding. This paint-the-day (or night) project will run alongside two others, meaning I may paint more than 400 landscapes by next Hogmanay. The notion that wakes me most forcibly nowadays is that I am running out of time.

My spirit guide for this project is a book, published in 1827 to poor sales and scant acclaim. John Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar suffered an arduous gestation at odds with the joyful 197-year-old publication that readers take into their hearts today.

This poet’s almanac freezes in time a rural year, except, of course, nothing birthed by Clare’s ink was ever frozen. Getting his entire world onto paper in the present tense, without the little gates of punctuation, or what he perceived as the oppressive pedantry of grammar, Clare fills his verse with life, his gaze rupturing with love for every flower, bird, insect, animal or shift in weather. Climate activists cite “environmental generational amnesia” as a psychological impediment to halting nature’s decline. Each generation accepts the environment into which it is born, no matter how developed, urbanised or polluted, as normal, thus repositioning the baseline for what we call nature. Birds and insects alive in Clare’s era are no longer so alive in our world. Fields once lush with blossoming colour have been buried with the poet who trampled them. John Clare witnessed the beginning of this process; we are perhaps

here to see its end.

Temporality and calendrical cycles have shepherded my painting since I first picked up a brush in childhood. Some 40 years ago, I devoted a winter to making a book of hours, filled with scenes painted outdoors.

The following year I made one for each season. Across the middle of my life stretches a chasm of decades where I abandoned art, my youthful work lost to its depths. For all that I paint in the present tense, within the durational framework of single sessions, open to whatever visual occurrences materialise here and now, my paintings are also acts of remembrance. Out in nature, within whose breath I stand before my easel, time is exteriorised. Inside me, the painter in the landscape, time is internalised. Nature’s calendar dates budbursts and flowerings, arrivals and departures of migratory birds, the lengthening and shortening of daylight. My calendar dates sorrows and joys through time, reaching towards people dear and departed. The paintings hope to bridge these two calendars. I am painting the same patch of earth I painted in the past, as my disappeared self in the landscape of my ancestors. Often, walking across fields with my easel and paints, I have the sense that I am walking alongside this lost artist, under skies that are now emptier of wings.

I envision The Painter’s Calendar as a single work in 366 segments. This may never be exhibited, yet in the event of a gallery outing, I see the ‘days’ unframed, in the spirit of Clare’s unpunctuated manuscripts.

My painterly ‘grammar’ is raw and unoppressive, informed by life rather than learning. On exposed headlands, often I see squally showers half an hour before they reach my painting spot. They pass through me and away into the hills, leaving behind flurries of haphazard marks, half-painted by wind and rain, which move beyond representation. In these exposed moments, I am painting time.

Cornelius Browne is an artist based in County Donegal.

Cornelius Browne on New Year’s Day, 2023; photograph by Paula Corcoran, courtesy of the artist.

Sinéad Fahey, Flowers with Hands, 2023, acrylic with Posca markers on canvas, 2023; image courtesy of the artist and KCAT.

THREE CENTRAL BROAD-PETALED flowers, blooming and bursting with life, despite being static and rendered in markers, stand tall in a vessel surrounded by open hands and jaunty chevrons that snake around invisible obstacles across multidimensions.

This painting is a snapshot; a moment exploded and frozen in vivid multicolour celebrating, in non-linear ways, time given to watering plants, watching swallows, bidding greetings or farewells. Everything present radiates with its own fullness of being. The world of this work is detailed, frantic, colourful, unruly, expansive and segmented. The artist, Sinéad Fahey, has spent over two decades developing her artistic process, building a rich visual vocabulary, and finetuning a rigorous drafting technique. Her subject matter has evolved over time, but certain motifs endure and recur: flowers, birds, hands, friends, and the vibrant space between them.

Fahey’s work often depicts the people, objects and activities that populate her environment. Her studio is in the Kilkenny Collective for Arts Talent (KCAT) Arts Centre in Callan, County Kilkenny. KCAT is a lively artistic hub dedicated to the belief that everyone, regardless of background, age, gender or ability, should have access to a creative world – whether as an artist, student, participant, or audience member.

A studio member of KCAT since 2001, Fahey is disciplined in her practice. Everyday activities include making new work, archiving and administrative tasks, teabreaks with colleagues and friends, packing works to be shipped off or stored, ordering materials, cleaning, and watering plants.

For Fahey, these vital activities of ongoing maintenance and attention accumulate to compose a holistic practice of care. As

Dominic Thorpe so succinctly articulates, Fahey “shares her work in order to decorate the world with the beauty she sees in it.”

Fahey’s imagery often wanders from painting into three-dimensional realms.

She was recently commissioned to produce a mural for ‘Wayfinders’, an inclusive arts participation project, produced by Áit Productions and curated by Etaoin Holahan, that considers ‘wayfinding’ to explore sustainability, connectivity, and biocultural diversity around Bridge Street in Callan.

Fahey created a mural for the three-storey building where KCAT intersects with the town. Fahey is no stranger to largescale murals, having previously devised the ornate explosion of joy and colour that adorns KCAT’s façade.

Her latest mural depicts a flock of birds in flight, swirling and swooping around the full breadth of an enormous wall. Fahey’s bold line was translated from paper to building with fearless fluency by graffiti artist, Dan Leo. Now the birds swarm over Callan like elegant messengers. As Maeve Mulrennan wrote in a catalogue essay in 2017, the artist’s preoccupations vary from “the micro to the macro – depicting scenes from real life while proposing an alternative way of experiencing real life.” That Fahey’s work can so masterfully evoke more-thanhuman perspectives is testament to her strength as an artist, noticing things, and showing them with a lightness, strengthened by care and attention.

Kate Strain is founder of Kunstverein Aughrim, a curatorial production office for contemporary art projects, supported by the Arts Council. kunstverein.ie

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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

Columns

Organisation

VAI Award

RHA at 200

Masking / Unmasking

ABIGAIL O'BRIEN REFLECTS ON BICENTENNIAL CELEBRATIONS AT THE ROYAL HIBERNIAN ACADEMY LAST YEAR.

VAI EXCHANGE AWARD WINNER CHINEDUM MUOTTO DISCUSSES RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN HIS INTERDISCIPLINARY PRACTICE.

THE ROYAL HIBERNIAN Academy (RHA)

THE MAKING OF a mask requires an imagene

is the oldest artist-led organisation in the country. We are artists supporting artists. On 9 October 1823, King George IV granted the RHA her Royal Charter. 14 male artists, “trusted and loyal subjects”, petitioned the King on the basis of the success of the Royal Academy in London, which had been founded some decades earlier. They saw the Charter as a benchmark to help promote a National School of Art in Ireland. A coat of arms was fashioned carrying the motto Nulla Dies Sine Linea (No Day Without A Line). Drawing has always been at the core of the RHA’s founding ideology.

When the first RHA President, landscape painter, William Ashford, died after a year in office, Francis Johnston, the most celebrated architect of the day, succeeded him. A wealthy and generous patron of the arts, Johnston designed and gifted Academy House at 35 Abbey Street, to the fledgling RHA. With its splendid galleries, council room, library and school, the building was completed in 1826, in time for the first RHA Annual Exhibition. Johnston’s generosity was later matched by that of businessman Matt Gallagher in the 1970s, who gifted the RHA its current home on Ely Place, which now houses our Galleries and School.

This location on Abbey Street put the RHA at the heart of the Easter Rising of 1916. A shell from an English gunboat, The Helga, aimed at the GPO, fell short, igniting a barricade and starting a fire that engulfed Academy House and adjacent buildings, destroying everything in its path.

The RHA Keeper, Joseph Malachy Kavanagh, escaped the burning building with the two Royal Charters, the minutes book, the insurance policy, and the Presidential Chain, which exist to this day. But it was a devastating loss – one of the biggest cultural calamities of the century.

In 2023 Dublin City Council unveiled a commemorative plaque on Abbey Street in memory of the first half of the Academy’s great history, which had been lost.

Last year’s important commemorative programme, marking the 200th anniversary of the RHA, began with the opening of the exhibition, ‘Six Architectural Presidents’, at the Irish Architectural Archive in Merrion Square, which presented portraits and works by past presidents from the field of architecture.

Two commemorative stamps were commissioned by An Post, illustrating the main functions of the Academy as a place for exhibition and learning. We also commissioned a book on our story, by acclaimed critic and writer Cristín Leach, titled From Ten ‘Till Dusk: A Portrait of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts in Twelve Stories (RHA, 2023). This publication was made possible by the generous support of both

IPUT Real Estate and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.

For the first time in 200 years, our Academy Assembly was held outside Dublin last February, when we were generously hosted by The Model in Sligo, giving rise to an accompanying programme of classes and talks. Last year we also celebrated our School, and our recent accreditation from TU Dublin, with Head of School Colin Martin, the tutors and students. The making of art and the importance of peer learning were the focus of our ten-day Festival of Making, held during October 2023, when over 6000 visitors viewed talks and demonstrations on a variety of art-making processes. Internationally recognised artist Maser, created Around The Block, Ireland’s largest augmented reality experience to date, which was launched on Culture Night at the RHA Gallery. The 193rd Annual Exhibition opened in May with record art sales and visitors, making it a key event for artists and buyers alike.

Unafraid of self-criticality, we highlighted the fact that it took one hundred years for the RHA to elect the first female member, Sarah Purser, and another hundred before the first woman President was elected. The exhibition, ‘It Took a Century: Women Artists and the RHA’ opened at the National Gallery of Ireland in June 2023, presenting a historic survey of the past 100 years, including work by current woman members of the Academy, which has now achieved equitable representation in its membership. On the opening night, RHA Director, Patrick T. Murphy, said: “This exhibition is the jewel of our Bicentennial Programme; it is as important to celebrate what we have achieved over the past two hundred years as it is to underline where we failed to progress. We are indebted to the National Gallery of Ireland for collaborating with us on this exhibition – the brilliance of the artists here casts a deep shadow on the record of the RHA in relation to inclusion, and with lessons learnt, bodes well for our future.”

Among other commemorative exhibitions, Ballinglen Museum of Art presented ‘RHA Ballinglen Fellows Exhibition’ (28 July – 25 September 2023), comprising works from the Ballinglen Permanent Collection. Ballina 2023 presented ‘RHA West’, a selection of the RHA Members Collection in partnership with Ballina Arts Centre and Mayo County Council Civic Offices. In addition, ‘The Bend Back: RHA 200 from the Crawford Art Gallery Collection’ continues until 28 January. As we celebrate our Academy, let us continue to cultivate a vibrant community and ensure that the RHA remains a vital and inclusive cultural hub for years to come.

Dr Abigail O’Brien is RHA President. rhagallery.ie

(imagining) that, I am of the opinion, cannot be taught. I grew up with them. As a young boy in Nigeria, I was lucky to have access to ceremonies, traditions and totems that visualised and crystallised signs and symbols within my consciousness. My method of research is primarily auto-ethnographic as it aligns with my method of creation. My interests are particularly within the ‘living’ – that which is alive and activated through the process of living. In my obsession with found objects, I am attempting to breathe life into things that now exist within this dichotomy of life and death. Through the intentional acts of touch, imagination and fascination, I am attempting to find a new life for these objects as poetically and abstractly as possible.

I believe that through our interaction with time and space, we are transported to futures and pasts which seem forever intertwined, as though we had been here before.

I create strictly from a spiritual place in which I am not concerned with knowing but, rather, the unknown. Given the histories of colonialism and paternalism towards respective African art practices and forms, my research into mask-making practices across respective African cultures solidifies my assertion that African art has always positioned itself in the contemporary, given its constant transmutability as well as cultural significance for the communities it serves. My research took me to explore mask-making within the countries Morocco, Barbados, Haiti and Tanzania.

This journey with mask making began during the height of the pandemic. As an interdisciplinary artist, I find myself stimulated by the world around me – the sounds, colours, parts and most importantly, the people. I see working with found objects as a collaborative and socially engaged activity, through the augmentation of everyday objects that define and build the structures we see or experience in some shape. There is a clear focus around sustainability and sensitivities towards a better world, as these pieces – that would have otherwise ended up in landfills, waterways, or in the air we breathe – are diverted towards transformative art production.

My selection for the VAI Exchange Award truly solidified the belief in myself as an artist and the validation of my practice. I still remember getting the phone call from Noel, and the warm words we exchanged – this remains a highlight of 2022 for me. I believe my selection for this award, based on my proposal, is a testament to VAI’s commitment to cultural diversity beyond superficiality, whilst also prioritising the reflexivity needed to be an artist, in my case, of Nigerian heritage. Through this residency and from my research, I have expanded my material curiosity to include more materials from the sea, such as sea

moss, sea sludge, shells, and fish scales, to name a few.

As stated by Beninois artist, Romuald Hazoumè, in the catalogue accompanying his solo exhibition at IMMA in 2011: “It is the work of the African artist to make masks.” For me, masks suggest the ability to conjure the unknown; the abstract yet personal. The personification of objects is something we understand, as it helps us to see ourselves through the eyes of the ‘other’ – in this case an animate object. Very recently, as a society, we have been confronted with masks of a different kind. However restrictive and impersonal, these masks became part of our everyday. My entry point into this creation award then became the marrying of both the everyday and impersonal.

One of the works I subsequently created was selected for ‘Samhain’, a group show at The Copper House in November.

My exhibition last June at Sean McDermott Swimming Pool, as part of my Creative Residency in Art and Sport with Dublin City Culture Company, marked my first and only solo exhibition to date. The experience of it, at times, felt overwhelming – the idea of a site-specific installation in a swimming pool, given the socio-politics of how this building became free to use, and also what it meant to me. Sean McDermott Swimming Pool was the first pool I attended when I arrived in Ireland at the age of ten. I still remember walking down the narrow deck to meet the rest of my classmates, who were as eager as I was to get in, but we all definitely varied, in terms of our capabilities and confidence in the water.

My ambition with the exhibition was to showcase the breath of my multi-disciplinary practice whilst in turn foregrounding experiences of women of African descent, in relation to water and swimming as a sport. The exhibition touched on themes of religion, memory and trauma, joy and freedom, with a subtle yet overarching thread of folklore. The exhibition title, ‘Mama Wata: Mmiri Niile’, translates directly as ‘Mother of Water: All of the Waters’. During my residency, I was interested in creating bodies of work that transcend the various intersections I was exploring as part of my socially-engaged practice, such as race, gender and class. It was important for me that audiences, irrespective of their backgrounds, could identify with the stories, images, smells and sounds which enveloped Sean McDermott Swimming Pool. Retrospectively, I have a sense of pride, especially in what was achieved over the course of the residency, which culminated in the exhibition.

Chinedum Muotto is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural producer, researcher, and educator who is currently based in Dublin. muotto.com

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In Focus Textiles

Shapeshifting Ciara O’Connor VAI Member

True to Our Roots Ceadogán Rugmakers Colm Kenny

CEADOGÁN RUGMAKERS HAVE been mak-

ing hand tufted rugs in the southeast of Wexford for over 34 years. Starting out under dye house master, Tom Ceadogán, as a small hearth rug business in Wexford town in 1981, it was then acquired by Denis Kenny and Fiona Gilboy in 1989. Denis had undertaken an apprenticeship with Tom after stints as a fisherman, teacher and pig farmer – the long and winding road!

In 2020, the baton was passed once again. Having spent several years deeply involved in the running of Ceadogán Rugmakers, I took the reins along with Martina Navrátilová. In keeping with tradition, both Martina and I found our way to rug making via the scenic route, with backgrounds in furniture and fine art printmaking – and a few other detours along the way.

Over three decades, Ceadogán has evolved from a small hearth rug business to a leading maker of fine, bespoke rugs and wall hangings. Our works can be found hanging or lying all around the globe. United in our passion for design and making, the Ceadogán team are dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in our craft, and pride in our work. We remain true to our roots – fiercely independent, committed to our local heritage and the tradition of exceptional craftsmanship.

The workshop and showroom are situated on the family homestead, a stone walled farmyard that dates back to the 1600s, overlooking Bannow Bay Estuary in County Wexford. Collaboration has always been an important part of the ethos at Ceadogán, which keeps things interesting and brings new life and ideas to the table in every instance. Since taking over in 2020, Martina and I have focused on the strengths that make Ceadogán unique in the field – namely, commitment to exceptional craftsmanship, collaborative and forward-thinking design approaches, the rootedness of this business in its surroundings and locality, and the use of sustainably sourced, high-quality natural materials. We have removed all synthetics from our rugs,

now using only natural fibres, fabrics and adhesives. All waste and byproduct can now be composted or used in compostable byproducts.

In 2022, we reached out to 12 artists, inviting them to take part in an exhibition of individual one-off rugs or wall hangings.

The exhibition, titled ‘Island’, was held in January 2023 and ended in an online charitable auction. With some very well-known artists involved – like Sean Scully, Dorothy Cross, and Gottfried Helnwein – the show received a lot of attention. The auction raised €82k for the Peter McVerry trust, as well as €32k for a regenerative project at the site of Ceadogán’s workshop, which introduced a herd of alpaca from which we have been making yarns and rugs, while supporting and creating habitat for local wildlife. It was the first show of this kind for Ceadogán and a steep learning curve. The making of the rugs was at times very technically challenging, pushing to the outer limits the craftsmanship and skills required.

Collaborating with 12 unique artists also brought challenges and the administration and management of the project was an enormous undertaking.

The exhibited works firmly straddled the boundary between art and craft – a position that Ceadogán have become more than comfortable with over the years. The success of ‘Island’ has underpinned and nurtured all of those strengths which Martina and I had chosen to focus on. We have a longheld belief in the power of the arts to create and inspire change, and to have a positive influence in the world. Craftsmanship and the collaborative processes were incredibly nourished by the whole experience. The much-needed funds raised for Ceadogán’s regenerative project places our making process right at the heart of our surroundings in reciprocal and mutually beneficial ways.

Ceadogán Rugmakers is a luxury textile brand based in rural County Wexford. ceadogan.ie

‘Island’ exhibition, Hang Tough Contemporary, January 2023 with Colm Kenny, Peter McVerry and Martina Navrátilová.

Ciara O’Connor, Luscious Labahaoise Sizzles on Cinderblocks as Flirty Fidelma Frolicks on Frontloader, thread, found fabric, linen, 52 x 62cm, 2023; image courtesy of the artist.

I WAS FASHIONABLY late to the textiles par-

ty. In fact, I am still a little surprised when I hear myself being described as a textile artist, as I studied painting and printmaking in college. I didn’t excel at either, but I knew I could draw. It is something that has always come easily to me. I like to draw rapidly, expressively and without an agenda. The practice of meticulous forward planning, a tradition I thought necessary with textiles, went against what I felt art should be. I saw embroidery as something rigid, a means of beautifying, and embarked on it merely to scratch a creative itch whilst being shadowed by a toddler.

My first embroidery was inspired by an image of a pink grapefruit. It reminded me of a vaginal opening, and I made it to make a friend laugh. I enjoyed the process. It is a very therapeutic thing to sit with needle and thread, and so I found myself making another embroidery, and then another. But everything changed when I discovered textile art on social media and became open to its endless possibilities. When I came across free-motion embroidery (which is essentially drawing with a sewing machine, dropping the feed dogs, and using the needle like a pen), the wheels went into motion and suddenly I found myself with a practice again. Free motion allows for the speed and fluidity that excites me, while hand stitching is where I get to slow down and really contemplate the resolution of each piece.

Both practices are equally important to me.

I enjoy giving things new life; taking fabrics that have their own history and reinventing their purpose. I have become a regular in my local charity shops, prowling the aisles for old table linen and vintage napkins for use in future work. I am also the proud owner of a kaleidoscope of ethically ambiguous blouses that are just the right density for quilting and collage. I love the

dichotomy of depicting modern women, their complex thoughts and desires, using a traditionally quaint medium associated with female domesticity – and saving a little fabric from landfill in the process.

I love a bold, unapologetic outline.

Sometimes I wonder if I should be more subtle and think about introducing new colours into my line work, but more often than not, I go back to black. I think it comes back to my love of drawing and the fact that I’m not trying to be painterly; realistic portrayals are not particularly important to me.

I get the idea down quickly in dark thread and everything after that is icing on the cake.

My discovery of textiles unfolded organically, and I have had to ground my practice in research-based learning and constant upskilling. In my current studio structure, I am learning patchwork quilting via online tutorials. My textile journey has a self-directed curriculum, and within its realms, I am continually shapeshifting.

My last body of work dealt with themes of sexual assault and my next project is based on stories of loss and the emotional release of grief. It wasn’t a conscious decision to root so much of my practice in trauma, but I think we have so much to learn from it. I am fascinated by the affect it has on us, both positive and negative. I believe that one of the main reasons you’re reading my words here today, the reason I have a practice, is because of the loss I’ve experienced, and the subsequent loss of worrying about what people think. There is the most wonderful abundance of creative freedom in that.

Ciara O’Connor is a Kerry-based visual artist who works with textiles and embroidery. @ciaraoconnorartist

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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

In Focus

Loose Ends Áine Byrne VAI Member

Áine Byrne, Medium Mediums, 2023, tarp and tufted fabric, performance written by Isadora Epstein, Douglas Hyde Gallery; photograph by Cait Fahy, courtesy of the artist.

Installation view, ‘Lets Go Inside’, 126 Artist-Run Gallery, featuring Isadora Epstein performing Siren; photograph by Vanessa Jordan, courtesy of the artist.

I AM A textile artist and maker based in Dublin. My

suited me. In 2018, when Soojin moved to a bigger studio, I took her space in a warehouse in Hackney Wick, and began to make my own work, while running workshops in the adjacent space alongside some visiting lecturing.

During this time, I juggled lecturing on a foundation course in Cambridge, running weaving workshops, café or shop work, and working in the studio.

Since returning to Dublin at the end of 2019, I have been working as a fulltime assistant lecturer at NCAD. Although I spend a good chunk of my year teaching, I have carved out more time for my practice, and have had some brilliant opportunities to develop and showcase my work – from my first solo exhibition in Hens Teeth studio last September, to a number of group exhibitions in Dublin, and one earlier this year at 126 Artist-Run Gallery in Galway. Collaborations with artist Isadora Epstein have been enriching. One work, which started off as a costume for her performance, The Dodo, was chosen to be exhibited at VISUAL Carlow’s summer show, ‘Artworks: Remembering the Future’, which was a huge achievement. More recently I spent three months on a research residency in Thammasat University in Bangkok, developing woven work, which concluded in a solo exhibition at the end of August. This trip was hugely inspirational, and I am still absorbing and developing work from that time, which will hopefully lead to exciting things in the new year.

As I write this, I am currently clearing out the garden shed in my rented accommodation, which my landlord reluctantly but kindly allowed me to use as a studio for the past three years. It’s been a hard process, as everything I’ve ever made is held in the confines of this space, as well as hoarded objects and new works I’ve cluttered it with over the last while. I wonder whether holding onto years of past projects, scraps and found materials is some kind of optimism about circularity in textile work, or whether they are simply loose ends.

practice involves textile construction, drawing, photography, sculpture, and costume, and has always been rooted in material process, colour and driven by materials. I studied Textile Design in NCAD, specialising in woven textiles in 2012 and then went on to complete an MA at the RCA in London in 2015. I lived in London for nearly eight years before returning to Dublin for a full-time teaching position at NCAD within First Year Studies and the Textile and Surface Design Department, where I first studied, which feels very circular.

My training within textiles, and especially woven textiles, has given me a heightened appreciation of how materials are made – from the fibre and yarn to the construction of fabric on a loom – the patience it teaches you, as well as the organisation and planning skills. You have to think ahead, prepare your yarn, consider colour and material interactions, and you spend so much time handling and getting to know the tools and materials you work with. There are ritual-like motions to prepare every step before making a cloth, including the dying, the warp-making, and winding yarn onto a loom. I try to return to these processes when I am at a loose end.

This method and appreciation have really informed my current way of working and how I deal with materials as well as my teaching practice.

During my time studying within textile departments, I never really fitted into what usually constitutes a typical weaver, or designer for that matter. While most students were working with fine wools and silks, making beautiful woven samples at their looms, I was on the other side of the studio, pumping expanding foam into a jacquard fabric, or trying to weave with found building materials and ropes. For a long time, I didn’t know where to place myself in this industry.

Studying in the UK really opened me up to the world of textile art, and my work having a space in a gallery.

I had brilliant lecturers like artists Freddie Robins and Fiona Curran, who validated the way I was working.

Rather than trying to fit into the box, I was encouraged to expand on how I was working on a large scale with a variety of making methods, such as screen-printing, or building with found materials. I almost treated the loom like a construction site, forming fabrics that escaped the confines of the loom, spilling into sculpture and costumes for performance.

After finishing my MA, I went to India to carry out an internship at a textile factory in Delhi for four months. The factory I worked in was predominantly making homeware textiles for the western market and provided ‘handmade looking’ products for wellknown companies like Zara Home and Pottery Barn.

Although this experience was a mostly extraordinary one, it gave me a stark understanding of where and how a lot of our products are produced, and how disconnected most people are with this idea. On my return to London, I worked for a couple of years for weave studios, producing digital woven designs, mostly for fast fashion companies like Topshop, Zara and some slightly higher end brands. This process of working digitally felt so disconnected to the finished fabric that hadn’t been produced yet, most likely being sent off to China to be produced into thousands of metres. Paired with my time in India, this experience really put me off working as a textile designer, or being in any way part of the chain that produces so much quantity in such a fast turnover.

Once I quit working for these design studios, I began to work for Korean artist, Soojin Kang, who was looking for a weaver to help construct a huge woven artwork she was making for ‘Collect’ in the Saatchi Gallery. I then continued to assist her on a number of projects over a two-year period, while forming a friendship and learning so much about how to navigate the art world in London, from writing applications to working with curators and meeting art collectors. This was very time intensive, hands-on work, creating large woven sculptures that would take months to make; however, this connection with materials and slow methodical work

Áine Byrne is an artist, designer, and educator working in Dublin. @ainekbyrne

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

In Focus

13

Slow Time Contemporary Tapestry Artists Ireland Frances Crowe

Lorna Donlon, Science is very near us-Looking at the Smell of everyday Gorse, 2020 [Detail], handwoven tapestry, cotton, linen, nettle, silk, metallic yarns, 120 x 120 cm; image courtesy of the artist.

CONTEMPORARY TAPESTRY ARTISTS Ireland is a net-

work of ten professional tapestry weavers working across Ireland. Tapestry weavers have a particular relationship with time – we do ‘slow time,’ elasticated time.

Our practice is more easily characterised by decade than by year, making the prospect of individually building a collection of work for exhibition somewhat quixotic.

Originally founded in 1990, our current members – Muriel Beckett, Mary Cuthbert, Frances Crowe, Lorna Donlon, Áine Dunne, Terry Dunne, Angela Forte, Anne Harte, Uisce Jakubczyk and Theresa McKenna – joined forces again in 2020, primarily to create opportunities for exhibiting together and in so doing, raising awareness of hand-woven tapestry in Ireland.

We are all makers, concerned with aspects such as technique, materiality, colour, pattern, surface and narratives of expression in the construction of hand-woven tapestries. The uniquely slow physical act of passing, hand to hand, non-continuous coloured wefts over and under a stretched wool, cotton or linen warp is as much the ground we stand on as the discipline we push forward against. It is our medium, our métier, even when our work sometimes finds alternative modes of realisation, as in Theresa McKenna’s recent enormous handmade paper pieces about the fragmented nature of memory, or in Lorna Donlon’s science inspired cabinets, filled with narratives of collected and assembled objects.

For us, the inherent physicality of the weaving process – the direct engagement with warp and weft – and the iterative rhythm of movement between hand and eye are the essentials in our working days. But the apparent straightforward simplicity of this process ought not to see it rendered purely craftwork, for there is a lot more at stake for the weaver than a finished product. Ideas implicate themselves, persist, demand to be heard, are lived with, considered, crystallise; the exquisite slowness of the work involved in bringing them to fruition renders them born to the world, alive, held in the tapestry, however abstract the inherent imagery.

This process holds true even for weavers like Frances Crowe who weaves relatively quickly, intuitively, dynamically responding to her materials as she explores

her personal landscape of memory and emotion. Áine Dunne considers her process of tapestry weaving to be a pathway, a thread that connects the world within to the world outside. For Angela Forte, the characteristic energy, quality and intensity of colour that can be achieved in a woven tapestry is the whole point. Colour is her process, her start, and her end. Uisce Jakubczyk has developed a technique for using recycled paper in her tapestries. For her, paper holds the memory of the tree and acts as a physical representation of her interest in heritage, while Mary Cuthbert skilfully blends and mixes different coloured yarns to create an effect highly characteristic of woven tapestry in her interpretations of music and song. Terry Dunne makes large-scale work following close observations of nature while Muriel Beckett’s weavings reflect the perennial changing beauty and colours of her surroundings. Anne Harte weaves delicate miniature tapestries, distillations inspired by winter gold and summer green, earth and water.

It is really exciting to see recent interventions such as digital Jacquard tapestries and gun-tufted pieces bringing textiles into the mainstream of contemporary art in Ireland. Versed and skilled in the language of tapestry weaving, we hope we will be forgiven for believing that there is still a place for hand-woven tapestries, luminous in intensity of physical colour and quality of object, woven in slow time, by skilled weavers. These things take time to weave, but they are worthwhile investments.

Contemporary Tapestry Artists’ current exhibition ‘Slow Time With A Butterfly’ was first seen in King House Boyle, County Roscommon, during the Interconnections Fibre Art Festival in April 2022. It travelled to Market House Gallery in Cappoquin, County Waterford in June 2022 and was hung in the Pearse Museum in Rathfarnham during September and October 2023. We acknowledge support from Design and Crafts Council of Ireland & OPW. Contemporary Tapestry Artists Ireland is a network of ten professional tapestry weavers. behance.net/ctaireland

Muriel Beckett, Ripples 1, 2022 [Detail], handwoven, wool warp, linen weft, 50 x 145 cm; photograph by Jasson Photograph, courtesy of the artist.

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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

In Focus

Grand Land Sinéad Kennedy VAI Member

I AM A multi-disciplinary visual artist and musician.

I work with fabric when making flags, textile sculptures, and costumes, but I also make drawings, collages, paintings, zines, and short stories. Both of my grannies knit Aran jumpers for a living, working for factories in Donegal, and my dad spent some time working in the textile factory in Kilcar, before emigrating to America, so I suppose textiles are in my blood.

I was born in The Bronx, New York, in 1990. We moved to Ireland in 1997, first to Donegal where my parents are from, and then to Meath. I moved to Dublin for college and have been here since. I graduated from NCAD in 2013. My undergrad was in Fashion Design, where I acquired technical skills like sewing, pattern-cutting and illustration. During my time in the Fashion Department, I went to London to do an internship with Gareth Pugh, which confirmed my intuition that the fashion industry was not for me.

Instead, I wanted to make sculptures out of fabric, rather than rapidly making garments to reflect seasonal trends.

I avoided computers and technology as much as I could, during my time in NCAD, preferring to work with my hands. A few years later, I enrolled in a Springboard MA course in Creative Digital Media in TU Dublin. There were modules in critical theory, interactive technologies, and graphic design, which I got a lot from. I did the course to get away from working in the service industry, as my main income was from waitressing (and teaching music). I still much prefer working with my hands in an analogue way as opposed to looking at a screen, and this is reflected in my art and music practices. I play the fiddle, bouzouki, dabble with analogue synthesizers, and I collect tape cassettes and vinyl records.

Over the past ten years, I have moved around different studios in Dublin, including Talbot Studios, Monster Truck, Hendrons Studios, A4 Sounds, and also

sheds in gardens in rented homes, and spare rooms in friend’s houses. The studios I most enjoy are ones where like-minded people are milling around, talking about the various projects they are working on, as opposed to the solitary studio, where you are on your own.

Since 2019, I have been building a fictional world called Grand Land and making civic paraphernalia for it. I made a series of flags to represent the inhabitants of Grand Land, some of which were shown in VISUAL Carlow last summer. When making them, I was thinking about ideas of emigration and movement from one place to another. The larger tapestries depict a sequence of revolutionary events in Grand Land’s history. I was looking at the Asafo flags from Ghana, John Hargrave and The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift’s clothing logos and flags, and also artists who have made flags, in particular The American Flag (c. 1974), The Black German Flag (1974) and The World Flag (1991) by James Lee Byars, and The Gates (2005) by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

I was also interested in the professional and industrial clothing designs of Varvara Fyodorovna Stepanova.

Closer to home, I was greatly inspired by The Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment and the flags and banners they made for protests and demonstrations. For me, the only function of art is to ignite social change; anything outside that is decoration.

I have taken a short break from Grand Land. My dad passed away during the summer and I am still catching up with myself after that. I still have a few projects on the go, some music gigs here and there, a series of cat illustrations as revolutionary leaders, and I made a nice big Palestinian flag and hope to make some more. I’m moving into a new studio in December and plan on getting back to Grand Land then.

Sinéad Kennedy is a visual artist, designer, and musician based in Dublin. @sineadok

All images: Sinéad Kennedy, ‘Remembering the Future’, installation view, VISUAL Carlow, June-August 2023; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and VISUAL Carlow.

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

In Focus

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Materiality and Meaning Richard Malone VAI Member

TEXTILES CARRY A personal and political weight

through which I understand the world, and in turn, myself. For me, the medium represents labour practices, class, nationality, the domestic and the industrial, gender expectations, queerness, desire, human experience, hungry capitalism, and its exact opposite.

The commonality of textiles in our lives may have led to it being somewhat overlooked in art historical contexts. The labour that is responsible for textiles production is almost categorically invisible. We are surrounded by and inundated with garments, textiles, bedlinen, sportswear, home-furnishings that are created by human hands, without signs of the humans who created them. Textiles exist uniquely across disciplines – an embroidery is a drawing, fabric has form, stitch and weave are both action and performance, a painting is often on woven canvas. It’s this very transience and lack of formal categorisation that consistently engages me. Textiles are both expansive and overlooked.

Material has a way of situating me in the world with certainty – a direct link to where I’m from, and the lived experiences and environments I discovered myself in.

It can also ‘other’ me entirely, expressing queerness through dress, or working-class identity through material and process choices. I utilise textiles, I realise now, for their humanity and complexity. It is these same multiplicities that I believe every human to be made of. A body of work can exist outside of traditional categorisation, as a person can.

Textiles communicate the labour I have understood from a very young age. In Wexford, we lived opposite Pierces Foundry that once employed my grandfather, while the Max Mauch factory employed my father. My grandmother was a seamstress at the local hospital who later worked out of her home making cushions, curtains, upholstering, altered clothes, created various ribbons for horse shows, and plaited wool bands in Wexford colours. I was always fascinated by the materiality in each of these spaces, the sways between warmth, care, compassion and the industrial, functional, metallic. Each represents graft and labour, ritual, action, and community, but these processes have lost value in our culture. They’re not fast enough, not cheap enough, not automated enough.

I have witnessed a very real decline in employment in my lifetime. Factories closing down, conglomerates moving in, jobs being lost, and the very real culture that surrounds this labour being eradicated. These skills are culturally significant; however, it is a sincere lack of value and respect for these working-class cultures that has led to their dismissal. The work that I make carries that same labour – whether metal bent around my own body that I’ve welded, or the thousands of invisible stitches that can render a sculpture weightless. Seeing this labour occupy space in galleries, museums, and art institutions gives me a sense of pride, and a conceptual manifestation of the identity politics it stems from.

After completing a FETAC Art and Design course in Waterford, I studied Womenswear at Central Saint Martins, mainly because I understood a certain class pressure to graduate with real, employable skills. However, helping my grandmother with a cross-stitch or witnessing her skill and love for sewing was equally significant, and I learned as much about colour, working on building sites with my dad, as I did in art school.

Learning is embedded in my work, and without the formality of education, the link to the place I’m from might still be the same. The material language that I know hasn’t changed.

Textiles have been significant in my experience of identity. They carry ideas of sentimentality and nostalgia – a smell, the closeness to our skin, intimacy of touch, or flags, which can communicate national or regional identities without language. They also rep-

resent the gendered roles and opposing materials of working-class environments. Men worked with concrete, wood, plaster, or metal, in factories or on building sites; whereas women’s labour centred on the domestic, where I witnessed the care and craft of mending or stitching – a linoleum tablecloth, the texture of a tea towel, the hum of a sewing machine.

As a child, and more so as an adult, I find this difference fascinating and confusing, likely because I haven’t found a place in either world. My own gender identity is not something I consider definitive, so I lean on these multifaceted experiences in my own work. In all its complexity, I have a certain refusal to rely on the visual tropes associated with the intersections of my identity. I’ve witnessed scores of extremely privileged and wealthy people commodify ideas of uniform, utility, labour, and class, as a way to communicate that one is more grounded, or perhaps that we live in a meritocracy, which of course is untrue. It baffles me to watch the culture I’m from become fetishised, which is not the same as honouring or respecting it.

I sincerely believe that our lived experiences, labour, and cultural realities – as queer or gender fluid people, immigrants, or the working class – to be valuable. It is my intention to develop a language that recognises the transience and the overlaps in our identities, refusing categorisation. This is a quiet act of resistance. In many ways, my research exists to make sense of something that is invisible and complex. Hopefully it illustrates the important culture of textiles, its inherent labour and humanity, as well as the medium’s very real connection to identity and the lived experience of otherness.

Richard Malone is an Irish multi-disciplinary artist working between London and Wexford. @richardmalone

Richard Malone, Restore and Repair, 2023; photograph courtesy of the artist.

Richard Malone, poem in the dark about sadness / filíocht faoi bhrón as an dorchadas, 2023, installation view, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2023; photograph courtesy of the artist and Royal Academy of Arts.

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Artist-Led

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

All images: Installation view, ‘messy business’, QSS Belfast; photographs by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artists and QSS Belfast.

HERMETICS IN THE Studio is a group of four painters: Sinéad

HERmetics in the Studio MEMBERS OF A NEW PAINTING COLLECTIVE SHARE THEIR MOTIVATIONS AND SPACES OF ENGAGEMENT.

Aldridge, Patricia Doherty, Mary Theresa Keown, and Louise Wallace. They each trained in Ireland, where they now live and work, with the exception of Aldridge, who currently resides in Berlin.

The group came together online in 2022, embarking on a series of monthly Zoom meetings. Their objective was to share the highs and lows of studio practice, to move through works-in-progress, and to try and find resolution.

This monthly appointment to ‘show and tell’ resulted in an ongoing dialogue that dissects the travails of a painter’s ordinarily quite solitary life in the studio. It is a conversation without a full stop. The four artists found comradeship and support in sharing their experiences both inside and outside the studio. In this way, the HERmetics group models the historical imperative for women artists to seek each other out and work supportively. Such collaborative projects have broad art historical precedence, as well as specific examples in Irish art history.

The exhibition ‘[In]Visible: Irish Women Artists from the Archives’ at the National Gallery of Ireland (19 July 2018 – 3 March 2019) focused on peer support as a mode of female artistic production. One of the curators, Emma O’Toole, highlighted the importance of forming “networks of influence… (sharing) artistic ideas and practices.”1 Networks produce stability, community and opportunity where otherwise there may be instability, isolation and stasis. As Rebecca Fortnum notes: “For women, often isolated, the desire to forge a relationship with other women is crucial in giving them ‘permission’ to practise.”2 From 5 to 26 October 2023, the HERmetics group staged their first exhibition in Queen Street Studios in Belfast. Titled ‘messy business’, the exhibition focused on the physical, sustained explo-

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

ration of paint as a medium. Painting is indeed a messy business. The paint is slippery and hard to control. It gets on everything – clothes, skin, hair. In the studio it can be hard to find a path through the chaos. In many ways, the group’s online monthly meetings act as a way to make sense of the chaos. In their separate studios, the artists engage in a precarious balancing act. Ideas and colour are stacked in each composition. Paint gets moved around, imagery appears and disappears, shapes collapse and are rebuilt through a series of improvised moves. The aim is to leave the final composition open somehow, while holding onto possibility in the artwork.

Aldridge, Doherty, Keown and Wallace are concerned with space and an embodied relationship with it. Space, in this instance, may be topographical and there are references to a particularly Irish landscape across the work of all four artists. They each acknowledge the importance of place within their practice and share an understanding of history in Northern Ireland and its impact upon the land.

The group is also concerned with the space of painting itself: the tactile terrain of moving colours in the surrender to the medium. In this space of abstraction, there may be references to music, poetry, mythology, art history, or cartoonery. The ebb and flow between sense and non-sense (the conscious and the unconscious) keeps the surface alive and sticky.

There is a third space at stake for these painters: the space that painting occupies within art history. Their works operate as interpellations within a long and complicated history as they problematise assumptions surrounding the body of the painter. The feminist art historian Griselda Pollock summarises the problem as follows: “[Women] want to paint, a desire which is as much about wanting the right to enjoy being the body of the painter in the studio – the creative self in the private domain – as it is about wanting to express individualistically the nonetheless collective experiences of women.”3 Across these complicated discourses, the HERmetics artists are committed to engaging with the various challenges. Aldrige, Doherty, Keown and Wallace share in the desire that “living profoundly as a woman in the profession of painting… (can) lead to a shift in the critical value systems of the discipline.”4 HERmetics in the Studio is a group of four painters: Sinéad Aldridge, Patricia Doherty, Mary Theresa Keown, and Louise Wallace. @hermetics_in_the_studio

1 Susanna Avery-Quash, ‘[In] Visible: Irish Women Artists from the Archives: An Interview with Emma O’Toole’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, Issue 28, 2019.

2 Rebecca Fortnum, ‘Baggage Reclaim: Some Thoughts on Feminism and Painting’, Journal of Contemporary Painting, Volume 3, Issue 1-2, April 2017, p 216.

3 Griselda Pollock, ‘Painting, Feminism, History’, Looking Back to the Future: Essays on Art, Life and Death (London: Routledge, 2001) p 140.

4 Op. cit. p 232.

Top: Louise Wallace, Tremble Before the Thicket of Eyes!, 2023, wood assemblage with acrylic paint, dimensions variable.

Middle: Patricia Doherty, Field grammar and Bird tool remix, both 2023, oil on linen, 60 x 80 cm.

Bottom: Mary Theresa Keown, Rocky, and Dust Up, both 2023, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm.

Artist-Led

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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

Member Profile

Slowly but Surely (I’m so fucking tired)

Folded In

BELFAST-BASED VISUAL ARTIST TARA MCGINN REFLECTS ON CONCEPTS OF HOME IN THEIR EMERGING PRACTICE.

AODÁN MCCARDLE DISCUSSES THE EVOLUTION OF HIS WORK TO DATE INCLUDING VARIOUS CAREER HIGHLIGHTS.

I’M TYPING THIS whilst straddling the oil

heater in my freezing third-floor studio, nonchalantly observing the unromantic, post-industrial landscape laid out beneath me. It’s a hodge podge of rent-a-car parking lots, a caustic rainbow-wielding beer garden, and derelict shops, overshadowed by modern red-brick high rises, all illuminated by the glowing letters of the BBC and EUROPA signs, against the gloomy northern sky.

Belfast has been my home for several years now. It was (and perhaps still is) a comparatively low-cost option for many artists like me, who have been priced out of everywhere else, both on the island of Ireland and in the UK. I came to do an MFA in 2017, and stayed for the open, accessible, and friendly arts community here. Unlike my rural roots in Enniscorthy or the limitations of highly competitive urban scenes like Dublin and London, Belfast falls nicely in between: a cosy nook I cradled myself into until I could figure out where my art was going to take me. Belfast could be described as strategically placed, allowing me to take advantage of funding and opportunities on both sides of the border, buying me the most precious asset of all – time.

Six years on, ‘home’ has become a central theme in my practice. It is the source of the forms and language I have come to employ; wallpaper as diary pages, delph as vessels for grief, and window surfaces as thresholds that withhold bodies. It has become a balance of distilling an emotional interior into objects of play and performance, slowly integrating with the exterior spaces my work examines. Each exhibition becomes a body within a body. Dissecting the meaning of home and queering its layers, my work peels into the uncanny, the perverse, the comforting, and the painful.

The pandemic was a period where a private family crisis – unrelated to the health

crisis at large – turned my life around. I became a family carer and attempted to maintain momentum in my work for the sake of my sanity, whilst simultaneously performing the duties of nurse, parent, and child. I sat down with the detritus and trophies of domestic labour surrounding me; plastic food packaging, rusted utensils, glass trifle dishes and jelly moulds. Using clay, plaster, and paint I began to cast and create feminised monstrosities out of these globalised and sentimental wares, and a series of ceramic allegories emerged.

In late 2021, once things were a little better, I was accepted onto the final cohort of the Freelands Artist Programme. The imposter syndrome plagued me, but it was my window to keep moving forward. This opportunity sat in stark opposition to my previous experience of endless rejections, let-downs and unsustainable pay, from a world I feared I may never be professionally acknowledged in. This award granted me an income that has let me relax into the possibility of failure – a prospect I wouldn’t ordinarily be able to financially recover from.

This assurance and temporary place of safety gave me the emotional space I needed to grow up, come out, and put down roots in a practice and a place I’m proud of. The programme culminates in a group show in London in February 2024, then at The MAC in Belfast, where I plan to exhibit new and ongoing work. This work finally feels like it belongs to me, rather than something for an academic deadline or curatorial approval. I don’t know what I’ll do after that – but for the first time ever, that isn’t so terrifying.

Tara McGinn is an interdisciplinary visual artist from Enniscorthy based in Belfast. taramcginn.com

Tara McGinn, She was in my Dream (and then she left again), 2021, polymer clay, acrylic paint, yellow beeswax, yacht varnish, PVA glue; A Resting Place – a coffee table to be exact, 2023, plywood, timber, jesmonite cast of a fake table leg, plaster bandage, mahogany wood stain, caramel wood stain, polyurethane clear resin; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artist.

Aodán McCardle, Spaces, 2020, from ‘Forgotten Spaces’, curated by Wild Swans in conjunction with Bbeyond, Fanad, County Donegal, August 2020; photograph by Jacqui Devenney Reed, courtesy of the artist.

I BEGAN STUDYING design at Ravensbourne

College London, in part because art, from the perspective of my social background, was not considered a viable job. Ironically, the economic downturn, as I left college at the end of the Thatcher era, effectively released me into an idea of art as something other than a career.

My focus in the beginning was painting.

I was interested in expressive and figurative painters such as R.B. Kitaj and then Frank Auerbach and Sandra Blow. I found that when making a portrait, I became interested more and more in the basic actions and processes of making itself. What a painting was and how it worked came from the making of the present. I wanted to return to college to do an evening course that would allow for full-time work, and came across Birkbeck (formerly the London Mechanics’ Institution and now University of London) established by the Chartist movement to educate the working classes. I began an English Literature degree and encountered a very different world than I had expected, which included concrete poet, Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum Workshop. With poetry growing out of Dada and Surrealism, poetry that was no longer a representation of a subject but an investigation and experience.

This led to London Under Construction – a group that one of the initiators called an ‘anti-performance collective’. Combined with pursuing a PhD on the work of Frank O’Hara – which included work on Cy Twombly, Richard Long and crucially, Charles Olson and the Black Mountain school – my poetry and writing informed my art, and vice versa. I then moved back to Ireland and began to consider how to make performance work that could include writing, drawing, and improvisation, where the making happened live in the space in front of the audience – meaning that the thinking happened out there in front of you as well. As Olson said, one was “folded in, a thing among things.”

The central tenet from this period that continues to inform my current work

(whether performance, drawing, painting, or writing) is the idea that the author or artist is not at the centre of control; rather, that any artwork is a collaboration of potentials. I use the term potentials to describe anything – research, ideas, experience, the environment, social, political, or ecological – that could assert influence on the work and artist as it is being made.

Among many career highlights, my performance at the opening of An Gailearaí in 2011 considered where the Gaeltacht and the Irish language figure in the contemporary art world. The following year, I was commissioned to make work in response to avant-garde composer, Robert Ashley, at the Béal Festival in Smock Alley. At the opening of Performance Week at Beton 7 gallery in Athens in 2015, I performed My Hands Are Sore (2015) in response to working class struggles for social justice under the IMF and banking debacle. A collaborative project with Bernadette Hopkins and Áilbhe Hines, titled Cuislí (2015-18), used improvisational performance to investigate corporate social structures, while Wild Swans (2020-22) was a collaborative performance art project, made over many months and involving six or seven artists at a time.

‘Emerging Forms’ was a drawing exhibition/residency at Artlink in Donegal in 2022, where the objects had influence on the possibilities of what drawing them might entail. These ideas extend into my current projects, one of which started as a re-evaluation of how to make paintings at the beginning of the pandemic. It involves an ongoing making of a single work that examines my making, as much as I examine painting. ‘Emerging Forms’ continues with printmaking (etching, intaglio and collagraphy) at the Derry Print Workshop, and I anticipate this project will take a couple of years to complete.

Aodán McCardle is an artist, performer and writer based in Donegal. aodanmccardleartandwriting.com

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Critique

Edition 71: January – February 2024

Isabel Nolan, The Light Poured Out Of You, 2017, mild steel, paint, fabric, dye; image courtesy of the artist, Kerlin Gallery, and Crawford Art Gallery.

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2024

‘Self-Determination: A Global Perspective’ Irish Museum of Modern Art 30 November 2023 – 21 April 2024

All images: ‘Self-Determination: A Global Perspective’, installation view, IMMA, November 2023; photographs by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artists and IMMA.

IMMA’S ‘SELF-DETERMINATION: A Global Perspective’

is a complex, ambitious, and timely exhibition. It draws on how art responded to the seismic political and social changes of 1913 to 1939, when the German, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires were reconfigured and when Ireland also gained partial independence. Concentrating on Europe and the near East, as far as Turkey, Palestine and Egypt, it includes work from Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Finland and Ireland, amongst other states and regions.

The exhibition prioritises the impact and deployment of the forces of modernity across its themes and structuring. For example, the space devoted to ‘Cross Currents’ encapsulates how the complex networks of empire continued to influence interaction with the wider world. Mary Swanzy’s Samoan Scene (1923), a Gauguin inspired work by the Ukrainian artist, Zola Bielkina, who had not ventured abroad, and Alan Phelan’s sculpture of Roger Casement peering out of an exotic houseplant, share the room with Dragana Jurišić’s 2013 series, ‘YU The Lost Country’, in which the artist revisits the now non-existent Yugoslavia via Rebecca West’s 1941 travelogue. The complex interaction of these works raises questions about how economic and political systems unconsciously impact our worldview.

‘Extractive Industries’ focuses on the construction of hydro-electric schemes in the 1920s and 1930s in Ireland, Poland and Ukraine. Seán Keating’s paintings of Ardnacrusha, familiar to Irish visitors, are contextualised by the work of international artists and by Declan Clarke’s film, and as a result, a more critical reading is apparent. His take on the Siemens project in which Irish workers, especially the Irish speakers, were underpaid and mistreated is alluded to in the minutiae of their onsite living conditions. Dnieper Dam (1932) by Dmytro Vlasiuk depicts the imposition of this gigantic modernist structure into the pastoral setting of Ukraine.

The dam was part of the expansion of the Soviet Union, then in control of the region. Concentrating on agricultural workers, the painting alludes to the ways in which the industrial scheme caused the flooding of acres of farmland and the displacement of rural land dwellers.

A neighbouring dam at Kherson Oblast made headlines in June 2023 when it was blown up by the Russian

Army as part of its campaign to retake Ukrainian territory. Rafał Malczewski’s Building of the Roznow Dam (1938) refers to the development of an industrial infrastructure of the Second Polish Republic, founded in 1918. The bright mountainous landscape is latticed off by wires and the geometric constructions of the dam, in a work which accentuates aesthetics over politics.

In the Garden Galleries, the theme moves from a state perspective to that of the citizen, including those marginalised by new regimes. Aesthetics seem more to the fore or perhaps this reflects the move away from official ideologies. The impressive pairing of William Conor’s cartoon for the mural, Ulster Past and Present (c. 1931) with Kristjan Raud, City Under Construction (1935) refers to how the ruins of the past were revisited to create national mythologies. Conor connects ancient Ulster warriors with the factory and shipyard workers of the new Northern Ireland, while Raud’s work alludes to the Estonian national epic, Kalevipoeg (1857). This folktale, like those of Ireland, equates the construction of ancient tombs and landmarks with the heroic deeds of the past and provides a sense of pride in the nation’s ancient prowess for its modern citizens.

The basement of the Garden Galleries is given over to the delightfully irreverent ‘Reconciliations’, presided over by Phelan’s De Valera with his tongue out. Here, dances and social gatherings of all kinds and in all styles bring in the carnivalesque, perhaps most evident in the juxtaposing of two of William Orpen’s depictions of celebrations of Armistice Day in Arras with the bizarre Village Wedding (1926) by the Slovenian painter, Tone Kralj. The drunken antics of Orpen’s traumatised celebrants contrast wonderfully with the metallic embracing peasants of Krajl’s nuptial festivities. In both the war casts its shadow. Krajl’s deployment of modernist forms, ultimately derived from cubism, is echoed throughout the exhibition in works by artists who lived in Paris or who learnt about it second hand. Several artists including Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone studied there with André Lhote, and there are some startling comparisons to be made with other regions here, such as the works of the Serbian artist, Sava Šumanović, another former Lhotean, who was executed in 1942 after the establishment of the pro-Nazi Croatian state in Serbia. Many of the paintings by the Ukrainian art-

ists were banned under Stalin in the 1930s and were only allowed to be displayed after Ukraine achieved independence in 1991. Now these works are again in storage, except for those in this exhibition.

Contemporary artworks provide a crucial element of reflection and disruption to what might otherwise be a pedestrian art historical display. Minna Henriksson’s wall drawing, Limits of the State (2023), traces the comparative experience of women in Ireland and Finland in the aftermath of independence, when in both cases, their role was defined in terms of home and family. This freehand, transient plotting of legislation could be seen as a metaphor for the entire exhibition, revealing how fragmented and arbitrary the division of power is, and how necessary research and uncovering of facts has become in our relationship to our national and global histories. The playful works of Ursula Burke, Alan Phelan and Array Collective punctuate the monumentality of much of the older works and bring in contemporary skepticism towards official histories and national myths.

Sasha Sykes’s Trove III (2023), an ivy, wood and hessian construction of an imagined ruined chimneypiece, a relic of the Ascendancy House, is a reminder of the vagaries of history to which we are all subject. Larissa Sansour’s film, Familiar Phantoms (2023) creates a narrative of her family’s complex history of displacement and enduring trauma of exile from Palestine. Jasmina Cibic’s Beacons (2023), a film set in a series of isolated buildings, re-uses the rhetoric of transnationalism to consider the position of women and the soft power of architecture. Situated at the end of the exhibition in the main building, it is perhaps an opening to the wider repercussions of self-determination in the era of globalisation. This is a stimulating and challenging exhibition, its theme more relevant now than ever. It makes a case for the need to look beyond the borders of our own state and to situate ourselves within a broader constantly evolving history. ‘Self-Determination’ asserts art’s role in imagining the nation but equally reminds us that its task is also to critique the boundaries of the state and its often-rudimentary ideologies.

Dr Róisín Kennedy lectures in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at UCD.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2024

Critique

‘Following Threads’ Crawford Art Gallery 9 September 2023 – 28 January 2024 ‘FOLLOWING THREADS’ AT Crawford Art

Gallery features a diverse selection of artists working in the medium of textiles – once perceived as peripheral but now increasingly central to contemporary art practice. The remit of the exhibition is seemingly simple: to showcase the breadth of artists using fibre and thread today.

The group show spotlights prominent artists such as Dorothy Cross, Cecilia Danell and Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, whose practices involve a broad range of mediums and methods. Ní Bhriain, who usually works in film, photomontage, and installation, presents a jacquard tapestry, Intrusions III (2022), in isolation. The artist’s broader practice is often concerned with imperial legacies. However, this singular tapestry – a surreal composition of an architectural ruin – achieves a critique of power structures and grand narratives through its mode of display. The large wall hanging reminds us of Annie Albers’s assertion that “along with cave paintings, threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning.” From Ní Bhriain’s clean-cut machine-woven lines, or the haunting painterly quality of Dorothy Cross’s mixed-media boat, to the boundless loopy joy of Danell’s hand-tufted rugs of enchanting landscapes, here is a material language that is being stretched and pulled in all directions, aesthetically and conceptually.

This presentation highlights the “potential of thread in contemporary art” through a variety of artistic practices. Matt Smith reworks traditional textiles to subvert the original imagery. His interruptions cause the compositions to give way to mesmerising abstractions of pattern. In Isabel Nolan’s installation, The Light Poured Out Of You (2017), large swathes of material are draped from the ceiling to create a chandelier-like centrepiece. The work is an exciting demonstration of the possibilities of textiles in the basic formal qualities of light, colour, texture and space. The gallery collaborated with Ceadogán rugs to document the process of rug making and to present sketches

by Cubist painter Mainie Jellett in textile form. Jennifer Trouton’s hand-embroidered series, Mater Natura: The Abortonist’s Garden (2020-21), visually references the medium’s origins in domesticity and the feminine.

The fine needle and thread-rendered imagery features plants commonly known to induce abortion. The traditional presentation of her work highlights the importance of textiles as a feminist communicative tool, rendering the domestic realm as highly political.

The exhibition occupies the ground floor of the gallery. In its centre, there is a small room which provides some historical context. A selection of the gallery’s collection of Cork lace is presented alongside portraits by James Butler Brenan. Brenan was an advocate for the development and support of craft and design and the headmaster of the School of Art in Cork in 1860, when it occupied Crawford Art Gallery’s current building. We are told that Brenan developed a visiting educator scheme in partnership with local convents, including the Presentation Convent in Youghal. It is worth noting that Youghal began to pro-

duce its own lace during the Great Famine (1845-1852). Deprived women and young girls could engage in the industry to avoid further poverty and so the lace work was developed out of economic necessity.

Michelle Malone’s three digitally woven tapestries of the Artane Boys Industrial School speak to the medium’s working-class roots. The school was a reformatory institution for young boys who had committed minor offences or were facing destitution.

While detained at the school, the boys were engaged with activities such as pull wool roving, as depicted in Workshop, Artane Boys Industrial School (2021). Malone’s digitisation of the tapestry process acts as a pointed political commentary on modern labour histories. The artist’s source images originate from The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse Activities, Volume I (Dublin: Government Publications, 2009). The tapestries hang from brass bars that further institutionalise these depictions.

It is noticeable that all of the artists featured in the exhibition self-identify as female or queer. Traditionally a gender assigned medium, textiles continue to occupy a contentious space between fine art and craft, the domestic and public realm, labour history and economics. The scope of this medium is anything but simple; it involves potent material of vast political and social expression.

Sarah Long is an artist and writer based in Cork. In 2020, she created The Paper – an online forum for discussing and responding to the Cork art scene. @thepapercork

Top: Isabel Nolan, The Light Poured Out Of You, 2017, mild steel, paint, fabric, dye; image courtesy of the artist, Kerlin Gallery, and Crawford Art Gallery.

Bottom: Cecilia Danell, The Primeval Sunset, 2022, hand-tufted rug, 100% wool yarn, 200 x 200 cm; image courtesy of the artist, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, and Crawford Art Gallery.

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2024

Elaine Grainger ‘Holding on Lightly’ Diaa Lagan and Basil Al-Rawi, ‘Shahid’ The LAB Gallery 15 September – 4 December ‘HOLDING ON LIGHTLY’, Elaine Grainger’s show in The

LAB’s Cube Space, conveys both a desire to retain something and an acceptance of letting it go. This dynamic plays out over time, a dimension used as a working element in a site-responsive installation that evolves throughout its run across three locations. Exhibits carried to and from the artist’s nearby studio are installed and de-installed intuitively, a clipboard inventory on the wall recording changes. Some are placed among the eclectic fare of a local antique shop, inviting visitors to move between the calm of the gallery and the noise and clutter of a real-world emporium.

The Cube Space has two glazed walls, which overlook the street, and two internal walls; all have been draped in lightweight plastic sheets, made from dissolvable hospital laundry bags. This creates an inner sanctum that models subjective interplay between public and private domains. Their fleshy pink colour fosters somatic associations, with the womb, for instance, or with closed eyelids filtering light.

A gathering of items, some with nostalgic overtones, are arranged individually or as assemblages, either within the drapes, outside them, or in between. They variously include tired potted succulents, dusty chipboard, a silver jug, a holey jumper, a workaday stool, a grow-box containing brown-tinged moss, shards of bottle-glass held together by the label, and unfired clay vessels. Some are anchored to the floor by flimsy wires that hold on lightly. The vessels, especially, embody time and its unwinding. Made from coils that have been rolled and layered, they will, before long, disintegrate, losing these in-built acts of creation.

Visiting on a sunny day, the light-inflecting drapes lend an air of mystery. On a second encounter, the sky is dull and a section of plastic has been pulled back.

Stripped of imagination upon seeing the entire display, the inevitably of things breaking down is laid bare. Later, finding one of Grainger’s clay vessels in the nearby

shop, among discarded buttons, used crystal glasses, and kitsch melting clocks, the story shifts to one of renewed potential.

Thoughts about second lives, past and present intertwining, are amplified in the joint presentation by Diaa Lagan (a Dublin-based artist from Syria) and Basil Al-Rawi (an Irish-Iraqi artist from Leixlip). It brings an expansive energy to the ground and first-floor galleries through its range of historic and socio-political perspectives.

The title of Al-Rawi’s film The Salmon Leapt Toward Babel (2023) combines myths from his dual heritage; the leaping salmon of Leixlip and the Tower of Babel (in modern-day Iraq). Alternating between footage of Irish country roads, woodlands, a river, and the dry, brighter terrain of Jordan, the consistency of its bilingual soundtrack (Arabic voiceover spoken in the Irish passages, and Irish voiceover in the Jordanian) weaves cohesion between locations, laced through with memories of trauma.

Unlike a related passage in the Book of Genesis, in which God intervened to ensure that the builders of the tower spoke in different tongues and could no longer collaborate, subtitles are provided. Typed translations, artist talks and tours, and an Arabic calligraphy workshop also work to bridge divides and promote mutual understanding through both verbal and visual languages.

Upstairs, the space is partitioned by Between the Lines (2023), Al-Rawi’s take on a traditional mashrabiya screen, which melds intricate Arabic and Celtic motifs. Nearby, a postcard series titled Baldati, ‘my town’ (2014), comprises six photographic images, some modified (in the ways memory might) to find parallels between two homelands. They carry messages from his Iraqi family, one of which urges: “We wish you to learn Arabic and talk to us.”

In Arabic Calligraphy Composition (2022), Diaa Lag-

Elaine Grainger ‘Holding on Lightly’, installation view; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist and The LAB Gallery.

an’s trio of unframed screenprints, flowing text excerpts are cast into motion around other recurring elements, some rendered cleanly, others sketchily. An impression is given of mapping, or a lexicon being formed, altered and re-formed, while the plain supports and muted colours lend a contemporary feel. Other prints include Whirl (2022), which layers an experimental shape created by combining triangles (representing higher and material worlds) with overlapping circles of varying scale that symbolise the unity of the universe.1 Downstairs, the artist’s new paintings and sculptures draw freely from Eastern and Western traditions.

Eight-pointed stars (an Islamic symbol) and excerpts from sacred texts and classical poetry proliferate across the works, including the gold leaf-embellished Paradise (2023) and floor-based Christ on a Carpet (2023). The latter incorporates a loose rendering of Carlo Maratta’s The Rape of Europa (c1680-1685), housed in the National Gallery of Ireland Collection. The narrative of this Greek myth, which involves the abduction of a Phoenician princess to Crete, references, for Lagan, among other things, transit between East and West, and ongoing losses of life in the Mediterranean.

In working through themes relating to culture, geopolitics and identity, ‘Shahid’ moves fluidly between personal and public, experienced and inherited realities. It also communicates a pressing need – painfully underscored by the recent Dublin riots – to understand and engage meaningfully with others in our shared world.

Susan Campbell is a visual arts writer, art historian and artist. susancampbellartwork.com

1 ‘In-Conversation about Shahid’, with artists Diaa Lagan and Basil

Al-Rawi and Viviana Checchia, Director of Void Gallery, The LAB Gallery, 27 November 2023.

Basil Al-Rawi, ‘Shahid’, installation view; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist and The LAB Gallery.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2024

Maeve Brennan ‘An Excavation’ VISUAL Carlow 30 September 2023 – 21 January 2024 MAEVE BRENNAN’S FILM, An Excavation

(2022), shown in an exhibition of the same name at the Digital Gallery at VISUAL Carlow, presents ancient artefacts, expanding on their legacy, value and movement, and examining the knowledge that we can (or can no longer) glean from them.

We watch as forensic archaeologists, Dr Vinnie Nørskov and Dr Christos Tsirogiannis, carefully unpack a cardboard box containing looted antiquities, broken clay pieces enshrined in bubble wrap, lining up the segments and reassembling images of ancient bodies and Gods, sphinxes and arpias. This box belongs to a large seizure at Geneva Freeport in 2014, when 45 crates of trafficked antiquities were taken into custody and are now being examined as criminal evidence.

The puzzle-like task of the archaeologists feels akin to the task of the viewer – to construct meaning out of reference points, while assembling and building on acquired knowledge. The slow pace of the film prompts me to think about the evolution of art. The relationship between art and function was closer in the past than it is now, and these ancient pieces were as much artwork as they were funerary objects. I think about the trajectory of artwork from antiquity until now, the traditions and contexts for making and showing art, of which this exhibition also forms part.

Considering the relationship between the context of the pots and the artwork that is depicting them also invites reflection on the relationship between institutions and artworks. An Excavation was commissioned

by Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, with support from Arts Council England and Museum of Ancient Art and Archaeology, Aarhus. I think it is a nice loop for a film that expands on the destructive forces of looting to be supported by an English funder, while the British Museum refuses to be drawn into conversations of provenance regarding Parthenon Marbles and other notable cultural artefacts on show there.

An Excavation is part of a larger ongoing body of work by Brennan, entitled The Goods, which looks at the custodianship of ancient artefacts. Shown alongside the film are two works – a blown-up polaroid of a stolen artefact, and the cast of a car glovebox that was used to store photographs and papers relating to the stolen goods. The placement of these intriguing objects suggested a subservience to the documentary film, and a more engaging exploitation of the space might have better served their embedded potential.

The market for ancient artefacts, involving looters, smugglers, antiquities dealers, auction houses and museums is, by nature, highly lucrative and illicit. We learn the trajectory of these vases, from ancient burial sites in Southern Italy to high-end auction houses like Sotheby’s or Christie’s, with dealers often buying back their own objects, whitewashing them through the selling possess, giving them provenance and a paper trail.

This criminality adds another layer to the biography of these extremely old objects, their physicality touched by ancient noble-

men and women through to thieves – from pagan customs to airport customs. This new layer erodes the knowledge we could have gained about the object’s creators and purpose. The context of the vases is removed, we no longer know the tomb from which the object was taken, and so we cannot re-establish the narrative that was so carefully woven about the human who was travelling from the world of the living to the world of the dead.

Normally, a tomb would hold a variety of objects to help the deceased on their journey and it is assumed that the beautifully drawn stories on the pots overlapped with common themes and references, to paint a picture of the life lived. Now that the pots have been looted and separated for the market, it is impossible to know which pots were entombed together 2500 years ago, and as such, a lot of this contextual knowledge is gone. “The historical loss is, by far, much more important than the incomplete nature of the vases themselves,” reflects Dr Nørskov. “We will never be able to re-contextualise all these objects and know which particular objects belong together, in the same archaeological context.”

The history of the people who carefully created these objects has been irreparably damaged, their value denigrated to market prices. Had they been left in place, deep underground, intact and eventually excavated, lovingly and respectfully, then their value would be enormously greater.

An Excavation masterfully weaves between narratives past and present concerning the value of artworks, and ties into the artist’s long-standing inquiry into forms of repair and reparative histories.

Ella de Búrca is an Irish visual artist and lecturer at SETU Wexford College of Art. elladeburca.com

All Images: Maeve Brennan ‘An Excavation’, installation view; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and VISUAL Carlow.

Critique

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2024

Victor Sloan, ‘Beyond’ Belfast Exposed 12 October – 23 December 2023 ‘BEYOND’ IS A mini retrospective, covering

photographer Victor Sloan’s work from 1984 to 2023. It includes observations from the north of Ireland, along with records of his travels through Europe and West Asia.

Three motifs recur and dominate the show: signs of national identity; history contained within underused and abandoned buildings; and the persistence of nature within the context of urban decay.

The longest wall of the gallery has three grids of 12 photographs, with four alternating large images. These four untitled works from the 2006 series, ‘Luxus’, differ from those accompanying them, nodding towards non-figuration. The artist’s use of bokeh highlights certain features – a short strip of warning tape, a radiator, a section of tiled wall – while their context is denied satisfactory recognition.

The three accompanying groupings are thematic. The first, from the 2000s and early 2010s, focuses on West Asian culture, made in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and the Golan Heights, plus a number from Augsburg, but also with middle eastern content. These are mostly portraits and include headdresses from Lebanon, one with the traditional use of coins for decoration, and in another a smiling man gazes out, wearing a red and white shemagh. The photograph of a section of damaged mosaic flooring shows that destroyed elements were once images that have been replaced with randomly placed tesserae. The purpose, if any, behind this iconoclasm is unclear.

The second set consists of black-andwhite photographs made in Germany and Poland in the mid-nineties. Here, natural forces impose their presence on battered Berlin walls; with wire reinforcement and tagging, a deified Lenin is placed pathetically behind the bars of a fence, and in Poland, a warplane sits rusting in an ugly park. Trees feature in all these flashbacks to the then recently dismantled Stalinism, with ahistorical nature mocking remnants of human history. Sloan’s photograph of the enlarged version of Käthe Kollwitz’s Mother with her Dead Son (1938), located in the Neue Wache in Berlin, shows a large halo of light behind her, giving a hint of Christian identity to this secular Pietà.

The third grid is made up of 12 photographs from 2010 of the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, Syria, made just four years before it closed its doors. The photographs, bereft of human presence, hint at impending desertion, but evince its activities over the years. In addition to a couple of external shots, including the hotel’s signage and its now-lost giant thermometer, all others are interior images. These include a long shot of a staircase, looking down to the checkerboard floor (echoing the one in the gallery), to the white light from the door, enclosing the yellow of an ornate lantern. This image is reminiscent of the famous long zoom in Hitchcock’s 1946 film, Notorious. Other photographs from this series are of closer details, including a map, behind reflecting glass, of parts of Lebanon and Syria, a bar table with the staining of years of wet glasses, examples of both professional and amateur marquetry, and a charmingly toy-like minimalist telephone.

As well as Sloan’s hometown of Dungannon (including the first photograph made with his first SLR, of his father’s shop), Belfast features prominently. A 2008 series looks at the then abandoned Harland & Wolff Drawing Offices. The paint flaking from grubby neglected neoclassic decorative features gives them the appearance of the ancient world to which they refer.

In a 2019 stand-alone piece, the much-admired but tragically neglected brutalist car park in Belfast’s Corporation Street is loomed over by the less impressive Royal Mail building, like the school bully intimidating the scruffy gifted kid.

Alongside are images of the Peace Walls from 2019. There is a surprising elegance to the concrete walls with their steel cladding, while the graffiti and tagging add visual vulgarity. Again, trees assert their presence among these aesthetic battles.

Sloan is best known for his scratched, coloured, bleached images, mostly looking at the ceremonial activities of the Orange Order. There are two very good large examples of these, but the works in this show may come as a surprise to many who were unaware of the broadness of his oeuvre.

There are many more beyond this show, of which few will be familiar. One hopes that a sizeable gallery or museum will soon give us a large-scale survey show to redress this.

Colin Darke is an artist based in Belfast.

Top: Victor Sloan, Lord Northland Orange Hall, Market Square, Dungannon, County Tyrone, 2021; Bottom: Victor Sloan, Drawing Offices series, 2008; all images © Victor Sloan, courtesy of Belfast Exposed.

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

Columns

Moving Image

Residency

Blissed

Artist-Centred Approach

MAXIMILIAN LE CAIN DISCUSSES HIS NEW FILM WHICH EXPANDS THE EXPRESSIVE PALETTE OF IRISH CINEMA.

DOROTHY SMITH OUTLINES HER ONGOING CURATORIAL RESIDENCY AT DROICHEAD ARTS CENTRE.

BLISSED (2023) IS an underground, no-bud-

get feature film that I made quietly over the course of the pandemic. It is an experimental love story, both lyrical and graphic. Hovering in the sensuous haze where flesh and dream become one, it wordlessly explores the shared inner life of two people whose devotion to one another expresses itself in forms that still challenge convention. Sexually frank and poetically immersive, this plunge into one couple’s erotic utopia does seem to push the boundaries of what has previously been shown in Irish cinema. The film also features an original soundtrack by Mick O’Shea. The day after it was screened at the IFI in Dublin, filmmaker Paul Duane took to Twitter to offer “kudos to the IFI for showing Le Cain’s serious, often beautiful, highly explicit experimental film Blissed last night. Probably the first Irish feature film to include unsimulated sexual activity?”

The question that arises is perhaps why?

What drew me to make such a film? Obviously not profit or any commercial motivation. It was, in more than one sense, a pure labour of love. Before tackling that question, a better description of what the film contains might be called for. But I find myself recoiling slightly at trying to provide one, and this is perhaps part of the reason I made the film. Words have a weight and power that can trap images, binding them to prejudice and expectation. Blissed attempts the exact opposite – through a wordless engagement with image and sound, it allows viewers to navigate for themselves the very specific dynamics between the couple at its centre and their inner world. An almost plotless meditation, Blissed alternates between sequences showing the sex life of a married couple in middle age who have built a ‘dungeon’ playroom in their home, and lengthy, equally important sequences depicting the suburban space they inhabit as an eerily empty and abstracted reverie. Without the mediation of much narrative, it places viewers in direct contact with the physicality of bodies and places and invites them to parse their own feelings rather than being “taken

Maximillian Le Cain, Blissed, 2023; still courtesy of the artist.

out of themselves.” Yet this physicality is in turn perceived through the subjective haze of desires and emotions experienced by the wife, including her objectification of the ostensibly dominant husband. Filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi best encapsulated the atmosphere and intentions of Blissed when he wrote: “This film feels as if an early-career Alexander Sokurov has adapted a novel

by J.G. Ballard.”

Blissed has a complicated relationship with its status as possibly the first Irish film to feature unsimulated sadomasochistic sex acts. It desires this as a token of expanding the expressive palette of Irish cinema while recoiling from the risk that it might be reduced to just that, to a sort of emblematic liberatory gesture. It organically arose from the trajectory of my work rather than from any wish to make a grand statement about sexual expression. In 2017, I made a feature in collaboration with Vicky Langan called Inside, a portrait of a woman completely adrift in a personal reality formed of her domestic rituals and frustrations. We knew the film was extremely dark in its evocation of isolation and of futile relationships that rot rather than fulfil desires. But it was only with the passing of time and the reactions of numerous viewers that I came to realise the full extent of its bleak resonance. This led to my interest in making a contrasting companion piece that would be an equally oneiric portrait of a woman’s domestic existence but this time one full of joy and fulfilment – a love story. Like Inside, it would make the normal strange and the strange normal, and highlight physical sensation and the mysteries of place to an unsettling degree.

A private language of love comprised of chains, whips, and needles revealed itself as the most appropriate vehicle for this.

Maximilian Le Cain is a filmmaker and critic based in Cork City. He is currently 2023 UCC/Arts Council Film Artist in Residence. maximilianlecain.com

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‘Looking/Seeing’, installation view with works by Michael Wann; image courtesy of the artist and Droichead Arts Centre.

AT THE OPENING of the exhibition, ‘Looking/Seeing’ in Droichead Arts Centre (25 September – 4 November 2023), the six exhibiting artists sat down with me to speak about their work. The atmosphere was convivial and collegiate with a full attendance.

This spoke to the sense of ambition and belonging that has been engendered in the centre over the last seven years by a range of initiatives that support artists and nurture audiences.

This was the first in a series of exhibitions I am curating in my role as Curator-in-Residence 2023-24 at Droichead Arts Centre.

‘Looking/Seeing’ presented the work of artists Michael Wann, Ida Mitrani, Sahoko Blake, and Maeve McCarthy, as well as Drogheda-based artists Raphael Hynes and Vivienne Byrne.

My first engagement with Droichead was when Director Collette Farrell invited me to curate an exhibition of local artists.

‘Orientation’ (30 November 2017 – 3 March 2018) highlighted 16 artists all working and living in the area. This was the beginning of a re-imagining of Droichead’s visual arts programme, and heralded the centre’s new approach. The Curator-in-Residence is one of a number of key programmes aligning with Droichead Arts Centre’s Strategy 2022-26, and its repositioning as a flagship cultural hub in the Northeast region.

Since that initial show, a number of exhibitions and other key initiatives have been put in place to support visual artists in the region. These include annual Bursary Awards across all art forms; an annual First Solo Award, supporting artists with a solo exhibition in the gallery; and an Artist in Association Award, offering a stipend and studio space for one year. The inaugural recipient is textile artist Violet Shirran.

Droichead Arts Centre was established in 1989 and occupies two buildings: Stockwell Street, which hosts the bright contemporary visual arts gallery and a modern 169-seater theatre; and Barlow House, a Georgian townhouse, which hosts artists’ spaces and a print studio.

In 2019, the centre undertook an ambitious programme in collaboration with 11

artists to highlight the lack of studio space for artists in Drogheda. For three months, the gallery was converted into studios for the 11 artists for the ‘Borrowed Ground Residency’. I was commissioned to research and write about this project. The resulting publication, Creating Place: Borrowed Ground Residency, demonstrated the psychological difficulty as well as the physical reality of being an artist with no dedicated workplace. The artists from this residency went on to form the Borrowed Ground Collective and with the support of Droichead, and with much searching, the group finally found a workspace in a town house in Drogheda. Now named 8 Fold Studios, the building provides centrally located studio spaces for six artists.

I have had the pleasure of undertaking almost 20 studio visits in the Northeast region over the last year with artists at all stages of their careers. From these visits, I have planned seven more exhibitions for the coming year. All will showcase work being created by professional artists in this region, helping to create an ecology that nourishes art and artists and, importantly, support artists in maintaining viable careers.

The North East Network – a cross centre collaboration between Droichead Arts Centre in Drogheda, An Táin Arts Centre in Dundalk, and Solstice Arts Centre in Navan – is planning an ambitious new visual art biennial starting in 2025. This creative alliance will support, value, and encourage Meath and Louth-based artists in the development of their practices and careers.

Going forward, Droichead will continue to support and value local audiences and professional artists, while expanding to include national and international connections, opportunities and partnerships. It is a privilege to have a small role in establishing such a dynamic and strong artist-centred approach in the Northeast Region.

Dorothy Smith is a visual artist and is Droichead Arts Centre Curator-in-Residence 2023-24. droichead.com

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VAI Event

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

Lindsey Mendick, SH*TFACED, 2023, instalation view at Jupiter Artland; image courtesy of the artist, photograph by John McKenzie.

FOLLOWING FEEDBACK FROM members, Get Together 2023 adopt-

VAI Get Together 2023 JOANNE LAWS AND THOMAS POOL REPORT ON THE ANNUAL NETWORKING EVENT FOR VISUAL ARTISTS.

ed a hybrid approach, with dual events hosted online and in-person at Esker Arts Centre in Tullamore. The online event on Friday 29 September was convened by VAI CEO, Noel Kelly, who was broadcasting from VAI’s new space at 2 Curved Street in Temple Bar. Noel noted that it has been ten years since the introduction of the Payment Guidelines for Professional Visual Artists in 2013, which emerged from VAI’s survey on The Social, Economic and Fiscal Status of the Visual Artist in Ireland. Providing an overview of recent VAI advocacy work, Noel reflected on Job Seekers Allowance for Artists and the Basic Income pilot programme. In each instance, VAI worked closely with the department to advise and advocate on behalf of artists, which included adopting VAI’s definition of an artist, and recognising their working patterns.

Commenting on the post-pandemic reality for artists, Noel noted that diminished exhibition opportunities have been met with the reemergence of DIY practices, through which artists are rethinking traditional hierarchies and pursuing other opportunities for themselves. He also acknowledged the work being done by regional arts officers and Creative Ireland in this regard. Noel reiterated VAI’s commitment to protecting the rights of artists in Northern Ireland – a region whose current government sadly does not seem to value the cultural sector. He emphasised that the arts community is not a homogenised entity – it is an interdependent network which must be willing to listen, learn, share, and have the capacity to contribute to new policy areas.

How We Work British artist Imogen Stidworthy’s presentation was titled ‘How

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

We Work’ – something she described as “an ever-pressing issue for artists.” Imogen’s work is concerned with language and voice, which she often employs as a sculptural entity to create ambisonic sound installations. Her work explores inherent questions, such as: How do we voice ourselves?

What forms of language do we use? How do we communicate at a societal and collective level?

Imogen introduced some of her soundworks from the early 90s in which she worked with her own body and those of her parents, from whom one’s identity is formed. She has since created numerous works that explore the power dynamic of verbal communication. The conditions of trauma and crisis are present in many of her works, which often involve people who have “reached the limits of language,” such as former British soldiers experiencing PTSD; non-verbal autistic adults; people with traumatic brain injuries; a shaman who lost her voice after an activist trauma; and more recently, stroke and heart rehabilitation patients.

Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s concept of ‘Linguistic Hospitality’ – which refers to empathy, generosity, trust, and a willingness to learn other people’s languages and cultures – Imogen discussed the value of artists working in therapeutic settings with vulnerable patients, whose own voices and bodies have become estranged to them.

Rather than studying or objectifying others, Imogen’s work focuses on our shared language, how this affects us all, and what is encountered in the spaces between.

European Projects President of the European Centre for Cultural Organisation and Management (ECCOM), Cristina Da Milano, shared her research on cultural access and participation with a presentation titled ‘Nothing About Us Without Us’ – a motto from early European policy declaring that no policy should be decided upon without the active participation of the affected groups.

ECCOM is a not-for-profit independent research centre based in Rome, which was established in 1995 by a group of women with backgrounds in sociology, librarianship, archaeology, and art history. The activities of ECCOM are research, training, and consultancy at local, national, and Euro-

VAI Event pean levels, with a broad focus on cultural heritage, access and participation, focusing on the artists themselves, and investigating the role of culture in contemporary society for everyone, not just tourists.

Being Italian, Cristina feels the pressure of heritage as a touristic imperative; however, she is much more interested in heritage as a tool for community engagement and empowerment. She noted that audience development is a pillar of current European cultural policy; yet the term implies a kind of passivity, transience, and spectatorship. Cristina stated that the role of artists is paramount in creating organisational change. Through partnership, co-creation, and sharing power – something that organisations are not often willing to do – artists can identify communities and engage them in ways that make sense for their lives. She outlined an engagement project exploring the role of the river since antiquity in Rome – a city “overwhelmed by its own history.”

Artists were engaged to increase the participation of communities of migrant origins and representatives, using cultural organisations as ‘contact zones’ – however the institutions were resistant, and ended up limiting the scope of the project.

Migrants are not traditional visitors and do not typically respond to the usual engagement approaches, such as guided tours, perhaps due to language barriers, or because they simply have no context for the information. A more successful project was delivered in Reggio Emilia, a smaller city near Bologna in northern Italy. Using ‘fears’ collected from a diverse range of contributors, the artist created an installation in the civic museum, thus highlighting the central role of artists in fostering institutional dialogue and change.

Miguel Ángel is Mayor of Genalguacil, a small town and municipality in the Málaga province of southern Spain, where an outdoor museum, known as Pueblo Museo, harnesses the village as an arena for expanded exhibition-making. Miguel explained that over the last century, the region has lost over 70% of its population, and the museum has helped them to identify new ways to create a sustainable community. Pueblo Museo has become one of the most prestigious cultural resources in Spain, attracting more than 20,000 visitors to the isolated area and making a huge economic impact.

Paint student Sylvia Maher ‘commoning’ her knowledge of making yellow dye from Buddleia gathered on site to members of the Rhizome project, May, 2022, photograph by Gareth Kennedy.

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Lindsey Mendick, Where The Bodies Are Buried, installation view at YSP, 2023; courtesy the artist, photograph © Jonty Wilde, courtesy YSP.

The project has been built on generosity with very few resources and receives very little funding from the Spanish government. Visitors give donations, and income is generated through the gift shop. The Pueblo Museo Foundation has become a pilot of rural innovation in Europe, demonstrating how art and culture can transform rural communities. Over 250 artists have engaged with the project to date, working with the town’s residents and local artisans.

Artists receive a fee, a production budget, and an exhibition catalogue; a new artist residency programme will launch in March.

Artists Speak The much-loved format, Artists Speak, returned to Get Together 2023, for both the in-person and online events. Bernadette Doolan is a self- taught (or “self-found”) artist, working in painting and sculpture.

Bernadette joined us online from Florence, where she is currently studying. She spoke about her curiosity and drive as an artist, and her determination to always take chances and learn something new. Bernadette paints first and foremost for herself, and her work includes personal narratives and strong autobiographical elements, such as garments and flowers remembered from childhood. Recent studies in counselling and psychotherapy have reinforced the importance of portraying the human experience in her art.

Dublin-based visual artist Anthony Cullen works primarily in video, installation, drawing and performance. He is interested in testing and exploring everyday structures and systems with the aim of understanding human behaviour and responses. He previously developed a projection on an exterior wall of a former Magdalene Laundry in his Donnybrook neighbourhood. He wanted to address the fortress-like presence of the building, while holding space for public conversations around this traumatic collective history. Further observing people’s behaviour in response to structures, Anthony devised a ‘speculative tour’ in which people were invited to take the lead and orchestrate the tour for themselves. In addition to performance and filmmaking, Anthony makes drawings and paintings about the decline of the human body. Anthony has Erb’s Palsy, due to a nerve injury at birth, which led to paralysis on his right side. His drawings are in a comic format, which he

attributes to reading comics during long stays in children’s orthopaedic hospitals in the 1980s.

Beatrice O’Connell had her first exhibition at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in 2000, as a recent graduate of DIT, when she mainly made landscape and figurative paintings. In 2016, she started a body of work called ‘Silent Spring’ (2016-20) focusing on biodiversity. She felt a sense of anxiety around the environment and created still life paintings of fallen birds and insects.

Following an MA in NCAD, her multidisciplinary practice is currently exploring how the era of the Anthropocene will be memorialised.

Plein air painter, Cornelius Browne, hasn’t painted within four walls for over 20 years. He grew up in a Donegal immigrant community in Glasgow; his father was a labourer, and his mother worked in an egg factory. When the family later returned to Donegal, he remembers frogs leaping across the kitchen floor; the house was deemed uninhabitable in the 1990s and demolished. Cornelius concedes that a sense of feeling ‘unsheltered’ has always followed him, stating that “I have been built by the house that itself was so poorly built.” In 1987, he enrolled in NCAD, and later worked in the bookshop at IMMA, where he saw an exhibition of works from the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection. This was the lightbulb moment when he realised that he was actually an artist.

Upon returning to Donegal, he had no studio, so he painted outdoors within 5 km of his house. Cornelius has never applied for a passport, has never stepped on continental soil, and has never seen great works of art in the galleries of Paris or Rome. He has not seen the world, in the conventional sense, but is trying to see as intensely as possible his immediate landscape – his ancestral landscape.

We were thrilled to host British artist Lindsey Mendick, who was in conversation with Helen Pheby, Associate Director of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where Lindsey’s exhibition was showing in The Weston Gallery (6 April – 3 September 2023). This expansive, multi-media installation, ‘Where The Bodies Are Buried’, subverted notions of the white cube and took the form of a decaying house. Drawing on Gothic stories and 1990s popular culture, the installation explored the artist’s recurring nightmare

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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

VAI Event

that she was responsible for buried bodies. Lindsey has obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and says that it is common to torture yourself with deep-rooted fears of doing something bad.

Lindsey works primarily in ceramics but develops meticulously planned environments, often in collaboration with other craftspeople and specialist makers.

Describing ceramics as the ‘protagonist’ in her installations, she noted that the medium is visceral and immediate, pleasing yet horrible, especially considering the pain of firing something that breaks. For Lindsey, her work involves a tension between maintaining and relinquishing control. Helen noted that there was humour in the installation at YSP, with Lindsey adding that she was inspired by the grotesque special effects of B-movie horror films, and by a deep-rooted human fear of decomposition and decay. Lindsey is currently a resident artist at Tracey Emin’s TKE Studios in Margate – a British seaside town, where seagulls attack your bin bags, and your household detritus can be strewn across the street. Bin bags, she noted, can be the biggest carriers of shame.

Running concurrently at Jupiter Artland outside Edinburgh was ‘Lindsey Mendick: Sh*tfaced’(15 July – 1 October 2023) – a newly commissioned installation, presented across three rooms, including the Ballroom Gallery. The work explores themes of hedonism, excessive drinking, and obliteration, paired with mortal dread, shame and repentance. In this art historical context, Lindsey wanted to create a Victorian dinner party, but one with shame seeping out, and containing beautiful but poisonous things – octopus, starfish, frogs, ants, snakes, and flowers. “Beautiful but repulsive is becoming my modus operandi!”, she said. Lindsey has previously struggled with her mental health; she lost her ability to laugh, sing, socialise, or eat and was quite pious yet miserable in these dark moments.

Helen noted that over 25 thousand people attended Lindsey’s exhibition at YSP, which was generous and relatable on many levels, and gave people the space to think about mental health. Lindsey conceded that creating a resolved piece of work was not her aim; rather, creating opportunities to talk about something difficult or fearful.

Esker Arts Centre VAI’s 2023 Get Together event in Tullamore on Monday 2 October kicked off with a panel moderated by VAN Editor, Joanne Laws, featuring Laura Ní Fhlaibhín and Gareth Kennedy. Laura discussed her use of ecologies and slugs to create an ‘erotic afterlife’ in Belmacz, an art gallery in London. She also discussed her pandemic-related work, created during her residency at the Courthouse Art Gallery, as well as her residency in the Burren College of Art, in which she considered Ireland’s theocratic past. Gareth discussed NCAD’s The Field, the fallow plot of land that the art college has repurposed into an ecological space for education.

Originally a car park, the site was ‘guerrilla composted’ to become a haven of biodiversity in The Liberties.

When pressed by Joanne about the role of artists in addressing the existential threat of climate change, both expressed the need for new narratives regarding the climate collapse and making sustainable decisions in one’s art practice.

Next up, Emer Ferran moderated a panel on ‘AI in Contemporary Art’ with artists Jialin Long and Tamsin Snow. Tamsin, who specialises in installation and sculpture, discussed how the digital footprints of artists influence machine learning technologies and who AI products are being produced for. She also discussed her use of ATMs in her art as a confluence of socioeconomics and AI technology. Jialin began her career as an electronic engineer and uses her art to explore realities in her hometown, Beijing. Her series Red Illuminates 1 and 2, were very much influenced by her difficulty communicating with family during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Her work featured portraits of ‘leftover women’ – unmarried women over the age of 35. For another project, she played state propaganda on loop to a white orchid to see if the flower would turn red. She

also generated AI images using the prompt of a Chinese woman under 35, with two kids, a husband, and a thriving career. The outcome was uncanny images of women who were dependent upon men, and always in a domesticated role of motherhood, rather than elevated career status. When Emer asked the artists whether they believe AI will have a long-term impact on artistic practice, both emphasised the dramatic effects AI is already having. Tamsin discussed how AI is being used in marketing to replace illustrators. When opened up to audience, several attendees noted that AI, by nature, ‘steals’ the work of established artists. Both artists expressed concern at the ethical implications of AI but also find it a useful tool that artists can harness.

After lunch, Ann Mulrooney hosted a panel with Ben Malcolmson and Catherine Hemelryk on ‘How Spaces Can Expand Programming’. Ben discussed his Belfast upbringing and the pervading sense of shame he felt growing up working-class and queer. He recently collaborated with Glenn Coleman on a digital project for the Douglas Hyde Gallery that explores the geography of hate crimes and reclaims those urban spaces through mapping. In the future he wants to collaborate with other queer artists to create a ‘queer thinktank’. Catherine discussed CCA Derry~Londonderry’s gallery spaces as well as solo and group exhibitions archived on CCA’s website. After CCA overhauled their website in 2021, they began a digital residency that researched the plantation cities in Northern Ireland that served as models for the West Indies. Catherine stressed the importance of not shoe-horning work that does not fit the digital environment into a digital space.

During the first of two ‘Artists Speak’ segments, three artists took the stage to discuss their practices.

Ciara Rodgers outlined how her site-specific works animate temporary spaces in the built environment.

She also discussed her recent performance, Green Mouth (2023) at SIRIUS, that interrogated colonial legacies and grass-eating during the Great Famine (1845–52). Galway-based artist, Bernice Cook, recalled how art was her sanctuary during her tumultuous teenage years, when she was subjected to bullying. She was unable to attend art college after finishing school, due to familial circumstances, but she began to do craftwork after getting married and having children. In 2022, she had her first solo exhibition that delved into the connection between people and buildings. She is currently writing her first book, and also hosts a podcast called ‘Whispering Stones’ focusing on the built environment. Laurence O’Toole is a self-taught artist from Bray. Discussing how “fear and procrastination will never see adventure,” he described his residency in southern Japan and its striking architecture, as well

as the influence of American culture on a Glaswegian candy shop that he visited in Scotland.

In the afternoon, VAI CEO Noel Kelly was joined

by Sally O’Leary of Offaly County Council and Ann Marie McGing from Mayo County Council for the panel ‘Art in Landscape’. They discussed the establishment of Lough Boora Sculpture Park in 2002 and the site-specific works there that respond to the region’s industrial heritage. Between 2002 and 2010, the parkland won four national awards. Sally highlighted the importance of the park to the Offaly community, and added that in 2019, Tim Collins was commissioned to make a deep mapping project of the park. Ann Marie discussed Mayo 5000, the site-specific sculptures that celebrated 5000 years of human inhabitancy of Mayo.

The project made use of organic, natural materials and environments, with the foresight that the works would degrade overtime. Noel focused on VAI’s role in bringing the voices of local artists into a central position, noting that the UN has decided to use the ‘neighbourhood’ as a focus of local policy, in a synergistic development that seeks to reverses post-industrial depopulation. The conversation also focused on bringing positive political engagement to the arts and the importance of grass roots development of projects.

The final segment of a whirlwind day was the second ‘Artists Speak’ session. From County Mayo, Saileen Drumm discussed her paintings of geese and Innis Boffin, as well as her use of colour to embolden natural landscapes. While she started exhibiting in a local pub, her work now sells on international markets, and she has since launched a gallery and retail space in Westport. Marian Basta is an Egyptian visual artist who worked as graphic designer for seven years before moving to Cork in 2018. Her work is influenced by ancient Egyptian art and Coptic Orthodox iconography and focuses on cultural issues. She launched a solo exhibition, ‘Unbounded Voyages’ in West End Art Studios in Cork, of 35 paintings created during the pandemic travel restrictions, when she imagined places that she wanted to go but couldn’t. Tipperary-based artist, Josephine Geaney, spoke of her drive to paint since childhood. Life got in the way, she said, of her attending art college, but she ran a fashion business for 18 years, and later enrolled in Limerick School of Art and Design.

After graduation in 2008, she began to paint full time.

Employing oil paint and cold wax, her work Boat Light (2021) is a symbol of hope and resilience during the pandemic.

After a long and exciting day, VAI staff thanked attendees for their attendance and participation. We are already looking forward to Get Together 2024!

Laura Ní Flaibhín, ‘Slug Love’, 2023, two-person show with Morten Skroder Lund, installation view, Belmacz, London; photograph by Peter Otto, courtesy of the artist.

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

Exhibition Profile

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Cosmic Wetness DAY MAGEE SPEAKS TO KAREN DONNELLAN ABOUT THEIR RECENT EXHIBITION AT THE RHA.

EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT sugar is bad for you. And yet,

as children, it is what we are often first rewarded with, in exchange for being good. You then spend your whole life trying to be good, and then, one day, you’re in serious need of a root canal.

Jelly tots and marshmallows, pierced with wooden skewers and arranged in geometric optical illusions, litter the wall. Invoking subatomic particles and platonic forms, the otherwise preservative-rich materials of Cosmic Flaccids (2023) branch out in generative activity and suggest that something is growing.

“I’m horny for physics,” smiles the artist, Karen Donnellan. With wry glee and a show-matching outfit, Donnellan tours me through the confections, speaking at length about entropy versus syntropy – how the forces of disorder might indeed give way to creation – skinny-dipping, and their trained material, glass.

Baudrillard wrote about glass in 1968 as a “material of the future.” In its transparency, glass reflected “faster communication between inside and outside,” though significantly, in his view, as a trick of the light – an ersatz communication that homogenised these distinctions as opposed to dissolving them. However, what we look into here are not shop windows, but rather, Donellan’s own System of Objects.

Vivid purples punctuate the pastel-coloured crystals and minerals, and the anomalous ways in which the light meets sheets and shards of dichroic glass. A pink rope chew-toy loops around a clear phallus (if not an inverted yoni); lavender anal beads circle the raw cast of Romanesco broccoli; a pair of rose quartz domes bear fake pearls, Blu-Tacked on for nipples. Innocence and deviance intermingle, the earnest and ironic continuing their dance. Just as the works produce literal refractions, so too does each pairing pose an infraction – these things are not supposed to be together. Containing multitudes, they are never quite placed in the mind, however fixed they are in situ.

And both of us, artist and spectator, are cackling.

“You have permission to laugh in a gallery, in these

white-cube spaces,” they say, as if we specifically need reminding. “If we don’t have pleasure in the smallest part of our lives,” Donnellan says, then referring to the endlessly nested scaling patterns of fractals in nature, “how can we bring it out into the world?”

Donnellan invokes American feminist writer, Audre Lorde (‘The Erotic as Power’), and the ‘pleasure activism’ of adrienne maree brown, speculatively posing sex, if not pleasure itself, as a reparative and political technology. Donnellan’s works seem to ask: how might our bodies conceive of, let alone enact liberation, if they have not themselves lived through its conceivable effects of joy and freedom? How else might bodies, these agent sites of knowledge production, of phenomenological data, build or even envision utopia without having first visited upon it? Experiencing is believing is being.

This is where the naïve and esoteric may meet; where reward and punishment, pleasure and pain in their polarisation must, at some point, coalesce in a gradient dialogue. The first principles of being are one’s binary acceptance of, or resistance to, sensory input. As we grow, life in all its sensations begins to muddy; boundaries are discovered, begin to blur, or even reshape themselves in our ontological gymnastics.

Choice necessitates consent, not simply to another’s body, but to one’s own body, to its own potential – that is, what do you want to feel? “That my values as a child are still valued,” they tell me. “And that glass can be fragile… but it can also be strong – we have whole buildings made from it.”

Day Magee is a performance-centred multimedia artist based in Dublin. @daymagee

Karen Donnellan’s exhibition ‘Cosmic Wetness’ ran at the Royal Hibernian Academy from 24 August to 1 October 2023. rhagallery.ie

All images: Karen Donnellan, ‘Cosmic Wetness’, installation view, Royal Hibernian Academy; photographs by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist.

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Exhibition Profile

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

All images: Kwok Tsui, ‘Deferral | Echo’, installation view; photographs by Paola Bernardelli, courtesy of the artist and CCA Derry~Londonderry.

‘DEFERRAL | ECHO’ AT CCA Derry~Londonderry (30 Septem-

Deferral | Echo KEVIN BURNS DISCUSSES KWOK TSUI’S EXHIBITION AT CCA.

ber – 21 December 2023) is Belfast-based artist Kwok Tsui’s first solo exhibition, consisting of a new body of work that symbolically mines the lived experience of immigration. An essay by Anna Liesching (Curator at the Ulster Museum) accompanies the exhibition, which relays some biographical elements of Tsui’s practice, including his childhood migration from Hong Kong, and an adulthood of bureaucratic displacement in jurisdictional pipelines.

The effect of this displacement is to be perpetually held in stasis, obstructing the pursuit of social norms such as education, work, and, I imagine, a robust sense of familial and social connection.

The presented work is almost all oil paintings that, at first glance, resemble abstract Colour Fields. These works are large enough to leverage a physical presence in the eye, but not large enough to be architectural; yet, they have a distinct bodily scale that one could comfortably fit into. The paintings have a shared palette, wavering in horizontal bands between indigo and midnight blue, which lends the galleries of CCA a close, monochromatic quality.

The outward uniformity in visual style invites contemplation of the details, characterised by a structural diversity of geometric and organic forms. On one canvas, a darkened triangle emerges from the bottom like the wing of an aircraft, as seen from a window seat; on another, pale dappled marks are distributed along the bottom half of the canvas, like many-legged cellular organisms, heaving under a microscope. The most emphasised motif is one of paired circles, depicted in some relation of declining scale. One canvas, titled Lessen (2023), recalls a space-probe image, with a distant, dark celestial body seen in the background of another, much nearer twin.

If Tsui’s paintings are concerned with distance or vantage

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

points, then the positioning of the works around the CCA walls conjures an observational, connective space between them. More than just locating a viewer in the middle of the gallery space, these paintings may be displaced agents in their own right, regretfully observing distant counterpoints on opposite and adjoining walls.

The text by Liesching references the artist’s sense of ambivalence to artistic tradition, looking toward both Asian and Western traditions. While the Colour Field Painting is a modality associated with post-war American art, the layering of circular forms is suggestive of traditional Chinese symbolism, including the recurrent circular forms of East Asian national emblems.

This push and pull between traditions may be reflected in a formal outlier to the exhibition: one wall is interspersed with nine small mixed-media drawings, about the size of postcards, made with pencil, masking tape, and Chinese ink. They are set apart from the rest of the exhibition by their physical depth; where the paintings are flat, these works have a layered construction of shapes, either affixed sculpturally to the paper or scored under pressure from a tool. The treatment of paper as a sculptural material, rather than a surface, is suggestive of Chinese paper crafts. Some drawings replicate compositions in the paintings, or perhaps the paintings replicate compositions from them – the viewer is unsure how to read the relationship between the two mediums.

This dichotomy may symbolise the artist’s professed ambivalence to artistic traditions (as noted by Liesching) as well as his lived experience of migration.

The drawings could be viewed as subversive counterpoints to the conventionally more authoritative painted canvas in the Western art canon, and stand, therefore, as an assertion of individual agency, even when held in jurisdictional stasis.

Kevin Burns is an artist and writer based in Derry.

Exhibition Profile

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Organisation

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

[L-R foreground]: Eilis O’Connell, Held Across, 1975, painted steel & Yellow run around, 2023, cast bronze, brass, polycarbonate; photograph by Roland Paschhoff courtesy the artist and Lavit Gallery.

ON 16 FEBRUARY 1963, a circular was posted out to prospective

Art for Patronage BRIAN MAC DOMHNAILL REFLECTS ON THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF CORK ARTS SOCIETY, NOW TRADING AS LAVIT GALLERY.

members of what would become Cork Arts Society, “the object of which is to promote a lively interest in art subjects generally, including art appreciation, painting, sculpture, architecture, ceramics, crafts, etc., and membership is open to all those who have an interest in these subjects.” The circular lists patrons and promoters already supporting the initiative, which included members of the Cork business community, clergy, military, politicians, academics, and artists such as sculptor Seamus Murphy.

Cork Arts Society, now trading as Lavit Gallery, went on to put greater emphasis on providing exhibition and sales opportunities for artists and makers, as well as providing a stimulating programme for its audience and patrons. With this came additional costs, so a commission from sales was necessary, as would be the case with any private commercial enterprise. With limited resources of its own, and operating in what was a limited local market, Lavit Gallery could not aspire towards providing fully fledged representation for artists. On the contrary, to maintain its own place in the commercial art market, and in line with its not-for-profit status, the organisation adopted a more fluid and inclusive approach.

Rather than maintaining a fixed stable of artists, the organisation would work with regular contributors whilst also being open to approaches from new artists and makers on an ongoing basis as well as seeking out artists of interest. As such the exhibition programme and gallery stock could be adapted in response to audience and customer behaviour. This open, responsive, and adaptive approach is arguably what has sustained the organisation over the decades.

As well as maintaining a stock room, Lavit Gallery currently programmes ten exhibitions per year. Annual fixtures include the

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

Student of the Year Award, Graduate Group Exhibition, Annual Members Exhibition, Summer Exhibition, and Winter Exhibition. We also host our neighbours, Cork Printmakers and Backwater Artist Group, on an alternating basis. Between these recurring exhibitions, we programme a combination of solo, two-person and small group shows. In 2023, this included a solo show by Bernadette Kiely as well as a two-person show by Johnny Bugler and Diarmuid Breen. Lavit Gallery has always maintained a diverse range of stock that acknowledges the close links between art, craft and design.

In 2023 the exhibition ‘Into the Weave’ occupied the slot in the programme that often links to Cork Craft Month, but in this instance (and in the previous year with the exhibition ‘Clay and Canvas’), the gallery set out to blur the boundaries between art and craft, rather than define any separation. ‘Into the Weave’ included work by Laura Angell, George Bolster, Ceadogán Rugs (designs by Deirdre Breen and Shane O’Driscoll), Myra Jago, Allyson Keehan, Richard Malone, Evelyn Montague, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Helen O’Shea, Caroline Schofield, Margo Selby, Matt Smith, Jennifer Trouton and Leiko Uchiyama.

At one point, Lavit Gallery operated alongside two excellent fully fledged commercial galleries in Cork City, namely Fenton Gallery and Vangard Gallery, both of which ceased operations at the end of the last recession. Lavit Gallery is unusual in the national arts landscape. Unlike other not-for-profit arts organisations, such as studios, galleries, art centres and workshops, who might supplement their income with sales, Lavit Gallery has always pursued sales both as its core function and its main source of income. That it has succeeded in doing this for 60 years is a credit to all involved.

However, a lot has changed since Cork Arts Society was inaugurated in 1963, and the context in which its gallery operates has also changed significantly.

Patrons who contributed greatly to the success of Lavit Gallery over the decades have arguably done all they can. They maintain a love of art and continue to visit our exhibitions, but the walls of their homes are full of the art they have collected to date. We hear anecdotal accounts of their offspring showing an interest in art but struggling to find a home of their own. Added to this, there are ever-increasing living costs, and this means harder choices have to be made in terms of spending. There have also been broader societal and cultural changes. In a world where we are now bombarded with imagery daily, the real-world experience of viewing an exhibition has a lot more to compete with than in previous decades. Indeed, it is a challenge to convey the benefits of owning art to an audience who has yet to take the plunge. The cohort of customers who are actively collecting continue to inspire us, and it is hoped that, with our encouragement, others will follow in their footsteps.

Our 60th anniversary in 2023 has been a time of reflection as well as celebration. We find ourselves revisiting some of the broader objectives of our organisation and taking stock of our contribution to the arts, including initiatives which set us apart from private enterprises. Since 1967, Cork Arts Society has given the Student of the Year Award to one or more graduates of MTU Crawford College of Art & Design.

The award traditionally comprised a cash prize from a sponsor but later evolved to include an exhibition at Lavit Gallery. A second award in the form of a group graduate exhibition was also added later.

To celebrate the organisation’s 60th anniversary and the legacy of these awards, Lavit Gallery presented the landmark exhibition, ‘Taking Form: Students of the Year 1973-77 | Maud Cotter, Eilis O’Connell and Vivienne Roche’ (31 August – 21 October). Curated by arts writer and academic Sarah Kelleher and I, this show celebrated the foresight of Cork Arts Society in recognising the talent and potential of these three young sculptors, each of whom were awarded Student of the Year in the 1970s. In bringing together the narratives of these acclaimed artists, this exhibition pointed to a significant moment in the development of contempo-

Organisation rary Irish art, when a dynamic and ambitious approach to sculptural practice emerged from Crawford College of Art in Cork.

The exhibition presented new work along with rarely seen early sculptures and archival material spanning the artists’ lengthy and illustrious careers. The individual and shared experiences of the three artists informed the exhibition but also continued to be revealed through an associated programme of events hosted in collaboration with MTU Crawford College of Art & Design and Crawford Art Gallery, which was home to the college in the 1970s. The impressive archival instinct of the artists has inspired an in-house archival project at Lavit Gallery, starting in December 2023, during which boxes of material transported from our previous venue were sorted with a view to preserving the legacy of the organisation and making selected items available for future online dissemination.

At this point in its history, Lavit Gallery seeks to strengthen its sales-based model whilst placing new emphasis on other potential sources of revenue, including membership, venue hire, consultancy, sponsorship, philanthropy, and funding. Lavit Gallery maintains relationships with institutional collections, whose purchases can have significant impact, for both Lavit Gallery and the artists whose work is acquired. Membership remains an important part of the organisation’s structure, with associated fees providing much needed revenue at the start of the year. However, what is striking is that most members are now artists, who choose to support Lavit Gallery and avail of the opportunity of participating in the Annual Members Exhibition.

Venue hire has begun to take off with events including a book launch, wedding and memorial service but compatibility with programming can be challenging.

Private sponsorship contributes to our graduate awards.

Lavit Gallery has, for the most part, sustained itself outside of the funding model despite its not-for-profit and charitable status. Except for a small annual sum, gratefully received from Cork City Council, the organisation is not currently in receipt of any other funding.

This is now very much an area of interest and applications and discussions are ongoing. There is of course pressure to meet criteria that don’t necessarily mesh well with a sales-based model.

The demand for exhibition opportunities in a versatile, medium-sized gallery in Cork City is very apparent, given the diversity of proposals we receive; however, not all these submissions have commercial potential and therefore cannot be considered. It is hoped that funding can facilitate a blended model, whereby elements of our programme can be supported with artist fees, production and marketing costs, rather than being entirely dependent on sales. There is a perceived division between sales-based visual art initiatives and those which are based on a funding model, yet many artists avail of both to maintain a sustainable art practice.

Funded visual arts programming in Ireland is now earnestly multi-disciplinary and continues to become increasingly focused on intellectual, political, social and environmental concerns as institutions and practitioners compete to be relevant and ambitious. In contrast, commercial galleries provide a rare opportunity for art to be appreciated for its own sake, based on its aesthetic value and what it communicates to the viewer in the absence of institutional interpretation. However, the story of the artist remains of interest in a commercial context, as patrons consider buying into an artist’s practice in the literal sense. Since taking up my role as Director of Lavit Gallery, I am finding that the centuries-old model of making art for patronage remains a far more accessible concept for the general public and is therefore equally deserving of support.

Brian Mac Domhnaill is Director of Lavit Gallery in Cork. lavitgallery.com

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Maud Cotter, at undoing, 2023, 1.5 mm birch ply; photograph by Roland Paschhoff courtesy the artist, Lavit Gallery and domobaal gallery, London.

[L-R]: Caroline Schofield, Figures 1-4, 2020-22, thread and insect pins; Myra Jago, Linn, 2023, oil on canvas, ‘Into the weave’, installation view, Lavit Gallery, August 2023; photograph by Brian Mac Domhnaill, courtesy the artists and Lavit Gallery.

[L-R]: Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, The Muses iii, 2018/2023, Pigment print on bamboo in a stained walnut frame with gold leaf, window mount and clarity glass, edition of 30 + 5AP; Myra Jago, Leiko Uchiyama Small basket, beige, 2023, Navajo-Churro (sheep) wool; Richard Malone, Untitled (knight), 2020/21, jersey, wadding, wood, cotton, cotton thread, insulation foam; Richard Malone, knight 2, despair, 2020/21, jersey, wadding, wood, cotton, cotton thread, insulation foam; ‘Into the weave’, installation view, Lavit Gallery, August 2023; photograph by Brian Mac Domhnaill courtesy the artists and Lavit Gallery

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Organisation

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

Moira McIver, Washing Line, 2022; image courtesy of the artist and An Gailearaí.

LOCATED IN THE Donegal Gaeltacht, it could be argued that An

A Gaeltacht Sensibility ANDREW DUGGAN INTERVIEWS ÚNA CAMPBELL, DIRECTOR OF AN GAILEARAÍ IN COUNTY DONEGAL.

Gailearaí is an anomaly, an outlier; yet it is the kind of space you might expect to find in an urban centre. It is a large purpose-built, concrete floored, white walled modular arts space in an industrial area in Gaoth Dobhair (Gweedore). These factors give An Gailearaí its unique mandate: “To showcase contemporary visual art to the public from artists who use traditional cultural sources and / or reflect Gaeltacht senses.”

An Gailearaí’s back catalogue reaveals a wealth of ambitious exhibitions and projects. When asking any artist who has shown there, or even An Gailearaí’s funding partners, you hear resoundingly positive reports. Artist Maria Simonds-Gooding says An Gailearaí’s director, Úna Campbell, “approaches the visual arts with a dynamic originality and has made a considerable contribution to the visual arts, especially to artists working in the Gaeltacht.”

An Gailearaí, which began out of necessity, is remarkably now in its 25th year. On the subject of An Gailearaí’s origins, Úna and I started our conversation. Úna Campbell: As the saying goes ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ and that was exactly the impetus behind establishing An Gailearaí. I had graduated as a mature student from the University of Ulster in the summer of 1997 and moved from Belfast to Donegal to paint and raise my youngest, rather naively I might add, as I hadn’t factored in how I was going to pay the bills. Anyway, the local bank manager was supportive and mentioned that the space above the bank was up for rent. Myself and another artist, Annjo Carr, took the tenancy, originally for a group studio, but I quickly realised that the area badly needed an exhibition space. At that time, the main art venue in Donegal was located in a relatively

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

Organisation

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Moira McIver, Bridge of Tears, Muckish Gap, 2022; image courtesy of the artist and An Gailearaí.

Andrew Duggan, ‘TUATH – an cuairteoir – the visitor’, installation view; photograph courtesy of the artist and An Gailearaí.

small basement under the central library in Letterkenny, and any other exhibition spaces were very limited.

I particularly liked the idea of a contemporary exhibition venue being located in the heart of a small rural community. So, we began exhibiting in 1999 under the name ‘Ceardlann na gCroisbhealach / Studio at the Crossroads’, and we’re still at it 25 years later.

Andrew Duggan: I think one of An Gailearaí’s strengths is the relationships fostered between art, artist and public. Can you discuss that mediation? ÚC: No one from my family studied art, so I always was interested in ease of access – that an art space was welcoming and not set apart from its community. Being accessible from the street was important but equally important is a community’s sense of ownership of such a space, and so this would influence our exhibition programming. Furthermore, I began to learn about the role of the curator as a link between the artist and the viewer and so how an exhibition is presented to an audience became an important aspect. We now have 25 years of exhibitions and hundreds of artists utilising the space and the variety of exhibitions has been vast. We decided from the outset that An Gailearaí’s programming would reflect and have meaning for our community and our context – that of being located within the heart of the Donegal Gaeltacht – and as such, we have become one of the primary exhibition spaces that reflects a Gaeltacht sensibility. We seek and promote artists who, in one way or another, draw from and explore our rich cultural heritage of language, custom and place. From group and solo shows, installation and performance, school and community projects and special commissions – we’ve done it all, and our back catalogue is worth a look. We have been supported from the outset by Ealaín na Gaeltachta and Donegal County Council, and this steady support has been invaluable.

AD: While a ‘Gaeltacht sensibility’ is a much larger discussion, you recently undertook a major survey of visual art in the Gaeltachtaí. How did this multi-venue exhibition come about and develop curatorially? ÚC: To celebrate the 40-year anniversary of Údarás na Gaeltachta – the authority responsible for the economic, social and cultural development of the Gaeltacht –

An Gailearaí curated, hosted and toured the exhibition ‘Dath an Dóchais / The Colour of Hope’. 40 practitioners living and making work within a Gaeltacht context and from numerous disciplines were selected to exhibit, representing all of the Gaeltacht regions. We mounted an online catalogue and commissioned critic and curator Catherine Marshall to write an accompanying essay. The show then toured to numerous venues throughout the Gaeltachtaí nationally. Whilst I personally do not think a ‘sensibility’ can be attached to a specific Eircode, these were the terms of the funding. For example, we recently hosted two exhibitions by artists Christina McBride and Moira McIver; each explored in very different ways the strong family and cultural links between Gaoth Dobhair and Glasgow.

Neither artist currently lives within a Gaeltacht but the work they produced oozed with a Gaeltacht experience.

AD: What aspirations and future projects are in the offing for An Gailearaí? ÚC: We’ve a much-welcomed new member of staff that will enable An Gailearaí to realise more ambitious commissions. We’ve reestablished a biannual slot for graduate artists, and we will exhibit two new graduates in the 2024 programme. An Gailearaí has often commissioned multidisciplinary projects in the past, as well as direct community engagement projects, and we will explore fresh possibilities this year, as we celebrate our 25th anniversary. Contemporary Gaeltacht expression remains at the heart of An Gailearaí’s programming, and we look forward with enthusiasm and confidence to the future. Úna Campbell is Director of An Gailearaí in County Donegal. angailearai.com

Andrew Duggan is an artist and educator based in the West Kerry Gaeltacht on the Dingle Peninsula. He was commissioned by An Gailearaí to create the mixed-media exhibition, ‘TUATH – an cuairteoir – the visitor’ in collaboration with performance artist Hollie Miller, composer Seán Ó Dálaigh, and camera person Siobhán Dempsey. andrewdugganartist.tumblr.com

Andrew Duggan, ‘TUATH – an cuairteoir – the visitor’, installation view; photograph courtesy of the artist and An Gailearaí.

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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

Festival / Biennial

Rouzbeh Shadpey, Forgetting Is The Sun, 2023, video, installation view, TULCA Gallery, Galway; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts.

A 2017 STUDY revealed that artworks capture an average ten seconds

Hospitality & Hidden Time LUCY ELVIS REFLECTS ON THE LEARNING OF THE TULCA FESTIVAL BOARD IN TERMS OF ACCESSIBILITY AND INCLUSION.

of gallery visitors’ attention before the next work, the next room, the next venue, or the world at large beckons. In thinking about accessibility, I’m struck by the ways in which not only the time signature of individual works or a wider festival might unfold, but also the temporality of bodies, and how they might interact with the often-conflicting impersonal timeframes of policy. TULCA Festival of Visual Arts takes place in Galway each year as Samhain spirits linger. Curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais, the generosity of TULCA Festival 2023 ‘honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise’ (3 – 19 November 2023) helped to create a marked contrast between the microcosm of the festival and the city outside.

Hidden Time The TULCA team devoted an undercurrent of hidden time to making the latest edition of the festival accessible. This involved drafting online and printed information to include access statements; undertaking staff training in audio description; developing and administering accessibility riders for all artists; and setting up live captioning technology before each event. Professional captioning, whereby a person live-transcribes an event as it unfolds, was used at the opening and for several artist talks but came at a steep financial cost.

In the main TULCA Gallery, a patch on Jamilla Prowse’s Crip Quilt (2023) read: “Who would I be if I could just turn up, a glass of wine in hand?” It stressed the importance of ‘time unfettered’.

Clearly, bodies that give and receive care – silently disciplined by the heaviness of infants, by battling the pressing fatigue of masking neurodiversity, or by navigating inhospitable thresholds – must exist in dual time signatures.

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

The use of audio descriptions for film works across the festival also stressed this double-time. Holly Márie Parnell’s Cabbage (2022) – a documentary film about her family’s move away and return to Ireland, instigated by a lack of support for her brother David – required viewers to wait for the version of the film they wanted to engage with. Likewise, Jenny Brady’s Music for Solo Performer (2022) at the University of Galway Gallery played on a loop that alternated between described and non-described versions. Viewers responded diversely to these interventions, and admittedly, it was challenging for those on short visits to venues; however, many appreciated the extra layer the description added to their engagement with the work. In the case of physical works, such as Prowse’s Crip Quilt (2023), the audio description made engaging with the work a deeper and more luxurious affair.

Policy, Practice & Support TULCA has taken time to fully articulate an Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) policy. Perhaps echoing our history as a practice-led organisation, we’ve chosen to implement and test feasible interventions first, rather than simply articulate best intentions. In this iteration of the festival – which closely interrogated the relationship between health institutions and those whose lives are defined by them – it was wonderful that diverse and differently-abled audiences were facilitated, and we look forward to continuing this support in future festivals.

The financial support received from Arts and Disability Ireland (ADI) for this year’s festival was invaluable. It covered the high cost of professional live captioners and also enabled TULCA to hire a support worker for artist Bridget O’Gorman, whose art practice has been irrecoverably changed due to the deteriora-

Festival / Biennial tion of a permanent spinal injury. We co-commissioned Bridget to make Support/Work (2023) – a large-scale sculptural installation of fragile ‘mobiles’, made from jesmonite and supported by pulleys and hoists, which occupied the front of the TULCA Gallery. In addition, The Birthday Party by Áine O’Hara – a celebratory event for the sick, differently abled, D/deaf, chronically ill, and neurodiverse people of rural Ireland, hosted at the University of Galway on 9 November 2023 – was made possible by a grant from Creative Europe.

Partnerships with Helium Arts and Saolta Arts facilitated bringing work to marginalised communities.

Anna Roberts-Gevalt’s podcast, Ridgewood Sick Centre (2023) was brought to wider audiences through a partnership with FLIRT FM, while a showcase of works by young artists suffering long-term illnesses was delivered on the second and final weekend of the festival.

Working with Galway County libraries allowed us to screen Edward Lawrenson and Pia Borg’s documentary, Abandoned Goods (2014) – chronicling the Adamson Collection of British ‘asylum art’ – in Netherne psychiatric patient J.J. Beegan’s (presumed) native Ballinasloe, alongside a talk from Professor Clair Wills.

Hospitality One of the unique things about TULCA’s model as a platform for Irish curatorship is the chance to learn from a new curator each year. Iarlaith’s practice not only showed the importance of careful research, but also of the conceptualisation of curatorship, and festival curatorship in particular, as a kind of hospitality. Welcoming audiences to critically engage with the theme and be aware of the modes of delivery, mattered here. Each time Iarlaith gave a public talk, her effortless descriptions for the low vision and blind, or her encouragement for audiences to notice and engage with different

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supports, showed the power of the personal touch.

Creating spaces for rest across venues is something TULCA will certainly maintain for all visitors going forward. At the opening, extra seating meant people gathered in clusters and spent longer in the gallery spaces. Choosing to buy bench seating, rather than following advice to hire them, means that TULCA can use this furniture in future festivals. Likewise, production innovations – such as the lower hanging height of Paul Roy’s monoprint series in the main gallery space – facilitated comfortable viewing by children, wheelchair users, or those simply choosing to sit for a while.

Restfulness was further invoked in Bog Cottage’s faery fort (2023) – a mixed-media installation featuring ceramics, fabric hangings, rugs, seating, and a soundscape – which created a space for respite and reflection in Outset Gallery. Complimentary carer seats were provided at the premier of Leila Hekmat’s riotous and delirious film, Symptom Recital: Music for Wild Angels (2022) at Pálás cinema, and a safe, quiet opening was provided for visitors challenged by crowded spaces.

Actioning all of this for a two-week festival made us consider the longer time needed to facilitate audiences, for whom time is not their own. Returning to Prowse’s provocation, one wonders what TULCA might become as an institution, if we were able to invest in longer, iterative practices, different opening hours, and the hidden and sometimes costly support systems needed to transform time into space for marginalised audiences. However, TULCA is reliant on support from funders, partners, increasingly stretched local infrastructure, and the herculean work of a contracted but precarious team. Finding ways to intersect conversations about access with sustainability – while reaching beyond success measures that hinge on audience numbers, towards depth of engagement – is long overdue.

Dr Lucy Elvis is a curator, writer, philosopher, and lecturer, who currently serves on the TULCA Board of Directors. tulca.ie

Installation view, TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2023: honey, milk and salt in a seashell before sunrise, TULCA Gallery, Galway; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artists and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts.

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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

Project Profile

Sentient Entity DEBI PAUL TALKS ABOUT GLANDWR, HER HOME IN CHAPELIZOD, WHERE SHE HOSTS EXHIBITIONS AND PROJECTS. I REMEMBER THE first day I met Glandwr; it affected

my whole being. Years later, while working on a project together, artist Tanad Aaron intently quizzed me on the ‘why’ of Glandwr. I realised it was akin to the curiosity I had felt as a small child in Vesey Place, a three-storey terraced house in the suburbs of Dublin, which surrounded a wild central sunken garden. That building housed Dalkey School Project (DSP) – the first Educate Together school in Ireland, in a move away from church-run schools in favour of multi-denominational education.Vesey Place, was one of many temporary locations, buildings and prefabs we had ‘on-loan’. Strangely it never felt scary or unsteady to me as a child. In fact, quite the opposite; it was full of wonder, excitement, and safety. I still remember the sense of freedom, as my little body ran down the tarmac slope and into the lush garden each day.

Glandwr had that same community vibe, and that’s probably what I picked up on. The Victorian building was previously a day centre with bedrooms turned into classrooms where people came to re-habilitate. There was also a series of fairly ramshackle outhouses, and a glasshouse in a romantic state of disrepair. The tracings of the building’s previous life showed care – that it had meant something to the people who had shared it. I moved in and it did feel daunting, but somehow, neighbours, friends, family, housemates, boyfriends, and guests buoyed me onwards. Parties were had to clear the energy; the house liked having many people in it. I knew that eventually I would introduce some form of art project, but I had no idea that the house itself would be the first artwork. Born from a lack of money, the ‘working with’ nature of this place seemed to find its own way forward, and the real joy came from figuring it out creatively.

In 2015, mid-way through my first decade at Glandwr, I began an MA in Art + Research Collaboration (ARC) at IADT. Prior to the master’s, I had dipped my toes in curating and organising small intimate events.

In my first year, there was a big emphasis on making.

I had come from an applied art background, which I was doing my best to move away from, so this was not what I wanted, or so I thought. Looking back, it was exactly right for me, and the MA really helped me to bring together multiple research interests and value them equally. I can confess, happily now! I am a maker too, and that mix between practice and philosophy and ideas relating to the material world is where my work sings.

I then worked in a Dublin gallery, which, if I’m honest, felt like a study trip. I was a pretty dedicated invigilator! I thought that someday I’d run a gallery – that was the dream. And then the world stopped. The pandemic was tough for everyone in so many ways; however, it was a chance for me to stay in one place, instead of running to multiple jobs. During this special time, a notepad, a pencil and some watercolours helped me to stay with concepts. I read a lot, joined an online book club, partook in a weekly zoom dancing and writing class. To sit and be with my practice was transformative. I walked in the Phoenix Park and by The Liffey.

In these times I reflected on artist’s works, rested them side by side in my mind. I left them alone for a while, coming back to immerse myself within their world, and in mine. Somehow things started moving.

The first exhibition I curated at Glandwr was ‘Home Bodies’ June/July 2021 featuring work by Joanne Reid, Sibyl Montague, and Jennie Moran. Due to the pandemic, we couldn’t meet in person, so we shared readings and ideas via email. As we got closer to the real-

isation of the show, the artists were super generous in allowing me to have their works for a long time before we opened. It simply felt right that the exhibition was thematically focused on ‘host’ and ‘guest’ and played with ideas around food, hospitality, and the feminine.

The second exhibition, ‘Where is George Bulfin?’ in October 2022, concentrated on a stripped back form of ‘use + function’, with artists Tanad Aaron, Jamie Cross, and Florian Weichsberger. The exhibition title channelled a sense of magic. George Bulfin was the decorator who wallpapered Glandwr’s hallway in 1964.

Including ‘Where’ allowed us to jump into place and process within the imagined ghosts of this and other places.

Most recently, ‘Starting Point’ in September 2023, was a diagrammatical walking performance, devised by artist Phil Smith for the wider environs of Chapelizod village. Phil had studied the village in minute detail, remotely from Plymouth, where he lives. Then later, a week prior to the performance, Phil came on residency to Glandwr. In the preceding days, he could be seen leaning into the ivy, as he turned the bend of local pathways.

Just like the low chink of light on an autumn day, I’m a believer in sentient entity of things, whether artworks or household objects or words which can hang in the air. I’m interested in effusive memories and the potentialities or residue left by groups or individuals as they move through spaces. I’m keen to explore how these energies can be carried forward, walked beside, or seen anew. Much of 2023 has been about curatorial research, made possible by a Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. The main project has focused on a series of activating research events, curatorial conversations, and residencies. These activations are essential, both to stretch my curatorial capabilities, and to

support a depth of enquiry into each artists’ practice.

We are building towards a site-specific exhibition in November 2024 at Glandwr called ‘houseWORKhomeWORK’ with artists Ella De Búrca, Rachel Fallon, and Eva Vēvere. The project will address housing, labour, maintenance, and eco-feminism, and will explore how artists often operate in unseen ways. The artists all consider performative modes of engagement. Ella is reflecting, activating, and sharing her own lived experience of endometriosis. Eva will consider the complexities and benefits of shared spaces within domestic and natural environments, observing how choreography of the body during conversation changes experiences of connection. Rachel poses the question, “Who gets to garden?”, exploring how land ownership, housing rights, colonialism, and ecology collide with neighbourliness.

In spring 2024, ‘houseWORKhomeWORK’ will be part of the FREESPACE programme at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, comprising of research gatherings and public events in support of our planned exhibition.

In addition, curator Sara Greavu is acting as a critical friend to me and the project. Our current conversations focus on labour and concepts of ‘maintenance’, referencing the history of place and current-day uses of Glandwr. Finally, I’m delighted to mention that I am working toward co-curating an exhibition with Mark O’Gorman at The Complex Gallery, Dublin, in 2025.

Mark and I share a commonality of interest in non-traditional, collaborative modes of exhibition-making, which makes for an exciting and meaningful working relationship.

Debi Paul is an artist and curator based in Dublin. @debi_p_a_u_l @_glandwr_

‘Where is George Bulfin?’ installation view [background]: Tanad Aaron, Reflector, 2018-22, polyester, acrylic, silk; [foreground] Florian Weichsberger La casa nasconde ma non ruba, 2022, necklace, floor tile, glass marble, cotton; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artists and Glandwr.

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | January – February 2024

Lifelong Learning January – February 2024

January

February

VAI Helpdesk with Brian Kielt (Online)

Let’s Talk Creative

Date/Time: Wednesday 10 January, 2pm – 4.30pm Places: 5 Cost: Free Booking: VAI website

Details: VAI & Dublin City LEO: Practice Development Programme. Oneto-one mentoring and five workshops.

Dates: 1 Feb – 6 March, time TBC Places: Open to members located Dublin 1-13, 17 or 20 only Cost: €10 per session (€60 total) Enquiries to Emer: services@visualartists.ie

VAI Helpdesk with Brian Kielt (Online)

VAI Helpdesk with Brian Kielt (Online)

Date/Time: Wednesday 17 January, 2pm - 4.30pm Places: 5 Cost: Free Booking: VAI website

Date/Time: Tuesday 20 February, 2pm - 4.30pm Places: 5 Cost: Free Booking: VAI website

Writing Creative Proposals

Webinar: Tax Advice for Artists – NI

Date/Time: Thursday 18 January, 11am – 12.30pm Places: 70 Cost: €5 (VAI members) €10 (Non-members) Booking: VAI website

Speaker: Louise Gorman, Balanced Business Solutions Date/Time: Wednesday 21 February, 11am - 12.30pm Places: 70 Cost: £5 (VAI members) £10 (Non-members) Booking: VAI website

VAI Helpdesk with Brian Kielt (Online)

Home Studios Northern Ireland

Date/Time: Wednesday 24 January, 2pm - 4.30pm Places: 5 Cost: Free Booking: VAI website

Speaker: Orla Whelan, At Home Studios Date/Time: Thursday 22 February, 12 noon - 3pm Location: Belfast Office (and walking tour of nearby galleries) Booking: VAI website

Webinar: An Artist’s Guide to Accessing Funding

VAI Helpdesk with Brian Kielt (Online)

Speaker: Marianne O’Kane Boal Date/Time: Thursday 25 January, 11am - 12.30pm Places: 70 Cost: €5 (VAI members) €10 (Non-members) Booking: VAI website

Date/Time: Tuesday 27 February, 2pm - 4.30pm Places: 5 Cost: Free Booking: VAI website

VAI Helpdesk with Brian Kielt (Online) Date/Time: Tuesday 30 January, 2pm - 4.30pm Places: 5 Cost: Free Booking: VAI website

Pretty Pickle Eszter Szabó 9 January—17 February 2024 www.thedock.ie

A PEANUT WORM’S DREAM Ella Bertilsson 9 January—17 February 2024 www.thedock.ie

Luan Gallery in collaboration with Westmeath Arts Office presents

SA LÁR A Westmeath Artists Awards group exhibition featuring work by 30 Westmeath Artists selected by Guest Curator, Emer McGarry

Exhibition Continues until 8 February

Gordon Hogan, Who Are You (Video still), 2023

Exploding View Gordon Hogan

LUAN GALLERY

LUAN GALLERY | Elliott Road | Athlone | N37 TH22 www.luangallery.ie

2 Dec 2023 – 20 Jan 2024 The Source Arts Centre | Thurles | Co. Tipperary Tues – Fri: 10 am – 5pm | Sat: 2pm – 5pm thesourceartscentre.ie | @sourcearts