Mark Joyce, Heliocentric 2, 2019, pigment on raw linen; photograph © and courtesy of the artist.
First Pages
6. Roundup. Exhibitions and events from the past two months.
On The Cover Columns
9. Hide and Sing. Cornelius Browne reflects on his ongoing artistic collaboration with Sara Baume. The Anatomy of Art Making. Manal Mahamid outlines her journey as a multidisciplinary Palestinian artist.
10. ACNI Collection. Joanna Johnston outlines recent acquisitions to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Collection . Earth Rising. Siobhán Mooney outlines the forthcoming eco art festival taking place at IMMA this September.
11. Wicklow Artists Salon. Philip St John and Joanna Kidney reflect on a year of the Wicklow Artists Salon. The Ocean and The Forest. Frank Golden draws on European Modern Art to reflect on Timothy Emlyn Jones’s exhibition.
Festival
12. The Gleaners Society. Frank Wasser interviews Sebastian Cichocki about his guest programme for EVA International.
In Focus: Artist-Led
14. An Altering Rhythm. Inter_site.
15. Welcome to the Neighbourhood. ACA. relocation / reaction / response. Catalyst Arts.
16. A Basic Need for Space. Basic Space.
17. Grass Roots. Muine Bheag Arts.
Critique
19. Ruby Wallis, ‘Whistling in the Dark’, installation view, Galway Arts Centre; photograph by Tom Flanagan, courtesy of the artist and Galway Arts Centre.
20. Fiona Mulholland, Artlink, Fort Dunree.
21. Katherine Sankey, The LAB Gallery.
22. ‘Then I Laid the Floor’, Triskel Arts Centre.
23. ‘On Earth We are Briefly Gorgeous’, glór.
24. Galway International Arts Festival, Various Venues.
Exhibition Profile
26. Red Illuminates. Adam Stoneman considers Jialin Long’s current body of work which uses AI processes.
27. Bending Light. Catherine Marshall reflects on Mark Joyce’s recent solo exhibition at Damer House Gallery.
28. Empathy Lab. Colin Martin discusses current themes in his painting practice and forthcoming show at CCI Paris.
Postgraduate
29. Getting to the Heart of Practice. Laurence Hynes discusses his experience of the MA Creative Practice at ATU Galway. Daughter(s) of Danu. Nina Fern outlines her artistic journey as part of the MA Creative Practice at ATU Sligo.
Project Profile
30. The Agri-Cultural Summer Show. Ciara Healy interviews Orla Barry about evolving thematic concerns in her practice.
32. The Ninth Muse. Frank Wasser interviews Aoibheann Greenan about her current body of work.
33. Supernatural Bureau. Kate Strain interviews Sonia Shiel about current and forthcoming projects.
Member Profile
34. Twilight Time. Ann Quinn, VAI Member.
35. You Begin. Margaret Fitzgibbon, VAI Member.
36. Stacks. Mary O’Connor, VAI Member. Give Me A Ring Tomorrow. nerosunero, VAI Member.
The Visual Artists’ News Sheet:
Editor: Joanne Laws
Production/Design: Thomas Pool
News/Opportunities: Thomas Pool, Mary
McGrath
Proofreading: Paul Dunne
Visual Artists Ireland:
CEO/Director: Noel Kelly
Office Manager: Grazyna Rzanek
Advocacy & Advice: Elke Westen
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
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W: visualartists.ie
Northern Ireland Office
Visual Artists Ireland 109 Royal Avenue Belfast BT1 1FF
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Online – 29 September 2023 (10am-4:30pm)
In Person (Tullamore) – 2 October 2023 (11am-5pm)
Programme highlights include:
• Imogen Stidworthy: How We See Work
• Cristina da Milano: Nothing About Us Without Us
• In Conversation: Lindsey Mendick and Helen Pheby
• Panel: Exploring Our Intrinsic Interconnection with the Natural World
• Panel: Working with AI in Contemporary Art Practice
• Launch: The Hedge School Project
• Artists Speak, Speed Curating & VAI Café
Information & Bookings: visualartists.ie
Taispeántas Ealaíne Comhaimseartha
Casino Marino, Baile Átha Cliath
An 1 Iúil go dtí an 6 Samhain 2023
An Exhibition of Contemporary Art
Casino Marino, Dublin
1 July to 6 November 2023
casinomarino.ie
Christopher Banahan, Alana Barton, Mónika Bögyös, Becks Butler, Celie Byrne, Joanne Clerkin, Joanne Betty Conlon, John Cooney, Laura Cronin, Vivienne Dick, Amanda Doran, Samantha Ellis Fox, Philip Flanagan, Owen de Forge, Carol Graham, Charles Harper, Ciaran Harper, Anthony Haughey, Beverley Healy, Jessica Hollywood, Stephen Johnston, Merve Jones, Vanessa Jones, Garry Loughlin, Maitiú Mac Cárthaigh, Connor Maguire, Alice Maher, Paddy McCabe, Kim Montgomery, Kevin Mooney, Daniel Nelis, Eva O’Donovan, Nuala O’Sullivan, Tolu Ogunware, David Quinn, Alex de Roeck, Vera Ryklova, Dáibhidh Stiúbhard, Éva Anna Szántó-Nádudvari, SÍle Walsh.
Image features detail of Amanda Doran’s Beast Mode
MA: ART & PROCESS
is an intensive and stimulating taught Masters in Fine Art that is delivered over three semesters through the calendar year from end of January to December. Each semester focuses on a different function of the course:
• CRITIQUE
• RESEARCH
• PRESENTATION
MA:AP offers innovative approaches to learning, individual studio spaces, access to college workshops and facilities, professional experience through collaborative projects, peer-to-peer exchange and a bespoke visitor lecture series.
26
Now taking applications for start January 2024
MTU Crawford College of Art & Design Cork Ireland
Information and online application details: https://crawford.cit.ie/ courses/art-and-process/ ccad.enquiriescork@mtu.ie 00 353 021 4335200
Project Visual Arts presented ‘Culchie boy, I love you / Grá mo chroí thú, mo chábóigín féin’, by Kian Benson Bailes, from 22 June to 12 August. Showcasing sculpture, collage, musical instruments, ceramics, textiles, woodwork, and live sound elements, Bailes’s work delves into rural queer experiences, intertwining Irish folklore and craft traditions. The show was accompanied by an essay from Iarlaith Ní Fheorais. Bailes’s creations, inspired by the essence of rural Ireland, challenge perceptions, and evoke a sense of purpose and local identity. projectartscentre.ie
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios
On 2 September Léann Herlihy presented With Everything We’ve Got! [warm-up], a one-hour performance as part of the group exhibition ‘Reflex Blue’ at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Herlihy takes stylistic reference from alt text/image description, and utilises frameworks of coalition building. This body of work moves against common understandings of sporting bodies and situates itself as a warm-up for an expansive project that realises an active state of losing/ falling as an embodied response to systemic injustice.
templebargallery.com
Walter’s Bar
ArtNetdlr presented ‘PERSPECTIVES’, an exhibition of new work by Maria Ginnity at the Upstairs @ Walters, Dún Laoghaire. The exhibition was opened on 29 June by artist and Head of RHA School, Colin Martin, and was on view until 23 July. Focused primarily on figurative art, Maria’s work captures a moment in time, drawing the viewer in through the use of cropped images and unusual perspectives. The overall result is rhythmic, bold and intriguing.
artnetdlr.ie
Rua Red
Candice Breitz’s exhibition, ‘Love Story’, delves into cultural diversity, confronting social barriers hindering connection and belonging in South Dublin County. ‘Love Story’ spotlights personal stories of displaced individuals, like Syrian escapee Sarah Ezzat Mardini, and former child soldier José Maria João. Breitz weaves their narratives into an emotive montage, raising powerful questions about the impact and representation of human suffering. On display from 25 August to 11 November.
ruared.ie
The Complex ‘MOVE – SET – MOVE’ was a newly commissioned group exhibition by Lucy Andrews, Andy Fitz, and Katie Watchorn. The artists engaged in detailed discussions about sculptural processes, materiality, and the interplay of objects. The exhibit ran from 19 August to 2 September and showcased their explorations into the transformative qualities of materials, the strive for authenticity, and the peculiarities of handcrafting. Glass emerged as a common material thread, while the artists’ interconnectedness resembled a “love triangle” of ideas. thecomplex.ie
Zoological Museum
‘Anthropomorphia’ was a two-site Dublin exhibition by multidisciplinary Visual Artists Mel French and Celine Sheridan. The Complex Gallery, curated by Mark O’Gorman, and the Zoological Museum in Trinity College both exhibited work that stems from a collaborative research engagement within the fields of Zoology and Psychology. Both French and Sheridan’s artworks reflects on and engages with the psychosomatic of both human and animal. On display from 7 June to 23 August.
tcd.ie
‘The Name of the Water’, an exhibition by Karen Daye-Hutchinson and Déirdre Kelly, is a fusion of Venice and Belfast. Their artworks, inspired by cartography, depict the intersection of these two locales. Karen’s prints and bookworks, a product of her Scuola Internazionale di Grafica residency, converse with Déirdre’s shifting collages from her Ballinglen Arts Foundation experience. Lagoons surround and define the shape of Venice, in the same way that the ocean characterises the wild Irish coastline. On display from 5 July to 26 August. artisann.org
Belfast Print Workshop celebrated art and heritage at the Linen Biennale 2023, fusing art, culture, and heritage. From 3 to 31 August, the studio and gallery showcased the intricate beauty of linen, captured by talented artists. The opening reception on 3 August immersed attendees in the world of linen artistry. The event featured guest speakers and demonstrations throughout the month, offering insights into the creative process behind this remarkable medium.
bpw.org.uk
The Naughton Gallery presents ‘Neue Palette’, a solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Gianni Lee from 10 August to 1 October. Hailing from New York and Los Angeles, Lee’s work spans fashion, fine art, and music, showcasing his mastery of diverse media like painting, drawing, and photography. Lee’s art transcends boundaries, often featuring his signature skeletal graffiti figures or focusing on alien-like subjects to address societal challenges. The exhibition delves into Lee’s creative process, exploring completion in artistic creation.
naughtongallery.org
Belfast Exposed
Belfast Exposed hosted the British Journal of Photography’s exhibition, ‘Portrait of Humanity Vol. 5’, from 3 August to 23 September. Deirdre Brennan’s portraits of Dublin streets were selected, including her portrayal of Elizabeth and Edward O’Brien. When Brennan encountered the couple, their glamour and love prompted a spontaneous street photoshoot. The exhibition celebrated 200 portraits worldwide, with 30 overall winners displayed at Belfast Exposed and The Indian Photo Festival. belfastexposed.org
Golden Thread Gallery
‘Objects in Time’ by artist Anne Butler ran from 3 August to 2 September. Butler’s exhibition featured intricate Parian porcelain vessels, wall pieces, and sculptures, all of which aimed to delve into the concept of the material and the passage of time. Her art was inspired by both natural and manmade structures, revealing connections between cultural and personal memory, while juxtaposing strength and fragility, permanence and loss. The exhibition was presented in collaboration with Craft NI as a part of August Craft Month. goldenthreadgallery.co.uk
Ulster Folk Museum
‘Gintlíocht’ was an exhibition of contemporary art on the theme of heritage skills and crafts, as part of August Craft Month and the Linen Biennale 2023. Supported by PSsquared, the exhibition brought together Susan Hughes, Dorothy Hunter, Tara McGinn, Emma Brennan, artist collaborators Sinéad Bhreathnach Cashell, Jayne Cherry and Alice Clarke, Grace McMurray, Gerard Carson and collective Soft Fiction Projects, who showed work on the theme across the site, for the month of August. On display from 1 August to 1 September. ulsterfolkmuseum.org
Athlone Civic Centre
‘The Weight Of It All’ by Mariza Halliday was on display from 31 July to 1 September. This confronting exhibition showcased a series of paintings that delved into the artist’s personal struggle with mental health. Born out of a period of grief following the loss of a close friend, these artworks have evolved into a poignant representation of a journey with mental health over the years, offering viewers a visual glimpse into the intricacies of the artist’s mind.
marizahalliday.com
GOMA
‘An Instinct, A Continuance’ is a new video installation by Sandra Johnston based on physical movements that are interconnected with archival material and textual forms referencing colonial residues of WWII. Developed with GOMA, this project furthers Johnston’s long-term experimentation with non-verbal communication, looking at how we move and express ourselves as emotional conductors, being incessantly changeable – both sociable and insular in our patterns of self-construction. On display from 22 July to 26 August. gomawaterford.ie
Convergence festival, presented by Live Art Ireland with Livestock, ran from 25 to 27 August and aimed to celebrate and promote diverse artistic talents from around the world. It served as a platform for artists to showcase their innovative works and foster cross-cultural exchange. Artists included: Kira O’Reilly, Satadru Sovan Banduri, Selina Bonelli, Erica Felicella, Topiy Volodymyr & Mariya Hoyin, Marina Barsy Janer x Isil Sol Vil, Slavek Kwi, Mads Floor Andersen, Una Lee, Robbie Maguire, Venus Patel.
live-art.ie
Sligo artist Sarah Ellen Lundy named her exhibition ‘Géag’, the Irish word for the limb of a tree or human arm, because her varied installations draw on the parallels between human and non-human forms. Sarah’s work has been selected for the Chicago Underground Film Festival 2023, and this show includes her filmic work, Every Woman Is An Eyeland, an eco-feminist exploration of the connections made between women and nature in culture and religion. On display from 15 July to 26 August.
ballinaartscentre.com
KAVA
‘A Moment of Joy’ by Kathryna Cuschieri was on display from 25 August to 3 September. Kathryna uses the flexible potential and properties of hot glass to explore the emotions that carry the inner world of visions, dream images and fairy tale. She envisions her work as an alchemical process that brings the ordinarily hidden into the light. Some of her works entail creating a body-cast. This cast is first taken in plaster and silica of the person whose story she is working with.
kava.ie
The festival ‘CLAY : holding/transforming/ performing’ ran from 25 to 27 August and involved a mould making workshop with Kate O’Kelly, a live raku bench for audience participation throughout the month of August, and a live performance by Florence Peake. This festival was curated by artist Clare Twomey, artist Nuala O’Donovan, and NSF curator Dobz O’Brien. Featured artists were Linda Sormin, Florence Peake, William Cobbing, Simon Kidd, Kate O’Kelly, Bernadette Tuite and Nuala O’Donovan.
nationalsculpturefactory.com
Clare Museum
‘Dúlamán na Farraige’ by Marie Connole features new work that expands on her previous exhibition at the Irish Arts Center in New York. Sublime figures of hybrid sea creatures, informed by scientific research and folklore, dwell in an aquatic underworld. The merging of their bodies with Kelp seaweed conveys the intensity and range of human emotion. Dúlamán is the Irish word for a type of seaweed. On display from 1 August to 1 September.
marieconnole.com
Lavit Gallery
‘Into the weave’, was a group exhibition of artist and makers using textiles, with a wide variation of experience with the medium. Exhibiting artists included 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.
lavitgallery.com
R-Space Gallery
R-Space Gallery and artist Jill Phillips presented an innovative interactive exhibition, ‘Connected Emotions’, from 28 July to 26 August. The exhibition brought together art, design and science, to create a textile installation and explore connections between emotions and different types of design. Visitors had the opportunity not just to view but interact and contribute to this installation, and thus explore their very own emotional connections with design.
rspacelisburn.com
Custom House Studios + Gallery
‘Stack’ by Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh was on display from 6 to 30 July. Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh is innately concerned with the material qualities of paint, and the physical act of painting itself. Resisting the confinements of allegory, she earnestly engages with painting as its own autonomous language. Much like a poet, Ní Mhaonaigh is interested in ambiguity and in anachronisms. It has been said that she is a painter who suggests rather than represents. Ní Mhaonaigh has become known for deriving titles of her shows from the Irish language. customhousestudios.ie
‘Attitude of a Plane’ by Julie Merriman was an exploration of women’s contributions to aviation and Irish female pilots. In a series of large-scale composite drawings, mimeograph prints and book art, various aspects of flight was explored. The show examined the design and construction of the first aeroplane, built by an Irish female aeronautical engineer, and the experience of a contemporary Aer Lingus female pilot, flying an Airbus A330-200 from San Francisco to Dublin. On display from 21 July to 26 August.
thelinenhall.com
As part of the Galway International Arts Festival visual arts programme, the ‘Salthill Reverie’ group exhibition was a celebration of place, viewed through the eyes of the Hare’s Corner Collective; artists Sacha Hutchinson, Hilary Morley, Ursula Murry and Geraldine O’Rourke. Using paint, collage and photography, they expressed what Salthill means to them as individuals. Their images reflected the sights and sounds: the sea, the shelters, and people of all ages, swimming, diving, walking, and chatting. On display from 17 July to 30 August. giaf.ie
CORNELIUS BROWNE REFLECTS ON HIS ONGOING ARTISTIC COLLABORATION WITH SARA BAUME.
MANAL MAHAMID OUTLINES THE EVOLUTION OF HER PRACTICE AS A MULTIDISCIPLINARY PALESTINIAN ARTIST.
I AM CURRENTLY in the final stages of completing my thesis for an MA in Cultural Policy and Art Management at University College Dublin. Concurrently, I am thrilled to be actively engaged in a captivating residency, hosted by Leitrim Sculpture Centre.
As an artist, I believe that identity goes beyond conventional categories like nationality, religion, or gender; that’s why I find a great fascination in exploring the diverse conceptual aspects of identity. My current focus lies particularly on examining the lives of Palestinians who reside under Israeli occupation. In my artistic practice, I delve into themes that are part of my daily reality, particularly the intersection of landscape and identity.
ture, video, installation, drawing, photography, printmaking, and collage are all essential artistic processes. However, moving image has emerged as a powerful medium for me in the Palestinian gazelle project, to depict the visually divided and geo-politically fragmented Palestinian landscape. This takeover of the landscape is an act of decolonisation. It monitors the physical barriers, checkpoints, and cultural divides imposed on our people, allowing me to tackle these pressing issues, challenge prevailing norms, and break through forbidden boundaries.
WRITER AND ARTIST, Sara Baume, and I are on the lookout for a gallery to host our two-person exhibition, ‘North & South: A Conversation in Words, Objects, Pictures’. By nature, all my life, I have been reclusive, and to show work I must scale inner walls. Considering this, beginning to collaborate, particularly with one so brilliant as Sara, has been as invigorating as a summer spent painting by the sea.
‘North & South’ is a relaxed conversation between two artists working at opposite ends of this island. Of course, I was in communication with Sara long before we had exchanged a word. Her debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, published in the spring of 2015, alerted readers to the arrival of an exciting new literary talent. While I grew up in a house without a single book, my children are growing up in a house overflowing with thousands. The book as physical artefact has, for this once bookless child, never lost its enchantment. I find magic in the communion that exists between writer and reader over the stillness of the printed page.
Once we began talking, outside of Sara’s books, affinities between our work patterns and responses to the world quickly came to light. Sara in Cork, myself in Donegal, unknown to one another, we have been walking our same local roads, fields and beaches year after year, often within earshot of our respective stretches of the North Atlantic. The art we make grows out of this repetition. Sara constructs the same object over and over with small, yet significant, changes. I paint in the same locations across seasons and years, building such local knowledge that I’m versed in which buds on which branches will open earlier than others on the same tree. Although the works are primarily engaged in this scrutinisation of place, they are also driven by wider-world anxieties. In answer to consumerism and climate change, I have woven a simple existence that harmonizes with the life and art cultivated by Sara. In this, we are both artists of this present hour of crisis.
The great essayist, William Hazlitt, insisted that no one should approach an artist at work, for something sacred is happening in that moment. Sara, as both author and visual artist, locates divinity in the everyday, and I hope I tread a similar path. We have each invented art-related rituals as a form of substitute for organised religion. To varying degrees, at various times, we have retreated from the world, to renew wonder.
We talk about art, finding, to our mutual delight, that we are drawn to the same outsider, folk or visionary artists: Hilma af Klint, Alfred Wallis, Maud Lewis, and John Craske, among others. Echoing af Klint, we never accent individual paintings or sculptures; rather, they become droplets in a hidden stream. Such kinship do Sara and I feel with our forebears – mostly mavericks, whose work was neglected or unseen during their lifetimes – that we share a keen sense of continuity in our day-to-day experiences of making art. Sometimes, one must converse with the dead to unearth what is still alive.
After words, we are now conversing in objects and pictures. Responding to my paintings, Sara has been creating cotton appliqué and silk floss on linen landscapes, capturing the beauty of her southern walks. My new northern landscapes will occupy the same dimensions as my well-thumbed copies of Sara’s non-fiction debut, handiwork, and its fictional companion piece, Seven Steeples. Both books concern withdrawing from society, finding sanctuary in remote places, and living as an artist in harmony with nature.
In his poem, The Botanist’s Walk, John Clare says of the nightingale, “she hides and sings”, which might well describe the poet himself. Hazlitt also hid, beginning in childhood when he would read all day in the long grass, his whereabouts unknown. Art is often created in secrecy but thrives by communication – we hide and sing.
Cornelius Browne is a Donegal-based artist.
For example, during a family visit to a zoo in Kiryat Motzkin, in the Haifa District of Israel, I discovered that in the signage, an animal was described as a ‘Palestinian gazelle’ in English and Arabic, but as an ‘Israeli deer’ in Hebrew. To my surprise, I also discovered that the Palestinian gazelle was amputated. This scene struck a deep emotional chord in me, as metaphorical image of the gazelle’s struggle and the challenges we face as Palestinians under the oppressive occupation. It also triggered childhood memories of a picture of a deer, which hung in my parents’ living room, and set me on a path of research and exploration.
Through my research, I discovered the deep-rooted importance of the gazelle in Palestinian and Arab culture. The animal permeates various aspects of daily life, from food, tea, and sweets to folk music, literature, and placenames. I also found that the Arabic term, ghazal, carries connotations of beauty and flirtation, and has close connections with the Palestinian landscape, history, and culture.
I set no limits when it comes to choosing the right medium for each project. Sculp-
My artistic exploration delves into the ecological consequences of colonialism on the Palestinian landscape. Growing up amidst the breathtaking hills of my rural village, I witnessed the displacement of Palestinian communities, replaced by Israeli settlements. The fragmented landscape, with its checkpoints and barriers, acts as a metaphor for the fractures within our society. Through my art, I aim to shed light on the impact of political forces on our concept of home, and the profound interconnectedness between our land and its people.
Since I moved from Haifa to Dublin in 2020, amid restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I have been exploring the artistic scene in Ireland, and have gained momentum, particularly as I approach the end of my master’s studies. I have been engaging in the art scene in Dublin, working on some projects, undertaking a residency in Leitrim, and planning an exhibition that I will be announcing soon. Additionally, I am working on a project to participate in the Dubai International Art Fair. Currently, one of my works is on display at the Qattan Foundation in Ramallah.
Manal Mahamid is a multidisciplinary Palestinian artist currently based in Dublin. manalmahamid.com
JOANNA JOHNSTON OUTLINES RECENT ACQUISITIONS TO THE ARTS COUNCIL OF NORTHERN IRELAND COLLECTION.
THE ARTS COUNCIL of Northern Ireland (ACNI) holds over 700 works in its public collection and supports contemporary visual arts practice across Northern Ireland by purchasing from artists living and working in the region. The ACNI Collection has a long history dating back to 1943. By the late 1990s, ACNI had amassed some 1,200 artworks, which were subsequently, for the most part, gifted to the permanent collections of museums across Northern Ireland between 2012 and 2013.
The collection of works currently held covers a new collecting period from 2002, which represents the practices of artists at different career stages and is illustrative of a wide range of disciplines including painting, sculpture, drawing, craft, printmaking, photography, video and digital media works.
The ACNI Collection has always prioritised public lending, with a remit to provide the public access to the visual arts. Our aim for the collection is to continue to exhibit as much of it as we can, and as widely as possible, which we do through a free Art Lending Scheme. This loan scheme is open to galleries, museums, and a wide range of public venues across the island of Ireland and further afield, to borrow a full exhibition of works, or a single loan, as part of a larger exhibition.
Over the past year, ACNI has lent works to institutions both within and outside of Northern Ireland, including Birmingham Open Media Gallery, PhotoIreland, Crawford Art Gallery, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Craft NI, and the Golden Thread Gallery. To further increase the reach of the ACNI Collection to younger audiences, in 2019 we launched a Schools Lending Programme, which has successfully grown to 12 participating schools spread across Northern Ireland, positively connecting the work of contemporary artists to the school arts curriculum and allowing young people to engage with the visual arts in non-tradi-
tional settings.
ACNI recently published a brochure, Arts Council of Northern Ireland Collection Acquisitions 2021-22, outlining the purchase of 35 new works by 22 artists during this timeframe. These acquisitions are innovative and challenging and contribute to the development of visual arts practice in Northern Ireland. For the artist, having their work held in a major public collection can really help raise their professional profile and is an important institutional endorsement that can open doors with curators and galleries, as well as interest from other collections. Artworks are acquired for the collection in a number of ways throughout the year, including from current exhibitions, directly through visits to artists’ studios, and also through an open-submission scheme, which ACNI operates every two to three years.
Among last year’s purchases, pieces were largely drawn from significant exhibitions taking place that year, with artists ranging from recent graduates to those with established practices. A number of themes can be observed, including an interest in the spaces we inhabit in a physical and abstract sense, an exploration of process and materiality, and a representation of past and present cultural narratives.
New pieces to join the ACNI Collection include a large-scale ink on canvas work by Joy Gerrard, photographic works by Paul Seawright, Golden Fleece Award-winning sculptural and photographic work by Maria McKinney, a video piece by Myrid Carten, and a sculptural installation by Nina Ołtarzewska. Full details of works purchased can be viewed on the ACNI website and Instagram page.
Joanna Johnston is the Visual Arts & Collections Officer at the Art Council of Northern Ireland.
artscouncil-ni.org
@artscouncilni_collection
SIOBHÁN MOONEY OUTLINES THE FORTHCOMING ECO ART FESTIVAL TAKING PLACE AT IMMA FROM 21 TO 24 SEPTEMBER.
IN LATE OCTOBER 2022, IMMA presented a pilot eco art festival, Earth Rising, celebrating people, place, and planet. The festival hosted practitioners tackling climate change, a showcase of citizen science, and an artistic programme drawing on themes of environmentalism, eco-activism, and environmental art. Over three days, this vibrant event showcased more than 70 projects, consisting of workshops, sound, film, talks, installation, and performance.
For this inaugural event, IMMA sought to give a platform to as many creative voices as possible working, and to provoke, inspire, and empower audiences to become agents of change. The huge response to and success of the festival reflects the pressing need for people to get together to discuss possibilities, exchange ideas, and engage critically and artistically with this urgent global issue. Over 9,000 people attended the festival last year.
Earth Rising 2023 will run over four days from 21 to 24 September. The festival will feature exhibitions, screenings, workshops and talks led by innovators and thinkers in the fields of science, design and creativity.
Earth Rising Presents: Through an open call, IMMA has provided funding to support over 50 artists, who will showcase their work during the festival weekend. Events include an outdoor film screening; nest-making workshops with the Oikos Artist Collective; cheesemaking workshops with David Beattie and Michelle Darmody; a live cinema indoor performance from Colm Higgins; an outdoor Gaelic ritual immersive theatre piece by Sadbh Grehan; a community smokehouse by William Bock and Max Jones; a Woodland Symposium presented by Interface; a wind activated clay pipe installation by Brandon Lomax; and an interactive moss-pit from RE-PEAT; to name a few.
Earth Rising Talks: Presented in partnership with the DCU Centre for Cli-
mate and Society, this programme will bring together voices from diverse fields to explore creative solutions for environmental and societal change. Eminent author and activist, Dr Vandana Shiva, Irish inventor and environmental advocate Fionn Ferreira, Irish broadcaster and ecologist Anja Murray, and best-selling author Eoghan Daltun are among the notable speakers. On Culture Night, Friday 22 September, the festival will host a special Seanchoíche storytelling evening, exploring the theme of Creativity for Change.
Earth Rising Field Kitchen: Curated by Jennie Moran and Gerry Godley, this dedicated food-themed site within the festival aims to demonstrate and provoke, while fostering a spirit of convivial debate and discussion. Bright minds, young activists, creative thinkers and skilled hands from Ireland and elsewhere will walk us through the new food landscape. With an empowered and positive stance on our shared food future, this space promises a richly diverse programme throughout the four-day event.
Earth Rising Future Generations Tent: Curated especially for children and young adults by ECO-UNESCO, this will host a vibrant programme of exhibitions, workshops, and discussions, exploring themes of biodiversity, sustainability, and agency for change, involving younger generations in the crucial conversations.
As a space for dialogue and understanding, IMMA recognises the significance of the climate crisis as one of the greatest challenges of our time. Earth Rising aims to be a catalyst for creative thinking, imagination, and individual agency in tackling this urgent issue, to reimagine a more sustainable future for generations to come.
Siobhán Mooney is an independent curator, co-director of Basic Space, and co-curator of Earth Rising.
WRITER PHILIP ST JOHN AND VISUAL ARTIST JOANNA KIDNEY REFLECT ON A YEAR OF THE WICKLOW ARTISTS SALON.
IN 2019, WICKLOW County Council Arts Office held a funding seminar in Mermaid Arts Centre. Afterwards, we were talking about how much we had learned from listening to artists from other disciplines. We were surprised that, although there is a lot of emphasis on cross-practice collaboration now, there are few opportunities to meet people working in other artforms. Wouldn’t it be useful to have regular get togethers in an informal but structured setting?
As far as we knew, there was no model for an event like that in Ireland. There are arts festivals, of course, and these mix different art forms, but are aimed at a more general audience. Our event would be for all disciplines and would address issues of particular concern to artists and cultural practitioners.
After a lot of discussion, we devised a format. Each event would have a facilitator and a panel of two or three artists. The panellists would begin the evening by sharing some of their work. After the panel discussion, the rest of the gathering would join in with questions, comments, and suggestions. This would be followed by tea and coffee and an invitation to continue the conversation in a nearby bar. Crucially, the Arts Office supported the venture, and both Mermaid and The Courthouse arts centres agreed to host the event. So, after four salons, what have we learned about the realities of being an artist in Ireland today?
Surviving as an artist is tough
Even our most high-profile guests are finding the creative life a struggle. One performer memorably described a moment on stage when they realised that everyone else in the room was earning more than they were. Others talked of banks refusing to give mortgages and rent increases forcing them to move out of urban centres, where performing artists, in particular, are most likely to find work. Income is sporadic, unpredictable, and rarely enough. Resilience seems to be as vital as talent in this career. One guest told us they hadn’t earned more than €20,000 in any year, across two decades. Another became so frustrated with earning a living in low-paid jobs in the service industry, that they ingeniously blended creative work into their paid time: they now create art on the job.
Money matters
All of our guests were generous with financial advice. One wisely advised us to put aside a percentage of any income, however small, and to keep rigorous written records of incomings and outgoings. Others praised such innovative schemes as Mermaid’s Transform, which buys the practitioner time to develop and sustain their career. And of course, the Basic Income for the Arts Scheme would go a long way to easing the financial pressures on artists
if it becomes permanent. Finally, we were struck by how younger and older artists differed in their attitudes towards income. A couple of older artists said that no one had asked them to be an artist, and that whatever hardships they were experiencing were of their own making, whereas some younger artists expressed a stronger expectation of financial support: art is important, and you can’t have art without artists, so fund them!
Art can take a long time
Many of the projects our guests discussed were years in the making. This is especially the case with collaborative art, where different opinions and visions have to be integrated. Then there is the need for funding; however, finding adequate support can require patience and persistence.
We need to look after ourselves
All of our guests had suggestions about how to deal with the stresses of the lifestyle. Two are regular sea-swimmers; another finds escape in playing in a band and roller-skating. Another centres himself through playing music to the tick of a metronome for an hour each day. Many guests stressed the need for breaks from work, the benefits of taking the weekend off, sticking to office hours, and also setting limits for time spent on admin. Yet, however individual a practice might be, and however strongly felt the need for time alone, all agreed that creative buddies are essential for support, advice, and solace.
Ireland is alive with creativity
One exciting aspect of the salons has been the opportunity to bring together such a dazzling array of vision and skill under the same roof. During the introductory sections, we’ve experienced a bodhrán solo, a novel extract, theatre images, a poem, insights into an artwork critiquing surveillance technology, a brain-imaging self-portrait, dance visuals, and a video of a collaborative arts sea swim project. Our most recent salon, Taking the Initiative, took place at The Courthouse Arts Centre in Tinahely on 24 June. An exciting range of artists and cultural practitioners shared their experiences of creating a new theatre festival, an internationally acclaimed literary magazine, and two art centres. It is really heartening and inspiring to experience such powerful, adventurous works side by side.
Philip St John is a writer and Joanna Kidney is a visual artist. Both are based in Wicklow. The Wicklow Artists Salon will reconvene with a new programme of topics in autumn. For further details about the salon, see the websites of Wicklow County Council Arts Office or Mermaid Arts Centre.
FRANK GOLDEN DRAWS ON EUROPEAN MODERN ART TO REFLECT ON TIMOTHY EMLYN JONES’S RECENT EXHIBITION.
WHEN I CAME to Ballyvaughan in the late 1980s, I used to run into the noted installation and video artist, James Coleman, who had a summer cottage on the Green Road in a little kind of Dingley Dell, surrounded by apple and beech trees. He used to tell me that he could spend hours just sitting in his chair, mindfully gazing out of the window, alert to the plenitude of the natural world surrounding him. He used to speak of these periods of immersive observation as being critical to his process.
There’s a similar story relating to the great Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, who, in the early part of the twentieth century, worked as secretary to the sculptor, Auguste Rodin. Rodin was Rilke’s first mentor and when Rilke was at an impasse in his work, Rodin advised him to go to the zoo and sit in the presence of an animal. Rilke was only 24 or 25 at the time, and the animal he chose was a panther. He sat for hours with the panther in immersive contemplation and the poem he produced was a seminal work that set him on course to become a poet of great power.
Dean of the Burren College of Art since 2003, Timothy Emlyn Jones is a prolific artist with a similar disposition of mind; namely, that the phenomenal world is the ultimate subject. Tim’s magisterial drawings are the result of a kind of contemplative and meditative indwelling in the landscape. But as Tim himself would say, every painting is in a way incomplete; we the viewer, with our attendant experiences and histories, complete each work, and it is through this relationship that the painting achieves its ultimate destiny.
Every artist, no matter what their discipline, is aware of a state of pure immersion. This is the point of self-forgetfulness, in which the ego and its attendant stresses are sublimated, and one enters a state of ecstatic flow. Time seems suspended and passes without any real consciousness, and the work appears to complete itself by some kind of magical artifice. It is a kind of ecstasy. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says, in his lecture on flow, the word ‘ecstasy’ derives from Greek and means ‘to stand to the side’. It was only later that it became analogous to a mental state. Mihaly argues that ecstasy is essentially about stepping into an alternative reality, where one’s identity disappears from consciousness. Obviously, this will only happen if you have the established skills and technique to accomplish whatever it is you’re doing – be it realising a drawing or writing a novel. Tim is a master of flow and the serenity his works exude is a reflection of that.
Tim’s latest exhibition, ‘The Ocean and The Forest’, ran at The Gallery Café in Gort from 9 July to 31 August. As the exhibition title implies, Tim’s artworks were divided neatly into ‘the ocean’ and ‘the forest’, as two parts of a whole that sit easily together
because they derive from the same contemplative enquiry. When I asked Tim, during a studio visit, if his birch drawings had an affinity to any other artist, I was surprised when he said Gustav Klimt. Klimt, whom many consider principally as a figurative artist, also composed landscape paintings during his summer stays at Lake Attersee in Austria. It is only when you see his beech and birch paintings that the link becomes obvious. There are also traces of Egon Schiele’s more metaphorical landscape paintings, and philosophical alliances with yet another Austrian artist, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, who founded the transautomatism art movement. These connections with Austria go back to Tim’s first visit to Vienna in 1982, where he first encountered the Jugendstil work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh at The Secession. As a professor at Glasgow School of Art, Tim would later develop an intimate understanding of Mackintosh’s secessionist aesthetic, which is tacit within the works on show in Gort.
There has always been something of the rebel about Tim, and this goes back to his membership of the Free International University (FIU), established by artist Joseph Beuys and writer Heinrich Böll in the mid-70s, and which focused, in part, on interdisciplinary work and cooperation between the sciences and the arts at a time when that was far from fashionable. Tim played a very active part in the FIU. That rebel note is struck in Tim’s work, through his use of artist Stuart Semple’s pigment, Black 3.0 (the original of which Anish Kapoor tried to buy exclusive rights to) and Semple’s limited edition pigment, Incredibly Kleinish Blue. Black is central to Tim’s oeuvre because, for him: “Black emphasises the nature of the mark. It is unquestionably itself before it is anything else.”
Given the contemplative and meditative nature of his work, I asked Tim if he has a ritualised set of actions prior to engaging with a drawing. He spoke of centring, and of the Alexander Technique and of breath. For his ocean drawings in particular, each line was delivered on the outbreath, which gives power to the lineation. An important question for every artist is knowing when to stop; knowing when a work has realised its particular destiny. For Tim, the conclusion of a work is “the point at which you can no longer find the correct place for the next mark.”
Frank Golden is a County Clare-based poet, novelist, and visual artist. frankgolden7.com
CONTINUING UNTIL 29 October, the 40th edition of EVA International centres around the theme of citizenship, and comprises the EVA Platform Commissions, Partnership Project initiatives, and a special Guest Programme, ‘The Gleaners Society’, curated by Sebastian Cichocki.
Frank Wasser: Sebastian, it’s an incredibly busy time for you, so thanks for agreeing to talk with me. I wanted to start by asking you about your own practice. Can you tell me about your research methodologies, and how you arrived at the curatorial framework for the EVA Guest Programme?
Sebastian Cichocki: Where to start? I’m very much into assemblies, summer camps, and gatherings. I’m interested in people, and so I work with movements and organisations who are eager to apply artistic strategies in their daily work. My background is in sociology, and I’ve always been fascinated by the social potential of art. I like to think of art as an apparatus that can bring people together and change things, to open our eyes to new possibilities.
FW: Where or how do these possibilities unfold? What are the contexts that your practice operates within?
SC: I work in the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, a public institution which is under construction, and it is just about to open in its final configuration. I’ve been working with different formats. For me, curating is a lot about usefulness, agency, and doing things with art. This is much more interesting than defining something as art or not art. My natural environment is to be among people who represent different skills, competences, and backgrounds. They are chefs, gardeners, therapists, climate activists, social workers, or biologists, but what is characteristic is that most of them graduated
from art academies. Climate and anti-fascist activism, feminist movements, these are all close to my heart. I’m part of the Sunflower community, an anti-imperialist think-tank and emergency centre, working mainly with the large Ukrainian diaspora and its queer community in Poland. Environmental struggle is something I’ve been working with a lot recently, which evolved from a fascination with land art practices as a possible way of escaping the traditional configuration of the museum. Needless to say, the museum might be an outmoded apparatus, but it is undergoing radical changes.
FW: You have previously spoken and published widely on the invisible histories and ideological frameworks of museums. How does the context of the art biennial differ from that of the museum?
SC: It’s fascinating how we can do things in a different way. I love museums and global biennials, but I do feel that they are operating in separate galaxies. It’s quite unusual how they are restricted by very specific ways of doing things; the singularity of an artwork, the cult of the authorship, all these
obsessive ways of separating art from notart. Many regulations, which were kind of petrified in the nineteenth century, are still determining what art is. The biennial model follows these protocols; it is mostly novelty that is fuelling this system. The expectation is that you have to present something which is new and unusual, the unknown, the forgotten, the overlooked. In a way, a contemporary focus on ‘the marginalised’ has replaced the dominance of dead white men in the western art canon. This is quite an insatiable and exploitative system. But actually, this novelty is the last thing I am interested in.
FW: So, does this refusal of ‘novelty’ underpin the thematic framework of ‘The Gleaners Society’, your Guest Programme for EVA? Gleaning was originally a farming term, denoting the act of collecting or gathering that which already exists.
SC: Yes, exactly, gleaning is about picking up stuff, the leftovers; it has specific legal and ethical connotations in different languages. The act of gleaning is the opposite of over-production and extractivism, because as you know, we do generate a lot
of objects and ideas. The standard biennial is like a potlatch ritual, with the necessity to constantly commission and produce – it’s quite a monstrosity. It’s hard to believe how time-consuming and exhausting the model is, and I seriously question its sustainability. So, I was thinking about this unique opportunity in Limerick, working with such an open and generous organisation. I was told “you don’t even have to do an exhibition!” This was so liberating. Paradoxically, in the end we might end up with a quite conventional exhibition. EVA has such a rich history, albeit hardly visible in the city, but there are small traces of previous editions. It’s like a myth, something immaterial and fleeting, that is also treated as a piece of public property. For example, the person who works in the local flower shop will tell you what should be done for an exhibition!
FW: I guess the idea of gleaning also implies crisis. Is this something you’re considering?
SC: Yes, the planetary crisis; ecocide, fossil fuel wars, loss of biodiversity. In this sense, it is all about saving the resources that exist. There are so many contemporary versions of gleaning; for example, foraging, free shops, dumpster diving. For me, gleaning is not only a metaphor – it is a methodology. Let’s look at the leftovers of the past. There have been 39 editions of EVA. What are those stories, invisible traces, or unfinished businesses? One of the unwritten rules of the biennial format is that you are obliged to invite mostly new names, but what if you work with what is already established in this unique environment of collaboration and trust? One of the first things I did was scan through the incredible artists who had already contributed, such as Orla Barry and Deirdre O’Mahony, with a view to working with them again. What would it mean to bring back Janet Mullarney’s sculptures, which were exhibited in Limerick in the
1990s? There are artists who know the local context deeply, so why not engage with them and continue these conversations, in spite of expectations and fetishisation of the new?
FW: Your approach is reminding me of conversations I had with the curators of documenta fifteen last year. They had this idea of harvesting ideas over the course of the event. Is there a connection here?
SC: Yes, this is interesting because I just came back from Korea, where I worked with local collectives, including ikkibawiKrrr, who will participate in EVA. They were also one of the core members of documenta fifteen. While drinking rice wine, and spending a lot of time with each other, we spoke about the particularities of what gleaning meant in European history and what might be the Asian parallels, like the lumbung concept. Our conversations are ongoing and will grow over the following months. In this sense, gleaning is also about my resources, recent projects, existing collaborations, and network of friends in the Baltic States, South Asia, Ireland, Ukraine and Poland. As the hero of my teenage years, Robert Smithson, once wrote: “Nothing is new, neither is anything old”.
Frank Wasser is an Irish artist and writer based in London. frankwasser.info
Sebastian Cichocki lives and works in Warsaw, where he is the chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art. artmuseum.pl/en
The 40th edition of EVA International opened on 31 August and continues until 29 October, spanning various locations in Limerick city and beyond. eva.ie
INTER_SITE
Collective Members
INTER_SITE IS AN artist collective based in Cork City, and was established in 2021 by Pádraic Barrett, Deirdre Breen, Aoife Claffey and Kate McElroy, amidst the restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic. A collective desire was established as isolation was enforced. As four students undertaking the MA in Art & Process at MTU Crawford College of Art & Design, we gravitated towards one another, pulled together by commonalities in our individual practices. Pressing themes include the agency of body and materials, non-spaces, the potentiality of place, and the particular presentation of research-driven media.
2021 proved to be a precarious period for exhibition-making, production, and dissemination. It was the perilous nature of the exhibition at this time that spurred us to consider alternative sites outside of the traditional white cube space. This ultimately led us to the Marina Warehouse, the former Ford Factory in Cork’s Docklands. With the success of our MA show behind us, we approached the industrial site during the first window of tentative re-openings in May 2021. The decision to exhibit and make work in an industrial space provided an open and autonomous platform where our ideas, processes, and subsequent artworks, could expand and breathe.
It was here that we began our distinct collective formula, which lends towards ephemeral, large-scale, artist produced exhibitions and events in non-traditional art spaces. In the intervening years, we have had seven more site-responsive collective exhibitions, including ‘Oileán’ on Spike Island, ‘Pulsating P(l)ace’ in Wandesford Quay Courtyard, PADA (an international residency and exhibition in Portugal) and most recently, ‘Oscillation: An Altering Rhythm’ in the newly renovated Counting House, as part of STAMP Festival of Creativity in Cork last May. Our exhibitions lead the viewer through a carefully considered kaleidoscope of media, including video projection, sound, sculpture, performance, and installation. We aim to activate the environment and the encounter, reimagining spaces, and re-presenting them, using art as a tool to question structures of power.
Embedding art in non-traditional settings challenged us to respond to specific historical and conceptually loaded sites that affect our mechanism of production and display. Audience engagement is integral to our thinking and informs how we plan and stage the work. By activating these kinds of spaces, we hope to reach beyond traditional art audiences to reconsider the environment and the present moment.
Support from the community of Cork has been foundational in our development; Cork City and Council Arts office, Sample Studios, MTU Crawford, Backwater Artists Group, The Living Commons, and the general public have all greatly encour-
aged us. We look forward to exhibiting our work in Dublin for the first time at Pallas Projects, from 5 to 21 October, as part of their Artist-Initiated Projects programme. The exhibition will allow us to reflect on our trajectory so far and help us orient towards what is to come. We will embrace the gallery setting and consider how we can stretch the boundaries of this format. In developing this work, we are considering durational, time-based media and how we can probe the tension between permanence and impermanence. As a collective working against standardised modes of presentation, we are interested in disturbing the white cube format and recovering connections to reality from inside those walls.
Alongside the exhibition will be a publication, designed by collective member Deirdre Breen, who is currently on maternity leave with twins. Deirdre has used her design skills to create a dynamic book which chronicles INTER_SITE’s progress so far. Divided into sections, like multiple sites, the publication catalogues six Corkbased site-responsive exhibitions from 2021 to 2023.
Through shared concerns and artistic approaches, INTER_SITE aims to shed light on the paradoxical nature of current systems. Ultimately, we believe more can be achieved together. The individual within the collective can bring experience and expertise that can be distributed and synthesised within the group. As artists, our responsibility is to make visible different perspectives, often through a process of challenge and consensus. Our practices remain independent but share a common language and objective. We wish to disrupt the ordinary and create space for reflection where alternative narratives can emerge.
As its core, through collaboration and cooperation, INTER_SITE is founded on the ethos of care. By refusing to work in competition and instead choosing participation and co-creation, the collective itself becomes a site of resistance, potential, and world-making.
INTER_SITE is a Cork-based artist collective, established in 2021 by Pádraic Barrett, Deirdre Breen, Aoife Claffey and Kate McElroy. Our forthcoming exhibition runs at Pallas Projects/Studios from 5 to 21 October.
@inter_site
Michele
HorriganHusk Bennett
TRANSITION, RELOCATION, AND precarity swarm artist-led spaces such as Catalyst Arts. Catalyst was founded in 1993 by a group of MFA graduates from Belfast School of Art, who felt the city lacked exhibition spaces and opportunities. Born as a harbour for experimentation, live art, production, and curation, the ecologies and processes within Catalyst have developed over time, shaped by the various artists who have passed through the rolling board.
Niamh Seana Meehan, and Tanad Aaron, and was curated by Catalyst Co-Director, Kate Murphy. Aspects of the exhibition remain in the gallery, almost as a lingering question, through Weir and Aaron’s permanent installations, and the remnants of Meehan’s window vinyls.
SINCE 2006, ASKEATON Contemporary Arts has commissioned, produced, and exhibited contemporary art in our small town in County Limerick. An artist residency programme, titled ‘Welcome to the Neighbourhood’, situates Irish and international artists in the midst of Askeaton each summer, while thematic exhibitions, publications, and events occur throughout the year.
There are no ‘white-cube’ gallery spaces or arts centre infrastructure in Askeaton. Instead, artists work in public spaces throughout the town and hinterland – from petrol stations and hair salons, to medieval castles and uninhabited islands. This form of engagement focuses on the existing dynamics of the locale, intending to bring forward the diverse layers of daily life and create a rich framework for subjective encounter. Generally, the artists we work with have a vested interest in placemaking and context, and the local community is often actively immersed in the development of projects through sharing their specialised knowledge, assistance, and participation. This approach is built on a belief that contemporary art can be a form of critique, investigation, and celebration, in which artists play a primary and fundamental role at the centre of social dialogue.
For our recent summer programme, Robin Price delved into a murder mystery narrative with the local Tidy Towns committee; Chris Kallmyer arrived from Los Angeles to investigate the sounds of holy wells (a pertinent topic, considering the high levels of water pollution here); while Bryony Dunne made bricks from river clay, stamping them with goat footprints to remember the devilish legacies of the ruined Hellfire Club, seen in the centre of Askeaton. In addition to the artist residency, a public programme featured, amongst other events, the premiere of Michael Holly’s short film, Lily of the Valley (2023), exploring an esoteric body of artworks by Flemish-Irish artist Lily van Oost (193297), evoking the intrinsic relationship
between sculpture, inhabitation, and nature. Reassessing Van Oost’s work today, Holly’s video – one of many commissioned since 2020 for our online media channel – delves deep into the memories, documents, and artworks that make up her legacy, made in close collaboration with film artist, Mieke Vanmechelen.
Our programme and relationship with artists, while primarily based in Askeaton, often stretches to elsewhere; many artworks made here have been subsequently presented throughout the world in exhibitions, art biennials, and film festivals. For several years, we’ve worked with the Irish Architectural Archive in Dublin, placing artists to research and produce works in direct relationship to their holdings. In early 2023, Adrian Duncan’s Little Republics (The Lilliput Press, 2022) was realised in this context, examining the history of bungalow building in Ireland, and utilising resources made available to him in Dublin and Askeaton towards an extensive exhibition and publication project. Over the next year, we are planning public programmes with partners in New York, Chicago, and Helsinki.
Another aspect of ACA has been the commissioning and realisation of artist publications, and we recently worked with Camden Arts Centre in London to launch Adam Chodzko’s new publication Ah, look, you can still just about see his little legs sticking out from it all! (2023). The book emerged out of lockdown conversations with Adam around his lifelong relationship with Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s sixteenth-century painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1560), and is richly illustrated with his many multimedia artworks, made over the last thirty years.
Michele Horrigan is a curator at Askeaton Contemporary Arts. An archive of artist projects, news updates, media channel, and publications is available on the ACA website. askeatonarts.com
In January 2021, Catalyst moved from a monolithic building in College Court, to a hive of creativity at 6 Joy’s Entry – marking our fifth premises within Catalyst’s 30 year-history. Re-structuring thoughts and processes have been integral to the success of our programming and curation in the new venue. Recent programme highlights include ‘it feels hairy to start again from nothing’– our re-imagined Catalyst Members Show 2022, featuring Reuben Brown, Niamh Seana Meehan, Peter Glasgow and Sun Park. The limited floorplan of Joy’s Entry meant we needed to take a more considered approach and exhibit selected members’ works. The 2023 Members Show, running from 17 August to 15 September, has once again been re-imagined, in the hope of accommodating more members in the space.
Cecelia Graham’s recent director show, ‘Ornaments of Prospect’ (2 March to 1 April 2023) saw Beau W Beakhouse and Sadia Pineda Hameed transform our gallery into a think-tank of speculative futures, through examining tools and their history. “Tools and their use can also redefine hierarchies and create a foundation for considering anti-colonial strategies of resistance, whilst acknowledging the complex role of tools in capitalist and western hands that utilise their designs as instruments of progress.”1 By re-contextualising and examining ways of working and power structures, we can conceptualise new strategies and dialogues within the artist-led space.
Another cumulative show came with ‘core is concrete’ (3 October to 6 November 2023) which spotlighted a series of site-orientated responses, questioning the function of the space. The show featured Ben Weir,
Catalyst Arts began as a response to the arts and cultural landscape of Belfast, against a backdrop of violence and unrest, prior to the Good Friday Agreement. Belfast remains a challenging and somewhat turbulent city; however, Catalyst Arts continues to offer opportunities, supports, and community for emerging and established artists. The organisation persists at the forefront of contemporary art, and remains critical within the arts ecology on the island of Ireland. Whilst we rely on funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, we remain autonomous in certain aspects, through our independent publishing, fundraising, and membership. We have also established a number of independent events and workshops, such as OFF-Site*, Propagate, and FIX.
The Catalyst board is constantly in flux – an organisational model aimed at preventing stagnation and catalysing new ways of thinking, collaborating and working. At its core, Catalyst Arts has a community-centred approach to contemporary art and curation. It’s hard to conceive of the organisational structure, which has been maintained over the last three decades; yet its legacy of ‘anchored unsteadiness’ continues to produce new discoveries, connections and methodologies.
Husk Bennett is a current Co-director of Catalyst Arts, along with Sean Ward, Dominic McKeown, Silvia Koistinen, and Rachael Melvin. The Catalyst Arts Members Show 2023 continues until 15 September, while our forthcoming exhibition, featuring Charys Wilson and Hazel O’Sullivan, will be presented from 5 to 31 October. catalystarts.org.uk
BASIC SPACE IS an independent, voluntary-led art organisation, founded in 2010 by Kari Cahill, Hannah Fitz, Greg Howie, and Hugo Byrne, while they were students. Basic Space was established during the recession and from frustration at the lack of exhibition spaces for emerging artists in Dublin. A vacant warehouse was secured just behind Vicar Street and a studio and exhibition space were set up. The venue became an essential testing ground for creative dialogue and risk-taking for a wide range of artists.
Providing a space for ‘things to happen’, and a place to experiment for a community of artists, was the driving force for Basic Space in these early years. Important collaborations and connections were made with other artist-led spaces in Ireland and across Europe at this time. In 2012 Basic Space took part in IMMA’s Residency Programme, which was followed by a move in 2013 to Eblana House in The Liberties.
From 2016 onward, Basic Space occupied a number of locations in Dublin. As the years progressed, empty space around the city increasingly got swallowed up by development. The logistics became almost impossible and it was no longer viable for Basic Space to exist in a physical location. This new nomadic presence led to increased collaborations with established art institutions. Basic Space programmed residencies, staged exhibitions, and held events under an ethos of exploring new and alternative ways of programming without a dedicated base. It became a flexible site for collaboration and engagement, and as different iterations emerged and co-directors came and went, these core principles allowed Basic Space to evolve and adapt to changing socio-economic and political circumstances, while continuing to provide a supportive and safe platform for a diverse range of artists.
Over the past 13 years, Basic Space has initiated over 50 projects through the dedication of 19 different co-directors, who have striven to maintain the organisation as a vital and useful space for the creation and dissemination of contemporary art. Basic Space have collaborated with 126 Artist-Run Gallery, Ormston House, Gallery Eight, CCA Derry~Londonderry, TBG+S, Galway Arts Centre, and ONONO Rotterdam, to name a few. More recent projects include: inviting Diana Bamimeke to curate the exhibition ‘On Belonging’ in the Library Project; a Basic Space commissioned t-shirt from the artist Emma Wolf-Haugh, with proceeds going to support MASI; a solo show by Cara Farnan, hosted by Backwater Artists Group in Cork; and a self-improvement table quiz fundraiser, devised by David Fagan and John Waid.
In the summer of 2020, Basic Space hosted a series of Instagram conversations with various practitioners in response to and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. In December 2022 Basic Space were invited to be co-selectors, along with Gavin Murphy and Mark Cullen, for Periodical Review 12 in Pallas Projects/Studios. Most recently, in collaboration with MART Gallery, Basic Space invited Kasia Kaminska and Samuel Arnold Keane to run an urban foraging and anthotype workshop.
Basic Space also curates Basic Talks, a monthly series of informal talks with leading contemporary practitioners, in partnership with the Hugh Lane Gallery. This crucial activity provides steady funding for Basic Space while offering an open platform for artists, curators, writers, and collectives to present their practice in the form of lectures, workshops, presentations, and performances to new audiences. This relationship with the Hugh Lane was forged in 2016 by the directors at the time and, so far, 45 Basic Talks have taken place. Francis Fay, Manal Mahamid, Vanessa Daws, and Venus Patel are among the most recent speakers.
Basic Space is currently funded on a project-by-proj-
ect basis. While this affects our ability to make longterm plans, it also affords us a degree of flexibility and receptivity that is at the core of how we engage with the artists, audiences, and institutions that we work with. Ireland is well out of recession, but there are still not enough spaces for artists to work. Back in 2010, when Basic Space was founded, artists could just about afford to rent a studio and live in the city; however, this has now become almost impossible.
A lot has changed in the intervening years, but the ethos on which Basic Space was founded – collaboration, inclusivity, experimentation, engagement and providing space for artists – remains as relevant and important as ever. We hope to keep evolving and producing dynamic and valuable events with a strong focus on underrepresented communities within the art world. As an artist-led space in a world increasingly dominated by profit-driven forms of expression, Basic Space exists solely for artists.
Upcoming events include Basic Talks from Laura Fitzgerald, Jonathan Mayhew, and Ciara Roche; an event with Conor Nolan, based on a residency borne from a collaboration between Basic Space and VOID Gallery in Saskatoon; and some exciting fundraising events in autumn.
Muine Bheag Arts
Mark Buckeridge and Leah Corbett
MUINE BHEAG ARTS is an artist-run organisation based in County Carlow. Set up by Mark Buckeridge and Leah Corbett in 2020, the organisation grew out of a need for better arts infrastructure outside of the city context, and a wish to create a space for experimental programming in a local setting. Our aims are to promote contemporary art and artists in collaboration with the community.
Muine Bheag Arts presented its inaugural programme, Grass Roots, in 2021, followed by the second edition in 2022. Grass Roots refers to the self-organising approach of the programme and how working at a local level facilitates ideas and dialogue. Grass Roots begins in the community, inviting artists and contributors to respond to the town of Muine Bheag as a site for artistic production, research and collaboration. In this way, growth is cultivated by and for everyone involved.
Rather than operate from a fixed space, Muine Bheag works remotely to host exhibitions and events in the public realm, providing opportunities for artists to make work that may not be possible in a gallery setting. In 2022 we worked with Marian Balfe, Angela Burchill, Colm Keady-Tabbal, Gemma Kearney, Niall McCallum, Cillian Moynihan and Quantum Foam to present a series of public sculptures and events that unfolded in green spaces throughout the town, as well as in the Community Centre, along the river, and in St. Andrew’s Church.
Niall McCallum presented New Versailles turning over and over (2022), an earthwork that guided visitors through a labyrinthian structure, referencing the town’s history and surprising links to Versailles. Descent of Waves (2022), an audio-based performance by Quantum Foam, incorporated environmental sounds from the River Barrow. The performance took place onboard the local community boat, Bád Keppel, and spilled out across the riverbanks.
The town’s architecture, infrastructure, and history provide the backdrop for each of the projects we undertake. Working in this setting requires ongoing dialogue and negotiation with members of the public. We rely on the community for essential local knowledge, for use of spaces, and for tangible support. Having grown up in Muine Bheag, Mark’s connection to the area is key to building a strong relationship to the community.
The third edition of Grass Roots takes place from 11 August to 10 September and includes contributions from Cóilín O’Connell, Mollie Anna King, Niamh Seana Meehan and Holly Pickering. The artists spent time together as part of a short residency in June, which has led to a rich and meaningful programme, whereby the artists have each developed new site-specific works in response to their time in Muine Bheag. A series of public sculptures is accompanied by a programme of events including a film screening, ceramics workshop, performance, and zine-making workshop.
Looking ahead, we want to continue to promote experimental programming and to champion art in the public realm. We
are committed to supporting artists and to building our relationships and networks within the community. It’s important for us to continue asking questions, challenging how and why we do things. Rather than expanding our programme for the sake of expansion itself, our priority is to create a sustainable model which will allow Muine Bheag Arts to continue our work.
Despite the difficulties faced by the sector, and especially artist-run initiatives, we are hopeful for the future, having seen over the past three years how community and communication have supported the development of Muine Bheag Arts so far.
Mark Buckeridge and Leah Corbett are founding directors of Muine Bheag Arts. muinebheagarts.com
The Visual Artists' News Sheet
Edition 69: September – October 2023
Ruby Wallis, ‘Whistling in the Dark’, installation view, Galway Arts Centre; photograph by Tom Flanagan, courtesy of the artist and Galway International Arts Festival.
Fiona Mulholland ‘In Search of Pearls & Future Fossils’ Saldanha Gallery, Artlink, Fort Dunree 24 June – 23 July 2023
AS OBSERVED BY American writer, Ray Bradbury, in his dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451: “We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”1 If we imagine the future, does it provide a sense of comfort or a feeling of terror that is nearly the stuff of Science Fiction? Looking directly at a crisis such as climate change does not seem to have produced the lessons that might bother society; it is necessary to take a more oblique perspective. Artists are ideally placed to probe important issues as their sensory approaches can often communicate to the individual on a different register. Art is immediate, subjective, and often jarring, with messages persisting in the mind longer than any news report.
Fiona Mulholland’s recent exhibition at Artlink, ‘In Search of Pearls & Future Fossils’, integrates natural materials and handcrafts while dwelling on reconfigurations of manmade materials and their detrimental impact on nature. The setting for this exhibition is deliberate, as Mulholland wanted to reference the coastal landscape as a dramatic and constantly evolving environment. Fort Dunree was strategically built in 1813 on a hillside overlooking the natural harbour of Lough Swilly. A military museum now occupies the original fort which leads to the Saldanha Gallery. The gallery is named after the HMS Saldanha that sheltered in Lough Swilly from a heavy storm in 1811 but was later wrecked off Fanad Head with over 250 lives lost. The fact that Artlink occupies the former military hospital building interestingly connects with Mulhol-
land’s hopes that through meditation on detritus and found objects, we can consider avenues for renewal and repair of our surroundings.
The exhibition is laid out across three spaces, which lead the viewer from the present, through the past, and into the future. In the Mezzanine Gallery there are 17 works, including a series of small, square photographs, titled Land and Sea essence | Sites Unseen, which document the shore, plants and sea life, including dandelion seedpods, underlining a sense of ephemerality. For Mulholland, these photographs act as preparatory sketches for her larger photographs and sculptures, and are her means of “studying, listening and reflecting”. The artist notes that “it is an effort to capture the essence of things and conduct an almost microscopic study of their energy.”2
Presented along the glass corridor is the ‘Donegal Ringfort Series’, comprising eight pieces of digital embroidery on tweed and linen. These works feature individual mapped ringforts with a scale indicator, suspended against the glass backdrop within their embroidery hoops. This makes a direct connection between the archaeology of the past and the landscape around the fort. These works are felt by the artist to be “the perfect way to capture the theme of comfort and repair and a return to simpler ways, yet the contradiction is that they are machine-made rather than handmade.”3
The main gallery features extensive artworks, including wall-based photographs and silk hangings, combined with freestanding sculptural pieces, shelf-based works, and a vitrine of cast objects. There is a dramatic interplay between the thin grey metal roof beams of
the exhibition space and the palette of the artworks below, suffused with natural light. The floorboards of the dark wooden floor subtly suggest a ship’s deck, with this maritime sense heightened through the placement of tweed lifejackets within the space. These are modelled on early twentieth-century lifejackets, with their tactility inviting viewers to lift them, put them on, and cuddle into the comfort of the material.
The main piece within the space is Pearls of Wisdom, Repair and Renewal (2023), which consists of a large threaded needle, made of powder-coated mild and stainless steel, extending at an angle from a Perspex and mild steel base. Threaded through the needle is fishing rope, with two white pearl-like buoys at the base, and a cartographic arrangement of threaded Styrofoam balls, resembling a string of pearls. This sculpture prompts reflection on how we can balance our fragile relationship with nature and how we might repair the damage through considered intervention. Returning to Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 – in which he warns that “our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge” – we have the opportunity to act, but are we sufficiently bothered to take note?
Marianne O’Kane Boal is a writer and curator. She is currently completing her PhD at ATU Sligo.
1 Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Ballantine Books, 1953)
2 Writer’s interview with the artist’, Fort Dunree, 8 July 2023. 3 Ibid.
Katherine Sankey, ‘an atom bomb in each morsel of life’
The LAB Gallery
15 June – 5 September 2023
MY VISIT TO Katherine Sankey’s current exhibition at The LAB Gallery was filtered through the experience of having just had surgery on a broken wrist, shaping the encounter in ways that pivoted around a heightened awareness of the importance of care. When a person, or planet, is vulnerable, care is an often-unspoken need. A form of connection, it shows willingness to pay attention in the interest of doing right by someone or something.
The presented works, all created this year, pay attention to the impacts – infinitesimal to infinite –of mid-twentieth-century atomic-bomb testing and deployment. Drawing on the writings of feminist theorist and physicist, Karen Barad, and the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, the overarching title is, says the artist, “a provocative reminder of just how deeply humans have ‘invaded’, penetrated all living systems”.1
In an accompanying text, Nathan O’Donnell references the ‘bomb pulse’ associated with the 1955-63 period: “the spike in atmospheric Carbon-14 produced by the […] more than five hundred nuclear bombs [that] were exploded, above ground, in the open air, around the world, creating an atomic pulse that effectively left a time signature in every living thing on earth.”2
A recent film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory that produced this technology, suggests he grew concerned that it could wipe out civilisation. There were myriad precedents to forewarn of unintended consequence, including Hollywood’s popularisation of the novel Frankenstein, not long before the instigation of his Rubicon-crossing project. And so, it continues. Social media is regarded by many to be an unrestrained experiment, and an AI developer recently expressed regret about the dangers of the technology he pioneered.
Sankey’s exhibits materialise humanity’s capacity for
care, while addressing its failures to act responsibly. She attentively conjoins manufactured and natural materials to emulate hybrid, mutant states. More uncanny than monstrous, these probe the human-nature problematic by channelling intrigue rather than fear.
While many are modular, Small Earth (Eden) (2023) features an intact variegated privet, resting horizontally on a steel grid. This upending of a small ‘tree’, a form with multiple symbolic meanings, overturns the principle of the vertical and, with it, the hierarchical structures that shape all kinds of human activity. Concurrently, as the levelling forces of storms, floods, and political unrest become increasingly prevalent, the material condition of this everyday shrub – titled after a paradise perfectly calibrated to sustain life – is emblematic of the exhibition’s concerns. Unplugged from its life source, its creeping desiccation concentrates visitor attention on dying processes (although the artist will try to keep the shrub alive for the duration of the show).
In the main gallery, eight spindly tripod sculptures, titled EarthLab (2023), are built from branches, and sections and junctures of commonplace supply lines. That they bifurcate downwards, from an asymmetric ‘elbow’, imbues them with a lurching attitude, their ‘legs’ resting on the ground or on staggered plinths. Some draw sustenance from stagnant water, while others appear to penetrate the floor or walls – suggesting, for Sankey, connection to the energies of the underworld.3
As surfaces shunt between bark, copper, and white emulsion, I find myself imagining my recently acquired metal-and-bone wrist joint. Similar anthropomorphic qualities in Breather (2023) – a large vine laid out on the floor, trailing plastic tubes analogous to an oxygen supply – recall the feeling of lying prone on a pavement, of being sedated, and later anaesthetised. Gratitude for plugging into a system of care and availing of
medical technology is tinged with concern for variables there was no time to research, such as the ecological cost of harvesting titanium.
Upstairs, Activated Entrance (2023) may be a gentle call to action. A sweeping brush leaning against a demarcated section of wall urges us, perhaps, to clear away the debris falling from the tangle of branches in Perc(h) (2023) and take a look at ourselves in the mirror below. Also reflected are crustacean claws that recall the grasping side of human nature.
In Swallow (2023), a proliferation of bleached wood and plumbing overspills a bathroom sink to evoke uncontrolled growth and imbalance, while, nearby, the video pairing Craters and Handmine (2023) links large and small impacts; the massive holes caused by excavation, quarrying and bombing, and a pair of hands disturbing a patch of soil.
With the future of the planet inextricably bound to ours, what Sankey’s works appear to advocate is – above other priorities – underpinning action with appropriate attention to interconnection and consequence. The atomic bomb was justified as ‘the bomb to end all bombs’, but insufficient thought was given to the irrevocable changes it would herald, many of which are still not fully understood. Tethered to humanity’s technological aptitude is the responsibility to go beyond due diligence, acknowledging what it’s not yet possible to know – and caring about that.
Susan Campbell is a visual arts writer, art historian and artist. susancampbellartwork.com
1 Quote from @katherinesankeystudio, 30 May 2023.
2 Nathan O’Donnell, ‘’55-‘63’, exhibition text, published by The LAB Gallery.
3 Ibid.
‘Then I Laid the Floor’
Triskel Arts Centre
15 July – 30 September 2023
A TROWEL IS delicately placed atop a sheet of pale-yellow paper, whilst a voice-over matter-of-factly dictates the importance of building and leaving something for the future. Relying upon an agricultural metaphor (of planting and harvesting), the significance of construction is posited here as that which cultivates the will to continue – if you look back upon your life and see nothing, “you won’t have the strength to build anything else.”
A hand reaches out to pick up the tool, as Lô Borges’s Eu Sou Como Você É, originally released on his self-titled album of 1972, plays in the background. The lyrics, delivered in that Bossa Nova-inspired manner, which seems to oscillate effortlessly between softly singing and almost whispered-speech, dovetails with the sundrenched cinematography, as we are led through the streets of São Paulo’s Jabaquara district. As the music fades, we arrive at the home of Valdemar, our narrator, who begins to recount the story of his arrival here in 1949, and his efforts to build a home and a family in the favela.
Robert Chase Heishman’s film, Then I laid the floor (2023), emerged from an ethnographic research project – titled ‘The House That Valdemar Built’ – that was conducted in collaboration with artists Brian Maguire and James Concagh. The central theme here is Concagh’s
in-laws, their home, and story of battling through discrimination as migrants in São Paulo, originally arriving from the backlands of Bahia in north-eastern Brazil, in order to build a better life for themselves. The work of each artist in the resultant exhibition (which takes its name from Heishman’s film) all seek to respond and give form to the lived experience of the family. Simply put, this is a phenomenological study of a singular familial home and unit, which celebrates the strength and ability of the human spirit to overcome adversity. The bulk of the conceptual framing is provided through Heishman’s video, as we learn of the piecemeal manner in which Valdemar built the family home. This narrative forms a harmonious dyad in combination with the shot selection, as much of the imagery emphasises and celebrates the labour associated with the act of construction. The house, continually in formation, lives and breathes as a somatic extension of its inhabitants. When Valdemar announces that “this house protected us from the rain, and gave us the shelter that we have today, the whole family”, the statement seems to rearticulate Gaston Bachelard’s proposal of the house as a sort of protected enclave. The home, as such, manifests an enclosed cosmology that is distinct from the universe outside, with this space fostering the peace and security necessary for the complexity of life to be
fully grappled with: “Inside the house, everything may be differentiated and multiplied.”1
Concagh’s series of intricately bricolaged, abstract compositions continue the thematic significance of construction. His grid-based images are built up from layers of industrial materials, wherein the process of creation is clearly evidenced across the surface. Their form immediately conjures drone-eyed views of the favela, with the imperfect rendering of each of the cloistered cells within the matrix helping to impart a sense of human individuation onto the canvases. Each of these cells becomes a signifier for the innumerable homes that make up Jabaquara (all of Concagh’s works in this exhibition are named after the district) as well as the discrete experiences and memories of all those housed within.
This emphasis on the autonomy of the human subject, as distinct from the sprawling urban mass, is crystallised within Maguire’s seven charcoal drawings of the Valdemar household. Executed in the artist’s trademark flowing, expressionistic style, the starkness of these black and white portraits establishes an arresting aesthetic contrast with the lustral colour of the accompanying works on display. Yet, like everything else here, the artist’s loose and humanistic depictions preclude the flattening of the subjects into anonymous categorisation, as their specificity is rendered in line clearly and powerfully for the viewer.
As Heishman’s film approaches its close, we are greeted to a scene of Valdemar’s granddaughter, Isabela, dancing to Itzy’s Wannabe (2020). The synthetic instrumentation of the K-POP hit, with the accompanying choreographed performance by Isabela, functions to simultaneously universalise and individualise the core themes of the exhibition. These people could be anyone, yet the sustained and intense focus on their lives in the respondent works by each of the artists encourages the audience to contemplate the singularity and uniqueness of their own specific human experience. When considering the global stresses of migration and housing, it is sometimes inevitable that we lose sight of the individual. After all, everybody, like every house, is nominally a statistic. The success of ‘Then I laid the floor’ therefore lies in its ability to calmly offer a space of reflection which allows these human stories to be heard.
‘On Earth We are Briefly Gorgeous’ Glór 6 July – 2 September 2023
IN THE TWO-PERSON exhibition, ‘On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous’, curated by Conor O’Grady, Catherine McDonald’s sculptural installation, Of Salt and Ore (2023), features a range of weathered copper and iron vernacular utilitarian objects that serve as hosts for the growth of cubic salt crystals. Over the course of the twomonth exhibition, the crystallisation process – resulting from chemical reactions of copper water and supersaturated salt solution – presents the alluring and disquieting nature of corrosion.
Entering the installation, two large, rusted, circular vessels are situated on separate plinths, inhabited by stunning crystal ring formations. Eroded and twisted copper piping, with distinctive greenish-blue patina, and an iron anvil have alien-like, white, crystal protrusions. Corroded pipes extend from plinths, accompanied by wisps of salt crystal growth that seep onto the gallery floor. The salt crystals grow on these objects like a futuristic invasive species.
Climate change-induced desiccation is giving rise to higher salinity levels, disrupting the delicate equilibrium between saline and fresh water. This is anticipated to escalate in the coming years, potentially making salinisation a pivotal driver of environmental displacement.1 Recent solutions in water purification have been driven by Artificial Intelligence, identifying optimal nanopores within materials like graphene, to enhance their efficiency in salt removal.2
Drawing inspiration from Artificial Intelligence, Méadhbh O’Connor’s multimedia installation, altspace (installation 1.0) (2023), variously contemplates the digital, the virtual, and the natural. In the accompanying artist’s statement, O’Connor provocatively asks: “What kind of installation might appeal to a conscious computer?”
Four geometric sculptural forms on dark grey plinths resemble architectural models, fusing synthetic and biological materials
such as wood, electronic wiring, and the evergreen perennial air plant, Tillandsia.
It remains unclear whether O’Connor’s large abstract textile wall hanging is of human or machine origin, or if it depicts a fractal or an algorithm. Pixel forms and an aerial map-like wireframe of a motherboard overlay botanical forms. This multi-layered, surreal environment features two-dimensional vinyl works on walls and floors, portraying inverted landscapes, black holes, clouds, and data. These works possess a slightly peculiar, almost DALL-Elike quality, but are somehow more human. Within O’Connor’s installation, nothing feels incidental. A television screen displays extracts of the poem, The Physicist, written and recited by the artist: “I notice quartz embedded in the rock as my foot makes contact with the ground…” and “‘entanglement’ he says, ‘is the most amazing part’.”
While the artist’s installations for ‘On Earth We are Briefly Gorgeous’ are situated at opposite ends of the gallery space at glór, they each grapple with entangled speculative concerns. Where O’Connor’s work raises topical questions in relation to conscious computers, McDonald’s dystopian saline habitats pose unsettling environmental dilemmas.
In advocating for a moratorium on the development of technological consciousness, German philosopher, Thomas Metzinger, places the ethical burden on humans for the potential harm that we might impose on conscious machines in the future. He argues that we lack comprehension of the nature of consciousness, or the potential suffering our future inventions might encounter.3 Metzinger urges a ban on experiments that risk the emergence of synthetic phenomenology (or artificial consciousness) until at least 2050 – coincidentally, the same year that a threefold increase in soil salinity is anticipated. Alarming predictions suggest that by then, 90% of Earth’s
topsoil will be eroded beyond suitability for cultivation.4 While the leap from Artificial Intelligence to artificial consciousness may seem remote, the works exhibited at glór raise various environmental and ethical concerns for both humans and machines.
Gianna Tasha Tomasso is an artist, writer, and assistant lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies at Limerick School of Art & Design.
1 Fred Pearce, ‘Salt scourge: the dual threat of warm-
ing and rising salinity’, Yale Environment 360, 10 May 2022.
2 Yuyang Wang, Zhonglin Cao, and Amir Barati Farimani, ‘Efficient water desalination with graphene nanopores obtained using artificial intelligence’, npj 2D Materials and Applications, Vol. 5, No. 66, 2021.
3 Thomas Metzinger, ‘Artificial Suffering: An Argument for a Global Moratorium on Synthetic Phenomenology’, Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2021, pp 43-66.
4 ‘Saving our soils by all earthly ways possible’, Key Findings of The Global Soil Partnership – a Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, July 2022.
Various venues
17 – 30 July 2023
IN CLASSROOMS EVERYWHERE, beleaguered maths teachers urge students to ‘show their working.’ No matter the problem, articulating your ‘working out’ matters. Across the diversity of the visual arts, presented as part of Galway International Arts Festival this July, a commitment to articulating or showing ‘seeing’ through attention to practices, processes, and spaces united a range of different shows. Although showing your work in maths might serve to justify an answer, the transparency offered to audiences in these exhibitions functioned as a generous invitation to engage anew with artistic processes, familiar spaces, materials, and unseen forces that shape our experience of the world. Rather than expose definitive answers, these shows raised questions about how the visual arts might provoke or support conversations that matter.
Ruby Wallis’s solo exhibition, ‘Whistling in the Dark’, curated by Megs Morely and showing at Galway Arts Centre until 20 August, presented digital photography, film, collage, and cyanotypes. Downstairs, photography and film, shot during lockdown night walks, featured hastily captured suburban flora and fauna, reminiscent of crime scene photography, while a video across three screens evoked the strange otherness of night-time suburbia.
In Gallery Two, large cyanotypes of Galway Arts Centre’s Georgian ceiling roses highlighted the space’s history, just as the exhibition title nodded to Lady Augusta Gregory’s writing about St Brigid. Wallis’s collectively cut ‘swarm’ collages that bled out from corners of the gallery space and stairwell were well accompanied by the sounds of Mike Small’s composition of whistling women that Wallis sourced via Instagram. Above all, Wallis’s work highlights the subtle ways our deep connection to other beings persists, even during moments of deep solitude.
In Engage Studios, a group exhibition, titled ‘Infinite Possibilities’, was curated by Simon Fennessy Corcoran and featured works by Vicky Smith, Brigid Mulligan, and Cecilia Bullo. All three artists explore the traditional and familial structures that shape us. Silhouettes from Brigid Mulligan’s chandelier danced across home video footage of her deceased father and cyanotypes of her brother’s possessions, evoking the emotional ties that bind us. Family and domesticity also permeated Vicky Smith’s large self-portraits in which faces obscured by domestic objects – a mop, an iron, and a lampshade – appeared against backgrounds inspired by her grandfather’s photographs. Informed by Matrilineal theories, Cecilia Bullo’s mixed-media sculptures explore her lived experience of bicultural identity through examining healing practices and womanhood. Fennessy Corcoran made the curatorial decision to co-produce exhibition elements and the open call with ChatGPT.
A site-specific installation with audio on Salthill Promenade, titled Wordspace (2023) by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects, highlighted the hidden beauty of James Joyce’s descriptions of the everyday at the seaside. Wordspace is the final instalment of the Arts Council-funded ‘Ulysses 2.2’ – a year-long project of creative responses to the 18 episodes of Ulysses (Shakespeare and Company, 1922), presented by ANU, MoLI, and Landmark Productions to mark the century of its publication. The installation was directed by Louise Lowe and featured recordings of Olwen Fouéré reading from the Proteus episode.
126 Artist-Run Gallery presented a two-person exhibition by Anne Marie Deacy and Eimear Murphy, titled ‘Musica Universalis + Eternal Equations of Love’. The sparse participatory installations were augmented through performances and workshops by the artists. Deacy’s Static Ritual (2023) allowed participants to explore the hidden resonance of AM frequencies, while Murphy’s performance work explored the enduring value of care through human interaction with a dying
world. In the gallery, copper sheets and electromagnets hummed as visitors passed between them, while Murphy’s installation invited viewers to use charcoal fingers to create their own rubbings of phrases from words engraved on wooden panels. Across this dual show, material qualities were subtly explored.
In the Printworks Gallery, there were two solo exhibitions: Diana Copperwhite’s ‘Onomatopoeia’, curated by Aoife Ruane; and Lorraine Tuck’s ‘Unusual Gestures’, curated by Photo Museum Ireland.
Interspersing Copperwhite’s large canvasses, and further highlighting painterly processes, were vitrines featuring preparatory sketches, video conversations between the artist and curator and between fellow painters. Copperwhite’s weight of painting was matched by the weight of experience that resonated in Tuck’s photographs in the adjacent gallery space, documenting family life with ASD and intellectual disability. Stolen glances of intimacy include a sibling embrace, acts of care or eating together, and the documentation of medication and customised clothing for her son. Love characterises this gaze, allowing the subjects to reveal themselves. The same is true of Tuck’s series of collaborative portraits with Owen/Pink, a gender-fluid relative with Down Syndrome, shot outdoors, fabulously dressed in various outfits and poses. Tuck’s exhibition beautifully reflects her own family’s experiences in a way that honours the unique everyday intimacies that make a life.
David Mach’s epic sculpture of an exploding Range Rover, The Oligarch’s Nightmare (2023), filled the main space of the An Post Festival Gallery, while side rooms showed maquettes of other works-in-progress, and sketches styled after graphic novels, woodcut prints, and pastoral scenes with dystopic twists. Mach’s explosive sculpture (pun intended) seems to manifest the energies of unrest against the super-rich, the totemic power of status symbols, as well as the flimsy justification they create for authority and influence, thus committing a form of upper-class iconoclasm.
In ‘Far Away & Close to Home’, curated by Tom McClean at the Outset Gallery, Enda Burke’s signature kitsch photographic vision of 1980s Irish domesticity – replete with religious icons, shell suits, and so many
cigarettes – was complemented by a meticulous installation of a sitting room. There, a video work, Adverts from the Past (2023) by Dara Greaney, aired various addresses from ‘Father Michael’, advertisements for John Paul’s gift shop, and archival footage of RTÉ’s Angelus bells. This exhibition celebrated the palimpsests that sustain nostalgia – in glorious technicolour.
A welcome reopening of the University of Galway Gallery presented the group show, ‘Mindscapes’. The presented works were developed in response to conversations with psychology researchers to reveal hidden facets of the experience of living with mental illness and neurodiversity as part of Dr Jane Conway’s Scientific Arts Lab initiative.
Dr Lucy Elvis is a curator, writer and philosopher who teaches at the University of Galway.
ADAM STONEMAN REFLECTS ON JIALIN LONG’S CURRENT BODY OF WORK WHICH USES AI PROCESSES.
IN HER 1972 essay, ‘The Double Standard of Aging’, Susan Sontag writes that “aging is much more a social judgment than a biological eventuality.”1 It is a judgment largely directed towards women, who, as Sontag notes, “are old as soon as they are no longer very young.” Men, by contrast, have “a freedom to age” – they can age “without penalty.”
These conventions have largely persisted in the decades since Sontag wrote her essay, and indeed, they are not unique to the West. Jialin Long’s ongoing series, ‘Red Illuminates II: Instructions on Marriage and Childbearing’, most recently exhibited at The Library Project (28 April – 28 May), explores the Chinese phenomenon of Sheng Nv, translated as ‘Leftover Women’, denoting those over the age of 27 and unmarried. The series includes photographic portraits and interviews with women in their thirties, who, despite their successful careers, face social stigma and shame: “Pressure from society to get married and have children before the age of 30 is very high… you’re not normal if you’re not married.” The presented testimonies convey the personal impact and harm caused when a patriarchal society polices the lives of women. Such damaging attitudes have a long history in China, that endure, despite significant progress in gender equality since the 1949 revolution. Closer to home, we can recall the same chauvinist sentiment in Duke Vincentio’s cruel dismissal of Mariana, in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: “Why, you are nothing then: neither maid, widow, nor wife.”
‘Red Illuminates II’ builds on a previous body of work investigating statecraft and social conditioning in China. Long traces the origin of the category of Sheng Nv to China’s family planning policies, which from 1979 to 2011 mandated a one-child limit per family. Due to a cultural preference for boys, this resulted in a significantly higher proportion of marrying-aged men than women. In 2007, the state responded with a campaign that introduced the term Sheng Nv to persuade women to get married younger. Long exposes the visual systems by which social conventions are naturalised and enforced.
A triptych shows the changes in family planning policies from 1979 to 2021. In the first image, three children (common for Chinese families before the 1980s) sit in front of a doorway; an official red banner above announces: “Having only one child is the best option, the state will take care of you when you’re old.” In the next image, a baby sits alone, but the words on the banner reflect the revised 2011 policy: “Having one child is too few while having two children is just the right amount.” In the final image, a second child has been added dutifully, but the banner now reads: “Having three children is the best option, you don’t need the state to take care of you when you’re old.” Even for the most obedient citizens, it can be hard to keep up.
Long uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) processes in her work – a text generation tool translates state directives from Chinese into English. The blankness of the instructions, “Maintain your youth and beauty / The value of women decreases as they age”, imitates the impersonal edifice of state bureaucracy. British academic Dan McQuillan argues that AI, such as facial recognition and surveillance technologies, is particularly attractive to authoritarian governments: “The offer of generalising abstraction and action at scale appeals directly to the state apparatus, because bureaucracy and statecraft are founded on the same paradigms.”2
In another portrait, a young woman sits, arms crossed, looking into the distance, but something is
amiss. The navy-blue collar on her blouse begins to dissolve as it runs down her chest; her forearm ends in a large, undifferentiated mass, as if a painter had dropped their brush in a hurry. The effect is unsettling. Long created the image by feeding an AI image generating tool with a simple text prompt: “A successful Chinese woman who has accomplished a thriving career, a loving husband, and two beautiful children, by the age of 35.” Long uses AI subversively to speak back to the state: “This is the perfect woman you are looking for?” Rather than the state instructing the citizen to create the ‘model woman’, this time the citizen instructs AI. The result reveals the futility of the task.
In foregrounding AI as a tool in her artistic process, Long continues a tradition that began with Harold Cohen in the 1970s and his computer programme, AARON. The latest wave of generative AI systems, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and ChatGPT, has spurred a noisy debate about the implications of AI for society and culture. The exceptional economics of fine art production, “outside the first orbit of capitalist social relations”3, as American academic Nizan Shaked put it, together with the role of the museum in stabilising the art market, and the aura of the individual artist, mean that AI is unlikely to pose a threat to these artists in the future. However, for those in the creative industries – including illustration, advertising, and graphic design – AI tools threaten to deskill and disempower already overstretched and underpaid workers. While not promising to outdo human artists, AI can produce ‘good enough’ results at a fraction of the cost. There is a legitimate fear that the commercial application of AI may result in creative workers becoming discarded, devalued, obsolete, ‘leftover artists’.
Sontag, then aged 39, ends her essay with a call for women to resist and refuse sexist conventions by being honest about their age and embracing the aging process: “Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.”
By contrast, Long’s series appears to conclude with submission to social pressure: an image of a woman embracing a baby. Does this suggest a ‘happy ending’ of marriage and childbirth for a Sheng Nv woman? Yet the faces of the mother and child are turned away, provoking an uncomfortable thought. I count the fingers on the child’s hand, looking for tell-tale signs of AI. Is this a photograph or an AI generated fantasy, a vision of escape? Long’s work reminds us that while AI does not provide an answer to society’s problems, it can create a convincing illusion of their resolution.
Adam Stoneman lives and works in Galway.
CATHERINE MARSHALL REFLECTS ON MARK JOYCE’S RECENT EXHIBITION AT DAMER HOUSE GALLERY.
EMILY DICKINSON’S POEMS are like hand grenades; pithy, beautiful, explosive, and unforgettable. She comes to mind when you walk into Mark Joyce’s exhibition at Damer House Gallery in Roscrea (21 June – 7 July). Dickinson gives total consideration to every em dash and comma to carry her thought, and this condensed energy is what carries the charge. Appropriately titled ‘Bending Light’, Mark Joyce’s recent exhibition –chosen to mark the re-opening of Damer House after the long pandemic closure – dances with lightness and radiance against the building’s 400-year-old grey walls.
The exhibited paintings counteract the solid stoniness of the edifice with jewel-like canvases that are full of colour yet always controlled. If the building is about power, so are they, but of an entirely different kind, so modest that you don’t realise their strength at first, and directed to our inner selves, rather than to political dominance. The power resides in the way each colour combination is distilled from a range of possibilities of light on the retina. They play with translucence, shadows, juxtapositions, and combinations, shapes and volumes, as if there is simply nothing else to be said.
In an age of anxiety about war, climate change, artificial intelligence, gender identity, and a host of other things that keep us awake at night, these paintings call us back to the essentials. What did we actually see in the beginning? What were those shapes and colours? Why did we see them on some occasions and not others? They posit a reality that is as real as the source of those other anxieties, but every bit as important. These paintings are incredibly restorative to those who make the effort to connect with them. They evoke the Garden of Eden, that first beginning, innocence.
Joyce is fascinated by the way colour exists as a quality of light – something that emerged as a force in art history with the nineteenth-century colour theory of Chevreul and was taken to its most potent extent in the work of Kandinsky. However, in this show, the intimacy of the canvases connects more to the paintings of Vermeer, who painted the effects of light on objects long before the theory was there to support him. Joyce also mentioned that, apart from nature and the landscape, an important domestic influence on his painting was the work of women, weaving and knitting garments, and wall-hangings made from wool that was carded and made into thread around him in childhood. It was the colour of the woollen threads that attracted him then, but this was quickly followed by an understanding of craftsmanship, something else that comes through in the purity of the paint application. With this work, in this historic place, we get a combination of Vermeer’s chronological time, humanised by its domestic scale and setting, and an unflinchingly contemporary exploration of light and colour.
It is a small exhibition, confined to two modest rooms and a narrow corridor. There was another, much larger space available, but Joyce, true to his instinct, opted for a more intimate experience. This is the mark of someone who really understands his mission, that he can resist the temptation that greater space allows. It pays off superbly here. Damer House has so much presence that the embrace of the intimate becomes a strong counter statement, in which the gleaming surfaces of Joyce’s small paintings humanise years of history, colonisation, and power.
Damer House itself deserves special mention as an art venue. Without waiting for the current and ongoing restoration by the OPW, a handful of local people in Roscrea, with the artists Patricia Hurl and Therry Rudin, have put the gallery on the cultural map for
about a decade now, hosting cutting edge national and international artists, film screenings, performances, and community programmes. They have recently stepped back and handed over to a new programming team. If this statement exhibition is a sign of what they can do, we must all add Damer House to our list of significant art venues.
Catherine Marshall is an art historian, freelance curator, and member of Na Cailleacha. She is co-editor of Irish Art 1920–2020: Perspectives on change (Royal Irish Academy, 2022).
MY LATEST SERIES of paintings, ‘Empathy Lab’, will be exhibited at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris from 16 September to 27 October. The exhibition takes its title from a dedicated area in Facebook’s EU headquarters in Dublin, where employees are invited to express empathy to various causes, through the mediation of technology. This body of work explores a prosthetic relationship with technology and uses the genre conventions of representational painting – such as portraiture, history painting, and still life – to quizzically probe the digital age. It makes reference to science-fiction genres and previously imagined futures that have now come to pass. The exhibition is curated by Nora Hickey M’Sichili and follows on from two group exhibitions in 2018 – ‘Surveillé.e.s’ at CCI Paris, and ‘House Taken Over’ as part of Sonorities Festival in Belfast – that examined the societal permeation of surveillance.
The formation of my practice is based upon periods of research around the material cultures and histories of big data and digital cultures that are subsequently edited and ordered to create the paintings. Many of the works look at the cultural and political ideologies that underpin architectural spaces. Images are researched, collected, archived, and edited. Technically the paintings are constructed along traditional methods; a large paper cartone is made from photographic sources and transferred by charcoal to the canvas to provide the paintings framework. The surfaces are painted in small giornata sections, which ensures that an area can be worked alla prima in a single sitting. Paint is applied through complementary mixing of colour and modulated shadows.
The large-scale painting, Fulfillment Centre (2021), was constructed from collecting stock photographs of international Amazon fulfilment centres, with an interest in these spaces as a place of labour and production, rendered through the analogue processes of painting. This draws attention to the time and labour of the physical process of painting. I collect images from architectural and interior agencies that design spaces
for the tech sector. Works such as Co-Workers (Second Home) (2022) explore how design manifests in tech interiors to blend the boundaries between leisure and labour for tech employees. The painting also explores how utopian surfaces and cinematic architecture are embedded in the corporate management speak and mandated rituals of the tech sector.
I am interested in objects and entities that have become obsolete or reappraised, such as computer museums, analogue recording equipment, and modular electronic instruments. Pre-internet sites of surveillance are investigated, such as the Berlin Stasi Museum, as are spaces associated with the geneses of a surveillance capitalism. Works such as Indexical Filing System (2022) or Bunker (Tito) (2022) have an undercurrent of Cold War paranoia and point to a pre-internet era, when there were clear distinctions between public and private. In this process, I am interested in the documentarian approach, similar to how Adam Curtis collects and amasses archival material, searching for the seeding of cultures from the recent past to the present. These begin to build and trace a narrative around how boundaries of privacy and labour have eroded or been imperceptibly shifted and the collection of personal data has shifted from the political to private capital.
Another long running theme is the nature of how images are made and illusions are formed, both actually and virtually, and how these verisimilitudes relate to the history of painting. Unreal Engine – Mega City (The Matrix) (2023) and Model City (Blade Runner) (2021) are two large format works that contrast how a dystopian metropolis is generated. The former is a hyper real rendering of the simulacrum city from a gaming system based on the film The Matrix, itself a generalised melting pot of international cities, at once recognisable but simultaneously unidentifiable as a specific city. The latter looks at how world building discourse in cinematic special effects industries have swung back to physical model making as a more convincing way of creating audience suspension. The works draw attention to the awe and fantasy that is central to these cultures and
obliquely references our subjective view within a vista that is a feature of romanticism in painting, in the conjuring of a technological sublime.
The portrait as a genre form is explored in numerous works which look at a gradual transhuman fusion with physical technology. Works such as Humanoid (2023), Neuralink (2020), Torso (Anthromimetic) (2019) and Deepfake (2020) are all gleaned from the research and development of companies such as Boston Dynamics or Elon Musk’s Neuralink and consider how human evolution can speculatively develop beyond its current form through technology. Crowd (2020) is based on a Chinese facial recognition system that recognises and links to social and online histories and subsequently orders and identifies crowds on a simple colour-coded basis. While these allude to a technological anxiety akin to the TV series Black Mirror, they are delivered in a deadpan manner, closer to German Objective Photography. ‘Child Actor’ (2018) is a series of paintings based on a troupe of child actors working on a sound stage as avatars. I was interested in the narrative archetype of the child actor as a figure of surging potential that often faces disappointment later in life.
Fake News War Room (2019) is a painting based on an image posted to Twitter by a journalist visiting Facebook, who had been facing pressure to moderate and verify its content, and invited journalists to witness firsthand how they were dealing with the phenomenon of fake news. The work looks at how blurred regulation around identifying big tech as either a platform for personal content or a publisher of news content. ‘Empathy Lab’ explores the blurring of boundaries between public and private, real and virtual, and explores a synthesis of technology, power structures and culture. While not overtly technophobic, the presented works are critically conscious of technological overreach and the blurs that exist in a boundless sphere.
LAURENCE HYNES DISCUSSES HIS EXPERIENCE OF UNDERTAKING AN MA IN CREATIVE PRACTICE AT ATU GALWAY.
THERE IS AN old maxim, which states that vessels on autopilot spend the vast majority of their time off course, with the purpose of the steering mechanism being to nudge them back on track. If we think of our core concerns in creative practice as being a set of guiding principles, then we may acknowledge that it is worthwhile making sure we are following the right constellation. The Master of Arts in Creative Practice offered by the Atlantic Technological University in Galway City is an intensive 12-month programme, leading to a Level 9 qualification, which sets out to ensure that its graduates have carefully identified their core concerns as practitioners and are wellplaced to further their professional careers.
The programme runs from October to September and students can choose from one of four strands: contemporary art studio practice, digital cultures, film and lensbased media, and socially engaged practice. In the case of my own year (2022-23), this led to an energising diversity of practices, viewpoints, and cultures in the student cohort – French, Catalonian, Palestinian, and Irish – of a broad age range and from different disciplines. Engagement with fellow students is key, as research and projects gain shape, with the support of specialised tutors and technicians. Field trips in the second semester broaden engagement further, while a visiting lecture series brings new thought and valuable one-to-one tutorials. All the while, academic assessments are built up to through peer review, seminar presentations, and lively discussion.
The visiting lecture series deserves special mention, as it allowed access to practitioners that I would probably never have had an opportunity to engage with otherwise. The roster of visiting lecturers included contemporary artists, researchers, animators, filmmakers, photographers, and curators. Among the many standouts was Liverpool-based artist, Emily Speed, whose film installation, Flatlands (2021), showed at TULCA Festival 2022, and who gave a virtual presentation of her practice, which was revealing and generous to a fault.
Little moments of other people’s brilliance often illuminate our own work in ways we cannot imagine, and I certainly found this to be the case on the course. At first, one may be wary, or question the value, of crossing disciplinary boundaries, but it soon becomes apparent that there is a richness in being open to differences and commonalities in ways of working. My photographic practice can benefit from the insights of a ceramicist or storyteller, for example. Research presentations from fellow students were looked forward to as introductions to new practitioners and contrasting methodologies and sparked some of our most fruitful debates.
ATU’s Galway City campus is housed in a former Redemptorist monastery and has been home to the School of Design and Creative Arts since 1998. The building’s library, designed by de Blacam and Meagher, is the central hub of the repurposed space and offers access to the libraries of the other ATU campuses along with its own impressive collection of books and journals. I gained access to specialist knowledge, pertinent to my research on landscape, from the ATU’s Heritage Research Group, and was able to engage with authorities in other disciplines outside of our own institution – an ATU research email address opened doors for me. Course chair, Dr Gavin Murphy, has ensured that research and critical thinking are central to the MA in Creative Practice, and the MA faculty team go above and beyond in delivering a rounded programme to meet professional needs.
Laurence Hynes is a Galway-based visual artist working mainly in the medium of photography. laurencehynes.com
The ATU Galway MA in Creative Practice graduate exhibition, ‘Fissure’, curated by Sona Smedkova, runs in Galway Arts Centre from 8 to 22 September.
atu.ie
AT 5AM, I rang my best friend to tell him not to take me to the airport. My luggage was sitting in the hallway, my room empty, my things had been given away. Getting into New York Film Academy had been my dream, so chickening out now felt like an insane move. I was 18 years old, and my relatives had just phoned to say that they wouldn’t be able to collect me from JFK because of a family emergency. How would I survive New York on my own?
I didn’t. Instead, I stayed in Mannheim, Germany, got into a prestigious fashion academy, and worked in the local cinema to pay for costly tuition fees and living expenses. Was this the creative career that I had imagined? Two years into the degree, I specialised in costume, and met my now-husband. The next few years were spent with work, getting married, having kids, and at 30 years, my young family moved to northwest Ireland to seek a different lifestyle.
In 2019, I joined the BA (Hons.) in Fine Art at the Atlantic Technological University (ATU) in Sligo. I graduated and progressed to the Master of Arts in Creative Practice, a research-led or practice-based postgraduate degree, offered within the Yeats Academy of Arts, Design and Architecture (YAADA) at ATU Sligo. What attracted me to the MA was its unique multidisciplinary approach, with architects, directors, film and theatre makers, creative writers, designers, visual artists, and more, all in one group!
The full-time MA runs over 15 months with meetings in person or online, one day per week for two semesters, with a parttime option also available. With compulsory modules on research methods, dissertation writing, and practice-based group work, the course also invites visiting creatives. My highlights were artist researcher, Kiera O’Toole, who described her personal approach to research and gave hands-on practical advice, and visual artist, Celina Muldoon, who passionately focused her talk on collaborating with others.
MA students spend the summer on an extended research project, while the third
semester focuses on dissertation writing. It has been my most challenging study experience so far, with minimal personal contact, no set time for peer discussion, or continuous allocated space on campus. In turn, I have learned to believe in my creative voice, widened my network, and fine-tuned my ‘anything-is-possible’ attitude.
Our graduate showcase will take place on 14 September, presenting work by 15 MA students. My practice focuses on digital performance and immersive storytelling, and for the showcase I will present Daughters of Danu (2023), a virtual reality experience that follows a river goddess who is stuck in a lake. Other practitioners include Áine Atara, an interior architect and designer who engages with neuro design, biophilia and environmental psychology. Merging her analogue methodology with AI technology, Áine has developed an immersive paper installation which references acedia and wellbeing.
Matthew Englander, a British writer living in Vienna, will present Crocodile –a novella about an isolated grandmother feeding neighbourhood dogs to the crocodile that has appeared in her bathtub. Writer Sinéad McClure will read an extract from her epic poem, Talking Bird, which illustrates the birds’ struggles with environmental damage and habitat loss. Visual design specialist, Caitriona Murphy, will show her project, Type that tells a Story, exploring modern typeface creation techniques, that can be utilised to express dimensions of emotion. Author Jessamine O’Connor will read poetry from a new book exploring relationships and growing up. Her dissertation work will be accompanied by electronic music and saxophone.
Nina Fern is a Donegal-based visual artist and researcher.
@ninafern
The ATU Sligo MA in Creative Practice graduate showcase will take place on 14 September at YAADA.
atu.ie
Ciara Healy: I enjoyed the performance of your live artwork, SPIN SPIN SCHEHERAZADE (2019), in Crawford Art Gallery in late June, as part of Cork Midsummer Festival. Judging by the rich collection of stories presented in the show, these last few years have been very busy for you. What have you been doing?
Orla Barry: I’ve been herding, lambing, dosing, shearing, haymaking, sheep dog-training. There have been pedigree sales, art seminars, sheep discussion groups, Arts Council applications, Bord Bia audits, farm inspections, tax collections. Exhibitions, performances, livestock shows. I’ve collaborated with human animals and farm animals. I’ve been an attentive nature student, as well as a keen observer of the farm industry and the art world. I have been a bit of a hermit sometimes. I’ve been working hard at combining my work as an artist with running a pedigree flock of Lleyn sheep for over a decade.
CH: Rural Ireland has changed a lot in recent years. How did your practice evolve when you re-located back to County Wexford from Belgium?
OB: I returned to Ireland to live on my father’s tillage farm in 2009, and I established a pedigree Lleyn sheep flock in 2011. In many ways, while I was in Belgium, the Irish landscape never left me. It loomed large, but it was romanticised in works such as Foundlings (1999) and Portable Stones (2004), which were primarily concerned with the experience of remembering the land. When I got back to Ireland, my work became about the experience of making a living in and with the land.
I grew my flock to 70 and presented them at livestock shows.
The language of art and pedigree breeding replicate each other, and I found that interesting and humorous. Coming from a farming background meant that if I was going to farm, I had to do it properly. The farming I embarked on was no hobby and the creative work that emerged as a result came from the doing. Trying to run all those things at once was nearly impossible at times; to be a farmer, an artist, a lecturer, was a big ask. There was a marked difference between remembering the landscape when I was living in Belgium and drowning in the muck of real farming when I returned to live in Wexford. There were no preconceived ideas –the farming came from necessity. My days were filled with beauty and death, love and violence, as I embodied all identities at once, and from this experience, much richer creative work emerged.
CH: SPIN SPIN SCHEHERAZADE conveyed this rich complexity through collaboration.
OB: Yes, the first and most important collaborations in the work have been the human-animal relationships I foster on the farm. SPIN SPIN SCHEHERAZADE (2019) is a sequel to BREAKING RAINBOWS (2016). In both these works, I collaborated with Einat Tuchman, a Belgian-Israeli performer, with whom I have been making work for the last decade. My involvement with Einat evolved because I have always been interested in language and the ways in which it is spoken by native and foreign speakers. There is also humour and a kind of incongruity when someone as dazzling and cosmopolitan as Einat, presents and performs stories about a sheep with a prolapsed uterus, of lambs being slaughtered in the meat factory, of deals in the mart, of judging flocks and feeling the testicles of pedigree rams! I am interested in the tension between the visceral and factual here too.
The performance platforms and artworks I constructed for Spin Spin are white, highly engineered, and spotless – there is not a straw bale in sight. A tension emerges when these sterile surfaces are used as a stage for Einat to tell stories of intense kindness and love, blood and guts. My desire to contradict the clichéd imagery of farming can be confounding for an audience. It is unclear to them if I actually do farm. I tell my farming stories to Einat so that she knows them almost in an embodied way. Our linguistic worlds combine. The audience then gets the impression that her experience as a narrator is an authentic experience as a farmer.
CH: How does the audience experience this collaborative work and how does it all come together in a gallery space?
OB: Einat moves around the space and occasionally stands on the platforms the audience is sitting on, so the audience has to move around too. Chance plays a significant role in how the work is experienced. While Einat is performing my stories, I make toast. The toaster is a performative device that punctuates each story. When the toaster stops, Einat stops, and asks the audience to direct her to continue or to move on to another story. For the audience, it might feel like things are a bit out of control, as Einat jumps from one story to the next. Especially when these stories are intense or moving, about death or a complex birth. The audience might be totally engrossed, laughing or crying, then suddenly this emotion is brought to a halt. It is unsettling as there is no beginning, middle or end.
This type of disjuncture is integral to my work; it is how my dyslexic mind works, and it is how farming works. Making toast was also my way of being in the performance, and using bread is both personal and political. My grandmother’s family were in the famous Kelly’s bakery in Wexford. When I was researching Spin Spin, I thought about the fact that she was at the end of the farming cycle making bread, and my father, as a tillage farmer, was at the beginning of the cycle, growing grain. While the toast references my grandmother, it is also a product of capitalism, bread being the staple food that has kept workers alive across
Europe since the Industrial Revolution. Toast is something you live on when you are lambing. At 2 o’clock in the morning, a cup of tea and a slice of toast keeps you going, before you run back out into the rain to deal with the unknown in the darkness of the lambing shed.
CH: It is clear from your stories that your animals and the people you have worked with over the years – on the farm, in the pedigree sales community, and as the former secretary of the Breeders’ Association – are important influences, but who else has inspired your work?
OB: I like to think of myself as a minimalist-expressionist. My world is a crossover between Edvard Munch, Hanne Darboven, and Beatrix Potter! I admire her because she was a knowledgeable and skilled Herdwick pedigree sheep breeder, as well as a conservationist and successful artist. I remember when I started farming, I suddenly understood everything to do with fables and fairytales. I am the embodiment of all of that, the exhaustion, and the elation of it. I am so happy to have had the opportunity to do it. I have become a kind of anthropologist of my own rural community.
Ciara Healy is a writer and Head of Department for Fine Art & Education at Limerick School of Art & Design, Technological University of the Shannon. ciarahealymusson.ie
Orla Barry is a visual artist and shepherd who lives and works on the south coast of rural Wexford. orlabarry.be
SPIN SPIN SCHEHERAZADE will be presented at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios from 5 to 7 October in association with Dublin Theatre Festival. templebargallery.com
The work has been translated into French and will enter the collection of Musée des Arts Contemporains (MACS) in Grand-Hornu, Belgium, where it will be shown as part of the artist’s significant solo exhibition in April 2024. mac-s.be
Frank Wasser: We met a few months ago to discuss the very beginnings of your research for your forthcoming exhibition at Pallas Projects/Studios. How has the work developed since our initial conversation? I’ve noticed that the exhibition now has a title, ‘The Ninth Muse’. Can you tell me about some of the processes you have recently engaged in?
Aoibheann Greenan: Over the last couple of months, I’ve been working on the first phase of this project – a series of eight drawings that will be used to train an AI system. I’m producing these images using a process akin to Salvador Dalí’s Paranoiac-critical method, by which the artist combined multiple images to stimulate in himself and the viewer a “delirium of interpretation.” In a similar way, I’m allowing my drawings to emerge intuitively from disparate elements that begin to suggest a gestalt image. Demonic faces are just about discernible, triggering pareidolia – the tendency to perceive meaningful images in ambiguous visual patterns. These drawings will be scanned and turned into an animation in which each image will morph from one to the next in a looping sequence. The chroma key sections will allow additional video to be composited into the images. In the next phase of the project, I will incorporate a Muse headset – a consumer level brain computer interface – and a neural net trained on my drawings. In collaboration with an AI artist, I’ll develop an interface that can read my brain waves and translate them into input for an AI system. This will allow me to modify my drawings in real-time with my fluctuating brain states,
which will hopefully generate strange new compositions.
FW: There is a swift moving conversation across mainstream culture on the ethics and risks of AI. The technologies you’re exploring in this research are changing daily. How, if at all, might this play into your recent research?
AG: My research is connecting the dots between twentieth-century Surrealism, with its deep explorations of the unconscious, ancient Greek mythology, with its invocation of creative forces, and the current moment, in which a growing number of consciousness-hacking technologies are proliferating the consumer market. I’m keenly aware of the dangers that AI poses, its entrenched biases and lack of transparency, and privacy issues around data gathering, not to mention the already proven risks around artistic plagiarism. Certainly, adequate data protection frameworks need to be established to ensure remuneration and recognition for artists. However, beyond these very real structural concerns, I find that much of the paranoia surrounding AI within the creative industries – that it will surpass, or somehow even make obsolete, human creativity – has a misplaced existential tenor. It’s a disempowering narrative. What if instead we began to think of AI as a co-creative tool that can accelerate our individual and collective creativity?
FW: So, you view AI as an opportunity to analyse what constitutes creativity? Otherness? Even consciousness?
AG: Very much so! On a fundamental level,
I view AI as a mirror of the human psyche; the biggest dangers are merely a reflection of the human consciousness that cultivates it. When we start approaching it less as a competitor and more as a creative collaborator, we find many parallels with the way that previous generations thought about creativity. The title of the show, for example, refers to the Nine Muses of ancient Greek mythology, goddesses who were considered the source of knowledge and creative inspiration. The Greeks also brought us the idea of the daimon, spirits who mediated messages between the gods and the people. This was later adapted by the Romans into the idea of a personal genius, spirits that represent one’s intelligence and destiny. In each case, creativity was conceived as an independent entity that guides and inspires all people. It wasn’t until the Enlightenment that the idea of genius began referring to a special inner quality, owned by a few exceptional people. It is precisely this subsumed, egoic version of genius that persists in the main, making it little wonder that AI would constitute an existential threat!
FW: This brings to mind the uncanny, the psychological experience of an event or individual as not simply weird or mysterious but unhinging in a way that feels oddly familiar. Freud expands on this in his essay, ‘Das Unheimliche’ (loosely translating as ‘the unhomely’) which in turn points towards architecture and space. How are you thinking about exhibition-making in the context of this research? Or, alternatively, what do you want the research to do in the context of this exhibition?
AG: As I mentioned, my research triangulates surrealism, Greek mythology, and neuroimaging. I locate the common thread as the creative collaboration with an indwelling other – an entity that resides in us but is not of us. This version of creativity, taken up by Jung and the Surrealists, to me provides a productive way of framing our relationship to AI. The installation will be a further iteration of this idea. I will draw from another surrealist technique, Dali’s hypnagogic sleep method, in which the artist would nap in his armchair, holding a set of keys above a metal plate, whereupon the sound of them falling would awaken him with imaginative material for his work. My plan is to automate this set-up using an office chair with a Muse headband inserted in the headrest and a set of keys connected to an Arduino system that allows them to drop and retract. The video loop of my drawings will play on a screen, gradually shifting into a recording that details the impact of my brainwave fluctuations on the images. This ever-changing image is ‘The Ninth Muse’ of the title.
Frank Wasser is an Irish artist and writer based in London.
Aoibheann Greenan is an artist currently living in London. aoibheanngreenan.com
Greenan’s forthcoming solo exhibition, ‘The Ninth Muse’, runs at Pallas Projects/Studios from 2 to 18 November. pallasprojects.org
SONIA SHIEL IS an artist best known for her work in painting and sculptural performance. Throughout 2023, Kunstverein Aughrim is accompanying her artistic practice, with the aim of underwriting some of the experimental methodologies she is currently developing, in the course of producing a major new body of work, commissioned by VISUAL Carlow for exhibition in September.
Kate Strain: What made you want to become an artist?
Sonia Shiel: I might say now it was my reckless optimism – that art school would place me within the general field of ‘self-expression’. I didn’t know then whether it would be painting or fashion or something more performative, but certainly I hoped that I could have that license to explore the arts as a maker. A couple of years in, and my motivations became necessarily charged by determination. I was a young single mum, embedded into a still patriarchal painting and educational system that, at the time, doubted the bedfellows of motherhood and a ‘serious’ career in art ever existing simultaneously. But motherhood helped me become more resolute about my career, using its tools of resourcefulness, and thriving off the chaos, with little time to waste.
KS: Can you tell us a bit about how other disciplines beyond painting, for example dance, law, or gaming, have come to shape your approach?
SS: Mostly my interdisciplinary influences have been facilitated or designed by residencies and academic fellowships, or site-specific shows. Collaboration on any level provides a lively cross-pollination of ideas between people. And what’s nice is it’s just two or three imaginations in a room and a load of materials – it’s all constructive. Exploring subjects intensively for short periods of time situates me in other-worlds; allows me to appropriate non-art-related rules, materials, and histories; opens my self-reflexive stories to broader objectivity; and best of all, brings surprises.
KS: Can you describe some of your current artistic methodologies and how you arrived at them?
SS: In recent years, a strand of my painting practice has become very collaborative in its approach, and more rebellious in nature and form. Shows like the upcoming one at VISUAL allow me to explore ideas beyond the pictorial frame; to dematerialise space, navigate the politics of representation, and challenge conclusion. Adapting painted surfaces to soft-form sculptures, large floor works, free-standing sculptural shapes, or backdrops, sets and props, my paintings have been many things – but are nearly always storytellers. They have regularly featured sound or dictated choreographed routes to view the exhibition, have been narrated in animated states, appropriated to video or audio works, and are currently traversable.
KS: I’m interested in how you take thoughts, theories, techniques, and approaches from people in other disciplines, and incorporate them into your own practice. As part of your collaboration with Kunstverein Aughrim, you’ve devised a series of Pulse Events, to which we’re inviting responses from various interlopers of interest – people coming from fields of archaeology and gaming, theatre directing, and fan non-fiction. Can you tell us more about the ideas behind these Pulse Events, what the events entail, and what it is you
SS: Pulse Event #1 took place on 25 May and involved the construction of a large gaming board in a borrowed studio at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (where I have my studio). On top of this 4 x 4 metre platform, three performers were invited to reconstruct a fragmented landscape painting, and to engage with its terrain according to a set of carefully crafted rules. In this Pulse Event, portals into the fields of gaming and painting were opened, in the hope of manifesting a potential creative bleed between Benjamin Hanußek’s gaming research and my painting practice.
Pulse Event #2 on 27 July was a conversation with acclaimed theatre director, Anne Bogart, that took place in my own studio, against a selection of worksin-progress. These included three triptychs, in which figures appear to ordinarily inhabit an extraordinary natural environment. The triptychs have emerged from a central terrain, which was first workshopped with Hanußek. The terrain is a dynamic floor piece, made up of composite shape-shifting platforms, housing seven slatted facades with a series of holes, features, and dressings that together form an enchanted landscape, through which visitors can walk. The terrain is at once many things – a nature table, painting, birdsong, music box, stage, map, animal, and an interactive walk. Ultimately it will orientate the visitor through the exhibition with apparent opportunities for elaborate agency.
Finally, for Pulse Event #3 on 1 August (Lughnasa) myself, a group of performers, and the Kunstverein Aughrim team were joined on a nature walk by an intimate audience, and virtually, by writer Elvia Wilk. Wilk presented a reading from her book, Death by Landscape (Soft Skull Press, 2022), which recounts literary and artistic references to women from literature who wilfully returned to the landscape in acts of sometimes principled, sometimes desperate, protest. On the walk, there was a sequence of botanical, sonic, and water features that follow a set of points on a map, and tailored orientation cues or field notes, to find a number of objects. These were choreographed opportunities for image-making that used observational, transformational, and co-operative actions – burial and excavation, washing and bathing, planting, picking, birdwatching,
cooking, drawing, burning and sawing. And they aimed to summon other, more disruptive agents – the weather, the long grass, tricks of light, ghosts, sounds, and a time of return. Back at the Kunstverein, the arrangement of these objects activated the topology, already part installed as Supernatural Bureau, a multi-dimensional cabinet that recalls the game and staging elements of earlier Pulse Events, and an abstracted taster of the performative terrain for VISUAL.
KS: Can you talk more about the involvement of performers as autonomous protagonists in your work?
SS: The alter egos I have created for the protagonists in my narrative works are variations of one persona, an artist longing to do something of import. They always seem to be in, or not far from, the studio, though life for them is multi-dimensional in every way. Their route is never simple; complicated by ego, the warping of time, lack of security, and faced with all sorts of adversities, they seem somehow to command the landscape or environment magically but powerlessly. I’ve used performers in workshopping texts, live performance, recording dialogue, voiceovers, and song. In upcoming works, the performers will care-take the work, through a season of ‘unexpected’ conditions, spectacles, and shapeshifts. The question of their autonomy is complex, as the performance and its environment are both improvisational and controlled.
Kate Strain is founder of Kunstverein Aughrim, a curatorial production office for contemporary art projects, supported by the Arts Council. kunstverein.ie
Sonia Shiel is an Irish visual artist based in Dublin. soniashiel.com
Shiel’s Supernatural Bureau is on display at Kunstverein Aughrim until 1 December. It acts as a prologue to her forthcoming solo exhibition at VISUAL Carlow (30 September 2023 – 7 January 2024). visualcarlow.ie
IN SPRING OF this year, I returned to the Ragdale Foundation in the United States for a residency. This was my first residency in five years, and the timing was perfect for me to step back from my practice, as I had been intensely working towards my forthcoming solo exhibition at Taylor Galleries. These new paintings are based on locations in East Donegal and parts of Dublin, where I have spent time over the past two years, and films that I have watched. Most of the paintings are set at twilight.
This was my second residency at Ragdale. After I finished the first residency in autumn 2016, I hoped to return some day to see the prairie in a different season. I got to fulfil my wish by returning in spring when all four seasons could be experienced.
The Ragdale Foundation is a non-profit artists community located on the former country estate of architect, Howard Van Doren Shaw, and poet and playwright, Frances Wells Shaw. Howard designed and built the house in 1897. It was established as an artists’ community in 1976 by Shaw’s granddaughter, poet Alice Judson Hayes. Ragdale offers 18-day residencies for visual artists, writers, poets, composers, dancers, and performers. It is situated close to 50 acres of wild prairie, is a 15 minute-walk from the town of Lake Forest, and about an hour by train to downtown Chicago, where I made several trips to visit museums and galleries.
I found the light blinding when I arrived in Chicago from Ireland in late March. It felt like I had been transported into the coloured Land of Oz. Stepping back into the prairie for the first time in nearly seven years was very powerful. I had made so much work about this place from 2017 to 2020; it was like meeting a long-lost love.
During my recent residency at Ragdale, I was given the Meadow Studio, a magnificent huge studio situated in the prairie and built on the grounds of the original Meadow Studio of the sculptor Sylvia Shaw Judson, daughter of the Shaws. I came across a small enigmatic tombstone near the Meadow Studio, marking the grave of a muchloved pet belonging to the Shaws, a fox terrier that was buried there in 1909. I saw all kinds of birdlife through the studio windows while I worked, and during my walks through the prairie – cardinal, bluebird, American robin, tree swallow, red winged blackbird, and the Canada goose. I also saw deer regularly at dusk. Packs of up to nine coyotes have been seen on the grounds of Ragdale, and some of the other residents heard their strange cries at night. I was not lucky enough to see or hear a coyote, but I was always aware of their presence.
There were eight writers and one poet/ dancer in residence with me; we had amazing dinners together every night, cooked by the wonderful chef Linda. Each bedroom and studio has a stack of blue notebooks in which each resident writes something about their time at Ragdale before they leave. I slept in the Yellow Room, where
the oldest entry in the notebook was dated 1981. It was very moving to read through the entries of so many creative people that stayed in this room over the past 40 years.
While I am on residency, I do not work from my surroundings, but spend a lot of time outside taking hundreds of photographs to use as source material for possible future paintings. After each residency, I put this source material away and forget about it. At least a year has to pass, before I can look at it, but once I begin revisiting this source material, I might be making work from it for a number of years.
I look for atmosphere and story when I am out walking with my camera. I might see an animal or there might be something about a human figure in a setting that interests me. For example, my painting Halloween Boy from 2018 was based on Halloween night during my time at Ragdale in 2016. The staff arranged for me to go to a suburb where hundreds of children were trick or treating so I could take photographs, wearing a witch’s hat to blend in with the crowds. I took about 80 photographs but used only one of them – of a boy dressed up as The Joker. For the painting, I placed him standing in a swamp in the prairie.
On my last night at Ragdale this year, two of the resident writers modelled for me in the prairie at sunset. A red-tailed hawk landed in front of us; I will never forget the loud thud it made as it touched the ground. I will let my time there settle and see what paintings unfold in the future.
I COMPLETED A BA in Sculpture at Crawford College of Art and Design in the 1980s. Soon afterwards, I joined the recently formed Cork Artist Collective (est. 1985) and became a director, serving until 2006. Not only did CAC provide me with a studio, but also the fellowship of other emerging artists.
During the 90s, I completed a range of public art works. For example, in 1997, I was commissioned to create a site-specific commission for University College Cork, Ten Foolish and Wise Virgins, comprising ten bronze and stone sculptures, sited in the foyer of the O’Rahilly Building. In 2008, I completed an MFA in Sculpture at NCAD, followed by a practice-based PhD in 2013. My doctoral thesis was titled ‘Loss and Return: Exploring collective memory in an Irish family archive 1950-1966 through installation art practice’.
I work across a wide range of media, including sculpture, textiles, sound, drawing, moving image, and collage, and my choice of materials is often intuitively led. I like my processes to be technically exact, however the final results often look spontaneous, even awkward, suggesting a sense of fragility. In the last few years, I’ve turned to early Surrealism, drawn to its recurring principle of ‘the strange beauty in the unexpected’. Different media have their own cultural and historical charge, which informs and resonates with me and, in turn, the viewer.
Art-making is how I process memories, experiences and observations. By fusing narrative modes, including poetry, text, image, and collage, I recalibrate the tensions between reality and fantasy. I often work in series and return to the same themes, which includes the natural world, the boundaries of the body, autobiography, memory, hidden histories, and feminism.
This summer I had two concurrent solo exhibitions.
‘You Begin’, at Mermaid Arts Centre (20 May – 1 July) presented new artworks employing a broad range of materials, such as ceramics, collage, and textiles. Making art through the global pandemic and affected by isolation, fear, and a new connectedness, I drew on the sensuality of plants and research on early female Surrealist artists. This exhibition was accompanied by a publication with an essay by Ingrid Lyons. For ‘Do you see us – Do you hear us?’ at Godsbanen Cultural Centre in Aarhus, Denmark (26 June – 21 August) I exhibited a series of large-scale collage works. These figurative works explore ancient mythologies and holistic forms of crafting, belonging and surviving in harmony with nature, conveyed through the repeated motif of female hands as symbols of both oppression and comfort that yearn to connect.
My plan for the next couple of years is simple enough – to continue making art. I’m currently in discussions with Godsbanen and Pamela Gomberbach (Project Manager, AaBKC International) to develop an artist residency in Aarhus next year; researching at HEX! Museum of Witch Hunt, located in Riba, the oldest town in Denmark. I would like to find an Irish venue to exhibit the Aarhus collages. I’m also at the early stages of a short, experimental animation, for which I received an Arts Council of Ireland award.
Margaret Fitzgibbon lives in Dublin and has a studio in Glencree, County Wicklow. margaretfitzgibbon.net
STACKS IN NATURE are biproducts of erosion and geological transformation. They are part of the land, out in the sea. We are currently experiencing rapid shifts in our environment, from melting ice caps to rising temperatures. There is an urgent environmental task at hand and there are seismic shifts in thinking required to get us there. In my latest collection of works, titled ‘Stacks’, I am developing new works related to the land we live on and the bodies of water that connect us. Through this work, I want to engage with audiences and bring awareness to the dramatic shifts, resulting from climate change.
Since 2020 there has been a significant departure in my work, from two-dimensional printmaking and painting into sculptural installation. I began making small paintings on plywood and stacking them, one upon another. As a result of photographing them on their sides, they became sculptural; to me they began to resemble sea stacks. Since then, I have produced variations on this form, from small-scale stacks, presented on plinths or on the ground, to wall-mounted stacks. This has been a pivotal development in my practice.
Throughout my work, I have moving shapes. To me, this movement represents the immediate and rapid impact we humans are having on our environment, which sits in opposition to the slow movement of tectonic plates. Our planet is constantly moving; we sit on continents, which are in turn situated on constantly moving plates. Small shifts, over millions of years, move mountains and separate the land from itself. The stacked layers of multiple panels mimic geological layers of soil and rock, visible when slicing through a landscape. Within each layer, there are numerous colours. As in nature, the formation and layout of each colour is accidental and not controlled; it is in fact a biproduct of painting on the panels. These works are flat and gestural with recurrent shapes, forms, and layers of
colours that emerge as abstract compositions.
Throughout my life I have experienced much flux and flow, which has had a huge impact on my work. I make paintings, screen prints, and large-scale wall murals, as well as my recent departure into sculptural installations, all influenced by the many vast landscapes I have encountered on my travels. I am originally from Wexford and now live in Dún Laoghaire. I studied at TU in Dublin, Chelsea College of Art, London, and in Auckland. Following five years in New Zealand, I also lived in Belize, Central America, and for 11 years I lived in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, before returning to Dublin in 2014.
Since moving back to Ireland, I have kept busy. I have been selected for many group exhibitions, including the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, the RHA Annual Exhibition, RUA Annual Exhibition, and Cairde Visual at The Model in Sligo. I was commissioned to create murals in Capital Dock, Dublin, and in 2021, was invited to participate in the Belfast street art festival, Hit the North. I participated in ‘OVER NATURE’, a touring group exhibition, curated by Valeria Ceregini. My first solo exhibition, ‘KEEL’ was presented at SO Fine Art Editions in Powerscourt Townhouse Centre in August 2020. My most recent commission was for Ceadogán Rugs, for their ‘Island’ exhibition. I recently participated in group shows in emerging galleries: ‘Rally’ at Glovebox gallery, Dublin, curated by Ronan Dillon; and ‘Concrete and Canvas’ at Outset Gallery, Galway, curated by Tom McClean. I am a member of Black Church Print Studio and love being back in Ireland and part of this thriving and exciting visual arts scene.
Mary O’Connor is an artist who lives and works in Dublin.
@maryoconnorart maryoconnorart.com
NEROSUNERO REFLECTS ON THE EVOLUTION OF HIS ARTISTIC PRACTICE.
IN THE LATE nineties, having completed a PhD at Trinity College Dublin and published some important historical research, I opted for something closer to my pre-university occupation. Living in Rome in the studio of my father, the painter Alberto Sughi, I had previously drawn cartoons and written short stories for a satirical magazine. I then applied for the position of illustrator at an archaeology company, here in Dublin. The time with the archaeologists proved to be significant for my future career. I perfected my drawing techniques and learned to draw and paint with digital graphic tablets, at a time when nobody was using them. Most importantly, I learned this skill on my own, in my own unique way.
I have always considered myself a painter, but in 2007 I joined the Illustrators Guild of Ireland, where some of the members were really talented, working with the best international agencies and clients. However, even within this professional association, I felt a bit awkward, as my major concerns and interests were towards modern figuration and abstraction, at a time when conceptual art seemed to be a priority.
It took me three years to get my first solo exhibition at Green Room, a fledgling art gallery in Manchester, in 2010. Then the following year, I had my first shows in Dublin at the Exchange Gallery and The Complex, where I presented some large and very colourful paintings. Also in 2011, with three other Italian artists, I was invited to exhibit my paintings at the Italian Institute of Culture in Dublin as part of the 54th Venice Biennale.
Despite this exposure, my work seemed to run counter to the major trends of the time – not to mention the prejudice against digital paintings, still present these days. All of these shows were successful, therefore I never felt the need to embrace new tendencies in order to create opportunities for my work; rather, I just wanted to extend my vision to the limit, and to acknowledge uncertainty.
Over the past ten years, other solo exhibitions followed abroad and across Ireland, at Greyfriars Municipal Art Gallery
(Waterford), Luan Gallery (Athlone), Droichead Arts Centre (Drogheda), the Italian Institute of Culture and the United Arts Club (Dublin). My works have been regularly shown in the RHA Annual Exhibitions and I have worked with commercial galleries who have brought my works to Art Fairs in Europe. In 2022, I was represented at Art Basel Miami by Galleria Ca’ d’Oro, New York.
In recent years, my works have been chosen for book and magazine covers, such as the Italian editions of novels by Sally Rooney, Emilie Pine, Emma Straub and David Nicholls, and the weekly newspaper, Domani – a factor that has greatly helped the visibility of my work in Dublin and abroad. As mentioned, my years working with history were formative ones. The courses I attended had a strong multidisciplinary approach – a tendency I brought with me into my art practice. I am a painter, but I have always wanted to practice other disciplines as well, especially street photography and writing.
In June, I wrote an atmospheric short story, set in contemporary Dublin, for an exhibition catalogue, published on the occasion of my solo show, ‘Give Me A Ring Tomorrow’ at the United Arts Club in Dublin (8 June – 2 July). In September, another of my stories will be published along with some of my artworks by Marinonibooks, one of the most interesting and innovative publishers in Milan at the moment.
Nerosunero (Mario Sughi) is an Italian painter and illustrator living in Dublin. nerosunero.org
The Arts Council’s Artist in the Community (AIC) Scheme, managed by Create, offers awards to enable artists and communities to work together on researching, developing, and delivering projects.
Closing Dates
Round One: 27 March, 2023
Round Two: 25 September, 2023
www.create-ireland.ie
Saturday September 9th -
Saturday October 14th www
Eamon O’Kane presents several of his art projects which explore the idea of the archive.
The Metaverse & Me is available as an exhibition funded by Arts Council NI.
Ten physical artworks, each with ten digital augmented reality animations and stunning soundtrack.
Contact info@deepamannkler.com for further information.
Anne Collier eye
25 March - 29 October 2023
Lismore Castle
Mariela Martin a space for Lismore
16 September - 8 October 2023
St Carthage Hall
ORIGINS
Graduate Award Exhibition
Seán Cahill, Kate Lauren Dukelow, Tyrell Mc Bride, Andrea Newman, Samar Nezamabad, Sarah Partington, Megan Wynne, Emma Yuan
16 September - 8 October 2023
The Mill
