Nancy Holt, Concrete Poem (1968) Ink jet print on rag paper taken from original 126 format transparency 23 x 23 in. (58.4 x 58.4 cm.). 1 of 5 plus AP © Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
LISMORE CASTLE ARTS, LISMORE CASTLE, LISMORE, CO WATERFORD, IRELAND +353 (0)58 54061WWW.LISMORECASTLEARTS.IE
28 MARCH 10 OCTOBER 2021
Nancy Holt with A.K. Burns, Matthew Day Jackson, Dennis McNulty, Charlotte Moth and Katie Paterson. Curated by Lisa Le Feuvre
LIGHT AND LANGUAGE
Lismore Castle Arts
LISMORE CASTLE ARTS: ST CARTHAGE HALL CHAPEL ST, LISMORE, CO WATERFORD, IRELAND WWW.LISMORECASTLEARTS.IE
10 JULY 22 AUGUST 2021
Curated by Berlin Opticians
ALICIA REYES MCNAMARA
Image: Alicia Reyes McNamara, She who comes undone, 2019, Oil on canvas, 110 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Berlin Opticians Gallery.
The Visual Artists’ News Sheet
Issue 4: July – August 2021
VAN
Inside This Issue
ARRAY COLLECTIVE THE NATIONAL COLLECTION EXPERIMENTAL FILM SOCIETY BELFAST PHOTO FESTIVAL
A Visual Artists Ireland Publication
Contents On The Cover Array Collective, Pride, 2019; photograph by Laura O’Connor, courtesy Array and Tate Press Office. First Pages 6. 8.
Roundup. Exhibitions and events from the past two months. News. The latest developments in the arts sector. Columns
9.
One Hundred Summers. Cornelius Browne reflects on the enduring legacy of painter, Joan Eardley. Fragmented Body. Mel French discusses her recent training in silicone casting with model-maker, Paul McDonnell. Regional Focus: Donegal
10. 11. 12. 13.
The Winds are Wilder. Paul Hallahan, Visual Artist. Glebe House and Gallery. Jean Kearney, Head Guide, Glebe House and Gallery. On the Edge. Martha McCulloch, Coordinator, Artlink. Shape of The Place. Laura McCafferty, Visual Artist. Cé as tú? Myrid Carten, Visual Artist. Community in Donegal. Jeremy Fitz Howard, Acting Manager, Regional Cultural Centre.
Profile 14. 16.
Portraits of Resistance. Colin Darke reviews ‘Sorry, Neither’ and Zanele Muholi at the Naughton Gallery, Belfast. The Art of Now. Susan Campbell reports on recent acquisitions to the National Collection at IMMA and Crawford Art Gallery.
Critique 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.
Cover Image: A.K. Burns, The Dispossessed, 2018, installation view, Lismore Castle Arts, 2021. Sheila Rennick, ‘Screaming on Mute’, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. Fiona Hackett, ‘The Long Disease: LA Stories’, RHA Ashford Gallery. ‘Light and Language’ at Lismore Castle Arts. ‘HOME: Being and Belonging in Contemporary Ireland’ at The Glucksman. Richard Mosse, ‘Incoming and Grid (Moria)’, Butler Gallery. Charlie Porter, What Artists Wear (Penguin, 2021). Adrian Duncan, Midfield Dynamo (Lilliput Press, 2021).
Editorial WELCOME to the July – August 2021 Issue of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet. To mark the much-anticipated reopening of galleries, museums and art centres, we have compiled a Summer Gallery Guide to inform audiences about forthcoming exhibitions happening in July and August across Ireland and Northern Ireland. This guide is published on the VAN website (visualartistsireland.com). We are thrilled to resume coverage of exhibitions in VAN’s summer issue. Colin Darke reviews ‘Sorry, Neither’ at the Naughton Gallery, as well as ‘Somnyama Ngonyama’ – the first solo exhibition of renowned South African photographer, Zanele Muholi, on the island of Ireland, which was presented in partnership with Belfast Photo Festival 2021. Matt Packer interviews Iranian-Irish filmmaker, Rouzbeh Rashidi, founder of the Experimental Film Society, marking its twentieth anniversary this year with a new publication and exhibition, ‘Luminous Void’, at Project Arts Centre. In addition, reviewed in the Critique section are: Sheila Rennick at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery; Fiona Hackett at RHA Ashford Gallery; ‘Light and Language’ at Lismore Castle Arts; ‘HOME: Being and Belonging in Contemporary Ireland’ at The Glucksman; and Richard Mosse at Butler Gallery. This issue features an interview with members of Belfast-based art collective, Array, following their nomination for the Turner Prize 2021, along with four other UK collectives. Another significant development
The Visual Artists' News Sheet:
Editor: Joanne Laws Production/Design: Thomas Pool News/Opportunities: Shelly McDonnell, Thomas Pool Proofreading: Paul Dunne The VAN Podcast (Post-production): Louis Haugh
Visual Artists Ireland:
CEO/Director: Noel Kelly Office Manager: Bernadette Beecher NI Manager & Services Impact: Rob Hilken Advocacy & Advice: Shelly McDonnell Membership & Special Projects: Siobhán Mooney Services Design & Delivery: Michael D’Arcy Logistics & Administration: Kaylah Benton Ní Bhroin News Provision: Thomas Pool Publications: Joanne Laws Accounts: Dina Mulchrone
Project Profile 27. 28. 30. 32.
Mergemerge. Brian Fay interviews Michael Geddis and Joanna Kidney about their long-running collaborative drawing project. I Know, But Only Just. Claire-Louise Bennett and Ruby Wallis continue their collaborative project. The North is Now. Joanne Laws interviews members of the Belfastbased Array collective. Luminous Void. Matt Packer interviews Rouzbeh Rashidi, founder of the Experimental Film Society.
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.
Career Development 34. 35.
Light and Shadow. Joanne Laws interviews artist Ciara Roche about the evolution of her painting practice. Working Interdependently. Rachel Botha outlines recent developments in her curatorial practice.
Residency Report 36. 37.
Living Island. Rosie McGurran outlines the evolution of the ‘Inishlacken Project’, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. High Impact. Bryan Gerard Duffy reports on his experience of the inaugural Bolay residency in the Linenhall Arts Centre.
within the Irish visual arts community is outlined in Susan Campbell’s report on the million-euro acquisition fund, through which 422 artworks by 70 artists have been added to the National Collection at IMMA and Crawford Art Gallery. Among other profiles for this issue, Claire-Louise Bennett and Ruby Wallis continue their collaborative project, Brian Fay interviews Michael Geddis and Joanna Kidney about their long-running collaborative drawing project, Rachel Botha outlines recent developments in her curatorial practice, while Joanne Laws interviews Ciara Roche about the evolution of her painting practice. Residency coverage for this issue includes Rosie McGurran’s text on the Inishlacken Project, celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, and Bryan Gerard Duffy’s report on his experience of the inaugural Bolay residency in the Linenhall Arts Centre. In columns for this issue, Cornelius Browne reflects on the enduring legacy of painter, Joan Eardley, whom he refers to as the “patron saint of plein air painting”, and Mel French discusses her recent training in silicone casting with model-maker, Paul McDonnell. This issue includes a Regional Focus on County Donegal, with insights from the Regional Cultural Centre, Artlink and Glebe House and Gallery. In addition, artists Laura McCafferty, Myrid Carten and Paul Hallahan offer insights into the realities of maintaining a visual art practice in the county.
Republic of Ireland Office
Northern Ireland Office
Visual Artists Ireland Windmill View House 4 Oliver Bond Street Merchants Quay, Dublin 8 T: +353 (0)1 672 9488 E: info@visualartists.ie W: visualartists.ie
Visual Artists Ireland 109 Royal Avenue Belfast BT1 1FF T: +44 (0)28 958 70361 E: info@visualartists-ni.org W: visualartists-ni.org
Principle Funders
Project Funders
Corporate Sponsors
Project Partners
Last Pages 38. 39.
Opportunities. Grants, awards, open calls and commissions. VAI Lifelong Learning. Upcoming VAI helpdesks, cafés and webinars.
International Memberships
Cooperative Commission Opportunity A call for project proposals A brand-new commission opportunity for collaborative and socially engaged artists and/or arts collective, working at the intersection of art, theory/research and social action/justice. A 15 month project (Sept 2021 – Dec 2022), with a budget of €60,000, open to local, national and international artists or arts collectives with a focus on collaborative and socially engaged arts practice. This Cooperative Commission sets out to encourage meaningful and in-depth engagement with the communities of Tuam as well as the distinct cultural, geographical, architectural and socio-political landscape of this unique place. Interested artists/ collectives should submit their application pack via the Creative Places Tuam website.
Hypnagogia
The LAB Gallery, Foley Street, Dublin 1 01 222 5455
NEW WORK BY ANN MARIA HEALY 27TH JUNE TO 8TH OCTOBER 2021 THE LAB GALLERY
artsoffice@dublincity.ie thelab.ie @LabDCC facebook.com/TheLABGalleryDublin
Supported by Dublin City Council, The Arts Council and The Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics
ADMISSION FREE
creativeplacestuam.ie
The Butler Gallery in partnership with Kilkenny Arts Festival present the Irish premiere of
INCOMING 11 June – 29 August 2021
Book free tickets at www.butlergallery.ie Visit website for Public Engagement Events
Butler Gallery Evans’ Home | John’s Quay | Kilkenny | R95 YX3F
Fingal, A Place for Art
Fingal County Council and Royal Hibernian Academy RHA School Studio Award Fingal County Council Arts Office in partnership with the RHA School are offering an opportunity of a funded studio space for a professional artist for a period of one year, commencing in September 2021. The award is open to practising artists at all stages in their professional careers working in visual art. The award offers an artist the opportunity to develop their practice within the institutional framework of the RHA School and covers the cost of studio rental and administration. To be eligible to apply, applicants must have been born, studied or currently reside in the Fingal.
Closing date for receipt of applications: Sunday 25th July 2021 at 5.00pm
Visit www.rhagallery.ie to complete an application form. For further information please contact RHA School by email at info@rhagallery.ie or by phone on (01) 661 2558.
www.fingalarts.ie www.fingal.ie/arts ArtistsSS2021_VAI_Landscape_255.04x164.012mm_OD140621.indd 2
16/06/2021 11:36
May—Sept 2021
IMMA OUTDOORS Pavilions / Exhibitions / Artist Commissions / Workshops / Yoga / Performances / Music / Poetry / Studio Street / Cafes / Pop-up Shop
Enjoy IMMA Safely. Admission Free. All Welcome. Book your tickets online for events and exhibitions at imma.ie
info@imma.ie +353 1 612 9900 imma.ie
Laura Fitzgerald I have made a place 18 June – 19 September 2021
Laura Fitzgerald, Smallholder (Detail), 2021. © The Artist.
See our website and social media channels for the latest updates: crawfordartgallery.ie
6
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2021
Exhibition Roundup
Dublin
Belfast
A4 Sounds Gallery ‘Queer Utopia’ by Mariette Feeney was on display online and in-person at A4 Sounds Gallery from 13 to 30 May. As stated by the gallery: “‘Queer Utopia’ is a collaborative sculptural and digital vision of a queer future: a pink, joyful, playful space created in response to a series of discussions between the artist and other queer people… Our queer utopia is a place of freedom, of righteous anger, a place full to the very brim with loving and radical care for our comrades.”
Dlr LexIcon The group show ‘Tangled’ is on display at the Municipal Gallery, dlr LexIcon, until 18 July. The exhibition was created by Michael Fortune in collaboration with Southside Travellers Action Group. From the gallery: “The exhibition includes both new and recent work from the artists’ studios. The range of work varies from folkloric themed drawings by Alice Maher to intimated ethnographic styled images of Traveller hair and hairstyles as seen in the photographs by Breda Mayock.”
ArtisAnn Gallery Margaret Arthur RUA’s new collection of work ‘Tides of Life’ was on display in the gallery and online from 2 to 26 June. From the gallery: “This exhibition is inspired by the ever-changing light and colour of the coastlines and tides of Counties Donegal and Down… [Margaret Arthur] exhibits widely in Ireland, the UK, and throughout Europe, and in the USA, where she lived and worked for a year, holding a solo exhibition at The Russell Rotunda, a Senate building in Washington DC.”
a4sounds.org
libraries.dlrcoco.ie
artisann.org
Pallas Projects/Studios John Conway’s ‘Object Im/permanence’ was on display at Pallas Projects/Studios from 21 May to 5 June. From the gallery: “John’s verbal description of the exhibition space evokes a Church-like quality; I imagine a quiet, reverent space that has been designed to make you take a moment, to think. In my mind, the gallery is large and filled with darkness that your eyes adjust to as you walk in. The luminous icons which intermittently fill with light are dazzling, appearing as if by magic and sizzling words into your eyes.”
Temple Bar Gallery & Studios Viewable online and in-person until 10 July, ‘Agitation Co-op’ features artists Michele Horrigan, Catriona Leahy, Laurie Robins, Libita Sibungu. From the gallery: “’Agitation Co-op’ is an exhibition that investigates the subject of landscape from a range of vantage points; not only social and political ideologies but also, mapping and topography… It is accompanied by an online screening programme highlighting films by Forensic Architecture, Melanie Smith, and Eva Richardson McCrea, Frank Sweeney and the Dublin Dockworkers Preservation Society.”
Golden Thread Gallery Paul Moore’s solo exhibition, ‘Fionnghlas’, was on display from 25 to 30 May in the Project Space at Golden Thread Gallery. From the gallery: “Within the exhibition, Moore looks to these experiences almost meditatively, creating a cathartic release during difficult times. This continuing struggle with the present and the search for both extreme reality and out of body experience marks a change in Moore’s practice towards a more contemplative question about how we as a society are equipped to deal with adversity.”
pallasprojects.org
templebargallery.com
goldenthreadgallery.co.uk
The Complex Tanad Aaron and Mark Swords collaborative project ‘Portico’ was shown at The Complex from 7 to 28 May. An online programme of scheduled events coincided with the exhibition, to communicate the exhibition to digital audiences. This featured a textual exchange of ideas between the artists – which was digitalised to create an interactive experience and punctuated with links to research material and imagery – a video walk-through and audio description of the exhibition, musical performances/practices, and audio essays.
The Library Project The Library Project and Basic Space Dublin exhibited the group show ‘On Belonging’ at The Library Project from 3 to 27 June. This collaborative group exhibition was guest curated by Diana Bamimeke and featured work by Bassam Al-Sabah, Moran Been-noon, Maïa Nunes, Osaro, Oscar Fouz Lopez, and Salvatore of Lucan. From the gallery: “Each of the exhibiting artists have been invited to respond not only to the state of belonging – how it is conceived and made physical – but conversely, to not-belonging, and the outcomes of both in the modern world.”
Naughton Gallery The group show ‘Sorry, Neither’ continues until 11 July. From the gallery: “Taking its title from Star Trek’s Lieutenant Nyota Uhura’s response to being referred to as a ‘fair maiden’, ‘Sorry, Neither’ is an exploration of Afrofuturism and Black futurity within contemporary art and pop culture… The term ‘Afrofuturism’ refers to a cultural movement that uses the frame of science fiction and fantasy to reimagine the history of the African diaspora and to invoke a vision of a technically-advanced and generally hopeful future in which Black people thrive.”
PS² Gary Shaw’s ‘GYRE 2’ was on display at PS2 from 27 May to 12 June. Shaw exhibited three work groups of his drawing output: Drawings of circles, Sketches of passers-by and kinetic animations. From the gallery: “Gyre is a term mostly used in oceanography and means a circular or spiral path, a motion or large current… At first glance the drawings look calming and meditative like a mandorla, but then reveal a nervous energy, where the lines turn to sparks in a fire wheel.”
naughtongallery.org
pssquared.org
thecomplex.ie
basicspace.ie
John Conway, ‘Object Im/permanence’, 2021, installation view; image courtesy the artist and Pallas Projects/Studios.
Belfast Photo Festival Belfast Photo Festival took place from 3 to 30 June this year with the theme of ‘Future(s)’. From the festival: “Taking ‘Future(s)’ as its theme, this year’s festival tackles issues as diverse as climate change, migration, the advancement of technology, government surveillance and the power of protest, to explore how the future is shaped by our actions in the present. Rather than presenting a singular vision of what this future might be or look like, the festival instead offers up a speculative, imaginative glimpse into… what might lie ahead.” belfastphotofestival.com
MAC Belfast Three exhibitions are showing at The MAC until 8 August. Dutch filmmaker Jaap Pieters’s Super 8mm film medley, ‘The Eye of Amsterdam’, is on display in The MAC’s Sunken Gallery, shown on three showreels, rotating throughout the duration. Presented in the Tall Gallery is the first institutional exhibition of artist Maya Balcioglu, whose works are “neither figurative nor abstract but in an intermediary condition.” The Upper Gallery hosts the first UK exhibition of New York-based painter, Ambera Wellmann, whose works “embody processes of erasure and revision, engaging with the potential of chance, vulnerability, and failure.” themaclive.com
Paul Moore, Fionnghlas, image courtesy the artist and Golden Thread Gallery.
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Exhibition Roundup
7
Elizabeth Price, Footnotes: Stiletto, 2020; image courtesy the artist and Void Gallery.
Regional & International
126 Artist-Run Gallery The group show ‘Fuzzy Logic’, was on display at 126 from 19 May to 13 June, featuring artworks by Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Ben Reilly, David Dunne and Lorraine Cleary. According to the press release, the exhibition was a “kaleidoscope of approaches to the entropy of uncertainty and fuzzy logic… Uncertainty is a term used in subtly different ways in several fields, including philosophy, statistics, economics, finance, insurance, psychology, sociology, engineering, and information science. It applies to predictions of future events, physical measurements already made, or to the unknown.”
Backwater Artists Group The Cork-based Backwater Artist Group premiered their show ‘The Human Animal’ on 22 February and it will run until 12 November. From the artist group: “In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic a core strand of Backwater’s 2021 artistic programme examines humanity’s relationship with the natural world and takes a closer look at ‘the human animal’ in this context. The Human Animal: A Personal View of the Human Species is a 1994 television documentary series written and presented by zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter Desmond Morris.”
Cork Midsummer Festival 2021 This year the Cork Midsummer Festival (14 – 27 June) featured a diverse range of visual art projects, which were exhibited at venues across the city, including: Marie Brett, ‘The Day-Crossing Farm’; Laura Fitzgerald, ‘I have made a place’; Bassam Al-Sabah, ‘Longing, Beyond’; Eimear Walshe, ‘The Land for the People’, developed with NSF Neon public art commission; Fatti Burke, ‘Open Road’, developed with The Glucksman; ‘FALL/OUT’, a series of installations curated by Pluck Projects; and Doug Fishbone, ‘Please Gamble Responsibly’, which continues at Crawford Art Gallery until 28 August.
GOMA Gallery of Modern Art, Waterford Elaine Hoey’s solo exhibition, ‘Flesh and Tongue’, was presented from 8 June to 1 July at GOMA Gallery of Modern Art, Waterford. As stated in the press release, the exhibition, which presented new work by the artist, “questions the negative representation of the ‘monstrous’ female body through the exploration of the myth of Medusa. Historically Medusa has been depicted as either a monster or a beautiful woman who was raped, blamed, then transformed into a raging monster and subsequently beheaded.”
126gallery.com
backwaterartists.ie
corkmidsummer.com
@gomagallerywaterford
Künstlerhaus Bremen Irish artist Aleana Egan’s exhibition ‘small field’ was on display at Künstlerhaus Bremen from 8 May to 29 August. From the gallery: “‘small field’… creates a setting of abstract sculptures that are assembled in multi-layered constellations. Materials such as metal, wood, pigment and fabric refer to their own properties, while also remaining indeterminate: In this ambiguity, the objects evoke immaterial moments – ideas, thoughts, feelings, moods, energies, and relationships both towards each other as well as interpersonal. Manifested in form, the internal is turned outwards.”
NEON, Athens The ‘Portals’ group show in Athens, on display from 11 June to 31 December, features work by Irish artist Daphne Wright. The exhibition is a collaboration between Hellenic Parliament and NEON and is shown at Hellenic Parliament (a former Public Tobacco Factory) Library and Printing House. From the gallery: “‘Portals’ aspires to convey the messages, ideas and visions of contemporary artistic creation, investigating the new reality revealed through the prism of change and disruption.” The exhibition is curated by Elina Kountouri (NEON) and Madeleine Grynsztejn (Pritzker, MCA Chicago).
Pavilion of Ireland The 2021 Irish Pavilion exhibition, ‘Entanglement’ by Alan Butler, opened at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale on 22 May and runs until 21 November. From the artist: “‘Entanglement’ physicalises the materiality of data and the interwoven human, environmental and cultural impacts of communication technologies. The exhibition highlights how data production and consumption territorialise the physical landscape and examines Ireland’s place in the pan-national evolution of data infrastructure… ‘Entanglement’ responds to the [2021] theme... How will we live together?”
Limerick City Gallery of Art The latest iteration of Mary-Ruth Walsh’s touring exhibition, ‘Skin Deep’, was on display at Limerick City Gallery of Art from 14 May to 27 June. The tour began at Highlanes Gallery in 2020 and will end at Wexford Arts Centre in October 2021. From the gallery: “Through the medium of film, collage and sculpture, Walsh explores skin’s parallels to architecture. Using Arnold Bocklin’s ‘The Isle of the Dead’ (1883) as a reference, ‘Skin Deep’ brings us to an imaginary island, a medical-tourism destination for the pursuit of the perfect skin.”
labiennale.org
gallery.limerick.ie
Roscommon Arts Centre Barbara Knežević’s ‘Scapes: Rose Quartz’ was on display at Roscommon Arts Centre from 11 May to 18 June. From the gallery: “’Scapes: Rose Quartz’ is a sculptural work that is comprised of an array of crystals, plants, ceramic coiled vessels, a single-channel video work and silicone surfaces that are carefully arranged on clear acrylic display plinths. The arrangements of objects in this exhibition speak to the deep human faith in the power of the material things around us.”
South Tipperary Arts Centre The artist collective, Na Cailleacha (The Witches), is comprised of eight older women who are currently based in Ireland but come from several other countries as well as Ireland. Their group show was on display at South Tipperary Arts Centre from 7 May to 12 June. From the gallery: “The collective set out to explore their experience of being creative women in a collective way. In that way, they are doing what women have always done – working, sharing and supporting, arguing and debating with each other, owning their space, and their visibility.”
The Dock, Carrick on Shannon Featuring artists Brian Fay, David Smith, Ellen Duffy, Eve O’Callaghan, Fiona Finlay and Jamie Cross, the group show ‘Second Summer’ is on display at The Dock until 28 August. From the gallery: “It’s an exhibition that gently asks questions of us, as it marks both the end and the start of a time – when we as a community are resurfacing from a period of remoteness. The exhibition is full of pattern, colour, and whimsical moments that point to the domesticity of our recent lives.”
Void Gallery ‘CHOREOGRAPH’, the first solo exhibition of Elizabeth Price in Northern Ireland, is on display from 22 June to 21 August at the Void Gallery. Price’s distinctive film works inhabit the digital world using computer animated voices, graphics and a saturated videography that give the works a dystopic sensibility, exploring the human experience from industrialisation to the digital age. The films are anthropological, often exploring mundane objects and imbuing them with a relevance, and situating them within an historical moment.
roscommonartscentre.ie
southtippartscentre.ie
thedock.ie
derryvoid.com
kuenstlerhausbremen.de
neon.org.gr
8
News
Array Nominated for Turner Prize 2021 Array Collective is a group of Belfast-based artists who create collaborative actions in response to issues affecting Northern Ireland. Their work encompasses performances, protests, exhibitions and events. The Turner Prize 2021 jury commended the way Array Collective fuse seriousness with humour, and address contemporary issues using ancient folk imagery. Recent projects include public artworks in support of the decriminalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland, challenging legislative discrimination of the queer community, and participation in the group exhibition ‘Jerwood Collaborate!’ in London. Other shortlisted arts groups include London-based collective, Black Obsidian Sound System; London-based duo, Cooking Sections; Cardiff-based project, Gentle/ Radical; and Project Art Works, a collective of neurodiverse artists and makers based
THE LATEST FROM THE ARTS SECTOR
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
in Hastings. One of the world’s best-known prizes for the visual arts, the Turner Prize aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art. Established in 1984, the prize is named after the radical British painter JMW Turner (1775-1851). The Turner Prize winner is awarded £25,000 with £10,000 going to each of the others shortlisted. The members of the Turner Prize 2021 jury are Aaron Cezar, Director, Delfina Foundation; Kim McAleese, Programme Director, Grand Union; Russell Tovey, Actor; and Zoé Whitley, Director, Chisenhale Gallery. The jury is chaired by Alex Farquharson, Director, Tate Britain. Turner Prize 2021 is supported by the AKO Foundation, with additional support from The John Browne Charitable Trust and Lance Uggla. Array Collective and Friends, The North is Now (one week after decriminalisation), 2020; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy Array and Tate Press Office
Basic Income Guarantee Pilot Scheme VAI welcomes the announcement that a Basic Income Guarantee pilot scheme for artists will be part of the government’s recovery plan. Speaking following the Cabinet meeting on 1 June, Catherine Martin TD said that she was delighted to confirm that in the National Economic Recovery Plan announced that day, she has secured a commitment for Government to prioritise a Basic Income guarantee pilot scheme for artists. Minister Martin said: “This was the number one recommendation from artists and the sector through the Arts and Culture Recovery Taskforce Report – Life Worth Living. It is an unprecedented move and the pilot scheme will involve a significant number of artists.” She added: “We recognise that bold steps are necessary for our invaluable and much treasured arts community to come back stronger than ever before. I will therefore develop a proposal for the Basic Income guarantee pilot scheme by July, working with my Cabinet colleague Minister Heather Humphreys in the Department of Social Protection”. The Economic Recovery Plan (ERP) sets out a framework for recovery as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. The ERP pays particular attention to sectors most impacted, such as tourism and hospitality, live events and the arts, and will help kick start the recovery. Minister Martin added: “This plan presented today goes a long way to meeting the commitments we made in the Programme for Government and in charting a path to recovery from the challenge of COVID-19. Crucially, the Plan specifically recognises the unique challenges that have been faced by sectors such as Tourism, the Events sector, Gaeltacht, Sports, Arts and Culture and Media, and sets out a package of supports that are being put into place to safeguard and stimulate these sectors.” VAI look forward to seeing detailed plans for the roll out of the pilot scheme and to continuing our advocacy work in this area. Turner Prize Shortlist Announced In early May, Tate Britain announced the shortlist for Turner Prize 2021: Array Collective, Black Obsidian Sound System, Cooking Sections, Gentle/Radical, and Project Art Works. An exhibition of their work will be held at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry from 29 September 2021 to 12 January 2022
as part of the UK City of Culture 2021 celebrations. The winner will be announced on 1 December 2021 at an award ceremony at Coventry Cathedral broadcast on the BBC. This is the first time a Turner Prize jury has selected a shortlist consisting entirely of artist collectives. All the nominees work closely and continuously with communities across the breadth of the UK to inspire social change through art. The collaborative practices selected for this year’s shortlist also reflect the solidarity and community demonstrated in response to the pandemic. Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain and Chair of the Turner Prize jury, said: “One of the great joys of the Turner Prize is the way it captures and reflects the mood of the moment in contemporary British art. After a year of lockdowns when very few artists have been able to exhibit publicly, the jury has selected five outstanding collectives whose work has not only continued through the pandemic but become even more relevant as a result.” Francis Nielsen, Cultural & Creative Director of Culture Coventry, said: “We are incredibly excited to work with the five collectives to present their work at the Herbert as part of UK City of Culture 2021. We pride ourselves on our socially engaged programme, rooted in and relevant to our local communities – something echoed by the practice of each collective. This selection of artists and the timing of this Turner Prize presents us with the opportunity to do something truly exceptional.” Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021 The Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin T.D. launched Ireland’s Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale on Thursday 20 May 2021. This year Ireland is represented by Annex, a multi-disciplinary research and design collective, comprised of a core team of architects, artists, and urbanists who are presenting an exhibition, titled ‘Entanglement’, which addresses how our everyday lives have become increasingly entangled with data technologies. Launching the opening of the exhibition online, Minister Martin said: “I congratulate Annex on this innovative and cutting edge exhibition which I know has been delivered in particularly challenging circumstances. The Venice Biennale remains the world’s most important international platform
for presenting and discussing architecture. Since 2000, the Irish pavilion has showcased the range and vigour of Ireland’s diverse architectural culture and this year Ireland’s creative talents have delivered a special project with global resonance which I know will have wide reaching impacts.” Ireland at Venice is an initiative of Culture Ireland in partnership with the Arts Council and the commitment to support and fund Ireland’s presence at the Venice Architecture Biennale enables Irish architects to achieve international exposure in line with the Government’s commitment to promote Ireland’s creative strengths globally. Annex’s exhibition, situated in the Arsenale in Venice, responds to the overall theme How will we live together? set by Hashim Sarkis, the curator of Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. ‘Entanglement’ addresses the human, environmental and cultural impacts of communication technologies by highlighting the materiality of our digital age. The pavilion presents Ireland’s central place in the pan-national evolution of data infrastructure while reflecting the fact that historically Ireland has played a significant role in the story of data infrastructure. This dates back to 1858, when the world’s first transatlantic telecommunication cable landed at Valentia Island, off the south-west coast of Ireland. Extending from Newfoundland in Canada, the cable rendered the remote 11km-long island as the most connected node in a global telecommunications network. ‘Entanglement’ will be open as part of The Venice Architecture Biennale until 21 November 2021 and viewers can also engage with the exhibition through a dedicated website (entanglement.annex.ie) and Culture Ireland’s YouTube channel. On its return from Venice, ‘Entanglement’ will tour in Ireland in 2022, thus ensuring that Irish audiences can see the exhibition first-hand. Creating Time Awards 2020/21 Winner of The Voice UK, Andrea Begley, is one of 11 d/Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent artists to be awarded £1,000 by a new grant programme run by the University of Atypical. The Creating Time Awards is the first in a series of grant programmes funded by Unlimited and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to support Northern Ireland’s d/Deaf and disabled artists to develop their work and enable them to reach new audiences.
Awards were made to artists in the following disciplines: Dance, Literature and Language Arts, Drama and Theatre, Music and Opera, Visual Arts, Film, TV and Combined Arts. The next programme, the Chris Ledger Legacy awards, opened in May and is named after the former CEO of University of Atypical, who sadly passed away in the summer of 2020. New Neon Commission at NSF The National Sculpture Factory (NSF) in association with Cork Midsummer Festival have commissioned a new public artwork by artist Eimear Walshe, entitled The Land for the People. For the second year running, the National Sculpture Factory has commissioned a new public artwork for the Cork Midsummer Festival in the form of a neon artwork which will hang on the front facade of the NSF building. This year they have commissioned Walshe to create a new work which was publicly launched on the evening of the summer solstice, Monday 21 June, at 11pm. The illumination of this artwork was live streamed from the venue on Instagram TV and we can continue to watch it light up the darkness of our evenings right through to the winter solstice on Tuesday 21 December. The Land for the People draws on Walshe’s research in nineteenth and early twentieth century land contestation in Ireland, and its significance in the contemporary era. The project comprises of a temporary neon sculpture and an interactive publication based on nineteenth century political pamphlets. The project is the latest in a series of works by Walshe which aim to re-imagine land ownership and land use in Ireland. Eimear Walshe is an artist, writer, and educator from Longford. Their practice is based on research in fiscal and sexual economies and histories, working to reconcile the aesthetics, values and tastes of their queer and rural subjectivity in the production of sculpture, publishing, performances, and lectures. Walshe lives and works in county Longford. Recent projects and presentations include a Platform Commission for the 39th EVA International; ‘The Department of Sexual Revolution Studies’, Van Abbemuseum / Design Academy Eindhoven (2018); ‘Miraculous Thirst: How to get off in days of deprivation’, curated by Daniel Bermingham, Galway Arts Centre (2018); and ‘Separatist Tendencies for The Deviant Programme’, Van Abbemuseum (2017)
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2021
Columns
Plein Air
Skills
One Hundred Summers
Fragmented Body
CORNELIUS BROWNE REFLECTS ON THE ENDURING LEGACY OF BRITISH PAINTER, JOAN EARDLEY.
MEL FRENCH DISCUSSES HER RECENT TRAINING IN SILICONE CASTING WITH MODEL-MAKER, PAUL MCDONNELL.
Joan Eardley, Untitled, c.1950s; Photograph courtesy of Glebe House and Gallery.
THIS SUMMER MARKS the centenary of Joan
Eardley’s birth. A summer thunderstorm in 1989 brought this painter into my life. Most days I was on the streets of Glasgow, entertaining passers-by with what is likely considered the lowliest form of outdoor art: scraping by as a pavement artist. Fleeing the downpour, coins jingling, I flung myself into a tiny gallery and found myself before a painting of Glasgow children, drawing with chalk on a pavement. The woman behind the desk was amused by the young man covered in colourful chalk dust so obviously captivated. She told me a little about Eardley, of whom I had never heard. The remainder of that summer, I scoured Glasgow and Edinburgh for more Eardleys. Ever since, she has travelled with me as a kind of patron saint of plein air. Eardley is often portrayed as a two-sided artist: half-urban and half-rural. Urban Eardley’s studio lay at the heart of an overcrowded and unsanitary Glasgow slum. Through the back streets of Rottenrow, she pushed her easel in a pram, drawing and painting the tenements and the children who called them home. Rural Eardley was an all-weather outdoor painter in the remote fishing village of Catterline in Aberdeenshire. Her cottage had an earth floor, no electricity or running water, with forty abandoned canvasses nailed to the underside of its roof to help keep out the rain. Glorious rain poured into Eardley’s painting life, however, along with wind and snow and whatever else the North Sea flung towards her easel, held down frequently by ropes and anchor. Paint became weather and weather became paint. The two Eardleys, I feel, also bled into one another. Rottenrow and Catterline had much in common; both small, poor, close-knit communities, existing under extreme pressure. Eardley’s letters from Catterline form a mosaic of her engagements with the elements: “In between blizzards it has been so much just
what I wanted for my painting – that I stupidly imagined I could rush out and in with my canvas. You know what a job it was setting up that canvas at the back of the house. Well, I’ve had it 3 or 4 times to do and undo in the teeth of the gale.” Mostly these letters were to her dear friend, Audrey Walker, whose first-hand reminiscences of Eardley “painting outside in appalling weather” are supported by her photographic record of the painter shoulder-deep in summer fields or facing tempestuous winter seas. “Wrapped up in her world” was how Walker described the woman in her viewfinder, deftly conveying the fullness of Eardley’s immersion in all she painted. I was born at Rottenrow hospital, five years after Eardley’s death, my parents having left Donegal in the 1950s. The Glasgow street over which the hospital loomed was one of Eardley’s favourite places to work, and from its windows she was a familiar sight. Eardley spent so much time standing on streets to draw that the constant and intense action of looking up at her subject and then down at the paper caused severe back problems, forcing her to wear a surgical collar. This vanished city, preserved by Eardley, greeted my unworldly parents as they arrived to join a Donegal community of migrant labourers, settled in the poorer tenement districts of Glasgow since the early twentieth century. Such bonds exist between the two places that as a child I thought the River Clyde flowed all the way from Glasgow to Donegal. Glasgow was permeated with a left-wing aesthetic, promoted by refugee Polish artist Josef Herman, in whose studio Eardley found inspiration and friendship. I myself was a socialist before I could tie my own shoelaces. In Donegal, we are fortunate to have two Eardleys on public display. Both are part of the Derek Hill Collection at the Glebe House and Gallery. Hill was an early admirer, making significant purchases and writing a tribute to Eardley for Apollo magazine in 1964. For several summers, the Glebe have invited me to tutor plein air workshops in their magnificent gardens. As I encourage painters to immerse themselves deeper in the experience of being alive at this moment in this place, I’m often aware of the presence of Eardley. She is nearby. According to Virginia Woolf, “great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.” In this spirit, I overlook the fact that Joan Eardley died at the young age of 42, her ashes scattered on the shore at Catterline. She has now been alive for one hundred summers. And I have little difficulty imagining a wayfarer ducking indoors from a shower, one hundred summers from today. She will find herself before a wild Eardley seascape, astonished that this long-dead artist is so bracingly alive.
Cornelius Browne is a Donegal-based artist.
AS FAR BACK as I can remember, I would see
something on television or a friend’s toy I coveted, and would ask myself: “How can I make that?” I would fashion my own versions of these things out of any materials I could readily lay my hands on. I remember as a ten-year-old, saving up for months to buy a latex prosthetic kit for £9.99 in Argos. Alone in the house, I spent hours meticulously following instructions and applying individual latex scars and wounds that I had cast, painted and glued to my face. I still remember distinctly the complete fear I felt when I looked into the large wall mirror and saw the impact of the prosthetics in their totality; the prosthetics were ripped off and the kit was put away never to be used again. The point being that my interest in understanding materials and processes and using that knowledge to realise ideas has been there since childhood. Through my artistic career performance, video, photography, installation, drawing and sculpture have been dominant. I have extensive experience in moulding, making and casting in various mediums including rubbers, plaster, concrete, wax and Jesmonite. I was awarded The Irish Concrete Award for Sculpture twice. I push the possibilities of materials, often gaining specialist knowledge in specific mediums and then subverting ‘traditional’ processes, in order to achieve what I need for my work. My practice explores the space between human function and dysfunction, frequently referencing the human form literally, fantastically and abjectly. My research often compares the physical and psychological states of animals and humans. I collect materials such as human detritus, hair, laundry lint and found objects. Recently, hair and fragmented body parts, such as tongues and teats, have featured more frequently within my work. At the end of last year, I felt the progress of new work was stalled by my lack of technical knowledge in hyperrealism, relating to skin and surface effects (in silicone and oil-based clay) and hair punching. I believed specialist training would allow ideas to be realised with the visceral aesthetic I had imagined in sketches and maquettes. I contacted the model-maker Paul McDonnell to discuss the possibility of undertaking bespoke engagement that would teach me the skills I was hoping to learn. Paul has over 16 years experience as a lecturer at IADT in prosthetics and as a model-maker. Paul and I are familiar with each other’s practices and the range of skillsets we each possess, which allowed for immediate in-depth discussion and learning. Our introductory sessions, funded by Creative Ireland Westmeath, informed our strategy of engagement, which would comprise online workshops covering materials and sourcing, manipulation and surface effects with oil-based clay, silicone casting, colouring and hair punching. I later received an Arts Council Professional Development Award to fund these workshops. Through consultation, we agreed on a list of specialist materials and tools, which Paul ordered, divided and shipped to me. We were working remotely so it was important that we had exactly
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the same supplies, to ensure they would behave and work in exactly the same way. Sometimes Paul demonstrated and sometimes we worked simultaneously. I took extensive notes and asked many questions; Paul generously shared his knowledge, skills and decades of experience with good humour and the type of enthusiasm evident in someone who loves what they do. I undertook some of the processes live, whilst both Paul and I worked ‘alongside’ each other. I undertook other processes, such as casting, independently after the workshop, returning the following day with my sample casts to practice hair punching. Prior to working with Paul, I had commenced sculpting an oversized tongue in oil-based clay. Paul demonstrated surface manipulation and tool-use and then I applied the techniques to the sculpted tongue. All the workshops were recorded and emailed to me as ongoing reference material. The experience surpassed my expectations and my mind reeled with how this new knowledge would empower my practice; I was waking at night and making notes in my sketchbook. Since the last workshop, I have continued to experiment and develop further possible applications for these new skills. Paul has kindly offered to have one final online meeting to reflect on these experiments and to address any questions that have arisen through them – and so the learning continues. Mel French is a multi-disciplinary visual artist who holds a BA in Fine Art Sculpture from NCAD and an MA in Fine Art from The New York Academy of Art. Upcoming exhibitions include two-person shows with visual artist, Celine Sheridan, in Zoological Museum, Trinity College Dublin in 2022 and Limerick City Gallery of Art (date TBC). @melfrench
Mel French, oversized tongue sculpture in oil-based clay; Photograph courtesy the artist.
Regional Focus
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Glebe House and Gallery
Donegal
Jean Kearney Head Guide
The Winds are Wilder Paul Hallahan Visual Artist THE WINDS ARE ferocious, the rains are heavi-
er, and the cold can get inside your bones, but when the sun appears in the north west, it all becomes clearer to me why I made the move to south Donegal in mid-2020. For a number of years, I dreamed of moving out of Dublin to a more relaxed, rural community. The north west was always on my radar as somewhere I would love to live and work. Moving back to Dublin in 2015 after a brief period in land-locked Berlin (I need the ocean), the city gave me a lot and helped me refocus on my practice while taking in the energy of the city. I had slightly side-lined my practice and spent the years after college curating and running a gallery in Waterford. While at times I enjoyed thinking about art through exhibition-making, I also knew I stumbled into curation without a formal decision. Between 2014 and 2015, I decided to be an artist. Over a five-year period, I worked all sorts of day jobs to support my practice and, like many artists, after working a full day, I would go to the studio in the evenings and weekends. After a period of working intensely in my studio, and in Independent Studios Dublin, I was able to start showing my works to the world. That studio space, above any other spaces, helped me refocus and direct all of my energy into my work. I owe that studio a lot. It was a surprise to me that my practice moved towards painting from primarily video, but within the medium I felt I could control time better and explore ideas in-depth. It also allowed me to portray ideas better than I could in moving image, text or installation. Living and working in Dublin for a time was energetic, but many different aspects of living and working there were making life harder for me. There is a great artistic community, but I did feel the city as a lifestyle choice offered me less and less. Getting engulfed by bus diesel fumes while cycling to the studio every morning was
Paul Hallahan, studio view; photograph courtesy the artist.
getting tiresome. Then an opportunity came up in mid-2020. My housemates were also looking to move; we all knew the north west area and especially Bundoran and south Donegal. So we began looking for somewhere to rent and we luckily found a house and made the move in late summer. It’s still all new to me here, and the difference of knowing somewhere you have visited compared to living there is vast. It has been above and beyond the best decision for me and it’s funny to think I had reservations last year. The winter was hard with very short days, intense storms and bitter cold, but there is no better way to get to know a place than to live through its winter. As I arrived, I was working on a solo exhibition, ‘Running, returning, running’, for Roscommon Arts Centre and a two-person exhibition, ‘Everybody knows’, for The Complex, so I initially finalised that work when I moved here. I did know a few people in the area before moving, and with the help of local artist Celina Muldoon, I was able to privately rent a new studio locally. This new studio has invigorated my practice. I feel the mental space of living by the sea and in the countryside has affected my work positively. I have started several new series of paintings and while I don’t directly expect the landscape of this beautiful place to be part of new works right now, I know it will eventually enter the work somehow. It has been an odd time to make such a move with all normal businesses closed since I arrived, but even so, it has been great for me. There is an energy of creative people in the north west I did not expect to be so strong, and I look forward to things opening back up again fully so I can meet and engage with more artists. So far, I have met a number of artists based up here in the north west and the place has won over my heart. Bring on the wild winds, the heavy rain, bitter cold and sunny days! paulhallahan.com
James Dixon, HMS ‘Wasp’ Gunboat Wrecked off Tory Island, Ireland, undated, c. 1960s, mixed media on paper; image courtesy Glebe House and Gallery.
SITUATED 14KM OFF the northwest coast of
Donegal and surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, Tory Island is the most remote of Ireland’s inhabited islands. It is a place that people have called home for over 4,500 years. The island is steeped in history with pre-historic and early Christian remains. It is an island of music, song and stories, where the incredible spirit of the people shines through. It was on Tory Island that James Dixon ( Jimmy Dhonnchaidh Eoin) was born on 2 June 1887. He had one sister, Grainne, and three brothers Johnnie, Dennis and Hughie. They were a seafaring family and their skills as fishermen and boat-builders were well-known throughout the community. Aside from the occasional visit to the mainland, Dixon remained on Tory Island his entire life. He was a wonderful character, whose gentle unassuming nature belied his intelligence and skill. He always had a pipe in hand and the top of his index finger was scorched from tapping the tobacco in his pipe. It was on a sunny Sunday morning in the summer of 1956, that Dixon first encountered Derek Hill – an artist who subsequently lived for nearly thirty years in Glebe House, later bequeathing it to the Irish state, along with his extensive private art collection. Hill was painting down by the foreshore on the island, looking out across the sea to the beautiful mountains on the mainland. He became aware of someone watching him paint. That someone was Dixon, who was seventy years old at the time. Little did they know that this chance meeting would change and enrich both of their lives and indeed inspire many people throughout the world. A conversation struck-up between the two men; Hill asked Dixon what he thought of his painting. Dixon looked at the painting and then looked at Hill and said that he thought that he could do a lot better if he tried! Hill was intrigued and later that evening he made his way to Dixon’s house, where he encouraged him to paint, giving him tubes of paint and some paper. However, Dixon declined the use of a paintbrush and instead insisted on making his own paintbrush from the hair cut from his donkey’s tail. Hill did
not teach Dixon to paint but encouraged him to develop his own style. Dixon set to work. He drew inspiration from his island home and the wild Atlantic storms that frequently battered Tory and the ships that were lost, interspersed with myth and legends passed down through the generations by the island’s storytellers. He painted events he had heard about, such as the sinking of the Titanic. He depicted them looking down upon the event from the sky – a bird’s eye view. He often wrote an inscription in a small rectangle in the corner of each of his paintings, providing details of the work with his name and the date. His paintings provide a unique record of his life on his beloved island. Hill was impressed with his work and said that he knew that he was in the presence of a genius. Hill likened Dixon’s work to that of the Cornish artist, Alfred Wallis. Hill introduced Dixon’s artworks to the world, helping Dixon to become an important figure in the history of twentieth-century Irish art. Dixon had his first solo exhibition in 1966 at the New Gallery in Belfast, containing 21 paintings. This was followed shortly afterwards by another exhibition of his work at the Portal Gallery in London. He also exhibited at the Dawson Gallery in Dublin and the Autodidakt Gallery in Vienna. In the years following his death, Dixon’s paintings were included in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally including Queen’s University Belfast, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Glebe Gallery in Donegal and in galleries in Vienna, London and New York. Dixon continued to paint in his own unique style and his friendship with Hill lasted up until Dixon’s death in 1970. Through his example, and with encouragement from Hill, the school of Tory Island Artists was born. We’ll leave the last word to Dixon, who once said: “Painting has got me to places I never could have gone.” glebegallery.ie
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2021
Regional Focus
On the Edge Martha McCulloch Coordinator, Artlink WE COULD BE anywhere, but we chose here on
the edge in the wind and the wild, in the heathery hills and the damp, away from the centre, away from train stations. The space we occupy at Fort Dunree is modest; a multi-function room in a former military hospital building, where unannounced visitors are welcomed, meetings are held, funding applications are sweated over and art and tea are made, and where the internet is what we euphemistically call ‘intermittent’. We do however have access to an elegant gallery, a rich history and inspirational vistas over land and sea, which are unique to this beautiful, remote site. Fort Dunree is the best preserved of six forts, built by the British on Lough Swilly when fears of a French invasion were high. The original fort, built in 1813, houses a military museum, while the surrounding headland is littered with WWI remains, gradually melting into the heather covered hillside. Lough Swilly, one of Ireland’s great natural harbours, may seem like a backwater, but it has played its part in significant historical events from the Viking invasions and the Flight of the Earls to the 1798 Rising and WWI. Artlink was celebrating 10 years of success shortly after I arrived in Buncrana in 2001, one of a host of people moving ‘home’ around that time. I wasn’t raised here but my mother is from the area and these roots give me license to call it home; so I’m not exactly a ‘blow-in’. I was drawn here to be with family, to pursue my art practice, to step out of academia, to get space. But Artlink was also the draw. I couldn’t have imagined moving from Glasgow, with it’s vital and connected arts community, to small town Buncrana, without the possibility of becoming part of a community of artists. At this point Artlink, with substantial resources, was based in a restored nineteenth-century corn mill at the edge of the Crana River and was held together by its three founding artists, Lisa Spillane-Doherty, Marie Barrett and Eileen Barr; but the organisation soon reached a turning point. By 2003, the founding artists had moved on and the management structure changed. Mhairi Sutherland, who was appointed as Creative Director, initiated the connection with Fort Dunree, establishing a satellite exhibition space, where pilot projects such as Edge Centring, an international residency, took place in 2007. The origins of Edge Centring began in 2006 when representatives from Norway and East Iceland visited Donegal to locate a west European partner for the Gulf Stream Project which used the gulf stream as an actual and metaphorical link between the regions of Norway, East Iceland and the north-west coast of Ireland. This was the basis of a hugely successful partnership whereby each year we welcome an artist from either Norway or Iceland to take part in our residency programme. We recently extended this North Atlantic connection to Newfoundland, our closest neighbour across the ocean. Two more directors followed – Elaine Ford and Declan Sheehan – then in 2013, contracted funding saw Artlink relocate to Fort Dunree entirely, with scant resources but the determination to keep going, which we have, and we changed in the process. Artlink has in some ways returned to its roots. It is once again non-hierarchical in its staff structure. Decisions are made by Team Artlink – Patricia Spokes, Rebecca Strain and myself, supported by the board. We now have
a membership, financial support from The Arts Council and Donegal County Council, and a commitment to caring for and sustaining artists and celebrating what is unique about this place. No one could have foreseen the circumstances of the past 16 months. Entire continents disrupted by COVID-19, almost unimaginable changes in the daily patterns of life and suddenly ‘working remotely’ – a concept once seen as aspirational, when city-bound people dreamed of working from home without the drudgery of the commute or cubicle life – which became the enforced reality for many. As it turned out, for Artlink, the concept of isolation and remoteness was perhaps less strange than might have been presumed. Operating and collaborating at a distance had long been an element in our working methods. Despite the shortcomings of infrastructure, temperamental Wi-Fi and occasional power outages, we were able to meet regularly with other organisations, albeit ‘virtually’, developing much stronger connections than before. Internationally, we were able to host events with artists from anywhere on the planet, attended by an international audience. Michael Flaherty, for instance, sounds like he runs the pub on the main street (yes, there is a Flaherty’s Bar here), but he’s actually from Port Union, Newfoundland, and invents devices that slow processes down and make them visible. He’s our first Resident Artist from Newfoundland, as part of our newly established partnership with Eastern Edge Gallery and is coming to Donegal to make a tidal weaving device as soon as restrictions allow. Anais Tonduer came here from France and showed us the magic of the wind, while Matthew de Kersaint Giradeau made an animation from a face he saw in the land at Malin Head. Christine Mackey initiated a living herbarium that has since morphed into a thriving community garden, where this year we are growing oats to make straw hats. These are our people. They are drawn to us, to Donegal, to the creative people here, who take their talent with a pinch of salt (probably from the sea). We are a lot of people spread far and wide and we also are the handful of people who are the day-to-day email answerers, meeting attenders, floor moppers and non-hierarchical hot air balloon idea flyers. Being on the edge allows us a bit of spontaneity, to embrace indeterminacy and allow artists to take risks with their practice in this inspiring place.
Fort Dunree; photograph by Martha McCulloch.
Catherine Ellis, ‘Elephants in the Room’, installation view, Fort Dunree, April 2018; photograph by Martha McCulloch.
artlink.ie
Artist-in-residence Anaïs Tondeur making drawings with the wind, Fort Dunree, 2018; photograph by Martha McCulloch.
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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Regional Focus
Shape of The Place
Cé as tú?
Laura McCafferty Visual Artist
Myrid Carten Visual Artist
THIS PLACE PULLED hard. My body ached
to lie down and plug into the dark peaty earth. “You’re in the wrong place,” came the voice as each footstep hit the pavements of Nottingham, where I’d lived for twenty years. I ignored this, convincing myself it was normal. In 2019 it boomed loud, and Donegal called. “There are people dreaming of the hills of Donegal” played on repeat; my young family watched on. Eyes closed, rocking, crooning. Those words spoke to me. I’d become a cliché. “Where is home?” he asked. “Is it Dublin, Belfast, Derry or Shroove?” With flushed faces, we scrolled through houses and jobs to figure out how to swap Nottingham for Inishowen. Seven months later, as the news of the pandemic broke, we boarded the ferry to Dublin, making our way to Donegal. Arriving on Saturday 14 March 2020 at 9:30pm. I was now a Donegal artist. I left Derry in 1999 to start the Art Foundation in Belfast’s University of Ulster, telling my parents there was no such course in town. They would later find out that this had been a lie. I had the time of my life, but the division of the city was hard-edged. “Where are you from?” they would ask, and with my answer, nod and pigeonhole me. Ringing the right taxi firms or walking in the right area was perplexing. In 2000, I moved to Nottingham where no one knew much about all that or cared. In 2003 graduating from a Decorative Arts BA, I became a self-employed artist, set up my studio and lectured at Nottingham Trent University – continuing to live and work there until the move to Donegal last year. Maybe I’m not here long enough to know this place. I think about connections. Mum is from here, granda’s family stretches back generations. On the morning that he died at home, my aunt pointed to the headland, saying, “Remember this. Hold it with you.” I took in its shape. This place is full of childhood memories. Sunday lunches squeezed into nana’s kitchen, running wild on summer evenings, falling off walls, breaking bones. One summer night in 1988, our
babysitter let the gang of children run in the rainstorm. The wind caught the large parasol I was holding, blowing me backwards up the garden. Laughing. Beach days, digging to Australia, blue lips from the cold Atlantic Sea, nettle stings on my rear-hind with my nana singing, “Dockin in, Nettle out, Dockin in, Nettle out,” as she rubbed the leaves against my skin. I think of nana and granda looking after six-week-old me, when mum returned to work. I think of being in this place from those early days. The key in the door (no need to knock) and the welcome hug. Is there a way to find something new in a place full of memories? In April 2020 this place gave me new things to think about. At first it was a ‘log’ about the view from the window, written each morning in the one minute I had. The logs then grew into On The Other Side, a publication featured in The Dublin Artist Book Fair that November. New shapes, colours and patterns appeared during walks. Followed soon by the need to make. Lacking materials and a studio, in the midst of the first lockdown, I ordered the basics and The Shape of The Place emerged. With paper, scissors and glue, I turned the finds into collages. This new body of work slowly grows on borrowed kitchen tables and makeshift work surfaces. In the same month, I received a Donegal County Council Artist Bursary to develop textile works. Once these large cloth panels are made, I will continue to experiment and figure out what happens next. My role as Public Programmes Curator at CCA Derry~Londonderry connects me to artists and writers nationally and internationally. I am also part of N I N E, an artist collective interested in the exploration of materiality and visual art processes. Maybe I’m still getting used to the idea that I am now an artist in the place where I once soothed nettle stings with shreds of dock leaf. My connection to this place runs deep; its shapes and patterns are still revealing themselves to me. lauramccafferty.com nine-artists.com
Plugging into Donegal. Laura McCafferty plugged into the peat bog. Two arms, with the edges of purple cardigan sleeves showing, with two hands, fingers stretched wide, inserted into the green moss and heather of the peat bog in the hills of Donegal. Photograph by Matthew Graham, courtesy the artist.
Myrid Carten, The Divide, 2014, installation view; image courtesy of the artist.
How did I get involved? As a young man I chanced to flirt with it and it possessed me. – Brian Friel DÚN NA NGALL literally means ‘Fort of the
Foreigners’. I confess that I’m a foreigner here. Not a blow-in but a blow back – elevated above the former because of my local family. My childhood life was split between Donegal and Derry. But Donegal was home; distant and unknowable – we see what we are. When I think of Donegal’s relation to my work, I hear Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke urges solitude, patience and humility. Each wisdom pushes me to go deeper into the foreignness within, into Donegal. I make films because I grew up here. It’s cinematic – it confronts us with our aloneness in time. Kierkegaard advocated standing on your own before God, and one stands alone before Donegal’s barren beauty. It’s an uneasy beauty, but isn’t all truth? Rilke said, “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us.” There’s a quietness – reassuring and insistent like death. But also, an alive wildness that shows how small and desolate we are. You have to struggle to remain human in it and confront what being human is. We are all visitors in this old landscape, if not by space, then by time. And time here is not measurable by us. The mountains can disappear under cloud or fog in an instant. They mutate – both unwavering, solid and an ever-changing mirage. Perhaps this is why visual art was not big in school, the singular image not enough. Writing was encouraged because it explored atmosphere, subjectivity and change. And then I found film. Russian poet, Boris Pasternak, remarked: “cinema ... is called upon to express what is true in drama, its surrounding plasma. Let it photograph not tales, but the atmospheres of tales.” This statement was echoed in 1928 by critic Viktor Shklovsky, who commented that filmmakers “film the air around their subject”. Poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin wrote: “In rural Donegal, you develop a sixth sense for what might be buried in darkness, for what came before you and will survive after.” Ahead
of my BA degree show at Goldsmiths, I dream of myself digging in the bog at Earagail, my mother then doing the same, cutting back and forth between us. Before and after. I fly back home to film. “Is that near the Grand Canyon?” viewers ask about the work in London. This free epic scale and ambition have been useful for my career. Repeatably I find myself drawn to barren sites, to my childhood – the early dark solitude and later play – for films. Donegal enables the intimacy that comes from taking risks alone. The solitude gives the freedom to explore existential themes. I feel a kinship with other Donegal artists like Cara Donaghey and Cliodhna Timoney, whose work shows traces of this dark adventure. For me, Donegal holds the truth of both one’s aloneness and connection. Just as the landscape’s change is constant and beyond us, human life is finite and ongoing. We are tied to those before and after us; our families. Here they ask Cé as tú? – Who are you from? Not where. My Donegal family name is Gallagher, meaning ‘Foreign Aid’. Useless – sure, the place’s crawling with us. Instead, families are named after a recent significant ancestor. I am a ‘Mhanus’ after my greatgreat grandfather. Because this high recognition is only given after death, I recently had the uncanny experience of hearing my uncle called ‘Danny Mhaggie’ – my grandmother is now our forebearer. This constant identification with family fuels the desire to escape and be a standalone individual. Yet it rings of truth. We are both alone in the world and carriers of our kin; often subconsciously driven by repetition to initiate repair. Family dynamics get passed through generations – that name tells a lot. Then there is the gossip – frustrating as hell but it showed me how endlessly interesting people are to one another. I make films about people and relationships because, like Donegal, it fascinates me. myridcarten.com
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2021
Community in Donegal Jeremy Fitz Howard Acting Manager, Regional Cultural Centre
Ursula Burke, Embroidery Frieze - The Politicians, 2016-17, embroidery thread on cotton; photograph by Jeremy Howard, courtesy the artist and Regional Cultural Centre.
IT ALWAYS FASCINATES me to hear how peo-
ple from other parts of Ireland describe Donegal. Most get lost in a sea of superlatives while attempting to describe the landscape or fall down the reminiscence rabbit-hole recounting childhood holidays involving beaches, friendly faces, dusty pint bottles, and of course, endless rain. One good friend relocated here for a decade or so and left with the conclusion that, ‘Donegal… is a state of mind’. That works well for me. It manages to say everything without really saying anything – a treasured skill in this business. What really strikes me the most about Donegal is the inherent value we place on the communities we build around us. Large communities, small communities, communities every shape and size that often overlap where we least expect. Maybe this eagerness to connect is a symptom of living in such a diffusely populated county – we tend to seek each other out and although this tendency might not have helped with ‘keeping the numbers down’ in recent months, it can offer us a great insight into how to build sustainable audiences, both ‘in real life’ and online. It’s this desire for shared experiences that we have always built arts events around. We can screen the critically acclaimed new film by a beloved director of world cinema but unless we serve tea afterwards and provide people with the opportunity to collectively dissect the evening, they simply won’t come. Social connections are central to the human experience and this is becoming increasingly evident online during the COVID-19 lockdowns. I’ve noticed new ‘regulars’ who ‘catch up’ during our online gigs. Most of these people have never met in real life but formed close bonds in the comments section. Parents in our Young Artists social media group throwing virtual birthday parties for their kids so they can celebrate with these new friends that they’ve never met. Our creative Zoom classes for older people have evolved into extended families where the art takes second place to the conversations; participants often ‘accidentally’ join our Zoom waiting room at random times, in the hope of finding someone inside ready for ‘a little
catch up’. Online concerts have taught us to stop pushing the ‘hard sell’ and spend more time developing meaningful relationships with these new worldwide micro-communities. We recently hosted an online Irish music festival for North Texans and were delighted to introduce 23,000 of them to the music of Donegal. It’s an interesting switch but suddenly we have regional artists on a local stage playing to a global audience. This, alongside galleries making a concerted move away from ‘blockbuster’ type touring exhibitions and shifting focus to the development of local artists of promise, will set the scene for healthier and more sustainable professional visual arts communities across the country. The Regional Cultural Centre’s forthcoming visual arts programme will continue to welcome major solo and group shows from international and leading Irish artists but with a renewed and increased focus on developing North Westbased contemporary artists over sustained periods of time. The recent exodus from major cities has afforded us the opportunity to make meaningful connections with young and emerging artists that ‘came home’ for the first time since leaving as teenagers. The age of Zoom will allow us to keep these conversations moving. Future RCC visual arts programmes will be presented over three dimensions: the physical gallery, online spaces, and projects and exhibitions that take place in shared spaces within our local communities – each one as vital as the other. Donegal can feel like an outpost on the periphery at times, but these communities make us strong. Emerging technologies help us connect with the rest of the world. We have an uncertain economic landscape ahead with environmental issues around the corner that will make COVID-19 look like ‘the good old days’. However, I am confident that artists and arts organisations in Donegal will prevail. Our ingrained sense of community gives us a head start in navigating societal shifts and the local frameworks we build now will ensure that we stay dynamic and ready for change. regionalculturalcentre.com
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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Zanele Muholi, Phaphama, at Cassilhaus, North Carolina, 2016, installation view ‘Somnyama Ngonyama’, Queen’s University Belfast quadrangle, 2021; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy the Naughton Gallery.
THE NAUGHTON GALLERY, located in Queen’s University Belfast, hosts
Portraits of Resistance COLIN DARKE REVIEWS ‘SORRY, NEITHER’ AND ZANELE MUHOLI AT THE NAUGHTON GALLERY.
two exhibitions which both incorporate considerations of African history and culture, coming from differing perspectives, but sharing a number of visual and ideological characteristics. The first, ‘Sorry, Neither’ (25 May – 11 July), is a group show in the gallery of mostly Autofuturist work and the second, which is shown in partnership with the Belfast Photo Festival, is a remarkable selection of self-portraits by South African visual activist and photographer, Zanele Muholi (3 June – 1 August). These are printed large scale and shown in the university grounds. Sorry, Neither The multi-layered art and activism movement Afrofuturism has developed over a number of years, with the jazz of Sun Ra, the funk of George Clinton and the science fiction novels of Octavia Butler its forerunners. In visual terms it has developed a recognisable, but fluid, aesthetic and the lineage of many of the recent works included in ‘Sorry, Neither’ can be traced back particularly to Sun Ra, whose costumes and stage sets evoke the future cosmos from which he claimed to have travelled, seen in the low-budget 1974 film, Space is the Place. Afrofuturist film has developed considerably from this rather rudimentary beginning to, for example, the beautiful and moving ecological sacrifice in a futuristic East Africa in the short from 2009, Pumzi, written and directed by Wanuri Kahiu. The aesthetic reached a wide audience in Ryan Coogler’s 2018 Marvel blockbuster, Black Panther. Afrofuturism is an art of resistance, grounded in objective analysis and imaginative rethinking of history. It blurs the distinctions between past, present and future to create new realities which can highlight the nature of injustice and oppression or present alternatives which negate them. This marks a distinction from (other) forms of resistance, which assert the primacy of material reality over ideas – ever since Marx stated that it is not
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2021
consciousness that determines being, but social being that determines consciousness. The two sides of this ideological contradiction can, perhaps, be reconciled through the formation of a strategy that looks to W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, whereby African Americans recognise that their identities can be formulated through the juggling of their Africanness and their Americanness. As an extension of this, the material and the ideal, the traditional and the modern, the actual and the potential, can impact on each other to create a dialectical basis for understanding historical realities and potential futures. This can in turn form the basis of fictional discourse, existing across all artistic forms (exploring the historical truths of slavery, lynch mobs, Jim Crow and now the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement in the face of the state murder of George Floyd), while simultaneously creating new futuristic, posthuman diageses in which the African diaspora has autonomously forged its realities. The work shown in ‘Sorry, Neither’ is almost exclusively based on the human figure. Many are located in future or extra-terrestrial environments and at times display signs of evolved or mutated physical characteristics – in the works of Benji Reid and Charlot Kristensen, for example, humans have gained the ability to fly. In Gianni Lee’s This Was Your Future but We Failed You (in which even the title travels through time), the heavily-made-up character stares out at us contemplatively, with a futuristic seafront cityscape behind them. Their hands are blue-green with red-painted nails, emerging from a white shirt which dissolves into brushmarks melting the sea. This same character appears in Change That Man’s Heart or Kill Him, now sporting decorative armour and a full red skirt, which again breaks down into gestural marks that blend into the visually chaotic background. Rickii Ly utilises digital photomontage to create his other-worldly “humaliens”, with elongated necks and airs of indifference. In one piece (The Gift - Look, 2020), one of the strongest images in the show, a mother and daughter sit at a table laid out for a simple meal of fowl and fruit, its familiarity countered by the mysterious gold filigree spheres placed on the yellow tablecloth. The verticality of the green curtain background echoes the elongation of her neck. Katia Herrera employs long-standing and familiar science fiction aesthetics in order to assert the strength and endurance of black women, exploring the universe with confidence and regality, wearing her gold insignia and disposing of adversaries with her laser eyes. Bobby Rogers’s portraits of royalty from his photographic series, ‘The Blacker the Berry’, are at the same time beautiful and disarming. Their silver technology-enhanced eyes, gazing at us hypnotically to pull us through their fourth walls,
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are complemented by their costumes of elaborate fabrics and gold and bejewelled ornamentation, wiping out the criminal legacy of Cecil Rhodes and European colonial history. Even more elaborate is Luke Nugent and Melissa Simon Hartman’s ‘Equilibrium’ series, its subjects draped in intricate regalia which again merges African tradition with an imagined future. Somnyama Ngonyama This ubiquitous outward gaze is at its most piercing and disarming in Zanele Muholi’s show of self-portraits, ‘Somnyama Ngonyama’, which translates into English as “Hail, the Dark Lioness”. This is enhanced by Muholi’s exaggeration of the blackness of their skin, which places their eyes at the focal point of each image, even in the few in which they glance sideward. The artist is virtually daring us to confront both their face and its harsh, but stunningly beautiful, contextualisation. Like much of the work included in the Belfast Photo Festival, Muholi’s work is printed large and exhibited outside, which in this case somehow enhances the intimacy and unease of the audience experience. Muholi has long been exploring complex intersections of LGBTQI+ issues (including their own non-binary identity), labour, politics, history and tradition. As they have said, “Photography for me is always first and foremost a tool of activism, driven by the idea of social change.” A European audience may struggle somewhat to comprehend fully the signification within the work, but Muholi themself has provided some clues. In the very limited space available to me, I can only touch on these complexities and I’d encourage visiting the show as often as possible. A number of the pieces in the show, for example, refer to labour and to Muholi’s mother Bester specifically. In these, they are adorned with, for example, clothes pegs and scouring pads. The exploitation of black domestic labour has historically been a highly-visible sign of white supremacy in both apartheid South Africa and in the United States and Muholi shows that this is far from becoming a lost memory. Employing a further long-standing racist characterisation, in the piece titled Phaphama (which I believe translates as “rise” or “waken”), Muholi wears the shirt, bow tie and (leopard-skin motif ) waistcoat of the minstrel. Their expression is simultaneously one of sadness and accusation. This combination of direct emotional confrontation with the audience and politically charged imagery forces a Brechtian relationship, ensuring objective critique and self-evaluation. The manner in which the work is presented, large-scale and al fresco, enhances this contemplative process.
Bobby Rogers, The Blacker the Berry, 2017; image courtesy the artist and the Naughton Gallery.
Colin Darke is a multi-media artist based in Belfast. colindarke.co.uk
Zanele Muholi, ‘Somnyama Ngonyama’, installation view, Queen’s University Belfast quadrangle, 2021; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy the Naughton Gallery.
Rickii Ly, The Gift – Look, 2020; image courtesy the artist and the Naughton Gallery
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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Profile
The Art of Now SUSAN CAMPBELL REPORTS ON RECENT ACQUISITIONS TO THE NATIONAL COLLECTION AT IMMA AND CRAWFORD ART GALLERY.
Aideen Barry, not to be known, 2015, still from video; Image © Aideen Barry, commissioned by the Arts & Heritage Trust, UK, courtesy Crawford Art Gallery.
IN AN INITIATIVE designed to support the visual arts com-
munity and provide some redress for the financial fallout from COVID-19, the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and Crawford Art Gallery have received a combined total of €1 million in funding for acquisitions to the National Collection. Drawn from the budget of the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sports and Media, it targets the mutually compatible aims of assisting artists living and/ or working in Ireland and building the National Collection for current and future generations. Last October, when announcing what amounts to the most significant spend on the national holding in over a decade, Minister Catherine Martin acknowledged the unprecedented difficulties being experienced by artists, impacted by a lack of opportunity to make, exhibit and sell work. IMMA, which focuses on national and international modern and contemporary art, received €600,000, with the remaining €400,000 allocated to the Crawford, which has collections ranging from the eighteenth century through to the current time. The institutions were tasked to work collaboratively in realising shared goals, which included reflecting developments within contemporary practice and filling gaps in representation. Between them, 422 artworks by 70 artists were selected through what has been described as a rigorous process. These include established, emerging and traditionally marginalised
practitioners, working across a breadth of mediums. Currently celebrating its 30th birthday, IMMA’s acquisitions are guided by a policy outlined in its Strategic Collection Development Plan 2017-2022. Giving insight into the kinds of criteria applied to collecting “the art of now for the future”, it considers if works represent a key moment of achievement in an artist’s career, resonate powerfully within a given context, complement the existing collection, and/or trigger new ways of working and thinking. The museum’s purchase of 197 artworks by 31 artists represents a sizable expansion of its 3,500-strong collection. The majority categories were painting (89), print (32) and drawing (26), but sculptures, publications, installations, moving image, performance, photographic and audio works also featured. All were pre-existing artworks – as opposed to new commissions – with some dating to the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Most, however, have been created since 2000, and many address the pressing issues of the current moment. Crawford added 225 artworks by 39 artists to its existing holding of over 3,000; comprising 100 paintings, 58 photographs, 28 drawings, 14 prints, eight sculptures, four installations, one sound work, five digital films, one quilt and six embroideries. The artwork-to-artist ratio was similar across the two institutions and suggests that in many cases, multiple works were bought from individual practitioners. This dissemina-
tion of the funding arose, according to Crawford director Mary McCarthy, due to artwork-led decision-making. “Some works are series”, she explained, “and we wanted to create densities of works by some artists to give substance to the collection.” There was also consistency in the gender ratios, the majority of artists being female: 21 in the case of IMMA, alongside eight male and two non-binary artists; 24 for the Crawford, in addition to 12 males and three artists from the LGBTQI+ community. Commenting on these figures, McCarthy spoke of “a continuous need to redress imbalance”. Cork-based artist Stephen Doyle, whose practice references queer identity and culture, remarked that, through its purchase by the gallery, his painting Meditating Tongqui (2020) “will go towards documenting our existence and experiences”. In total, the Crawford sourced work by over 20 artists from or based in Cork, including Tom Climent’s mixed-media painting, Eden (2020); Stephen Brandes’s paintings, Todnauberg Puppet Set and Chat Show (both acrylic on canvas, 2020); Sara Baume’s neon text piece, So Sick and Tired (2020), originally commissioned by the National Sculpture Factory for Cork Midsummer Festival 2020; and Debbie Godsell’s screen-print-based works, Stack (2019-21) and Stray Sod (2021). Some among this cohort are affiliated to supported studios for artists with physical and/or intellectual needs.
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2021
Examples of their work include two untitled acrylic-on-board paintings by Yvonne Condon and three ink-on-paper drawings by John Keating (Shopping Trolley, Girl in Shopping Trolley and Girl on Dog). The gallery also purchased Encrusted Dog (2019), a mixed-media sculpture by Kilkenny-based, KCAT studio artist, Declan Byrne. An all-island focus was further reflected in its acquisition of the photographic print series A Living Colour Index (2020) by Belfast-based Michael Hanna; the ceramic work Farther to the East (2004-19) by Limerick’s Andrew Kearney; If we winter this one out (2020), a photographic print by Elaine Byrne, Dublin; and the environmentally charged vinyl wall drawing, Irish Tree Alphabet (2020) by Katie Holten, whose practice spans New York and County Louth. In addition to a strong representation from the many artists living and working in Dublin, the film Liberty’s Booty (1980) by Galway-based artist Vivienne Dick; paintings by Tipperary-based Patricia Hurl (Jingle Bells, Hush-a-bye Baby, 1986, and Study for The Kerry Babies Trial, 1984); and Sligo-based Cléa van der Grijn’s HD video, Jump (2018), were among those purchased from outside the capital by IMMA. The museum consolidated its collection of 18 works by Alice Maher, acquiring the large-scale sculpture, Mnemosyne (2002), which featured prominently in the Mayo-based artist’s 2012 mid-career retrospective. It also doubled its holding by the Northern Irish, London-based Anne Tallentire, purchasing These Aggregations (2019) – laminated MDF panels, pine wood battens – and Setting Out 2 (2020), comprising builders string, screws, tape. Bassam Al-Sabah’s hand-tufted rug, Still, In The Darkness (2019), augments the textile component of the national holding and represents a practice concerned with displacement, nostalgia and perseverance. Also acquired was the Iraqborn artist’s video work, Dissolving Beyond the Worm Moon (2019), described as a response to “war, unrealised childhood fantasies, and representation within globalised media”. Kathakers: Take a Bow I, and The Kathakars 0:38 - 0:11 (Storytellers) (both 2019), by Mauritius-born artist Anishta Chooramun, probe themes of culture, perception and identity, combining abstract sculptural form with inspiration from a rhythmic North Indian dance. Alice Rekab’s Isatu an Ee Cat (2021), a digital drawing on a composite photographic print, addresses the complexities of a mixed-race identity, while works by artist and Traveller Leanne McDonagh “represent and record her community from within”. These include Prim and Proper (mixed-media photographic print) from the artist’s 2014 ‘Reminiscence’ series, and a set of pigment on photo rag prints from 2019, made to illustrate Why the Moon Travels, a book of tales from the Travellers’s oral tradition by Oein DeBhairduin. As the range and diversity in this sampling shows, the significant injection of public funds made in response to COVID-19 has considerably enriched that part of the National Collection held by these two cultural repositories. As a reflection of its other intended aim, many of the featured artists testified to its positive impact on their practice, not just from the much-needed financial boost, but also the associated prestige and validation of their work.
Susan Campbell is visual arts writer and researcher.
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Crawford Art Gallery Aideen Barry Sara Baume Stephen Brandes Angela Burchill Declan Byrne Elaine Byrne Tom Climent Yvonne Condon Elizabeth Cope Gary Coyle Stephen Doyle Rita Duffy Amanda Dunsmore Kevin Gaffney Debbie Godsell Michael Hanna Marie Holohan Katie Holten Brianna Hurley Andrew Kearney John Keating Fiona Kelly Anne Kiely & Mary Palmer Roseanne Lynch Brian Maguire Evgeniya Martirosyan Danny McCarthy Roseleen Moore Peter Nash Ailbhe Ní Bhriain Íde Ní Shúilleabháin Nuala O’Donovan Sarah O’Flaherty Tom O’Sullivan Michael Quane Jennifer Trouton Charles Tyrrell Daphne Wright
Sara Baume, So sick and tired, 2020, neon text work commissioned by National Sculpture Factory for Cork Midsummer Festival 2020; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy the artist and Crawford Art Gallery.
IMMA Bassam Al-Sabah Marie Brett Sarah Browne & Jesse Jones Anishta Chooramun Amanda Coogan Vivienne Dick Edy Fung Emma Wolf-Haugh Patricia Hurl Sandra Johnston Eithne Jordan John Lalor Breda Lynch Alice Maher Leanne McDonagh Eoin McHugh Alastair MacLennan Sibyl Montague Maïa Nunes Brian O’Doherty Alanna O’Kelly Sarah Pierce Atoosa Pour Hosseini Alice Rekab Nigel Rolfe Dermot Seymour Rajinder Singh Anne Tallentire Cléa van der Grijn Eimear Walshe
Elizabeth Cope, Generation Gap (Menopausal series), 2006, oil on canvas, 183 x 244 cm; image courtesy the artist and Crawford Art Gallery.
Alice Rekab, Isatu an Ee Cat, 2021, digital drawing on composite photographic print; image courtesy the artist and IMMA.
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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Sandra Johnston, Wait it out, 2019; image courtesy the artist and IMMA.
Alastair MacLennan, Bled Edge, 1988; image courtesy the artist and IMMA
Rajinder Singh, My Sister’s Coven, 2019; image courtesy the artist and IMMA.
Nigel Rolfe, European Dream, 2009; image courtesy the artist and IMMA.
The Visual Artists' News Sheet
Critique
Edition 56: July – August 2021
A.K. Burns, The Dispossessed, 2018, installation view, Lismore Castle Arts, 2021.
Critique
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Sheila Rennick ‘Screaming on Mute’ Kevin Kavanagh Gallery 6 May – 5 June 2021
Sheila Rennick, Bye Bye Bar, 2020, oil on canvas, 75 x 60 cm; image courtesy the artist and the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.
THE BRITISH LABOUR Leader Keir Starmer’s
Sheila Rennick, Summer 2020, 2020, oil on canvas, 140 x 140cm, (SR029), ; image courtesy the artist and the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.
Sheila Rennick, Monkey Magic, 2019, Oil on canvas, 70 x 65 cm (SR010); image courtesy the artist and the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.
recent admission that the traditional left had lost touch by failing to listen and engage with the societal grassroots that they claim to represent, their inability to parse and solve the discontents that led to Brexit and the subsequent vacuum that the conservative right have shamelessly and ruthlessly exploited for political gain, feeding on bias and unsubstantiated narratives and fuelled by editorially free digital spaces, has been well documented in the UK and elsewhere. This space between unheard inchoate articulations of coping class needs and the absence of shame as a regulating and moderating force within the political class came to mind as the context for considering the practice of UK-based Irish painter Sheila Rennick and her recent solo exhibition, ‘Screaming on Mute’ at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. Rennick’s paintings sit comfortably within a painting lineage that contextualises the macro socio-political in the micro machinations and absurdities of a specific social milieu that ranges from Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress to Weimar Expressionism and more recently to painters such as Genieve Figgis’s grizzled aristocracy. Although, unlike Figgis, as Rennick goes native in the post-Brexit jungle, her characters are more likely to be clad in trainers than tiaras. In tone, Rennick’s worldview resists punching down; however, they are not overly infused with empathy, sentiment or compassion either. Rennick’s gaze comes closer to a deadpan bemusement at where we find ourselves. Many painters have experienced the challenge of negotiating a field that has the weight of a long historical tail, so while there are some classical allusions in her use of tondo supports and Rubenesque figures, in their material construction Rennick’s paintings do not seem overly hidebound by traditional formal constraints around colour, drawing accuracy or composition. There are no rules to be learned and then broken here, perhaps because they never existed to begin with. The paint application builds layers from brisk thin under painting to thick fresh impasto. As a colourist, her palette tends toward pastel powder blues, tinted oranges and unmodulated pinks that are iced on as the painting progresses, like an ABBA song in which the melodic sugar rush can sweeten the lyrical toothache that lurks below the surface. These instinctual and unfiltered production values feel entirely integrated
with the meaning and tone of the narratives. Where Hogarth’s eighteenth-century narratives are characterised by their moral and redemptive tone, the protagonists in Rennick’s soap operatic dramas are defiantly twenty-first century in their boundless non-judgemental world and there are no obvious moral arcs or heroic journeying. The connective tissue for the actors in this theatre of the absurd is the digital age of blended work arrangements, Tinder hook ups and Instagram self-regard. In Working from Home (2020), the proverbial ‘pram in the hallway’ is crawling on the floor of a kitchen-cum-dining space, where pandemic work practice and domesticity merge into an overwhelming cocktail, fuelled by wine and fast-food takeaways. In Zero Perks (2020), a sterile open plan office, two male employees engage in horseplay as they gesture toward an isolated female with overtones of a toxic male dominated work culture. In Summer 2020 (2020), a plane plummets into the sea, witnessed by beach goers astride an inflatable unicorn and beside Guinness towels, only to emerge comedically on the other side of the composition. Placed in and amongst these psychodramas are a menagerie of animals both domestic and exotic – foxes, flamingos, monkeys, dogs, whales and ponies – all of whom bear witness dispassionately to the foibles and absurdities at play and are conceivably wiser and more knowing than their human counterparts. Emojis abound as a preferred option of emotional shorthand. Taken at face value, this could sound like grim kitchen-sink realism but the paintings are delivered with a buoyant sense of fun and humour. Each painting has a clear narrative proposition yet leaves enough lateral space for viewers to draw their own conclusions. Perhaps these characters are ciphers for a western capitalist society that theoretically is structured to satisfy all human desire. What happens when nothing is denied or inaccessible? The characters in Rennick’s paintings seemingly populate a world of capitalist abundance consisting of sun holidays, instant digital gratification and flexible supported work culture. Yet there persists a pervasive sense of vacuity and lack of nourishment that, like Starmer’s ignored and unheard classes, are worth unmuting for. Colin Martin is an artist and Head of the RHA School.
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Critique
Fiona Hackett ‘The Long Disease: LA Stories’ RHA Ashford Gallery 10 May – 6 June 2021
Fiona Hackett, Untitled, from the series The Long Disease LA Stories, 2020, Archival pigment print, 63 m x 44 cm; Image courtesy of the artist and the RHA.
PHOTOGRAPHS ACHIEVE THEIR poignan-
cy by freezing their subjects within a moment of time. “Time stood still”, we often say, when something stops us in our tracks. But time doesn’t stop. Time, as photographs remind us, is always running out. Eventually staged in May of this year, Fiona Hackett’s exhibition was deferred from September 2020, and this unscheduled hiatus seems to play into the meaning of the exhibition itself. What happened in those intervening months; the accretion of time on those sunny streets, the fixed smiles of her human subjects, already dead, drawn out beyond initial expectations. Hackett presents an unusual coupling here: a set of framed photographs of Los Angeles streetscapes, and a series of obituary columns, enlarged and printed out from the pages of the Los Angeles Times. The buildings depicted also carry their own depictions, their walls painted with murals suggesting a glamour beyond their ordinary façades. The human subjects memorialised in LA’s historic newspaper are glamorised too, less in their grainy headshots, than in the words of the anonymous staff writers responsible for summing up their lives. “All photographs are memento mori”, Susan Sontag wrote.1 Photography, memory and death seem naturally intertwined. Perhaps this unusual coupling is not so unusual, after all. A large photograph, Untitled 4 (2020), shows a painting of Gary Cooper – though it could be someone else, since all the works are untitled – a giant figure holding a flight helmet and goggles, the orb of the moon framing him like an ancient halo. A pair of concrete kickers at the base of the painted wall suggest the mooring stations of a car park. But Gary won’t be stopping long; there are too many brave new worlds for him to conquer. Hackett’s photographs are relatively flat, her focus on façades resulting in the plane of interest being largely horizontal – the flatness of the prints themselves corresponding to the flatness of her scenes. This lack of photographed depth is complicated by the illusionistic depth in the painted murals, the photographer and the anonymous painters entangled within the illusionistic and the real. Like American photographer Stephen Shore, Hackett likes to use street signs or telegraph poles as framing devices, her shallow depths of field punctuated by these vertical elements. This can also have the effect of making the scene appear like a passing frame. The largest photograph, Untitled 2 (2020), shows the façade of a
white, single storey building, its roughly plastered wall hosting a black and white image of Sophia Loren. A former Miss Italy and Oscar winning actress, Loren combines the glamour and gravitas of an old-school star. Smouldering and chic, a no-parking sign frames her on the right, while on the verge in front, two real cactus plants anchor her image to terra firma, making gentle play with the painted textures of her unseasonable furs. The show is arranged so the printed obituary columns and accompanying headshots are shown together in an irregular grid. There is no direct correspondence between the individual obituaries and the variously sized, framed streetscapes occupying the other walls. Instead, we get to think about them separately – the connections develop in our minds. Like the figures in the murals, all of these faithfully departed saw their manifest destinies in the Golden State. But Eden, to paraphrase Robert Frost, will always sink into grief.2 Timothy Howe died peacefully at home in 2014. Tim had been a surfer. He raised pigs. He loved cooking and Jazz. His obituary ends with how “his dark humour and insatiable love of women will be greatly missed.” Who provided these extraordinary details? Who believed his “insatiable love of women” is what counted? Or is that an example of his humour, a parting shot in the manner of Spike Milligan’s, “I told you I was sick”. Julie Payne ‘came of age’ in the company of Humphry Bogart and Doris Day. Later, she married the famous screenwriter, Robert Towne, before reconnecting with her high school sweetheart – a first love renewed for the end of time. In her portrait, Julie is breezily glamorous, her floppy fedora framing a pretty face with panda eyes. It could be a publicity still for a modern movie-star, but all it is now is the saddest kind of promotion.
Fiona Hackett, Untitled (Cropped to square format), from the series The Long Disease LA Stories, 2020, Archival pigment print, 12.9 x 110 cm; Image courtesy of the artist and the RHA.
John Graham is an artist based in Dublin. A book on his recent drawing practice, 20 Drawings, designed by Peter Maybury and with a text by Brian Fay, was published in June. Notes: 1Susan Sontag, On Photography (Penguin Books, 1979) p 15. 2Robert Frost, ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’, first published in the collection New Hampshire (Henry Holt, 1923).
Fiona Hackett, Untitled, from the series The Long Disease LA Stories, 2020, Archival pigment print, 42 x 29.7 cm; Image courtesy of the artist and the RHA.
Critique
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
‘Light and Language’ Lismore Castle Arts 28 March – 10 October 2021 LISA LE FEUVRE is the executive director
of the Holt/Smithson Foundation1. She has foregrounded Nancy Holt’s work in this exhibition, with her opening remarks stressing the importance of thinking and of asking questions through the experience of art. Holt’s Electrical System (1982) is a site-responsive piece2. A network of more than 70 lightbulbs is connected via conduit pipework to the electrical system of Lismore Castle. It is designed to externalise hidden networks that connect the architecture to the landscape. We may wander through this maze of lightbulbs. Are the matrix of pipes and wires comparable to the roots and branches in the gardens? Could these systems fail? There are ‘thought prompts’; inscriptions carved by micro waterjet in sterling silver, displayed at intervals throughout the gallery. These are works by Katie Paterson in response to Holt’s conceptualisations and they whisper to you as you drift. “Objects soaked in moonlight for over one million years” (2016) “The Universe’s lights switched off one by one” (2015) Light and language were entangled concepts for Holt. She expressed her most pressing concerns in her concrete poetry3; Sun, moon, water,
sky, earth, star – the cosmos contained by the frames and reflections of the human eye, by a pool of water, or by the lens. American artist, Matthew Day Jackson’s work, Commissioned Family Photo (2013), comprises 82 photographs of the artist and his family taken by a military camera, designed to record the extreme light waves and shock reverberations of nuclear detonations. This is chilling work; more evocative for being placed in the intimate setting of the upper gallery, surrounded by Holt’s concrete poetry and other writings. “The world focuses And spins out again, seen.” A.K Burns’ 13-minute 16mm film (transferred to HD video), Untitled (Eclipse) (2019), shows a total solar eclipse in 2017, through footage from a field in Nebraska. What will the world be like when the sun dies – or with a different solar pattern – like on Mars? The film is projected onto an angled screen – the film grain is thus amplified. The colour looks washed out – jaded, from another time. There are flares and bokeh, refraction and reflection, wildly ranging focus – ominous and unsettling. Using her locators4 or ‘seeing devices’, Holt was always focusing and extending the limits of vision and perceptual significance. AK Burns does this with The Dispossessed. Located in the
Nancy Holt, Electrical System, 1982, installation view, Lismore Castle Arts, 2021; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, © Holt/ Smithson Foundation, licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York.
lower gardens, the function of the barriers is dissolved by glamourising and contorting them into shapes that invite their transgression. In Boundary Conditions (2021), Irish artist Dennis McNulty creates a geolocated audio walk via The Echoes App. This evokes The Trails series, where Holt and associates experienced the landscape through sound words and image – an idea that is extended by McNulty’s use of geolocation5. The theme of an accelerating dystopia is continued in McNulty’s Maybe everything dies… (2013), where the lyrics from the Bruce Springsteen song, Atlantic City, are spelt out in haunting, digital time, on a minimalist structure – an apotropaic eye? Does ‘the digital’ frame the limits of our being? Interested in the sculptural relationship to experience, Charlotte Moth has created Blue reflecting the greens (2021) – a 90 cm blue mirror disc, mounted against a wall in the castle grounds, designed to reflect sunlight and foliage of the gardens in a blue-green cast. Is the reflection (this reality) real, or is it an illusion?
Jennifer Redmond is an artist, writer and editor at mink.run and at The Unbound,
an online platform for moving image and hybrid writing collaborations theunbound.info Notes: 1The Holt/Smithson Foundation was set up in 2014 to develop the distinctive creative legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. It will end in 2038. Holt and Smithson recalibrated the limits of art, changing what art can be and where art can be found. Their art, writings, and ideas were the fertile foundation from which contemporary art has grown. 2The term ‘non-site’ was used by Land Artists to signify work that was situated within an exhibition space. A work was ‘site’ if situated on the land. 3Nancy Holt, ca. 1970, typewriter ink on paper 11 x 8 1/2 in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm) © Holt/Smithson Foundation, licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York. 4Two of these ‘locators’ are in this exhibition; one in the riding house and one in Carthage Hall. They are made from steel pipes, drawing medium and black paint, in variable dimensions, according to the site. 5This work will be available globally from 3-6 September 2021 on lismorecastlearts.ie
Charlotte Moth, Blue reflecting the greens, 2021, installation view at Lismore Castle Arts, 2021.
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Critique
HOME: Being and Belonging in Contemporary Ireland The Glucksman, University College Cork 11 May – 31 October 2021 THINKING OF ‘HOME’ today, it is hard not to
attach its suffix ‘less’, while ‘housing’ is stuck with its roommate ‘crisis’. The group exhibition, ‘HOME: Being and Belonging in Contemporary Ireland’ at The Glucksman, turns its glance towards a more general sense of home, one tied to notions of ‘belonging’ and ‘national identity’. This show is the third in a series connected to the gallery’s programming for the decade of centenaries. It also arises more obliquely from a unique moment in history, when people were largely confined to their homes during the global coronavirus pandemic. The first work encountered in the show alludes to the refugee crisis. Martin Boyle’s Somewhere Else (2017) – thirty-six pieces of crinkled, reflective golden material, derived from torn-up survival blankets rotating on the wall – contains connotations of shelter, while making reference to that displaced and distant ‘other’ of home, ‘somewhere else’. On tables across from this are placed a series of eight 3D-printed black MDF models of buildings with accompanying text, one of which is the fascist era Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, re-framed as the City Hall of a re-imagined capital of Ireland. The text utilised in Doireann Ní Ghrioghair’s Declaration of the State Metropolis at Tara (2019) is from the early 1940s and written by the architect of the Garden of Remembrance while he was a member of an extreme right-wing group that fantasised about Ireland as a Catholic Fascist hinterland. The work probes an absurd and sinister imaginary that has only recently been forcefully contested in Irish society. Three artists respond to the theme through painting. Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh’s work, Teorainn No.6 (2019), uses a layering of large brushstrokes to depict what looks to be a shack on wheels. Viewing the large horizontal brush strokes representing the planks of the ‘shack’, one tries to make sense of another internal structure that seems to be hidden within this ‘limit/boundary’. Kathy Tynan and Ciara Roche’s paintings are similar in style, each depicting ‘unremarkable’ interior and exterior scenes, respectively. Where Roche depicts shopfronts, most interesting at the level of signage and text displayed on these buildings, Tynan’s interiors play with notions of empty spaces and ‘paintings within paintings’. Sara Baume’s Talisman (2018) assembles 100 little houses, made up of combinations of basic 3D shapes – pyramids, cones, cubes and cuboids. It is simple but very effective. The serial use of shapes nods to LeWitt, while the constructions just looked strange. Somehow this display has reduced architecture to an absurdity: “Is that all houses are… a few shapes stuck together?” Opposite is James L. Hayes work, consisting of plaster casts of the back of a canvas, repeated 63 times. With the canvas supports and interior on display, we are looking at the ‘architecture’ that allows the canvas to transmit images. A second work, Homegrown (2017), consists of a unique bronze cast of three stalks of asparagus, tied together by a loop of string, wound numerous times around their width. Kerry Guinan’s Landscapes (2018) consists of two photographs. One depicts a field with reeds blowing in the wind, while in the other, a building developers’ hoarding abruptly curtails our view, an allusion to the ‘cutting off ’ by private developments of swathes of our cities. Julia Pallone Gate Keepers (2012-19) consists of snapshots of the ubiquitous plastered walls that defend the lawns and bungalows of rural
Ireland. Amanda Rice’s photographs play with making-strange remnants of older architectural endeavors, while in her video, Site Where a Future Never Took Place (2015), the camera moves slowly through a disused building, the soundtrack an ominous hum. Julie Merriman and Tinka Bechert engage notions of ‘home’ at the level of style – the former with prints employing repeated images of housing estates to form off-kilter grid designs; and the latter, in New Flags (2020), by repurposing patterned fabrics to create textile assemblages attached to canvases. The rural aspect of Irish identity is touched upon in two videos – Mieke Vanmechelen’s atmospheric Residual Minority (2019) and Treasa O’Brien’s The Blow-In (2016). Vanmechelen documents the birth of a calf to a drone soundscape that includes an organ-like motif, surprisingly adding a mild celebratory tone to the video. O’Brien’s film portrays some inhabitants of the community of Gort, County Galway – a mix of locals and ‘blow-ins’ from Brazil, Romania and the village down the road – through the eyes of a main character, who interestingly has a sense of liking her own mode of ‘not belonging’. Eileen Hutton’s video, Becoming (2020), is a short two-minute loop depicting a swallow snuggling into its nest. This display of the simple pathos of animal existence works nicely with the theme to shift our thoughts into the fundamentality of some form of home or stable habitat for the flourishing of all species. Similarly, Brian Duggan’s more conceptual piece, Breath I Mean Something More Than Air (2020), displays documents and filters from measurements of air quality. It makes us think of the natural environment and technological innovation as integral contributions to what we call home. The show contains interesting approaches to the theme of home yet fails to fully engage with some of the most current topics connected to this key socio-political issue, such as the continued failure of government to invest in a comprehensive social housing policy, the sweetheart land deals for developers, and the bulk-buying of Irish real estate by investment funds, which has resulted in escalating homelessness, precarious rental situations and individuals being priced out of cities, due to the core issues of supply and affordability. Not that an exhibition focusing on the housing crisis would change anything, but it would serve to bolster the exhibition by offering insights into the contemporary material conditions necessary for a sense of home to be built.
Doireann Ní Ghrioghair, Declaration of the State Metropolis at Tara, 2019, and Martin Boyle, somewhere else, 2017; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of the artists and The Glucksman.
John Thompson is an artist, writer on art and philosophy and researcher whose interests are conceptual art, politics and materialist philosophy.
Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh, Teorainn no.6, 2019, oil on canvas, 183 x 183cm; image courtesy of the artist and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin.
Critique
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Richard Mosse, ‘Incoming and Grid (Moria)’ Butler Gallery, Kilkenny 11 June – 29 August 2021 THE BUTLER GALLERY welcomes visitors to the
Irish premiere of two highly acclaimed screenbased works by Kilkenny-born artist, Richard Mosse. This is one of the first main exhibitions since the gallery relocated from Butler Castle to its newly renovated site by the river. Both works detail the often-fatal journey of refugees and migrants into the European Union and the infrastructure that’s employed along its Mediterranean borders. Grid (Moria) (2017) focuses on one particular camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. A fire in 2020 has since destroyed the camp but four years ago, Mosse undertook to document the facility and its inhabitants, producing a six-minute, 16-channel video work, whose scanning motion provides a brief survey of this open-air site and its surrounding area. Presented as part of the Arts Council’s ‘Brightening Air/Coiscéim Coiligh’ – a ten-day season of arts experiences in outdoor places – the work was displayed on one large screen, erected outside of the gallery building. The mechanical operations of each divided section work in tandem to illustrate a picture of captives awaiting their release. Incoming (2014-17), which has a running time of 52 minutes, is presented indoors as a large three-channel projection. The video starts with one central screen of the triptych active, and two black screens on either side. In a darkened room, the sound and controlled climate makes for a hospitable but nervy environment. There is just one long bench from which to observe this
work but seeing is simply the act of confirming and allowing to register what you have heard. The tearing open of fabric. Cutting. Breathing. The left screen comes on as the full extent of the visual continues to be drawn with sounds. Skeletal remains are revealed before the screen goes black and our attention is placed again on the central screen. A bone is sliced through with an electrical saw until there is an unmistakably real spray of black fluid shorn from the marrow of the deceased. It is fair to say that the only way one might stomach this sort of visual content is through the almost metaphoric quality of the technical equipment, used here by Mosse to convey what is sadly a routine occurrence that we are both aware of and blind to. In an earlier project set in Africa’s Congo Basin, the artist used saturated reds, pinks and purples to bring warring militia and the lands over which they fight into to a sort of hyper life. Where the locations and people of The Enclave (2013) acquired the characteristics of a colourful if troubled community, Incoming offers a haunting black and white portrait, again using military-grade camera and lens technology to show us what we cannot ordinarily see. If the armed Congolese tribes of that widely successful series appeared far from everyday life here in Europe, Incoming is about bringing the story nearer by showing us how close to it we really are. In that sense, it follows a simple narrative structure, but that depends on how much of the film you watch. From the autopsy we move into
Richard Mosse, Grid (Moria), 2017; image courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery and carlier | gebauer.
the open air of holding facilities, where children and adults are observed day and night as they make the best of the conditions and what few freedoms they offer. The camera used to deliver these black and white images illustrates not light but heat and at times we are watching all three screens, something that isn’t really possible given their size and proximity. At other stages, just one screen focuses our attention, and this too is not always easy, as night-time sea rescue is followed by loss of life and the harshness of survival that predominates any aesthetic or moral consideration. Dappled light warms whatever it touches, and the moments of magical transcendence appear at times to shimmer as light and heat fuse, bringing into focus the nature and culture of human existence. As a viewer, what lifts you also keeps you seated; but as the film’s composer Ben Frost has said elsewhere of his often tensely sonic output, you will be waiting a long time for the base to drop. In that sense and others, this work’s sympathies provide the basis for an excoriation of the leading causes of mass migration and the containment of people, outlining simply another accepted feature of the military-industrial complex, from which we all await release.
Darren Caffrey is an artist and art writer currently based in the Southeast.
Critique – Book Review
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
What Artists Wear Charlie Porter Penguin, 2021, 376 pp. THERE IS A glossy exuberance to how people dress in Dublin right now, markedly different from how we all looked a few weeks or months earlier, shuffling between home and the supermarket. Emerging from a pandemic – back to studios and exhibition openings – means a change in how we present to the world and how we dress for work, even if we are only re-describing our work selves to ourselves. We are all changed, and we may choose to signal those changes, and the possibilities they open up, through what we wear. A graphic designer friend often wears a pencil in his top pocket. He doesn’t really use it, but the pencil reminds him and his clients that his work is based in craft. Another friend, an artist who works mainly in video, describes how she cuts her nails before a big project, a residual ritual from her training in ceramics. In Charlie Porter’s new book, What Artists Wear, a number of artists describe an attachment to a particular item of clothing worn in the studio; others, Frida Kahlo or Picasso for example, are identifiable by a particular clothing item or style. The studio wear is often an old garment that used to be worn ‘out’, or workwear from another making or fixing based profession, adapted so that it is fit-for-purpose. Sometimes it involves wearing the same garment repeatedly until it takes on a role, similar to but not exactly like Winnicott’s description of a transitional object, a ‘blankey’ or comfort item that has accumulated smells and patinas from previous work.1 How is what artists wear different enough from what other people wear to merit special attention? How artists wear clothes is often imagined as stemming either from a desire for flamboyance or unconcern (or accidentally flamboyant unconcern), close to the common portrayal of a preoccupied professor as ‘nutty’. Porter’s book undoes this with careful concern, both for the clothing and the wearer. Where he doesn’t know the artist and what they tended to wear, he visits their clothing and picks over it for us or elicits a reliable testimony from someone observant and close. This is how we discover that Joseph Beuys’s (often emulated) hat functioned as a way to cover over a metal plate in his head, which used to get cold. Early on, Porter identifies a ‘defiance’ in relation to how artists wear clothes, but it could also be considered ‘taking liberties’ with materials, etiquette, and status. There are
descriptions of crusty patches on cashmere, paint splattered overalls under Comme des Garçons suits, and Agnes Martin’s fittingly quilted Sears and Roebuck work jacket, all of which demonstrate a particular approach to suitability or appropriateness. There’s a slippery cliché that artists are class-migrators. Porter addresses this by looking at some of artists’ clothing as workwear, clothing for making, often borrowed or hacked from other labours. Porter notes Andy Warhol’s switch from the chinos he always wore, to black jeans and then to blue jeans which were a more legible link to his working-class, middle American roots, as well as ubiquitous city wear. Bill Cunningham, the photographer and chronicler of fashion in New York, dressed unfailingly in a blue workers’ jacket from the French department store, BHV. Described as ‘bleu de travail’, it was picked up for about 10 euro in a DIY shop in Paris and functioned as a personal uniform – specific but unremarkable – which afforded Cunningham the possibility of gliding from streets to runway shows as he documented what other people wore, the jacket’s handy pockets filled with film and lenses. After Cunningham died in 2016, photographers gathered at New York Fashion week wearing versions of the blue jacket (now known as ‘The Bill’) as a tribute. Cunningham must have known that this might happen. In What Artists Wear, Porter often writes in a long ellipsis, gently returning us to an item of clothing in a way that defines how its symbolism has altered. Yves Klein wears a tuxedo while a group of women, employed by him, performatively imprint their body shape in his patented Blue onto canvas or a wall. General Idea had parodied this in Shut the Fuck Up (1985), where we see a rather abject stuffed poodle covered in blue paint spinning in front of a large painted X. Porter takes the menace in the distance and power-signalling of Klein’s tuxedo seriously – “Tailoring is not neutral”, he notes. Much later, after having described the queering/ querying of the male power suit by Georgia O’Keefe and Gilbert and George, he remarks on how David Hammons oils his own clothed body, leaving the bluish imprint of his jeans on the paper. Mark Leckey spoke about ‘casuals’ in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios a few years ago and his film, Fiorucci Made
Richard Hamilton; photograph by Tony Evans / Getty Images. (Artwork: Kent State, 1970 © Richard Hamilton. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2021)
Barbara Hepworth, 1948; photograph courtesy Bowness.
Me Hardcore (1999), documents this form of dress, as worn at Northern Soul events. For Leckey and his peers, casual clothing was something that could only be worn by the ‘welloff ’ and so labels like Fiorucci became desirable as a way to overturn this. Charlotte Prodger worries on the possibility of appearing queer in a rural setting, where the nuances of what she is wearing may not be read. David Hockney describes how his father wore a suit decorated with cut-out paper dots. “He taught me not to care what the neighbours think”, Hockney tells Porter, but if the neighbours hadn’t noticed, his father may not have done it, and Hockney’s subsequent experiments with dress could be read as a rehearsal in audience, as well as aesthetic, development. There is a devastating moment when Porter, by his own admission, assumes that a paint-covered pair of loafers belong to Jackson Pollock. They are Lee Krasner’s; Pollock’s are pristine. Earlier Porter has told us that her career suffered because of his alcoholism and mental illness. In this light, Pollock’s clean shoes seem as troubling as Yves Klein’s tuxedo. Porter leaves out, probably rightly, some kinds of specific performance wear and wearable sculpture, such as Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolé Capes, or Franz Erhard Walther’s fabric performance-forcing works. VALIE EXPORT’s chaps and Lynda Benglis’s dildo don’t get a mention either. But these categories are different: they are costumes or actual artworks in themselves. This project covers everyday dress practice for artists, from workwear to awards ceremonies; all part of the job, but not the job itself.
Vaari Claffey is a curator based in Dublin.
Note: 1Donald Winnicott, ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena; a study of the first not-me possession’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1953, 34 (2), pp 89-97.
Sarah Lucas, Self-portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996, C-print; photograph © Sarah Lucas, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.
Critique – Book Review
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Midfield Dynamo Adrian Duncan The Lilliput Press, 2021, 152 pp. I AM SITTING alone in the chapel of Kings College Hospital
in London, where I am being treated for a long-term condition. I have been in hospital for 70 days. I came to write this review, for the quiet. The pew is hard, and my back is arched so that the entirety of my vision is spent on the blank white ceiling. Slowly a damp patch appears, and I begin to look for meaning from its form, its undeniable beauty. I am favouring the aesthetic over the pragmatic, choosing to ignore the impetus of its creation. This choice I am confronted with resembles the conceit which bounces at the centre of Prosinečki, one of the short stories in Adrian Duncan’s first collection, Midfield Dynamo. In 1977, Pelé named his autobiography My Life and the Beautiful Game. The book’s acknowledgement page reads: “I dedicate this book to all the people who have made this great game the Beautiful Game.” Arguably such beauty is the fulcrum of wonder that imbues the protagonist of Prosinečki, as he dwells on his own style of play in relation to the former Croatian football player, Robert Prosinečki. It is rare to see sport dealt with in fiction, if at all. The story first appeared in The Stinging Fly, edited by Sally Rooney, whose editorial style is detectable in the accessible intimacy and immediacy that permeates the prose. Duncan, knowing that Rooney is a football fan, submitted the story upon hearing of her being invited as a guest editor. This is the third release from Duncan with The Lilliput Press. Midfield Dynamo follows Love Notes from a German Building Site (2019) and A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020). Both draw heavily from Duncan’s training as an engineer before embarking upon an education in artmaking and writing. This is Duncan’s first collection of short stories. They are arranged in the formation of a soccer team in “the somewhat old-fash-
ioned: 1-4-4-2.” Defence, Midfield and Upfront. Each story is given a field position based on a perceived personality. While this might at first seem novelty (and it is, partially), it is revelatory in so far as it provokes the thought that there is an element of the autobiographical present. A story about a struggling, ‘failed’ artist named Vincent, About the Weight of a Bucket Salt takes the coach position, as the final text in the book. Vincent’s story, the only text in third person, looms over preceding texts as a cautionary tale on being too precious about ideals as a young artist, whilst being a razorsharp critique of the messiness that entangles relationships in the art world. Oblique critique is at the core of the ‘up front’ positions. In We Too Have Wind-blown Plazas, an engineer who has emigrated to Abu Dhabi forces Duncan to come face to face with the scale of exploitation that underpins the construction of many of the city’s high-rise buildings. Having befriended his boss, the protagonist is witness to (and participant within) a drug-infused orgy with his employer, all in the same 24 hours as seeing the body of a worker splitting in half in front of him. The absurdity which Duncan displays in his writing is well nestled in the genre of horror. Some stories seem to catch the writer realising that his characters are expendable, that they are after all most certainly fictional, they can do things that real people couldn’t possibly do, or could they? In Houses by the Sea, Finn befriends a local named Leonard. When Leonard’s life takes a dangerous boozy downward spiral, Finn stands back to let it all unfold, even when Leonard is close to death. The assumed humanity of Finn is sucked out of the character suddenly and somewhat inexplicably. A common point of connection between all these stories is a moment of violent upheaval. For
the most part, these characters are utterly detestable; their relationships seem to make spectacle of the complicated and aggressive reality of toxic masculinity. When I return to my bed there is a football match playing on the communal television. I take out my laptop to conclude the review when I notice that many of the nurses watch on as Christian Eriksen collapses on the pitch and is resuscitated all on camera. They stand around the television in shock with their hands over their mouths. Meanwhile, in the same room, behind their backs, a man, my roommate, is slowly dying of too many illnesses to list. I think that there is something to be said about framing – how the frame might reinforce the image of a certain violence, and that this is relevant to the book, but I cannot quite figure out how, exactly. This collection is engrossing, seductive, deeply terrifying, and an absolute must-read for artists, engineers and those of us with a love for the beautiful game; at times, a terrible beauty.
Frank Wasser is an Irish artist and writer who lives and works in London.
Fingal County Council’s Arts Office is delighted to present
New considerations of familiar settings Curated by Marysia Wieckiewicz Carroll
Guest Niamh McCann, Not Tycho’s but Collin’s nose, 2018, bronze
To book a ticket visit www.newbridgehouseandfarm.com For further information visit www.fingalarts.ie
Ella de Burca Eithne Jordan Barbara Knežević Niamh McCann Helen O’Leary Niamh O’Malley Liliane Puthod Alice Rekab with Louise Meade Katie Watchorn Emma Wolf-Haugh
Newbridge House 4 June — 19 Sept 2021
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Project Profile
Mergemerge BRIAN FAY INTERVIEWS MICHAEL GEDDIS AND JOANNA KIDNEY ABOUT THEIR LONG-RUNNING COLLABORATIVE DRAWING PROJECT. Brian Fay: A standard dynamic in drawing is the making of marks onto a blank surface. When drawing over the work of others, how does this differ and what is at stake? Joanna Kidney: At the start of a drawing, which Michael has initiated and passed to me, I generally make my response in either the negative spaces or the openings in his forms. I tend not to work over his drawing in this early phase. The additions I make either echo the existing patterns and shapes or introduce a varied range of marks. If what he has drawn is already a well-formed structure, I can find it difficult to find a ‘way in’ to the drawing. My additions in these instances tend to arise from experimentation and chance. At this early stage of the drawing, there is little at stake. Later on, when the drawing has grown and matured, there is obviously more to lose. Though sometimes risky, continuing to work instinctively is important for me in maintaining a dynamic quality to our drawings. Michael Geddis: In my solo work, I never erase or rework marks made. When working with Joanna, I adopted this form of editing, in order to assist with integrating our contributions into viable compositions. In our most recent work, by necessity, Joanna initiated all the drawings by laying down encaustic surfaces for me to inscribe marks into. At first glance, they often resembled slightly tinted and textured blank pages. However, after a bit of looking, I could usually discern hints or fragments of forms and patterns in their subtle but interesting surfaces. I much preferred these helpful prompts to the totally sterile blank pages that we worked on earlier in the project. BF: Could you discuss the need for a taxonomy of drawings, as you worked collaboratively? MG: The taxonomy, based on key visual characteristics, enabled us to systematically sort and classify our initial output of over 200 small drawings. As a result of this analysis, we were able to develop an agreed list of generic descriptors relating to both successful and unsuccessful drawings. Up until this point, our investigation into the process of jointly making intuitive drawings had been entirely open-ended. Whilst not intended to be prescriptive, the list of descriptors for successful drawings provided a useful framework to focus this activity. Our descriptors for unsuccessful drawings were also a valuable tool. We used them to spot ‘dead-ender’ drawings that were likely to prove unsuccessful at an earlier stage, which allowed us to make much better use of our time. JK: Using taxonomy to define and categorise a body of work was a new and fascinating approach for me. Michael introduced it about two years into the project. We’d been intentionally communicating almost entirely through visual means until then, which had enabled us to assimilate each other’s visual vocabulary. The large number of drawings we made during this time were varied and experimental in content; the taxonomy was brilliantly succinct in taking stock of them. BF: Scale is important in drawing, as it has implications for gesture, marks and relations with our own bodies. In the case of collaborative work, how did you decide what scale to work at, and how did this impact the drawings? JK: We began the project with many small-scale drawings to allow us to get to know each other’s language, to be experimental with techniques and materials, and to be able to send the initial drawings to each other via the post. After taking stock of the strengths and weaknesses of this series of drawings, it was a natural progression to move up in scale and so we began making larger drawings on paper. We took the same
approach for the encaustic works, making a large number of 30 x 30cm works, before embarking on the 1 x 1m scale, and the concertina folded drawings. The larger works developed over a longer period of time, involving more passes between us to conclude. This generated exciting results in terms of visual depth and complexity.
opacity – each holding parts of the drawing within. The combination of layering and scraping creates an optical depth containing fragments of the drawing, sometimes only faintly visible. It should be noted that Michael has remained extraordinarily tolerant of my brutal erasure and subtraction habits throughout the collaboration!
MG: The larger scale definitely supported more protracted and developed visual conversations. I also like the way that the larger drawings totally fill the visual field of viewers, as they stand at a comfortable viewing distance. This effectively immerses them in our drawings and enhances their experience of the work. During the course of the project, under Joanna’s influence, my drawing became slightly less figurative and more abstract. Such gestural marks were not possible with the larger encaustic panels because I was using surgical instruments to incise my marks into their surfaces. These tools are designed for precision and do not lend themselves readily to making large sweeping marks.
MG: I am very drawn to the intriguing visual properties of drawings layered in translucent wax and find the illusion of optical depth particularly fascinating. I enjoyed experimenting with fineness of line and colour to optimise this illusion. In the large encaustic drawings, successive layers of wax and drawings act like multiple geological strata by imparting a timeline and a sense of sequence. It is possible to peer deep into the wax and find tiny ‘fossilised’ fragments that subsequently evolved into drawings in the upper layers. The unique properties of encaustic and Joanna’s accomplishment at manipulating it allowed us to develop highly complex multiple-layered drawings that would probably be unachievable (or undecipherable) using other mediums.
BF: Could you talk about the properties of chance and control in these collaborative works? MG: My drawings all start the same way – I spend a lot of time visualising in fine detail what I will draw before I start. This is possibly a habit that I picked up when I was in veterinary practice and spent many hours visualising detailed anatomical structures before completing orthopaedic operations. For me, these initial visualisations are entirely intuitive. In the case of our collaborative work, each time I receive a drawing back with Joanna’s changes, I regard it as a completely new drawing and repeat the process of visualisation using it as a starting point. JK: Chance has always played a role in my work. It ties in with possibility, discovery and the unknown. Michael’s controlled methodology was one of the foremost reasons I chose to work with him. When Michael passes me back one of our drawings, I need to get to know it afresh before I start working on it. My additions generally work against the organised structure and defined forms characteristic of his additions. This tension between our differences energises the drawings and is a key aspect of our collaboration.
Brian Fay is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and Visual Culture at Technological University Dublin. brianfayartist.com
Dr. Michael Geddis, based in Northern Ireland, is a visual artist/retired veterinary surgeon specialising in very finely detailed drawing. michaelgeddisart.co.uk
Joanna Kidney is based in Wicklow. Her practice is a continual enquiry of an abstract vocabulary through drawing and the expansion of drawing into paint and space. joannakidney.com
‘Mergemerge’ will be exhibited at Ballinglen Arts Foundation from 2 to 30 July 2021 and at Mermaid Arts Centre in 2022.
BF: How did your approach to drawing, sequential elements and surfaces alter when you used the folded concertina format? MG: We adopted two distinct approaches using the concertina format. In one, the entire concertina was visible to both of us all the time. In the other, previous drawings were obscured with wrapping. In the latter, the only prompt for each of us was a tiny piece of the most recent drawing that had continued slightly onto the next blank surface. With both approaches, I found drawing on the concertinas to be an artistically emancipating experience. JK: The process of making the concertina drawings together was completely different from making the two-dimensional drawings. For me, the format invited a greater degree of imagination and playfulness. There was an ease with making these drawings, akin to doodling. With the folded format, we were working largely from memory of the hidden additions each of us had previously made. This memory speaks to narrative and sequence, which are integral to this format. BF: How important is the idea of layering to the collaborative encaustic drawings? JK: The encaustic drawings evolved through adding many layers of paint – with varying degrees of translucency and
Michael Geddis and Joanna Kidney, Concertina 3 (detail), 20cm x 145cm, pencil and pastel on paper, 2018-2020
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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Project Profile
I Know, But Only Just CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT AND RUBY WALLIS CONTINUE THEIR COLLABORATIVE PROJECT.
I do have some quite nice jars I like the idea of there being a few of them, different shapes and sizes, you know, like the way Victorians always had jars of weird life forms and things. There’s probably a name for that, but I don’t know what it is ʘ I watched it with fascination as it circled around the light, wavering, floating and rising, then the tiny animal changed direction and flew straight to me, all of a sudden there it was, a fragile frame, curled up on my chest ʘ Yesterday I was working on a scene in my book where a girl climbs onto a table at school to get into a box that’s on top of a cupboard in the classroom ʘ I miss being able to meet up ʘ Greeks and Romans placed great importance on the healing powers of cabbage ʘ Deviancy! I love that word ʘ I was able to study its minute velvety body in detail, it folded its wings and relaxed, we sat there together for quite a while I remember glowing with the feeling of it ʘ I also find the image of a woman holding a box really powerful ʘ She shrieked, took a tissue and pulled it from my nightdress. I was so surprised by her reaction ʘ I suppose that’s also what I mean by fluidity ʘ Boxes are so evocative, holding things, secrets, womb-like, cave-like, internal ʘ I hope you are having a good day, the beautiful sunshine was distracting yesterday ʘ The deep, rich, red purple colour of the beet symbolizes the heart, blood, and love ʘ It could be fun to play Exquisite Corpse, I know you can play with drawings, words, photography too ʘ There’s something really nice about sitting in silence with someone both working away on something - like the way women used to do embroidery together, you’re in your own worlds and side by side, there’s something really female about that, I thought and the odd little things we’d come out with now and then ʘ Please save anything stained you have, even old stains ʘ It can be nice to go just around the back of Henry Street by the canal and eat them ʘ Meret Oppenheim, Mona Hatoum & Eva Hesse ʘ When I was doing the mandala one day I thought about how nice it would feel if you were at the table doing one too ʘ Gold leaf is lovely - maybe we could put it on our ears! ʘ Hopefully I’m wrong ʘ I love the strange hybrid entities that emerge from the Exquisite Corpse procedure - I really like the series the Chapman brother’s did. Hybrid forms are kind of interesting actually ʘ trying to find octopus tentacles, first because of the ink and also because they are so completely weird ʘ I was looking at photos of Louise Brooks when she was older, she had ever such long hair ʘ I felt pretty low and apathetic yesterday but realized I’m pre-menstrual too, all edgy ʘ One is like a baboon, another like a bird - I forget the third animal - and another is human ʘ I’m drawn to the idea of keeping the ‘I’ out of it too, or at least the ‘I’ that is me ʘ If the weather is OK tomorrow evening do you want to have a beer and some fish and chips? ʘ Hannah Höch made some great collages ʘ Also gathering some ideas on stains, cuttlefish ink, wine, berries, etc... ʘ Like the Eve story, there is also the issue of ‘female curiosity’ at work in this myth - and that’s something I’ve been thinking about in various contexts recently, including in surrealist thinking and in the Tanning work specifically, as you know ʘ Wouldn’t it be great to be half animal? ʘ (I remember I daubed my ears with gold for your 40th birthday - ears look good gold) ʘ One evening after being bathed, powdered, brushed and tucked tightly into bed, I was sitting up, and in flew a tiny flickering dark winged creature ʘ I’ve been looking at the word jar, because I was thinking about how we say something ‘jars’ to describe something incongruous or unsettling, and ‘ajar’ which refers to something neither open nor closed - and again, something at variance ʘ The results are quite interesting ʘ I feel like I’m being slowly backed further and further into a corner sometimes ʘ having a big tail would be amazing ʘ I am too tired to say anything very sensible - I think the antibiotics make me a bit sleepy - do they do that? ʘ Thinking of the hidden, the energy released, and the dynamic of the opening ʘ Some energy, irreversible, from the box (This idea of havoc released also resonates with our current virus experience) ʘ A closed box is so exciting, and I love to see them - they were so magical as a child and some of that magic has endured ʘ I feel like bustling about and seeing a few faces! ʘ How much longer do you think it will go on for? ʘ Making quite a mess here, like a kid with mud pies - squashing grapes, etc ʘ It’s sort of slow and very present, and totally impossible at the moment!! ʘ The sounds of our feet ʘ ʘ ʘ
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Project Profile
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‘I Know, But Only Just’ is an ongoing project, first published in Winter Papers Vol. 6, 2020 with a second audio-visual iteration for ‘View Source’, curated by Fallow Media and commissioned by Solas Nua, Washington, 2021. winterpapers.com solasnua.org
Ruby Wallis is a visual artist and lectures at Burren College of Art. Wallis is a recent recipient of a Visual Arts Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. rubywallis.com
Claire-Louise Bennett is the author of Pond, Fish Out of Water, and Checkout 19. Images: Top left, bottom right & bottom left: stills from I Know, But Only Just, 2021, stop motion video, 3.5 minutes; Middle left: Foldings, 2020, photomontage 36 x 45 cm. Top right: Tearings, 2020, photomontage, 36 x 24cm. All images © and courtesy the artists.
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Project Profile
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Array Collective, Pride, 2019; photograph by Laura O’Connor, courtesy Array and Tate Press Office.
Joanne Laws: We were thrilled to hear that Array has been nominated for this year’s Turner Prize, along with four other UK-based art collectives. Do you have a sense of the work that led to your nomination?
The North is Now JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS MEMBERS OF THE BELFASTBASED ART COLLECTIVE, ARRAY.
Emma Campbell: It still does feel very bizarre when people congratulate us! As far as we understood from the jurors this year, they were specifically trying to look at arts collectives who had in some way kept up a version of their practice during lockdown, perhaps around issues of community cohesion. They also mentioned the ‘Jerwood Collaborate!’ exhibition we did in London, but to be honest, our social media presence seems to have been a big part of it. We were also asked to do a video for A-N, because they had a special series on artists and social change, which the jurors mentioned. Clodagh Lavelle: Normally nominations are based on an exhibition that has happened previously, but because no galleries were really open last year, it focused on groups who were still visibly trying to work together in isolation. We created videos together, made online work and kept that sense of community alive through birthday nights and dress-up Zooms like the QFT screening of the DUP Opera, for example. JL: What was the rationale for originally establishing the Array collective? Did you have any founding principles, in terms of your collective identity, or how you might define a discourse or build communities for your collaborative practice? EC: It happened organically at first, because there are lots of overlaps between friendship, art practice and community practice, but also because we were all just at the same rallies and protests. It wasn’t as if we were dropping into another community to speak on behalf of anyone else; all
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
of us were in some way directly affected by the stuff we were protesting about, like equal marriage and abortion rights. A couple of people from Array were running an activist stall, while others were doing stuff with Outburst and Pride, but it wasn’t until we were asked to do the Jerwood exhibition in London, that we began to formalise our work. CL: For the Jerwood show, we realised that we were a collective, rather than just 11 people putting in a lot of work. We didn’t talk about our values before that because they were implicit in some ways, but we did write a statement for the Jerwood exhibition and organised a symposium with ‘house rules’ which outlined being respectful to one another and having the craic, whilst talking about some serious issues. We’re all about hospitality and activism and karaoke and food and dancing and acting the maggot! JL: The political situation in Northern Ireland is central to your projects, which often take the form of public processions, rallies and material activism on issues like reproductive rights or equal marriage. What is the role of art in giving visibility to national conversations such as these? EC: I think art was really central to the campaign for abortion rights particularly. I think what works really well at protests are these kind of repetitive motifs – like Leanne Dunne’s repeal jumper, for example – which people can very easily identify with, as part of a larger community. Artists can also bring a bit more reflection and nuance to conversations on sometimes difficult issues. Because these issues are so serious and traumatic for many people, it’s nice to be able to have something that can lighten the load a little bit with a sense of humour. I think colour and spectacle is really key. It’s been important for social movements for hundreds of years, when you think of trade unionist banners or Suffragettes banners, the Irish rebellion and so forth. However, none of us are under any illusions that it’s the art that makes the change. We are very aware that we are a small part of much larger movements, where there’s a lot going on. JL: Many of Array’s members have backgrounds in artist-led spaces, most notably as former directors of Catalyst Arts in
Project Profile Belfast. Has this artist-led grounding and DIY ethos has shaped your working methods? EC: Neither of us have been involved with Catalyst but others have. The unpaid directorships can make them inaccessible for some, but others gained good insight and experience. Array are careful enough to not take on work that would push us beyond our reasonable capabilities as a group. We’ve made decisions to decline work before, just because we thought we couldn’t take it on, since it might not be good for everybody’s mental health or whatever. Lots of us are involved in community activist organisations, some work with young people, a number of us work with Household, and these kinds of things inform what we do. CL: And the culture is definitely changing, as we are becoming more aware of artists working for free. The labour exchange model of days gone by – “I’ll help you out, you help me out” – has lessened as we have more life commitments, homes, children etc. There can be a lot of burn-out in the arts, especially within that model of working and it limits who can take part as well. The whole Turner thing is a big deal, and it came as a surprise. One of the things we have for this project is a self-care/mental health message thread, in case anyone finds it too overwhelming, so that we can be there to support each other. EC: We’re very clear with each other that we don’t expect everyone to be putting in 100% all of the time. That’s one of the joys of having 11 of us. People have multiple day jobs and caring responsibilities, so it’s very much about making accommodations for that and making sure that nobody feels too much under pressure. There’s also something in the safety of being with your people – the kind of people you don’t feel like you have to explain yourself to all the time. JL: It’s worth considering the dynamic of friendship – which, historically, has sustained all kinds of co-ops, collectives and artist-led projects. While artistic collaboration, peer support and shared labour are all central to the process of making things public, it is friendship and the desire for collectivity – the parties, shared meals and common interests – that allows
these things to endure. Are you all good friends? CL: I think that is absolutely key. We enjoy each other’s company and have a deep love and respect for each other. Because of the culture of doing everything for nothing, you could so easily give it all up, if you were driving each other soft. We drink together, we dance together, we enjoy sparking off each other and coming up with ideas and all of that is definitely rooted in friendship and care for each other – that’s more important than anything else. Yes, our careers as artists are important to us, but our relationships and love for each other is key. EC: And I think that even extends beyond the 11 of us in Array. We don’t just lift up each other’s work; we also want to share with our other friends in the community and draw attention to other people and bring them onboard. There’s something really welcoming about the arts community in Belfast. It’s really small and supportive and there’s generally a sense of camaraderie and pulling each other through some awful shit as well, not just the cultural backdrop of being in the north but also what Clodagh was talking about – this idea of being instrumentalised for your labour as an artist and the precariousness of our spaces. Even at a base level, Array have been my childcare on occasion; we’ve been through many life events together and it’s nice to have our art family.
Array Collective are a group of individual artists rooted in Belfast, who join together to create collaborative actions in response to the socio-political issues affecting Northern Ireland. arraystudiosbelfast.com
The Turner Prize exhibition will take place at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry from 29 September 2021 to 12 January 2022, as part of the UK City of Culture 2021 celebrations. The winner will be announced on 1 December 2021 at an award ceremony at Coventry Cathedral broadcast on the BBC. theherbert.org
Array Collective and Friends, The North is Now (one week after decriminalisation), 2020; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy Array and Tate Press Office
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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Project Profile
‘Luminous Void: Twenty Years of Experimental Film Society’, installation view, Project Arts Centre; photograph by Rouzbeh Rashidi, courtesy the artists and Project Arts Centre.
Matt Packer: The Experimental Film Society (EFS) was founded in Tehran, four years before your move to Dublin. To what extent did these different contexts alter your vision for EFS?
Luminous Void MATT PACKER INTERVIEWS ROUZBEH RASHIDI, FOUNDER OF THE EXPERIMENTAL FILM SOCIETY.
Rouzbeh Rashidi: In 2000 I founded the Experimental Film Society. I made films in Iran until 2004 and then I moved to Ireland. During my filmmaking adventures in Iran, I would organise private screenings of new work (my movies and films by others) for friends and peers. During that time, I realised that you could not expect any support from film festivals or government agencies. If you want to survive, you must create the culture you want to be part of and build it yourself from scratch. Naturally, it is not a one-person job, so an experimental film collective was needed to achieve this goal. When I came to Dublin, I continued making films. As time passed, I came into contact with like-minded filmmakers in Ireland, and EFS started to grow again. Although an international entity, it must be admitted that the Middle East and Ireland form the two definite geographical poles of EFS. Arriving in Ireland, I found myself in a similar situation to what I had experienced in Iran: Irish film history can boast a few notable figures in experimental film, but there was never a substantial tradition of alternative cinema. Nothing was happening I could relate to or fit into as a filmmaker. Therefore, creating the safety and infrastructure of EFS was the only way for me to survive, both as an avant-garde artist and immigrant at the same time. MP: One of the things that interests me about EFS is the relationship between the ‘institution’ of EFS and its constituent filmmakers. You have been very active in writing about your work, self-organising screening programmes, and publishing anthologies of the EFS back catalogue. There’s a comprehensive, self-appointed, institutional ‘apparatus’ that surrounds your work as filmmakers that seems to be driven by more than just the
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
pragmatics of promoting and distributing your work? RR: I am not a writer; I am only a filmmaker and nothing else. But I write my ideas to contextualise and support my work. I find it very constructive to create a literature of ideas about what I do. All of us at EFS are engaged with the craft of filmmaking and are filmmakers first and foremost. But we are also animated by a passion for film history; our films are constantly interacting with, incorporating, or ingesting the history of film directly or indirectly in a creative and mysterious love affair. Therefore, a platform to discuss this has become necessary. After more than two decades of making and screening films, I came to the realisation that I need to explain myself in critical terms to survive as an artist. And by ‘survive’, I mean to continue making and screening films. EFS has organically created an underground niche for itself, but the type of work it produces is still fragile and emerging, as far as its visibility is concerned. For a long time, I felt the work should speak for itself, but I have seen that frank and, if necessary, controversial discussions around it have only had positive outcomes. Therefore I have decided to systematically write about what I do in my films, what I think about cinema in general, and how I feel about the work of others. MP: Historically, there’s been a lot of discussion about definitions of cinema, film, video, which have in turn been channeled through the separate discourses of film and visual art respectively. I’m not sure I want to rehearse these arguments here, but I do think it’s interesting that you’re currently presenting the work of EFS within a visual arts exhibitionary context at Project Arts Centre. To what extent are you interested in these different conditions of presentation – the exhibition, the screening etc. – in terms of how they ‘perform’ the work itself ? RR: For me as a filmmaker, the most important thing is to refute the fact held by many, that the invention of cinema is now fully formed and complete. Consequently, I never
Project Profile believed that cinema only exists in traditional screenings and presentations such as in theatres. At the same time, I never accepted that cinematic material presented within a visual arts exhibitionary context betrays their cinematic DNA. I am always interested in discovering and finding out how a cinematic project can inhabit a space. It all depends on how you present, weaponise, juxtapose and orchestrate your projects. Every film I ever made began as an exhaustively plotted narrative in its primordial stage. By the time it was rendered, filtered and materialised through me, it had lost its original form, context and even purpose. What remains is an unexplained ancient artefact in the form of an apparition – an eolith with the free will to cast a spell – a ritualistic experience for the audience designed by the filmmaker. Hence, I always seek a traditional or non-traditional space to present these works, as long as I am committed to the idea of ‘cinema’ itself. MP: I’d like to turn to your film work, specifically your ‘Homo Sapiens Project’ (2011-ongoing), which is a kind of vast compilation ‘framework’ of shorter video pieces. It’s a mammoth project, both in terms of its scope and undertaking. I’m interested in the way that ‘HSP’ renders the human body with a certain elasticity, both as an ambivalent subject of the lens and also in the act of viewership – an engagement which can only ever feel partial and insignificant when faced with the work’s totality. RR: Perhaps if I provide some of the reasons I decided to create the ‘Homo Sapiens Project’, it would somehow answer your question. I began by asking a fundamental and yet simple question: what is the notion and existence of cinema in the 21st century? Form, in my view, is the most essential and vital part of cinema. When you conceive a unique form, then narrative (and I believe all cinema is narrative to a degree), drama, or story can be articulated with it. Then I realised that I needed a system that provided me with the ability to engage with filmmaking on a technical level, such as experimenting with different camera formats, lenses, filters and apparatus. I also wanted to eliminate the name, identity and even purpose
of each instalment without having the pressure of putting them in the circulation of screening and distribution. This agenda perhaps correlated with my continuing existential grasp of immigration. The films one makes are nothing but the haunting shadows and lights of the movies that one has seen in the past. There is no original film, except for the very first ones by the medium’s pioneers. Therefore I decided to render all my experiments through the prism of science-fiction and horror cinema, because they are the foundation of my upbringing as a cinephile and discovery of the medium. Finally, I wanted to create a project that I would forget about immediately on the spot, even while in the process of making it. Due to the massive production rate of the work, I can’t remember making much of it. What this amnesia has not swallowed up seems to exist in an artificial memory, as if implanted in my mind by someone else without my knowledge. The whole project seems so alien and distant. I always dreamed about having a secret underground cinematic life in my work, like a metaphorical secret addiction. If my feature films can be seen as a day job to earn a living, I created ‘Homo Sapiens Project’ as a private nightlife to feed my addiction to filmmaking. They serve no purpose, and I could comfortably live without them. The sheer volume of instalments in this series makes it impossible for audiences to watch all of them, yet I still plan to continue making them. Matt Packer is the Director of Eva International. eva.ie
Rouzbeh Rashidi is an Iranian-Irish filmmaker and founder of the Experimental Film Society. rouzbehrashidi.com
The exhibition, ‘Luminous Void: Twenty Years of Experimental Film Society’, ran at Project Arts Centre from 13 May to 25 June. A book of the same name was also launched in late 2020, which can be ordered on the EFS website. projectartscentre.ie
Maximillian Le Cain & Vicky Langan, Inside, 2017; film still courtesy the artists and EFS.
Atoosa Pour Hosseini, Kinetics, 2018; film still courtesy the artist and EFS.
Maximillian Le Cain, Whale Skull, 2019; film still courtesy the artist and EFS.
Atoosa Pour Hosseini, Refining the Senses, 2016; film still courtesy the artist and EFS.
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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Career Development
Light and Shadow JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS ARTIST CIARA ROCHE ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF HER PAINTING PRACTICE. Joanne Laws: Can you discuss what have you been working on during lockdown? Did you have access to your studio? Ciara Roche: I consider myself to be so lucky that my studio is in my parents converted garage, which is just a few minutes’ walk from where I live, so I had access to my studio throughout the pandemic. I spent all of my time there making many small paintings but also testing larger scales and really pushing myself with what it was that I was painting. I had a lot of failures in the studio but success also came. The paintings made during this time were for two shows in particular – ‘of late…’ in Mother’s Tankstation and ‘Ochre’ in Wexford Arts Centre. Just as the pandemic hit, I was starting to really think about what it was I wanted to say to the world. I remembered a trip to Kildare Village a few weeks before; I was there with four friends, and we were all browsing luxury bits. I was particularly taken with some top of the range bedsheets and then it hit me – at the time, all of us were still living at home with our parents. I cannot afford health insurance and have no pension plans. Did I really want those bedsheets or did the world just make me think I did because the acquirement of stuff is a measure of your success when the things that normally mean success are unattainable? I don’t have a dependable income or a home of my own, but it’s ok I have every shade of this Charlotte Tilbury lipstick. I started thinking about this in relation to my painting. I can make beautiful paintings and I wanted to challenge the idea of what I can or should paint – what deserved to be painted? I began with paintings of lingerie shops (the perfect body); appliance stores (the perfect home); and Ikea showrooms – would the viewer see the ideal home set up, or the fact that this is not a real home? In a way, the isolation of the pandemic helped in the making of this work. I felt like I was just doing it for myself and nobody else was ever going to see them, so I might as well make multiple paintings of shiny, sexy, disgusting stuff !
JL: Your paintings are being shown concurrently in several venues: ‘of late…’, your solo show at Mother’s Tankstation; ‘Ochre’ a two-person exhibition with Emma Roche at Wexford Arts Centre; ‘HOME: Being and Belonging in Contemporary Ireland’, a group show at The Glucksman; and ‘MEET’, a group show in Periphery Space. What can you tell us about these different bodies of work? CR: ‘of late…’ at Mother’s Tankstation is the body of work made throughout 2020 of places of retail, the paintings made in the first two lockdowns – paintings coming from a place of anger at first but progressing to some really fun paintings. Allowing humour and cheek into the work, it ended up being the most enjoyable body of work to make. They can also be read in terms of the lockdown and all the empty public spaces people became so accustomed to. The paintings for ‘Ochre’ were made between January and May of this year. Working with Emma has been a joy. Her paintings are coming from a very different place, since she is at the stage of rearing a young family and she brings her own experience into the work. Her paintings focus on a lack of time with a heavy dose of reality. We would bounce work off each other; I have continued to paint objects of desire for the attainment of the perfect lifestyle – nutribullets, Tom Ford makeup, sexy yoga gear and spaces for idle time with a heavy dose of superficiality! The paintings in ‘HOME’ were made in Sydney, Australia, when I lived there in 2019, and depict the bar, café and restaurant that I first felt at home in. It fits with the show, as
it is a representation of the huge numbers in my generation (and previous generations) who have emigrated to Australia. After the intensity of preparing work for ‘of late…’ and ‘Ochre’, I felt I needed to do something a little different for a while and the latest works for ‘MEET’ are paintings of my place and with some of my people appearing in them. I feel that ‘MEET’ is a safe space in which to test these works that I have not shown before; it’s exciting that they are different to all the other paintings currently on show. JL: Can you outline some of your current work or upcoming projects? CR: At the moment, I am making some paintings with figures in them. These are a continuation of the works in ‘MEET’ and really just experiments and a break from retailheavy work. I plan to take some time over the summer to feed my practice by visiting places of interest for the purposes of research. I have the beginnings of some new paintings in my mind, and I am very excited about spending prolonged time in the studio testing and pushing the work. I feel like my recent paintings are just the beginning and that I have so much more to say. Ciara Roche is a painter based in County Wexford. Her solo exhibition, ‘of late…’, continues at Mother’s Tankstation until 3 July. motherstankstation.com
JL: In many of your paintings there is a heavy emphasis on light and shadow; can you outline the importance of this for your practice? CR: I have always been obsessed with painting light. Previous bodies of work have all been around natural light, exploring the effects of certain painted lights on different scenes – how light is read in terms of narrative. Some have explored the difference in painting cold Irish light and the heightened Australian light. More recent paintings of retail interiors play up the notion of seductive artificial lighting to draw the viewer in and then when I have your attention with the beautifully painted light, then you can really look at what is being painted. I also love the challenge of rendering light, as it is really all about colour and I think in colour. JL: The lack of figures in your paintings and the focus on structure suspends many of your pieces in time. How do you see temporality as a factor in your process? CR: Leaving figures out also helps to let the viewer in. I rarely paint figures so the viewer can inhabit the scene themselves, imagine themselves there. I never want figures in the paintings of public places – parks, cafés, shops – places for idleness, as I want the viewer to insert themselves and create a moment, to let their own thoughts fill the scene. I have painted people in my own home and I think these paintings work as this is a barrier to the viewer. There is already a figure there and you cannot come in now, as this is my private space, and these are my people. You can watch but cannot partake, since this is a moment set in reality – the time did exist and there were witnesses.
Ciara Roche, SMEGS, 2020, oil on canvas, 40cm x 50cm; image courtesy of the artist.
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Career Development
Working Interdependently RACHEL BOTHA OUTLINES RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN HER CURATORIAL PRACTICE. HOW DO YOU become a curator? How does a curator see
your work? These are frequent questions in the regular mentoring sessions I have with members of The Douglas Hyde Gallery’s Student Forum. Talking to the participants brings me back to that time of uncertainty after college. I remember knowing that I wanted to work in the arts but had no idea what I wanted to do. Your circumstances, at a certain time, determine the opportunities you can avail of. I was on the dole when unpaid internships were rampant, and it was the only way to gain any gallery experience – those days are hopefully behind us. Part-time arts-related work in Poetry Ireland and Fire Station Artists’ Studios gave important insights into the officebased and organisational aspects of the arts sector. I met real poets and artists in these positions, chatting in the canteen about looming deadlines and the pressures of working on a publication or exhibition – everyone was very busy. I am very thankful for these entry positions into arts organisations, but I knew that I wanted to do something more creative. I was also aware that I could be very easily lured in by even a sliver of stability in Dublin. So I signed up for a two-year directorship at Catalyst Arts, an artist-led organisation in Belfast. It’s been an absolute whirlwind, and anything seems possible when working with a team who are so passionate and ambitious. That said, this year we’ve been having serious discussions about worklife balance and the impact of running a busy programme – conversations which relate to the arts sector as a whole. This issue of perpetual ‘busyness’ only really came to light when we were forced to stop. Talking to colleagues, friends and peers about the harsh reality of working in the arts and the lack of infrastructure for care demonstrates a precarity that leaves the arts community anxious, exhausted and competitive. So how can we create an arts sector that we want to work in? What change and support is needed? The Provost’s Curatorial Fellowship is an opportunity for a Trinity graduate of the last five years. I am acutely aware of the privilege of this position – I receive a salary, which means
I have financial stability for twelve months. It is crucial for me to use this precious time to explore, understand and adhere to the values I wish to embed in my practice. My self-directed research focuses on the concept of interdependence and working collaboratively in terms of the artist curator relationship. I am understanding this from the broader context of ‘the commons’, in building a resilient and sustainable human network. The exhibition, ‘Common or Garden’ at Catalyst Arts – Leah’s Corbett’s Director Show – has grounded this thinking and sparked further research. I have enrolled in online courses such as ‘Contradictions of Capital, Curating, and Care’ with Sascia Bailer at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and ‘Art as Politics!’ with Maria Hlavajova, the director of BAK in Utrecht. I am taking an enquiry-led, conversation-driven research approach and interviewing artists and curators. The findings will be collated in a small publication, kindly funded by ArtLinks, Kilkenny County Council Arts Office. Undertaking the Emerging Curator in Residence programme at the Kilkenny Arts Office was a unique opportunity for me to curate a series of exhibitions in my hometown. I felt a real sense of pride about this residency; it was a rare chance for my family to see what I actually do, as opposed to hearing about how busy I am. However, I was also quite nervous about returning to a place that I know but have fallen out of sync with. Ian Maleney’s book of essays, Minor Monuments, talks about the experience of becoming a ‘voyeur’ in your own hometown – when you leave and return, you don’t always see the place in the same way. The residency was supposed to be six months but ended up spanning a year, with the artists and I benefitting from a fallow period of research and review. A solo exhibition with local artist Robert Dunne, titled ‘(the site + ruin)’, ran from 10 April to 1 May. Due to restrictions, the exhibition could only be engaged through the windows of 76-77 John Street Lower, but in the end, this suited the concept. Robert is drawn to the in-between spaces; take for example the vacant shops on High Street that are a part of the city but not in use. Kilken-
Robert Dunne, Composite, 2020, wood, plaster, paint, metal, installation view, ‘(the site + ruin)’; Photograph by Kasia Kaminska, courtesy the artist and curator.
ny identifies strongly with its history, yet at the same time, a city has to function as a place to live. This creates a duality of experience; the charm and beauty of the historical juxtaposes with the lived experience of mundane routine. Robert’s work examines the development of the city witnessed through its architecture, from the exposed foundations of the city walls to the chronological layers of building. Through a process of extracting the familiar and reinterpreting this materially, he questions our imprint and demands on a city over time. ‘The limits of my language’ was an exhibition with invited artists Chloe Brenan, Elaine Grainger and Johanna Nulty. With a strong dialogue between the practices through respective mediums of form, sound and film, they each attempt to articulate tacit knowledge, haptic memory and subconscious experience. Working with the artists over the year (and after continuous postponing) it became crucial for the work to be installed in the space, for it to exist beyond the studio and to be shared with the public in some form. However, this exhibition of newly commissioned artworks was simply realised and documented in the Kilkenny Arts Office Gallery, with Elaine Grainger’s work left to be engaged through the windows of 76-77 John Street Lower until Sunday 23 May. In response to this, a souvenir was collaboratively produced with writer Michaela Nash and designers Models & Constructs, to be posted out in an effort to emulate the exhibition experience in printed matter. Over the past year, I have been very fortunate to receive a number of opportunities that have been significant to my career development. Although outcomes have had to be reimagined and adapted because of the circumstances of the pandemic, I have had the immense pleasure to work with amazing artists and practitioners over an extended period of time. I am so grateful for this, and I hope to continue working in a slower and more interdependent ways in the future. Rachel Botha is the Provost’s Curatorial Fellow at The Douglas Hyde Gallery and a Director at Catalyst Arts, Belfast.
Elaine Grainger, ‘the limits of my language’ installation view; Photograph by Brian Creggan, courtesy the artist and curator.
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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Residency Report
Living Island ROSIE MCGURRAN OUTLINES THE EVOLUTION OF THE INISHLACKEN PROJECT, CELEBRATING ITS TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY THIS YEAR.
Mick O’Dea giving a painting demonstration, 2014; photograph courtesy Rosie McGurran.
AFTER READING THREE men on an island by James Mac-
Intyre in 2000, I was inspired by his illustrated story of a summer spent on the small living island of Inishlacken in 1951. He travelled there with fellow artist, George Campbell, on the invitation of their friend and colleague, Gerard Dillon. The three men spent their days drawing and painting, being chased by geese, rowing to Roundstone village for supplies, taking a few pints in the pub and making friends. Their presence on the island was quotidian; painters have long visited the west, particularly Roundstone. Fanfares are few – artists are part of life there. The final pages of the book stopped me in my tracks. Years later, George Campbell and Gerard Dillon had died young, possibly with paintings in their heads. The sadness gave way to an overwhelming sense that I should put artists back on that island. I knew no one locally and had a studio and career in Belfast. In June of that year, I was invited to participate in an artists’ residency in Roundstone. I had been visiting the area since my art college days, unaware of its significance in Irish art history. The two weeks of the residency gave way to further weeks in a rented apartment, and I was quietly becoming anchored in the village. I returned to my home in Belfast, bought a car and packed up my belongings in September. I had secured a lease on the apartment for the winter; I only expected to stay a few months. A small house overlooking the harbour then became my home. The water would reflect on the bedroom ceiling in the mornings; I often felt like I was on a boat. It is only fitting that an artist should want to live in a beautiful place. The natural and built environments of Roundstone and Inishlacken hold many obvious visual delights and other concerns lying beneath the surface. Sitting at the foot of Errisbeg Mountain, overseeing the changing light on the Twelve Bens and Bertraboy Bay, the village is steeped in history, but the constant factor is its beauty. The sun rises behind Inishnee island – at shouting distance in a strong wind – and sets behind the hill, often offering up mackerel skies and a strange low light that illuminates the windows of homes on
Michael Doherty surveying his work, 2018; photograph courtesy Rosie McGurran.
Inishnee. On such occasions, the peculiar light casts the fields there in bright golden brilliance, like a Hollywood film set. In Autumn and late summer, the houses on the village street cast long shadows with streaks of sunlight jabbing over the road into the harbour. These fascinations for light and colour must have also tantalised many other artists before me. Inishlacken continued to fascinate me, as it sat on its rocky perch waiting for artists to visit. In 2001, I established ‘The Inishlacken Project’, a one-day visit with a few painters and supporters, which eventually became an annual week-long residency with artists spending long days and often nights on the island. From a modest start, over two hundred artists have since visited during that mid-summer week. The summer solstice gives optimum time for working in daylight. We have often camped out to watch the bonfires light up on the mainland on St John’s Eve, when the sun never really sets. Artists have worked there in many different art forms, including painting, drawing, performance, photography, sculpture, poetry and musical composition. The island is small – one mile long and three quarters of a mile wide. From Errisbeg, the manmade walls and fields make it look like a giant patchwork quilt, floating in the sea. The island was inhabited until the early sixties. The boreen that circles the island is subsumed by bog and rocks in places. A water tower sits on the rocky highest part of the island, where a broken windmill and overgrown reservoir point to a long-abandoned water system, which was revolutionary in its time. Looking due north from that point, potato drill scars run along fields towards the schoolhouse and small cottage where Gerard Dillon had lived. The grass gives way to the white sand of the beach; a line of stones, maybe once a wall, bejewel the sandy height of a shell midden. It is said that the former landlord’s daughter is buried there. Another notable soul was a Luftwaffe pilot, whose body washed up on the island. He was eventually repatriated by his family after the war. This is all framed by the Twelve Bens in the distance. These mountains change shape and colour constantly, a vexation for many artists or a challenge to some.
The painter Mick O’Dea has long been a temporary islander with us. The beach is one of his main subjects and often he turns his back on the obvious view of the mountains to examine the sand and rocks. He has produced an extensive collection of Inishlacken landscapes, which often feature other artists in the composition. English artist Caroline Wright has set her performance works on the beaches and in the water documenting and presenting her responses in video and drawing. Belfast architect and artist Michael Doherty holds a fervent commitment to plein air drawing and painting; he is prolific and never wastes a moment. Dublin artists Una Sealy and Dorothy Smith have approached the subject of left behind houses and their contents, while also working directly from the landscape. After years of absorbing the island landscape for studio work, I have recently embraced the practice of plein air painting, which has sharpened up my drawing and observation skills. As a group, we have exhibited at Galway Arts Centre, the Linen Hall Library and the Gerard Dillon Gallery in Belfast, Áras Éanna on Inis Oírr, The Red House Arts Center, New York, Clifden Arts Festival and on Inishlacken itself for Culture Night. No one could have foreseen the circumstances and events of annus pandemicus 2020. The pandemic almost put a halt to the annual gathering but in September 2020, a small window opened when a group could go there. The island was perfect for social distancing and the weather held for a few days of much needed island isolation, breaking the months of imposed isolation we had all lived through. The further lockdowns make this year’s ‘Inishlacken Project’ seem like an aspirational dream. We should have been celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the project with another exhibition in Syracuse, but hopefully we will be able to mark it next year. Michael Doherty called me to suggest a twenty first commemoration instead, to celebrate “... a coming of age”, he said. Rosie McGurran is a visual artist based in Roundstone. rosiemcgurran.com
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Residency Report
High Impact BRYAN GERARD DUFFY REPORTS ON HIS EXPERIENCE OF THE INAUGURAL BOLAY RESIDENCY IN THE LINENHALL ARTS CENTRE. IN 2020, THE Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar reached
the significant milestone of 30 years at the heart of the community in Mayo. Unfortunately, the year began on a sad note with the passing of the artist, Veronica Bolay, a friend of the centre and former board member, in January 2020. This was soon followed by closures due to COVID-19 lockdowns. However, the art centre’s response was brave and ambitious. It was a great honour to be the recipient of the inaugural Bolay Residency award at the Linenhall, which was established to honour her life and work. The committee selected me from a pool of ten shortlisted Mayo artists, with the purpose of developing two site-specific artworks in the building. The residency took place over the course of eight weeks between the end of the first lockdown (August 2020) and the beginning of the second Level 5 lockdown (October 2020). At this time, access to the Arts Centre was allowed under the set guidelines; the gallery and coffee shop were open, but all theatre events and workshops were cancelled. It was an opportune time to activate the first visual art residency at the venue, since having an artist working and creating in the centre would bring life back to the building after the long period of lockdown. What was once the community arts room for approximately 20 years became my studio space during this time. And I had the freedom to roam. Funding of €2000 was made available for the development of the work, and free lunch every day for the duration of the residency was one of the surprising (and welcome) perks of the residency. As part of the residency award, I was offered mentorship from Mayo-based artist, Alice Maher. I enjoyed and appreciated every conversation I had with Alice, and I am beyond grateful for her guidance and support. Alice places particular importance on supporting upcoming artists in the county, and nationally. It was a belief held by Veronica Bolay too, as Alice states: “The ‘quiet poetry’ of her work is often written about, but it is the singular focus and absolute dedication she had to her own personal visual language that I think of. She never once passed up an opportunity to help or encourage a younger art-
ist, and this residency aims to fulfil that legacy in the best way possible, by providing time and space for an artist to focus solely on their work.” Bolay was an acclaimed visual artist and a member of Aosdána and the Royal Hibernian Academy who sat on the Board of Directors of the Linenhall spanning a period of 13 years. Former Linenhall Director and Founder, Marie Farrell, who worked with Bolay for many years said: “Veronica Bolay was a great artist, and she was also a very fine human being. In her many years of voluntary service as a member of the Board of the Linenhall Arts Centre, her gentle, firm presence always ensured the work of the artist was at the centre of every decision made. I think it’s fitting that the Linenhall honours her by ensuring that, once again, the work of the artist is at the core of this residency.” No Introductions Needed My experience was made all the more special as Castlebar is my hometown; in fact, my first encounter with the art world was at the Linenhall. I had a solo show, ‘The Fool by the Roadside’, in the main gallery in 2017; I co-facilitated workshops alongside artist Vukasin Nedeljkovic (Asylum Archive), and we had a group show with a number of asylum seekers from direct provision in 2008. I also regularly featured in the popular biannual Mayo Artists Show. I felt right at home from the start. I began the residency in a mode of personal reflection on events that occurred during the first lockdown. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was exploring the ‘in-between spaces’ – buffer zones and safe spaces – of the Occupied Territories of Western Sahara, where political and military activity is prohibited. However, a few weeks into lockdown, my art practice took a dramatic change with events unrelated to my art. My car collided with a train at an unmanned Irish Rail crossing. I did not hear or see the train until I was on the tracks; by then it was too late. How the accident occurred is less relevant at this moment in comparison to the fact that I
survived something I really shouldn’t have. Some newspapers called me the “Miracle Man”, while social media commentators called me “blind”, asking “how can you not see a train coming?” The car is now a write-off, and the shattered car windows have become a significant feature in the direction of my art practice. Site-specific Artworks I began to contemplate: (1) the process of the split-second ‘bracing for impact’ from the train; (2) the deconstruction / reconstruction of society; and (3) the airbag as a buffer zone. In the midst of this, the Black Lives Matters movement gained traction, as statues of colonisers and slave traders were being torn down. The whole of lockdown became a series of deconstructions, as we attempted to find elements of familiarity, routine and normality. I started to reflect on my family legacy of Duffy’s Photography, which was established in 1912. Our family holds one of the oldest private collections of photographs in Connaught. We still have many of the ‘haunting’ glass plate negatives, and so I began using these plates in a different manner. Screens appeared throughout our communities to prevent the spread of the virus, and we were no longer in a position to embrace each other. So, I began hammering imagery of people hugging into panes of laminated safety glass, reenforced with toughened glass. The glass panels (80 x 100 cm) are now hung in the Linenhall Arts Centre. While I waited for the glass panels to be sealed by Lawless Glass Ltd. in Castlebar, I began work on the second of the two site-specific works. I spray-painted swift and swallow birds onto the outside seating area, with a Hitchcock moment in mind. This space houses the swift nest conservation project and is quite active during the summer months. In the remaining weeks of the residency, I developed an interview series, titled ‘Hall Talk: Celebrating 30 Years at the Linenhall’ in which I interviewed some of the many local voices that made up the Linenhall community over the past three decades, featuring visual artists like Alice Maher, Breda Mayock, Nuala Clarke, Vukasin Nedeljkovic, Breda Burns, Hina Khan, Tom Meskell, Áine O Hara, and Ian Wieczorek. ‘Hall Talk’ is available on the Linenhall’s Facebook, Instagram and YouTube pages. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to all the friendly Linenhall staff, the visual art selection committee, the local radio station/media, and the community for supporting and accommodating me during my time on the Bolay residency. A special thank you to the local artists who visited me and shared their uplifting memories and stories, and to the new powerhouse Linenhall Director, Bernadette Greenan, for her immense support and welcome under such difficult circumstances. I can’t recommend this residency highly enough. The Bolay Residency is now an annual residency with a new large studio space, specifically designed for visual artists. In the midst of all the struggles of the past year, the future of the Linenhall’s ever-evolving visual arts programme certainly looks promising. Bryan Gerard Duffy is an artist and filmmaker based in Mayo. bryangerardduffy.com
The official launch of the Bolay Residency site-specific works will take place during the summer, once restrictions allow, with talks, presentations, and the big reveal of the new studio space. Gerard Duffy, Impact, 2020, installation view, laminated safety glass and toughened glass, each work 80 x 100cm; Photograph by Ger Duffy Media.
thelinenhall.com
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Opportunities
GRANTS, AWARDS, OPEN CALLS, COMMISSIONS
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
To keep up-to-date with the latest opportunities, visit visualartists.ie/adverts
Residencies
Funding / Awards / Commissions
Arts Council Agility Award From the Arts Council: This award aims to support individual professional freelance artists and arts workers at any stage in their careers to do one or more of the following: • Develop their practice • Develop their work • Develop their skills • Create new work • Present new work This award was developed to support people following the Covid-19 crisis and is open to all. We particularly welcome new applicants and encourage applications from all areas of the community regardless of your gender, sexual orientation, civil or family status, religion, age, disability, race or membership of the Traveller Community, or socio-economic background. €5,000 in available funding. You can also apply for additional costs to meet access needs you may have as part of your proposal. All awards and schemes are informed by the Arts Council’s ten-year strategy (2016-25), ‘Making Great Art Work: Leading the Development of the Arts in Ireland’.
Visual Artists Workspace Scheme From the Arts Council: The purpose of the Visual Artists Workspace Scheme is to support artists’ workspaces throughout the country to provide the best possible working environment for visual artists and, where feasible, to enable a level of subsidy for the artists working in these spaces. The scheme is in line with the Arts Council’s ten-year strategy (2016–25) ‘Making Great Art Work: Leading the Development of the Arts in Ireland’ which commits to ensuring “a supportive working environment that addresses key points in the creative cycle by which art is made.” The scheme will award grants of up to €40,000 towards core costs including the running costs of the workspace such as light, heat, rent, administration and/or appropriate management costs. A proportion of support up to a maximum of 20% of the total request may be directed towards essential repair and maintenance. Please visit the Arts Council website and funding page for more details and how to apply. Note: workspaces that are successful in their application to this scheme cannot have received or have applied to other Arts Council Awards or grant programmes for the same purpose.
Galway City Council Arts Grant Scheme From Galway City Council Arts Office: Galway City Council Arts Office invites applications for the Arts Grant Scheme 2021 which will provide funding for arts organisations and arts groups for their projects and programmes. In order to be considered for funding the organisation or group: • Must operate primarily as an arts organisation • May be voluntary or professional • Must operate on a not-for-profit basis • Must be based in Galway City or operate substantially within the city Art forms and projects supported include music, film, theatre, dance, visual arts, multi-media, combined arts, literature, architecture, traditional art, arts festivals and arts venues. Grant assistance will be awarded only where applications meet the criteria set down by Galway City Council. Please note that the City Council reserves its right to add to or reduce the value of an award it may make, and to withhold an award at its discretion. For more information and application forms visit: galwaycity.ie/artsgrants2021
Creative Residency in Sport From Dublin City Council Culture Company: In partnership with Dublin City Sport & Wellbeing Partnership, we invite applications from artists to spend eight months ‘in residence’ with a designated sports club in the city Made by Dublin City Council Culture Company, the Creative Residency programme creates partnerships to try out ideas, test new approaches and add to the cultural story of the city. Creative Residencies encourage makers and experts to pilot new partnerships with organisations. By bringing creative people and organisations together, and by connecting through culture and conversation, we will develop and share new ways of working. The Creative Residency in Sport is a new and exciting partnership between the Dublin City Sport & Wellbeing Partnership and Dublin City Council Culture Company. Through the residency, the selected artists will be encouraged to explore the theme of art and sport, with reference to a designated local sports club, and to create a final (permanent or temporary) creative work for public presentation at the end of the residency.
Deadline Thursday, 8 July, 5:30pm
Deadline Thursday, 8 July, 5:30pm
Deadline Friday, 9 July, 4pm
Deadline Wednesday, 14 July
Web artscouncil.ie
Web artscouncil.ie
Web galwaycity.ie
Web dublincitycouncilculturecompany.ie
Email adrienne.martin@artscouncil.ie
Email maeve.oflaherty@artscouncil.ie
Email c&c@galwaycity.ie
Email info@dublincitycouncilculturecompany.ie
Wexford Artist Workplace Scheme From Wexford County Council Arts Office: The Arts Office in partnership with Creative Ireland is pleased to announce they are launching a new Artists’ Workspace Grant Scheme. This scheme is seed funding to help visual artists, craft makers and creatives establish a practice by offering support in suitable, affordable and flexible workspaces throughout the county, and enable a level of subsidy for artists/ creatives working in these spaces. The total fund is €20,000 and applicants may apply for a maximum fund of €5,000. Awards will be in the region of €3,000 – €5,000 each. Workspaces must accommodate at least three professional artists working on site and show in your application how you will share resources for the benefit of all artists sharing the workspace. The scheme is in line with the ‘Creative Ireland Wexford’s Culture and Creativity Plan’ and the ‘Wexford County Arts Plan’, to support artists accessing affordable and flexible workspaces for making, exhibiting and selling work. It also aligns itself with the Arts Council ten-year strategy (2016-25), which commits to ensuring a supportive working environment for artists.
Creative Ireland Open Call 2, County Leitrim From Leitrim County Council: A central theme of Creative Ireland is collaboration in order to facilitate an ecosystem of creativity and to nurture the creative imagination through active engagement with the arts and culture. Leitrim as a county is regarded for its unspoilt landscape, culturally vibrant, rich in heritage and remarkable, relative to its size, for its levels of activity and capacity across a wide range of artforms and cultural arenas. Leitrim County Council recognises the value and importance of creativity. We recognise that while the creative sector plays a central function in the cultural wellbeing of the county, it also has vast implications socially and economically; the three strands of which are inherently intertwined. Funding is €5,000. Applications must be developed by a community group, venue or organisation in partnership with individuals with professional expertise in any creative or cultural arena such as visual or performing arts, literature, heritage or other culture and creativity area. A group may approach the professional practitioner with a view to developing a project or visa-versa.
Creative Places Tuam From Create Ireland: Creative Places Tuam, led by Create, is delighted to announce a brandnew commission opportunity for collaborative and socially engaged artists and/or arts collectives, working at the intersection of art, theory/ research and social action/ justice. We are seeking proposals for a 15 month Cooperative Commission commencing in September 2021 that engages with and responds to the unique town of Tuam, located north of Galway City in the west of Ireland. Funding is €60,000. We wish to work with artists and/or arts collectives that are seeking to further explore the potential of the town and hinterlands through collaborative and socially engaged art making practices. Creative Places Tuam is inviting proposals to deliver an engaging project that will embed the successful collective within the diverse communities that make up Tuam. We expect that through this cooperative commission the selected artists and/or arts collective would create a strong connection into and with the local ecosystem of social solidarity whilst engaging with the issues and concerns that matter to the communities of Tuam.
Artist in Residence at UCD Earth Institute From UCD: ‘Creating a Sustainable Global Society’ is one of the four strategic themes underpinning UCD’s 2020-2024 Strategy. The theme addresses critical global and local challenges relating to biodiversity, climate, water, food, the built environment, communities and work. UCD Parity Studios are delighted to announce the 2021-2022 residency which aims to address one or more of these challenges, supported in partnership with UCD Earth Institute and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. The Earth Institute is UCD’s institute for environmental and sustainability research. The Institute comprises a community of over 130 senior academics and 200 early career researchers drawn from across the University’s six constituent Colleges, and seeks to promote interdisciplinary activity across the sciences, social sciences, arts, humanities, engineering and architecture. Areas of multidisciplinary expertise include biodiversity, climate, ecosystems, water, the built environment and sustainable communities.
Deadline Monday, 26 July, 2pm
Deadline Friday, 23 July
Deadline Wednesday, 21 July, 5pm
Deadline Sunday, 11 July
Web wexfordcoco.ie
Web leitrimcoco.ie
Web creativeplacestuam.ie
Web ucdartistsinresidence.com
Email arts@wexfordcoco.ie
Email creativeleitrim@gmail.com
Email cptuam@create-ireland.ie
Email emer.oboyle@ucd.ie
Lifelong Learning Summer 2021
WE ARE CONTINUING to run our Lifelong Learning programme online using Zoom (zoom.us), with a full schedule of regular events planned for the summer months, including talks, webinars, helpdesks, clinics and Visual Artists Cafés.
An exhibition by Colm Mac Athlaoich
VAI members can attend our Lifelong Learning programme at reduced rates and can also watch a selection of our previous Lifelong Learning Webinars, via the Members Area of the Visual Artists Ireland website (visualartists.ie).
11 May – 11 July 2021
To book a place for any of our upcoming events – and to get updates on new events – please visit visualartists.ie and sign-up to our mailing list.
As If I were a saint, oil on canvas, 2020
QUEER AS YOU ARE
Helpdesks / Clinics VAI Helpdesk (with Shelly McDonnell) Date/Time: Wednesday, 7 July, 2pm – 5pm Places: 6 Cost: FREE
A group exhibition by artists: Austin Hearne, Breda Lynch, Conor O’ Grady Kian Benson Bailes, and Stephen Doyle
VAI Helpdesk (with Shelly McDonnell) Date/Time: Friday 30 July, 2pm – 5pm Places: 6 Cost: FREE
20 July – 19 September 2021
VAI Helpdesk (with Shelly McDonnell) Date/Time: Friday 16 July, 10am – 1pm Places: 6 Cost: FREE
Visual Artist Cafés Introducing... Berlin (In association with the Irish Embassy, Berlin) Date/Time: Wednesday 7 July, 6pm (Dublin Time) / 7pm (Berlin Time) Places: 70 Cost: Free for Germany based Irish artists and VAI members Artist Talk with Miriam O’ Connor Date/Time: Tuesday 13 July, 3pm Places: 70 Cost: €5 (VAI Members); €10 (General Public); Artist Talk with Elaine Hoey Date/Time: Tuesday 3 August, 3pm Places: 70 Cost: €5 (VAI Members); €10 (General Public);
Lifelong Learning Partners
Satan Was A Lesbian, cyanotype, Breda Lynch 2018
Artist Talk with Joy Gerrard Date/Time: Tuesday 23 September, 3pm Places: 70 Cost: €5 (VAI Members); €10 (General Public); Curator Talk with Kim McAleese Date/Time: Tuesday 28 September, 3pm Places: 70 Cost: €5 (VAI Members); €10 (General Public);
LUAN GALLERY
Tues – Sat 11 – 5pm Sun 12 – 5pm Gallery Admin Free
Tel: 090 6442154 Email: info@luangallery.ie Insta: @luangallery.ie
Fingal, A Place for Art
Fingal County Council and Graphic Studio Dublin Fine Art Print Residency Award Fingal County Council Arts Office in partnership with Graphic Studio Dublin are offering a Fine Art Print Residency for a professional artist at any stage of their career, working in any discipline, who is interested in exploring print processes. The two-week long residency will provide an ideal environment for the development of a creative project in printmaking, working with a master printer. To be eligible to apply, applicants must have been born, studied or currently reside in Fingal.
Closing date for receipt of applications: Thursday 29th July 2021 at 4.00pm
For further information and an application form please contact Graphic Studio Dublin by email at info@graphicstudiodublin.com or visit www.graphicstudiodublin.com
www.fingalarts.ie www.fingal.ie/arts ArtistsSS2021_VAI_Landscape_255.04x164.012mm_OD140621.indd 1
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