Visual Artists' News Sheet - 2017 May June

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet ISSUE 3 May – June 2017 Published by Visual Artists Ireland Ealaíontóirí Radharcacha Éire

Susan MacWilliam, Kuda Bux, 2003; installation view, F.E. McWilliam Gallery, 2017; photo by Simon Mills

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Editorial

May – June 2017

Contents

WELCOME to the May – June 2017 issue of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

Cover. Susan MacWilliam, Kuda Bux, 2003; F.E. McWilliam Gallery, 2017; photo by Simon Mills 5. Column. Martin Waldmeier. The Problem of Jargon.

From late-February to mid-April, a series of public meetings were held across the country as part of the Creative Ireland programme, a five-year government initiative which seeks to place creativity at the centre of public policy. Joanne Laws’s VAI News column outlines what transpired at the Roscommon and Leitrim meetings. In other columns, Pádraic E. Moore describes a revived interest in 1970s industrial music, probing the crossovers with performance art. Our Northern Ireland column comes from artist and researcher Laura O’Connor, who discusses the WANDA Feminism and Moving Image event which took place in Belfast in February 2017. Martin Waldmeier’s column tackles ‘The Problem of Jargon’ within the art world and introduces Plain English Criticism, a concept explored by Art and Disability Ireland, who invited Michelle Browne to write a review for the Critique section using this pared-back approach to language.

6. Column. Pádraic E. Moore. Industrial Music for Industrial People.

7. Column. Jonathan Carroll. Total Recall.

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

9. Regional Profile. Resources and activities in Kerry are profiled by the Arts Office, Courthouse

Studios, K-Fest, Lisa Fingleton, Susan Leen and Nicole Tilley.

12. Career Development. A Séance of Images. Susan MacWilliam discusses her touring survey

exhibition ‘Modern Experiments’.

14. Career Development. A Sense of Stillness. Joanne Laws talks to John Hutchinson about his 25-year

directorship of the Douglas Hyde Gallery.

15. Organisation. Everywhere Yet Nowhere. Daniel Bermingham discusses the evolution of Basic Also in this issue, Joanne Laws interviews John Hutchinson about his 25-year directorship of the Douglas Hyde Gallery, while Manuela Pacella interviews Irish curator Kate Strain about her recent appointment as Artistic Director of the Grazer Kunstverein in Graz, Austria. Sue Rainsford, winner of VAI/DCC Arts Office Critical Writing Award, presents her review of Vanessa Donoso Lòpez’s exhibition ‘to swallow a ball’, which was presented at The LAB, Dublin from September to November 2016. Susan MacWilliam reflects on her survey exhibition ‘Modern Experiments’.

This issue includes several organisation profiles: Daniel Bermingham outlines the evolution, methodologies and future trajectories of Basic Space, Dublin; Gavin Murphy reflects on last year’s 20-year anniversary programme of Pallas Projects/Studios; and Paul Tarpey offers insights into the working methods of Parallel Editions, an independent fine art printmakers based in Limerick.

Space and its future trajectory.

16. VAI/DCC Critical Writing Award. Serpents & Clay. Sue Rainsford, winner of the 2017 VAI/DCC

Critical Writing Award, writes about Vanessa Donoso López’s exhibition ‘to swallow a ball’.

18. Residency. Seeing the City from Above. Charlotte Bosanquet discusses her residency at New Lodge

Arts in north Belfast.

19. Critique. ‘Futures, Series 3, Episode 1’, RHA, Dublin; ‘The Mistress of the Mantle’, MART, Dublin; ‘Artistic Migration: Frank O’Meara and Irish Artists Abroad’, Hugh Lane, Dublin; ‘I Wanted to

Write a Poem’, Wexford Arts Centre; ‘Buzz & Hum’, Limerick City Gallery of Art.

23. Organisation. Never the Same Thing Twice. Paul Tarpey introduces fine art print publishing house,

Parallel Editions.

In the How is it Made? section, we have project profiles from Matt Packer and Alissa Kleist, who discuss CCA Derry’s touring exhibition ‘Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone’, currently showing in Ormston House, Limerick. Lisa Moran outlines the recent Palestine/Irish student exchange at IMMA. Charlotte Bosanquet looks back at the various strands of her residency in New Lodge Arts, North Belfast. The Regional Profile for this issue comes from County Kerry, with updates from the Arts Office, Dingle’s Courthouse Studios, the Rural Artists Group and K-Fest, as well as artists Sue Leen and Nicole Tilley.

24. How is it Made? Mind-Controlling Images. Matt Packer and Alissa Kleist discuss CCA Derry-

Reviewed in the Critique section are: ‘Futures: Series 3, Episode 1’ at RHA, Dublin; Jonathan Mayhew at Wexford Arts Centre; ‘Buzz and Hum’ at Limerick City Gallery of Art; ‘Frank O’Meara and Irish Artists Abroad’ at Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane; and ‘The Mistress of the Mantle’ at MART, Dublin. As ever, we have details of upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public art roundups, news from the sector and current opportunities.

Londonderry’s touring exhibition ‘Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone’.

26. Organisation. Pallas Projects at 20. Gavin Murphy reflects on the organisation in its twentieth year.

28. Project Profile. To Be Determined. Lisa Moran profiles the recent Palestinian student exchange

that took place at IMMA following Emily Jacir’s exhibition ‘Europa’.

30. Career Development. The Necessity of Art. Manuela Pacella interviews Kate Strain about her new role as curator of Grazer Kunstverein in Graz, Austria.

32. Northern Ireland. WANDA: Feminism & Moving Image. Laura O’Connor introduces the WANDA

festival of feminism and moving image.

32. VAI News. Creative Ireland: Leitrim & Roscommon. Joanne Laws reports from two recent

engagement sessions on the government’s new culture policy.

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

other forms of art outside the gallery.

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

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

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Production: Features Editor: Joanne Laws. Production Editor: Lily Power. News/Opportunities: Siobhan Mooney, Shelly McDonnell. Invoicing: Bernadette Beecher. Contributors: Martin Waldmeier, Pádraic E. Moore, Jonathan Carroll, Lisa Fingleton, Nicole Tilley, Susan Leen, Andrew Duggan, Caroline Lynch, Penny Dahl, Susan MacWilliam, John Hutchinson, Joanne Laws, Daniel Bermingham, Sue Rainsford, Charlotte Bosanquet, Carissa Farrell, Mary Catherine Nolan, James Merrigan, Michelle Browne, Chris Hayes, Paul Tarpey, Matt Packer, Alissa Kleist, Gavin Murphy, Lisa Moran, Manuela Pacella, Kate Strain, Laura O’Connor . A: Visual Artists Ireland, Windmill View House, 4 Oliver Bond Street, Dublin 8 T: 353(0)1 672 9488 E: info@visualartists.ie W: visualartists.ie A: Visual Artists Ireland, Northern Ireland Office, 109 –113 Royal Avenue, Belfast, BT1 1FF W: visualartists-ni.org Board of Directors: Mary Kelly (Chair), Naomi Sex, Michael Corrigan, David Mahon, Niamh McCann, Donall Curtin, Richard Forrest, Clíodhna Ni Anluain. Staff: CEO / Director: Noel Kelly. Office Manager: Bernadette Beecher. Publications: Lily Power. IVARO: Alex Davis. Communications Officer:/Listings Editor: Shelly McDonnell. Professional Development Officer: Monica Flynn. Book-keeping: Dina Mulchrone. Membership Services Officer/Listings Editor: Siobhan Mooney. Northern Ireland Manager: Rob Hilken (rob@visualartists-ni.org).

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet COLUMN

Martin Waldmeier

May – June 2017

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Roundup

AS THE STORY WAS TOLD The Problem of Jargon ‘As the story was told’, a group show featuring work by Yuri Ancarani, IT’S been five years since American artist Alix Rule and sociologist David Levine Gerard Byrne, Jamie Crewe and Diego published their provocative essay on ‘International Art English’, kick-starting a Marcon, ran at Catalyst Arts, Belfast (9 debate about the use of jargon in art museums and galleries. They observed that – 30 Mar). The project takes its title from curators and artists had developed an odd penchant for using exotic verbiage like a short story of the same name by “aporia”, “radically”, “space”, “proposition”, “biopolitical” or “tension”. The list could Samuel Beckett, which explores “frames undoubtedly go on: “critical”, “engaged”, “emerging”, “decentering”, “subjectivity”. of reference, stories told by an ‘other’ In order to define this phenomenon, they collected exhibition press releases and the ongoing interplay of authority from e-flux, the notorious American online advertising platform where internafrom a first person narrator”, the press tional art institutions announce their latest exhibitions. They then compared this release stated. The four artists use lensstock of writing to the British National Corpus to prove that there is indeed a spebased works to reconsider texts, objects cific “sociolect” used by artists, curators and academics to unify the profession and and documents from recent history in a to show who’s in and who’s not. contemporary context using methods The study provoked a number of interesting responses from the art world. of “restaging, re-enactment and narraSome questioned the authors’ motives, accusing them of mockery or questioning tion”. whether it was fair to imply that press releases are representative of art discourse catalystarts.org.uk at large. The artist and theorist Hito Steyerl argued further that artists and curators around the world had no need to speak English according to British norms.

PROJECTIONS Moreover, she suggested that the very idea of language norms was an imperial relic and hence could only stand in the way of a more democratic art world.

Whatever the merits and flaws of the study, the question that remains unanswered is why today’s art world appears to be so strikingly incapable of working without jargon. Some say that art, like other vocations and professions, needs its own terminology. Recognising this, some museums have started to offer glossaries that would allow visitors to learn the concepts necessary to unlock contemporary works of art. On Tate Modern’s website, for example, one can look up key terms like “deconstruction”, “tactical media” or “socially-engaged practice”. Do these concepts open windows into vast repositories of artistic thought or merely add to the mystical aura that so often surrounds contemporary art?

John Fitzsimons, image from ‘Projections’, 2017 Certainly, the former is true. Moreover, specialist terms like these alone canFrom 19 Mar to 20 Apr, the Olivier not explain the grudge many hold against art world jargon. The problem appears Cornet Gallery, Dublin, held an exhibito be the extent to which they are used. Consider the example of an international tion of paintings by John Fitzsimmons. biennial who, writing on e-flux, recently announced “the invention of discursive ‘Projections’ was the artist’s fourth solo and performative apparatuses, and the production of models and images leading to show and took a “darker and more foreheterogeneous narrations allowing transdisciplinary artistic experiences bound boding turn than his previous work,” to a critical intimacy between the artwork and the visitor”. Confused? This may be the press release noted, “reflecting the an extreme example, but it is not an isolated one. Not only does such writing fail to current international political climate make sense, it displays a breathtaking arrogance towards the public. and associated nervousness about the At best, we might blame this on a certain complacency among predominantly path that lies ahead”. The work comyounger curators who, used to working within a tight-knit art community, someprised surrealist landscapes featuring times confuse addressing their audience with trying to impress their colleagues. “ominous, hypnagogic premonitions”.

At worst, the excessive use of jargon serves selfish ends. There’s no better way to oliviercornetgallery.com discourage criticism than to create a theoretical smokescreen that makes everyone else feel stupid. Unfortunately, many talented artists and curators, especially those ALL THAT SURROUNDS US just about to enter the art world, feel pressured to use ‘International Art English’ as a rite of passage. Instead of standing up for clarity where there is none, they chastise themselves for not being smart enough to understand it.

Unnecessary jargon is unfortunate because it fails to engage a thinking audience and make contemporary culture more accessible. It is also a lost opportunity to empower someone who might not yet know the rules of the game. To those denouncing this argument as ‘populist’, or trying to uphold their right to ‘intellectual resistance’, I would respond that there is nothing anti-intellectual about reconsidering the language we use. To the contrary: making sense of complex ideas Jennifer Cunningham, ‘All That Surrounds Us’, 2017 using simple words is perhaps the most challenging intellectual task of all.

The debate between those who advocate linguistic clarity and those who Jennifer Cunningham’s exhibition ‘All defend elusiveness is as old as Postmodernism itself. But the case against jargon That Surrounds Us’ ran at the RHA, could not be greater than in this era of rising political uncertainty. Today, the task Dublin, 17 Mar – 23 Apr. Cunningham of developing a more open and inclusive way of communicating is vital towards looks at the ways in which “modern ensuring that contemporary art institutions will continue to make the kind of realms of collective pleasure decay”. contribution to society they want to make. The great contradiction we observe The works in ‘All that Surrounds Us’ today is that, even though many curators speak in the name of the public, and feature abandoned fairgrounds, overnearly all of them are concerned with diversity and inclusion, the language many grown glass houses, untended car parks, of them speak tells a different story. With much recent criticism of social, political ghostly figures and derelict hotels, and cultural ‘echo chambers’, the art world is often no exception. which “hint at recent economic strugIt’s time to stop pretending that art institutions and curators serve anyone by gles but also suggest the cycle of change ‘speaking in tongues’. This is precisely why initiatives like Art and Disability and renewal in which places become Ireland’s ‘Plain English Art Criticism’ project, launched in this VAN, are so imporspaces and vice versa”, evoking feelings tant. After absorbing decades of Postmodern and critical theory, curators and art of familiarity and unfamiliarity. critics today might think that we need this powerful vocabulary. But this is rhagallery.ie exactly what makes the attempt to translate it into plain English – and thereby perhaps even reinvent the language of art itself – so challenging and courageous.

PLASTIK FESTIVAL The second Plastic Festival of Artists’ Martin Waldmeier is curator, writer and lecturer based in London.

AND EUROPE WILL BE STUNNED Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, screened a film trilogy by Yael Bartana titled And Europe Will Be Stunned, in collaboration with Artangel, London. The films explore “propaganda, longing and

Still from James Richards Leslie Thornton, Crossing, 2016

Moving Image ran at the IFI, Dublin, 24 – 26 Mar, in association with the IFI, LUX and Temple Bar Gallery. Works by more than 40 artists and filmmakers from around the world were screened throughout the weekend, with several making their Irish debut. Plastik aims to “represent the breadth and scope of innovative and experimental work being produced in this ever-expanding field of practice, developing a platform for the moving image, with a focus on the cinema as exhibition space”.

Internationally-acclaimed artists and curators in attendance included James Richards, Erika Balsom, Yuri Pattison, Ann Hirsch and Benjamin Cook. plastikfestival.com

LET ME SING WORDS AS DREAMS OF TRUTH

Yael Bartana, still from Zamach (Assassination), 2011; image courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv

migration through an uneasy fusion of fiction and reality that is hard to untangle”, the press release noted, remaining “bold and subversive”, while avoiding cliche. goldenthreadgallery.co.uk

WOMEN MAKE MOVIES Void, Derry, holds a series of screenings as part of the Women Make Movies Season (25 Mar – 20 May). The moving image exhibition features a broad range of films by women from around the world, with a focus on “civil rights explored from a feminist perspective, viewed through the lens of current events impacting on movement and immigration issues”. The festival is a collaboration with Women Make Movies, a New York based media arts organisation first established in 1972. derryvoid.com

Eve Parnell, Pencil on Tissue Paper Study of Lion in Rome (detail), 2017

Eve Parnell’s exhibition ‘Let me sing words as dreams of truth’ ran at Humboldt University, Berlin (30 Jan – 26 Feb). The title was take from a poem by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who was concerned with his duty towards society. In the drawings for this show, Parnell addressed this theme of compassion.

GIRLHOOD

Orla Sloyan, image (detail) from ‘Girlhood’

AWAYLAND

Cormac O’Leary, Chez Cezanne (detail); oil on canvas

Cormac O’Leary’s exhibition ‘Awayland’ ran at the Doorway Gallery, Dublin (2 – 27 Mar) and featured a series of paintings inspired by places the artist has visited, including Auribeau in the south of France, where he undertook a residency. “Awayland,” the artist stated, “is an imaginative place, somewhere lost in time, where memories and dreams merge”. thedoorwaygallery.com

Photographer Orla Sloyan’s exhibition ‘Girlhood’ ran at Ballina Arts centre, Mayo, 11 Mar – 29 Apr, and documented the lives of the Maughan family in Castlebar. Members of the Travelling community, the Maughans collaborated on the project with Sloyan, who wanted to look at issues around identity and cultural diversity in Ireland. The photographs became much more, however, “a complex personal story of cherished family milestones”. ballinaartscentre.com

THE LAST WILDERNESS Galway Arts Centre held an exhibition

by Cecilia Danell titled ‘The Last Wilderness’, 10 Mar – 19 Apr. This new body of work was developed on residency at the Nordic Artists’ Centre in Dale, Norway. Influenced by Jungian psy-

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet ROUNDUP

by Joy Gerrard whose work was included in the show.

The exhibition was curated by Aisling Prior and featured work by more than 90 artists, including Richard

Pádraic E. Moore Industrial Music for Industrial People IN recent years there has been an upsurge of academic interest in Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, two groups who emerged in England during the late 1970s as proponents of industrial music. From today’s perspective, their strategy of co-opting music industry apparatus as the means of disseminating audacious and challenging art seems particularly radical. Moreover, recent reappraisal of these artists reveals how, in utilising concepts gleaned from visual art and performance, they pioneered an art form that can be described as truly intermedial.

Both groups emerged from once-industrial cities now in terminal decline: Throbbing Gristle (TG) came from Hull and Cabaret Voltaire (CV) from Sheffield.

Members of both groups have stated that the urban fabric of these cities was a major influence on their work. TG grew out of COUM Transmissions, a group of performers who share affinities with Fluxus and Viennese Actionism. By the mid70s they had gained a reputation for staging happenings which involved masturbation, bloodletting and defecation. Consisting of cathartic actions and abject assemblages, their 1976 show ‘Prostitution’ at London’s ICA is now considered a milestone in late twentieth century British art. When COUM evolved into TG, they maintained these performative approaches but also integrated a strong sonic element into their shows. They generated forcefields of electronic sound which were intended to have a visceral and all-encompassing effect upon audiences.

Incidentally, TG were scheduled to perform in February 1979 at a now legendary 24-hour happening entitled ‘Dark Space’ at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre, but stormy weather prevented them from travelling. Recent years have seen a revaluation of Throbbing Gristle’s oeuvre, with two rare performances taking place at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. A major exhibition of COUM Transmissions archival material took place in February 2017, as part of Hull’s year as UK City of Culture, while Cosey Fanni Tutti’s autobiography was published in March.

The concept of sound as a weapon was key for Cabaret Voltaire, whose early performances incorporated reel-to-reel tape machines, slide projectors and primitive electronic instruments. The fact that the group took their name from the Zürich nightclub where the Dada movement was founded in 1916 gives an idea of the irreverent attitude they espoused. Long before they began producing records that could be disseminated via conventional means, CV were blasting musique concrète onto the streets of Sheffield. Hybridity was a key aspect of their early work – a fact that was highlighted in a recent interview I conducted with Stephen Mallinder, one of CV’s founders. He recalls the group’s contribution to the 1976 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, when they posted what he described as a “performance package” to festival organisers. The package contained films, tape recordings and cut-up montages, as well as instructions on how to present these elements to audiences as an immersive installation.

Mallinder explained that, “while making music seemed to be a more immediate and collaborative way of expressing ideas, the visual output of the band was always equally as important”. Of particular significance was the group’s use of the cut-up technique, which they applied to electronic sound technology, but also to visual performances in which the surface of Super 8 films were often scratched, painted or collaged together. The arrival of domestic video technology enabled the group to duplicate and disseminate their visual material more readily. Mallinder stated that they “never viewed video as a merely promotional tool, but always as an art form”. For CV, “visual art and sonic art were interdependent”. They were not seen as “hierarchical, but as interacting mediums”. The aesthetic significance of CV’s work was widely recognised. Their ground-breaking music video Sensoria (1984), produced in collaboration with film director Peter Care, was one of the first videos to be acquired by MOMA, New York.

These groups had little or no formal music training and saw the music industry as a means to an end, rather than the end in itself. Given that both groups dealt with sounds, images and subjects that many found repugnant, it is somewhat surprising that they gained such a substantial following. This was particularly the case for CV, who steered their work in a more commercial direction towards the then emerging dance scene. Perhaps one of the most important aspects of their legacy is that it represents a transition in culture; their early work was the outcome of technical experimentation constituting something of a death rattle of radical art “before it was contextualised by brand aesthetic and entirely absorbed into entertainment, leisure and the creative industries”. One can trace a lineage of these artists back to Futurism and Dada, whose proponents sought to generate art that was unorthodox, transgressive and insistently opposed to bourgeois values.

However, one might also argue that the work of these artists also represents the culmination of the twentieth century avant garde, in that they devised a sensibility that would become part of the fabric of the everyday, disseminated far and wide via the conduits of recorded music. Do these artists deserve the recognition they are receiving? The proof is in the listening: be sure to pump up the volume.

Pádraic E. Moore is a writer, curator and art historian currently based in Brussels and Dublin. padraicmoore.com

May – June 2017

conversation between Turner Prize winner Richard Long and Declan McGonagle on 22 Apr and an audio installation by Varvara Sharvrova themed around The Haw Lantern at HomePlace. seamusheaneyhome.com

SMILE Cecilia Danell, The Mountains Loomed

chology, existentialism and utopian/ dystopian science fiction, Danell’s work uses landscape as a metaphor for the exploration of the human psyche. “By experiencing and documenting the Scandinavian landscape on foot,” the press release stated, “she explores ideas about wilderness and solitude and how the yearning for an authentic life may be no more than a construct”. galwayartscentre.ie

Sven Sandberg, Count Lasher (detail); oil on canvas

Forrest, Shane Berkery, Garrett Phelan, Sven Sandberg, Alan Phelan, Megan Burns, Peter Bradley, Mollie Douthit, Sean Molloy, Gillian Lawlor, Blaise Drummond, Eileen O’Sullivan, Gabhann Dunne, Cecilia Danell, Eithne Jordan, Gerry Davis, Brian Fay and Alice Maher.

Eve Woods, ‘Smile’, 2017

From 27 – 29 Apr, ‘Smile’ by Eve Woods ran at Pallas Projects, Dublin. Woods’s paintings feature “nightmares; teeth; anxiety; the ambivalence and possibilities of dreams contrasting with vividity and certainty”. She explores pseudoscience, urban legend, mysteries and hearsay, looking at how our online networks map our personal myths.

STANDARD EXHIBITION From 10 Mar to 8 Apr, the group show ‘Standard Exhibition’ ran at Artbox, Dublin. It featured work by Neil Carroll, Conor Mary Foy, Olivia Hassett, David Lunney, Alex de Roeck and Zoe Sheehy.

TWO COLOURS: RED AND BLUE Each work took the form of a flag.

Declan Campbell’s exhibition ‘Two ‘Standard Exhibition’ was curated by pallasprojects.org Colours: Red and Blue’ ran at the Pearse Davey Moor.

Centre, Dublin, 31 Mar – 4 Apr. Colour artboxprojects.wordpress.com relationships, colour harmony and light COLOURLESS GREEN IDEAS play a central role in Campbell’s paintSHACKLETON’S ENDURANCE ings. He takes inspiration from the changing and fluctuating light of the sky which influences the colour and light in the works. declancampbell.net

POSTCARDS FROM THE HINTERLAND Eoin Butler’s solo show ‘Postcards from the Hinterland’ runs at the Embassy of Ireland, Berlin, 27 Apr – 9 Jun. The paintings are in part abstract, imbued Gerlach en koop, Untitled (Scatter Piece), 2013; image courtesy of the artist and Maarten Zaalberg and Geert with a stillness and a reverence of place. Kits Niewenkamp Butler depicts a solitary place in the Pauline Garavan, Shackleton’s Endurance (detail), 2016 landscape, the hinterland and the bog. Project Arts Centre presents ‘Colourless “Sometimes the work is like a whisper,” Green Ideas Sleep Furiously’ (21 Apr – Pauline Garavan’s work Shackleton’s 17 Jun), an international group exhibiEndurance was exhibited at Town Hall tion that tells the story of how 24 Theatre, Westport from 4 Mar to 1 Apr. Orthodox icons came to be housed in The work was created specially for the collection of the National Gallery of Kildare’s official centenary commemoIreland. Curated by David Upton, the ration of the rescue of Ernest exhibition features work by Erik Shackleton’s crew off Elephant Island Bulatov, Ida Lennartsson, gerlach en after their ship Endurance became koop, Raqs Media Collective, and trapped and crushed in the Antarctic Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck and Media ice-pack. The image is made up of thouFarzin. “It stems from and seeks to open sands of very closely condensed words ideas of dissolution, dispossession, and taken from extracts of Shackleton’s loss, cultures in crisis and futures diary and written on the aluminium Eoin Butler, ‘Postcards from the Hinterland’ (detail) altered,” the press release states. using oils. The words are combined, projectartscentre.ie the press release notes. “It is modest, sometimes compressed together and rarely ever shouts for attention, yet it sometimes lightly inscribed and spaced.

THE WAITING ROOM calls for the discerning mind”.

ArtBox, Dublin, held an exhibition of work by Ella Bertilsson and Ulla Juske, THE HERMIONE EXHIBITION HOMEPLACE titled ‘The Waiting Room’, 28 Apr – 20 The Hermione Exhibition ran at The Seamus Heaney HomePlace Festival May. This narrative-driven audio instalAlexandra College, Dublin, 3 – 16 Mar. runs at HomePlace, Derry, Apr – Jun, lation aim to challenge the audience’s The exhibition and accompanying art and features a varied line-up of events perception of time. Taking the idea of lecture arose from an endowment by themed around Heaney’s collections waiting rooms as liminal, transitional Hermione Fitzgerald, the fifth Duchess The Haw Lantern, Seeing Things and The places, impersonal and quickly forgotof Leinster. The 2017 lecture was given Spirit Level. Visual arts events included a ten, Bertilsson and Juske created a “zone

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

COLUMN

7 ROUNDUP impact of state and commercial interests on a rural setting, often causing long term problems of pollution and abandonment”. McGrath was selected for this award (developed by curator Linda Shevlin) by internationallyrenowned photographer Martin Parr. It was presented as part of PhotoIreland Festival and Belfast Exposed Futures Gallery at Belfast Photo Festival.

Jonathan Carroll Total Recall

I read recently about an unfortunate condition called hyperthymesia, where the sufferer possesses an extremely detailed autobiographical memory. What at first sounds like a blessing – the superpower of total recall – turns out to be a nightmare in which every trivial detail of every single day is remembered. It made me feel much better about my own abysmal powers of recall (schadenfreude sufferer!).

Testing their powers of recall, IMMA, in collaboration with NIVAL, are undertaking a collaborative research project to revisit ROSC (the six exhibitions of international contemporary art presented in Ireland between 1967 and 1988) on its fiftieth anniversary. ‘ROSC 50 –1967/2017’ will show at IMMA from 5 May to 18 June and will examine the “ambition, reception, controversies and legacy of the ROSC exhibitions” through talks, screenings, events, displays and presentations of archival material.

In addition, a number of artists will be commissioned to produce new work inspired by ROSC. People like you and I, who are interested in art, will have met some of the ROSC veterans and heard about the wonders it brought to these shores.

The adjectives ‘ground-breaking’, ‘inspiring’, ‘seminal’ and ‘innovative’ are often associated with ROSC. Inventive ways of exhibiting were necessary by default, as no suitable permanent exhibition spaces existed in Ireland at that time to accommodate such ambitious shows. The organisers of the first iteration, which occupied the warehouse-like main hall of the RDS, came up with an ingenious way of hanging work (without walls) by using white muslin to divide the spaces and form a sail-like ceiling above. Paintings were mounted on boards suspended from above, avoiding the need for cumbersome partitioning walls, and making it easier to view and compare paintings. Photographic documentation of these exhibitions (and RTE films of the 1967 and 1971 exhibitions) attests to the ingenuity of the installation. That these exhibitions still stand out as visually interesting is testament to the diverse skill-set of the initial committee, which comprised art historians and curators as well as Ireland’s leading modernist architect, Michael Scott, who founded ROSC. The idea was to bring recent works to an Irish audience, who were deprived of an enlightened museum of modern art.

Eimear O’Connor’s review for the Irish Times of Peter Shortt’s timely book The Poetry of Vision: The ROSC Art Exhibitions 1967 – 1988 was headlined “Ireland’s most magnificently controversial art exhibitions: ROSC events were extraordinarily ambitious but to reprise them would be a mistake”. It is true that the controversies surrounding ROSC (such as budget deficits, resignations and the initial omission of Irish artists) are recalled as often as its many successes. One such controversy included the decision to uproot five ancient monuments and transport them to Dublin (despite protests from the National Monuments Advisory Council) with the aim of presenting ancient art alongside contemporary art. This prompted members of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association in Donegal to stage a sit-in around the high cross in Carndonagh to prevent it being taken to Dublin. The presentation of art from other eras and traditions became a recurring theme, with Scandinavian artefacts displayed in 1971 and Russian Avant-Garde art in 1988.

But there were also many unique performances that took place during these exhibitions. For ROSC ‘80, 14 artists were invited to present live performances, which included the debut of Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s Rest Energy, involving a sprung arrow being pointed at Abramovic’s heart for four minutes. Clement Greenberg (the number one international art critic of the day) was rocked in a car in Trinity College as part of an art performance called 25 H.P., involving 25 horses, by the Argentinian artist Leopoldo Maler. At Earlsfort Terrace another Argentinian artist Marta Minujín constructed James Joyce’s Tower from 8000 loaves of bread provided by a Dublin bakery.

For ROSC ‘84, Richard Serra installed his metal sculpture Sean’s Spiral outside the Guinness Hop Store, while Lawrence Weiner was putting the finishing touches to his wall texts across the road – works that are still visible today on Rainsford Street. It was the presence of the artists and the freshness of their work that made ROSC so vital for Irish audiences. This vitality was further confirmed by the display of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings at ROSC ‘88 just a week after his tragic death. So it will be some task for the 2017 curators to capture the excitement of these exhibitions. I only have second-hand knowledge of ROSC, gleaned from my perusals of the rich archive housed by NIVAL (which includes Dorothy Walker’s personal archive), the books written on the shows, the well-illustrated catalogues and the stories of those who remember attending the exhibitions. It was originally intended that ROSC would finish once a new home for modern art was established in Ireland. This happened in 1991 with the formation of IMMA, so it is fitting that IMMA will stage this commemoration. I will be interviewing those organising the IMMA-NIVAL collaboration in an article for the upcoming July/August issue of the VAN. Jonathan Carroll is a writer and curator based in Dublin.

‘The Waiting Room’ exhibition image

of attention, emphasising and acknowledging the subjective experience of time passing”. Throughout the gallery space an audio-narrative based on interviews with astrophysicists and astronomers about the nature of time was played.

roscommonartscentre.ie

THIS IS NOT ARCHITECTURE

artboxprojects.wordpress.com

and domestic duties, compiling inventories and anecdotes,” the press release noted, “this approach of logging and indexing reflects an effort to regain some semblance of order and a means by which past and present might begin to align or reconcile in some way”. tip.photoireland.org

VIRTÚ ‘Virtú’ runs at the Hunt Museum, Limerick, from 7 Apr to 21 May, and explores the ongoing relationship between the Museum and Limerick School of Art and Design. The exhibition includes contemporary artists working in various disciplines and a collection of drawings from several collections including IMMA, Limerick

MARTIN CREED

‘This is Not Architecture’ exhibition image

The group exhibition ‘This is Not Architecture’ runs at Highlands Gallery, Drogheda, 24 Apr – 21 Jun, and features work by Owen Boss, Stephen Basic Space present two live gigs/perfor- Brandes, Gerard Byrne, Elaine Hoey, mances in May by Turner Prize winner Eithne Jordan, Elaine Leader, Maggie Martin Creed, in Dublin and Limerick. Madden, Colin Martin, Tom O’Dea and Creed, who was born in 1968 in Winnie Pun. The show looks at how artWakefield and grew up in Glasgow, has ists represent and discuss the built enviworked across media and combined art ronment, as well as their inherent biasand music for many years. In 2001 Creed es and limitations. The press release won the Turner Prize and moved to notes that “the built environment is Alicudi, a remote island near Sicily. meant to be experienced in real time Creed has composed orchestral works and space but it is illustrated and for the Birmingham Symphony explained through representations”. highlanes.ie Orchestra (2008), Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra (2009) and the London Sinfonietta (2012) and has permanent TOMORROW IS SUNDAY

Martin Creed, Work No. 2661, 2016; photo by Hugh Glendinning; image courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth

installations in the Royal Festival Hall, London, and the Van Abbe Museum, Amsterdam. basicspace.ie

PROJECT CLEANSWEEP

‘Virtú’ exhibition image

City Gallery and the University of Limerick. The press release stated: “These two strands of the exhibition presented side by side provide a platform for creative dialogue and contemplation of the relevance of the Museum and its collection. These important collections of artists’ work spanning generations and cultures have had an influence on a younger generation of artists.

This show aims to reveal that art among other things is a conversation.” huntmuseum.com

SUBTEXT An exhibition of work by Joanna Hopkins, titled ‘SubText’, ran at Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda, 19 Jan – 18 Mar. Through video, installation and interactive work, ‘SubText’ explored, the artists stated, “the unease of a digital dependent society, and its implications on empathy and consent”.

Hopkins questioned whether humans

Miriam O’Connor, Tomorrow is Sunday book cover (detail)

The Library Project, Dublin, held an exhibition of work by Miriam O’Connor titled ‘Tomorrow is Sunday’, 6 – 23 Apr. Dara McGrath, Kimbolton, Cambridgeshire (detail), 2012 Following a family bereavement in Dara McGrath’s ‘Project Cleansweep’ 2013, O’Connor returned home to live runs at Roscommon Arts Centre, 13 Apr and work on the family farm. ‘Tomorrow – 25 May. The project surveys the land- is Sunday’ is the ongoing photographic scape of chemical and biological weap- project she embarked on to document unanticipated homecomons in the British Isles and its continu- this ing legacy. “This bucolic landscape,” the ing. O’Connor also draws on farming press release states, “today holds layers diaries, notes and exchanges as a means of narratives that the security appara- of exploring the past and at the same tus of the state would prefer not to tell. time opening up new perspectives.

It is another representation of the “Through detailing daily farming tasks

Joanne Hopkins, ‘SubText’ installation view; image courtesy of the artist

are becoming less empathetic and physically interactive as we grow increasingly dependent on digital devices, camera surveillance and online interaction. droichead.com

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News DOUGLAS HYDE GALLERY The Douglas Hyde Gallery announced the appointment of Georgina Jackson as Director. Jackson will take up her role in May 2017, succeeding John Hutchinson, following his retirement after 25 years in the role. Jackson comes to the Douglas Hyde Gallery from Mercer Union, Toronto, where she has been Director of Exhibitions and Programmes since 2013. During this time she led the organisation towards a renewed focus on the commissioning of work by emerging and established contemporary artists, while elevating its reputation within the local, national and international art world.

Jackson stated: “I’m honoured to be joining the Douglas Hyde Gallery and am looking forward to shaping its future. Its location within the leading research university in Ireland – and at the threshold between the university and the city – marks an important and exciting space for contemporary art. I look forward to working with the team, Trinity College and the wider arts communities to build on John Hutchinson’s extraordinary legacy, and to shape the Douglas Hyde Gallery as an artist-centred space.”

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

in 2010, and protracted periodontal treatment, where this is clinically required.

People with the required PRSI contribution history paying Class S contribution will be qualified to receive the benefits under the scheme. The change will be welcomed by professional artists in Ireland, many of whom are registered as self-employed. Artists registered as self-employed can avail of Artist’s Tax Exemption.

SEAMUS NOLAN: CAPP Create and Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane announced that Seamus Nolan has been successful in the Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme (CAPP) Open Call for a socially-engaged commission. The commission will run from 2017 to 2018 and sets out to encourage meaningful and in-depth engagement with communities of place and of interest as well as the distinct architectural, socio-political and cultural landscape of the North Inner City of Dublin.

Nolan’s proposal to investigate the idea of archive, deconstruct ideas on ‘heritage’ and engage with both communities of place and of interest, involving Traveller activists and archivists, douglashydegallery.com stood out in terms of concept and imaginative power. The artist stated: “I am BENEFITS FOR THE SELF EMPLOYED really pleased to have the opportunity Some 500,000 self-employed people will through this commission to examine be able to access free dental benefits for basic notions of representation and the first time, as the Department of community building in relation to Social Protection introduces a measure Traveller past and heritage. The comsignalled in last October’s budget. The mission will support the coming self-employed can also look forward to a together of cultural practitioners, activfree eye test every two years and a con- ists and archivists in an exploration of tribution of €42 towards glasses. The contested histories. move means that the self-employed who were previously excluded from receiving a free annual check-up with NI POLITICAL PARTIES their dentist or a free eye check, on the Organisations in receipt of annual grounds that they paid a different cate- funding from the Arts Council of gory of PRSI, will now be entitled to it.

Northern Ireland (ACNI) have been The government also signalled in notified that they will be allocated 50% last October’s budget the re-introduc- of their funding as an interim measure tion of an annual scale and polish den- to deal with the uncertainty of the tal treatment, which was discontinued exchequer budget 2017. In the absence

of a Budget Act, the Permanent Secretary of the Department of Finance will use powers assigned to him under Section 59 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 to release cash to departments on an interim basis and until such times as a budget is agreed by ministers and budget legislation is put in place.

Funded organisations will receive only a percentage of their proposed allocation for 2017/2018. Organisations have also been notified that this measure must not be taken to indicate that funding will continue after this date or that, if it does continue, it will do so at the same level for the remainder of this financial year.

This leaves arts organisations in the precarious position of not knowing their funding situation for their full programme year. The Annual Funding Programme is divided into two distinct elements: core and programming. Core costs are met from exchequer funds and programming costs are from National Lottery funds. Whilst lottery funds are not immediately directly affected by the current budget issue, each organisation’s funding situation will have to be re-assessed against the outcome of the final exchequer budget.

with both housing and studio space in the same building. Artists invited to the panel will not be guaranteed cooperative membership, this will depend on spaces available. If you would like to be considered for membership of the cooperative in future please fill out the online form, which can be found via the VAI website, and provide information on your current housing, studio needs and financial circumstances.

THOMAS BREZING: SPARK Artist Thomas Brezing from Balbriggan, County Dublin, has been awarded artist-in-residence on the Creative Spark Residency Programme. Brezing’s work explores the collective shadow of contemporary mass culture from a variety of conceptual, painterly and performative perspectives. Edge-walking the lines between beauty and horror, abstraction and representation, the near and the far, the visible and the invisible.

Brezing’s images and installations confront the enormous power of humanity’s collective will and its impact on the environment. Brezing will develop a new series of work for the Creative Spark Residency programme exhibition at An Táin Arts Centre in October 2017.

This residency is supported by Louth ABCD CO-OP Local Authorities Art Service as a ABCD is an exciting new cooperative of means of supporting the development artist households working together of visual artists in the region. towards the development of affordable live/work space in Dublin city centre.

ABCD is now seeking expressions of VAI MEMBERSHIP interest from professional artists to Over the years we have attempted to form a panel, eligible to join ABCD, as find ways that members’ profiles could membership spaces become available form part of our website. The main issue that we found was the time required to within the cooperative.

ABCD are currently a mixed group ensure that they were up to date and of households, some with savings, some best represented each member.

For the past few weeks we have who can secure a modest mortgage and some who are eligible for or already on been testing a new membership system the Dublin City Council housing that would allow us to have precisely list. Expressions of interest for the the above, as well as providing us with a ABCD panel are invited from artists way to ensure that our membership database is up to date. Therefore, we are with similar financial means.

Please note that this development now introducing a new system for joinwill not provide stand-alone studios. It ing VAI as a member as well as renewis being developed to provide residents ing membership. This means that we

May – June 2017

will introduce a new members’ section.

Our new membership section includes: a directory of our members who have a public profile; the capacity for members to join/renew/update personal details; details on offers that our members currently have; a list of members’ events; a list of members’ services; a payment system for membership.

All of this forms part of a larger project that we are working on that will work towards us streamlining and making our website and ebulletin more user friendly. visualartists.ie, visualartists.org.uk

CRITICAL WRITING AWARD Visual Artists Ireland, in partnership with Dublin City Council’s The LAB Gallery and AICA Ireland, are pleased to announce Sue Rainsford as the winner of the 2016 Critical Writing Award.

Rainsford is the fourth recipient of the award, following James Merrigan, Rebecca O’Dwyer and Joanne Laws. The panel of judges this year comprised J.J. Charlesworth (AICA UK, Associate Editor, Art Review), Sheena Barrett (Assistant Arts Officer, Dublin City Council and Curator, The LAB) and Noel Kelly (President, AICA Ireland, Director, Visual Artists Ireland).

Rainsford’s winning piece of writing – a review of Vanessa Donoso López’s exhibition ‘to swallow a ball’ – is published in this issue of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet. She will also receive a fee of €500 and join the Visual Artists’ News Sheet panel of art critics.

In addition, Rainsford will be invited to contribute to The LAB Gallery’s 2017 programme, with a €300 writing commission.

Sue Rainsford is a writer and researcher based in Dublin. A graduate of Trinity College and IADT, she recently completed her MFA in Writing and Literature at Bennington College, Vermont. Her practice is concerned with hybrid texts and radical experience, as well as the intersection between visual and literary arts practices. suerainsford.com, visualartistsireland.com

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

9

Kerry: Resources & Activities Inspiration & Validation

Kerry Arts Office

Courthouse Studios, Kerry

Courthouse Studios interior

IN 2002, poet Nicholas McLachlan, artist Kate Buckley and I set up Courthouse Studios with support from Kerry County Council, Ealain na Gaeltachta and Culture Ireland. At the ‘H2O Symposium’, held in May 2005 in association with IMMA and Feile na Bealtaine, artist Sarah Landers made a comment which has stayed with me. The symposium’s focus was on connecting studios situated in geographical peripheries, with guest artists from Norway, Poland, Brooklyn and the Dingle Peninsula. Landers stated that the ‘centre’ is where you seek validation and the ‘periphery’ is where you get inspiration.

While ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ might not be such a preoccupation for artists living on the Dingle Peninsula as they were in 2005, definitions of ‘elsewhere’ and of ‘here’ still hold currency.

Many artists in the area hail from other places.

Considering new perspectives on location and the relationship between artist and workplace, particularly in a ‘post-studio’ and increasingly international art world, I caught up with some of the artists connected to, or based at, Courthouse Studios.

Laura Fitzgerald, an emerging artist working in video, drawing and text, has just returned from the International Studio and Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, and is a current recipient of a 16x16: Next Generation award from the Arts Council.

Fitzgerald describes her studio, which overlooks Castlemaine Harbour, Inch, as “both a small internal space (with a little desk in my Granny’s former henhouse) and also [the] local environment,” where she develops performative walks and records improvised narratives. Fitzgerald finds it amusing that, since completing her MA at the Royal College of Art, she is nearly a ‘post-studio artist’. “It’s not that my practice is necessarily poststudio, more that the studio has spilled out and engulfed something far larger than I expected.”

For me, the studio acts as the necessary narrative to counter-balance my larger, predominately collaborative projects, such as ‘PROCLAMATION’, which was profiled in the November – December 2016 VAN. My studio gives me the chance to work intimately, researching and developing relationships between theories, objects and actions, often grappling with very personal preoccupations that can’t be made sense of elsewhere.

This interest in the interplay between private and public is shared by fellow Courthouse Studio artist Caoimhghin Ó Fráithile, whose large public artwork South of Hy-Brasil (profiled in the same issue of the VAN) was recently installed at the Boston Public Library Map Centre and on the Muddy River. Ó Fráithile describes being able to

come home to Dingle after intense periods of work as “a lifeline” that enables him to “recharge and reflect on the work recently created”. He also touches on the pertinent issue of validity. In the studio he is able to “create work without thinking of what others may perceive it to be”. Ó Fráithile considers this his “spiritual home”, where he can feel close to the Irish language as well as the creativity and solitude of the place.

Nik Taylor, a British-born artist, has recently moved to the Dingle Peninsula from London and describes struggling with “the sense of isolation” in rural Kerry. But for Taylor this has been eased by the support of new friends and people in a similar position. “Striving to maintain a creative life in this sort of environment seems to breed a great sense of camaraderie”. The late VAN editor Jason Oakley put him in touch with me – a gesture that, for Taylor, indicated the level of artist support here in Ireland. “In London the attitude between artists always felt rivalrous, but here I think the common struggle is just to keep making work brings people together.” Taylor has recently received a Kerry County Council bursary to make new work and feels that he has received more support in his brief time in Kerry than over the past 10 years in London.

When I moved here from with photographer and ethnographer Siobhán Dempsey, we were seeking time and space to focus and develop our work. These are also key priorities for artist and activist Orla Breslin, who currently occupies the project space at Courthouse Studios. She states: “As an artist and a parent, it is difficult to juggle artistic practice, regular income and family commitments”. Breslin has just completed a Masters in Digital Culture at University College Cork, researching the use of digital tools for community participation and artistic practice.

While these artists are variously negotiating the global/local, elsewhere/here and time/life dynamics, I sense that there is a need for more connection: a network of artists’ studios for peer critique and lobbying purposes. Fitzgerald suggests a hub for artists who view critical contemporary practice as a way to engage with the world. Breslin adds that such a network of artists and/or artists’ studios would mean a louder voice advocating for recognition of artists, for peer support and for cultural value as a whole. Watch this space!

KERRY has a strong visual arts tradition and community. Many artists make their home here, drawn by the landscape and the people. Kerry County Council is keenly aware of the contribution that visual artists make to the county.

Our Arts Strategy 2016 – 2021 consultations identified a lack of exhibition opportunities within the county as a major concern for visual artists.

To address this, Kerry County Council Arts Officer Kate Kennelly established the Kerry Visual Artists’ Showcase in 2015, which ran over two years and was curated by Orla Flynn, Head of CIT Crawford College of Art and Design. The event was co-funded by the Arts Council and artists from or based in Kerry were invited to apply. The 2015 exhibition presented the work of Roisín McGuigan, Dervla O’Flaherty, Sandra Hickey, Mieke Vanmechelen, Syra Larkin, Patsy Farr, Lisa Fingleton, Julie Lovett and Barbara Reen. In 2016 the selected artists were Pat Owen, Miroslava Pavelkova, Joseph Keating, Des Fitzgerald, Diarmaid O’Sullivan, Diana Muller and Deirdre McKenna.

The artworks were exhibited at the Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs in Killarney. Both exhibitions ran for a month and opened in September on Culture Night, which gave the wider public an opportunity to engage with some of the best artwork being created in the region today. A catalogue was also produced for both years and featured a selected work from each artist. Kerry County Council purchased work from each exhibition for the county collection.

Applications for the Kerry Visual Artists’ Showcase 2017 are now being accepted. Qualified artists from or living in Kerry are welcome to submit their work for consideration. Application packs can be obtained on request from arts@kerrycoco.ie and the closing date for receipt of applications is 4pm, Friday 2 June.

Other visual arts initiatives run by Kerry County Council include a series of professional development seminars for artists in Kerry in association with Visual Artists Ireland. The first of these, which took place in February 2016, covered taxation, financial planning and budgeting for

Andrew Duggan is an artist working in video, installation and group projects throughout Europe and America, exploring the complex relationships between the self and place.

Extended interviews with the artists above can be found at vernacularconsequences.wordpress.com.

visual artists and was led by Gaby Smyth and Annette Moloney. In June 2016 we also partnered with VAI on a seminar discussing artist-led festivals and events in association with K-Fest. In January 2017 a daylong seminar funded by Kerry County Council took place at Siamsa Tíre. This was hosted by Catriona Fallon. Artist Lisa Fingleton gave a presentation entitled ‘Toolbox for the Creative Mind’ and artist Aideen Barry delivered a workshop on ‘Award Winning Proposals’.

In addition, a session titled ‘Positioning Your Practice’ will take place at County Buildings, Tralee, in June, and will include presentations from artist Ceara Conway, Justine Foster (Programme Manager Education and Community at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre) and Carl Doran (artist and member of Askeaton Contemporary Arts). This event is aimed at visual artists working collaboratively with local communities or places of interest and will comprise several areas of discussion: the issues to consider when undertaking collaborative work; how to support oneself as a collaborative artist; relationships between the artists; and strategies for developing critical engagement with ones work. Each presentation will be followed by questions and discussion.

Kerry County Council also supports venues in the county that host exhibitions, such as Siamsa Tíre in Tralee, St. John’s in Listowel and Tech Amergin in Waterville. In addition, a number of visual art projects and artists have been supported through the Arts Act grants. These include: Studio 8, which will be exhibiting at Féile na Bealtaine in Dingle over the May Bank holiday weekend; K-Fest Music and Arts Festival, which runs in Killorglin from 2 – 5 June; the Tralee Art Group; and upcoming collaborative projects by socially-engaged artists Tricia O’Connor, Julie Griffiths and Maeve Collins, entitled ‘The Travelling Tea Party’ and ‘Fold & Rise’.

The visual arts also formed a major part of Kerry’s Cruinniú na Cásca events on Easter Monday 2017. These events were funded through the Creative Ireland programme and organised by Kerry County Council in collaboration with arts groups in the county.

In Dingle, the Other Voices festival will feature work by artist Áine Ní Chíobháin. ‘Lúmina’ is a light art and music event that will take place in conjunction with local schools and performers. A series of workshops will culminate in an exhibition of projections and light sculptures with live musical performance. Students will be challenged to make their own version of the Other Voices heart logo to be incorporated into the final light art installation.

In Tralee, visitors will be able to enjoy ‘Beautiful Beasts’ at Siamsa Tíre, an exhibition of sculpture for children, presented by The Ark. Visitors can interpret the exhibition in their own way (drawing materials are provided) and include their artwork in the exhibition. Kerry Arts Office publishes a fortnightly newsletter which provides details of upcoming events and opportunities.

Caroline Lynch, Kerry County Council Arts Office. kerrycoco.ie

Killarney Culture Night 2016 participating artists

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

REGIONAL PROFILE

Doing it Alone is Not as Much Fun WHEN we moved to Kerry first (from Cork City) I remember feeling very isolated. I had been in Backwater Studios for a short while and missed being able to chat with other artists over coffee.

When I did eventually meet other artists in north Kerry, I asked why they didn’t regularly meet up.

We decided to host a pre-Christmas get together in the beautiful Cottage Studio, Ballybunion, run by artists Liam and Marie Brennan. About 10 artists shared mince pies and talked about experiencing the same sense of disconnection.

On that winter day in 2010, the Colourful Spirits group was born. The essence of the group was really simple. We agreed to meet in a different studio once a month to share ideas and skills, organise events and exhibitions, keep up to date with the art world and potentially collaborate.

Rotating between studios has been one of the most successful features of the collective over the last seven years. Delicious food has also been a hallmark of these meetings, and definitely helps to sustain attendance levels. Many of the group members are also organic growers and are committed to ecological and environmental practices.

Over the year, the group has also built strong connections with Listowel Writers’ Week and St. John’s Arts Centre.

Last September I was invited to curate a group exhibition with the Tralee Art Group (TAG). I have to admit I was a bit apprehensive about working with 35 artists. We had less than three months to create new work for a group show in December at Siamsa Tíre in Tralee. Needless to say, my anxieties were misguided and I enjoyed every second of the process. TAG will be celebrating their fortieth birthday in 2019 and one of the founders is still a prolific member of the group. What is most impressive is not just the range and diversity of TAG’s artistic skills but their openness to new creative processes. The final exhibition, ‘Time and Place’, reflected a real engagement with different media including installation, film, photography, painting and drawing. The group has an active exhibition programme and members are constantly investing in their practice.

Last year I was invited by Visual Artists Ireland to write an article for the Visual Artists’ News Sheet about being an artist in rural Ireland. I started to write about all the issues affecting rural artists I know: the physical isolation of working up the side of a mountain (with only the sheep for company); the reality of a three-hour round trip

from Valentia to get to an artists’ meeting in Tralee; the difficulty in getting your work seen by an appreciative audience. Curators don’t often visit the region, exhibition opportunities are scarce and funding is even more precarious. None of these issues are exclusive to Kerry artists but they are more pronounced when you live in a remote location. The first draft of the article depressed me so much that I decided to turn all the negative issues around and write about what I would like to see in 10 years’ time. The article ‘Vision From The Verge’ was then a catalyst for a seminar ‘On The Verge: Exploring Potential With Visual Artists’.

Siamsa Tíre hosted the seminar in January with the support of the Kerry Arts Office. 30 artists travelled from all over the county to attend.

Many had read the article and were shocked that they had missed so many positive developments in the county – realising at the end that it was a vision, not a factual account. This provided a springboard for us to think about the future and how we might work in a more collective and supportive way. On the day, Aideen Barry presented her practice and talked about how she develops projects and proposals. The new Rural Artists Group (RAG) have now met twice and are exploring ways to support professional practice in the county. Studio 8, a collective of recent fine art graduates established in 2014, have also been involved in this new development.

As the summer approaches, everyone is looking forward to K-Fest, when the town of Killorglin explodes with a feast of visual art, music and film.

The fun, exuberance and success of the festival are a real testament to the team of volunteers behind it.

Indeed, all the artist-led collectives are built on voluntary energy and a commitment to the arts. I hope that this will lead to the allocation of more resources and opportunities for the arts in Kerry. Artists need to be able to live sustainably and maintain professional practices, while connecting with each other for support, on the sides of mountains or down remote boreens.

Lines That Meet

Susan Leen, Life Between Streets

FROM September to November 2016 I undertook a residency at Siamsa Tíre, Tralee, which culminated in the exhibition ‘Lines that Meet’. This residency provided me with a studio space where I could make new work for the upcoming exhibition while also delivering collaborative workshops with new communities. My work is concerned with examining different locations and exploring the relationship between landscape and society.

I’ve been living and working in Paris for the last five years, and, as a native of north Kerry, it was interesting to return and make work in Tralee.

Siamsa’s director Catriona Fallon and I prepared this project over the course of two years. She noted the previous collaborations I’d undertaken and identified the Tralee International Resource Centre – who support integration of asylum seekers and the migrant community – as potential collaborators for the participatory element of the residency.

My work looks at the social and psychological aspects of geography and explores a connectedness to place. I investigate issues such as social integration and community through map-making, drawing and collaborative workshops. Utilising the language of cartography, I examine complex ideas around territory, frontiers and movement. During this residency, as Ireland celebrated the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, I also looked at the idea of nationhood. The commemoration caused me to Lisa Fingleton is an artist and filmmaker based question contemporary Ireland’s social landscape, in Kerry. She has worked as Filmmaker in which has undergone dramatic changes over the Residence with the Arts Office and has facilipast few decades. Focusing on Tralee, which is one tated professional mentoring for artists around of the designated areas for direct provision centres, the county. She also works closely with Siamsa I began to develop interactive ateliers with the aim Tíre as an artist, curator and professional develof uncovering the realities of daily life. Participants opment facilitator. engaged with these themes through graphic lisafingleton.com expression, drawing their own subjective maps of Tralee as a means to create dialogue and exchange on issues relating to the town.

I began by looking at the history of the area, speaking to local historians and residents, and organising a walking tour to explore lesser-known areas. Having lived in a very urban setting for the last five years, I was struck by the rural Kerry landscape. I decided to focus on the area’s topography and the role that it plays in the social geography.

As part of the exhibition, I created a crosssection of the north Kerry map, with Tralee at the centre. This large-scale map measured 10 metres long by 1.5 metres in height and stretched the length of the gallery wall. It was striking to see how underpopulated this region is, particularly in contrast to Paris. This map forms part of a larger series of cut-out maps I have been developing, entitled Life Between Streets. In fabricating these art-

Lisa Fingleton and Tralee Art Group preparing for the exhibition ‘Time and Place’

works, I extracted information from maps to depict spaces that were connected and bound in alternative ways. Roads were absent, but I incorporated the outlines of fields, which created boundaries and micro-territories.

For another piece I looked at natural borders in the landscape, creating a sculpture in wood inspired by Kerry’s Slieve Mish mountain range.

My work combines rather time-consuming fabrication methods with the use of technological applications like Google Maps. While I was making preparatory drawings for the large map piece, I became interested in Google satellite images, which generate geometric forms in various hues of green. Informed by these images, I created a series of landscape drawings depicting the fields, mountain ranges and river, all of which were important to the historic development of Tralee.

The Tralee International Resource Centre played a significant role in the residency. I worked with a broad range of people who use their services. Many came to the region for economic reasons.

Some had relatives who were from or working in Kerry, while others were seeking asylum. Many are enduring a great deal, as war rages in their home countries of Iraq or Syria. These difficult circumstances meant that we approached the subject with sensitivity, particularly as our inquiries focused on the concepts of boundaries and borders, but the participants’ frankness and willingness to contribute made it a very worthwhile experience.

We developed a number of different collaborations in an attempt to explore the town’s built environment and compare it with the participants’ places of origin. The research sessions took the form of drawing sessions, printmaking workshops, writing and group discussions. It is always challenging to work with people who don’t speak the same language or who, in some cases, have experienced personal loss or trauma. Through biweekly sessions, a relationship formed and people got to know each other, which led on to discussions about their different experiences of arriving in Ireland.

The changes I have observed in Tralee and other small towns around Ireland over the last years can only be a positive development for regional communities. The research sessions often touched on the experiences of new arrivals, which were, for the most part, fairly positive. What became apparent, however, is the detrimental effect of the direct provision system. We need to urgently rethink this policy for Ireland to become a truly integrated and intercultural society.

Susan Leen susanleen.com

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

11

REGIONAL PROFILE

Thresholds & Perilous Positions

Chance Encounters

IT’S an arts festival by day, a music festival by night.

It’s poetry and spoken word, theatre and film. It’s song, dance and street performances. It’s the Screaming Pope Prize. It’s many things to many people, but at its core, K-Fest is really about visual art and how the gallery exhibitions of a wide array of emerging artists transmute a small town in Kerry and the people who spend their June bank holiday weekend here each year.

To date, K-Fest has housed over 350 visual artists and approximately 1700 original works of art, featuring paint, print, sculpture, performance, textiles, fashion, graphic design, photography, film and audio-visual work. Visitors to the festival come not only to view the work of these talented artists sprawled across galleries throughout the town, but to experience the galleries themselves. Since 2013, K-Fest has been using unoccupied spaces in Killorglin, transforming vacant retail outlets, deserted buildings and even domestic homes into bespoke pop-up galleries of all shapes and sizes.

Nicole Tilley, The North Wind Still Twittering With Delight (detail) The re-appropriation of over 15 vacant buildings by more than 100 visual artists working across BETWEEN the jigs and the reels, I have positioned creative act in itself. I use things that are available in disciplines is itself a work of socially-engaged art. myself with one foot planted in the wilds of south the natural environment or those found on my city These unconventional spaces force collaborations west Kerry – about as close to ‘the edge of Europe’ as visits. I am drawn to charity shops, flea markets, between artists and venues. Artists act as resuscitayou can get – and one foot firmly in the city. I have secondhand bookshops and museum collections tors, breathing new life into these alternative and fashioned for myself a hazardous position, with my (often of the quirkier variety). Discovery, touch and sometimes decaying sites, and the spaces give right identity skewed in all directions. Am I a city dweller inspection trigger ideas. For this approach to be suc- back to them. P. Sheahan’s Gallery, which featured or a countrywoman? An English artist or Irish art- cessful, I need to inhabit a space, so the internet, in the 2016 festival, was an old sweet shop and resiist? I am deeply connected to where I live, yet I still although a vital tool, does not suffice – hence the dential space. Exhibiting video works in its dimlyfind my situation peculiar and interesting. My work need for travel. I want objects and materials to make lit, abandoned rooms created a dramatic atmosalso reflects upon similar ideas: thresholds and per- their own journeys before coming into my posses- phere. The Tile Shed Gallery felt quintessentially sion. This is an important part of the conceptual K-Fest, with paintings, photos and prints arranged ilous positions both spiritual and terrestrial.

It can be idyllic here. This morning I walked underpinning of my work. Every process and object between pockets of moss on old concrete walls. This out of my house and climbed a hill towards a used has a symbolic meaning: I dye fabrics with turf is the festival at its best: a mash-up of art and place, secluded forest that would give Middle Earth a run dust and find clifftop wool trapped in barbed wire; I artist and audience that facilitates unlikely converfor its money. I had only the soft breeze, the view of collect and preserve spring flowers and dandelion sations. a silvery purple-blue ocean and warm sunshine for clocks.

Last year, as 2015 Screaming Pope Prize winner There is an element in this of the Victorian Lorraine McDonnell leaned against a metal scaffoldcompany. I encountered neither car nor human. I live in an exceedingly beautiful place where the desire to preserve beautiful fleeting moments at all ing post in front of her half-finished honey bee community has welcomed me warmly. I am very costs, even if that means flattening, drying, enclos- mural, she noticed a spectator. The discussion began thankful yet I can’t ignore the fact that, as a driven ing, binding or dipping in wax, all of which are in typical form: spectator expresses admiration for professional visual artist who is dedicated to her subtly violent processes. I use flotsam and jetsam artist’s work. However, as they continued talking, work and career, I spend a lot of time concocting and discarded fishing wire. I find dead butterflies in the focus shifted from the artist to the onlooker, a the wintertime and dead bees in the summertime, man who’d spent his entire life painting houses. plans to take flight.

Mini field trips have proved essential to the which I either use directly or as visual reference There, in the span of 20 minutes, the two connected development of my practice and career. I have the material. I have used feathers from a baby bird killed over holding paintbrushes for a living. He shared space and peace to create but, unfortunately, mak- by a feral cat and I once found the skeleton of a fox painting tips and anecdotes, and she listened with ing work and developing an art career are separate so bleached by the sun and the wind that its teeth entities. There are few significant exhibition oppor- were a brilliant white. I make constructions that tunities where I live, fewer art museums, poor pub- hold these strangely beautiful objects in front of a lic transport links, a dearth of visiting curators and paper screen on which their shadow is projected by limited opportunities to meet with other artists, either sun or moonlight. This imagery is photoparticularly during the winter months. In this graphed for use in a solar-plate etching project that respect, the links I have with Dublin are crucial. I utilises direct sunlight. A recent Materials and lived there for 14 years, studied for both my history Equipment Bursary from Kerry County Council of art and fine art degrees, as well as my MFA there, enabled me to start working with lunar shadows forging many enduring relationships with fellow and astro-photography.

Community is important here generally and professional visual artists. I show work with Black Church Print Studio, SO Fine Art Editions and my art practice is no different. There are many creative people in the local area: costume designers, Solomon Fine Art. The anxieties resulting from artistic isolation animators, painters, printmakers, musicians, ceramhave shaped my work and manifested in a fascina- icists and authors. The Cill Rialaig Project and Arts tion with flying things, shape-shifting creatures, Centre in Dun Geagan provide critical meeting bird-like mythological hybrid beasts and cutting up spaces for creative people in the region. and re-piecing imagery into feathery manifesta- Geographically we are distanced from each other, but I am aware that I live in one of the most culturtions.

As art supplies can take a couple of days or ally rich rural locations in the county. longer to arrive, I am pushed into working with the Nicole Tilley materials and objects that surround me. This is a nicoletilley.com K-Fest 2016 (detail); photo by David Hegarty

fascination, inspired by his knowledge of this different shade of the same craft.

These chance encounters and strange collaborations are pretty common at K-Fest. Even before the festival begins, we round up community members from all walks of life to help us prepare for the festival. Construction workers build toadstool houses for the children’s fairy trail and police sergeants discover their affinity for audio-visual sculpture.

These interactions and accidental pairings are what make K-Fest work. The art school graduate displays his work next to the self-taught muralist. At the root of it, we are looking for that rare jewel: original art, something new that startles us, makes us crack up from the self-awareness of it or even curl into a fetal position.

In 2016, there was no more powerful art piece than Quae: WHAT cannot be avoided must be endured

by Katie Higgins. The young Galway artist exhibited a series of death masks, made from the remnants of her late mother’s hospital gauze and cast using the artist’s own face, a near-mirror of her mother’s. It wasn’t just the birth of the piece, but the thoughtfully crafted details that felt like a heavy fist thrusting into our chests: the strands of her mother’s hair, interwoven with her own, from which the masks hung, or the footage playing in the background of her father slowly walking outside and looking up into the cloudless sky, demonstrating hope after such tremendous loss.

Just as the artist found solace in creating the work, the audience also found it through engaging with her. Each shared a different personal experience with Higgins, talking of lost loved ones, sitting on the floor together with an accordion over songs and tears, sharing an impromptu hug. Most, with their faces held in their hands, dragged themselves back down the gallery stairs and out into the sunshine, as her own father had done in the looping video.

It’s moments like these that the committee works for, securing the best emerging Irish and international artists, as well as the offbeat gallery spaces that will become their homes for four days during the summer. We’re looking forward to the unpredictable and unforgettable conversations K-Fest will inspire in 2017.

Penny Dahl, K-Fest, Music and The Arts.

K-Fest Music and The Arts takes place 2 – 5 June in Killorglin, County Kerry.

For more information visit kfest.ie.

12

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Susan MacWilliam, Aldous’s Eyes, 2014, video still

Susan MacWilliam, Faint installation view,1999, Highlanes Gallery; photo by Ros Kavanagh

Susan MacWilliam, Book Spheres, 2013 – 2014, F.E. McWilliam Gallery; photo by Eddie Byrne

A Séance of Objects & Images SUSAN MACWILLIAM DISCUSSES HER TOURING SURVEY EXHIBITION ‘MODERN EXPERIMENTS’, WHICH WILL HAVE BEEN SHOWN AT F.E. MCWILLIAM GALLERY, THE HIGHLANES GALLERY, UILLIN: WEST CORK ARTS CENTRE AND THE BUTLER GALLERY BY THE END OF 2017.

May – June 2017

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

13

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Susan MacWilliam, KATHLEEN, 2014, Highlanes Gallery; photo by Ros Kavanagh

IT’S a strange experience when works come back after an absence, materialising from their coffin-like crates or emerging into the light after a decade or more in darkness and obscurity.

A survey show feels like a form of mediumship. Past worlds collide in the present. These worlds are made by me, fabricated in the studio by different versions of myself at different stages of my life.

Some works ‘know’ other works, while others meet for the first time – converging like a gathering of relatives, mapping their family tree with regurgitated connectedness. The ancestors are here, having paved the way for descendants and works born of others. Having multiplied, they gather: siblings, cousins, great grandparents, aunts and uncles. Some are more assertive and demanding, while others lurk quietly in corners. Some take longer to get to know yet persist and linger.

As the maker of these worlds, I feel as though I’m in the presence of ghosts: ghosts from the past; ghosts from the future. There’s a falling in love, a sense of haunting that occurs when I work with my subjects.

There’s an intensity of knowing: of wanting to know, of wanting to know intimately, of observing, of watching, of looking closer, of getting under the skin, of wanting more. Spending time with them, here, now, I fall in love again with these first loves, with Helen, Kathleen, Kuda…

The works in ‘Modern Experiments’ are knitted together through entangled connections and the overlaps of subjects and lives. In making them, I’ve become investigator, participant and collaborator.

Spanning 18 years, these works have taken me back and forth across the globe, to libraries and archives, and to places and histories unfamiliar and little-known. Shifting my position from behind the camera to the subject of its gaze, I’ve become both the observer and the observed.

In 2005, in pursuit of knowledge of ‘eyeless sight’, I enter the underground Parisian laboratory of Madame Duplessis. I stand amongst dermo-optic boxes and coloured cards; plastic cups and measuring devices; fingers feeling through paroptic vision; voices overlapping, contradicting and concurring. I sense friendship, trust and camaraderie. “When I have finished my experience with Madame Duplessis, I feel much better,” Edith says.1 A year later, I’m in New York with the family of Irish medium Eileen Garrett. From Manhattan to Long Island and back, swept in and under their wing, engulfed in a whirlwind of histories and anecdotes.

Back now to ‘Modern Experiments’, amongst this family of objects, images and moving pictures. I’m sitting in a 1930s armchair, bathed in the glow of the multi-bulbed vaudeville sign that spells out the name “Kuda Bux”.2 Himself here now in front of me, his doughballed eyes and turban-bound face incased in a 1950s television that endlessly loops. An inter-title informs that Kuda Bux “was made famous during the 1930s and ‘40s by his dramatic demonstrations of eyeless sight”. The detritus of ‘me’ becoming ‘he’ hovers: the reconstructed blackboard to my side, the lumpen rags at my feet. This theatrical installation sits within ‘Modern Experiments’, amongst its laboratories of propositions, its anthologies and analogies, and its curiosity of personalities.

Susan MacWilliam, Headbox, 2004, video still

Elevated on a wooden stand, a monitor emits a gentle hum; from its cathode ray tube, the dark spaces of the Eileen J. Garrett Library open up.3 Elsewhere, the writer Kathleen Coyle transmits her inner thoughts through intimate earphones.4 ‘Modern Experiments’ is littered with the literary, and books abound: The Eternity of Time, Between Heaven and Earth, Unknown but Known, Extra-Sensory Perception.5 Kathleen’s daughter tells her: “Once you are there in that ESP atmosphere, the writing of your book should get on well”. Kathleen had hoped to get to Duke University to participate in the ESP experiments of J.B. Rhine. Her scribbled thoughts on a manuscript willing it to be: “going to get, going to get to Duke soon; going to get, going to get to Duke soon”. I’d already gotten to Duke before encountering Coyle and her desires to “get there”. In 2011 – amongst the folders, files and photographs of that ESP environment at Duke – my fingers find a telegram from 1934. Sent to Rhine on behalf of Garrett, its sticker declares: “AN ANSWER IS EXPECTED”.6 Answers can be found in books: shelved books, closed books, open books. In ‘Modern Experiments’ books become orbs, Garrett travels from Southampton to New York and Kuda Bux performs.7 Across 19 monitors, my younger self, trapped in an eternal fainting loop, becomes a body observed, a body controlled.8 Birds sing, scissors snip, an air conditioner hums. Then a voice from a television declares: “You won’t believe your eyes … that which you are about to see, you will never forget”. Reason is ruptured, while white neon asks: “Where are the dead?”9 and Mrs C. wonders: “Well where does it go?”10 Questions asked, answers demanded; reproduction and reconstruction; close inspection and gathered recollection. Bill first met Eileen Garrett while he was a student at Oxford; I met Bill while investigating Garrett. Together now in ‘Modern Experiments’, Bill, Mrs C., Lisette and Garrett enter my orbit, some as spectres from the other side, gone but not gone, floating in the ether, their voices resonating, their personalities pervading. Bill says of Garrett: “When she enters a room, you know it… she’s a kind of sun around whom planets rotate, you know who’s the centre – she’s the centre”.

On a screen on a shelf, Aldous Huxley’s eyes rattle and rotate.11 In his 1942 book The Art of Seeing, Huxley espoused the use of a raised hand to palm the eye in order to improve eyesight. The fainting girl raises her hand to her forehead: “Test, test, test”. Her body slumps. Arla reads how Hamilton “put his hands over the face of the medium… and said he felt nothing there…”12 Elsewhere on a monitor, Helen Duncan’s hands are bound to a chair.13 In 1920, Jules Romains described ‘eyeless sight’ in La Vision extra-rétinienne et le sens paroptique. Ciaran says: “You can see anything at all in anything at all…if that’s how you think”. In Winnipeg in 1931, teleplasmic letters emerge on a séance cabinet wall spelling out the name ‘Flammarion’.

In 2008, I cross the Atlantic once more to explore the photographs of that teleplasm. Back here, now, in a corner of the gallery, my nephew Mercer – age five and still learning language – enquires about ectoplasmic rods, experiments and fraud.14 “Light leak, spool down, lens flare, split screen”. Audio overlaps and images regurgitate. “Life has a habit of coming up with repeated patterns,” Kathleen says. And

Bill imagines three pictures of himself “saying the same thing slightly differently”. In ‘Modern Experiments’ patterns repeat and duplicate with doubling synchronicity. In 2008 I discover, on a ship’s manifest, that relatives of mine travelled to New York in 1934 on the same crossing as Garrett and her daughter. Kathleen observes how “life and living team with coincidences”.

‘Modern Experiments’ proliferates with relentless looking and intimate observation. A sequence of images unfolds across two monitors on the floor: an attic room wallpapered with repeated patterns; a view under a table; fleshy feet entering a wooden box. 15 Exploring the possibilities of table levitation, W.J. Crawford crawls on hands and knees and describes how “the flesh of ‘M’ is converted into plasma”.

Reason ruptures: “psychic stuff sent in fluxes”.

Plywood platforms house scissor-wielding hands and Rosa Kuleshova is brought back to life in paper form.16 In ‘Modern Experiments’ dislocated limbs construct models and fingers feel.

Bodies produce images, ectoplasm finds form and feelers extend: amorphous ambiguity … audio loops and layers … silence … webs weave … cameras observe … coincidence converge … These are the worlds of Helen Duncan, Kathleen Goligher, Kuda Bux, Eileen Garrett, Yvonne Duplessis, Flammarion and Kathleen Coyle.

‘Modern Experiments’ is a séance of objects and images. The dead and the not-yet-dead manifest in electrical boxes and in planes of projected light. Viewing devices capture and freeze three-dimensional moments in time. I’m peering in at myself crouched a decade ago on the floor of the Parapsychology Foundation library – that summer in New York with the Garrett girls.17 That’s me eternally frozen in a moment in the eternity of time, amongst those books, those worlds of knowledge, staring back at myself now – a viewer in the future. Here, time, space and place collide – the past is transmitted to the present, while ruby red neon flashes “NOW, NOW, NOW”.18 Susan MacWilliam is a Belfast-born artist based in Dublin and a lecturer in Fine Art at NCAD. ‘Modern Experiments’ will be presented at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen (9 September – 18 October) and at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny (28 October – 17 December). Curated by Riann Coulter, ‘Modern Experiments’ is supported by a Touring Award from Arts Council of Ireland and Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Notes List of Susan MacWilliams’s artworks referenced in the text: 1. Dermo Optics, 2006, video.

2. Kuda Bux, 2003, video installation.

3. Library, 2008, video.

4. KATHLEEN, 2014, video.

5. Book Spheres, 2013/14, sculpture, installation.

6. AN ANSWER IS EXPECTED, 2013, neon.

7. The Only Way to Travel, 2008, video.

8. Faint, 1999, 19-channel video.

9. Where are the dead?, 2013, neon.

10. 13 Roland Gardens, 2007, video.

11. Aldous’s Eyes, 2014, video.

12. F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N, 2009, video.

13. The Last Person, 1998, video.

14. Explaining Magic to Mercer, 2005, video installation.

15. Experiment M, 1999, video, double channel.

16. Headbox, 2004, video installation.

17. Artist as Medium, 2008, stereoscope.

18. NOW, 2013, neon.

14

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

CAREER DEVELOPMENT JL: Have you programmed a few things at the Douglas Hyde for 2017?

JH: I have bequeathed three solo exhibitions: Sean Lynch (17 February – 5 April) and Isobel Nolan (June – August), that I felt were appropriate to the gallery and with which any incoming director would feel comfortable. The current exhibition by Dennis Dineen (21 April 21 – 27 May) is a bit of a wild card. Dineen was an amateur photographer who ran a pub outside Cork. He took photographs of locals in the back room for passports, first communions and other events throughout the 1950s and ‘60s. Now, not every curator will like these photographs, because they’re odd things, but I think they are wonderful. I didn’t want to programme shows that I wouldn’t do myself, but by the same token I didn’t want to leave shows that were too obviously ‘me’.

Perhaps the Dineen show is the exception.

JL: Under your directorship, the Douglas Hyde also became renowned for its commitment to publishing. When and how did this practice unfold?

JH: There were three stages. I inherited a budget of £17,000 for a simple A4 catalogue when I started at the gallery in 1991. Massive amounts of money were spent on catalogues in those days. I started off working with a couple of designers and eventually with Peter Maybury, with whom I had a very interesting and productive relationship. At this time, every catalogue was designed according to individual needs, Alfred Jensen, installation view, the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Gallery 1, March 2010 ‘Turkmen and Uzbek Children’s Clothes’, the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Gallery 2, May 2016 budgets and aesthetic requirements. The second stage was to find a format that could be applied to all artists, that was affordable, democratic and could provide an identity for the gallery. I came up with the idea of small, bound A5 volumes and we began to print abroad. The artist was given the outside format and told they could do more or less JOANNE LAWS SPEAKS TO JOHN HUTCHINSON ABOUT HIS 25-YEAR DIRECTORSHIP OF THE DOUGLAS whatever they wanted within it. It worked like a dream. That lasted up until the economic crash, and then we couldn’t even afford those, so I HYDE GALLERY, DUBLIN. came up with a different format, printing digitally and designing inJoanne Laws: Your vast contribution to the Irish visual arts is one way, and this is the way of contrast that you describe. Another is house. Generally, I wrote the texts for the small books, and they were fondly conveyed in a series of thoughts, reflections and tributes the idea that you begin with oneness and end with it. If you do that, incredibly efficient financially. We were able to sell them for €5. In the by artists, colleagues and friends. How do you feel about these relationships are established like networks, in a kind of unfoldment, last few years we were typically printing 250 or 300 copies; often they which is less a set of binary oppositions of contrast than an investiga- would sell out and we would make a modest profit. comments?

John Hutchinson: I found it a very strange experience. It felt a bit like tion or exploration of connections – between big and small, outside reading my own obituary. But by and large they were lovely and very and inside, absence and presence. It’s this richness of interrelation- JL: Do you feel that printed matter does more than its digital counterpart? generous. Michael [Hill] and Rachel [McIntyre] put them together with ships that interests me.

JH: Oh yes, much more. It looks and feels different when you have an a lot of work and I’m very touched and grateful for all their efforts.

JL: Your curatorial approach seems rooted in questions of identity object in your hand. One of the ideas behind the scale of the small JL: Among these comments, Alice Maher described her 1994 solo and spirituality. Perhaps you could discuss some of your influ- publications was that they were meant to be, subconsciously, a bit like a little prayer book – something intimate that you could stick in your exhibition, ‘Familiar’, as pivotal, not only in launching her ences? career, but in starting to see herself as a “full-time practicing artist JH: When I first started at the gallery in 1991, I wrote a short piece for pocket. There was something slightly precious about them, but on the – no going back”. How important is it for you to champion emerg- Circa in which I said that the programme would be based on themes other hand if someone spent €5 and didn’t like it, they could toss it of identity and absence. These ideas served a purpose initially, but my away. I like those ambiguities and contradictions. But that normally ing artists?

JH: The funny thing was that at the time I wasn’t long there either. I approach gradually became more intuitive than rational. The prag- only comes across with a physical object. was learning my trade while Alice was learning hers. She said that I matics of curating are pretty straightforward; the rest is down to the gave her another six months to develop extra work and I only vaguely depth and breadth of your experience, the people you hang out with, JL: In foreword of the 2009 publication ‘Questions of Travel’, you recollect this – I’m sure it was just an instinctive or natural response. the books you read, the music you listen to and so on. The question of reflect on art as being founded on “stillness and familiarity”. To However, I rarely champion anyone. Besides, I always made an effort what a curator is and does is a thorny one, particularly as there are so what extent does art feature in your future plans? Will you still to have a balance between emerging and established, Irish, non-Irish, many approaches one can follow. It’s a bit like writing: almost anyone go to openings? Are you someone that likes to travel? What will women, men, minorities and so on – a basic structure to avoid opening can write a book, but the question is, can you write an interesting one? you miss?

JH: No, I disliked openings, even when I had to host them. I don’t want myself up to criticism for having too much of this or too little of that.

JL: With a shake-up of directors and curators happening across to set foot in the gallery again for a while, so the new director has time The other thing I had to bear in mind was a spread of different mediums. Nonetheless, if you look back, you’ll find a sustained inter- many Irish arts organisations at the moment, we are confronted and space to settle down and I can develop a new persona. But I do est in painting and photography. There was an emphasis on installa- with the (often anxious) realisation that, to varying degrees, the enjoy keeping in touch with artists, colleagues and friends. It’s interesttion in the early 1990s, when it was very fashionable, but as other curator is actually the institution. Do you have any thoughts on ing to see, though, how transient your influence is. You’re left with the people you want to see and who want to see you. galleries began doing more installation or conceptual work, I backed this?

In some respects, it’s taking longer to settle than I thought. What away from it. I tried to work with a sense of necessity, of need, with JH: Sometimes, when radical shifts happen, the contrast with what something I wanted to see happen. I increasingly gambled on the went before is very evident. I wouldn’t be surprised to see dramatic I will miss are the dialogues with artists and hanging shows. They are belief that if I found it interesting there would be other people out changes at the Douglas Hyde, and many people may well prefer them. things I wouldn’t like to do without, but how they can be sustained I Others might miss my approach – but that’s life. In general the art don’t know. I won’t miss the increasing bureaucracy or the politics of there who would too. system is very antipathetic to people staying a long time in one place. the art world, but I will miss standing with an artist in the Douglas JL: In your curatorial approach, the philosophy of dualism seems Curatorial careers are increasingly globalised and ruthless – a curator Hyde’s big concrete room, or even in the little one, and thinking “right, to allow binary opposites to coexist, emphasising the thresholds will often come into an institution already thinking about moving on okay, where do we put this?” I loved that. I travel mentally; I don’t travel physically much anymore. I’m a big reader. My house is full of between the expansive and the intimate, familiar or strange, even to another job within a year or two.

I worked for 25 years in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, where I probstuff. I collect things. I’ll probably have to stop now that I’ll have less the venerated art object and the discarded artefact or relic. Can ably put on around 250 exhibitions. One of the best-attended shows I money, but I accumulate books, CDs, films and objects from all over you say something about dualism?

JH: Actually dualism in itself interests me not at all. I’m much more was involved in was the ‘Kalachakra Sand Mandala’ with the Tibetan the world. They feed me. I garden, I walk, I listen to music, and I stare interested in – to use a metaphysical term – ‘oneness’. The question is, monks. We had phenomenal numbers for that. On the final day, we at the sky – and that does me, you see. how does one experience, explore, manifest or share that sense of one- collected donations for the monastery and they came in so fast that the ness? There are a number of ways to do this. For example – and of money boxes were overflowing. That all happened through word of John Hutchinson was Director of the Douglas Hyde Gallery, course I’m simplifying – in Hegelian dialectic you put opposites mouth. If an exhibition touches people and they’re interested, then Dublin, from 1991 to 2016. together and the result is something which combines the two. That’s that’s fantastic, but it often won’t happen. That seems okay to me.

A Sense of Stillness

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

15

ORGANISATION

Everywhere Yet Nowhere CO-DIRECTOR OF BASIC SPACE, DUBLIN, DANIEL BERMINGHAM, DISCUSSES THE EVOLUTION OF THE ORGANISATION AND ITS FUTURE TRAJECTORY.

Kian Benson Bailes, Untitled, ‘The Present Is Not Enough - Part I’, CCA Derry-Londonderry, March 2017

BASIC Space is a contemporary art organisation which operates from a gallery and studio space in Temple Bar. The current co-directors (myself, Bassam Al-Sabah and Kim Gleeson) run a programme of residencies, exhibitions and educational events in collaboration with institutions throughout Ireland and the UK. As it enters its seventh year, Basic Space continues to evolve in response to changes in place, community and purpose, through ongoing re-evaluations of institutional practices and stratagems of survival.

The conditions that were present at the founding of Basic Space in 2010 echo a history of artist-led responses to crisis and systemic change. Following the economic crash of 2008, the Irish arts ecology saw a fundamental shift in value systems, resulting from the aggressive neoliberalisation of public and domestic life. This necessitated a phase of readjustment aimed at institutional survival for both new and existing arts organisations. Among the artist-led spaces and collectives established at this time, a shared interest in experimental modes of production, collaboration and dissemination marked a distinctive shift in the art-institutional landscape.

This period saw the re-emergence of horizontal institutional methodologies, with Irish and international organisations pooling their resources to work together, crafting a valid response to the failure of conventional vertical models in addressing the needs of artists and audiences. Some of this activity was showcased in an exhibition at NCAD Gallery in 2012 entitled ‘New Ecologies of Practice’. As part of the exhibition, Basic Space presented a shop (selling mementoes from artworks and performances, limited edition collectables and exhibition memorabilia) alongside the work of three other artist-led spaces: Catalyst Arts (Belfast), Occupy Space (Limerick) and The Good Hatchery (Offaly). According to the exhibition press release, each of these organisations display “strategic ideologies [that] argue for a reconfiguration of inherited thinking about the nature and purpose of art and institutional practice”.

With the decimation of public funding and a glut of vacant commercial premises, this period saw a re-evaluation of how art is produced and disseminated as well as a reimagining of the modes of collectivism and the role of art and its spaces. However, as the ‘economic recovery’ continues, a new set of circumstances has emerged.

Substantial challenges now include a severe shortage of affordable spaces (particularly in urban centres), ongoing displacement and public arts funding that is apparently undeserving of restoration. This has again necessitated strategic institutional responses from artist-led initiatives.

In April 2016, we lost our main studio/gallery space on Marrowbone Lane in Dublin 8. This marked the latest in a series of changes in circumstance that forced us to explore alternative models of programming. Basic Space could no longer be what it had been, nor

Joanne Reid, Paul Hallihan, Lee Welsh, David Beattie and Linda Quinlan, ‘INFRA’ installation view, Eight Gallery, September 2016

could it adequately serve the same community or produce and disseminate the same type of work. As a result of this displacement, a new organisational structure and programme emerged – that of a multipurpose and collectively-owned ‘multiuser centre’. Basic Space realigned its resources towards external institutional collaboration, residencies and education, in an effort to establish sustainable strategies that can support the ongoing research, production and dissemination of contemporary art and its discourses.

In June 2016, Basic Space moved into Independent Studios on Eustace Street in Temple Bar, which allowed us to recommence our exhibition and residency programmes. We opened with ‘Illusions of Beloved Objects’, which featured work by Barbara Knezevic, Christopher Mahon and Sibyl Montague. The space has since hosted two Basic Space residencies: our Artists’ Residency with Joanne Reid and our current Research Residency with Paper Visual Art. Education and research has become an integral part of Basic Space’s activities.

Our ‘BASIC TALKS’ education programme, kindly supported by Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, has allowed contemporary practitioners (including artists, curators, writers and researchers) to create discourse around their work through lectures, workshops, presentations or performances. Previous participants have included Michelle Hall, Fiona Hallinan and Nathan O’Donnell, while upcoming speakers include Aoibheann Greenan, Ali Kirby and RGKSKSRG. Unable to support the large studio practices of the past, Basic Space has adopted a more faciliatory role in ‘making public’ contemporary art practice. In our recent collaborations with museums, galleries and spaces throughout Ireland and UK, we have attempted to make institutional space more accessible to the practitioners and associated communities, enacting what Pascal Gielen describes as ‘institutional mobilism’. Institutional mobilism is, in part, a response to current modes of urbanism and the hyper-competitive occupation and privatisation of space. Artistic acts of production and display are forced to occupy space in unconventional ways, raising questions around ownership and the uses of public space. We began to see Basic Space as a dematerialised entity, visible as a set of reproducible ethics, rather than a geographically-fixed architecture. With this new institutional methodology, Basic Space observes, accommodates and responds to a range of different communities and their socio-geographic interests.

This new phase commenced in September 2016 with ‘INFRA’, a group exhibition presenting the work of David Beattie, Simon Cummins, Paul Hallahan, Linda Quinlan, Joanne Reid, Suzanne Walsh and Lee Welsh at Eight Gallery on Dawson Street, Dublin. From this first collaborative ‘occupation’, a series of performative and pedagogical projects were subsequently developed. In March 2017, Basic Space presented ‘The Present Is Not Enough – Part I’ with Kian Benson Bailes and Olivia Sparrow’s ‘Queer Day School’ at CCA Derry-Londonderry.

Selected by Sean Lynch for CCA’s exhibition series ‘The Edge of Things’, this one day exhibition occupied CCA as an “ephemeral community centre” for the LGBTQ+ community. This provided a platform from which to engage in a series of social, political and artistic actions, including artistic display, workshops and archival research.

These temporary institutional acts mirror initiatives such as ‘No More Fun and Games’ by Jesse Jones at the Hugh Lane and to some degree Emma Haugh’s ‘The Re-appropriation of Sensuality’. By occupying host institutions, Basic Space aims to redefine the communities such institutions traditionally welcome and accommodate. Providing space for the public to engage with artistic, social and political acts expands the role of the art institution and its purposes.

Basic Space continues to evolve in terms of management and policy. From summer 2017 onward, programming will involve collaboration with a broader range of international institutions and practitioners. This move is, in part, a response to limited space and funding in Ireland, but also provides us with the opportunity to expand and diversify the discourses in which we engage. In supporting artists and practitioners through studio and exhibition opportunities, Basic Space looks to continue its legacy as a vital space for the production and display of contemporary art. This includes our current research residency with Paper Visual Art, which will see the production of a number of publications in Autumn 2017.

Basic Space is honoured to welcome Martin Creed for a series of gigs and subsequent talks in Dublin and Limerick in May 2017.

Projects such as these allow us to support international artists in presenting work in Ireland by connecting them to institutions and communities across the country. Concurrently, we aim to reconnect with independent and artist-run spaces across Ireland and elsewhere, to reaffirm the solidarity that is so central to our survival in this challenging era.

Through the enactment of various methodological approaches – including institutional mobilism, expanded institutionalism and international collaboration – Basic Space can continue to support the production and dissemination of contemporary art and its discourses.

We are conscious that, in the context of such precarity and instability, this approach represents a retreat from the idea of a fixed or tangible space for artistic production and display. It is a strategy of survival; a response to crisis, deficit and structural failure. Although operating in unstable conditions, this is a valuable opportunity to re-imagine and construct methodologies that ensure an adaptable longevity. Basic Space invites artists, practitioners, institutions and the community at large to contribute to a prolonged dialogue in this process of change and experimentation.

Daniel Bermingham is Co-Director of Basic Space, Dublin.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

VAI/DCC CRITICAL WRITING AWARD

Serpents & Clay SUE RAINSFORD, WINNER OF THE VISUAL ARTISTS IRELAND/DUBLIN CITY COUNCIL ARTS OFFICE CRITICAL WRITING AWARD 2017, RESPONDS TO VANESSA DONOSO LÓPEZ’S EXHIBITION ‘TO SWALLOW A BALL’, WHICH RAN AT THE LAB GALLERY, DUBLIN, FROM SEPTEMBER TO NOVEMBER 2016.

Vanessa Donoso López, ‘to swallow a ball’, installation view, The LAB, 2016

Vanessa Donoso López, ‘to swallow a ball’, installation view, The LAB, 2016

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

17

VAI/DCC CRITICAL WRITING AWARD

Vanessa Donoso López, ‘to swallow a ball’, installation view, The LAB, 2016

Vanessa Donoso López, ‘to swallow a ball’, installation view, The LAB, 2016

This provocation is answered by the theatrical inflation of mateTO swallow: to take something inside and, for a time – for the length rials in the next room. Our entry into the darkened space triggers a of your visit to the exhibition, perhaps – keep it there. light in the far corner and the sound of running water: now illuminated, a spectral Gilgamesh stands regal and sombre over a pool of water while, on the ground, a serpent swerves toward us. There is an As artistic material, clay requires repeated physical gestures: kneading, intensely intimate quality to this scene that makes us feel voyeuristic, prodding, probing. It also requires heat if it’s to be solidified. Coming crass in our watchfulness: this is because we know just enough from to Vanessa Donoso López’s ‘to swallow a ball’, we may know that, dur- the text on the wall to understand that this moment we intrude upon ing the Bronze Age, clay tablets were made to be written on. We may is a private one. Gilgamesh, following the death of his friend Endiku, not know that the writing was cuneiform script, that the marks were went in search of a life-restoring plant at the bottom of the sea. Having made with sharpened reed stems. We may also not know that, preced- found it, he stopped to bathe and put the plant aside, at which point a ing these tablets, clay balls were used to contain and transport written serpent snatched it away. The jolt we feel at the sudden light and running water is the jolt of the theft, the quick spasm of panic as content.

As linguistic material, clay references this gestural form of writ- Gilgamesh realises the rejuvenating plant is gone and his friend is ing, of mark-making, of mobilising discourse. It is solid, but can take truly lost.

After standing over the works outside, we are suddenly being any form, can approximate most things. approached, confronted. The shock of the serpent on the ground is This co-existence of solidity and ongoingness moves throughout heightened by the frenetic quality of the clay disks that might at any the exhibition. moment, it seems, slip out of place. The dense, climactic kernel is still unfolding as Gilgamesh realises that Endiku will not be brought back to life. The fraught intensity of this realisation is relayed in the helpThe floor of The LAB’s main gallery space has been covered with clay less, open-armed stance of Gilgamesh as he watches the serpent dart balls. At times, their patterns read like a kind of code – resonant, per- away. Our entry into the room sees his grief, for a moment undone, haps, of cuneiform inscriptions. Mostly, they read as decorative items, now cruelly compounded afresh by this material loss.

Text is truly material here: metaphorically and literally, the writas beads of jewellery, necklaces without their connecting thread.

Sprawled like the fruits of an archaeological dig, they’re hard to place: ten word has expanded. Gilgamesh is the earliest surviving literary are they artwork or artefact? Have they been freshly discovered, their work, initially inscribed on tablets. While the clay takes more sophisuse value long gone, or is theirs a value yet to manifest? This ambigu- ticated and astute forms, the piece is indelibly underpinned by this ity plays well with the space, drawing on the open floorplan and story’s birth in clay. The first word, the first material. And so, Donoso abundance of natural light, so that the exhibition doesn’t belie a gal- López employs medium and content that are without predecessor, lery so much as a private back room. The quiet numeration of the that each reach back as far as they can go.

Originally the medium of this ancient story, clay has now pieces and the industrial quality of the fabric they’re placed on help to become its very material. Not the means of relaying at a later time, but suggest a behind-the-scenes encounter available to only a few.

And so we crouch, look closely and see evidence of contact across rather the means of being, of occurring in the present moment. the spectrum of pressure: the inevitable thumbprint as well as the Though the conditions have been altered, the story remains indebted more emphatic, authorial indentation. These gestural micro-narra- to clay and touch: laden with pathos, endlessly expounded upon, it is tives relay the sheer amount of labour these small pieces entailed, as still indebted to the ground beneath us.

On the mezzanine two tables are densely laid with bowls, plates well as their long spell in proximity to the body. Digging, handling, shaping. With these actions in mind, we are reminded that clay can and balls of varying sizes that we read as edible – perhaps as fruit. take any form, can be – or be made to look like – almost anything. There are several oscillations at play. While these works at first conThere is something deliciously provocative, then, about this decision jure a museological display, the tables become, on closer inspection, to leave these pieces ‘in-process’, to have them evoke so much of their tables at which you might sit, and the balls are now balls that you might swallow. Again, the pieces fluctuate between beginning and making.

completing, their textures calling out for touch while their labelling and numeration discourage it. Are they things to be held, even consumed, or items to be revered? Is the knowledge they possess a tactile one, or is it less immediate, more historical? Once more, there comes a pleasurable uncertainty, a level of inquiry that necessitates the body.

In this arguably more simplified form, the clay continues to carry a story, and Donoso López seems here to be speaking to those clay balls that, long ago, allowed writing and meaning to take shape and move, garner readers and speed. We know this particular clay operates as a cross-section of place, being made with soil from both Ireland and Spain. This seems a simple, eloquent nod toward cross-cultural identity, fusing together two landscapes in the form of bounty, of cornucopia and feast. Having expanded her materials into complex forms, Donoso López pares them back again, reasserting the primal and primary nature of clay.

A ball: a story, the initial means of mark-making, of inscription, a reaffirming of our relationship to soil.

In this exhibition, Donoso López pursues a material discourse that operates in a cross-space and exists on its own terms. It is open to interpretation, but there is something subtle at work in the choice of clay, in its irrefutable solidity: while its form may alter, its base properties remain in evidence, unchanged. The connective tissue is this earth-coloured matter, this most basic of materials that requires of its maker touch and heat, that insinuates uncovering and moulding, dislodging old and new meanings from the ground. Elaborating on the materiality of our oldest story, consistently insinuating acts of uncovering and recovering, Donoso López also proposes – lightly, playfully – how our future narratives might unfold. By necessity, then, her works and process are rooted in solidity and gesture, but are also malleable and ongoing.

Sue Rainsford is a writer and researcher based in Dublin. A graduate of Trinity College and IADT, she recently completed an MFA in Writing and Literature at Bennington College, Vermont. Her practice is concerned with hybrid texts and radical experience, as well as the intersection between visual and literary arts practices. suerainsford.com vanessadonosolopez.com dublincityartsoffice.ie/the-lab

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

RESIDENCY

Charlotte Bosanquet, Stratheden Street, New Lodge, Belfast, October 2016

Seeing the City From Above CHARLOTTE BOSANQUET DISCUSSES HER RECENT RESIDENCY AT COMMUNITY ARTS ORGANISATION NEW LODGE ARTS IN NORTH BELFAST. IN 2016 New Lodge Arts invited me to become their first yearlong artist-in-residence. I had been working with New Lodge Arts as a community-based artist for the previous three years on their Arts Academy Programme and on the annual North Belfast Lantern Parade and Magical Festival. In this role I worked as a facilitator of objectbased, short-term projects. For the residency, New Lodge Arts expressed an interest in supporting a different approach to making artworks which would broaden out their traditional remit as an embedded community arts organisation and shift their focus away from outcomes towards artistic methods and approaches.

The residency was situated in the Culture Shop, an empty retail space next to the New Lodge Arts Offices in North Belfast. The Culture Shop was converted for artistic purposes and is used to host a varied programme of activities and community meetings. My residency commenced in 2016 and on 25 January we set up the Culture Shop as an open invitation event to welcome local stakeholders. The event was an opportunity to find out more about the geography and people in the area and to initiate conversations that would form the basis of my residency.

This residency was not undertaken alone. There was an understanding that I would be partnered with a youth worker, Joanne Smyth, and that funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation would develop our practices and our understanding of each other’s roles. This youth work foundation was supportive from the outset and gave me a greater understanding of the responsibilities and scope of the profession.

Around the same time I became interested in working with young men in the area, the Youth Justice Agency contacted New Lodge Arts about the possibility of working with an artist. It seemed like a good match and I began conversations with the agency about meeting clients who use their services.

The New Lodge is a predominantly working class Catholic area in North Belfast, which is currently undergoing massive transformation. The seven tower blocks are in the process of being re-clad, while three streets of terraced houses have been levelled to create large building sites. The area is shifting and changing on a daily basis. Based on the seed of a previous idea, I wanted to find ways to view this changing landscape from above, in order to gauge what was going on and to think about the role of developers in the formation of city spaces. I was invited to participate in the ‘Imagined City Bus Tour’ that travelled from west to east Belfast in April 2016 as part of the Household Collective’s ‘Imagined City’ programme and wrote a text

Charlotte Bosanquet, ‘Drone Project’ , 2016

curator. We also visited the artist-led spaces Platform Arts and Catalyst Arts, where we discussed the realities of being a professional practicing artist.

A group of local artists would meet up on a Tuesday in the Culture Shop and I started organising hour-long lunchtime talks with them once a month. These talks were aimed at situating the work that was happening in New Lodge within a broader arts conversation and could be viewed as an extension of my visits with the Youth Justice Agency. The Tuesday Drawing Group participants were invited to give a half-hour talk on their work, while visiting artists would talk for the other half hour. To date Lisa Malone, Brendan O’Neill, Aisling O’Beirn, Tonya McMullan, Mitch Colon and Edel O’Reilly have given lunchtime talks and these will continue into 2017.

In the midst of all of this activity, the team at New Lodge Arts have been discussing ways for community arts practitioners to work with local youth workers. Last year’s Lantern Parade raised some questions about the role of youth workers and artists, which in turn led to meetings between New Lodge Arts and partner youth organisations to see if there was scope for training both parties on expectations. A seminar is currently at planning stages on how youth workers and artists might work together to provide more sustainable and ambitious programming.

The processes and outcomes of this residency were quite meandering, which was fitting for a yearlong residency. During my work with the Youth Justice Agency I was invited to visit the Juvenile Justice Centre (JJC) in Bangor and the most exciting outcome of the whole residency was the work I carried out in this context. While working with young women in the centre, I was involved in discussions about some sort of sustainable or permanent artistic presence there. It was decided that this would take the form of another yearlong artist residency in a partnership between the JJC and New Lodge Arts. I will be the first artist-in-residence and then it will be opened up to other artists. We are still in the process of developing the programme. This new partnership with the JJC will allow me to continue the work I started during my residency at New Lodge Arts and will help me to maintain many of the connections that I found so supportive and rewarding.

on ideas of seeing the city from above. The text was a starting point for some of the ideas that I subsequently began to test out visually in New Lodge.

In May 2016 I started to work with social workers Rosie Ewing and Ben Rayot, and the clients from the Youth Justice Agency, five 15 – 17 year-old boys. I wanted to see the area from above and I wanted to engage the young people with whom I was working. We started making pinhole cameras and portable camera obscuras as a way to think about image-making before it was suggested that we should make a kit drone and see if we could fly it; and so the ‘Drone Project’ began.

With the support of FabLab Belfast, we had access to the tools and technical know-how needed to build a kit drone and fly it. With views of the New Lodge, The Grove playing fields provided a neutral space that was big enough to absorb any teething problems. The ‘Drone Project’ was soon up and running and we documented the failed flight attempts, which later formed the basis of a film. We plotted these experiences and footage against the history of New Lodge as a green agricultural space and the new construction sites. Among all of the building materials being introduced into New Lodge’s changing landscape – including stone, brick, clay, concrete and pipes – a tiny stone from Lourdes mounted in concrete in the grotto became a focus of the film. We also thought about the bedrock of Belfast or Béal Feirste – Charlotte Bosanquet is an artist and curator living and working meaning mouth of the river. in Belfast.

Speaking to the young people from the Youth Justice Agency charlottebosanquet.com about being an artist in Belfast, I felt that visiting art spaces in the city Note would help make this more understandable. We visited the David New Lodge Arts is interested in artists with socially-engaged aspects to their practice. Expressions of interest can be sent to Anne Delaney at anne.delaney@ashtoncentre.com. Details of the monthly Hockney retrospective exhibition at The MAC and spoke with the lunchtime talks can be found on the New Lodge Arts Facebook page and everybody is welcome.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Critique Supplement

Richard Forrest, Kevin Gaffney, Ann Maria Healy, Elaine Hoey, Ali Kirby, Jane Locke, Jane Rainey ‘Futures, Series 3, Episode 1’ RHA, Dublin, 17 March – 23 April

You are with a group of ghostly figures. A woman stares blankly into the distance and sometimes looks directly at you. The boat moves slowly in the water through strange structures with walls that are constantly moving. It is a haunting experience. This moving artwork brings us right into the refugees’ present reality and helps us to understand their terrifying journey.

Ali Kirby’s sculptural installation, Landing, is quite different. The artist recreates an old staircase that used to lead up to the gallery where the exhibition takes place. The work sits awkwardly close to a false wall in the middle of the space. It shows us an historical object and forces us to walk around it, bringing the past into our present.

On the other side of the wall, Kevin Gaffney uses history to imagine a situation that is set in the near future. The artist’s film, A Numbness in the Mouth, is staged in the old Shackleton Mill on the banks of the River Liffey. The mill produced flour for nearly 200 years until it closed in 1998.

In the film, a woman tells the people of Ireland to eat five pounds of flour every day because too much has been produced. We have to do this to save the country’s economy, otherwise we’d be making “a direct attack on our sovereignty”. It reminds us of the huge sacrifices that Irish people made in the past and are still making today, to help the economy recover. Gaffney’s film is both absurd and chilling. It makes us think about what we are currently stomaching in the name of recovery.

Ann Maria Healy’s digitally-generated video work, How to be Other, is shown on a monitor nearby. The video’s narrator tells us a story about a fictional world. This is a world “in turmoil” with “many attacks”. The people there use a well. In Ireland, people believed that traditional holy wells could cure different conditions, but the well in the video has traces of chemicals that are used to bring Elaine Hoey, The Weight of Water, 2016; VR installation,metal mesh grid, barbed wire, wood, sensor lights, seniors fan, Oculus Rift, controller, headphones, swivel stool; photo by Justyna Kielbowicz on abortions. This links to the present day, as Irish women still don’t have access to abortion. The artthey are thick with paint. Colours are mixed togeth- work makes us think about this issue.

Healy uses a cistern tank, a children’s paddling er on the canvas, resembling a damaged digital image with streaks running through it. But unlike pool and copper piping to make the holy well, digital images, they are handmade. They show the which is also presented in the gallery. By setting the physical process of painting. These are paintings story in the future, this artwork asks us to think about how change can happen. What stories will be that want to be touched.

Richard Forrest also explores the ways in told about us in the future?

Around the corner, you find Jane Locke’s Tales which digitally-generated images relate to real physical artworks. In From the Mouth of Chrysippus, from a Green Post Box, a ghostly drawing of a postthe artist uses digital imaging technology to recre- box in a forest. It makes us question why the green, ate ancient Greek sculptures from the Crawford Art cast-iron post-boxes are disappearing from our Gallery collection. The Crawford sculptures are streets. A table displays a research notebook on the plaster casts of original statues. As the ‘camera’ history of the postal service in Ireland.

Locke brought this information to life through moves around them, we can see that they are, in fact, hollow. Some are digitally modelled in a shiny a series of lecture performances during the exhibimaterial, like liquid metal. They resemble the shape- tion. These lectures asked: what is fact and what is shifting robot in Terminator 2 – the first film to use a fiction? We are in an age of ‘fake news’. Locke’s lectures make us feel uneasy about how history is prepartially computer-generated main character.

Forrest looks at how we understand real objects sented and what kinds of stories we like to tell about in a virtual world. These days, we often look at art- ourselves.

In this year’s ‘Futures’ there is much shapeshiftworks on computer screens. What is the difference between a digital version and the original artwork? ing and blending of worlds. It is a very rewarding Like Rainey, Forrest asks: what is the role of hand- exhibition that deserves multiple visits. made objects in the digital age?

Michelle Browne is an artist and curator based Elaine Hoey’s video work, The Weight of in Dublin.

Water, uses virtual reality (VR) technology to show us a different version of the present. The animation Note This review was written using the principles of plain English. Arts & Disability brings us into the lives of refugees who are trying to Ireland worked with Visual Artists Ireland to commission a text that is easy reach Europe by sea. As you sit in a cage with a VR to read and accessible to a wide range of readers. headset on, you are transported onto a boat at night.

Richard Forrest, From the Mouth of Chrysippus installation view, 2017, RHA; photo by Katie Bowe O’ Brien

Edition 31: May – June 2017

‘FUTURES’ is a series of exhibitions at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) that shows the work of emerging artists. ‘Futures, Series 3, Episode 1’ is one of the most engaging exhibitions in recent years.

The show takes us on a journey from the past to the present and far into the future.

Jane Rainey is a painter whose subjects are abstract, yet vaguely familiar. From afar, her paintings look like distorted digital landscapes. Up close,

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet CRITIQUE SUPPLEMENT

May – June 2017

Katherine Nolan ‘The Mistress of the Mantle’ MART, Dublin, 2 – 31 March 2017

‘Artistic Migration: Frank O’Meara & Irish Artists Abroad’ Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane 13 February – 11 June 2017

Katherine Nolan, The Mistress of the Mantle, 2017; photo by Seamus Travers

KATHERINE Nolan is a performance artist whose work focuses on her body and her image as sites of investigation into the representation and construction of femininity. Her recent series of performances, The Mistress of the Mantle, held at MART, Rathmines, were based on the artist’s experience of returning to Ireland after 10 years in London. She found that the reality of moving ‘home’ was not quite the return to the fold that she had anticipated.

Unexpectedly, this transition marked her symbolic arrival at the precipice of adulthood. Time away and dislocation from Ireland imposed a disruption of the rites of passage between childhood and maturity that are normally cushioned by the stability of family, community and place. Nolan had to grapple with expectations – both her own and other people’s – about how she should fulfil this new responsibility, triggering a re-evaluation of her identity, memory, nostalgia and complex attachment to Ireland.

The Mistress of the Mantle distilled what is intuitive but not easily articulated in a series of performances to camera, shot in iconic urban and rural locations around Ireland: the Cliffs of Moher, Sandymount Strand, the Phoenix Park Wellington Monument and the Guinness Storehouse.

Mimicking examples of uniquely Irish popular culture – including early pop videos and RTE’s Nationwide – she cast herself in a leading role, “performing a private act of listening to music, whilst very publicly letting it all out”.

I’m Frightened as Much as You brought four of these videos into a single-channel split-screen presentation, overlaying them simultaneously and filling the gallery with a piercing cacophony of Nolan’s raw vocals alongside crashing waves, clattering wind and rain. Watching her belting out power ballads in exposed locations, dressed in vintage clothing, was a bristling experience for the viewer, who might have sheepishly identified with her fantasy or felt empathy for her absurd circumstances. She dispensed with illusion by including the moments before and after the performance when she adjusts the camera – a technical decision that further unsettles the viewer and suggests that they are somehow conspiring in the work. The sense of watching, of being watched and of performing is exposed as a construct. It mirrors her frustration about what is expected of her as woman, artist and teacher.

I’m Frightened as Much as You was installed in the second space but connected to the first installation, where three of the dresses worn by Nolan in

the videos were hung reverently in tricolour formation. Somehow they appeared as outsized robes in a ritualistic colour palette of emerald green, bright orange and pristine white. The style of these garments was typical of the 1970s but also somewhat reminiscent of priestly vestments. This simple installation touched on nationalism, Catholicism and popular culture, while also alluding to the pinioned position of Irish women living under those powerful doctrines.

Breathless comprised a single-screen video in the second gallery. This time wearing a shoulderpadded black dress, Nolan moved away from the twee John Hinde era of the 1970s to the edgy 1980s.

Shot in the cobbled streets beneath the Guinness Storehouse, Nolan sings with wistful melancholy, but her voice is muted and the only audio is the static of wind and traffic. Despite time having moved forward, the 1980s represented a dark period for Irish women and one that continues to directly impact Nolan’s generation today. Her performative practice has for several years foregrounded the flesh and blood of femininity in the face of powerful forces. She unmasks the seemingly unpalatable truths of female biology that are hidden behind idealised and illusory notions pertaining to the status of women in Ireland.

A series of still photographs were also included in the exhibition that took a closer look at the contradictions of Nolan’s modernday interpretations of the past. In the most striking image, Nolan stands emotionless beside a dull Christmas tree in front of dreary brown curtains, as though hostage to convention. Wearing another classic 1980s dress in blue satin damask, she captures this period perfectly.

Another image depicts her looking straight to camera, holding a tea cloth in her hands with fatigue, disappointment and bewilderment perceptible in her drained expression. Both images manage to imprison her in a timeless loop of history repeating itself. Another pair of still images observe her engaged in ‘innapropriate’ behaviour, crawling over a dining table and using a dinner plate as a pillow.

The gallery text notes that, while contemplating becoming “the models of womanhood that she observed as a child”, Nolan experienced a range of emotions from catharsis to narcissism. In my view it is no wonder, given the sheer weight of expectation surrounding this subject and the complexity of these encounters.

Carissa Farrell is a writer and curator based in Dublin.

SARI: Subject. Aspect. Restrictions. Instructions.

This useful acronym, which I recommend students to use when analysing an essay title or exam question, came to mind when reflecting on the exhibition currently on display in the Hugh Lane, the title of which is ‘Artistic Migration: Frank O’Meara and Irish Artists Abroad’.1 Applying the first part of this analysis (S and A) to the title of the exhibition, we find that the subject – what it is about – is ‘Artistic Migration’, and the aspect – the narrower theme, the particulars of what it is about – is ‘Frank O’Meara and Irish Artists Abroad’. If this were the title of an essay, I would expect initially to be provided with a definition and discussion of artistic migration in which the following questions might be explored. What is meant by migration? Does it imply living abroad, or merely travelling overseas for extended periods? Does artistic migration mean the movement of artists in one direction only, or is there also a suggestion of exchange?

Another question emerges from the juxtaposition of Frank O’Meara and other Irish artists. Why is O’Meara singled out? What particular contribution has he to make to the concept of artistic migration?

Who are the other Irish artists? What do they have in common that O’Meara perhaps doesn’t share?

As this analysis demonstrates, the title of an exhibition is replete with suggestion of what the visitor can expect to see, experience and learn.

There is a promise being made, which must be met if it is to be considered successful. This is particularly the case where the works on show are not for sale (which could be considered a criterion for success) and have already been entered into the canon of minor masterpieces, as here in the Hugh Lane.

‘Artistic Migration: Frank O’Meara and Irish Artists Abroad’ occupies two rooms, one devoted to O’Meara (alongside a work by William Stott of Oldham) and the other to, well, other artists.

O’Meara’s work consists of one drawing and five paintings, including a self-portrait. O’Meara died at the age of 35 and the six pieces here constitute a major part of his oeuvre. Indeed, the gallery states that this is the “largest number of [his] works in a public collection”.

The paucity of available works means that the coherence of this room lies not so much in subject matter or technique, but in the artist’s life, with a certain poignancy in the fact that his fiancée, Belle, features as a model in some pieces. There are two thematically connected works, Study of an Old Woman and October. The former is clearly a preliminary version of the latter, which makes it puzzling

that they are not presented side by side.

Even with a very limited body of work, O’Meara’s draughtsmanship is evident, and he shows great command in his depiction of movement: the leaves in Toward Night and Winter, the smoke in October, the veil in The Widow. The pale tones of his palette create a sense of melancholy, an intimation of decline and decay.

Moving on to the second room, the mood is brighter and lighter. Unlike O’Meara’s works, which have a figure at their centre, the focus here is the environment rather than episode. The locations of these plein air paintings range from seascapes and landscapes to urban settings, such as Roderic O’Conor’s Boulevard Raspail and John Lavery’s Sutton Courtenay. The palettes of the collective works include the light greens of William Leech and bright reds of Mary Swanzy.

However, the viewer is confronted with another conundrum: what is meant by Irish artist? Given that all the artists displayed were born in the nineteenth century, the conclusion has to be someone born on the island of Ireland. Yet this is not true for Philip Wilson Steer, Moffat Peter Lindner and George Clausen, all of whom were born in England.

An obvious connection between the artists, both Irish and English, is, as the overview states, that they were “influenced by innovative new developments in en plein air painting on the Continent [and] travelled abroad to develop their art practice”.

But the time span of the exhibition makes it difficult to refine this further. Of the 12 artists represented, the oldest, chronologically, is Moffat Peter Lindner, born in 1852, and the youngest Mary Swanzy, born in 1882. This gap of 30 years is considerable and begs the question: what does the exhibition demonstrate with regard to general artistic development and personal evolution of the individual artists over such a long period?

An overview text and wall labels support the exhibition, but these generally lack coherence. The viewer may well find the individual works of interest, but they will struggle to understand quite why they have been brought together. To return to the essay analogy, it is clear that a lot of research has gone into this exhibition, but the organisation doesn’t sufficiently fulfil the promise of its title. At present, ‘Artistic Migration: Frank O’Meara and Irish Artists Abroad’ presents the viewer with more of a first draft than a final submission.

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

Notes 1. R. Barrass, Students Must Write, 1995, Routledge, London.

‘Frank O’Meara and Irish Artists Abroad’ installation view; image courtesy of the Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane

May – June 2017

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet CRITIQUE SUPPLEMENT

Samuel Walsh and Richard Gorman ‘Buzz and Hum’ Limerick City Gallery of Art 9 February – 16 April

Jonathan Mayhew ‘I Wanted to Write a Poem’ Wexford Arts Centre 27 February – 25 March 2017

AS the world gets more technological, networked, monitored, owned, sold and both more and less global in the chaotic scramble we call 2017, contemporary artists are largely responding by following suit. Younger generations of artists are making work that attempts to channel the aesthetic of the internet through the language of screens, pixels and digital distortion. But not all artists have the same desire. Inspired by the grand themes of art history – line, colour and composition – they live by being off-trend. Their instincts drive them away from the glare. They want to slow down, to offer something else, perhaps an escape from the everyday.

Samuel Walsh and Richard Gorman’s exhibition spans the five rooms of Limerick City Gallery’s ground floor. There’s a whole new series of big and brash, macho and monumental paintings. The title, ‘Buzz and Hum’, refers to a meeting between the two artists during which Gorman said, “You know Sam, your work buzzes and my work hums”.

An exhibition of two artists naturally prompts the viewer to compare and contrast them against each other, not simply to gauge quality, but to gain deeper understandings of the specificity of each.

These painters are both well established and have exhibited widely since the 1980s. Both are members of Aosdána and their work is held in collections across Ireland and abroad. Born five years apart, they both make large abstract paintings focused on formal problems and have developed an idiosyncratic style, working in, out and around the question of minimalism in abstract painting.

The first room and the two smaller rooms are divided evenly between each artist, reinforcing the compare and contrast imperative. Moving outwards, each artist has their own space on opposite sides of the gallery. The artworks on show are all quite recent; the oldest is from 2009, but most range from 2013 to 2016. While there is much formal overlap, it would be difficult to confuse either artist with the other. The layout plays with this fact throughout the exhibition.

Two paintings neatly suggest dual strands within Samuel Walsh’s practice. Locus XVII (Wotan) (2016) is the most stripped back and distinct painting by Walsh on show. Black and white lines and bush-like thickets of neon green are evenly dispersed on top of a blood red background. The red and green pop vibrantly and the even dispersion of lines helps steady the composition; its formal choic-

es are brash, but kept deftly under control.

Showing his other side, Walsh’s grid arrangement of 12 small pieces references the foundational framework set out by Locus XVII (Wotan), but diverges and even indulges in other concerns and investigations. Some work better than others; some make you wonder what they’d be like if they were bigger, or pushed this way or that. These are enjoyable works because they take risks, but would feel too slight in their thinking – shallow, perhaps – without being balanced by the larger works.

Richard Gorman’s works have a more serious and solemn atmosphere – if they hum, it’s the hum of a religious chant. His 2009 work Shuffle steals the show. It’s the biggest painting in the exhibition, a dwarfing 300 x 300 cm. Composed of two pill-like shapes, which overlap to form an X, the colours are odd but captivating: tin grey, fudge brown, slate black and Virgin Mary blue.

None of the paintings in the exhibition photograph well – the flattening effect of the lens removes all the charm found in looking. This is work that shouldn’t translate to the screen, and is all the better for it. The longer you spend looking, the more that the broad formal ideas – like colour and surface – feel less like an art history lesson and more like an intense bodily experience. There’s the slight cracking of a patch of paint, the glint of uneven gloss, minor gestures and wobbling, carefree lines. The paintings almost breathe.

The greatest potential of this exhibition is realised when it does some art historical heavy lifting, punctuating the relationship between these two well-established figures in the Irish abstract painting scene. Touching moments and details in the exhibition, such as the catalogue essay, point towards the ways in which artists work individually but also alongside one another, delving deep into their own specific fascinations and motivations, always keeping an eye on what else is going on. Yet, as so much of the work on show is quite recent, little of this history is present or demonstrated. As a showcase of fine abstract paintings there is a lot to see, but more could be done for audiences who are either less sympathetic or might want more context about the relationships at play in this corner of the Irish art scene.

Richard Gorman, Kan Run (left), Kan Fly (right) 2016

Samuel Walsh, Locus XVII (Wotan), 2015

Chris Hayes is an Irish artist and art critic, based between Ireland and the UK. deletechris.online

Jonathan Mayhew, ‘I Wanted to Write a Poem’ installation view, 2017

[Infinite Jest] can’t be read at a crowded cafe, or with a child on one’s lap.

Dave Eggers

WINNER of the 2015 Emerging Visual Artist Award, Jonathan Mayhew is one of those artists whose work requires a space where you can hear a pin drop. Wexford Art Centre (WAC) is not that space.

Perhaps Mayhew’s exhibition of new work would have fared better in the attention stakes during the recession, when such regional art centres were empty saloons in ghostly Westworlds. During my visit, the endless stream of visitors to the cafe and the hoofing of piano peddles with woohooing children upstairs was a sign of the times. But, there is a big BUT to all of this, which I will get to later.

Floor-bound ceramic vases with silver tags catch my eye due to the overall sparseness of the exhibition. Up close these silver tags become USB sticks attached to the inside lips of the vases. There’s a video work on a flat-screen TV that presents constellations of blinking and revolving white text against a black backdrop. One cartwheel of text reads something like “silence is the only communication”. This work’s big sister is projected in the gallery upstairs and dishes out sentiment over statement, poetry over authority.

Further along there’s paper that has been exposed to moonlight in one instance and sunlight in the other. With the subject of time so prevalent throughout, Mayhew has perversely displayed a clock without hands or digits above the titanic hull of the reception desk: most will miss this temporal black hole. But there’s a lot ‘missing’ here: a musical score by Gustav Mahler is played on a standing speaker when the gallery is closed; readings are performed there and everywhere but never here; and there are no flowers for the vases, which turns them into bed pans, no?

Parts of faces are missing too in the folded photographic portraits of dystopian mid-twentieth-century authors, from George Orwell to Aldous Huxley.

The integrity of these photographs, these references, is respected due to Mayhew’s minimal folding for maximal effect, which leaves Orwell mouthless and Huxley eyeless.

On another wall we have vinyl text with questions lifted from T.S. Eliot’s Choruses from The Rock (1934). The extracts question if life, wisdom, knowledge and information are being lost to one another in the dash of late modernity. Mayhew has added one or two sentiments about data and metadata that are adaptations of Eliot’s choruses for our times.

There is no ironic stalemate to ‘get’ or new insight to

take home; the artist is just innocently asking.

So what does it all mean? Mayhew wants us to make up our own minds. But I always think that stance is a con. For me the artist offers up a wealth of references that ping-pong between existential loss and redemptive love: philosopher Emile Cioran and writer David Foster Wallace are definitely here in spirit.

From this defining spirit there is a sense that Mayhew is tapping into the cynicism that still pours through the veins of people who grew up watching Seinfeld. However, there are efforts on the part of the artist to embrace and project something sincere, although Mayhew is not offering a happy ending or indeed any ending at all.

Félix González-Torres succeeded in marrying Duchamp’s anaesthetic readymade with feeling at a time when this wasn’t such an obvious act. However, the artist wasn’t motivated or conditioned by technology; love and death were both his muse and burden at a time when the two became tragically entangled in the 1980s AIDS epidemic. Mayhew’s work also runs parallel to current romantic conceptualists like Lebanese artist Charbel-joseph H. Boutros; however, where Boutros’s work is haunted by the shadow of his war-torn homeland, Mayhew doesn’t carry – or at least doesn’t advertise – such a burden.

I ended up asking what Mayhew’s motivation was. I also questioned what the differences are between artists that draw from a deep personal well (like the 2014 award recipient Dragana Jurisic whose work explores the concept of exile) and those that skim the surface through word games and design, á la Liam Gillick.

Due to the wealth of Mayhew’s literary, technological and art historical references I sometimes got dragged down at the expense of connecting with Mayhew the artist (maybe those USB sticks contain Mayhew’s digital DNA?). There’s a sense of dissociative tourism in his work that lacks a deeper connection with a subject, connections that make artists such as Miroslaw Balka so compelling. There is no anchor here; the context is everything rather than something.

But that’s the point. Mayhew is not taking ownership of a specific context to define him and his art like everyone else; everything is his context.

With life breezing in and out, WAC is the pitchperfect space to experience Mayhew reflecting back this ‘everything’ rather than just himself or some claimed subject or inherited trauma. An artist of our time.

James Merrigan is an artist based in Waterford.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

23

ORGANISATION

Tom Climent, creating and signing prints for Celestial Fix at Parallel Editions

Niamh McCann and Brian Fitzgerald mixing colours

Never the Same Thing Twice

ond plate, tile adhesive on aluminium was recommended. This allowed Coogan to manipulate the material in a gestural fashion and to channel the actions of a performance by adding and taking away sections. A third plate was developed to incorporate another element of the performative process – sound – which was conveyed in a visual record of notes, to be used in a future performance. The printing process for this plate has not been decided yet, as Coogan is still finalising certain elements, but it is likely to be some sort of soft ground, like an etching or collagraph. O’Reilly Mullaney describes how it will “evolve into its own performance in the end”, adding that Coogan’s attentiveness to the senses (which forms the basis of her practice as a performer) is being vibrantly translated into the print-making process. Coogan is very animated in the studio and does seem to approach the physicality of the printing process as a form of choreography.

PE introduced themselves to Alice Maher at the opening of ‘Two Birds One Stone’, an exhibition curated by Janet Mullarney in Farmeleigh Gallery, Dublin, in May 2016. Maher’s Medea’s Gloves (1999) was displayed as part of the exhibition. Renowned for her sculptural work, Maher has vast print experience and is familiar with the scope and options that a comprehensive print studio can offer. Her drawing practice and the delicacy of her imagery meant that lithography was an obvious choice of medium, though she was less familiar with lithographic processes than other print disciplines at that stage.

Maher was embarking on new work that explored the images and materiality of antique prints, and wanted to use them as physical and conceptual starting points. The process began by scanning source material gathered by the artist, who had been researching the patterns of repetition found in microbiological structures and wished to combine these with the original vintage imagery. The formal aspects of symmetry and the balance of nature evolved by chance and then came to directly influence the printing process. Negotiation of the final print is still ongoing and, as with most projects, a gestation period away from the print is recommended.

Each collaborative project that PE embarks on is unique and requires a disciplined approach. While each phase of a project is completed in a timely fashion, plenty of time is allocated for the development, expansion and revision of ideas, which will ultimately fulfil the artist’s ambitions for the project and their desired outcomes. Parallel Editions are committed to expanding the growth of contemporary printmaking in Ireland as well as providing creative opportunities for artists. Collaborative projects with Michael Canning and Samuel Walsh are planned for later this year.

PAUL TARPEY INTRODUCES THE FINE ART PRINT PUBLISHING HOUSE, PARALLEL EDITIONS. PARALLEL Editions (PE) is an independent, commercial fine art print publishing house, established in 2015 and based in Limerick. Operated by two experienced printmakers, Suzannah O’Reilly Mullaney and Brian Fitzgerald, Parallel Editions promote a collaborative approach to producing high quality multiples. The original impetus for establishing PE was to address what they perceived as a lack of high-end, professional approaches to traditional printmaking in which printers and artists collaborate. O’Reilly Mullaney and Fitzgerald wanted to “engage artists and makers who might not have previously considered working in this way”. PE offer original, limited edition and fine art printed editions, as well as small-run, hand-printed artist’s books. Artists can avail of traditional and digital processes including intaglio, lithography, serigraphy, letterpress, relief print and digital printing.

Collaborating artists include those who are new to any type of printing and those who are familiar with the scope of the discipline.

Each project is individual and carefully aligned with what O’Reilly Mullaney and Fitzgerald recommend as suitable options, based on an understanding of the artist’s practice. These range from planographic processes, such as silkscreen or lithography, to intaglio methods such as etching, collagraph, monoprint and relief printing. Last November PE celebrated their collaborations with a number of leading Irish artists in a launch event at Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) which showcased new work by Janet Mullarney, Niamh McCann, Samuel Walsh, Sean Lynch, John Galvin, Tom Climent, Cathy Cannon and Crea O’Donnell.

PE references the tradition of the European atelier, whereby master printers promoted a blend of education and apprenticeship.

Fitzgerald emphasises the responsibility that PE has as “printmakers for hire”, given the fact that the production of a print can appear time consuming in the digital age. Today, technology often dictates how printmaking as a practice is perceived. While the technical skill required to produce digital prints is formidable, an understanding of the digital surface as a culmination of traditional methods is a contentious subject. Most digital prints are not fine art prints and this has added to the misconception of what is required for the task.

The collaborative aspect presents interesting challenges, both for PE and the artists they work with. Fitzgerald states: “We are always looking to bring a solid range of technical knowledge to the collabora-

tion. We provide the materials but the finished work is the artist’s intellectual property. As publishers, we are presenting artists with another level to produce work as well helping situate Irish printmaking and contemporary art within an international context.” Operating in this way, he says, “is more exciting that just aiming to reproduce works that already exist”. Projects must be a challenge for both parties.

“We have no intention of doing the same thing twice,” he adds. “Even though we are about multiples, we never want to repeat ourselves.” At present, PE are working on two individual projects with artists Amanda Coogan and Alice Maher.

Engaging with Amanda Coogan’s practice as a performer through the medium of print represents exactly the type of disciplinary challenge that PE finds most rewarding. Coogan’s recent solo exhibition ‘I’ll sing You a Song around the Town’ was presented at LCGA from 24 November 2016 to 29 January 2017. Like all of her performances, ‘I’ll sing You a Song around the Town’ was initially mapped with a process of drawing and watercolours to design and format the form and movement of the piece. PE’s collaboration with Coogan was largely based on identifying appropriate ways to expound on the core elements she uses in her practice. The artist specified a print outcome that “would not be received as a standard print”. The use of colour is a priority for Coogan, as is her combined use of fluids and textures.

Given that Coogan was relatively new to the medium of print, PE outlined which techniques were available and possible within the workshop setting. This is what O’Reilly Mullaney calls “a creative introduction”, whereby the artist’s practice is contextualised and translated into the vocabulary of print. The exchanges that follow are the result of letting the work take charge. Fitzgerald adds: “When an artist is new to this type of collaboration, the frustration of not knowing what the results will be, can also be a contributing factor”. As both parties are committed to developing a shared vocabulary, this dialogue could be described as being akin to “a game of tennis!”.

Coogan sketched out her ideas in a preliminary drawing. From there, decisions were made to include texture from Aran sweaters – echoing the approach used by the artist when designing costumes for performances – and these were sourced from a second-hand shop in Limerick. Using a copper plate and soft ground, the cables and patterns Paul Tarpey is a senior lecturer at Limerick School of Art and from the sweater were impressed into the plate and etched. On a sec- Design. paralleleditions.ie

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

HOW IS IT MADE?

Mind-Controlling Images MATT PACKER AND ALISSA KLEIST DISCUSS ‘SCISSORS CUT PAPER WRAP STONE’, A TOURING EXHIBITION BY CCA DERRY-LONDONDERRY.

Eva Fabregas, Object for sitting (foreground) 2016; Alan Butler, Orphan Transposition (Albert Bierstadt, Merced River Yosemite Valley, ii.) (suspended), 2016; Jennifer Mehigan, theseus warcraft virocannibal diabla (sterna) 333, 2017 and Pakui Hardware, Transactions, 2016 (background and floor); image courtesy of CCA Derry-Londonderry/Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre; photo by Dervla Baker

Alan Butler, Orphan Transposition (Albert Bierstadt, Merced River Yosemite Valley, ii.) (foreground, suspended), 2016; John Russell, Parallel Domination Facility (background), 2015; image courtesy of the CCA Derry-Londonderry

May – June 2017

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

25

HOW IS IT MADE?

Alan Butler, Orphan Transposition (Albert Bierstadt, Merced River Yosemite Valley, ii.), 2016, installation view, Ormston House, Limerick; photo by Jed Niezgoda

LIKE many curators (and indeed, artists) we often develop ideas by thinking through references or historical incidences that have little to do with contemporary art from the outset. ‘Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone’ is a case in point: an exhibition that developed from our discovery of a science fiction novel written in 1994 by author Ian McDonald.

The novel led us to understand a rich history of sci-fi produced in Northern Ireland, of which Ian McDonald is a part. He is one in a long line of authors dating back to the late nineteenth century that obviously coincided with considerable political, industrial and cultural change over the intervening years. Given the region’s difficult past (and equally uncertain future), it makes sense that a history of science fiction literature exists in Northern Ireland. With its characteristic conjuring of alternative worlds, new life-forms and imaginative reworkings of everyday life, science fiction might be described as an act of ‘cognitive estrangement’ that allows us to re-approach the conditions of our society.

McDonald’s novel Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone tells the story of a young student, Ethan Ring, who develops the ability to produce images that bypass rational thought and control the mind of the viewer. The book alternates between scenes of Ethan’s pilgrimage through Japan as he tries to reconcile the responsibilities of his unique brand of power, and scenes of Ethan’s earlier life as an art college student in “some rainy-day city in the North”. As the book proceeds through Ethan’s time in college, it details his encounters with other students that share an interest in artificial intelligence, including his girlfriend Luka, who introduces him to a virtual reality visualiser that is channelled through the work of Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni.

Stimulated by conversation and experimentation, Ethan develops a technology of “fracters” – mind-controlling images that have the power to heal, cause pain and induce tears or ecstasy. The utopian promise of the image technology is short lived as Ethan finds himself blackmailed into employment by the public relations department of the “European Common Security Secretariat”, who demand that he uses these fracters for the purposes of interrogation and assassination.

It’s a complex story that is difficult to summarise. The book is packed with ideas, allusions and observations that are typical of the cyber punk sub-genre of science fiction. What struck us about the novel was the central idea of an image technology that could go beyond mediation, interpretation and criticality – the very things that comprise our modern framework of cultural experience and under-

standing of contemporary art. The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard wrote that “art harbours within it an excess, a rapture, a potential of associations that overflows all the determinations of its reception and production”. In other words, something antithetical to theory that makes the experience of art different from the experience of other kinds of objects. McDonald’s story provides an expansion of similar ideas.

The notion of Ethan Ring’s powerful image-technology also allowed us to think about how art is often instrumentalised and laden with promises of ‘impacting’ audiences. As a result of the funding language around the public benefits of artistic presentation, we have become used to the rationale, but McDonald’s story accelerates the basic question: what if art actually did impact people so directly that encountering an image could cause viewers to change their mindset or improve their wellbeing? It prompts further questions about the responsibilities and corruption potential of developing such an effective (and affective) form of artistic power, while also suggesting what is necessary and important in the failure of art to manifest these kinds of results for audiences, viewers and publics.

The ideas and evocations that we drew from McDonald’s novel provided a way of framing questions of technology, authority and the physical body that were in evidence in many of the artistic practices we were encountering at the time. It was on this basis that we began to approach Alan Butler (Ireland), Clawson and Ward (UK), Eva Fàbregas (Spain/UK), Pakui Hardware (Germany/Lithuania), Joey Holder (UK), Jennifer Mehigan (Ireland), John Russell (UK) and Andrew Norman Wilson (US), with a view to developing an exhibition that responds to this science fiction story of mind-controlling images. All of the artists demonstrate a commitment to these shared concerns in various ways, for example in the sculptures by artist duo Pakui Hardware (Neringa Cerniauskaite and Ugnius Gelguda), which use fleshy imagery from NASA archives, and in the work of Clawson and Ward (Anna Clawson and Nicole Ward) that references Josef Stalin and the censorship of his own portrait.

The body appears throughout the exhibition in various guises and is subject to forms of control and imposition. In John Russell’s large-scale, backlit prints, he presents scenarios where a motley crew of hybrid creatures seem to be playing out the mysterious social rituals of a fledgling multi-species society that has been glitched with technology. The evocative titles of these works (Diagonal Slaughter

Pakui Hardware, Transactions, 2016; photo by Dervla Baker; image courtesy of the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry-Londonderry/Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre

Optimisation, Parallel Domination Facility, Adjacent Bureaucracy Enhancement) add the suggestion of a threatening and administrative condition to each of these scenes. In Eva Fàbregas’s work, The role of unintended consequences (Sofa Compact), we see the animated character of self-assembly furniture, as though encouraging the furniture’s autonomous life and liberating it from the burden of human labours.

In this work there’s a sense that animism (the attribution of life to inanimate objects) has come to replace the primacy of the human body. A similar sense of attribution relates to Andrew Norman Wilson’s discombobulated ego puppet in Reality Models, and extends to Fàbregas’s Self-Organising Systems, a series of robotic artworks made of recycled product packaging that appear to navigate the gallery through their own self-determining movement. These examples are not exhaustive, but they do indicate the ways in which the exhibition ‘Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone’ offers room for different propositions of art’s relation to the human body, accelerated by technologies of affective power and domination.

We used the opportunity of touring the exhibition to Uillinn: West Cork Art Centre, Skibbereen, and Ormston House, Limerick, to include other artists (Jennifer Mehigan and Joey Holder respectively) whose practices are similarly engaged in imagining the physical future. The tour also enabled us to develop a presentation that was responsive to the architecture and scale of each space. The spilt level spaces at Uillinn meant that the encounter with the individual works in the exhibition was organised in a more narrative way, requiring audiences to navigate through certain artworks in order to access others. In its current iteration at Ormston House, the exhibition has the opposite effect, with many of the works visibly and physically encroaching on each other within the same space, disrupting any clear sense of linearity in the audience’s encounter.

Having produced three versions of the exhibition at this stage, we realise that there is no definitive version. Each exhibition behaves differently, and we try and keep ourselves open and learn from the process.

‘Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone’ continues at Ormston House until 27 May 2017. Alissa Kleist is Curator (Exhibitions) at CCA Derry-Londonderry. Matt Packer is currently Director at CCA. He will commence a new role in June 2017 as Director of EVA International. He is also Curator of this year’s TULCA Festival of Visual Arts (3 – 19 November 2017).

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

ORGANISATION

‘The Future is Self-Organised’, installation view, Limerick City Gallery of Art, curated by Pallas Projects, 2017; (left to right) Mark Cullen, Kathy Tynan, Eimear Jean McCormack, Brian Duggan, Fiona Chambers

Pallas Projects at 20 GAVIN MURPHY, CO-DIRECTOR OF PALLAS PROJECTS/STUDIOS, REFLECTS ON THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY PROGRAMME AND PUBLICATION.

Pallas Projects/Studios 20 Year Anniversary Benefit Auction, City Assembly House, Dublin

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

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ORGANISATION

Artist-Run Europe, edited by Gavin Murphy & Mark Cullen, published by Onomatopee, 2017

PALLAS Studios was started in 1996 by artists Brian Duggan and Mark Cullen in response to a lack of workspaces and opportunities for artists at the time. It quickly developed into an active artist-run organisation that programmed exhibitions, first in the studios, then offsite locations and later in dedicated exhibition spaces such as Pallas Heights and Pallas Contemporary Projects. Over the course of 20 years, Pallas has occupied 14 different premises in order to stay one step ahead of the developers during the rapid economic expansion of the Celtic Tiger era. Today, Pallas Projects/Studios (PP/S) is constituted as a notfor-profit company limited by guarantee, with a voluntary board of directors, but remains very much an artist-run organisation. We are dedicated to the provision of artists’ studios, developing opportunities for Irish contemporary visual artists, and engaging in research and advocacy for artist-run practice, as well as encouraging exchange via curated projects and collaborations. More than 20 years later, the politics of ensuring space for art and artists in Dublin city is still at the core of what we do.

The artist-run model and ethos that PP/S espouses is based on alternative and non-hierarchical modes of organisation and collaboration. It proposes non-commercial approaches to producing art and generating cultural interaction that eschews the roles of producer and consumer. Artist-run spaces play a vital role in supporting artists’ practices at the early stages of their careers and often have a key stake in the revitalisation of derelict urban areas (though rarely see the benefit of subsequent regeneration).

A 20-year anniversary is something that not many artist-run spaces get to experience. The energy invested in maintaining these initiatives is often used up quickly and burn-out is common. Based predominantly on an economy of free labour and resource-sharing, it can be difficult to keep activities going. As such, the continuous yet constantly changing presence and value of artist-run practice is difficult to quantify and record. With this in mind, we wanted to approach our own milestone by looking at the wider artist-run sphere, revisiting former collaborations, starting new dialogues and critically reflecting on the role of artist-run spaces within the wider field of contemporary art in Ireland over the past 20 years.

The first of these projects, titled ‘The Future is Self-Organised’, was held at Limerick City Gallery of Art (November 2015 – January 2016). Comprising artworks, artist presentations, collaborative installations, documentation and ephemera, the exhibition featured artists who have exhibited with (or helped run) PP/S over the last 20 years.

The exhibition also featured contributions from the many artist-run spaces that PP/S has collaborated with, including: 126 Artist-Run Gallery, Galway; the Black Mariah, Cork; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; E.S.P. TV, New York; Suburban Video Lounge, Rotterdam; former Limerickbased initiatives Occupy Space and Real Art Project (RAP); and Megs Morley’s ‘The Artist-Led Archive’. The aim was to show to the wider public how artist-run spaces are a distinct and central part of visual art

‘The Future is Self-Organised’, installation view (detail), Limerick City Gallery of Art, curated by Pallas Projects; ESP TV Live, Real Art Project, Catalyst Arts, Jim Ricks, Niall de Buitléar

culture, and how they present necessary alternatives to art institutions, museums or commercial galleries.

A major long-term project also came to fruition last year with the publication of Artist-Run Europe: Practice/Projects/Space. Part how-to manual, part history and part socio-political critique, the 208-page, full-colour book, designed by WorkGroup and published by Onomatopee, Eindhoven), was the culmination of four years of research. The book includes case studies of European spaces with different organisational models, including Triangle France, Transmission Gallery, Eastside Projects and Vienna Secession, alongside an expansive and detailed index of 600 artist-run spaces in Europe. It also features newly commissioned writing by Jason E. Bowman, A.A. Bronson, Noelle Collins, Valerie Connor, Céline Kopp and Alun Williams, Joanne Laws, Freek Lomme, Megs Morley, Gavin Wade and Katherine Waugh.

In publishing a book, we wanted to encourage discourse, provide a resource for academics and students and offer a practical resource for those running or wishing to set up artist-run spaces. The book investigates the disparate and heterogenous realities of artist-run spaces and challenges the expectation that they must emulate other ‘defined’ institutions in order to ensure sustainability – a problem (though not necessarily of artists’ own making) that has yet to be adequately addressed. Artist-Run Europe has been since been presented at book fairs around the world, including Printed Matter’s New York and LA Art Book Fairs, and conferences such as ‘Stretched: Expanding Notions of Artistic Practice through Artist-led Cultures’ at the Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, and ‘AiR for Experiment’ in Delft, organised

by DutchCulture, TransArtists and id11. It is stocked in galleries and bookshops as far away as Melbourne and Dubai.

On 20 August 2016 we hosted the ‘Artist-Run DIY Social’, a daylong event celebrating artist-run culture, which featured talks, discussion, food and music to coincide with an exhibition by New York artists Liz Nielsen and Max Warsh, which was presented at PP/S from 17 – 27 August in association with Sirius Arts Centre. A full day of talks and panel discussions, ‘Artist-Run Spaces: Conversations Across the Atlantic’, curated by Angel Bellaran, drew on the knowledge, experiences and various perspectives of the invited speakers which, along with myself and Mark, included: Jessamyn Fiore (former director Thisisnotashop, Dublin); Liz Nielsen and Carolina Wheat (Elijah Wheat Showroom, New York); Max Warsh (Regina Rex, New York); Miranda Driscoll (Director, Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, formerly The Joinery, Dublin); Lee Welch (Basic Space, Dublin, formerly FOUR, Dublin); Clive Murphy (former Co-director Catalyst Arts, Belfast) and Maud Cotter (founding member, National Sculpture Factory, Cork).

In September 2016 we held a twentieth-anniversary fundraising auction with the aid of the Irish Georgian Society and Whyte’s auctioneers at the City Assembly House. The auction raised just over €50,000 (€12,500 of which went back to the artists as a 25% commis-

sion on sold works) and allowed us to keep the organisation running for a further 18 months. 90 artists contributed, including Alice Maher, Sean Scully, Brian Maguire, Jesse Jones, Mark Garry, Eva Rothschild, Nina Canell and Gavin Wade, with a large number of emerging artists and recent graduates included, as well as several previous Irish representatives at the Venice Biennale.

The year culminated in ‘Periodical Review 20/16: 20 years of Irish contemporary art, four perspectives’. Brian Duggan, Sarah Glennie, Jenny Haughton and Declan Long were invited to select and write about what were, for them, pivotal events, exhibitions, moments and artworks from the past 20 years. The exhibition featured artworks by Dorothy Cross, Willie Doherty, Fergus Feehily, Aileen Lambert and Emer O’Boyle, as well as galleries and organisations such as FOUR, Douglas Hyde Gallery and Callan Workhouse Union, with public commissions such as Seamus Nolan’s Hotel Ballymun. The chosen practices emphasised recent developments in contemporary art in Ireland, a period of new engagement with international practices, and an increase in visiting artists, curators and speakers, with Irish curators and educators taking up major positions overseas, and Irish artists being showcased around the world. ‘Periodical Review 20/16’ also highlighted the importance of artist-led and non-gallery practices within the landscape of contemporary Irish art.

So, 20 years after opening our first studios in a run-down knitwear factory in a neglected part of the city, what can we say about our future trajectory and our aspirations for the artist-run sector in Ireland and for Pallas Projects/Studios as an organisation? What about the precarious situation regarding studio provision in Dublin and our other cities? Despite the robust health of our studios, our programme and our ongoing advocacy and research, long-running artist-run spaces like ours are still precluded from accessing secure funding streams, despite our proven ability to contribute to the sector on comparatively modest budgets. We can see the property developers slowly gathering pace in Dublin 8 and find ourselves – yet again and perhaps more than ever – having to address how long-term creative spaces can be maintained and supported in the city. The work of bodies such as the National Campaign for the Arts and its international equivalents, in addition to our own research, has equipped us with arguments to bring to local and national government. Collective efforts have been made to present the case for stimulating conditions through favourable zoning and policies for the retention and development of arts organisations. As we are all too aware – 14 locations and counting – this problem is not going away as long as it is left to the unfettered mechanisms of the open market.

Gavin Murphy is a Dublin-based artist and Curator/Co-director of Pallas Projects/Studios.

Note Founded in 1996, Pallas Projects/Studios (pallasprojects.org) is a not-for-profit artist-run organisation dedicated to the facilitation of artistic production and discourse via curated projects and the provision of affordable artists’ studios in Dublin city centre.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

PROJECT PROFILE

Students on a tour of Derry with Willie Doherty

Students outside IMMA, Dublin

To Be Determined LISA MORAN DISCUSSES THE RECENT PALESTINIAN STUDENT EXCHANGE THAT TOOK PLACE AT IMMA FOLLOWING EMILY JACIR’S EXHIBITION ‘EUROPA’.

THE future of Europe is the subject of much debate at the moment, but it was Europe’s past and its problematic relationship to the present that was the subject of acclaimed Palestinian artist Emily Jacir’s recent exhibition ‘Europa’, which ran at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) from 26 November 2016 to 26 February 2017.

Jacir’s work is concerned with questions of translation, resistance and silenced historical narratives. In IMMA, she presented seminal artworks alongside newly commissioned projects which reflect the strong links between Palestine and Ireland, and shared histories under colonial rule. She has been actively involved in education in Palestine since 2000 and for the past 10 years has been a full-time professor and active member of the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah. Drawing on themes from her exhibition at IMMA relating to experiences of colonisation, displacement and self-determination, Jacir proposed a collaborative workshop with students from Palestine and Ireland. Consequently, in January of this year, five students from the International Academy of Art Palestine (IAAP) spent two weeks working alongside four Irish students in a collaborative exchange led by the artist.

Jacir’s proposal for a student workshop emerged during an early planning meeting with IMMA’s Engagement and Learning team in the lead up to her exhibition. When she first visited IMMA, Jacir was struck by the historical context of the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, a former retirement home for soldiers in the British Army. Against the backdrop of the 1916 commemorations, Jacir’s workshop, titled ‘To Be Determined (for Jean)’ ,1 focused on the events and discourse surrounding the Easter Rising as a means of exploring common and divergent experiences of the pursuit of self-determination in both the Irish and Palestinian contexts.2 Emphasising the workshop’s genesis in her exhibition, Jacir stated: “It was very important for me to conduct this workshop in tandem with my show for many reasons, but namely because of the long relationship I have with Ireland and its impact on my work.

Many of the themes which run through my exhibition at IMMA are being touched upon in this workshop. Additionally, the colleagues I have invited to contribute to my workshop are people I have been working with for decades and almost all have worked in Palestine. So the workshop is not only build along the lines of my own research, explorations and interests, but also in line with a long history of exchange and collaboration with Willie Doherty, Conor McGrady, Gerard Byrne, Shane Cullen and David Lloyd.”3 Jacir’s proposal for a student collaboration fitted well with IMMA’s role as a locus and support for research and student interaction. IMMA has ongoing relationships with many colleges and third-

level institutions, and encourages students and tutors to think of the museum as a site for research and learning. While the project constituted a considerable investment of time and resources, as well as some degree of risk, it provided a unique opportunity to test out a model of transnational student exchange grounded in IMMA’s exhibition programme and its artist-centred ethos, which we hope will inform future collaborative projects.

The workshop took place over two weeks and comprised seminars, lectures, studio crits, gallery visits and several road trips. Jacir selected five of her students from the International Art Academy, Ramallah: Hamza Amleh, Yossur Hamed and Amani Yacoub (West Bank), Toka Elsarraj (Gaza) and May Marei (Jordan). Qais Assali (Jordan), Emily’s assistant and former student, also took part. IMMA invited art colleges throughout Ireland to nominate students who were interested in participating. The following students were selected: Yurika Higashikawa (NCAD), Oliwia Nowak (LSAD), Conor Burke (GMIT) and Tuyen Tran (DIT).

IN THE STUDIOS The students were based at IMMA’s workshop studios and most were housed on site in the museum’s residency accommodation, which is managed by Janice Hough. The students spent the first few days working with Jacir and the visiting lecturers and artists. This included a tour of Kilmainham Gaol and the Royal Hospital Kilmainham facilitated

by Barry Kehoe of IMMA’s Visitor Engagement Team. They also attended seminars on postcolonial theory with David Lloyd, distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, and a lecture titled ‘Ghost Stories: Contemporary Art and Post-Troubles Northern Ireland’ by Declan Long, lecturer and co-director of the ‘Art in the Contemporary World’ MA course at NCAD. Studio sessions were provided by Jacir and artist Gerard Byrne.

Mealtimes, co-ordinated by Brenda Kearney, were an important opportunity for everyone to get to know each other, to unwind and to share experiences. During the first week, we were joined by Ronit Lentin of Academics for Palestine and Fatin Al Tamimi, chairperson of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who delivered presentations that were followed by a pot luck meal.

ON THE ROAD Over the two weeks the students covered a lot of ground, both physically and conceptually. In the first week, the group travelled to Belfast where we were brought on a tour of the Falls Road and Milltown Cemetery. This was followed by a discussion between Michael Culbert

Students in Derry

(a former IRA prisoner and Director of republican ex-prisoners’ group Coiste), Noel Large (a former loyalist prisoner and representative of the loyalist organisation EPIC) and Lee Lavis (a former British soldier), each of whom talked about their respective experiences, both of the conflict in Northern Ireland and the peace process, which enabled them to share this platform.

We also travelled to Derry to visit the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), where we were warmly welcomed by Matt Packer (Director) and Sara Greavu (Curator), who introduced the students to the CCA’s work. Derry-based artist Willie Doherty gave a presentation about his work, much of which he has developed in response to the city’s troubled history. Following lunch, Doherty took the group on a walking tour of Derry, which included several locations that feature in his work. His ability to navigate and articulate the complexity of this contested landscape left a deep and lasting impression on many of the students.

In the second week, the students were hosted by the Burren School of Art (BCA), in Clare, where they spent three days working with artists Conor McGrady and Áine Phillips, as well as BCA students.

The group took part in a field trip to a famine village, as well as attending lectures, participating in studio sessions and watching a presentation by musicians and poets from the county. On their return to IMMA, the students worked with artists Gerard Byrne and Shane Cullen to explore some of their experiences through making new work. LSAD student Oliwia Nowak stated: “Being away from the college structure and working with different artists was a great opportunity for us to look at our own work from a wider perspective.

Personally, I have not only found out more about Ireland and Palestine and their relationship, but also about my own identity and my own relationship with Ireland.” The week concluded with a farewell dinner.

The workshop was contingent on the generosity and commitment of numerous individuals, most notably Jacir, and many organisations who helped to provide an extraordinary two weeks of learning and collaboration. The workshop enabled IMMA to explore the potential of the museum as an active site of research. As stated by NCAD student Yurika Higashikawa: “They transformed IMMA from a somewhat distant museum into an active learning space and test-site for ideas. To clarify, it wasn’t a case of IMMA’s officiality being diminished, but that IMMA began to feel like a true, active learning space, a base and occasionally, a home.” The knowledge and experience generated by this workshop will inform and encourage further collaborations, the outcomes of which are yet ‘to be determined’.

Lisa Moran is Curator of Engagement and Learning at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Notes 1. In the workshop title, ‘for Jean’ refers to Jean Fisher, a writer and friend of Jacir who passed away in 2016.

2. David Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity: The Transformation of Oral Space, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

3. Emily Jacir, ‘Dispatch from week one’, IMMA blog, 31 January 2017 (immablog.ie).

MA/MFA Art in the Contemporary World Art in the Contemporary World is a postgraduate degree programme offering pathways for artists, curators, writers and others interested in exploring the art of our times.

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Contact: Dr. Francis Halsall: halsallf@staff.ncad.ie Dr. Declan Long: longd@staff.ncad.ie Dr. Sarah Pierce: pierces@staff.ncad.ie Image: Michelle Hall, from ‘Part One’, 2015

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30

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

The Necessity of Art MANUELA PACELLA INTERVIEWS KATE STRAIN ABOUT HER NEW ROLE AS ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF GRAZER KUNSTVEREIN IN GRAZ, AUSTRIA.

Céline Condorelli, Things That Go Without Saying, 2013; extended commission for Grazer Kunstverein, 2017; photo by Christine Winkler

Isabella Kohlhuber, Space for an Agreement, 2016, on display for Frühling/Spring 2017, Grazer Kunstverein; photo by Christine Winkler

Elisabeth Printschitz Library and Grazer Kunstverein Archive; photo by Christine Winkler

May – June 2017

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

31

CAREER DEVELOPMENT Mast); and the thirteenth edition of DURCH, a magazine first published by the Grazer Kunstverein in 1986.

With a focus on active research, we’ve also begun a number of research collaborations, as a way to critically reflect on the programme and on the Kunstverein as an institution and community. We have a number of different kinds of libraries, including the newlyopened Ernst Fischer Reading Room, the Members’ Library, Fink’s library of tastes and the Elisabeth Printschitz Library, as well as the 30-year exhibition archive of the Grazer Kunstverein. We are working with students from the Institut für Zeitgenössische Kunst/Institute for Contemporary Art (IZK) in the architecture faculty of the Graz University of Technology (TU), on a project entitled ‘Let’s Build a Library Together!’ The students will act as custodians of each library to see how best to bring the contents of these books beyond their pages.

We are also working with Dr Sabine Flach, Professor of Art History at the University of Graz’s Institute of Art History, on a fashion-oriented relational aesthetics research project, ‘Fine Feathers Make Fine Birds’. The Institute’s postgraduate students will use the research spaces of the Grazer Kunstverein to host and develop reading groups and conferences. In this way we will work to generate a kind of critical feedback and art historical theorisation of our practice and activities as they unfold.

Another ongoing research partnership is with the Department of Ultimology and CONNECT Centre for Future Networks and Communications at Trinity College Dublin (where I am curator-inresidence throughout 2017). We hope to establish a second Department of Ultimology here in Graz with the ultimate aim of establishing one in every time zone across the world.

Fiona Hallinan, ‘Fink’s,’ Grazer Kunstverein, 2017; photo by Christine Winkler

Manuela Pacella: You have spent a number of years developing important partnerships and working as an independent curator on a range of exciting projects across Ireland and internationally.

What have you learned during this time that continues to inform your engagement with contemporary art?

Kate Strain: The main thing I have learned over the last 10 years is the importance of art as a practice and as a process. This means seeing art beyond any kind of concrete outcome, and instead understanding contemporary art as a way of enacting ideas, as well as a way of being in the world. Almost all of my longer-term curatorial projects have started with imagining something and then figuring out how to make that real. From RGKSKSRG (a joint curatorial partnership with Rachael Gilbourne) to the Centre For Dying On Stage (online commissioning body) to the Department of Ultimology (co-founded in 2015 with Fiona Hallinan, and hosted by CONNECT Centre for Future Networks and Communications at Trinity College Dublin), each project begins with a hunch and grows into something like a practice, always working in close collaboration with artists.

MP: As the newly-appointed Artistic Director of Grazer Kunstverein, can you share any details of the 2017 visual arts programme or future aspirations you may have for the institution?

KS: Throughout 2017 all of our new commissions, presentations and research collaborations will be guided and anchored by a single leitmotif – ‘the necessity of art’ – taken from the title of a 1959 publication

by Ernst Fischer. Fischer was a journalist, politician, writer, dramatist, poet, orator, exile, returning emigrant and thinker, who studied philosophy in Graz in the early 1900s. He spent the last day of his life just outside of Graz, at Prenning’s Garten, with his wife Louise EislerFischer and friend John Berger. Berger wrote an account of that day entitled ‘Ernst Fischer: A Philosopher and Death’, which I came across by chance last summer. Fischer immediately fascinated me with his passion, convictions, contradictions and capacity for self-reflection. He believed in art not only as a tool for recognising and changing the world, but also as something inherently magical. He saw art as a way to unmask the potential in things – as a process much more than a product. This is what drew me into his admittedly dated but wholly thought-provoking writings. As a politician, he fought fascism with communism and sought refuge, reflection and empowerment through culture. Today his ideas are less known than one might expect, especially here in Austria, and so we endeavour to enter into conversation with him as our ‘spirit guide’ for the entire year of programming at the Grazer Kunstverein.

Structurally, we have decided to work in seasonal cycles, rather than through fixed exhibitions. Instead we are seeing what happens

when we work through an accumulative process of display and presentation over a longer temporal timeframe. In this way, each body of work potentially overlaps, feeds into, informs and shapes the development of others. Our focus is to realise at least one major new commission each season, inviting artists from all over the world to locate the production of new work here in Graz.

For our spring season, which opened on 10 March, we launched new commissions by Chris Evans and Morten Norbye Halvorsen, who realised a permanent sound-piece for the gallery: a jingle that is activated upon entry through any one of the six entrance doors to the Grazer Kunstverein. Fiona Hallinan was commissioned to develop a long-term collaborative project called ‘Fink’s’. It is an experiment in hospitality, as as intentional alternative to a commercial café. ‘Fink’s’ operates as a library of tastes. The artist works with local producers from Styria and the surrounding region, collecting ingredients, tastes, flavours and recipes, which will be offered to visitors in the form of a powder, made up of all the elements that have been collected. A new powder will be produced for each season as a way of archiving a particular set of experiences at a particular time. Gradually, over the next four years, a library will emerge.

We have also extended an existing work by Céline Condorelli, originally commissioned in 2013 by the Kunstverein’s previous director Krist Gruijthuijsen. This work, entitled Things That Go Without Saying, houses the Members’ Library – a collection of over 200 books selected and presented by our members. Other works currently on display (which will stay with us throughout 2017) include Isabel Nolan’s provisory rug, sculptural and typographic furniture by Isabella Kohlhuber and a poem by Adam Zagajewski.

As for future aspirations, I want the Grazer Kunstverein to become the kind of space for art that I have always wanted to visit: a place where things are made possible – where the mode of presentation, temporal frame, developmental supports and conditions of display reflect the context and potency of the works being produced or practices being presented. The Grazer Kunstverein is a place that foregrounds the work of artists who are developing compelling, sometimes challenging, always considered, and most importantly, meaningful work. For me it’s important to see this as a practice, and treating the Grazer Kunstverein as a living entity enables that.

MP: During the previous directorship, a number of exhibitions focused on specific editorial and publishing projects. Do you plan to continue to explore these areas?

KS: Our focus is on preserving what has already been published, more than publishing a lot of new material. However, we are planning three publications over the coming year: The First International Journal of Ultimology; a published script for The Seed Eaters (a new play by Emily

MP: How will you meet the needs of the local arts scene while also addressing national and international concerns?

KS: One of the main things we want to facilitate and encourage is the production of new work. We will invite international artists to come and spend time in Graz and to work with local communities, experts, organisations and publics. For example, in the lead up to our summer season we’ll have Irish artist Ruth E. Lyons working here in residence on the development of her incredible conceptual artwork and business venture Women’s Wear for Worldly Work (WWWW). This will unfold in conversation with Edward Clydesdale Thomson (our future gardener) and Fiston Mwanza Mujila (our writer-in-residence), and in dialogue with the many and varied communities of Graz who make up our peers, collaborators and visitors. For our autumn season, Emily Mast will come from LA to develop a new performance work in collaboration with 15 local (non) actors and in co-production with the Steirischer Herbst Festival.

As part of our ongoing public programme, the Artists’ Homes initiative was established as a forum to learn more about Austrian and Graz-based artists and has recently been extended to include architects, designers, collectors, curators, practitioners, performers and musicians. Graz has a number of art institutions that work together, with each space having its own voice. Groups like CMRK (Camera Austria, Künstlerhaus KM-Halle für Kunst & Medien, <rotor>, and Grazer Kunstverein), and Open Modes (made up of 11 Graz-based cultural institutions) are examples of initiatives that aim to engage with an art-curious public in a city that doesn’t have a dedicated art academy (and therefore doesn’t have the kind of readymade audience that would typically exist within or around an art school).

MP: Your previous and ongoing projects appear to blur the traditional sites of art with live experiences (including lectures, performances and residencies) in which you and the artists are involved in a sort of constant ‘on stage’ experience. Is this something that you wish to further explore in Graz?

KS: I hope that over the next few years the Grazer Kunstverein will come to be defined by its commitment to performativity. Seeing performativity as the constitution of meaning through acts or practices is, for me, key in understanding the potential of art as a practice or a process, and ultimately as a way of making things happen.

Manuela Pacella is an Italian art historian, curator and writer currently based in Graz. Kate Strain is Artistic Director of Grazer Kunstverein, Austria, and Curator-in-Residence at CONNECT Centre for Future Networks and Communications at Trinity College Dublin.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

NORTHERN IRELAND

VAI NEWS

WANDA: Feminism & Moving Image

Creative Ireland

LAURA O’CONNOR INTRODUCES A SERIES OF FEMINIST MOVING IMAGES EVENTS AND SCREENING THAT TOOK PLACE ACROSS BELFAST.

OVER the past few months a series of public meetings have been held across the country, aimed at garnering feedback and input on the new Creative Ireland policy framework – a five-year government initiative, described as a “legacy programme” of the Ireland 2016 Centenary, which seeks to “place creative and cultural infrastructure at the centre of Irish life”.

One of the first community meetings was held in Roscommon on 6 March. There were over 100 people in attendance, largely comprising Roscommon County Council staff (from various departments including Community and Enterprise, Social Inclusion, Heritage and the Arts Office), as well as representatives from various cultural sectors within the county. The Leitrim session on 10 April generated smaller numbers, though there was greater attendance from local artists, craftworkers, filmmakers and musicians. Leitrim’s arts organisations and festivals were also well represented. Both events opened with councillors’ speeches, welcoming the Creative Ireland team and outlining how the new initiative might impact the respective localities.

Eugene Cummins, CEO of Roscommon County Council, spoke about the importance of creativity to wellbeing, not just in attracting industry but in strengthening communities, while Cathaoirleach of Leitrim County Council, Mary Bowman, commented on the existing scale of ambition within Leitrim’s creative sector, emphasising the central role of local authorities in enabling creativity in every community.

In Roscommon, Director of Creative Ireland, John Concannon, embarked on a fast-paced presentation which outlined the rationale and aspirations of the initiative. The Leitrim session was delivered

by Creative Ireland’s Michael O’Reilly, whose insights were comprehensive and considered. Both reflected on the successes of the Ireland 2016 Centenary Programme, which hinged on public participation.

The core themes gleaned from the 1916 commemorations were: citizenship – exemplified in the fact that people stepped up, contributed and participated; identity – enacted through multiple narratives and inclusiveness; and the role of culture – a significant and surprising aspect of 2016 that generated meaningful public reflection.

Michael O’Reilly stressed that Creative Ireland is not a funding agency or a quango, rather it is a government initiative that will be implemented over five years. In effect, it is the implementation mechanism for Culture 2025, Ireland’s new National Cultural Framework Policy. According to O’Reilly, there is no orthodoxy or any prescribed values underpinning Creative Ireland. It aims to build on existing infrastructures and secure additional resources for culture. By the time the initiative ends in 2022, it is envisaged that culture-based activities should be embedded across government departments.

According to Concannon, the local authorities “make things happen” in Ireland. Creative Ireland wants to capitalise on their depth of expertise, existing resources and community networks. Culture Teams were swiftly assembled in every county to informally include local arts officers, librarians, heritage officers, curators and archivists. These

gee crisis were discussed by panelists Caoimhe Butterly, Rosa Thompson and Lisa Keogh, who presented film clips and discussed how they approach difficult and important issues. The discussion was followed by a screening of Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983), a dystopian film of feminist resistance and revolution set in New York.

To round off the first day of in-depth conversations, we made our way to the American Bar for the ‘Pro-choice Dirty Dancing Live Read’, an event that will go down in ‘herstory’! The amazing Siobhan Barbour, Sarah Gordon and Alice Malseed created props, edited scripts and gathered actors. We cannot WANDA Feminism and Moving Image poster thank the actors who volunteered enough – they were superb! All money raised on the night went to THE WANDA Feminism and Moving Image event the Abortion Support Network. started as a conversation in November 2015 and The ‘International Shorts’ programme in the debuted in February 2017 at the Strand Arts Centre, Beanbag Cinema on Saturday addressed issues of Belfast. Over the course of 15 months, Rose Baker identity and sexuality in a variety of different docuand I had discussed how the festival would work, mentary and experimental film styles. Our features what type of events we would programme and what were from two pivotal figures in the history of femiwe wanted to address under the umbrella of femi- nism and filmmaking: Belgian filmmaker Chantal nism and moving image. I am a visual artist and Akerman and British feminist film theorist Laura researcher specialising in feminist video art and Mulvey. Akerman’s most celebrated moving image performance. Rose is a film programmer who works work, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 with organisations such as Belfast Film Festival and Bruxelles (1975), was screened at the Queen’s Film the Beanbag Cinema developing experimental film Theatre (QFT). In the Beanbag Cinema, we also programmes. screened Peter Wollen’s avant-garde film Riddles of We felt that, with our combined skills, we the Sphinx (1979), which deconstructs the traditions could present a series of events that would show- of Hollywood cinema. These seminal works expandcase moving image works produced by Irish and ed and challenged the conventions of filmmaking international feminist filmmakers and artists. We in the 1970s and still influence feminist moving wanted to start conversations about these industries image practice today. and the work of women, both on and off screen.

On Sunday we were honoured to have Irish After approaching the Belfast Film Festival, where filmmakers Margo Harkin and Anne Crilly speak director Michele Devlin and programmer Stephen about founding the Derry Film and Video Collective Hackett offered invaluable support, we secured and producing the films Mother Ireland (1988), Hushfunding from Film Hub NI and owe a big thanks to A-Bye-Baby (1990) and Strip Search (1986). manager Hugh Odling-Smee and coordinator Sara Afterwards we screened Maeve (1982), by Pat Gunn-Smith. Fiona McElroy and the Department of Murphy and John Davies. These brief insights highResearch and Impact at Ulster University also sup- lighted the importance of Irish feminist film history ported us. Emma Campbell from Alliance for and we look forward to continuing these conversaChoice (AFC) was part of early conversations and tions. she organised the (AFC-funded) panel discussion as The festival closed with the Irish and UK prepart of the festival programme. miere of the US documentary Trapped (2016), by WANDA takes its name from the 1970 film Dawn Porter. The film documents abortion clinics Wanda, written, directed and starring Barbara in southern American states which have been Loden. Wanda tells the story of a woman who impacted by laws and regulations forcing them to rejects the role of wife and mother and is subse- jump through so many legal hoops that many are quently shunned by a society that forces women forced to close. This was accompanied by the preinto domestic roles. Wanda is an accomplished film, miere of an Irish short, Our Right to Choose, by Hanan particularly in terms of Loden’s multiple roles, both Dirya, which documents the Galway pro-choice behind and in front of the camera. As our opening group and their stories about campaigning for aborfilm, it set the tone for the rest of the weekend. tion rights in Ireland.

The festival focused on the topics of activism We are deeply grateful to all of our funders, and filmmaking. We feel strongly about issues contributors, venues, mentors and volunteers. This affecting women’s rights, both in Ireland and world- was just the beginning for WANDA and we look wide, and wanted to draw connections between forward to future events. feminist activism and the importance of ‘the active’ Laura O’Connor is a visual artist and researcher within the conventions of filmmaking. Feminist, based in Belfast. Rose Baker is a film programactivist and filmmaker Treasa O’Brien delivered a mer based in Belfast. talk and facilitated a workshop at Ulster University. wandabelfast.com On Friday evening Emma Campbell chaired the ‘Filmmaking as Activism’ panel at the Oh Yeah Centre. Issues such as abortion rights and the refu-

May – June 2017

JOANNE LAWS REPORTS FROM THE RECENT CREATIVE IRELAND PUBLIC MEETINGS IN LEITRIM AND ROSCOMMON. teams have been tasked with developing a Culture and Creativity Plan for their county in the coming months.

The sheer scale of this programme, as well as the speed at which it is currently unfolding, were highlighted during both sessions as potential pitfalls. Similarly, the use of substantial concepts – not least citizenship, creativity, wellbeing, community and place – might arguably suggest cause for concern. The term ‘identity’, for example, could result in greater social exclusion or the instrumentalisation of culture as an economic or diplomatic branding imperative. Furthermore, it will be interesting to see whether this new emphasis on narrative and “storytelling” will be applied in evaluating the impact of the programme through qualitative rather than numeric means.

The public meetings were used to gather feedback and suggestions on regional priorities. Across both sessions, people found that Pillar 1 – ‘Enabling the Creative Potential of Every Child’– was extremely important, particularly considering ongoing revelations surrounding Ireland’s historic treatment of children. The proposed change in curricular emphasis towards arts-related subjects was also welcomed, as it will help counteract the increasing prioritisation of STEM subjects.

Regarding Pillar 2 – ‘Enabling Creativity in Every Community’ – people liked the idea of there being a ‘cultural space’ to encourage discourse and critical thought. The focus on wellbeing and mental health was also seen as an important strand of the programme. With Pillar 3 – Investing in our Creative and Cultural Infrastructure – it was broadly felt that dissemination via regional networks is essential.

However certain people expressed a need for institutional reform, which takes time. A renewed investment in cultural institutions was deemed critical, following their decimation during the financial crisis.

In terms of what is needed in each locality, discussions for Roscommon centred on galvanising a regional identity through a focus on experimental archaeology, local history, folklore, literary trails and the county’s waterways. In Leitrim, suggestions included reviving cross-border activity, increasing the provision of artist residencies across artforms, expanding festivals and creating a ‘living archive’ of the county’s cultural industries, infrastructure and resources.

The findings from these regional sessions are due to be collated as an ‘activation map’ in late May, while 31 region-specific county plans will be published later in the year. As a highly ambitious, allgovernment initiative, Creative Ireland is in its infancy. The Irish embassy in London described it as “one of the most interesting pieces of public policy in the world right now”. At local level, this new policy was broadly perceived as a gesture of faith in terms of what can be achieved when we invest in culture. It has the potential to frame artists as central figures in society and the arts as a more viable career path. From what I’ve seen so far, people appear to be largely committed to approaching these developments with optimism, not cynicism or scepticism.

Joanne Laws, Features Editor, Visual Artists Ireland.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

PUBLIC ART ROUNDUP

Public Art PUBLIC ART COMMISSIONS, SOCIALLY-ENGAGED PRACTICE, SITE-SPECIFIC WORKS AND OTHER FORMS OF ART OUTSIDE THE GALLERY.

was interested in the impact of captalism on the company and its workers. During the tour, real stories of those interviewed were woven into a fictional narrative that mapped out the changing nature of work over the last 200 years.

CAPTURING IMBOLC

THE HIDE PROJECT

Artist’s name: Garrett Phelan Title of work: The Hide Project Commissioning body: Fingal County Council Date sited/carried out: 13 March 2017 Budget: €170,000 Commission type: Per Cent for Art Scheme Project partners: Fingal County Council, Mckeon Group, HML Kavanagh Mansfield/Roadstone Description: In 2007 artist Garrett Phelan was selected by Fingal County Council to imagine and conceive a public art project. The Hide Project was inspired by the artist’s own personal history with the coastal area of Fingal, in particular the magnificent ecology of the Rogerstown Estuary, an area renowned for its bird life. Phelan’s work comprises four elements: a physical sculpture, thehideproject.com and Hide FM. The Hide Project takes the form of a twenty-first-century functional monument dedicated to the people of Fingal and their relationship with the landscape. In particular, it honours those who have given of their time for the protection, preservation and conservation of the local environment, its flora and its fauna.

NOW THUS NOW THUS

Artist’s name: Michelle Browne Title of work: Now Thus Now Thus Commissioning body: Heart of Glass, St. Helens, UK Date sited/carried out: 12 November 2016 Budget: €4000 approx.

Project Partners: Alexandra Business Park Description: Now Thus Now Thus was is a semi-fictional tour through Alexandra Park, the site of Pilkington Glass headquarters and factory that existed in the town of St. Helens for over 200 years. In the past Pilkington was one of the main employers in the town. Artist Michelle Browne drew from her research into the company, as well as interviews with local people, ex-employees of the company and the current staff at Alexandra Park. The tour looks at the contrast between the working lives of past and present employees at Pilkington. Browne

Artist: Sharon Greene Work title: Capturing Imbolc Commissioning body: Rachel Allen’s restaurant, Cork City Date sited/carried out: March 2017 Budget: €1200 Commission type: Private commission Description: Sharon Greene was commissioned to create a seasonal site-specific art installation for a restaurant in Cork City. The work, titled Capturing Imbolc, is a triptych. The first element comprises wild Irish hedgerow plants, collected, dried and pressed to create 38 unique cyanotype prints which hang from a continuous red thread and form a geometric web. On a second wall, the dried and pressed hedgerow plants were displayed between panes of glass. A third wall features a display of antique cameras. All three elements together make reference to the archaic methods of capturing images of botanics as well as the message of Imbolc (the Celtic celebration of spring), which signifies new beginnings, hope and life after death.

daughter, alongside a poem written by Grace Wilentz. The group also produced a chapbook publication of writings, which provide an insight into the views and opinions of new Irish women today.

HISTORY TABLE Artist’s name: Brian Connolly Title of work: History Table Commissioning body: Donegal County Council Date sited/carried out: March 2017 Budget: €25,000 Commission type: Open competition

Description: Brian Connolly’s permanent commemorative sculpture in Lifford was based on a performance artwork he delivered at Kilmainham Gaol as part of the 2016 centenary programme. History Table is a traditional kitchen table raised up and placed on branches of coppiced hazel. All elements are cast in bronze. The table-top is pierced with an extract of text from the Irish Proclamation, which can be viewed from below. The artwork represents an archway, a threshold and a link between past, present and future. It takes a recognisable item of domestic furniture and reconceptualises it as a symbolic form.

The kitchen table is the centre of the home, where ideas are discussed, familiar in the Irish consciousness as the centre of family life.

RESONANCE GROWS WE CLAIM Artists’ names: Kathryn Maguire, members of Young Migrant Women Title of work: We Claim Commission type: Artist in the Community Scheme Commissioning body: Arts Council of Ireland Date sited: December 2016 Budget: €10,000 Project partners: Create, the Abbey Theatre and Dublin City Council Description: We Claim was an artistic collaboration between artist Kathryn Maguire and the Young Migrant Women group, which comprises Valerie Molay (public speaker and activist), Catherine Kayya Murphy (model, activist), Annie Waithira Murugi (model, activist) Cyndi Njoki (poet and writer), Grace Wilentz (poet and writer and editor), Jennifer Hon (artist), Soraya Sobrevía (writer) and Kheira Belfedhal (writer). The aim of We Claim was to consider migrant womens’ voices

in the marking of the 1916 centenary. A large banner, inspired by activist, poet, actor and writer Alice Milligan (1866 – 1953), was displayed on Eden Quay in central Dublin. The image featured on the banner was depicts models and YMW members Catherine Kayya Murphy and Annie Waithira Murugi as mythical warrior Queen Maeve and her

Artist’s name: Rob Ireson Title of work: Resonance Grows Commission type: Open competition Commissioning body: Workers’ Educational Association NI Date sited: March 2017 Budget: £17500 Project partners: Ulster Hospital Dundonald, Belvoir Women’s Group and the Purple Vine Dundonald Description: Rob Ireson’s interactive artwork Resonance Grows is sited at the Ulster Hospital, Dundonald. Made from hammered bronze and steel, its form is derived from both a heart and a tree and appears to ‘grow’ out of the ground. It draws from the idea of the heart as a resonant chamber. The piece contains ‘knots’ which can be spoken into, while internal springs create an echo. This encourages people to speak to each other through the heart. In addition to this sonic element there are love poems – created in community workshops with the project partners – etched on perspex and illuminated by UV light.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

May – June 2017

35

OPPORTUNITIES

Opportunities COMMISSIONS POLLINATOR PUBLIC ART Laois and Offaly County Councils, with the support of Creative Ireland, wish to commission up to two artists to explore and present aspects of the pollinators of Ireland through art. The artist should consider vision how the story and value of Ireland’s pollinators – insects that visit plants to obtain nectar and pollen, and in the process, carry pollen from one plant to another – can be innovatively realised, interpreted, communicated and made public.

Applicants can submit a proposal to work in one or both counties. Each county project has a commission value of €10,000. This is a one-stage open competition and the selection panel will include representatives of the arts and heritage services of Laois and Offaly County Councils, an artist and representatives of the All Ireland Pollinator Plan.

For application procedure and brief see visualartists.ie Deadline 5pm, Friday 12 May Email ccasey@laoiscoco.ie Telephone 057 866 4129

JOBS DALY ANTIQUE SERVICES Daly Antique Services is looking for a friendly, confident person who is reliable and flexible to join its small team.

This is a temporary vacancy for a period of seven months, but may be extended to a total of 11 months. Daly Antiques are an antiques restoration business and therefore someone with knowledge or an interest of antiques would be preferred but not essential.

Candidates must have: two years administration experience, great organisational skills, good computer skills including Microsoft office (experience of working on a Mac a bonus), some experience working with accounts.

The position is five days per week. Start date: 15 May 2017 to allow for training/ handover. Salary DOE. Email your CV and cover letter to the email below.

Deadline 5 May Email info@dalyantiqueservices.com Website dalyantiqueservices.com

RESIDENCIES KYOTO ART CENTER Kyoto Art Center’s artist-in-residence programme offers support to emerging

artists and art researchers who wish to pursue creative activities in Kyoto. The organisers switch between hosting a performing arts practitioner and a visual artist each year. In 2018, the programme will be open for performing artists and researchers.

Applicants must be emerging artists and art researchers working in the performing arts sector who have a well defined reason to work and research in Kyoto. Writers and cross-media artists can also apply. Applicants must organise a public programme for Kyoto citizens during the residency, communicated in English or Japanese.

Artists will receive: accommodation during the residency period (maximum three months); a studio for production and research; a round-trip air ticket from residential area to Kansai International Airport or Osaka International Airport; JPY100,000 (including tax) towards production and research cost (for an individual or a group); publicity; and assistance from the art coordinator.

Deadline 30 June Website kac.or.jp/eng COW HOUSE STUDIOS With the support of Wexford County Council and the National College of Art and Design, Cow House Studios (Wexford) presents ‘Rising from the Hill: Local Systems in Global Contexts’, a sixweek residency for an artist to explore and develop methods of giving aesthetic forms to real-life situations. In particular, participants will respond to the local environment of Cow House Studios, in the rural Irish countryside of Wexford.

Participants will be encouraged to use ideas, strategies, and metaphors of ‘systems’ to consider the complex relationships between this local context and larger global systems such as economics, telecommunications or meteorology. Residency participants will be invited to develop a proposed project to be presented as both a visual record of research and development through a collaborative exhibition at the gallery at National College of Art and Design, Dublin.

There is no cost for this residency.

With the support of Wexford County Council, the National College of Art and Design and Cow House Studios we are able to offer participating artists: three delicious and healthy meals daily; a private room and studio; access to all Cow House Studios facilities, computers, darkroom, studios and supplies; transportation to the nearby towns of either New Ross, Enniscorthy or Wexford twice weekly; informative and challenging readings, workshops and presentations; an exhibition of work to

be displayed at NCAD gallery, Dublin.

To apply submit the following documents in PDF format: completed application form (on website); recent CV/ resume; a portfolio (only one PDF file).

Deadline 14 May Website cowhousestudios.com Contact Frank Abruzzese ARTSPACE, ARMAGH Artspace is a dedicated studio space for artists situated in Oxford Island National Nature Reserve on the southern shores of Lough Neagh. It stands on a site of outstanding natural beauty, surrounded by designated areas of special scientific interest. The winter residency runs October 2017 – March 2018 and offers individual artists a six-month-long studio opportunity to develop a new body of work that responds to the people and/or places in and around Lough Neagh. It is also an opportunity to exhibit the work created and present a talk to the public immediately following the residency. The opportunity includes an artist’s stipend of £2000.

Deadline 19 May Email emma.drury@armaghbanbridgecraigavon.co.uk Website artsdevelopment.org RESORT, FINGAL Fingal County Council Arts Office are seeking expressions of interest from artists and curators to engage in a short term residency opportunity at Lynders Mobile Home Park, Portrane. The Resort Revelations programme provides the resident an opportunity to return to the area and present new work during the local Bleeding Pig Festival at various locations in Portrane from July to September.

A fee of €500 will be provided for the weeklong period. The mobile home is located at Lynders Mobile Home Park, The Quay, Portrane, Fingal, County Dublin, and is fully fitted out with two rooms available. Assistance and introductions to local groups will be made and facilitated for the resident to gather information.

Those wishing to avail of the residency must submit an expression of interest which demonstrates their interest in engaging with Portrane/Donabate through this residency. The application must include: a maximum of 500 words/A4; a recent CV/biography with reference; links or images contained within a PDF document to demonstrate previous work.

Deadline 5pm, 19 May Email caroline.cowley@fingal.ie Website fingalarts.ie

TYRONE GUTHRIE Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council offer bursaries for a local artist to spend two all–inclusive weeks at the prestigious Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, County Monaghan. This idyllic artists’ retreat plays host to artists from around the world working in a variety of art forms.

Applicants should be born in or domiciled in the Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council area. Where applicants have studios based outside the area but are residents of the city, the committee will consider applications accordingly.

The application form can be downloaded from the Island Arts Centre website.

Deadline 4pm, 26 May Email lynda.mccord@lisburncastlereagh.gov. uk Website islandartscentre.com Address Community Arts Officer, Island Arts Centre, Lagan Valley Island, Lisburn, BT27 4RL

COURSES/WORKSHOPS/ TRAINING CHECK UP, CHECK IN Bookings are now being accepted for Arts and Health ‘Check Up, Check In’, the arts and health get-together hosted by artsandhealth.ie, Create and Arts Initiative in Mental Health, Sligo. Arts and Health ‘Check Up, Check In’ is a networking event for arts and healthcare practitioners and artists who work in healthcare settings.

The keynote speech, curated by Create, will take the form of a conversation between Patrick Fox of Heart of Glass UK and Mark Storor, an acclaimed and award-winning artist, who works in the space between live art and theatre.

There will be a series of paired presentations exploring the nature of collaborative working between artists and healthcare professionals.

Attendees will then have an opportunity to meet their peers in facilitated discussion groups. Artist Naomi Draper will employ various creative devices to allow entry points into conversations that invite participants to listen, share and exchange with one another. Places can be booked online. Admission is €20 per person including lunch.

Email claire.meaney@hse.ie Website artsandhealth.ie Telephone 051 842 664 FIRE STATION ARTISTS’ STUDIOS In 2017 Fire Station Skills Programme in both the Sculpture and Media departments will be providing courses for visual artists that explore new modes of making practice that consider new

digital technology and more traditional forms of making. The skills programme will focus on the potential relationship between these two areas and will investigate aspects of 3D software and design, mould-making, 3D printing and metal casting. It is envisaged that applicants will participate on all three of the workshops below and attend the demonstration, gaining experience with a variety of different materials and processes.

Reduced rate if signing up for all three courses this summer and preferential attendance at lecture: €430 Mould Making Workshop Level 1 and Level 2 with Ciaran Patterson.

Cost: €120 for each two-day course . 3D Printing for Casting by Sean Forsyth.

Wednesday 21 June, 6:30pm - 9:00pm.

FREE. Please book with artadmin@firestation.ie by 12 June. Bronze Casting Workshop with Ciaran Patterson. Cost: €220 for three days.

Email artadmin@firestation.ie Website firestation.ie SIGNWRITING & GRAPHICS The Cork Training Centre offer a foundation course in the art of sign making.

Learners will be given expert tuition in both traditional techniques such as hand-painted lettering, glass gilding (gold leaf), sandblasting and faux aged signs. The course also covers modern techniques such as computer-designed signs, digital graphics, vehicle signage, t-shirt printing, graphic design and sign installation. All materials are supplied for this 25 week course, which runs from 8 May to 27 October.

Email admissions@corktrainingcentre.ie Website corktrainingcentre.ie

OPEN SUBMISSIONS ART WORLDS Artquest’s Art Worlds gives an insider, day-in-the-life view of the current realities of living and working as an artist in different places around the world. Artquest are looking for the practical and the philosophical, for artists who can be honest about how their practice works on a day-to-day level, and how their life circumstances have altered their work (or vice versa). Writers will receive £200 per article, which will be displayed with up to four images, audio or film work, as well as promotion of your current projects on Twitter, Facebook etc.

One artist’s proposal will be selected every other month. To be eligible to apply to write for Art Worlds you must be a practising visual artist and a member of Exchange, Artquest’s studio exchange and collaboration network for visual artists.

Website artquest.org.uk

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

Spring/Summer 2017

ROI Dublin City BEALTAINE FESTIVAL EVENT FOR VISUAL ARTISTS: SUSTAINING YOUR PRACTICE II Bealtaine Festival in association with Visual Artists Ireland and the RHA School A day-long professional development seminar for mid career and older artists.

23 May 2017 (10.30 – 16.30) @ RHA School. Cost: FREE. Places: 30+.

DEVELOPING CREATIVE PROPOSALS In partnership with RHA Autumn date tbc @Royal Hibernian Academy.

Cost: €80/40 (VAI members). Places: 10 – 12.

RDS VISUAL ARTS AWARDS In partnership with the RDS Visual Arts Awards Building on the success of last years’ collaborative event we aim to run another event in 2017 to support recent graduates. Oct 2017 @RDS, Ballsbridge, Dublin. Places: 30+.

Galway SUSTAINING YOUR PRACTICE FOR MID-CAREER ARTISTS In partnership with Galway County Council & Galway City Council Jun 2017 date tbc. @Galway City venue tbc. Cost: tbc. Places: 20+.

Leitrim VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFÉ FOR GRADUATES In partnership with Creative Frame Leitrim Jun 2017 date tbc @venue tbc. Places: 20+.

Other events planned for 2017: Writing About Your Work, Marketing & Social Media for Visual Artists, Regional Artist 1-to-1 Clinics – Legal, Financial & Career Advice, Cataloguing & Archiving Your Work, Child Protection Awareness Training, Creative Proposals (Dublin), Visual Artists Café (Portlaoise), Handling, Packaging & Storing Your Work, Creating Opportunities for Your Work, Peer Critique: Mixed Media, Visual Artists’ Cafe (including professional practice talk), Creative Proposals (regional), Documenting Your Work (Dublin), Health & Safety for Visual Artists (regional), Peer Critique: Sculpture/ Installation.

VAI Show & Tell Events: SHOW & TELL FOR DUN LAOGHAIRE RATHDOWN ARTISTS In association with ArtNetDLR Sat 6 May @Lexicon Studio. Places: 25+.

SHOW & TELL FOR CREATIVE FRAME & LEITRIM ARTISTS In partnership with Creative Frame & Leitrim Sculpture Centre Autumn 2017 date tbc. @Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Manorhamilton . Places: 25+.

Tipperary WORKING WITH DIGITAL IMAGES WITH TIM DURHAM In partnership with Tipperary County Council Fri 28 Apr (10.00 – 14.00) @Damer House Gallery. Cost: €40/20 (VAI members). Places: 10 – 12.

DEVELOPING OPPORTUNITIES FOR YOUR WORK In partnership with Tipperary County Council Date tbc @Clonmel, venue tbc. Cost: €40/20 (VAI members). Places: 15 –20.

Fees VAI members receive preferential discount of 50% on fees for all VAI, training and professional development events. Fees range from €5 – €40 for VAI members.

Tell us about your training needs!

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

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

Kerry POSITIONING YOUR PRACTICE In partnership with Kerry Council Arts Office Wed 26 May @Kerry County Council Chamber, Tralee. Cost: €40/20 (VAI members). Places: 15 – 20. Artists Ceara Conway and Carl Doran, along with Askeaton Contemporary Arts and Justine Foster, Education and Community Programmer Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre, offer perspectives on artists’ working from a rural context.

BOOKINGS/INFORMATION Monica Flynn, Professional Development Officer, Visual Artists Ireland 01 672 9488, monica@visualartists.ie visualartists.ie/events

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

NI Belfast MASTERCLASS: SETTING YOUR OWN AGENDA 3 May @VAI Belfast Office. Cost: £10 / £5 (includes lunch and refreshments). An exploration of best practices for making ideas happen. Pragmatic action-oriented insights and skills are shared to empower you to realise your ideas.

VISUAL ARTISTS’ HELPDESKS 17 May, 14 Jun, 19 Jul @VAI Belfast Office. Cost: FREE. Six artists will be able to book into an individual one-to-one appointment with an experienced industry professional. Artists submit material in advance for the tutors and get a detailed 30 minute meeting to discuss their individual challenges.

VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFE: INTRODUCING WEST BELFAST 26 May @Artists at the Mill, Conway Mill. Cost: FREE. Find out more about the visual arts exhibition spaces, studios, resources and collectives in west Belfast. This networking and information event will be an excellent opportunity to meet other artists and arts organisations.

PEER CRITIQUE Jun date tbc. Venue tbc. This event for six artists will allow an in-depth review of current practices or projects, facilitated by an established invited curator.

MAKING SOCIAL MEDIA WORK Jun date tbc @VAI Belfast Office. This is an advanced look at using social media to further your goals. All participants should have a good understanding of how social media works and have an established presence that they wish to develop further.

Bangor & Ards VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFE: FACILITATION SKILLS FOR ARTISTS WORKING WITH GROUPS Date tbc. Venue tbc. Cost: £5/£10 (non-members).

This event will explore the theory and practice of facilitation skills, which can be applied to both group and individual activities, as well as collaborations in social and community contexts. Please register your interest for this workshop by emailing rob@visualartists-ni.org.

VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFE: LET’S MAKE IT HAPPEN! Jul date tbc. Venue tbc. Cost: FREE. This is a fun, lively, social networking event with a twist.

Belfast-based artist Charlotte Bosanquet has some-

thing unusual up her sleeve to get your creative juices flowing, kick out the old and get inspired to make things happen in 2017.

VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFE: INTRODUCING ARDS Sept date tbc. Newtownards venue tbc. Cost: FREE. Find out more about the visual arts exhibition spaces, studios, resources and collectives in Ards and the surrounding area. This networking and information event will be an excellent opportunity to meet other artists and arts organisations in an informal setting.

Causeway Coast & Glens DOCUMENTING YOUR WORK WITH SIMON MILLS Jul date tbc. Venue tbc. This event aims to develop photography and video skills that artists need to present their work to curators, galleries, in applications and proposals, in marketing and to gain exposure online.

SOCIAL MEDIA & ONLINE PRESENCE WITH SHARON ADAMS Aug date tbc. Venue tbc. This workshop will look at ways artists can use free internet tools to support their overall professional development and to promote specific exhibitions. We will also look at how social media can help expand your audience.

CREATING OPPORTUNITIES & BUILDING PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS September date tbc. Venue tbc. Artists will talk about their practice, sharing information on how they have maximised opportunities in order to develop their careers. We will also look at ways artists can think strategically about building relationships with curators and galleries.

VISUAL ARTISTS’ HELPDESK Oct date tbc. Venue tbc. Six artists will be able to book into an individual one-to-one appointment with an experienced industry professional.

CURATING EXHIBITIONS Nov date tbc. Venue tbc. Techniques for creating coherent, intelligent group or solo exhibitions.

Artists often produce self-curated group exhibitions with their peers. This workshop looks at how skills such as selection of work, techniques for hanging or presenting work and lighting can make a dramatic difference.

BOOKING INFORMATION Rob Hilken (Northern Ireland Manager) rob@visualartists-ni.org, 028 9587 0361 visualartists.org.uk/booking

Patricia Cronin, Shrine for Girls, La Biennale di Venezi, 2015; photo by Mark Blower, courtesy of the artist

The LAB Gallery is pleased to present:

SHRINE FOR GIRLS, DUBLIN Patricia Cronin

ground floor gallery

LIKE A BIRD I COULD SING Anne Maree Barry first floor gallery

16 June – 20 August 2017 The LAB A: Foley Street, Dublin 1 T: 01 222 5455, E: artsoffice@dublincity.ie W: www.thelab.ie T: @LabDCC F: facebook.com/TheLABGalleryDublin V: www.vimeo.com/dccartsoffice Open Monday – Friday 10am – 6pm, Saturday and Sunday 10am – 5pm