Visual Artists' News Sheet - 2017 July August

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet ISSUE 4 July – August 2017 Published by Visual Artists Ireland Ealaíontóirí Radharcacha Éire

Vivienne Dick, Augenblick, 2017; production still; HD video, 14 mins, colour, sound; image courtesy of Vivienne Dick

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Editorial

July – August 2017

Contents

WELCOME to the July – August 2017 issue of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

Cover. Vivienne Dick, Augenblick, 2017.

5. Column. Martin Waldmeier. Who are Biennials Speaking to?

With biennale season upon us, major international art events are taking place around the world. This issue includes two reports from the 57th Venice Biennale, which runs until late November 2017: an editorial column from Joanne Laws highlighting the work of female artists in Venice, and a report by Anne Mullee on the participation of Irish artists in various national and collateral events. In addition, Johnathan Carroll offers insights into Skulptur Projekte Münster and documenta 14, while Michelle Boyle reports from the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which ran until March 2017 in Kerala, India. In his timely column, Martin Waldmeier highlights the rise of English as the ‘lingua franca’ of contemporary art.

6. Column. Joanne Laws. Women Artists at Venice.

7. Column. Áine Phillips. Playing Hard to Get. 8. Column. Conor McGrady. Doing What We Are Told Makes Us Free.

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

9. Regional Profile. Resources and activities in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown are profiled by the DLR

In other columns, Alex Davis, Manager of IVARO, offers insights into artists’ estates. Áine Phillips outlines artists’ withdrawal from globalised systems, while Conor McGrady discusses a recent solo exhibition and ‘sleep concert’ by avant-garde musician and artist Steven Stapleton at Burren College of Art. Joanne Laws addresses the current issues faced by studio providers in Ireland, while VAI Northern Ireland Manager Rob Hilken outlines the studio situation in Northern Ireland.

Arts Office, DLR Artnet and artists Helen Hughes, Helen Barry and Patricia McKenna.

12. Career Development. University of the World. Pádraic E. Moore interviews Vivienne Dick about her career and current exhibition with Nan Goldin at IMMA.

14. Biennale. The People’s Biennale. Michelle Boyle reports from the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

15. Artists’ Publishing. Glenade Water Remedies. Ruth le Gear talks about her project and publication

‘Water Remedies’.

16. Biennale. An Irish Presence. Anne Mullee reports on Irish representation at Venice.

18. Career Development. I Am a Painter. Austin Hearne describes the evolution of his practice.

19. Critique. ‘This is Not Architecture’, Highlanes and Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda; ‘Snake’, Also in this issue, Pádraic E. Moore interviews Vivienne Dick about her new film, Augenblick (2017), and Belfast Exposed; ‘Forged, Carved, Cast’, Hamilton, Sligo; ‘Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously’; her long-running friendship with American photographer Nan Goldin, to coincide with their concur Project Arts Centre, Dublin; ‘Into the Gravelly Ground’, Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray. rent solo exhibitions at IMMA. Chris Clarke interviews Matt Packer, the newly-appointed director of 23. Organisation. Azure Tours. Barry Kehoe outlines IMMA’s special tours for people with dementia.

EVA International and curator of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts (3 – 19 November 2017).

24. Biennale. Twin Peaks. Jonathan Carroll reports from Documenta and Skulptur Projekte Münster.

In the ‘Career Development’ section, recent graduates Aoife Dunne and Austin Hearne offer insights into their practices, while David Dunne discusses his residency at Pilotenkueche International artist residence, Leipzig, Germany. Jonathan Carroll interviews several people involved in ‘ROSC 50 – 1967/2017’, an ongoing collaborative research project undertaken by IMMA and NIVAL. Barry Kehoe offers fascinating insights into IMMA’s Azure Tours for people with dementia and their carers.

In the ‘How is it Made?’ section, John Dine interviews Tamsin Snow about her new film Showroom. In the new ‘Artists’ Publishing’ section, Ruth Le Gear discusses her recent project and book ‘Water Senses’. The Regional Profile for this issue comes from Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. Reviewed in the Critique section are: ‘Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously’ at Project Art Centre; ‘Snake’ at Belfast Exposed; ‘Forged Carved Cast’ at Hamilton Gallery, Sligo; ‘This is Not Architecture’ at Highlanes Gallery; and ‘Into the gravelly ground’ at Mermaid Arts Centre.

26. VAI Advocacy. Artists’ Workspaces. Joanne Laws looks at issues facing studio providers across the country.

27. Northern Ireland. Studio Provision in NI. In his column, Rob Hilken looks at issues facing studios

across Northern Ireland.

28. How is it Made? Virtual Autopsies. John Dine interviews Tamsin Snow on residency in Finland

about her film work Showroom.

30. Residency. Finding Refuge. David Dunne talks about his residency at Pilotenkueche, Leipzig.

31. Career Development. Hyperbole of Form & Colour. Aoife Dunne discusses her recent work.

32. IVARO. Art After Death: The Artist’s Estate. Alex Davis of IVARO discusses issues around artists’

legacies and estates.

33. Festival. The Primal Voice. Chris Clarke interviews Matt Packer, curator of TULCA 2017.

34. How is it Made? Remains of the Day. Jonathan Carroll interviews the creators behind ‘ROSC 50 –

As ever, we have details of upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public 1967/2017’, the archival exhibition currently running at IMMA. art roundups, news from the sector and current opportunities.

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

other forms of art outside the gallery.

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

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37. 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, Áine Phillips, Chris Clarke, Matt Packer, Vivienne Dick, Pádraic E. Moore, Jonathan Carroll, Conor McGrady, Anne Mullee, Michelle Boyle, Lisa Moran, Seán Kissane, Brenda Moore-McCann, Jennifer Fitzgibbon, Tamsin Snow, John Dine, Ruth Le Gear, Aoife Dunne, Austin Hearne, Barry Kehoe, David Dunne, John Graham, Dorothy Hunter, Andy Parsons, Susan Campbell, Sue Rainsford, Rob Hilken, Alex Davis, Helen Hughes, Helen Barry, Patricia McKenna, Amy Fox, Ciara King. 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.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

COLUMN

Martin Waldmeier

5

Roundup

ELSEWHERE Who Are Biennials Speaking To? Backwater Artists’ Studios presented a group exhibition titled ‘Elsewhere’, DESPITE all the efforts to make the art world less Western-centric, few have tried curated by Helen Farrell and featuring to do the same with the language of art. On the contrary, not only is English the work by Megan and Cassandra Eustace, single dominant language of contemporary art today, but the kind of English used Helen Horgan, Róisín Lewis, John Kent, is often riddled with jargon that baffles even native English speakers. This jargon, Ben Reilly, Éilis Ni Fhaoláin, Luke Sisk, ironically, is often only comprehensible to a select group of Western-educated artJohnny Bugler, Angie Shanahan, Tracy ists, curators and intellectuals. Often aiming to bridge the gap between local and White Fitzgerald, Elaine Coakley, global, biennials are especially affected by this problem. It begs the question: who Gerard O’Callaghan, Jo Kelley, Peter are biennials actually speaking to?

Martin, Helen O’Keeffe, Angela The rise of English as the ‘lingua franca’ of contemporary art runs parallel to Gilmour, Darn Thorn and Sean the exponential proliferation of biennials since the 1990s. Today, Germany’s docuHanrahan. The works were sited at CIT menta may be known as the world’s foremost curated contemporary art event, but Wandesford Quay Gallery and Elizabeth when it was founded in 1955 with the goal of reintroducing modern art after fasFort, Cork, from 27 Apr to 20 May. cism, documenta addressed itself mainly to the German public. The first time that Undergraduate students at CIT were English-language texts were published by documenta was in 1982, when the exhipaired with professional artists, who bition catalogue included a special English-language section with summaries for created works either within the gallery international readers. The first truly bilingual catalogue was published in 1987. or in one of the Elizabeth Fort spaces, The embrace of English signalled the turn from national to international audiwhich include domestic dwellings, a ences and certainly influenced the dramatic growth of visitor numbers that still garda station and an air raid shelter. The continues. If we visit Kassel or Athens today, we take it for granted that English will documentation from the collaboration be spoken and used in textual information. was presented at the gallery during the The Venice Biennale was always more linguistically diverse in comparison. exhibition.

Summer of 1966 – an astonishing film by Belgian TV documentarist Jef Cornelis – ccad-research.org/gallery shows the 1966 exhibition as a place brimming with an eclectic mix of European languages. As European-centered as it was back then – at a time when the Biennale PERSONAL DEPLOYABLE CRANNOG Award was still handed out by the local cardinal – artists, curators and visitors nevertheless conversed eagerly in Italian, French, German and English alike. But Cornelis’s film also captured a dynamic that persists today: the awkward encounter between monoglot (but eloquent and theoretically-versed) North American artists and their continental European counterparts – usually middle-aged men in suits who, while mastering some English, French or Italian, often only reluctantly spoke about their work at all.

Today, the problem is not so much that travelling curators don’t speak the local language where they make exhibitions – this gap can be remedied in different ways via the use of local co-curators, multilingual texts and visitor guides. Paddy Bloomer, Personal Deployable Crannog on Glenade Lake, 2017; photo by David Spence Rather, the bigger challenge nowadays is often the artworks themselves, in particular conceptual, research-based or documentary works that use English, often Paddy Bloomer’s exhibition ‘Personal with a heavy dose of jargon. This was a problem at documenta 14 in Athens, for Deployable Crannog’ ran at Leitrim example, where many audiovisual works were shown without Greek subtitles. But Sculpture Centre, 19 May – 3 Jun. The if “an artist who cannot speak English is no artist” (as polemically stated by the artist’s “machines that don’t exactly Croatian conceptual artist Mladen Stilinovic in 1994), then we must admit that a work” present a “humorous and critical visitor who cannot read English is equally disadvantaged. challenge to the dysfunctional and irraSubtitling films and making translations is of course a costly affair that tional technologies that drive societal smaller art organisations often cannot afford. But for well-funded organisations change”, the press release stated. like documenta, language should be a greater area of concern. Language does not Bloomer used the found detritus of techjust communicate, it defines a social space. The way curators and art institutions nology and collaborated with various use language determines how an exhibition welcomes and accommodates the communities during his extensive fieldpublic, revealing the assumptions curators make about their audiences. To speak work. His interests lay in “finding and the local language and to offer translations and subtitles is a way for a travelling exploiting unusual power sources, biennial to reciprocate the hospitality received from the local public. If there is a waste disposal sites, health and safety kernel of truth to the criticism that documenta 14 has somehow colonised Athens, legislation and subverting public infrathen the dominance of English is something we might want to consider. structure towards alternative forms of Documenta 14 curator Adam Szymczyk could have taken a lesson from mobility and human settlement”.

Christian Jankowski, who curated last year’s Manifesta in Zürich. Jankowski and leitrimsculpturecentre.ie his team came up with an innovative way to mitigate the problem of translation.

One of the exhibition’s main venues was a wooden floating platform on Lake ACQUISITION COLLECTION Zürich where visitors could sit back, enjoy a view of the Alps and watch several From 2 to 17 Jun, the Clinton Centre, hours of fast-paced short films. Directed by young local artists, these short films Fermanagh, held an exhibition of confeatured high school students in the role of “art detectives”. Ambitious, energetic temporary photography works from the and blissfully unaware of art world jargon, these detectives interrogated the artists Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s colwith unassuming honesty, forcing them to speak about their newly-commissioned lection. The featured works were by works in the simplest possible terms. These polyglot detectives used their native both emerging and established artists, Swiss German to tell the story of each artwork and the films were subtitled in including Willie Doherty, Donovan standard German and English.

Wylie, Mary McIntyre, Simon Burch Like Ireland, Switzerland has an incredibly diverse landscape of dialects and and Jan McCullough. “Northern Ireland vernaculars that couldn’t be any more different from the exclusivity of academic has a particularly strong photographic art world jargon, with its stilted, abstract and formulaic expressions and wild exagart scene” the press release noted. “The gerations. The Manifesta organisers understood how vital translation is for a sucimages make us question our society in cessful biennial. They showed that the language of art can indeed be revitalised different ways and the artists share through translation, and that speaking about art can happen in a way that is their unique viewpoints”. democratic and meaningful without being exclusive and pretentious. fermanaghomagh.com

Martin Waldmeier is curator, writer and visual culture lecturer based in London.

Office and Mayo Arts Office. This sound and radio-based work responded to the festival’s 2017 theme of collectivism and the idea that “the arts can be the mortar that holds society together”.

Burns collated an archive of radio interviews with the vanguards of the arts community in Mayo and Sligo, which were broadcast locally. The project also included development of an archive of ephemera relating the artist-led movement in the region. Burns ran archiving

BEYOND DRIFTING

Mandy Barker, image from ‘Beyond Drifting’

Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, County Cork, held an exhibition by Mandy Barker titled ‘Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals’, 27 May – 2 Jul. The work focuses on unique ‘specimens’ of plankton discovered by pioneering marine biologist John Vaughn Thompson in Cobh and Cork Harbour during the 1800s. The press release stated: “Presented as microscopic samples, objects of marine plastic debris, recovered from the same location, mimic Thompson’s early scientific discoveries of plankton. The work represents the degradation and contamination of plastic particles in the natural environment, by creating the perception of past scientific discoveries, when organisms were free from plastic. The enveloping black space evokes the deep oceans beneath.”

Image from ‘Archiving Activism’

activism drop-in days in advance of the exhibition, collecting the memories, stories and printed materials of those involved in establishing or running arts projects, festivals or exhibitions in the counties of Mayo and Sligo during the 1970s to the 1990s. bealtaine.ie/events

FLEETING

siriusartscentre.ie

BECOMING CHRISTINE Amanda Dunsmore’s exhibition ‘Becoming Christine’ ran at Galway Arts Centre, 27 May – 9 Jul. This multimedia ‘selfie’ portrait exhibition, curated by Liz Burns, was a collaboration with Christine Beynon and follows her journey and gender transition over the past 12 years. ‘Becoming Christine’ comprised an immersive sound installation and narrated artwork in addition to the portraits. Dunsmore recorded conversations between Beynon and herself over the period of a year. The selfportraits range in tone, the press release noted, “from the painful, to the playful, from the mundane to the contemplative to the joyful”. These intimate silent

Amanda Dunsmore, image from ‘Becoming Christine’

video portraits, which Dunsmore has explored in other works, were based on her interest in reconfiguring the boundaries of portraiture.

Laura Kelly, image (detail) from ‘Fleeting’

Laura Kelly’s exhibition ‘Fleeting’, was shown at 126 Artist-Run Gallery, Galway, 13 – 28 May. Kelly’s processbased practice is focused on making an “expanded form of drawing”, the press release stated. Her 2D and 3D drawing installations move between the wall and floor and comprise various materials, including paper, wood, thread, graphite and tape. The two new works were created for this exhibition “allude to an ambiguous and dislocated sense of place”. Kelly’s work is informed by a broad range of reference points, from “the pictorial landscape tradition, the nature of perception, mark-making and the creation of illusion to Japanese spatial aesthetics”. This current work is the continuation of a series begun during a winter residency at the Banff Centre, Canada, in 2016.

126.ie

galwayartscentre.ie

ARCHIVING ACTIVISM Artist Breda Burns presented ‘Archiving Activism’ as part of Bealtaine Festival 2017, in partnership with Sligo Arts

THE SPACES OF THE IMAGINATION ‘The Spaces of the Imagination’, an exhibition of drawings by Melissa O’Faherty, ran at Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, 5 May – 3 Jun. O’Faherty’s works comprise

6 COLUMN

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet ROUNDUP addresses the radical reconfiguration of contemporary shipping and seafaring in the last 50 years.

Joanne Laws Women Artists at Venice THE 57th Venice Biennale, curated by Christine Macel, proclaims an emphasis on “art and artists, positivity and reinvention”, in contrast to curator Okwui Enwezor’s overtly political stance in 2015. Probing the ritualistic aspects of artmaking, Macel’s ‘Viva Arte Viva’ manifests a widespread preoccupation with craft and its traditions – an almost anthropological inquiry that occasionally borders on selfconscious ‘primitivism’. In a breakdown of the 120 artists participating in the main exhibition, the online platform Artsy noted that only 35% artists are female, 4% are black and 2% are under the age of 30.

Noteworthy presentations by female artists in Venice articulate the body as a site of unresolved struggle. Lani Maestro’s installations in the Philippines pavilion present the phrases “No Pain Like this Body” and “No Body Like this Pain” side-byside in red neon. In the Dionysian Pavilion, Heidi Bucher’s beautiful iridescent garments resemble cast-off skin, while Eileen Quinan’s photographs scrutinise her 40-year old, post-pregnancy body. Edith Dekyndt’s One Thousand and One Nights (2016) comprises a spotlit carpet of dust, maintained by a labourer who sweeps, causing the particles to rise in an ethereal cloud. These are some of the quieter, more poetic scenarios that sit in contrast to the intoxicating ‘Instagrammable angst’ of Anne Imhof’s award-winning performance installation Faust (2017).

Occupying the New Zealand Pavilion with an immense, scrolling landscape, Lisa Reihana’s ambitious digital projection, In Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015–17), depicts the colonial history of civilisations in the South Pacific. Kenyan artist Phoebe Boswell was special winner of the Future Generation Art Prize with Mutumia (2016), a mesmerising interactive installation of hand-drawn animations.

Romanian artist Geta Bratescu presents an impressive body of work across various media, expressing a “faith in motherhood as the matrix of all artistic creativity”.

Among the many collateral events, ‘Objection’ places domestic and feminine actions at the heart of political resistance with site-specific installations in a historic Venetian house. UK-based Israeli artist Michal Cole adorns the traditional front room with 25,000 men’s ties: the ultimate symbol of “phallic potency within a patriarchal civilisation”. In the bathroom, her heartrending film, Neverland (2017) depicts a 1950s housewife futilely rowing a boat with a mop. Turkish artist Ekin Onat upholstered dining room furniture with deconstructed military uniforms of the Turkish police and is depicted on film wearing these garments, which, on the female body, resemble fetish-wear.

In the deconsecrated church, Chiesa di Sat Caterina, Rachel McClean represents Scotland with a technicolour fantasy narrative, Spite Your Face (2017).

McClean’s compelling film assimilates various aspects of Venetian visual culture, reflecting the shimmering hues and flattened perspective of Early Renaissance art.

Channelling the Italian fairy-tale The Adventures of Pinocchio, the pimpled and destitute protagonist is gradually transformed into his bejewelled, power-hungry alter-ego, ‘Pin’. With rotten teeth now upgraded to a diamond grill, his new ‘golden stature’ offers commentary on class structures and social mobility.

Outside the Irish pavilion, the soundscape of Jesse Jones’s Tremble, Tremble (2017) reverberates. Inside the darkened space, a film is projected across two tall screens, depicting the lone figure of a witch (performed by actress Olwen Fouéré) who recounts woeful tales of ancient struggles. A third screen offers Italian translations. The giant figure towers above us, flitting between screens like a supernatural shape-shifter, whispering incantations in an unfamiliar dialect reminiscent of backmasking – a recording technique whereby censored messages are hidden in audio tracks. Systematically illuminated with spotlighting, sculptural artefacts expand this cinematic encounter. Lumpen and claw-like, they levitate above the ground, as if petrified and spellbound. Sheer curtains wisp past periodically like a veil of enchantment, creating a truly immersive experience.

Venice’s national pavilions transcend geography, functioning as patriotic portals and alternative territories of the state. Ireland at Venice is funded through Culture Ireland and other bodies, in support of Irish artists and the wider arts community. This year, the President of Ireland visited the biennale on official duties for the first time. It is infuriating that Northern Ireland, after successful previous presentations at Venice, continues to be denied similar governmental support.

At the launch, Jones discussed the changing political landscape that has produced new waves of resistance. She also spoke about our earliest encounters with our mothers “tethering over our cribs, their giant arms protecting and nurturing us”. We have since learned the heart-breaking news that the 24-year-old British artist Khadija Saye – whose evocative photographic portraits, ‘Dwelling: in this space we breathe’, are exhibited at the Diaspora Pavilion – tragically died with her mother in the devastating fire at Grenfell Towers, London. There are fears that some of the dead may never be identified, because many were undocumented migrants and refugees. It is achingly poignant that, as a young artist on the brink of success who had not yet achieved agency, Saye has become a symbol of the state’s failure to protect the vulnerable. Her work, which explores the migration of traditional Gambian spiritual practices, still hangs in an international exhibition that seeks to interrogate the meaning of ‘diaspora’ as an enduring critical concept.

July – August 2017

portwalks.ie/podcasts

OF OBJECTS AND ME

Melissa O’Faherty, installation view

visual diaries which examine the thought process of drawing, as well as new works which “imagine the environments of new planetary worlds where the scientific actuality and the artistic imagination may meet”. mermaidartscentre.ie

NO ACCOUNTING FOR TASTES

place. “The idea that our coastline is shaped by the unseen forces of the wind inspires me” the artist stated. “It makes me think of the complex beauty of nature at work, and how that mirrors our own inner workings ... I sense the hidden elements below the familiar skin of this place called home. I see the invisible. I see how the wind speaks to the surface of the sea, how it makes the waves and how it brings the language of the sea to life. I hear it in the dunes, along strands, whistling around buoys and rock and singing reeds”.

Iiu Susiraja, ‘Of Objects and Me’

PS2, 18 Donegall Street, Belfast, held ‘Of objects and me’, a solo exhibition by Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja, from 2 to 30 Jun. The work comprised large-scale self portraits, still lives and film-based installations. Susiraja’s work depicts the artist engaging in a variety of absurd activities in a domestic environment.

“She stages surreal situations in which a woman takes risks and challenges social stereotypes by exposing herself to the camera. Susiraja’s work is both humorous in its simplicity and unapologetic: her direct gaze challenges the viewer by contradicting what the work otherwise appears to be portraying”.

CROOKED ORBIT

Diana Copperwhite, image from ‘Crooked Orbit’

Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, held an exhibition of paintings by Diana Bath House, Belfast, presented an exhiCopperwhite, 1 Jun – 1 Jul. These “large bition by Olga Dziubak titled ‘There is and at least initially discordant works” no accounting for tastes’, 12 – 14 May, pssquared.org were described by writer Rebecca following a two-week residency at the O’Dwyer in the exhibition essay: “It gallery. Dziubak works in painting, perTHE LANDSCAPE OF SAVED seems as though no colour has been left formance and multimedia art, explorMEMORIES aside, from lurid fuchsias and cobalt ing ideas around “camouflage, the aesFrom 3 Jun to 1 Jul, Mary Cooke’s exhi- blues, to neon yellow and swatches of thetics of pop culture and of the milibition ‘The Landscape of Saved minty green. Recurring throughout the tary, physical and emotional gesture, Memories’ ran at St. Peter’s, Cork City, canvases, there is also a gradient effect shame and transgression, and political and featured a series of new works on achieved by loading the brush with difinfluence on life and visual culture”. paper by the artist. ‘The Landscape of ferent shades of paint; and this has a She often uses visual archives and Saved Memories’ marks a formal depar- consequence of suggesting that these explores the potential of painting and ture from Cooke’s earlier works, with paintings have almost outgrown the picture-making, looking at the borders drawings executed in ink. “Her brush- tools of their creation, those tools then between the two art mediums. strokes initially seem haphazard: auto- being forced to convey, through colour, matic, meandering, free flowing and as much as they possibly can”. drifting rather than structured”, the kevinkavanagh.ie PORT WALKS PODCAST press release noted. “However, a certain order has been imposed on this seeming NEW PAINTINGS chaos. [Cooke] makes reference to biology, to cell structures, likening her lines to DNA strands, and the chemical workings of the brain, and its capacity for memory storage”.

Olga Dziubak, ‘There is no accounting for tastes’

marycooke.org

AMHRÁN NA FARRAIGE Sheelagh Broderick, ‘Port Walks’

Sheelagh Broderick’s ‘Port Walks’ is a site-specific public artwork and online audio project. Walkers on the Great South Wall and around Dublin Bay are invited to download a series of podcasts, walk and listen via iTunes, Stitcher or Soundcloud. The 4km walk, from the Great South Wall at the entrance to Dublin Port, probes into global shipping practices. The text was written and narrated by Sheelagh Broderick, with sound by Dan Guiney and music from Chumbawumba, Linda Buckley, Mairéad Hickey, Georgy Kovalev and Ella van Poucke. The first podcast

John Shinnors, Shy Fox, Sixty Six Sheep, 2016

Esther O’Kelly, image from ‘Amhrán Na Farraige’

The Pigyard, Wexford, holds an exhibition of paintings by Esther O’Kelly, 30 Jun – 13 Jul. Kelly’s works is inspired by sea life and her own long family tradition of fishing. O’Kelly seeks to capture memories and evoke a strong sense of

A series of new works by John Shinnors were exhibited at Taylor Galleries, Dublin, 2 – 24 Jun. “Featuring his usual idiosyncratic three-tone colour scheme,” the press release noted, “this suite of 14 paintings in oil includes many of the familiar, semi-abstract motifs that have been appearing in Shinnors’ work since the early 1980s – badgers, scarecrows, cattle, lighthouses, kites, skunks – alongside experimentations with perspective and depth”. taylorgalleries.ie

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet COLUMN

Áine Phillips

July – August 2017

7 ROUNDUP

BELFAST PHOTO FESTIVAL The Belfast Photo Festival 2017 ran from Playing Hard to Get 1 to 30 Jun. Launched in 2011, this major photographic event celebrated a diverse DROPPING out of the professionalised art world comes at a price, and that price can range of national and international consometimes be even greater fame and fortune. This paradox might seem bizarre to temporary photography across 30 musethose observing the contemporary art scene from the fringes, but for insiders it is ums, galleries and public venues. The more comprehensible. The art market abhors a vacuum and into the empty space festival comprised exhibitions, talks, left by an artist who voluntarily withdraws rushes scrutiny, allure and value. In his symposiums, workshops, screenings, 2016 book Tell Them I Said No (Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2016), Martin Herbert masterclasses, portfolio reviews and explores the conundrum of artistic withdrawal, offering lucid insights into the tours. lives of 10 notable ‘drop-outs’. Most of the artists profiled are either from or living belfastphotofestival.com in the US (with the exception of German artist Charlotte Posenenske) and all attained some measure of notoriety and financial success before retreating from THE HONEYMOON SUITE the art world’s urban centres.

The opportunities offered by withdrawal from society are quite different for visual artists in Ireland, where there are fewer opportunities for commercial success due to a less developed art market. In Ireland, fame itself does not necessarily correlate to fortune, as financial rewards and wide recognition of visual art can be erratic. Here it is quite common for artists to relocate to regions outside major cities, with the aim of maintaining creative practices away from the stress and financial pressures of urban living. This reflects a somewhat utopian impulse to pursue alternative ways of life that are more conducive to artistic practice. I tested this approach myself in the early 1990s, moving to remote east Clare, but the details of this 20-year trial in failure and success go beyond the scope of this column!

Utopian visions are notoriously impracticable but some individuals do sucJuno Calypso, image from ‘The Honeymoon Suite’ ceed in sustaining life and art in isolation from the mainstream. The backwaters can usefully irrigate the ground of an artistic vocation. Maintaining one’s distance From 1 Jun to 22 Jul, Juno Calypso’s away from the centre can even generate an air of mystery, which might be heartenexhibition ‘Honeymoon Suite’ runs at ing in the absence of more material awards or attributes that rural living often Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast. Since precludes. It could be argued that many artists endure by developing the skills and 2011 Calypso has used a fictional alter business competencies needed to create and promote their own work while also ego named Joyce to “reenact the private building professional networks. Across my own discipline of performance art, I underlife of a woman consumed by the have found that this complex balancing act requires the ability to be objective in laboured construct of femininity”. ‘The the presentation and marketing of oneself as an art object, while also engaging Honeymoon Suite’ is a continuation of subjectively with public audiences. the ‘Joyce’ series. In the Spring of 2015 Martin Herbert outlines interesting forms of artistic withdrawal, citing Calypso spent a week posing as a travel David Hammons as someone who aspires to artistic sovereignty. Hammons writer at a couples-only honeymoon became disillusioned with the demands of gallery-going audiences, who he perresort in Pennsylvania USA where she ceives as humourless and staid. Cady Noland also holds high ideals with regard to photographed herself inside various the reception of her work and now demonises anyone seeking to show or sell her hotel suites. “Dressed in lurid pastels output. These artists purposely withdraw to maintain their creative independence and a wig, Calypso’s one-woman tour of and self-determination, exercising control over the dissemination of their work. honeymoon hotels defies the typical This can be seen as a form of artistic production in its own right. As Herbert notes, perceptions of gender and identity Trish Donnelly uses evasion as her primary medium. through an edgy prism of wit, humour Herbert cites a desire for “blessed invisibility” as another reason that artists and courageous vulnerability”. might seek retreat. Looking for respite from stardom and fame, Lutz Bacher went goldenthreadgallery.co.uk into hiding, deliberately assuming a near-invisible, gender-ambiguous identity.

Herbert observes that in this enactment, Bacher also predicts our “collective vanTHREE PEOPLE IN A ROOM AT A TABLE ishing behind avatars”. In a similar vein, Stanley Brouwn and Albert York also / HOMELAND sought obscurity, possibly as a way to find space or freedom away from the fashions and shifting tastes of cultured society.

According to Herbert, psychological evasion – where the professional pressures of maintaining an artistic profile and reputation become intellectually and emotionally overwhelming – is not so much strategic as self-enforced. The art world operates under certain unspoken rules of engagement. It performs specific social codes and to break them is to court reputational ruin. If a protocol boundary has been breached – perhaps after a public skirmish or an ill-conceived exhibition – pursuing retreat can offer much-needed relief. Agnes Martin suffered from schizophrenia and moved to the desert in New Mexico just as her career started taking off. Similarly, Albert York had difficulty speaking to people and was so tortured by the feeling that his paintings were inadequate that he often avoided ‘Cuislí’ poster image exhibitions and sales.

A decision to leave the equivocal comforts of the local or global art scene is a Damer house Gallery, Roscrea, held a chosen strategy which – depending on how it is played – can prove beneficial or one-off performance by Cuislí (Áilbhe detrimental to the retreating artist. Herbert points out that performing selfHines, Bernadette Hopkins and Aodán detachment pushes against the current in an era of “celebrity worship”. A reclusive McCardle) on 10 Jun. ‘Three People in a artist is undoubtedly displaying admirable independence of spirit in a world of Room at a Table’ was part of a series ceaseless social and mass media surveillance. Nonetheless, artists can be afraid of titled ‘Structuring Structures’, which being forgotten – of becoming no-one. This can easily happen as popularity can be included installations as well as several fickle and fleeting in the reputational economy of the luxury-goods market. In performances. The performance took romantic relationships, as in the art world, playing hard to get often yields fruitful place at 10.30am on 10 Jun. Residue, results because it builds curiosity and desire. For enigmatic artists hoping to play video footage and documentation of hard to get, it takes some finesse, balance and the right timing.

Three People in a Room at a Table was Áine Phillips is a visual artist, writer, curator and academic living in Clare. shown at the gallery until 30 Jun.

Damer House Gallery also hosted the third edition of ‘Homeland’ (22 – 29 May) in collaboration with the Loop Festival Barcelona and Safia Art Contemporani, Barcelona. The annual event is dedicated exclusively to video art and film, and aims to bring together professionals from across the sector: filmmakers, writers, directors and producers. The 2017 event focused on films that document life and livelihoods in Ireland’s towns and villages. The selec- Saidhbhín Gibson, Upright Meadow tion includes professional works, fiction boxes containing various wildflowers and non-fiction, sound and silent mate- that have been collected by the artist. rial.

CATCH 2017 The Stella Maris Centre, Kilmore Quay, Wexford, held an exhibition of work by over 60 artists based in the county.

There were figurative, landscape, seascape, still life, abstract and video pieces as well as some conceptual works on show. The hall of this local community centre was temporarily converted into a gallery space for the exhibition.

THE BURREN ANNUAL

TRAVELLER PRIDE The Hunt Museum, Limerick, held two The 2017 Burren Annual runs at the events in collaboration with the Irish Burren College of Art, 22 Jun – 28 Jul Traveller Movement. The aim of the and comprises joint exhibitions by events, which were held during Chicago-based artists Susan Giles and Traveller Pride Week, was to create a Jeff Carter. The Burren Annual exhibi- greater understanding and acceptance tion brings Irish and international art- of Traveller culture in society and to ists to the Burren to engage local and demonstrate diversity within the comvisiting audiences. ‘Interiors’ is a solo munity. On 6 Jun, selected glass artexhibition of sculpture and video by works from the ‘HOME’ exhibition were Susan Giles, focusing on how individu- shown in the gallery. These were creatals perceive architecture through ed by 13 Limerick City Traveller women speech and gesture. The artist respond- who worked with glass artist Róisín de ed to Newtown Castle as well as historic Buitléar (with support from the Hunt Museum, the Traveller Health Advocacy Chicago libraries.

Jeff Carter’s ‘occupier_Castle’ is a Agency, Limerick City and County site-specific sound installation utilis- Council and the HSE). On 7 Jun, Sindy ing the unique physical and environ- Joyce, a PhD student with the mental conditions of Newtown Castle. Department of Sociology, UL, gave a “In this installation Carter is guided by lecture entitled ‘Traveller ethnicity: the idea of the castle as an architectural reclaiming our identify and culture ‘body’ where history of place and acous- post-recognition’. huntmuseum.com tical architecture are explored”. Carter uses sounds, edited from recordings of street protests, rallies and demonstra- TUMBLEWEED Susan Giles, image from ‘Interiors’

tions from around the world to reflect “both the history of the tower as a defensive structure and the current social and political climate”. burrencollege.ie

UPRIGHT MEADOW Upright Meadow, a site-specific work by Saidhbhín Gibson, was installed on has on College Street, Carlow. The installation is part of a town-wide project whereby seven artists, to date, have been commissioned by the Pure Thinking Community Group to respond to a wall space in the town.

Upright Meadow is located in the vicinity of St. Patrick’s College, Visual Arts Centre, Carlow Cathedral, a pocket of land that is abundant with bees, butterflies, birds, wild grasses and flowers.

Upright Meadow features 53 junction

Martin de Porres Wright at the launch of ‘Tumbleweed’

Painter and sculptor Martin de Porres Wright exhibted a series of works (15 Apr – 15 May) in the ballroom of the historic Building 98 in Marfa, Texas.

The exhibition followed a three-month residency. De Porres Wright works in acrylic and oil on Icopal bitumen felt, with “bold use of colour inspired by his natural surroundings”. His sculpture arises from found objects and collected materials of local landscapes”. internationalwomansfoundation.org

8 COLUMN

Conor McGrady Doing What We Are Told Makes Us Free

STEVEN Stapleton is founder and principal member of the avant-garde group Nurse With Wound and has produced a prolific output of sonic experimentation since the late 1970s. Followers of Nurse With Wound will be familiar with Stapleton’s graphic work, through the album art he produced (often under the pseudonym Babs Santini) for the group and other experimental bands including Coil, The Legendary Pink Dots and Current 93. Less is known, however, about Stapleton’s extensive body of work in collage, painting and assemblage. Many of his artworks were recently brought together in his first major solo exhibition, ‘Doing What We Are Told Makes Us Free’, at Burren College of Art (4 May – 9 June 2017). The exhibition provided rare insights into Stapleton’s multidimensional practice, which complements and expands on his background in music and sound art.

Nurse With Wound’s evolution builds on the legacy of early twentieth century avant-garde movements including Dadaism and Surrealism. Stapleton’s extensive use of collage simultaneously references the historical trajectory of modernist experimentation, while collapsing it into our hyper-mediated present.

An acute awareness of the canon of montage permeates his visual sensibility, which draws on the moving image works of soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov and the graphic works of pioneering artists like John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch. His imagery flows seamlessly between the surreal and macabre, the erotic and political. Stapleton eschews the digital age to embrace a low-tech approach to art-making. Manually cutting and assembling appropriated images from books and magazines, he carefully composes hallucinatory dreamscapes. While some compositions invoke a dystopian vision that is nightmarish and Kafkaesque, almost all are underpinned by an absurdist and irreverent sense of humour.

Deploying Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky’s principle of ‘ostranenie’ in both his visual and aural work, Stapleton actively makes the familiar strange.

Shklovsky developed the concept of ostranenie – also known as defamiliarisation or estrangement – as a method for enhancing perception of the familiar. As stated

by Shklovsky in his 1917 essay, Art as Technique, “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged”. Stapleton’s densely-populated images demand time, with waves of associations emerging through slow engagement. In reprocessing visual material from the historical arc of photography and print, these works reflect a vision of the world that is at once seductive and chaotic – a theatre of the absurd.

The exhibition title ‘Doing What We Are Told Makes Us Free’ referenced hegemonic power structures and mass-manipulation. Artworks such as The Great Ecstasy of the Basic Corrupt (2016), for example, portray industrial production as a totalitarian edifice. Rows of uniformed personnel are dwarfed by claustrophobic architecture, while masked figures in the foreground signify the prevailing sense of unease underpinning alliances between fascistic and corporate forces. Likewise, political commentary informs Thank God for American Foreign Policy (2016). Here, a dense tangle of children’s bodies spills across a ruptured landscape. The arms of a central figure are raised, as if appealing to some higher power, yet his body resembles a twisted, anthropomorphic vegetable. Humour, here, is disquieting and the body is at once absurd and strangely vulnerable. Other works in the exhibition alluded to the contemporary phenomenon of the whistleblower and the documentary films of Adam Curtis – a prominent figure who continues to probe the mechanisms of social control. Through displacement and disruption, Stapleton separates these codes of control. In isolating and playfully reconstituting fragments from prescribed narratives, his images evade fixed meaning. They constitute a visionary antidote to the normalising drive of our image-saturated digital landscape.

Stapleton’s exhibition at Burren College of Art opened with a ‘Sleep Concert’, which saw the artist remix his audio work and perform as a ‘somnambulistic DJ’.

Rows of air mattresses filled the gallery, while reclining attendees drifted in and out of consciousness over the course of the evening. Film projections by former Nurse With Wound collaborators Freida Abtan, Graham Bowers and Paddy Jolley filled the space and provided hypnotic visual accompaniments. This was the latest in a series of similar concerts, but it was the first time that Stapleton’s audio and visual works were brought together in such an immersive setting. In ceaselessly experimenting with sound and image, Steven Stapleton dispenses with convention and defies categorisation. In this way, the boundary-pushing legacy of the avant-garde and subsequent countercultural movements remains prescient and enduring.

Conor McGrady is an artist, writer and Dean of Academic Affairs at Burren College of Art.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

News SARAH GLENNIE AT NCAD On 20 June, IMMA announced that Director Sarah Glennie will leave the organisation at the end of the year to take up a new position as Director of NCAD, (National College of Art and Design) in January 2018.

“Glennie has been director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art since 2012 and during her tenure has grown IMMA’s audiences to the most significant levels in the museum’s history, making IMMA the second most visited free attraction in Ireland in 2016. Under her directorship IMMA has shown the work of a wide range of leading Irish and international artists including Etel Adnan, Stan Douglas, Karla Black, Isabel Nolan, Vivienne Dick, Nan Goldin, Hito Steyerl, Helio Oiticia and Lucian Freud. Recent commissions of note include new works for IMMA by Duncan Campbell, Jaki Irvine and Emily Jacir as well as a number of new works commissioned as part of the two major group shows, What We Call Love and As Above, So Below.”

Commenting on her departure from IMMA, Glennie said: “I have been honoured to have led IMMA as Director since 2012 and I am extremely proud of the programme and institutional change that has been achieved by the team at IMMA over that period, despite the challenging times faced by Irish cultural organisations. While I am very sad to be leaving IMMA I am excited by the great opportunity to contribute further to the development of creativity in Ireland as the Director of such a significant institution as NCAD which is in a unique position to inspire and nurture creative talent in Ireland”. The recruitment process for a new director will commence in the coming weeks.

PER CENT FOR ART SCHEME CAP The Minister for Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Heather Humphreys TD, announced on Tuesday 23 May that she intends to review the cap on the Per Cent for Art Scheme. Minister Humphreys states: “The Per Cent for Arts Scheme is well known and embedded in all public infrastructure works. We are all familiar with the variety of unique public art works and sculptures on our roads which have been funded through the scheme. In addition, there are numerous artworks in our schools, hospitals and other public buildings which have been funded via the scheme. At present, capital construction projects can include a budget of 1% up to a maximum of €64,000 for an art project. The current cap was set by government in 1997 and given a period of 20 years has now elapsed, I believe it is an appropriate time to carry out a review of the cap.

In this regard, I have today asked my department to consider the matter and to report to me on possible options for reviewing the cap.”

July – August 2017

Humphreys TD, and thank the staff of both departments for the opportunity to discuss in detail how this new recognition of visual artists as professionals can work to the benefit of the many. Full details of the scheme can be found at visualartists.ie.

SUKI TEA AWARD Visual Artists Ireland, Suki Tea and Business NI Investment Programme are delighted to announce Mark McGreevy as the winner of this years Suki Tea Art Prize. McGreevy will undertake a two month, fully-funded artist residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, including flights, accommodation, studio space, a monthly stipend and superb networking opportunities. The prize is worth over £4,000 and aims to provide artists with an opportunity to respond to a new environment and develop new work. Courtesy of Suki Tea, and facilitated by the Arts and Business NI Investment Programme, Visual Artists Ireland initiated the prize in 2015. The prize is open to all professional artists resident in Northern Ireland and all Visual Artists Ireland members in the Republic of Ireland working in all visual art forms at all career stages.

Mark McGreevy studied at the University of Ulster, Belfast. To date he has exhibited in numerous exhibitions both in Ireland and internationally, VAI GET TOGETHER We are delighted to announce that this notably: ‘Between two Worlds’, F.E. year’s Get Together – our national day of McWilliams, 2013; ‘The Fold- A Painting coming together with talks, clinics, Show’, VISUAL, Carlow, 2011; The Third Gallery, Belfast, 2010; presentations, information sharing and Space networking – will take place on Friday, ‘Resolutions’, Katzen Arts Centre, 15 September 2017 at IMMA. The day Washington DC, 2007; ‘There Not will feature: Speed Curating, Portfolio There’, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Reviews, One on One Clinics, Help 2008; and ‘A Gap in the Bright’, the Desks, Artists Speak and the Visual Millennium Court Arts Centre, Artists’ Café. Full details of the event to Portadown, 2008. He has received Bursary Awards from The Arts Council be announced soon. of Ireland in 2012 and 2009, was shortlisted for the AIB Award, 2004, and the TALBOT STUDIOS SOCIAL WELFARE RECOGNITION BOC emerging artist award, UK, 2004.

Talbot Studios, Dublin, are delighted to Visual Artists Ireland have welcomed announce that Emma McKeagney is the the new pilot initiative which will recipient of the Most Promising acknowledge the professional status of VAN ONLINE ARCHIVE Graduate Award 2017. McKeagney visual artists and writers applying for Visual Artists Ireland have developed a recently graduated from IADT. As the Jobseeker’s Allowance. The pilot is new online archive for past editions of winner of the award she will receive a being developed in partnership The Visual Artists’ News Sheet is now studio for a year at Talbot Studios and between the Department of Social available on issuu.com (https://issuu. join the 11 other members at Talbot Protection and the Department of Arts, com/visualartistsireland). The Visual Studios. McKeagney works closely with Heritage Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Artists’ News Sheet is an important material processes to create bodies of Affairs, as part of a key commitment to record of the visual arts in Ireland. As work which incorporate the idea that a artists under the Creative Ireland pro- well as news and events, the Visual process is made up of not only the artist gramme. Visual Artists Ireland and the Artists’ News Sheet offers comment and but the material they use and the Irish Writers Centre have assisted in opinion from key experts in topical impending idea of exhibiting. Her con- providing expert knowledge for the areas. The archive represents part of cerns are that of respecting all matter, scheme and have been invited to facili- VAI’s preparation for our 40th anniverand to utilise materials that can return tate the one-year pilot scheme. Both sary in 2020. Further work is taking to the churning expanse of earthly mat- organisations are approved to certify place around VAI’s physical archive ter without causing substantial harm. the professional status of visual artists which contains back numbers of the The work in the last few months leading and writers through their respective News Sheet as well as The Sculptors’ up to her grad show looked at how she professional membership schemes.

Society of Ireland Newsletter. The could harness locally-sourced clay and We welcome this announcement archive further augments visualartistallow the refining process to become by the Taoiseach (then Minister for sireland.com which contains extracts part of the final artworks.

Social Protection), Leo Varadkar TD, the from current editions of the Visual Minister for Arts, Heritage, Regional, Artists’ News Sheet.

Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Heather

VAI News

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

9

Dún Laoghaire Rathdown: Resources/Activities Continuity of Place

ArtNet DLR

Patricia McKenna …and the world goes on, 2017; image courtesy of the artist

I am a visual artist living and working in Dún Laoghaire, where I built a detached studio in my garden. This was particularly useful when my children were small, as I could keep an eye on them whilst grabbing the chance to work in the studio as often as possible. Occasionally I would sub-let a short-term studio in Dublin city centre. I generally like being solitary, but working in an area that is home to many artists and writers with an active and supportive arts office has been a great help. There is a strong artistic tradition and atmosphere in Dún Laoghaire, so being arty doesn’t feel out of place.

Dún Laoghaire is on the sea and is only a short drive from the Dublin Mountains. Both of these locations often feed into my work, providing ideas and materials as well as a place to unwind. Having continuity of place, both rural and urban, has been important for my work. Over the years, I have built up a good working relationship with the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council Arts Office, which has been like a kind of anchor. I apply for things – sometimes I get them, many times I don’t – but it’s about more than that: it’s about having support for the progression of my work and seeing how it might fit into the broader arts activities of the region. My work is mainly installation and tends to be site-specific, both for gallery and nongallery contexts. A large proportion of my previous work was developed in Cavan and the arts office there were also very supportive.

Working in public spaces, galleries or other sites is at the heart of my work. There is a lot of personal freedom and expression in the type of installations I do, but it also means that you are a one-man band, applying through a public system with all its glorious quirks. Producing and showing work is frequently a complex undertaking, with issues such as selection, finding a venue, health and safety, insurance and general costs. In my experience, opportunities to exhibit have become increasingly narrow. I find it hard to see how I could make installations like The Grey House (1993 – 1994) or Soil (1997) today.

The following three projects show the type of work I do, as well as the opportunities I have been given over the years, working in collaboration with Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council Arts Office. Seachange (2008) was a public art commission that formed part of ‘Place and Identity’, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council’s 2008

Per Cent for Art programme. I moulded 350 jellylike forms in coloured gelatin and placed them on the beach in Sandycove at dawn during low tide.

During the day, the pieces moved to and fro with the tide, slowly dissolving and being carried out to sea. It was a brave decision on the part of Dún Laoghaire Rathdown to commission an ephemeral piece that would ultimately dissolve or be swept away. I documented and filmed the process from dawn to dusk. The film was later projected both inside and outside a building in IADT and I have since shown the piece in the Lexicon. As with all public art, I needed insurance before I could accept the commission. The jellies were all natural but I had to have test certificates in place to give details of their ingredients and there were lots of health and safety meetings. I worked with a local active retirement group at the time, who provided support on the beach.

Shearline (2016) was exhibited as part of the group show ‘Lines of Negotiation: Mapping the Land’, curated by Claire Behan. Other artists in the show were Katherine Atkinson, Bernadette Beecher, Diana Caramaschi, Anne Craddon, Katherine Maguire, Ida Mitrani, Kiera O’Toole and Nicholas Ryan. I found working with the curator, discussing the artworks and being part of a wider group to be a positive and enriching experience.

The Lexicon gallery is a designated art space in the new library. It looks lovely but can be problematic when hanging work. Sometimes I wonder if art spaces are compromised by architectural design.

My sculptural installation …and the world goes on (2017) is currently showing as part of a collateral exhibition ‘Personal Structures – Open Borders’, at the 57th Venice Biennale. This work, which is installed in Venice’s Palazzo Mora, consists of sculptural forms, neon and two video pieces that I filmed in Iceland. I enjoy travelling, the buzz of seeing different landscapes and meeting new people. Because of these interests I joined Sculpture Network, a German-based European sculpture group, a number of years ago (sculpture-network. org). The Global Art Affairs Foundation, a Dutch not-for-profit organisation, selected work for Venice through this network and invited me to take part. It runs until the end of November and, for me, has been exciting, demanding, challenging, exhausting and invigorating all at once.

Patricia McKenna patriciamckenna.ie

THE Artists Network in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown (ArtNetDLR) is a voluntary group originally established in May 2012 by the Dún LaoghaireRathdown County Council Arts Office. In late 2013, the arts officers expressed a wish to see the network develop independently but with their continuing support. A voluntary interim committee was subsequently established and received a mandate from the members to work on their behalf in March 2014.

At our 2017 AGM, an election was held to elect a new committee to run the network over the coming year, which now comprises Alison Kay (Treasurer), Hugh Cummins, Paula O’Riordan and Darina Meagher. The main aim of ArtNetDLR is to be a facilitation group that will provide professional workshops, talks and other events to support the artistic community throughout the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown area. ArtNetDLR also aims to be a centre for communication for artists working, living or having studied in the county. The dissemination of relevant information, news and opportunities is generally done through social media platforms and email. A Coffee Dock networking meeting for artists of all disciplines was established in March 2015. It had been running on the second Tuesday of each month in Dún Laoghaire Art Gallery and there was momentum for a regular gathering where artists could discuss their processes and share creative insights. In January 2017, with a shift in use of the gallery space, the Coffee Dock found a new home in the Lexicon. Meetings are currently hosted on the second Monday of each month at 10am, and an evening session is also planned.

ArtNetDLR is a free organisation which encourages the members to get involved with the professional activities of the network. A major aim of the committee for 2015/16 was to expand the awareness of the network to artists of every discipline who live, work or have studied in the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown area. ArtNetDLR promotional material was created from a call-out for members to submit images of their artworks. Six ArtNetDLR artist images were chosen and six postcards were created, representing a variety of different art forms. These postcards were distributed in selected locations across the county and gave information about the network as well as contact details.

ArtNetDLR have established working relationships with other artist networks in the country and are members of Visual Artists Ireland (VAI), Centre for Creative Practices (CFCP) and Cultural Freelancers Ireland (CFI). Collaborative

events have been run in the past and workshops have been scheduled with these professional arts organisations. Since 2014, the committee has organised a regular programme of professional practice workshops, talks and events between September and May each year. Events to date have included: poetry, literature and writing workshops, talks from the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown writers-in-residence and professional development workshops addressing wide-ranging topics such as entrepreneurship, social media, setting up studios and funding applications. From September 2016 to May 2017, ArtNetDLR organised eight workshops and five professional practice talks.

The talks are free for members to attend while the workshops are also highly subsidised and vary from half-day to full-day events. On 20 May 2017, we co-hosted a fantastic ‘Show and Tell’ event in the Lexicon, the second annual event in conjunction with Visual Artists Ireland.

In September 2015, an inter-disciplinary collaborative event was initiated by a sub-committee of member artists. An open-call invited writers, poets, performance artists, dancers, musicians and visual artists to work with fellow artists from different disciplines and explore ideas that would result in collaborative artworks. The positive outcome was that 30 artists applied, forming 15 pairs who collaborated on artworks for the ‘Interaction Project’. These artworks were subsequently presented in a week-long group exhibition in Eblana House, on the site of the old Dún Laoghaire Art College. This creative venture was very wellreceived by local artists, arts officers, friends, family and members of the network. Plans are currently underway to set up a new sub-committee for the 2018 ‘Interaction Project’. The network is also hoping to organise an ambitious event for Culture Night this coming September with details of a call-out to be released soon.

ArtNetDLR is evolving steadily. With the continued support of the Dún LaoghaireRathdown County Council’s Arts Office, we aim to expand its membership to include artists of every discipline in the county, while offering a broader range of networking opportunities, professional development events and collaborations between different art forms. As the out-going chair of the ArtNetDLR, I have had the privilege and pleasure of getting to know so many remarkable artists over the past three years. I can’t recommend the network highly enough for any professional artists who are based in the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown area. If you would like to join the ArtNetDLR, please contact us at artnetdlr@gmail.com.

Amy Fox, ArtNet DLR

Miriam Sweeney presenting at May 20th 2017 VAI ‘Show and Tell’; photo by Amy Fox

10

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

REGIONAL PROFILE

Altered Objects I live in Dún Laoghaire and currently work from a studio in Rua Red Arts Centre in Tallaght.

Originally from Mayo, my introduction to art was in London where I completed a BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art. When I returned to Ireland, I settled in Dún Laoghaire and commenced an MA in Visual Arts Practices (now ARC: Art & Research Collaboration) at the Institute of Art and Design Technology (IADT), Dún Laoghaire. This two-year programme provided me with an introduction to my new city, whilst also allowing me to develop new friendships and professional connections in Dublin. As an artist, I make predominantly sculptural work. Mostly, I use expendable materials from modern mass-production systems. I use both found objects and industrial materials and often create artworks in response to specific sites. The colour I use in my work tends to be quite pronounced and is often innate to the materials.

In 2016, I responded to a Dún LaoghaireRathdown County Council open call and was subsequently supported to produce a new body of work for an exhibition at the newly-built Lexicon Library in Dún Laoghaire. This two-person show with artist Felicity Clear (which included curatorial support from Brenda McParland) was titled ‘Amongst Other Things’. We were encouraged to respond to the space and architecture of the new building and to consider the mix of visitors: those from the arts community as well as those who might drift in from the library and so on. As a resident of Dún Laoghaire, I was aware of some public disaffection with the realisation of the library.

Some locals considered it overly extravagant, at a time when soaring rates for retail premises in the area meant the high street was increasingly littered with vacant shops. Personally, I loved the ambition and optimism of the library, both as a municipal resource and a wedge of gigantic contemporary architecture, looming over the existing Victorian buildings. Both Felicity Clear and I reference architecture and building materials in our respective practices, and we therefore felt strong connections to the new library building.

The work I produced for this exhibition referenced hidden systems within cities. This brandnew gallery space presents classic examples of highly-refined surfaces typical of modern architecture. My work emphasises fluid and gestural manipulation of (mostly) systemised building materials, to draw attention to latent qualities in

Helen Hughes, Double your breathing capacity, 2017

dlr Lexicon mass-produced goods. In the context of this new building – with its huge volume of visitors – my use of repurposed materials highlighted the hidden aspects of space that we passively navigate every day.

Electing to work with familiar materials and commodities such as polystyrene, plastic, resins and balloons, I altered their appearance using the basic skills of removing, adding and recasting. As a result, these materials no longer had the homogenous appearance of industrial products.

Sometimes disguising, sometimes revealing, materials and objects begin to mimic each other and other things. I view this tactile approach as an expansion of the industrial process, deploying a vision that’s more human in scale and sensibility.

Adding my own layers of history, I present combinations of altered objects and relations that might connect with the viewer through common narratives of memory and subjectivity.

Titles are integral to my work and are often borrowed from a number of typical mass-media sources. For example, For the men in charge of change was an archaic tagline used by the multinational business magazine Fortune, while Grace, Space, Pace was taken from an advertising campaign for Jaguar cars. As a kind of inverse endorsement, I facetiously couple these curious messages from branding culture with my efforts to repurpose mass-manufactured materials.

As was the case with the Lexicon commission, I value the influence of a strong context when developing new work and the challenges presented by the scale and energy of a pre-existing site. I use these elements as parameters to lead my practice in unanticipated directions. The Dún Laoghaire work responded to a modern, pristine space, whereas the work I developed for TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2016, for example, was for a large concrete and glass retail unit in Galway city.

This space was 10 years old, but it had never been properly finished or used for its intended purpose.

At The Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon earlier this year, I used fragile, expendable materials to produce delicate, fetishistic cellophane and balloon sculptures, so that their glossy, reflective appearance might tease the classic style of the surroundings, their ephemerality at odds with the imposing, period architecture.

Helen Hughes helenhughes.info

Aideen Barry, Aerosol, 2016; single-channel performative film with sound

THE dlr Municipal Gallery is located in dlr LexIcon, Haigh Terrace, Dún Laoghaire, and opened in December 2014. It is managed by Dún LaoghaireRathdown County Council’s Arts Office and we work closely with external curators, artists, key partner organisations and arts education specialists. The gallery programme is funded by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council with support from the Arts Council.

Since the gallery opened, we have presented a broad range of exhibitions and welcomed thousands of visitors, averaging about 45,000 per annum. By virtue of being located in a busy public library, our audience base is diverse and we welcome ‘accidental visitors’ who would not regularly visit contemporary gallery spaces. With this in mind, mediation is carefully considered and integrated from the very earliest stages of planning each exhibition. This approach means that we are responsive to feedback from our audience. We also ensure that the language used within the gallery is not ‘artspeak’.

Each exhibition programme includes artworks in the gallery spaces (Gallery 1 is a large space while Gallery 2 is smaller with a wallmounted projector), interactive activities in our purpose-built Project Room and a learning programme which gives visitors of all ages opportunities to explore the artworks, themes and techniques that feature in the exhibition. The programme is different for each exhibition and may include workshops, tours, performances, talks, film screenings and special events.

On an annual basis we programme five exhibitions which include: one show selected via an open call process; a solo exhibition involving the commissioning of new work by an artist(s), selected through an advertised open competition; a touring or other group show; and an engaged exhibition where an artist, facilitator or curator works with a local community group to select an exhibition. For example, in 2015 artist and curator Claire Halpin and a group of older people from the local area worked with the OPW collection. Similarly, last year artist/curator Claire Behan, with assistance from a group of people connected to the Glencullen/Tibradden area, brought together nine contemporary artists whose artworks explore historical, contemporary and cultural readings of the landscape and of land use. Every two years we hold an open submission for artists connected to the county and work is selected by an invited art professional. Mark St. John Ellis, founder of Dublin’s Nag Gallery, chose works for the 2015 dlr Open and

this year it will be selected by journalist and critic Gemma Tipton under the theme ‘Arrival’.

This year’s open call featured ‘then again’ by Catherine Delaney and ‘Mausoleums of Precious Belongings’ by Fiona Hackett. Hackett’s work explored the spaces of self-storage facilities in a conceptual documentary photography project, while Delaney’s installation comprised an assemblage of unwanted clothes heaped in the corner of Gallery 2. Linking into the broad themes and ideas in the work of these two artists, the learning programme included storytelling, collage workshops for children and families and ‘Swap Saturday’, a special clothes-swapping event with the innovative fashion community Nu Ethical, who seek sustainable alternatives to the fast-fashion industry model.

The dlr LexIcon Visual Art Commission 2017 was awarded to Aideen Barry, who will present an exhibition in the gallery from 15 September to 4 November. Taking notes from the 1968 lecture Of Other Spaces, by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, Barry will respond to the building – which houses books that offer portals to other spheres – as a world between other worlds, playing with the idea of books as devices for activating the space. Barry will present new moving image works using intricate and intimate installations and viewing devices.

Currently showing in the gallery spaces until the end of July is ‘SurprEYES!’ – an exhibition of nearly 50 works from the Arts Council’s collection.

This exhibition has been specially curated by Martin Drury to appeal to children. This approach is underlined by presentational features, such as the playful juxtaposition of works and the height at which they are hung, and by an extensive programme of workshops and events. We linked this exhibition to our primary schools arts programme, delivering classes to explore similar themes and materials as the artworks in the show. The participating children and their teachers gained an insight into collections, curation and contemporary arts practice. They had a preview of the show during the install, accompanied by the curator.

We are currently planning more opportunities for artists to create work for the gallery, while maintaining and expanding our audience. So, whether you’re a professional artist or two-yearold that has never visited a gallery before, you will find something to grab your attention in our programme!

Ciara King, Máire Davey and Carolyn Brown, DLR Assistant Arts Officers.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

REGIONAL PROFILE

Architecture, Learning & Purpose

Helen Barry, Suspended City, 2016; image courtesy of Sean Breithaupt

I am a visual artist and arts educator living and working in Dublin since 2004. I work across various different mediums and artforms but I primarily focus on sculpture and installation. In terms of the conceptual motivations that underpin my work, I am very interested in perceptions of faith and belief.

My ongoing project, ‘Conversations with God’, raises discussions around life, death and our purpose on this planet. I am also drawn to the architecture and geometry of social and public buildings and how they affect and direct us. I often visit sacred and spiritual buildings to study their form and to reflect on the legacy embedded in their bricks and mortar, while also observing the congregations that pass through. However, I am most passionate about how we learn through art and creativity. Working for over 25 years as an arts educator has taught me that art equips us with the skills to deal with life. Art is not just what we make or do with our hands or bodies; it provides us with the freedom to think for ourselves. This ethos is central to my approach when working with people of all ages. These three strands drive my practice and very often feed into one another, either by design or occasionally by accident.

Parallel to working in my studio, I also engage in collaborative processes that are intrinsic to my practice. Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council (DLRCC) Arts Office and the Arts Council have supported my collaborative work through long-term residencies in different educational contexts, principally in primary schools and early years settings.

The collaborative process allows me to bring ideas from the studio into different environments where the children and I explore themes together. I use this process to take my ideas in different directions and to provide stimulus for the creation of new works, either onsite or back in the studio. Sometimes I initiate collaborations as a way to inform or extend my research. Often the interface of working with others becomes just as important as the artworks we create together. The conversations, negotiation and development of ideas, as well as the discovery of new perspectives and how that impacts on everyone involved, can sometimes be equally inspiring.

Some examples of previous projects include ‘On Site’ (2014) which was developed over a sevenmonth period with senior infants in Rathfarnham Educate Together National School to focus on building and deconstructing social and architectural

environments. We created different forms of cities and structures on a range of scales. The children worked in teams and became more proficient in writing, which had a profound impact on their confidence and we ended up using a lot of text within the artworks. The final piece, The Children’s Pavilion, was a cardboard construction inspired by the Corbusier Pavilion in Zürich. My studio practice absorbed some of the young children’s spontaneity and I redesigned a series I was about to undertake in concrete. Another artwork, The 99 Names of Allah, is a batik work created with the Amal Women’s Association who meet at the Dublin Mosque on the South Circular Road. The piece is currently on display in the Chester Beatty Library. I am also currently one of six artists involved with the Kids’ Own’s ‘Virtually There’ project, a three-year online residency with a school in Belfast.

Over the last 10 years, my preferred learning environment has been with early years children. I have been involved in the development of the early years arts sector since 1998 when I wrote and illustrated a book called You Can Play Too! based on a programme of the same name that I initiated while working as education officer at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork. In 2014, with the support of the Arts Council and Dublin City Council, I devised and curated ‘I See You, I Hear You’, an early years arts seminar which took place in the arts centre Axis: Ballymun. A documentary film was produced on the day and is available to view on my website.

DLRCC Arts Office are at the forefront of early years arts education and I am currently in receipt of their second early years arts commission, ‘Caterpilliar’. This year I am based in a creche in Dún Laoghaire for a six-month period and will present work for early years audiences in the DLRCC area in the autumn. In addition, I recently teamed up with musician Eamon Sweeney to develop a proposal for an International Early Years Arts Commission. We were subsequently awarded a commission by the four local authority areas to make a new artwork entitled Sculptunes – an interactive musical/sculptural installation aimed at early years children and their families. The piece I am currently building will soon be road-tested with its target audience.

Sculptunes is also being supported by the National Concert Hall, where I will be based in a studio over the coming months.

Helen Barry helenbarry.com

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Nan Goldin, Vivienne at her mother’s grave (detail), 1979, Killybegs, Ireland; archival pigment print mounted on Dibond, 76.2 x 114.3 cm; image courtesy of Nan Goldin

Vivienne Dick, Olwen Fouéré, production still from The Irreducible Difference of the Other, 2013; SD video, 27 mins, colour, sound; image courtesy of Vivienne Dick

University of the World PÁDRAIC E. MOORE INTERVIEWS VIVIENNE DICK ABOUT HER FRIENDSHIP WITH NAN GOLDIN AND THEIR CURRENT EXHIBITIONS AT IMMA.

July – August 2017

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

13

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Vivienne Dick, Augenblick, 2017; production still, HDV, 14 mins; image courtesy of Vivienne Dick

Pádraic E. Moore: Your exhibition ‘93% STARDUST’ runs concurrently with Nan Goldin’s ‘Sweet Blood Call’ at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Perhaps we can discuss the milieu yourself and Nan once shared and the parallels between your work?

Vivienne Dick: I met Nan just after she arrived in New York. We hung out together throughout my time in the city and shared several interests, particularly music. There are parallels in our early work – we were always aware of that, even at the time. We were tuned into each other’s aesthetic from the beginning. There’s a documentary feel to our early work and several of the individuals that one might see in my films also frequently feature in Nan’s images. After the New York period, we met sporadically in different places and Nan travelled to Ireland, visiting Galway, Donegal and Tory Island. The IMMA show features images taken during those trips she made to the west of Ireland.

PM: In a previous interview, you mentioned that your earlier works (such as ‘Guerillere Talks’) emerged via an organic undirected process. Perhaps this approach is another aspect of your work that connects it with Goldin’s?

VD: My early works were directed, but not in the usual way. I’m quite loose in my method: I try and approach it in a collaborative way and invite those who I am working with to bring or suggest something. I have never worked with a script, but that’s not to say I wouldn’t rigorously plan the process or have clear ideas that I wanted to explore. I am interested in the different ways people present themselves to the camera and how this can shift within the shot: a vulnerability exposed; an internal focus; a kind of inscrutability or a performing of what someone wants to project.

Vivienne Dick, Lydia Lunch, production still from Guerillere Talks, 1977; Super 8, 28 mins; courtesy of Vivienne Dick

with films, free to express myself; a place where there was support from all sorts of people. New York was like a university of the world for me. I met so many interesting people and was exposed to many new ideas, and music and art. It was an eye-opener to say the least. I really do not think I would have begun making films had I remained in London or Dublin.

Years later in London, I became interested in psychoanalysis and the history of ideas and this began shaping my work. I had more of a theoretical understanding of what I had been doing. The sense of what it means to be a woman in a world shaped from a male perspective was always an important preoccupation for me. This, of course, is the same for anyone who is not heterosexual or white. Having taught at third level in Ireland for 14 years, it is clear that secondary education would benefit from gender studies being part of the curriculum – why this is not so poses interesting questions about where we are right now in our awareness of ourselves.

PM: Moving back to Ireland in 1982 heralded a shift in your work.

Certain aspects of the country found their way into your films.

Moreover, an explicitly political tone enters your films at this point.

VD: I met people in New York who were from Ireland and who had been directly involved in The Troubles. When I returned to Ireland, I encountered a whole raft of movements. It was fascinating how many different groups there were, at least 15 factions, and each were in competition. In Dublin, I hung out with a bunch of anarchists and this informed Visibility: Moderate (1981), which was made just before moving back.

PM: Perhaps we can discuss how working with a team of people changes the making process?

VD: I still approach things the same way. With Red Moon Rising (2015), I travelled around the country in an attempt to shoot at dawn or dusk.

When I make films, I am looking for something that I may or may not find. I shot a lot of material and sometimes I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for, but I found incredibly special moments. I always try to leave enough space and time to ensure that something unexpected can enter – something unanticipated needs to enter. When working on a larger-scale project, it’s ideal to be able to work with a crew who understand your working methods – who respect the process. If you can have a crew that get involved with what you are doing, it can be wonderful. At some point in the making of the last two films, that really did happen. We had sound technicians working with sound artists and really getting into the process, going into the forest to make experiments with sound and so on.

PM: With reference to the notion that 93% of the mass of the human body is ‘stardust’, I’m guessing that the title also refers to music associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s?

Perhaps you could give some insights into what the title of the IMMA show reveals about your more recent work?

VD: The title of the show ‘93% STARDUST’ refers to what we are actually made of apparently! It also refers to the 1960s and 70s, and the awe about ourselves in relation to the universe expressed in songs by Joni Mitchell and also Bowie. During the enlightenment, man was considered to be at the centre of the universe dominating everything. We are now entering a new age – a digital age. I think just as we are becoming colonised by the internet, we are simultaneously becoming more PM: Your work in the early 1980s also demonstrates an interest in aware of our mental fragility: things like PTSD are now accepted as PM: When you began making work, were you already aware of the Irish landscape: it seems to possess a pagan and arcane power. real. We are slowly realising that we do not dominate the earth, but the experimental films that had been made in America in the late VD: I studied archaeology and also prehistory, but later I was seeing it that we are dependent upon it. We are all part of the earth, all of us are through a feminist lens. God was, and could only be, male in the world embodied, fragile and vulnerable, and that’s okay.

1950s and early ‘60s?

VD: Even before I started making films, I spent a great deal of time at I grew up in. On reading Luce Irigaray, I realised how damaging this My most recent film, Augenblick (2017), which has just received Anthology Film Archives in New York, looking at all the American was for the female half of the population. It is not necessarily about its Irish premiere at IMMA, deals with the idea that we are moving avant garde work. That really inspired me to make films. It was the believing or not believing in god. God is an ideal; something you reach into a new age, which is an internet-led digital age. I practice Iyengar first time I’d ever seen what one could describe as ‘homemade’ films. towards; the creative impulse – while the female is always ‘othered’ in yoga and that helps me get connected to my body on lots of levels.

I’m talking about the work of individuals such as Ken Jacobs, Maya the monotheistic traditions. So, the idea that there was another time That’s an idea that I wanted to emphasise with ‘93% STARDUST’ – Deren and Jack Smith (whom I knew and worked with), as well as period in which the supreme being or creator was female held a great that we as organisms are changing all the time. The whole body fascination for me. I became interested in where the traces of belief in changes all the time; every aspect of us is changing all the time; every Bruce Baillie, Storm de Hirsch and Marie Menken. goddess culture remained in Ireland: on the land in the names of the part of us. The skin, the bone, everything. We are all interconnected.

PM: Did the experiences of growing up in what was ultimately a mountains, for example. There are numerous mountains in This interview was conducted via Skype in May 2017. Vivienne repressive and restrictive patriarchal Ireland inform the sexual Connemara which have been named locally as the Devil’s Mother.

Dick’s ‘93% STARDUST’ and Nan Goldin’s ‘Sweet Blood Call’ run Lough Derg was an ancient pagan site renowned all over the world – politics of your early work? until 15 October 2017 at IMMA. VD: I felt ill at ease in the Ireland of the late 1960s. Women were not like Glastonbury. You can always tell, when you read about the diffitaken seriously in mixed company in bars etc. – one was on the outside culty Saint Patrick had in banishing the serpents there, that a powerful Vivienne Dick is a feminist experimental and documentary filmlooking in. That’s just how it was then. I lived in France and Germany female entity once resided in that location. Even Croagh Patrick was a maker whose early films helped define New York’s No Wave and travelled through India – all experiences that really opened my fertility mountain that women once climbed during the festival of scene of the late 1970s. Pádraic E. Moore is a writer, curator and art eyes. In France, I was exposed to a completely different countercul- Lughnasadh as a kind of fertility rite, so yes, this was certainly some- historian currently based in Brussels and Dublin. padraicmoore.com tural scene. It was also there that I was exposed to contemporary art. I thing that intrigued me about the Irish landscape. There’s a threewas lucky to end up in New York, which turned out to be the best place screen work I made called Excluded by the Nature of things (2002) about to be for me at the time. New York was a place where I was free to speak the traces of the goddess within Ireland.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

BIENNALE

Raul Zurita, The Sea of Pain; installation with sea water and hanging text scrolls

Video projection (detail) of exiled poet Hasan Mujtaba (Sindh – Punjab) reciting in Urdu his poem For Allen Ginsberg

The People’s Biennale

MICHELLE BOYLE OFFERS INSIGHTS INTO THE KOCHI-MUZIRIS BIENNALE THAT TOOK PLACE FROM DECEMBER 2016 TO MARCH 2017 IN KERALA, INDIA. AS a natural deep-water port, Fort Kochi, in the south-western state of Kerala, has been a point of arrival and departure since Roman times for vessels on the trade route between Asia and Europe. A medieval traveller to its shores once noted that, “if China is where you make your money, then Kochi is surely the place to spend it”. Layers of colonial and religious histories are visible in Kochi’s architectural fabric, which includes Dutch palaces, Portuguese forts, Hindu temples, Christian churches, mosques, synagogues and spice trading houses. Where Fort Kochi and the ancient port of Muziris hold the living relics of the past, the Ernakulam district across the harbour reflects modern Kochi as an expanding cosmopolitan centre of commerce. Ernakulam’s vast container terminal is at the forefront of the developing Indian economy.

It is therefore no coincidence that Kochi and Ernakulum – with their multi-layered histories and outward-looking residents – should be the settings for one of Asia’s biggest art events. The 2016 KochiMuziris Biennale straddled four months from December 2016 to March 2017 under the curatorial direction of Mumbai-based artist Sudarshan Shetty. While Kochi was never the centre of contemporary Indian art, it has proven, through three consecutive biennales, to be capable of reaching beyond itself and engaging in international artworld dialogues. As Shetty pointed out, it is for these reasons that the Kochi-Muziris Biennale would not work anywhere else in India.

gramme of talks, seminars, collateral projects and a Students’ Biennale (which showcased 55 artists) took place in additional spaces. The venues were well mapped and largely accessible on foot, but rickshaws were busy in the soaring midday temperatures, as they carried visitors between venues.

FORMING IN THE PUPIL OF AN EYE The role of curator was new to Shetty, who decided to present himself more as facilitator and host. He started conversations with selected practitioners including writers, poets, architects, dancers, musicians and thinkers – people often on the peripheries of the conventional biennale space. This curatorial approach reflected and informed Shetty’s chosen title: ‘Forming in the Pupil of an Eye’. When I asked Shetty about this line of inquiry, he explained that it “attempts to gather multiple positions”. He also stated that “selecting from and bringing together a multiplicity of disparate sources, the artists gather and layer all the complexity of the world into their representations of it. ‘Forming in the Pupil of an Eye’ is an assembly and layering of multiple realities”. With such a broad theme, the biennale could have become disjointed, but, the event as a whole managed to demonstrate tangible threads of connection between multiple complex works. This became increasingly apparent as I revisited exhibitions over a twoweek period and spent time with the many intelligent, thoughtful and well-crafted artworks.

THE PEOPLE’S BIENNALE The striking installation The Sea of Pain, by the Chilean poet Raul Though introduced as the curator of the third biennale, Shetty describes himself primarily as an artist and then as a curator. As an Zurita, was dedicated to Syrian refugees and based on the story of internationally-recognised artist, he exhibited at the first Kochi- Galip Kurdi – a five-year-old Kurdish migrant who drowned in the Muziris Biennale in 2012 and remembers with fondness the enthusi- Mediterranean Sea along with his mother and younger brother Alan. asm and often-chaotic nature of the fledgling biennale experiment – The viewer was invited to walk through a vast high-pitched wareIndia’s first international biennale of contemporary art. Shetty was house which had been filled shin-deep with sea water. The Arabian unanimously elected as curator of the 2016 biennale by a 10-member Sea lies just beyond the venue’s walls and the working sounds of sea artistic steering committee, which included notable artists such as horns and cargo ships infiltrated the dead silence of Zurita’s installation, where sails hung like scrolls above the lifeless water.

Atul Dodiya and Bharti Kher.

Another deeply affecting work was Défilé (2000 – 2007) by AES +F The founding principle of the artist-led biennale was that it would be a ‘people’s biennale’, open and accessible to all. A record – a collective of four Russian artists – which comprised seven life-sized 600,000 people visited the 2016 biennale with 20,000 alone visiting on photographs of unclaimed corpses who were photographed on light the first free Monday. I was struck by the diversity within the attend- boxes and dressed flamboyantly in high-end fashion. These photoing audiences and also by conversations with local people, including a graphs were both macabre and beautiful, with the subjects appearing taxi driver who commented: “I go to each biennale and each time I see to float in lifeless solitude. In a separate location, AES+F’s three-chanthings that open my mind a bit more.” At the 2016 biennale there was nel video installation Inverso Mundus (2015) explored alternate realia lot to see. Over 97 invited artists from 35 countries exhibited across ties and strange worlds.

12 main venues in Fort Kochi and Ernakulam, while an ancillary pro-

SITE-SPECIFIC DIALOGUES: RESPONDING TO SPACE Another monumental project was Slovenian artist Aleš Šteger’s The Pyramid of Exiled Poets, a mud and gold pyramid based on the Great Pyramid of Giza. It was a commentary on those poets who have disappeared or were exiled from their countries because of their work. In the dark inner-sanctum of the tomb, words of poetry emanated from the mud walls, offering a powerful and immersive meditation on the fragility of life and the endurance of art. In a similar vein, but on a more intimate scale, Bharat Sikka’s photographic series ‘Where the flowers still grow’ presented documentation of small personal objects belonging to people who live in warn-torn Kashmir. A box of bullets, portraits and torn photographs were displayed in dark rooms. Sounds from Bazar Road outside were audible, reinforcing Sikka’s premise that even amidst war and terror, everyday life continues. Such dialogue between artworks and spaces was commonplace across the biennale and, according to Shetty, there was in-depth collaboration with the artists in editing and installing their work.

Several artists worked in residence and developed public engagement programmes as part of their participation. For example, Praneet Soi set up a temporary workspace for the duration of the biennale where visitors could observe the artist’s working process as he engaged with local people working in the coir industry. Coir is a natural material extracted from coconut husks that was traditionally used to make floor mats but is now increasingly used in road construction. Kerala produces 85 % of India’s coir, so it is pivotal to livelihoods and communities in the region. In addition, India accounts for two thirds of the global coir industry, so it is big business and something that Soi wanted to explore and research. He collaborated with coir workers to develop figurative sculptures based on his sketches from media images. Titled Cut-out archive, the larger-than-life sculptures of tumbling figures in motion were placed in the internal courtyard garden of Pepper House in Fort Kochi. Soi’s workstation was aptly situated in the nearby Aspinwall House, where English trader John H. Aspinwall founded the original coir export industry in the late nineteenth century. Irish audiences will have the opportunity to see the work of Praneet Soi when he exhibits in CCA Derry-Londonderry in October.

Other notable artists who might be less familiar to Irish audiences include New Delhi-based theatre-maker Anamika Haksar, whose socially-engaged work Composition on Water offered a commentary on topical social injustices of the sub-continent. Pakistani artist Salman Toor worked in collaboration with Punjabi poet Hassan Mujtaba to develop The Revelation Project, which addressed their experiences as immigrants living in New York. Sunil Padwal’s Room for Lies presented a series of over 600 photographs and over-drawings documenting the artist’s native Mumbai, while Desmond Lazaro’s Family Portraits engaged with his heritage through painting, video and embroidery. Abir Karmakar’s series of photorealistic oil paintings, Home, depicted the domestic interior of a typical middle-class Indian household that was replicated to scale as an immersive installation in Kashi Art Gallery. This created a displaced situation that reflected Karmakar’s questioning of ‘home’ as a place between reality and nostalgic memory. Remen Chopra’s floor-based sculptural installation, I see a mountain from my window/standing like an ancient sage (2016), took its title from a poem written by the artist’s grandmother and explored issues of lineage and feminism. Her large-scale, imaginary, topographic landscape carved from recycled wood fibre was inspired by the rich symbolism of a Persian carpet, passed down through her family from mother to daughter.

In the calendar of global biennales, the Kochi Muziris Biennale is a unique event. The success of Shetty’s vision for a ‘people’s biennale’ was highly evident, not just in the diversity of the attending audience, but in the huge team of volunteers who prepare, build, invigilate and dismantle the exhibitions. However, what makes the event so special for me, is the somewhat haphazard nature of Kochi itself, and how it accommodates the intimate and monumental works of the biennale in such seamless ways.

The Indian contemporary artist and art historian Anita Dube has been named as curator of the fourth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which opens in December 2018.

Michelle Boyle is a visual artist of Irish/Indian parentage. She will have solo exhibitions in The Cow Shed Theatre, Farmleigh House, Dublin, in late September 2017 and Gallery OED, Fort Kochi, in March 2018. michelleboyle-artist.com kochimuzirisbiennale.org

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

15

ARTISTS’ PUBLISHING

Glenade Water Remedies RUTH LE GEAR DISCUSSES HER PROJECT AND PUBLICATION ‘WATER SENSES’.

Ruth Le Gear, ‘Water Senses’, installation view, Leitrim Sculpture Centre

A recent Arts and Disability Connect Scheme award afforded me the time and space to create a comprehensive body of work and a publication. ‘Water Senses’ emerged out of the research, collaboration and fieldwork I undertook to explore water and its memories. Even though I didn’t realise it at the time, this work began in 2013 when I commenced a six-week residency at Leitrim Sculpture Centre (LSC). This followed a residency in 2012 onboard a tall ship in the Arctic waters of Svalbard, where I researched micro and macro forces in the retreating ice flows. After encountering Leitrim’s Glenade Lough – one of Ireland’s oldest glacial lakes – I decided to stay in the north west of the country.

Glenade Lough or Ghleann Éada – meaning ‘lake of the glen of jealousy’ – holds the story of the dobhar-chú, a creature of Irish folklore known as the ‘water hound’. This tale of heartache and loss is carried through the valley and takes many different forms. The most common version tells of a young woman called Grace who was killed by the ‘monster’ in 1722, as she was washing clothes in the lake. When her husband found her lifeless body, he avenged her death by slaying the monster. The beast’s companion awoke from the lake and chased the man and his brother many miles to Cashelgarron, below Benbulben mountain in County Sligo. There he managed to slay the beast. The nearby ancient Conwal Cemetery contains Grace’s gravestone, which displays a carving of the dobhar-chú. Ireland has many myths and legends, but very few are evidenced through carvings on a person’s gravestone. A second tombstone connected to the tale was once situated at the south end of Glenade Lough, but has since been lost. This particular folk memory is so deeply embedded in the landscape, that when I swim in the lake, people tell me to get out in case the dobhar-chú gets me. Variations on this story include women being killed by serpent creatures or jealous wives killing their husbands with poisonous reptiles.

My intention with this new body of work was to convey a narrative from the water’s perspective. I wanted to find ways to distill this ephemeral environment and decided to create remedies based on homeopathic principles with water taken from the lough. They channel the metaphysical forces that interact with it and the stories, memories, myths and folk tales that are layered upon it. My process involves serial dilutions with water and each individual water sample is analysed to see what is held within. These samples can be viewed as tiny, poetic time machines which form the basis of moving image and photographic works, as well as water remedies for the community.

Working with the community on this project has been transformative for me and has given me a newfound confidence within my practice. I’ve also developed a number of successful collaborations and gained access to specialist ecological knowledge. For example, during the field investigations, I joined Cillian Roden, an experienced naturalist and ecologist, who was carrying out a targeted aquatic survey of Glenade Lough. Accompanied by Jim Ryan, Cillian was searching for

Ruth Le Gear, Water Senses publication

Senses’ ran in LSC from 10 to 25 March. On entering the main gallery space, the viewer encountered a blue line of books across the back wall, at water level. A tall table in the centre of the space displayed the various components of the publication including the seven remedies and their corresponding images. Two screens disseminated my video works, while a clear glass orb containing water was suspended within the space using copper wire. On the wall opposite the film works, a large print comprised 70 images documenting my interactions with the waters over the years. As part of my exhibition, I held water remedy sessions in the gallery. I was reminded of my time as a student at GMIT when I was so ill that I needed a bed in my studio in order to work. I transported the very same bed to the gallery setting in order to treat people with water remedies.

GLENADE WATER & MOSS REMEDY This remedy is especially helpful for those who work with energy. It helps to clear old unwanted patterns quickly and to integrate new patterns that are emerging. The remedy allows your own innate healing Ruth Le Gear, ‘Water Senses’, installation view, Leitrim Sculpture Centre powers to do their work with ease and it holds space for you. When we the Najas Flexilis, a native aquatic plant that is entwined with Glenade hide things from others (tears, pain, grief etc.), they can become hidLough’s mythology, but has not been seen there since 1970. A record- den to ourselves. This remedy helps people listen to their intuition ing of the men’s conversations during this expedition formed the basis and stops them becoming stuck in repeated thinking. The moss brings of a soundtrack which accompanies my new video work. I also had the a new clarity and deep clear mental energy that is calm yet energising. pleasure of working with digital archaeologist Gary Dempsey. It works deeply on the sinuses and spine and helps to clear viruses. It Sometimes the lines between archaeology and folklore become is a powerful awakener and brings one on an inner journey to be in the blurred, as archaeologists excavate layers of rich topography, ancient now. legends, place-name lore, hagiography and local traditions pertaining to specific regions. It could be argued that where the folklorist digs GLENADE EQUINOXES REMEDY where the archaeologist does not.

Equinoxes occur twice a year, when the sun crosses the celestial equaBy opting for a publication as one of my main outcomes, I wanted tor in its seasonal migration. The Vernal Equinox happens in late to extend the work beyond the gallery context. I was thrilled to work March and the Autumnal Equinox is in late September. In addition to with Padraig Cunningham from Pure Designs on the design and layout the (approximately) equal hours of daylight and darkness, the equiof the publication. Cunningham created a vehicle for my ideas and the noxes are times when the sun’s apparent motion undergoes the most different elements we had discussed during our initial meeting. I had rapid change. It is the time of balance between day and night, before a fairly clear idea of what I wanted and just needed to identify an night takes over and brings the winter, a time of darkness and death, appropriate form and tone. We looked into different materials that and the rebirth of spring into the light. This remedy helps with the might suit the ethos of the project. He really helped to assert the idea inner-transformation and shift of darkness into light. It can help to lift of something precious that would reflect the level of the care and the grief for lost places of the past, a place to which you cannot return; research I had invested in the project. I wanted various aspects of the a place that perhaps never was. project to be contained within a presentation box. A unique water remedy sits snugly underneath a booklet and several postcards – a Ruth Le Gear is an artist who currently lives in County Leitrim formation that emulates the imprinted, layered stories I have encoun- and has a studio in The Model, Sligo. ‘Water Senses’ is supported tered on my journeys through this valley and its water. With this by the Arts Council’s Arts and Disability Connect Scheme manpublication, I want to take the reader on a journey to become part of aged by Arts and Disability Ireland. It is kindly supported by the water, to listen to the whispers of stories yet untold from this place. Leitrim Sculpture Centre and The Model, Sligo. ‘Water Senses’ I have worked diligently to assemble a range of poetic, critical can be purchased from ruthlegear.com and The Model, Sligo. and theoretical understandings as well as inventive artistic approaches linked to my broader water investigations. My exhibition ‘Water

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

BIENNALE

An Irish Presence ANNE MULLEE REPORTS ON THE CONTRIBUTION OF IRISH ARTISTS AND CURATORS AT THE 57TH VENICE BIENNALE.

Teresa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler, Flora, 2017; synchronized double-sided film installation with sound; 30-min, loop; Swiss Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2017; photo by Ugo Carmen, courtesy of the artists, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin

Nina Canell, Gum Drag and Brief Syllable, 2017; Nordic Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2017; photo by Åsa Lundén/Moderna Museet

Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Cinema Olanda installation view, 2017; curated by Lucy Cotter, commissioned by the Mondriaan Fund for the 57th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia; photo

by Daria Scagliola, courtesy the artist and Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

17

BIENNALE

Jesse Jones, Tremble Tremble installation view, 2017; film, sculpture, moving curtain, sound and light scenography; Venice Biennale

MANY of the reviews of curator Christine Macel’s ambitious handling of her two huge, artist-centered ‘Viva Arte Viva’ exhibitions at La Biennale di Venezia have drawn less than fulsome praise, with critics variously citing too many weak works, not enough diversity and flabby contextualisation, among other criticisms. Of course, the 57th Biennale is far more than a sum of these parts. Perhaps reflecting the increasingly globalised art world, this year sees the inclusion of new pavilions from first-time participants Antigua and Barbuda, Kiribati and Nigeria. As more countries are invited to participate in the event, reflections on nationhood are becoming an increasingly common trope. Virtual utopian state NSK hosts Turkish artist Ahmet Ögüt, who has worked with young refugees to run a live passport office, where I secured an NSK State Passport (nskstate.com). In contrast, the southern part of the globe is represented in Venice by the Antarctic Pavilion, which is not so much an imagined state as a state of enquiry. Instigated

by Russian artist and biennale stalwart Alexander Ponomarev, the pavilion provides a platform to showcase artworks and projects by various invited artists who participated in the first Antarctic Biennale – a 12-day artistic research expedition undertaken in March 2017 with 100 participants aboard the research vessel Akademik Ioffe.

Irish artist Méadhbh O’Connor, who is currently UCD artist-inresidence at Parity Studios, is among the 15 international artists selected to exhibit at the Antarctic Pavilion. Working in collaboration with UCD’s science department, O’Connor devised an experiment and offered it as an open-source work. Presented as a film work, the piece explores climate change, demonstrating atmospheric reactions on a micro level by mixing milk with different densities of water. Filmed in close-up and displayed on two wall-mounted tablets, the result is magical. Climate-Simulator Phase I and II are tiny worlds evoking the gaseous clouds around the earth, swirling and eddying at the whim of their creator. The film is disseminated via YouTube and social media throughout the biennale, inviting viewers to recreate the experiment at home.

Another cross-state collateral pavilion is the exhibition from the European Cultural Centre. Presented across three venues – Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora and the Giardini Marinaressa – more than 250 artists from all over the world respond to the concepts of “time, space and existence” under the title ‘PERSONAL STRUCTURES – open borders’. Irish artist Patricia McKenna has created an installation, ...and the world goes on (2017), in the eaves of the Palazzo Mora, where slender trees reach towards its centuries-old rafters, met by others reaching downwards. Illuminated by a neon sign proclaiming “Goes”, this makeshift forest is mounted on neat metal stands (painted in blue, red and black) and is broken up with straight rods. Here and there, small clay human figures seem to leap from tree to tree, while fake foil leaves indicate possible signs of life. It’s oddly dystopian, with the sodiumlike glare of neon casting a kind of post-apocalyptic yellowish tinge.

At the Giardini, the Swiss Pavilion is curated by Philip Kaiser, who has somewhat perplexingly given this year’s exhibition the title ‘Women of Venice’, drawing on the pavilion’s own history. Kaiser stated that he aims to “reflect on the history of the pavilion and

Meadhbh O’Connor, Climate Similulator, 2017; image courtesy of the artist

Switzerland’s contributions to the Venice Biennale from a contemporary perspective, and to initiate new work, specific to this context.”

However, one of the works is then framed through the history of the Giacometti brothers: Bruno, the architect who originally designed the pavilion, and Alberto, the acclaimed artist who repeatedly declined invitations to represent Switzerland in that pavilion.

Flora (2017) by Swiss artist Alexander Birchler and Irish-born artist Teresa Hubbard is one of the most arresting works at the biennale.

The pair made a synchronised, double-sided film installation about the life of Flora Mayo, a former muse of Alberto Giacometti and an artist in her own right. While it seems that every female artist working before 1980 is doomed to be ‘little-known’, ‘undiscovered’ or ‘underrecognised’, Mayo truly did fade into obscurity. This happened by her own hand, as she destroyed much of her work. Born into a wealthy US family, her first marriage ended after she bore her first child: a daughter. She absconded to Paris and later became friends with Giacometti, who sculpted her and gave her a son (who never met his father). Flora was cut off from her family and forbidden from seeing her daughter ever again. In the 1930s she moved to California, working menial jobs and bringing up her son, David Mayo. Flora’s story is told in the style of a drama/documentary filmed in black and white, which recounts an imagined view of her life in Paris as an artist. In the second film, now in colour, David recalls his mother’s life while we watch sequences of Flora’s lost works being reconstructed and reunited with the bust Giacometti made of her. A quietly powerful and moving work, Flora is a melancholy tribute to its namesake.

The history of national pavilions is a habitual source of inspiration for many biennale curators. The stunning Nordic Pavilion presents ‘Mirrored’, curated by Mats Stjernstedt, which includes work from Swedish artist and IADT graduate Nina Canell. Her explorations of transmission, connection and materials underpin a concrete collection of objects, including sections of transatlantic cable (famously running from Valencia in Kerry to Trinity Bay in Newfoundland) and a delicate tower of medicinal pink gum mastic. The frayed edges of the cable and the slowly oozing gum invoke the gradual erasure of the present.

The Dutch Pavilion is overseen by Irish curator Lucy Cotter.

Issues of post-colonialism and modernist social utopias are explored in a site designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1953. Here, Cotter, along with Dutch artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh, has created Cinema Olanda – a series of enquiries into the Netherlands’ perceived reputation as a progressive nation. A counter-narrative offers three video works and a pair of still images to introduce a string of observations from the ‘old Dutch’, who discuss some of the country’s new nationals, which include post-colonial Surinamese and refugees from Indonesia. The language used is frequently clumsy and, to the ‘enlightened’ ear, it borders on racist. Throughout the eponymous film, Holland’s newer population are flippantly referred to as ‘Indos’, while the language of the Surinamese is described as ‘violent’, assuming connotations of aggression and physical violence.

It’s hardly a revelation that such attitudes exist, though van

Oldenborgh offers counterbalance through her exploration of social experiments and redrawn narratives instigated by artists, activists and undocumented migrants. These take place in various locations including a church in Rotterdam and architect Aldo van Eyck’s Tripolis building in Amsterdam, linking these utopian urban ideals with those of the town-planner Lotte Stam-Beese, and capturing snatches of lesser-known histories. We learn about the first black member of the US Communist Party, Otto Huiswoud, a Surinamese revolutionary who organised workers around the world and lived much of his life in the Netherlands. We also gain insights into various forms of domestic activism and squatting that took place in the Netherlands from the 1960s to the present. Van Oldenborgh resists the construction of neat parallels and chronicles, instead allowing the viewer to listen in to the recollections and recounted experiences of black, white and brown Dutch citizens.

No resolutions are offered, a sensitivity that is missing in some of the other works presented at the biennale seeking to address contemporary concerns around post colonialism and migration. An example comes from the usually pitch-perfect Olafur Eliasson, whose Green Light project occupies the largest space at the Giardini’s central pavilion (curated by Macel). It calls on migrants in Venice to hold workshops making geometric lamps, which can be bought for €250. There is a decidedly uncomfortable ‘human zoo’ aspect to this spectacle, which recalls distinctly capitalist social entrepreneurship rather than radical collective, especially when it emerges that the workshop facilitators are unpaid.

But perhaps even this is not quite as borderline offensive as Ernesto Neto’s Um Sagrado Lugar/A Sacred Place at the Arsenale. Here, a vast netted tent – recently referred to as a “chill out space” – houses actual live shamans from South America. Macel seems keen on this kind of cultural appropriation, which runs through both of her exhibitions and feels excruciatingly naive. For all the vaunting of a biennale led by artists, the curator’s hand is decidedly heavy.

Berlin-based Irish artist Mariechen Danz presents her installation Womb Tomb (2017) at the Arsenale. A previous performance in the space is evidenced on-screen, while wall-mounted footprints and a thermoactive sculpture variously depict the ‘primordial theatre’ of the human body in a stage-set fabricated from locally-sourced mud.

Unstinting in its physicality, Danz’s corporeal practice recalls the visceral, second-wave feminist explorations of artists like Carolee Schneemann or Rebecca Horn. At the Irish Pavilion, Jesse Jones’s mesmerisingly powerful video and performance installation Tremble, Tremble, curated by Tessa Giblin, was widely well-received. The towering multi-screen video installation invites us to look upon Olwen Fouéré’s primordial crone and quake at her power. Elsewhere, amidst the often-overwhelming volume of work on show throughout the city, it’s gratifying to see such strong contributions from fellow Irish artists and those we claim for ourselves.

Anne Mullee is a curator, researcher and art writer. She is currently curator of the Courthouse Gallery and Studios in Ennistymon, County Clare.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

I Am a Painter AUSTIN HEARNE DISCUSSES THE EVOLUTION OF HIS ARTISTIC PRACTICE AT THE INTERSECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY, INTERIOR DESIGN AND PAINTING.

Austin Hearne, installation view, McDermott and McGough ‘An Experience of Amusing Chemistry’, IMMA, 2008; image courtesy of the artist

I was born into a family of painters and decorators. My father ran a very active business based in Dublin, serving both domestic and institutional markets. At the bottom of our garden was my father’s office and large adjoining workshop that we called ‘The Shed’. All manner of paints, wallpapers and associated equipment were stored there. By the time I came along, the shed had been in use for years, so it had a wellworn patina of age. The place was crammed high with old paint pots, their various colours dripping and cracking off the sides. The walls were a mass of paint daubs, wallpaper scraps, shimmering spots of gold leaf and splashes of glossy varnishes.

I was always drawn to this space, a place that, oddly, I was never discouraged from going. I spent many hours there mixing colours, gouging thick skins off the top of unlidded gloss paint cans, daubing my name on the walls and watching the drips slide. The space was alive and constantly changing. My father would use its walls to try out paint techniques like sponging, rag-rolling, stenciling and marbling, which were fashionable at the time and came to define 1980s home décor. The paint shades included lurid avocado, mustard, lemon and seemingly endless shades of cream. For some reason, there was always a heap of gold and copper powder on a shelf. It was mesmerising to watch this dust hang in the air, glistening in the sunlight that flooded into the shed. I am reminded of the shed every time I see Francis Bacon’s studio in the Hugh Lane, with its chaos, Dulux paint cans, brush-cleaning marks on the walls and sublime mix of colours.

Fast-forward to today and I now run the painting business. It has changed a lot since my father’s time and I have steered our operations in a direction that suits our combined skills and interests. Over the years, we have worked with a number of prominent art institutions, including IMMA, the Chester Beatty Library and the Hugh Lane. These projects are always interesting as they challenge our knowledge, skills and abilities. One of the most memorable projects we worked on was a 2008 exhibition at IMMA curated by Séan Kissane, which was titled ‘An Experience of Amusing Chemistry’ by McDermott and McGough, a collaborative partnership comprising American artists David McDermott and Peter McGough. We were commissioned to hang exquisite, hand-painted, silk DeGournay wallpaper and to replicate the hexagonal-shaped tiled floors of the Powerscourt Townhouse by painting the floorboards of IMMA’s East Ground Galleries. This was the type of job we love: technically difficult, requiring precise planning and with opportunities for on-the-job learning.

Austin Hearne’s shed (detail); image courtesy of the artist

The floor piece – which swept through the four adjoining rooms – involved many hours of marking and measuring out to make sure that all the shapes lined up. We then had to laboriously paint the hundreds of diamond shapes that made up the hexagon in three different colours, which took at least three coats. The DeGournay wallpaper was also challenging, in that it was an unforgiving and expensive product. Hanging it required a slow and measured approach, to avoid damaging its fragile surface. I had long admired the work of McDermott and McGough so this dramatic installation – with its clashing wallpaper, patterned floors and beautifully-framed time experiment photographs – roused something in me, speaking to me as a photographer, a queer and an interior design enthusiast.

As well as this day job, I also maintained an art practice, with varying degrees of activity. I graduated from Nottingham Trent University in 1998 with a BA in Fine Art Photography, and subsequently spent several years working in a busy commercial photographic studio in Dublin. I later went into the painting and decorating business full time, just as the dreaded Celtic Tiger took hold. These were extremely busy years and art-making for me existed in a vacuum, with much of my work not seeing the light of day, aside from exhibitions in Munich in 2003 and 2005. I now call these the ‘lost years’.

Ironically, they were the years during which the photographic medium was making its transition from analogue to digital.

During my studies in Nottingham, the photographic processes we used were still very much analogue, chemical-based and wet. It was these magical processes, full of experimentation and play, that initially made me fall in love with the medium. Throughout the 2000s, film and darkrooms became somewhat obsolete, with digital photography heralded as the way forward. I loathed this time, when the computer became the main agent in photographic archiving and production. I despised the dematerialisation of the medium and the increasing lack of engagement and care towards analogue photographic processes. In replacing the darkroom, Photoshop has, for me, eliminated the magic, smells, tactility and mystery of the photographic medium.

After this period of low productivity, I commenced NCAD’s MFA programme in 2014 and graduated in summer 2016. This intense, focused experience, coupled with a critical dissection of my practice, was transformative. During this time, I continuously experimented and researched the myriad ways to make and disseminate the photographic image, bringing it out of the frame, out from behind glass and

in touch with the world. As an artist, I enjoy engaging with multiple stages in the photographic process. In attempting to push the medium, I often feel compelled to introduce some form of alchemy – perhaps recalling the analogue processes of previous decades – while also creating something current. Unsurprisingly, the world of painting and decorating slipped seamlessly into my photographic practice.

Wallpapers became photographic material, photographs became wallpapers, painted papers became surfaces to print on and, more importantly, I was making photographs with my hands, my way.

My MFA final show, entitled ‘Residues’, was the culmination of two years’ work and showcased my experiments in the photographic medium. Critically, this body of work was a commentary on the historic and ongoing influence of the Catholic church in Ireland, over peoples’ lives, bodies and loving relationships. I have long fed off the rich visual beauty, ugliness and drama that lies at the heart of the Catholic Church and churches themselves have served as sites of stimulation and inspiration.

The immersive space I created for my MFA show acted as a church of sorts. I created an expansive wall collage that comprised several hundred photographs of marble in varying geologies. These pieces were printed, measured, hand-cut and pasted into position – a satisfying operation that took over 60 hours to complete. The cold marble walls contained images and messages, posing scenarios and narratives that were subject to viewer interpretation. Materially, every piece in the show was made, supported or informed by the stuff of the painting and decorating industry – the stuff I played with as a child in the shed, the stuff I love.

My current body of work, ‘Little Flowers’, is essentially a series of still-life photographs that have recently been shown in deAppendix, Solomon Fine Art and Artbox. The backgrounds and vessels are made from a combination of wallpaper and paint and every element within the frame is constructed. The flowers came from the gardens of the now defunct St. Clare’s Convent, Harold’s Cross, where I had my studio until recently. As a former orphanage, this site holds a powerful resonance, and for me, the flowers symbolise the church’s woeful past and pitiful present. My work will be included in Solomon Fine Art’s upcoming summer show and I am currently working towards a solo exhibition in Pallas Projects in spring 2018.

Austin Hearne is an artist based in Dublin.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

Critique Supplement Edition 32: July – August 2017

Installation view including work by Stephen Brandes, Winnie Pun and Elaine Leader at Highlanes Gallery

Installation view including work by Tom O’ Dea at Highlanes Gallery

Installation view including work by Colin Martin, Eithne Jordan and Elaine Leader at Droichead Arts Centre

‘This is Not Architecture’ Highlanes Gallery and Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda 24 April – 21 June 2017 FOR Vitruvius1, successful architecture combined “firmness” (structural integrity), “commodity” (function) and “delight” (aesthetic pleasure). While these remain core requirements, contemporary conceptions of the discipline tend to be more fluid. ‘This is Not Architecture’, a two-site group exhibition in Drogheda, animates thinking around the nature of its subject, probing its conventions through considerations of similarity and difference. Curated by Highlanes director Aoife Ruane, the exercise is enhanced by the contextualising environment of

NYCW1036 and NYCW2530 (1996 – 1999), feature interior spaces in disarray, shot through windows and layered with reflections captured from neon adverts. Like the real-time reflections in Leader’s works, they demonstrate the presence of glass, which sets up tensions between inside and outside, aspirational and actual. There is a sense of choreography across these images. The first is a rundown industrial space, in which a foregrounded stepladder shares taut linearity with the architectural ideal – except that it lies flat (like Leader’s balsa-wood stair), reading as a metaphor for decrepitude. The second shows an unfinished build, with a snake-like formation of electrical cables coiling towards the viewer, while the third features an upright ladder, more stable than the space in which it stands.

Maggie Madden’s Overgrowth (2011) is displayed within Perspex, another transparent medium. A blue optical-fibre construction just 23 centimetres high, it engages a dialogue about geometry, proportion and colour. Its spindly ‘legs’ support an expanding network that thrusts upward and outward, defying plausible architectural translation, while its scribbly reflections on a foam-board base evoke a sense of the organic. Winnie Pun’s similarly small-scale Untitled (Line) (2012) is a C-print of a pastoral, if unremarkable, landscape upon which scarcely perceptible lines are drawn. A closer look reveals faint indications of distant industrial structures that sully the rural archetype. Are these real or trompe l’oeil interventions, and, if real, what might they be?

The questioning continues with the monumental April 22nd (2013) by Stephen Brandes. A visual account of the diary of the fictional Albert Sitzfleisch,3 the piece is executed in marker and acrylic on wood-effect lino. The systematic the gallery, located in a repurposed Franciscan draughtsmanship is that of a proficient technician, church. Built in 1829, it combines stained-glass win- but while buildings abound in the composite scene, dows, gothic arches, cast-iron columns, a marble what is constructed is less bricks and mortar than a altar with late Celtic Revival tabernacle door, and fanciful history with textual elements. The juxtaponew, unobtrusive glass balustrades. The exhibition sition of a graphic sunburst (under the radial leadsensitises visitors to this blend of features, which ing of a stained-glass window) doubly enacts the activate connections across the works. trope of validating prevailing order by invoking the Mansion II (2012), by Eithne Jordan, is situated divine. Elsewhere, its group of gravity-defying on its own in cloistered half-light, which com- wooden planks recalls Maggie Madden’s impossible pounds its depiction of a desolate Dublin streetscape. form, and the smooth-hewn plinth of an equestrian The eponymous mansion, with blind, unlit win- statue bulges with outcrops of rock, its order underdows, is portrayed from a low angle with a slightly mined by nature which – as in Byrne’s images – skewed perspective. There are no parked cars along always fights back. the roadway, and the lights in a nearby building are Next door to Falling out of Standing (2017), an cool and uninviting. If architecture is for human atmospheric and sometimes chilling video installause, this is scarcely evident here. (Indeed humans tion by Owen Boss, Elaine Hoey’s Blueprint for a are absent from all the featured works; although at Virtual Nomad (2017) provides a virtual reality times their presence is evoked.) escape route out of and beyond the prevailing archiThe mood brightens downstairs, where, tecture. Physically swapping the Highlanes for a despite minimalist décor, inherited features inform smaller related showing at Droichead Arts Centre the visitor experience. While surveying the draw- builds on this sense of immersion. Its doors and ings in Elaine Leader’s Untitled (2016), a roaming windows are blackened to create a womb-like expereflection from a stained-glass window boosts her rience, in which visually connected works by Leader effort to “de-stabilise our preconceptions of space and Jordan – and Colin Martin’s video work Basic and how we move through it”.2 These framed works Spaces (2010 – 2017) – further explore conceptual feature an eclectic mix of structures, each adrift and material aspects of place and space. Across the against an over-generous ground of workaday paper. two venues, ‘This is Not Architecture’ exploits the Their lack of coherence is replicated in two floor- reverberating strengths of a group show to re-prebased groupings of balsa-wood models, fragmentary sent architectural qualities in a productive crosstalk presentations that highlight the unity of the sur- that fosters visitor engagement. rounding milieu. They emulate architectural mock- Susan Campbell is a third-year PhD candidate at ups, but appearances deceive; what look like enclo- the University of Dublin, Trinity College. sures do not close, while a would-be staircase lies Notes 1. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio was a first-century AD Roman architect and engirecumbent. neer and author of De Architectura.

Gerard Byrne’s C-prints, NYCW0335, 2. elaineleader.com.

3. Translation: ‘sitting-flesh’, implying the ability to sit still for long periods.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet CRITIQUE SUPPLEMENT

July – August 2017

Clare Strand ‘Snake’ Belfast Exposed, 28 April – 17 June 2017

Clare Strand, ‘Snake’, 2017; image courtesy of Belfast Exposed

IN ‘Snake’ the image is an interloper. At first unwelcome, it is nonetheless invited into the artist’s life for the long term. Clare Strand’s repulsion with the animal has compelled her to collect snake imagery since childhood, from scrapbooking serpentine forms in the loosest sense, to collecting more specific images – half glamour, half family-album-style photographs – of women who hold and love them.

The project initially took form as a small photobook, bound in a tactile scale-patterned cover. As an exhibition, ‘Snake’ again employs these uncanny resemblances, with the repulsive object of the image given a dissonance. Seven photographs of women with snakes are blown up many times beyond lifesize and cropped close, abstracting these two living forms into a disturbing symbiosis of glamour. Faces are cut across the middle, showing only the women’s joyous or fond smiles, and emphasising the point of contact where scales meet flesh. The animals are deftly handled or draped around limbs, fingers merging with the tones of the snakes’ tails.

In one grainy, pocked image in particular, the snake is easily mistaken for costume jewellery at first glance. In another, scales echo the polka dots of a blouse, something that’s in itself echoed in broad strokes – perhaps ink – on top of the original image.

It exaggerates the pattern and nullifies the animal.

The texts applied to these images have the same obliterating effect. Formed via online poetry generators using the words on the back of these found images, they read like suggestive song lyrics, nursery rhymes or disjointed, obsessive statements – “7 FOOT PYTHON/ ON HER HEAD/ SNAKES ARE MY THING/ SHE SAID”. Despite being graphically imposing, the screen-printed colour is slightly translucent, assimilating into the image and assuaging its impact. It’s an effect not dissimilar to looking at an Ed Ruscha painting, where landscape is intercut with slogans: in the same way, it’s hard to have a primordial reaction to an image when engaging with the demands of language.

At the entrance to the exhibition is an ongoing projection of this poetry generation. It is more disjointed and nonsensical than the text in the photographs, mimicking a live stream of half-formed thought. A fraction of this is printed out on till roll opposite the projection and captioned “A poem not

by Clare Strand”, ostensibly for the viewer to tear off and take away.

Collecting imagery dispels Strand’s passivity in her reaction to snakes, yet automation reinstates it.

The proffered text at first seems like a tangential or

even flippant gesture – a diminution of poetry that’s somewhat re-pedestaled when made into a physical object. In practice, however, it becomes a subversion of rationality and audience participation. When uptake is low, the amassed ream of text has the same redolence as the scrapbooked film reels, hosepipes, rubber bands and vacuum cleaners, safely encased in the display case, to the snakes in their vitrine-like box frames. As the end of a process the texts themselves are meaningless, digitally-aped streams of consciousness. The invitation to take is present, but isn’t attractive, in an odd way echoing – both directly and inversely – the artist’s own compulsion to collect what she hates.

The poems are a sample of re-sampled information, a scrambled response that stands in isolation to any emotion or reason. The ongoing presence of this automatic poetry generation is like an over-compensation for the artist’s long-held lack of reason in relation to her subject matter.

Both snake and image are simultaneous tokens of affection and loathing. The antagonism of the artist’s responses – one to squirrel away in personal scrapbooks, another to publish on walls and pages – emphasises the unavoidable degree of inscrutability in found imagery, and toys with its enticing nature.

The cultural symbolism of the snake and its gendered connotations are of course present in this exhibition, and referenced in the exhibition text, yet they seem to be secondary to the work when it is translated from book into installation. The processes and remnants of collection on display seems to be more engaged in the immersion and separation of such a working process, and the visceral effect of visual information over any cultural connotations.

At this scale, the second-hand punctum of these photographs seems to prevail over any studium. As viewers, we aren’t necessarily meant to share in Strand’s revulsion, nor are we encouraged to – we just witness different aspects of control and unpredictability as subject, object and viewer.

There is a nihilistic approach, or active negation, to ‘Snake’. The poems appear a word at a time, each one obviously irrelevant to the one before it.

They then disappear, suitably forgotten in their own authorless position. The advertisement-sized women are de-humanised, the snakes de-sensitised, to become objects within inscrutable, mediated layers.

Dorothy Hunter is an artist and writer based in Belfast.

‘Forged, Carved, Cast’ Hamilton Gallery, Sligo 1 June – 2 September 2017 AS the title suggests, ‘Forged Carved Cast’ is an exhibition about the act of making. It is about an intense relationship with materials and processes. The exhibition’s premise is arguably against the run of current practice in that it foregrounds the individual hand of the artist working on discrete objects. This quietly subversive idea is coupled with another: the messy business of life and emotions. Many of the works explore deeply personal narratives, and are rich in metaphor and allusion. On entering the exhibition, the viewer encounters the work of Orla de Brí and Eileen Mac Donagh, installed side by side in the sunlit main gallery space. The works have been sensitively installed and given sufficient room to breathe.

At first glance, Mac Donagh’s work appears to employ a minimalist language which is distinct from the other works in the show. Her stone sculptures present geometric configurations, with evidence of the carving processes fully on display. This dialogue between form and materiality is crucial to reading these works. For example, the corrugated surface of Jackstone 1 is like a rock face marked over thousands of years by rivulets of water, while Jackstone 5, fabricated in distinctive orange marble, appears both as a sculpted and natural object.

Jackstones is an ancient game which involves throwing five small stones up into the air and catching them. Mac Donagh’s five sculpted jackstones would take quite a bit of catching! This friction between the implied function of an object and its total unsuitability for that purpose gives these sculptures their power. They also convey interesting ideas about time, not least because jackstones is a game involving split-second reflexes. The sculptures’ symmetry and high quality of finish indicate many hours of labour. The inherent qualities of the stone itself speak to us about the enormity of time.

Orla de Brí’s nearby sculptures have very different qualities. They are assemblages in bronze made from casting found natural forms and combining them with carved and modelled figures. The delicate constructions play with scale; casts of twigs become giant trees when presented alongside tiny figures. The use of bronze patination, highly-polished surfaces and small brightly-coloured elements dramatise the relationship between the figures and the organic elements they are intertwined with.

Sculptures like Copse and Outer Scape 2 feature trees growing from the human body, invoking the myth of Daphne and Apollo as poetically recounted by Ovid in Metamorphoses. In this myth, the terrified Daphne transforms herself into a laurel tree to

escape capture by Apollo. De Brí’s sculptures update this mythological imagery, asking us to consider recurrent patterns of human behaviour across history. The idea of transformation – of figures sprouting forth trees or being encased by them – is emotive. Such expressive narratives stand in contrast to the passivity of the figures, who appear like mannequins.

In the next room, there is a cluster of four sculptures and two sets of wall-mounted drawings

by Catherine Greene. The works Remnant 1 and 2, and Wolf Remnant, depict the animal with skin flayed from its body, yet still retaining its musculature in fragmentary form. Elsewhere, another work in bronze, entitled Angel, depicts a figure who is neither wholly male nor female. Its perforated wings don’t feel like they would lift the figure off the ground, yet the angel’s body appears to be delicately touching down after flight. These ambiguities and inconsistencies make the sculpture work, as do the deliberate references to the small Roman bronzes one might find in museums of antiquities. By appropriating the look and feel of such devotional objects, Greene seems to imbue her sculptures with a magical potential.

Cathy Carman’s six sculptures are the final works in the exhibition. The Burden of Joy and The Burden of Fear are placed directly on the floor and are the largest works in the show. They depict isolated figures on platforms, bent over with their backs pierced violently at the spine with large planes of metal. In Carman’s smaller works, she explores a series of archetypes. Healing features a figure peering over a ledge to observe an identical figure looking upwards, suggesting a reflection on water. The myth of Narcissus is also implied; however, the precarious stilt construction upon which this vignette takes place, and the expressionistic contortions of the figures, make this a very contemporary interpretation of the theme. In Carman’s wall-based bronze Rachel, a figure hangs desperately from the bottom of a ladder at the feet of someone who seems unwilling to help. The complex meaning is left for the viewer to decode. Rich reds, blues and gold are used – colours reminiscent of sacred objects from different eras. Carman’s works combine complex symbolism with formal inventiveness, and, like all the artists featured in this exhibition, she uses the richness of sculptural language to explore spiritual and existential themes.

Eileen Mac Donagh, Jackstone; image courtesy of Hamilton Gallery, Sligo

Orla de Bri, Bound; bronze; image courtesy of Hamilton Gallery, Sligo

Andy Parsons is an artist based in Sligo. He is the founder of Floating World Artist Books.

July – August 2017

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet CRITIQUE SUPPLEMENT

‘Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously’ Project Arts Centre, Dublin 21 April – 17 June 2017 ‘COLOURLESS Green Ideas Sleep Furiously’ sounds like nonsense, and it is – a phrase coined by Noam Chomsky to be grammatically correct but semantically all over the place. In this ambitious exhibition curated by David Upton, five geographically diverse art practices explore ideas of transient or un-locatable meaning via their own un-locatable objects, objects rendered by impressions and residues, and images deviating between fact and fiction, movement and stasis. A story in the exhibition booklet describes the fate of Byzantine icons bought at a Turkish Bazaar in the 1920’s. Eventually ending up in the National Gallery of Ireland, the icons, separated from their original place and function (and unable to return to a home that no longer exists), have been opened up to new kinds of meaning and attachment. The exhibition booklet usefully outlines some aspirations, among them, “To open discussion around ideas of dissolution and dispossession, loss, of cultures in crisis and futures altered, of cataclysm – and [ask] what happens after all of this?”

That’s a lot to ask of a single exhibition, but the fate of the icons becomes a unifying concept, a paradoxically fugitive underpinning.

In a relatively cerebral show, works by Swedish artist Ida Lennartsson convey a powerful sense of materiality and touch. Modest in size, the floorstanding, irregularly-shaped tablets of Ruins (2013) have, like a mini Stonehenge, a sense of mystical presence. Impressed with rope patterns, the clay and wax forms also suggest fossils, body casts or flayed skin. Allusions to the sacred and profane also come together in Lennartsson’s drawing series, Tsuri (2013). In chalk rubbings of knotted rope patterns, her creased, black paper sheets reveal the intricate bindings of a Japanese form of bondage. Untied from these connotations, the rope patterns emerge from their stygian ground like illuminated relics.

Relics of a different kind are conjured in the graphic works of Erik Bulatov. Featuring text superimposed over images of urban landscapes (I was reminded of Ed Ruscha), these detailed drawings hark back to Russian Constructivism, and the didactic role the arts in Soviet Russia often conformed to.

Despite a connection to the emblematic icons as conveyors of orthodox pieties (though challenging orthodoxies seems to be part of Bulatov’s brief), in the six small works presented here, his imagery and Cyrillic typography remain stubbornly opaque.

Chronoscope, 1951, 11pm (2011), by the Venezuelan artist Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, in collaboration with Media Farzin, is more accessible, and offers a fascinating glimpse into the early days of Talking Heads TV. Reworked from original

American broadcasts, the video collage shows expert speakers offering polite analysis of the global economy. They talk about the Middle East, and the Iranian oil industry in particular. Bow-ties and oldfashioned cordiality seem like the only things out of place in conversations that might otherwise be happening today.

While Balteo-Yazbeck’s work is unambiguously concerned with the dynamics of power, the mood elsewhere is more cryptic, the exhibition’s miscellanea of artefacts like pieces in a puzzle. None more so than Lourde et dure comme de l’acier (2013), a piece by two Dutch artists, collectively named Gerlach en Koop. In an apparently casual floor arrangement, a dumbbell of polished steel, components of antique dumbbells, metal discs and steel cones appear like the remnants of some gnomic board game.

Translating the French title into ‘Heavy and hard as steel’ didn’t leave me any wiser. A second work by the pair is called Untitled (Scatter Piece) (2013) and comprises a string of pearls without pearls.

Presented in the manner of a priceless museum artefact, the fine, periodically-knotted string made me think of the 1953 Max Ophüls film The Earrings of Madame de… about a set of gifted jewels that become a clandestine currency between characters.

That film’s cyclical conceit felt somehow connected to the absence of the signified in Gerlach en Koop’s piece. An entirely fanciful connection, but in the duo’s enigmatic work, the relationship of language to things seen or unseen leaves everything up for grabs.

Projected onto a free-standing wall angled at the centre of the room, Re-run (2013) was made by the India-based Raqs Media Collective. Feeling pivotal to the show overall, the grey and blue-toned image shows a group of people, seemingly a section of a larger crowd, pressed together in a sort of anxious-looking conga line. The work is based on a Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph taken in Shanghai in 1948. Queuing to exchange their rapidly devaluing cash for gold, Cartier-Bresson’s original photograph captures the citizens of pre-Communist China reacting to another cycle of boom and bust. In this restaging – a transposition of contemporary figures into the look and choreography of the original – the photographic image has become subtly animated. Not immediately apparent, an extremely slow, pulsing rhythm gradually asserts itself. The image is breathing. The slow repetition suggests the convergence of intimate and historical forces, the cyclical nature of global and individual fates entwined.

John Graham is an artist based in Dublin.

Ida Lennartsson, Ruins, 2013; clay, wax and graphite, dimensions variable; image courtesy of the artist

Janine Davidson ‘Into the Gravelly Ground’ Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray 9 June – 8 July 2017

Janine Davidson, still from 53012762459

JANINE Davidson’s ‘Into the gravelly ground’ centres on an unusual site at Turlough Hill, County Wicklow. Here, embedded amidst scenic walks, is Ireland’s only pumped hydro-electricity plant. The film work 53012762459 features this structure, its interior and exterior, its machinery and technology.

Also depicted is another reservoir at this same location: Lough Nahanagan, which was formed during the Ice Age. Designed to impinge as little as possible upon the environment, the plant’s main station is buried out of sight behind the mountain. In Davidson’s 22-minute film, the structure is so sleek and streamlined that it appears almost tentative, partaking in the muted tones of the naturallyformed lough. The camera, replete with slight shudder, moves between various viewpoints: we are on a bridge, we catch glimpse of an open door, we are looking at a stunted, top-heavy tower emerging from the water. Importantly, the film makes no distinction between the two formations, and the lens portrays the machines and their inferred functionality with the same quiet, detached observation as it does the rock face and the water.

The structure, indeed, is so pared back and the terrain, for the most part, is so nondescript, that we might be moving through a depopulated dystopia.

In this distant or proximate future, the geological and manmade structures seamlessly coexist in formal and even aesthetic terms, entwined on several levels by their shared intent of containment and their mutual relationship with water. Slowly, however, we come to be affected by the stark angles and the constant thrum of electricity. The shots are long and hypnotic, the viewpoints and angles are repeated, and the longer we watch, the more sinister the plant becomes. The effect is purely accumulative, and sees the plant glean a material sentience, perhaps more subversive than we first suspected. Its convergence with the landscape, we understand, is still unfolding.

The exhibition’s title, of course, suggests excavation, and the final location is a vast, subterranean chamber. Lit by artificial light, the textures here seem rougher, and this change in register is marked by a shift in the camera’s treatment: it begins a backward track through a long tunnel, the continuous movement giving us a sense of depth and scale. The film ends with our exit into daylight, and the viewer is left to consider the disconnect between the plant’s public existence as an unobtrusive assembly of cable and steel, and the crudely formed space beneath – a space that can only have been made by burrowing and blasting. The reverberations of its construction cannot help, it seems, but manifest

somewhere, and the architectural innovation of the power station comes at the cost of this vast, inelegant intrusion concealed below ground.

This notion of convergence and its repercussions is meted out across the rest of the exhibition, with photographic prints appearing to ask: what are the effects of such structures, long-term and immediate, seen or unseen? How can their more pervasive, insidious aspects be captured? Davidson suggests that the resulting documents will be equipped with a degree of obscurity and distortion, manifesting in material form as well as in the gaze itself.

Taken in the vicinity of Turlough Hill, Davidson’s photographs formally expand on the concealment evidenced in the film. Their surfaces are predominantly shadow, and we see only a blurred and unspectacular segment of landscape, the shape of which conjures the aperture of an outdated optical device – perhaps real, perhaps invented. This sense of alternative technology and collected ‘data’ is compounded in Natura I and Natura II, suspended digital prints that seem to map the range of an unknown intensity, radiating from an epicentre that is black with energy or interference.

Tunnel, a second film work installed in darkness, more explicitly refracts the gaze. Filmed inside Túnel de La Engaña in Northern Spain, the piece consists of a seven-minute loop projected onto a diverging mirror. Throughout is the monotonous sound of footfall crunching on terrain, and this grating repetition, combined with the wilful obstruction of the mirror, creates a sense of endless entrapment and stunted progression (this railway tunnel, in fact, was never completed). Here, it is the convexity of the mirror, with its instant reflection and reversal, that disallows clarity. By circumventing the gaze at this early stage, the work suggests that there is no clear view to uncover; the distortion is both material and ontological.

It seems pertinent that this fruitless footfall is the sole sensory reference to human activity. Across the exhibition, bodies are notably absent. To emphasise so keenly the attempted passage of a body through space seems to suggest that such topographies require alternative methods of encounter.

Where environmental distortion manifests as refraction and occlusion, we must reassess the tools at our disposal, at the level of the senses, as well as technological device.

Sue Rainsford is a writer and researcher based in Dublin. She was recently announced as recipient of the 2016 VAI/DCC Critical Writing Award 2017. suerainsford.com

Niamh McCann and Brian Fitzgerald mixing colours

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

23

ORGANISATION

‘P

Trish Brennan, Barry Kehoe and Aidan O’Sullivan (the specially trained IMMA facilitators who deliver the Azure tours) standing in IMMA’s West Wing Gallery beside work by Corban Walker

Azure Tours

Barry Kehoe interpreting the Work of Vik Muniz for an Azure tour

Harkin puts it beautifully when she says: “Azure is about trying to create moments where, at least during the programme, people stop being ‘the person with dementia and their carer’ and, in some ways, go back to being husband and wife, mother and son, father and daughter, sister BARRY KEHOE OUTLINES IMMA’S SPECIALISED TOURS FOR PEOPLE LIVING WITH DEMENTIA AND THEIR and brother. Programmes like this allow for that moment, and that is a real privilege to see.”4 CARERS THAT FORM PART OF THE MUSEUM’S ENGAGEMENT AND LEARNING PROGRAMME. The immediacy of the encounter with an artwork in the contemOVER the past year at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), we tia. Nearly 50% of the population know someone who is living with plative space of the gallery is highly advantageous. Laurel Humble, have begun to provide Azure tours, which are designed specifically to dementia.3 With these growing numbers, it is important to keep in Assistant Educator at MoMA, is quoted on the IMMA blog as stating: make the museum and our exhibitions more accessible to people liv- mind the difficulties faced by people living with dementia and their “One of the biggest issues with Alzheimer’s disease is short-term ing with dementia and their carers. These drop-in tours are scheduled primary carers. Isolation and reduced interaction with the outside memory loss. Visual art is an ideal topic of conversation for people for a specific day once a month and we also organise special pre- world are common as the dementia progresses, when it becomes with dementia and Alzheimer’s because you don’t need to call on your booked Azure tours for groups. We deliver the tours in such a way as increasingly difficult for those with dementia to partake in activities memory to look at art and discuss it. It’s all about what you are seeing in the present moment and how that makes you think and feel.” As to welcome and accommodate people living with dementia and their outside of a familiar routine.

My own father has been living with dementia for at least eight suggested by Ciaran McKinney, Manager of Active Citizenship and primary carers, whether that be professional care-givers or family members. The Azure tours are administrated and organised by years and went into full-time care a little less than a year ago. Until Lifelong Learning at Age and Opportunity, such an encounter “can be Caroline Orr, a curator in IMMA’s Engagement and Learning that point, my mother, who is now in her mid-seventies, was his pri- an experience of being in the now. It’s not about the past. Also, it’s not Department, and facilitated by three trained facilitators of the visitor mary carer, with the rest of the family providing some respite for her. about needing to refer only to safe material. People with dementia As his dementia progressed, the HSE eventually provided some help. have the same rights as the rest of us to be shown something that is engagement team: myself, Trish Brennan and Aidan O’Sullivan.

In 2013 Caroline Orr and Helen O’Donoghue (Senior Curator of However, over time, I could see my mother’s health also beginning to challenging, new or avant-garde. To really hate an artwork is just as Engagement and Learning at IMMA) attended an international net- deteriorate. Undertaking the dementia training to provide the tours in valid as loving a piece”.5 This is something that really struck me in relation to the Azure working meeting of museum and gallery professionals in New York, IMMA gave me a much better understanding of what was happening where the ‘Meet me at MoMA’ programme was originally developed in my parent’s lives. I could see that my mother was finding it more tour, especially when thinking about my own parents. My mother is by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) with funding from METLIFE.1 and more difficult to do anything outside of the home and couldn’t very protective of my father and she prevents him from being exposed The programme was designed “to make art accessible to people living conceive of taking on a task as difficult as visiting a gallery or museum. to anything she feels may upset or confuse him. She would have been This is something that the Azure tours at IMMA are specifically hesitant to set foot in such an unfamiliar environment. However, the with dementia using MoMA’s teaching methodologies and approach.”2MoMA’s programme was brought to our attention through designed to overcome. The way the tours are delivered not only tries Azure tour tries to approach the entire experience as a social moment the excellent work of Bairbre-Ann Harkin, Head of Education in to recognise the needs of the person living with dementia, but also in which everyone is treated as equal partners. As with any tour, ultiKilkenny’s Butler Gallery. Bairbre-Ann had previously undertaken an aims to alleviate any worries the primary care-giver may have when mately it is our task as facilitators to guide the participants through internship in MoMA and had observed the incredible work they were visiting an institution like IMMA. It is important that both can have this process, keeping them engaged and stimulated while letting the doing to make their galleries more accessible to people living with an enjoyable and relaxing time while engaging with the artworks in conversation flow. At the end of each tour we invite the visitors to join the museum context. In practical terms, we try to make everyone who us for complimentary tea and coffee in our café, where they can chat Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

The development of a similar approach here in Ireland was initi- is on the tour comfortable with the process of engagement. We slow and relax. So far, participants have indicated that they very much ated by Age and Opportunity, the Alzheimer Society of Ireland, the down the experience and look at fewer artworks than we would on a enjoyed the Azure tour and found it a very welcoming and social expeButler Gallery and IMMA. Working collaboratively, the organisations typical tour. Occasionally, we also have the opportunity to facilitate rience. This feedback is very important and rewarding for us as tour piloted the ‘Meet me at MoMA’ model at the Butler Gallery, evaluated tours when the museum is closed to the public, which creates a more facilitators. this pilot programme and later hosted an international roundtable at intimate and safe space. I am glad to say I was able to convince my Barry Kehoe works at IMMA facilitating talks, tours and workIMMA, to discuss the work they’d been doing. The next phase was to mum to visit the gallery with my dad and I got to use the Azure tour shops for the museum’s various Engagement and Learning proexpand the Azure programme through the provision of facilitator techniques to show them around the gallery. It made for an enjoyable grammes. He also is an independent curator and art writer. training to museums and galleries nationwide. The Azure network and cherished experience for all of us.

When discussing particular artworks on an Azure tour, we often To book an Azure tour, contact Caroline Orr at edcommbookwas then established, comprising the organisations that had taken ask for first impressions or short one-word responses that can be ing@imma.ie or 01 612 9955. If booking in advance doesn’t suit, part in this specialised training.

One thing understood by everyone involved in the Azure net- expanded to inform a broader conversation. We have found that this people are also more than welcome to attend tours on a drop-in work is the importance of developing this service within our various style of interaction can create amazing experiences for both the per- basis. The dates and times are available at imma.ie. institutions and organisations, particularly in light of the HSE statis- son living with dementia and their carer. The space of the gallery and Notes 1. moma.org/meetme/index tics in relation to dementia in Ireland. According to the HSE, there are the artworks can stimulate discussion on emotions, feelings and 2. Ibid currently 55,000 people living with dementia in Ireland and by 2036 it memories, to the extent that it is sometimes hard to distinguish who 3. hse.ie/eng/services/list/4/olderpeople/dementia/about-dementia/dementia-stats 4. imma.ie is estimated that 113,000 will be diagnosed with some form of demen- is the person living with dementia and who is the carer. Bairbre-Ann 5. immablog.org

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

BIENNALE

Twin Peaks JONATHAN CARROLL REPORTS ON DOCUMENTA 14 AND SKULPTUR PROJEKTE MÜNSTER 2017.

Pierre Huyghe, After ALife Ahead, Skulptur Projekte, 2017; ice rink concrete floor, sand, clay, phreatic water, bacteria, algae, bee, chimera peacock, aquarium, black switchable glass, conus textile, incubator, human cancer cells, genetic algorithm, augmented reality, automated ceiling structure, rain, ammoniac, logic game; photo by Ola Rindal

Oscar Tuazon, Burn the Formwork, 2017; photo by Henning Rogge, courtesy of Skulptur Projekte

Aram Bartholl, 5V, 2017; photo by Henning Rogge, courtesy of Skulptur Projekte

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

25

BIENNALE

Marta Minujín, The Parthenon of Books, 2017; steel, books, and plastic sheeting; Friedrichsplatz, Kassel, documenta 14; photo by Roman März

THERE are two things that I do every five years: I attend a friend’s birthday (only celebrated in increments of five) and I attend the documenta quinquennial in Kassel, Germany. However, 2017 is a special year when some of the most celebrated European art exhibitions coincide: The 57th Venice Biennale, documenta 14, Art Basel’s annual fair and the fifth edition of the decennial Skulptur Projekte Münster. This really is a year not to miss. For many, myself included, it makes sense to visit events in Kassel and Münster in one trip. With a budget of €36 million, and showcasing 160 artists across two locations for the first time (Athens and Kassel), documenta 14 dwarfs all other exhibitions in its ambition and influence . Not to be outdone, Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017 (with an inferior €7.7 million budget) is also bi-located for the first time, with a modest proposal based in the nearby town of Marl. Where documenta is all about the curators (a whole team of renowned names), their ideas and explorations of the position of art now, Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017 is more “it’s the artists, stupid!”, to paraphrase a great political slogan.

Since its foundation in 1977 by Klaus Bußmann, Skulptur Projekte Münster has always focused on the creation of new work by individual artists. This, its fifth edition, showcases the work of 35 artists, including two Irish contributors: Gerard Byrne presents a new video installation, In Our Time, in the municipal library, while Benjamin de Burca and Bárbara Wagner show Bye Bye Deutschland!, one of the most talked-about pieces in Münster. The original idea behind the event was to add newly-commissioned sculptural work to Münster’s public collection. Notable this time are the number of video and performance pieces that depart from the more solid object-based contributions of previous editions. Documenta 14 also differs from its predecessor in its distinct lack of new commissions. The feeling on the streets of Kassel was that documenta 14 had spent too much energy delivering two events in one year. Athens, it seems, was a step too far.

However, one can forgive any curator who attempts to shake up a somewhat stale format. For example, Arthur Zmijewski’s 7th Berlin Biennale eschewed ‘art as object’, but baulked at the last minute to include some signs of immaterial or non-object-based art projects for the visitor to contemplate. Adam Szymczyk, artistic director of documenta 14, blindly bombards us with arguably tokenistic declarations of solidarity and exchange between the contrasting cultures of Germany (the economic oppressor) and Greece (the economically oppressed). In Kassel, the main exhibition venue, the Fridericianum, is given over to a display selected from the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens – a collection no doubt formed during very different economic times. Some of the better-known works take on a new significance in the current refugee crisis. Bill Viola’s The Raft (2004) acts as a reminder of the haunting images of protestors being water-cannoned and of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean Sea while trying to reach Greece. Mona Hatoum’s Fix It (2004) brings to mind Syrian torture chambers, while Acropolis Redux (The Director’s Cut) (2004), by Kendell Geers, has obvious connotations of border security and refugee exclusion. The acropolis-inspired structure con-

sists of metal shelving packed with every variety of razor-sharp barbed wire. With very few exceptions, the rest of the collection left this correspondent rather despondent.

Happily, my despondency turned to delight on exiting the Fridericianum. Just across the road, The Parthenon of Books – a full-sized replica of the most famous building of the Acropolis by the Argentinian artist Marta Minujín – was being formed. Visitors are invited to contribute formerly or currently forbidden books from around the world to be added to the columns of the temple. This work-in-progress was more in keeping, in terms of size and ambition, with what one expects from documenta. This is not a new work, having been previously realised in 1983 in Buenos Aires. Irish audiences might remember Minujín’s piece James Joyce’s Tower of Bread (1980), which was shown in Dublin as part of ROSC ’80.

At the Neue Galerie, we get a smorgasbord of what seems like disasters of war and famine from various moments in time where, as explained in the guidebook, “questions of nationhood and belonging, but also of dispersal and loss, weave a loose meshwork”. We encounter Zainul Abedin’s Famine Sketches (1943), Sunil Janah’s horrific photographs of corpses in Odisha (formerly Orissa), and Chittaprosad Bhattacharya’s ink-on-paper drawings of the malnourished and destitute. These are just from the Bengal famine; what follows are references to various other well-known periods of human tragedy, such as the end of WWII, and lesser-known but similarly devastating events in Albania and Poland. Less is not more for this artistic director! This is dragnet curating at its worst.

At the Neue Hauptpost (renamed the Neue Neue Galerie by documenta), housed in a former mail distribution centre, the site and the curatorial concept gel together more poetically. According to the press material, “the building appears as a site of post-Fordist labour, one that directly marks the impact of virtualisation on the service sector of economic production, its empty spaces serving as a testament to the final stages of a bygone economy. The art on view explores the labour of dissemination by mail, on horseback, through bodies or rituals”.

There are displays of concrete poetry and mail art by Ruth WolfRehfeldt and her husband Robert Rehfeldt. For years, the artists sent out their work by mail from behind the Iron Curtain, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This is what you come to documenta for: proper content with deep historical significance as well as inspiring locations. Upstairs, beside the former staff canteen, we find ‘Yugoexport’, a shoe production and distribution project by Serbian artist Irena Haiduk. In replicating an escort service advert, the film Nine Hour Delay (2012 – 2058) introduces the Borosana shoe – mandatory footwear for all Yugoslav women working in the public sector from 1960 – 1969. This shoe, in turn, becomes part of the workwear for exhibition staff wherever the work is shown (yugoexport.com).

Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017 takes a similarly dichotomous look at the present human condition. While the artistic director Kasper König (who promised us in 2007 that he himself would not be alive to see the 2017 edition) spoke of a new generation of artists and

Agnes Denes, The Living Pyramid, 2015/2017; verschiedene Materialien, Nordstadtpark, Kassel, documenta 14; photo by Nils Klinger

curators introducing new technologies and ideas of what sculpture could be, we in fact actually get a sort of new primitivism. There is a lot of work depicting humans interacting with fire. Aram Bartholl shows a kind of survival kit for post-apocalyptic conditions. He has installed three thermoelectric devices that transform fire (mankind’s earliest means of communication) directly into electrical energy.

Bartholl also examines the phenomenon of digitisation, exploring ideas around hacking, open source technology and anonymity. At one location, we see an attendant using a log fire (over which he holds a stick with what looks like a wok attached) to produce electricity with which visitors can charge their mobile phones.

Bartholl’s second work is located below a huge telecommunications tower where he has placed a barbeque with a device that is attached by a wire half way up the tower. This is all in aid of providing electricity to a router on the tower without using the internet. Visitors can log in to an offline data base via wifi to download instructions for living without the internet. This is a brilliantly-placed work, a Kubrickian coming together of the past (hubristic and overwhelming) and the future (future primitive). By the port, Oscar Tuazon’s concrete sculpture Burn the Formwork also functions as an outdoor chimney to be used for heat, as a barbeque or simply as a gathering place. Tuazon is interested in the dropout cultures and DIY architecture that form part of a simple, Henry David Thoreau-inspired existence. Romanian artist Alexandra Pirici’s Leaking Territories provides its own humanpowered search engine. The audience are asked by the performers of the piece to suggest a word, for which they then provide data, according to profile, age and gender. We get multiple responses to the words ‘history’ and ‘Brazil’. Collective memory or just old school memory seems kind of cute, no? (Look no iPhone!).

Pierre Huyghe’s work for Münster is not dissimilar to the postapocalyptic ennui he displayed at documenta 13. Huyghe’s After ALife Ahead (2017) inhabits an abandoned ice-rink. It is a building site, with broken earth and shattered interior occupied by a lonely chimera peacock and a fish tank with what looks like a 3D version of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The Wreck of the Hope (1824). We are told that another contraption contains cancer cells which are being influenced by the changing environment of the site. One can also open a special app to see ghastly creatures, à la Pokémon Go. The visitor is encouraged to descend into the trenches formed by the dug-up icerink floor and to view new ecological environments, from beehives and weed gardens to water pools and cesspits. Is this the apocalypse that Aram Bartholl is preparing us for?

Documenta 14 continues in Kassel until 19 September, while Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017 continues until 1 October.

Jonathan Carroll is an independent curator based in Dublin. His trip was supported by the Goethe-Institut Irland.

Note 1. Documenta 14 is fully bi-located for the first time, however the 2012 edition did have offshoot projects and events in Afganistan, Egypt and Canada. According to documenta 13 curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, these additional locations were important to her programme because they revealed “other states of being” and “oscillating relationships: onstage (Kassel), under siege (Kabul), hope and revolt (Cairo and Alexandria) and retreat (Banff).”

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

VAI ADVOCACY

Artists’ Workspaces

situation evidenced in the “closure of a significant number of longterm and highly successful artist spaces” between January 2014 and July 2015.3 The closure of Broadstone Studios, one of the city’s longest-running artist studios – which provided studio space for many of JOANNE LAWS PROVIDES A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF ISSUES FACING STUDIO PROVIDERS NATIONWIDE. Ireland’s most dynamic, determined and important contemporary artists for over 18 years – had a significant impact on the city’s visual arts infrastructure at the time. It caused many of Broadstone’s artists to rethink their studio requirements, with some establishing home studios and some securing workspaces in studio programmes in the city.

Other studios that are still subject to the rental market include Ormond Studios – an artist-run space and platform for emerging visual artists in Dublin City (est. 2009; ormondstudios.wordpress. com). In November 2016, Ormond Studios was forced to vacate 6 Ormond Quay when the building was sold. Rental costs for similar properties in the area had spiralled, while many buildings tended to be poorly maintained. Fortunately, tenancy was secured at 4 Ormond Quay, but this involved higher rent for a smaller space, reducing studio membership from nine to eight artists, and downgrading the project space. Additional funding under the Arts Council’s Visual Artists’ Workspace Scheme enabled these necessary changes. On the plus side, the building is more secure and well kept, and Ormond Studios has maintained its central location.

Sample-Studios is a not-for-profit centre for contemporary arts in Cork. Sample-Studios was recently forced to relocate from a central location in the old FAS building in Sullivan’s Quay to a new base in an industrial estate in Churchfield, Cork, several kilometres from the city centre, displacing approximately 100 artists. This is a major loss for the Cork region, where demand for studio space continues to rise, with Studio space at MART Fire Station, Rathmines, Dublin many fearing that it will put additional pressure on existing arts faciliIn Limerick, the arts office provide four artists’ studios in ties and studios like Backwater Artists Group and the National WORKING in consultation with studio providers, artists and local authorities around the country, this report offers updates on the cur- Cappamore Library and eight artist workspaces at James’ Street Sculpture Factory.

However, public funding does not necessarily guarantee longevrent situation across urban and rural areas. These insights are by no Studios, as well as eight subsidised apartments in John’s Square for the means comprehensive, and build on the existing discourse and grass- exclusive use of artists. According to Limerick Arts Officer, Sheila ity for studios. For some studios, lack of secure tenancy has been exacroots advocacy work that has been developed over the last few years to Deegan, the purpose of the initiatives is to “support artistic vibrancy in erbated by reduced funding which has diminished considerably over defend artist workspaces.1 One significant issue to come out of the the local community and provide vital support to artists in developing the last few years. For example, Pallas Projects/Studios (est. 1996; studio crisis is a reluctance to speak out publicly about health and their career”, with the aim of “attracting and keeping artists living and pallasprojects.org) has operated studios in 14 premises across the city over the last 20 years, in order to stay one step ahead of the developers. safety issues in studios – such as building maintenance, fire safety, working in Limerick City”.

Leitrim Sculpture Centre (LSC) in Manorhamilton offers a According to one of the directors, the organisation’s Arts Council fundovercrowding, outdated machinery and poor ventilation – for fear that it could lead to closure and further reduce the availability of studios. complex of 18 private and residency studios across three buildings ing has decreased by almost 70% since 2011, while long-term security However, not addressing these issues perpetuates a culture of misman- (est. 1997; leitrimsculpturecentre.ie). Factory Studios are located in the of tenure has still not been achieved and remains a primary goal. agement and an acceptance of hazardous working conditions for art- main LSC building and suit artists working in stone, wood, ceramics, ists. It is clear that this situation needs urgent further attention at hot glass, mould-making, metalwork, forge and foundry. In a signifi- GOVERNANCE & ADMINISTRATION management level. Above all, the provision of vital arts infrastructure cant new development, LSC recently had the opportunity to purchase Recent developments have shown that organisations benefit from needs to be central to the implementation of new policy frameworks the former Sheehan’s B&B (next door to Sheehan’s Studios), which will strong governance policies being in place, which protect both the provide additional studios and residency accommodation. LSC are in organisation and the artists. Management systems also need to be scalincluding Creative Ireland and Culture 2025. the process of trying to secure funding for the building’s renovation; able, depending on how many studios are provided at any given time. however, they are carrying out the first phase of the project with their Many of the studios who contributed to this article are in transition PUBLICLY-FUNDED STUDIOS In theory, government funding should go towards subsidising rents for own resources, enthusiasm and local good will. Meanwhile Fire where the management needs to go beyond a volunteer committee. As studio members, making low-cost studios more readily available. Station Artists’ Studios (est. 1993; firestation.ie) have recently invest- studios expand, there is often a threshold where, based on a growing Since 2013, MART Studios have expanded to become one of the most ed in innovative digital technology including 3D modelling. FSAS membership, it becomes necessary to appoint an administrator on a significant suppliers of independent workspaces in Dublin city for provides subsidised residential studios that offer self-contained, secure part-time or full-time basis. However, appointing a paid administrator visual artists, designers and other creative practitioners (mart.ie). accommodation and workspaces for professional visual artists. Access to manage the workspace and support members seems virtually MART currently maintains 80 studio spaces across eight buildings in to digital equipment, cameras and recording equipment is also avail- impossible without multi-annual funding or substantial increases to Rathmines, Portobello, Crumlin, Kilmainham and Blackpitts. In 2017 able at a reduced cost, as is use of the sculpture workshop and equip- studio rents. More and more evidence suggests that artists are working MART opened their largest single space: the MART Creative Hub in ment. FSAS champions the provision of creative workspaces in the part-time or full-time jobs outside of their studio practice, so can often Portobello Harbour. This former warehouse offers the space for studio context of a crisis that has seen a 50% reduction in artists’ workspaces be reluctant to take on the substantial commitments involved in studio administration. Many just want a workspace and no engagement members to work on much larger projects. MART also generates in Dublin’s inner city over the last two years. with a common goal. In the event that no one comes forward to underincome through gallery rental and by subletting spaces to commercial take these duties, studios can often close.

DIMINISHING SPACE and non-commercial enterprises.

In Galway, Engage Art Studios (est. 2004; engageartstudios.com) – who are situated on the top floor of the old Galway Pro-Cathedral – have recently opened a second studio space in Francis Street to accommodate an unprecedented number of membership applications. Other studio providers in Galway city include Artspace Studios (est. 1986; artspacegalway.com) – an artist-led collective that provides studios for 22 visual artists across 2 premises in Liosbán Industrial Estate and the Black Box theatre – and 126 Artist-Run Gallery (est. 2005; 126.ie) who relocated to more affordable premises in a residential area on the outskirts of the city in June 2016, and now provide studios for four professional artists on a long-term basis. The ongoing provision of studios is integral to the running of 126, because it generates approximately 50% of the annual rental costs for the building. Both Artspace and 126 stated that, given the rent increases and reduced funding in recent years, it has become increasingly difficult for them to provide studios at affordable rates.

A 2014 report on Limerick city’s visual art ecosystem, commissioned by the Limerick City of Culture, commented on the demise of Creative Limerick – an initiative set up by Limerick County Council’s Planning Department in 2009 to liaise with landlords of vacant commercial property – which had enabled the establishment of important visual arts infrastructure within the city, including Occupy Space, Raggle Taggle, Faber Studios and Ormston House. As stated in the report: “With the economy picking up, many expressed a worry that free or cheap spaces would become increasingly unavailable. The opening of Starbucks, where once there was Occupy Space, was seen as emblematic of this trend.”2 Published the following year, in November 2015, the Report on Artist Space Infrastructure in the City, by Dublin City Arts Officer Ray Yeates, outlined a similar crisis in the Dublin context. The report cites the “sustained growth in the Dublin property market” as having a “direct impact on the availability of affordable studios for artists” – a

SITE SPECIFICATIONS Occasionally, studio management is subject to special arrangements based on restrictions linked to particular locations, as is the case in Temple Bar, where Dublin City Council recently took over management of the area from the previous landlords, Temple Bar Cultural Trust. An association of 28 cultural institutions in Temple Bar is in the process of being formed and will hopefully have a lobbying role for the future development of the area. Independent Studios Ltd. consists of 10 purpose-built, self-contained studios in two buildings at 11 and 16 Eustace Street in Temple Bar (est. 1981; independentstudioartists. squarespace.com). In 1998 the limited company was established with a board of directors. Independent Studios is administrated on a voluntary basis by artist members and they seem to have a good and stable business model that suits them. It seems likely that funding will be sought for a part-time administrator to raise the profile of the studio

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

VAI ADVOCACY and its members. Temple Bar Gallery + Studios provides 30 individual artists’ studios, of various sizes and monthly rental costs. Each year, over 40 artists avail of the affordable workspaces at TBG+S. There is an annual competitive selection process which awards Membership Studios to mid-career artists for a three-year period. In addition, one-year Associate Membership or Project Studios are offered to artists at an earlier point in their career. On average, the selection committee awards 10 to 12 new studio occupancies each year. For the past four years, TBG+S have offered an annual Graduate Residency to Irish artists providing a 12-month studio at TBG+S with added professional development supports.

July – August 2017

NORTHERN IRELAND Kassam is concerned that affordable studio spaces in Limerick will become increasingly difficult to attain.

BARTER SYSTEM & HOME STUDIOS Contact Studios is an artist-run space on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Mental Hospital, Limerick, which provides affordable workspace for 14 professional visual artists (est. 1997; contactstudios.ie).

The premises are provided by the HSE. Paid for through a barter system, artists give recreational art classes at Le Chéile, a local mental health group, which amounts to a total of 520 hours per year.

Contact Studios is self-governed by a committee of permanent members and is largely independent of outside funding. Despite having an excellent working relationships with the staff and clients, this CO-OPERATIVE MODELS With some studio-providers using an artist-led arrangement with the HSE will come to an end on model, a lot of the administration is done on a vol- 31 July, reducing the artist workspaces in Limerick untary basis by studio members. Some artists enjoy City by a third. While Contact Studios are actively the ethos and purpose offered by a collective work- pursuing a new partnership, nothing is yet secured.

In a similar vein, Leitrim County Council Arts ing model. A4 Sounds opened their first artists’ studio in 2011 in Harold’s Cross, with 10 artists Office and Library Service established Drumshanbo working as a self-funded co-operative. When this Artists’ Studios in 2016. In lieu of rent, the resident building was sold for redevelopment in 2013, the artists of two studios in Market House, Drumshanbo, collective moved to their current city centre loca- are asked to commit the equivalent of one hour per tion in St. Joseph’s Parade. A4 Sounds currently run week over a one-year period, conducting workshops a studio that houses 70 member artists. They would or developing collaborative programmes with local like to open a second studio to increase revenue school, community or library groups. As stated by streams, while keeping memberships fees as low as Leitrim County Council Arts Officer Philip possible, but the shortage of suitable and affordable Delamere, across rural areas, studio providers are properties in Dublin city centre is a major obstacle. mindful of the isolation faced by artists working in home studios, and their need, not only for creative hubs and communal workspaces in towns, but for PRIVATELY-RENTED STUDIOS Co-working is an inexpensive, community-based basic infrastructure such as broadband. Initiatives style of working for freelancers and creative profes- like Creative Frame (creativeframe.eu) were develsionals. One example of a recently-established pri- oped to make rural art practitioners – including vate studio is The Tara Building on Tara Street, recent art college graduates – more visible to one Dublin, which opened in March 2017 (thetarabuild- another, both within the country and beyond. These ing.com). The Tara Building is a privately-funded sentiments are echoed in submissions from Cow business enterprise that receives no additional fund- House Studios, Wexford, who concede that their ing. Studio membership costs €185 per month and remote location makes it difficult to accommodate can be renewed on a month-to-month basis if long-term studio rental, while nonetheless recognisdesired. Members include animators, illustrators, ing the necessity for such facilities within the designers, poets, journalists, screenwriters and cul- region.

In conclusion, it is clear that there are still tural programmers. The second-floor open-plan office spaces are occupied by the artist Maser, festi- many unresolved issues in relation to studio provival organisers including Other Voices, a photogra- sion around the country. It has become increasingly phy studio and Apollo Print, who maintain a screen- evident that one size does not fit all. Several new workspaces have been set up with no funding, while printing studio.

Short-term leases without proper licencing others operate through barter systems with local agreements are still commonplace and, in some organisations. Patently there is a need for balance cases, artists are accepting studios in desperation. between publicly-subsidised studios and other busiOver the years, artist Ramon Kassam has worked in ness models – from co-ops and collectives to privatethree of Limerick’s main studio facilities. He recent- ly-funded business enterprises – within a healthy ly moved back to Limerick, having found it “increas- arts ecosystem. As a result, the various funding ingly difficult to sustain his practice in Dublin”, and streams need to find ways to reflect and support this despite spaces being more affordable in Limerick, he diversity. Lastly, it seems advantageous for there to experienced a major lack of choice. He is currently be greater dialogue between existing studios regardworking from Wickham Street Studios, on “what ing how they might support one other. One option is intended to be a temporary basis”, but states that would be to consider pooling resources and sharing “given the situation, it’s hard to know”. Wickham administrative costs among several studio providStreet Studios was established in 2009 to fulfil a ers. high demand for affordable artists’ studios (wickJoanne Laws, Features Editor, Visual Artists hamstreetstudios.blogspot.ie). A group of graduates Ireland. rented the first and second floors of the city-centre property, dividing the building into several private, Notes 1. See: Lisa Godson ‘Time to Create Affordable Spaces for Our Artists’, Irish semi-private and open-plan spaces. The studio spac- Times, 9 April 2016; Rebecca O’ Dwyer ‘On Our Collective Wet Dream’, Paper es are rented out individually and there are cur- Visual Art Journal, vol. 7, October 2016; Gerard Byrne ‘Dublin Has an Artistic Crisis on Its Hands: Now Is the Time to Act’, Irish Times, 26 May 2016; Creative rently 15 studio members. Wickham Street Studios Spaces Collective (CSC) Submission to Dublin City Development Plan 2016 – 2022, May 2016; Nathan O’Donnell ‘Dublin’s Disappearing Art Spaces’, We is one of only three main studio-providers in Are Dublin, quarterly magazine.

Limerick city centre. The building is leased from a 2. John Holden, Towards a sustainable Visual Arts Eco-System in Limerick, commissioned as a legacy project by the Visual Arts Pillar of Limerick City of private landlord, who can choose to sell the build- Culture 2014, published May 2015. ing at any time or use it for an alternative purpose. 3. Ray Yeates, Report on Artist Space Infrastructure in the City, Dublin City Council, 2015.

Citing the imminent closure of Contact Studios,

Studio Provision NI ROB HILKEN LOOKS AT STUDIO PROVISION IN NORTHERN IRELAND.

ONE of the most common queries we get at the VAI Northern Ireland office is from visual artists looking for studio spaces, frequently from recent graduates or artists returning after studying or working abroad. Unfortunately, studio provision for artists in Northern Ireland falls short of demand, with many studios occupying buildings with short-term leases, meaning that sustainability is an ongoing concern.

Costing between £25 and £150 per month, studios here are more modestly priced than in other parts of Ireland, commensurate with the NI’s lower income levels and living costs. Many studios occupy commercial buildings that would otherwise be vacant.

In order to access rates relief and reduce their own costs, landlords offer buildings to artist-led groups rent-free, thus benefiting from their non-profit or charitable status. This helps to reduce the price of studio rental for artists, but at the cost of having a short-term lease.

Belfast currently has 14 official studios and a handful of collectives occupying spaces within multi-purpose buildings. Many artists maintain their own private or shared studios, while others undertake residencies within various businesses.

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland subsidises six studio groups and two printmaking studios, and are currently working with Flax Art Studios to research sustainable models for studio provision across the city. Founded in 1989, Flax Art Studios recently merged with Orchid Studios to become the largest managed group in Northern Ireland, providing subsidised studios for 30 artists at various stages of their careers, working across a range of disciplines. Flax Art Studios maintain a waiting list, in order to gauge demand for studio spaces moving forward. Flax provides access to a range of subsidised shared resources such as a professional wood and metal workshop. The gallery continues to work with the University of Ulster to provide residency opportunities for recent graduates. Flax is now in the fourth year of an international exchange with Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo, while a new exchange will take place in 2017 with Bangkok Arts and Cultural Centre, Thailand.

QSS Studios and Gallery on Bedford Street is Belfast’s oldest and second largest studio group supporting 23 professional artists. QSS members are required to be fine art graduates and must have an exhibition history. They offer spaces for short to medium-term projects, as well as long-term studios for members. Their gallery programme is curated by an exhibitions committee and is often used to showcase the work of studio members. Paragon Studios (better known for their project space gallery, PS2) have recently relocated to North Street, which has increased the size of their exhibition space, and they now accommodate seven artists. Paragon Studios are unique in that they also provide studio space for a curator-in-residence for up to one year at a time.

The Belfast Print Workshop have a very active membership base and offer access to superb printmaking facilities and courses, as well as regular exhibitions. Lombard Studios was established in 2016 by five emerging painters from the University of Ulster. Cathedral Studios also have a core group of painters, but recently expanded to accommodate

eight artists working across a range of disciplines.

Platform Arts are the largest self-funded, permanent studios in Belfast. Their 12 studio spaces and large gallery space continues to play a major role in the artist-led contemporary arts scene. The organisation operates a two-year directorship model, similar to that of Catalyst Arts. Other notable studio groups in Belfast are Creative Exchange in east Belfast, Artists at the Mill in west Belfast and Array Studios in the city centre.

Belfast has seen two new studio collectives emerge in the last six months, with artists taking over an old Ulster Bank in east Belfast (Belfast Bankers) and the old InterContinental pub in south Belfast (Wee Art Pub or Wub). With fixed-term, oneyear leases, the 30 or so artists involved are applying their creative energy to make these studio-based projects successful in the short term, without having to secure public funding.

Outside Belfast, Bangor has a burgeoning studio sector, with facilities like Blackberry Path, Studio 24 and Seacourt Centre for Contemporary Printmaking providing a variety of artist workspaces. Boom! Studios is the largest studio group in the region, with spaces for 20 artists over two floors.

They were recently awarded charitable status and run workshops, artist residencies and participate in larger regional events and festivals. At Oxford Island, near Lurgan, 12 members of the North Armagh Artist Collective (NAAC) finished their studio residency at Artspace. Arts in Motion will take up a summer residency in the space, delivering creative projects for young people with disabilities in the Armagh, Craigavon and Banbridge area.

NAAC is in negotiations to occupy new premises in the coming months.

In Derry, Creative Village Arts have provided studio spaces for 13 artists at Bishop Street and Pump Street since 2012, where Derry Print Workshop (DPW) occupies the ground floor. Recent restructuring has seen DPW take over the lease of the whole building, transforming existing studio spaces into a new digital print room. This move aims to provide long-term stability, as they seek greater support through public funding. The studio groups in Derry frequently pool resources and collaborate with artists in Donegal. The partnership between Creative Village Arts, Derry Print Workshop and Artlink at Fort Dunree in Buncrana has been essential for supporting artists across the region. Many artists are concerned about the effects Brexit will have on such important cross-border partnerships.

There are many challenges facing studio providers across Northern Ireland. Gentrification issues in Belfast are forcing artists and organisations to look increasingly further outside of the city centre for vacant spaces, while existing spaces are threatened with increasing rents or eviction. Loft Studios became the most recent victim, when their building was torn down by a developer, days before a preservation order was about to be passed.

Rob Hilken, VAI Northern Ireland Manager.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

HOW IS IT MADE?

Tamsin Snow, Showroom, 2017; video still, CGI Animation, 3.30 mins

Virtual Autopsies JOHN DINE INTERVIEWS TAMSIN SNOW ON RESIDENCY IN FINLAND ABOUT HER NEW FILM WORK ‘SHOWROOM’.

Tamsin Snow, Showroom, 2017; video still, CGI Animation, 3.30 mins

July – August 2017

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

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HOW IS IT MADE?

Tamsin Snow, Showroom, 2017; video still, CGI Animation, 3.30 mins

John Dine: Your film ‘Showroom’ takes viewers on a virtual tour of a cryonics laboratory designed by you. (Cryonics is the process of freezing a person immediately after death, in the hope that science will one day be capable of reviving them.) What is it about cryonics that interests you?

Tamsin Snow: I think cryonics proposes a radically different way of thinking about death. I can give you an exact quote from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which was the first cryonics laboratory in the world: “A person who can be resuscitated is not dead. Therefore, if cryonics patients are preserved well enough that they might someday be resuscitated, then they aren’t dead: they are cryopreserved.” So, when they say ‘death’ what they’re talking about is a suspension of consciousness, as opposed to a terminal event.

JD: The idea is already kind of a retro sci-fi image, isn’t it?

TS: Yes, that’s why I chose not to make the film as a contemporary projection but more a montage of several quite dated sources and images. The train station is a replica of the station in the Westworld TV series for example, the escalators are a replica of the Canary Wharf tube station. And then at the virtual autopsy plant, the floating pods where clients’ bodies would be suspended in nitrogen are from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was made in 1967. That was the same year cryonics really took off in America, after the publication of a book called The Prospect of Immortality. So, the idea has been around for a long time, although very few people have actually been preserved up to now. In America it’s less than 300, with about 1500 who’ve registered for when they die.

called a ‘consented’ autopsy, which involves a full examination of every aspect of the body, is happening less and less. A pathologist from Guy’s and St. Thomas’ in London said recently that we’re risking a serious loss of knowledge, which could potentially have a negative effect on our understanding of death and its causes. In the past, autopsies would have been public for any student to learn from. There would be a poster saying when an autopsy would take place, but today because of a change in attitudes that wouldn’t happen. Outside of a very few institutions it’s not allowed in Britain to be present at a dissection. To me that seems odd. Personally, I would advocate for kids in secondary schools to go to dissections and autopsies, but for whatever reason people still see autopsy as a horrific thing, despite the fact that it happens after the event of death and it gives you answers as to what caused it.

JD: Have you ever witnessed an autopsy?

TS: A few years ago, I took part in a dissection course at the medical faculty of the University of Antwerp, where we dissected body parts as opposed to a whole cadaver, which is very different to an autopsy. But some of these body parts had been preserved only by freezing, so after thawing they were as close to the moment of death as possible. I can’t describe the impact it had on me to witness death in that way. If you see a body that is dead, in the flesh, what I experienced is that it effects a change in your own body. The brain I dissected was preserved in formaldehyde, so that when I held it in my hands, my eyes smarted from the fumes. That was a very strange experience, to feel the transference of matter from a dead body to your own.

Even the terminology used is very broad, and people tend to accept that. On the other hand, when it comes to diagnosis of a problem in someone alive, there’s a demand for far more specificity. There are all sorts of moral factors involved in this. If someone has an alcohol or drug dependency for example, an autopsy will generally not be conducted unless there are obviously suspicious circumstances. In some cases, there will be a partial autopsy, which stops once the cause of death is deemed to have been discovered.

JD: So, virtual autopsy is replacing the traditional kind?

TS: No, not exactly. The scalpel isn’t being replaced, but the move is towards a combination of scanning and traditional autopsy. The reasons for this shift though aren’t always to do with advancement.

Obviously virtual autopsy can add new layers of understanding, or make the process more economical, but in many cases, it’s also about making it less invasive on the body, making it more ‘humane’. That interests me. As technologically we become more and more removed from the body, autopsy is following the same logic. That’s why I initially made Showroom both as a video and as a virtual reality space, which is how clients now would usually interact with architectural projects before they’re constructed.

JD: It seems to me that most of your work is about the legacy of modernist, or specifically concrete, architecture. What’s the link between that and the autopsy process?

TS: Well, to me the autopsy room is an extreme version of Le Corbusier’s vision of ‘machines for living’. In other words, the employment of buildings and technologies that facilitate the inhabitant.

Alongside the interviews with pathologists I mentioned before, the other reason I’m here in Finland is to research the work of Alvar Aalto at the archive in Jyväskylä, specifically the tuberculosis sanatorium he designed in Paimio. In these places, absolutely everything is explicitly functional and makes sense in relation to itself, and is designed and designated to serve a purpose. This is the case with autopsy rooms, but on the other hand they might also be seen as transitory, or liminal, spaces. So, within the Showroom video you have what is essentially a kind of processing plant, but then also a chamber which is capable of suspending time itself.

JD: There’s a photograph of Damien Hirst as a student posing beside a severed head at the Royal College of Surgeons. He looks terrified.

TS: [Laughs] I know it. Well, all the body parts we were dissecting, of course they would just melt and start to smell in front of you. It’s surprising how quickly that happens if they haven’t been preserved. But people have an existential dread of their own bodies, long before they even allow themselves to start thinking about dying. Even when it comes to questions about what happens after death, there’s a kind of squeamishness about it. This might go some way towards explaining why so many people refuse autopsies, but it seems strange to me there JD: You get the full ‘rebirth’ package.

This interview was conducted in Helsinki, Finland, where TS: Exactly. I suppose it goes back to the question: what is the specific isn’t more interest in the specific cause of death of a person. If, for Tamsin Snow was artist-in-residence on the HIAP Helsinki motivation behind each of these technologies? At the moment, as a example, a relative dies, the information you can acquire without a International Artist Programme in collaboration with Temple continuation of the Showroom project, I’m interviewing different full autopsy is quite minimal.

Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin. pathologists about the practice of traditional autopsy versus a more Tamsin Snow is an artist who lives and works in Dublin and virtual process, remotely scanning the body basically. What interests JD: Because people don’t want the information? me most is what the consequences of these new technologies might TS: People accept explanations for death that really aren’t that rigor- London. John Dine is a writer living in Athens.

JD: That’s a lot less than applied for a one-way trip to Mars.

TS: [Laughs] I do wonder what kind of lifeline these clients are imagining they can expect in the future. If they’re preserved aged 70, are they going to be revived and then live for 15 or 20 years and die again?

When you listen to people who want to be cryopreserved, it’s clear a lot of them don’t expect to find themselves as themselves after revival.

They don’t want to be ill obviously, but they also imagine a future where the ageing process is reversed and absolutely everything is possible medically, so they’ll wake up as a completely different person.

be. In universities, the practice of medical students witnessing what’s

ous, and it’s quite common for the cause of death to be misunderstood.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

RESIDENCY

David Dunne, Die Wende, offsite installation, Leipzig, Germany, 2017; timber and electrical elements; photo by David Dunne

Finding Refuge DAVID DUNNE DISCUSSES THE PILOTENKUECHE INTERNATIONAL ARTIST RESIDENCE IN LEIPZIG. PILOTENKUECHE International Artist Residence was established in Leipzig in 2007 as a non-profit institution and is organised by artists for artists. Martin Holz and Ines Muff run the programme and their philosophy centres on an interest in exchange through group dynamics and trans-disciplinary experimental strategies. Through an open call process the programme invites selected artists from around the world to come and work in the space for a period of three to five months. Pilotenkueche has international partnerships with Amsterdam, Glasgow, Limerick and Fez in Morocco. It was recently included in a publication about international artist-led spaces, residencies and studios entitled Artist-Run Europe: Practice/Projects/Spaces, edited by Gavin Murphy and Mark Cullen of Pallas Projects, Dublin.

The post-industrial east German city of Leipzig was the centre of the peaceful revolution in 1989 and was transformed after the fall of the Berlin wall and Re-unification. It has been called the ‘new Berlin’ due to its thriving arts scene, low rents and association with the work of artists such as Neo Rauch, Matthias Weischer and Christoph Ruckhäberle, proponents of the New Leipzig School movement in contemporary German painting (though most members reject this classification on account of its imprecision).

In late 2015 I applied to the Pilotenkueche open call. This particular residency has a transdisciplinary approach between art, theory and the sciences that suits my working process. I commenced my threemonth residency in November 2016 after receiving an Arts Council Travel and Training Award. The residency is based at the Spinnerei complex, once the largest cotton mill in Europe. The complex houses a large number of studios, exhibition spaces and residences, as well as the contemporary art centre Spinnerei Halle 14 and Boesner, a large art supply shop that sells everything you could possible need to make work. My residency coincided with the winter Spennerei gallery weekend, a series of large-scale exhibitions, openings and performances which included our own group show at Pilotenkueche. This event draws up to 10,000 visitors to the gallery weekend.

The studio at Pilotenkueche is a 243-metres-squared communal loft. Each artist has a 24-metres-square space with access to workshop tools as well as a common kitchen and bar. I shared an apartment that was offered by Pilotenkueche with the Dutch-Canadian artist Jacqueline Van De Geer. Rental of the apartment costs €350 a month but most of the other artists on the programme sought out their own accommodation. The area of Lindenau/Plagwitz where I lived is particularly vibrant and the cost of living is far cheaper than in Dublin.

David Dunne, Cage, Werkstadt Arts Union, Berlin Neukölln, 2017; steel, plastic, brambles and electrical elements; 98cm x 85cm x 43cm; photo by Ryu Oyama

elements formed the basis of subsequent site-specific artworks in Leipzig and Berlin.

During the building of the new 465-metres-squared, fully remodelled Pilotenkueche residency space, which is now on the site of the former Dietzold factory, I came across an environment that lent itself to a particular ephemeral transformation. Utilising existing timber forms and archival electrical elements, I constructed a site-specific installation titled Die Wende, which references German Unification through notions of chaos, collapse and transformation. Among Leipzig’s many pop-up flea markets, I came upon a number of amateur Super 8 film rolls shot in the 1960s and 70s during the GDR period. On my return to digital work, this found footage will form the basis of my next project.

In each round of the Pilotenkueche residency, artists can realise and show new work. There were 11 artists on the programme coming from various countries including Chile, Cyprus, Japan, Canada, Germany, UK and the US. We had three separate curated group exhibitions, at the Gallery Bipolar, Spinnerei Halle 14 and in the Kulturny Dom Lipsk, where I collaborated with Japanese artist Ryu Oyama and Chilean artist Nicolás Olivares. In addition, artists have the opportunity to deliver artists’ talks or to meet visiting artists through organised studios visits, as well as museum and gallery openings. In one of the openings at Gallery Kub (galeriekub.de) in the district of Connewitz – where the underground punk rock movement developed in the early 1980s – I saw an extraordinary work by the French performance artist Olivier de Sagazan. I thought the scale of this venue and the openness of the curator Christian Liefke would be of particular interest to Irish performance artists.

I was very interested in producing a publication that would complement my exhibition at Werkstadt and was fortunate to meet the Brazilian artist Fernando Davis at his studio in the Spinnerei complex who collaborated with me on the design and production of an exhibition catalogue. An essay in English and German was written by Jule Böttner and printed in Leipzig. My exhibition, ‘Refuge’, opened in January 2017 at Werkstadt Arts Union in Berlin-Neukölln. It was curated by Jule Böttner and Jason Benedict, and consisted of sculpture, installation, drawing and a single projection. The curators at Werkstadt spoke about developing connections with artists and studio spaces in Ireland as a means to foster greater exchange and dialogue.

My experience of this residency was very positive in terms of the opportunities and contacts it provided and the new resilience and flexibility I found in my working process. The newly remodelled Pilotenkueche residency space at Franz-Flemming-Str. is a marked difference from its previous set up at the Spinnerei, in terms of the more generously-sized studio spaces, the professional facilities and an established network which acts as a conduit to the local arts scene.

I have embarked on a number of other artist residencies throughout my career. In 2016 I was selected through an open call from the Werkstadt Arts Union in Berlin-Neukölln as part of their solo exhibition cycle on the subject of ‘power and debility’. I approached this theme from the perspective of war and crisis, creating counterpoints between the flow of refugees seeking asylum in the current European migrant crisis and the migration routes of swallows and house martins that traverse central and northern Europe without border controls.

Perched high in the crevices of buildings, birds’ nests provide a safe haven, temporary lodging away from the industry of war.

In April of the same year, I commenced a residency at RUD AIR in Dalsland on the south west coast of Sweden. During this residency I explored notions of entropy, expropriation and re-contextualisation. I worked with timber and low-tech archival electrical elements, an exchange of materials that informed intuitive responses to particular archaic industrial situations and natural environments. This culminated with a solo exhibition at the Not Quite Arts Centre in Fengerfors, Sweden.

Before travelling to Germany, I worked in my studio in County Wicklow, collecting natural elements from the rural landscape around me. Conversely, during the Pilotenkueche residency, I walked around the city’s western district collecting redundant electrical and organic elements from former factories and overgrown vacant spaces. These David Dunne is a visual artist based in County Wicklow.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

31

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Hyperboles of Form & Colour AOIFE DUNNE DISCUSSES HER DIGITAL INSTALLATION ‘LIMITLESS’ AND UPCOMING COMMISSIONS FOR THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS, LONDON.

Aoife Dunne, Electric Forest, 2016; video still, HD film; image courtesy of the artist

PRIOR to pursuing a career in art, I was always very interested in film.

At the age of 13, I produced a short video piece that was selected to be shown at the Beijing International Film Festival 2008. This gave me the confidence to continue investing time in this passion of mine, which began to manifest in different ways as my career developed.

Being a dancer and performer also influenced my creative process and gave me insights into experiencing an artwork from the perspective of both the performer and the observer. As well as this, I have become increasingly involved in the styling industry, creatively directing editorial shoots for international publications. The experience I have gained from working in this industry over the past six years has been crucial to the development of my artistic practice, which is so heavily focused on clothing and costume. My proficiency with digital media has also been fundamental to the development of my work. I am an avid user of different software programmes, teaching myself the skills required to use editing and 3D modelling programmes. This is particularly important as a large amount of my work is solely computer generated. My background and experience across these different fields has given me the skills and knowledge required to develop and produce my own films.

I created LIMITLESS, a digital installation piece, in 2016 for my degree show at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), where I studied Fine Art Media. I was subsequently commissioned by the Royal Academy of Arts in London to present the work at the RA Lates event, ‘The Summer Circus’, in July 2016. After this exposure, Adam Lerner, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (MCA Denver), invited me to show LIMITLESS as part of the group exhibition ‘Bodaciousss’, curated by Taylor Balkissoon. This exhibition aimed to capture the fluid nature of twenty-first-century artistic practices that are “not only changing the definition of art, but also the ways in which art is produced and consumed” (mcadenver.org/bodacioussss). My work was shown alongside artists such as Dara Birnbaum and Keith Haring, who offer alternative perspectives on what is commonly termed ‘post-internet art’. The work of emerging digital artists was contextualised by artists from earlier generations who pioneered hybrid styles of art-making.

During this period, I was also selected to exhibit at the RDS Visual Art Awards, curated by Alice Maher, which showcased 13 of the best graduating artists of 2016. The selected artists were chosen by a panel of five judges nominated by the RDS, RHA, IMMA and the National

Aoife Dunne, LIMITLESS, 2016; video still, HD film; image courtesy of the artist

Gallery of Ireland. I was delighted to have been selected to exhibit, let alone receive the RDS Monster Truck Studio Award, which has enabled me to develop new work in the Dublin studio for an entire year.

I have always been interested in the complex relationships that exist between the viewer, the artist and the context in which the work is made and exhibited. In the early stages of developing LIMITLESS, I knew that I wanted to create an interactive piece that would potentially allow audiences to see themselves within the work – inviting them to participate in the installation, yet ultimately giving them no control over what was happening. The piece is based on the concept of a video game I created using MAYA and Adobe After Effects software, that I later extended into the physical realm.

An important element within my practice is the use of costumes and the creation of theatrical backdrops. The video features five models all wearing a uniform that I created. While the costumes seem futuristic, they were also influenced by the historic objectification of women under patriarchal societies. I wanted to eradicate the girls’ unique qualities and emphasise the notion of fabricated identity.

Working within the fashion industry over the past six years has heavily influenced my treatment of the body as a medium. I use costume as a vehicle to explore, express and define notions of identity in a consumer society. I want to use the language of clothing to push the boundaries between fashion and sculpture, both of which deal with notions of space and volume in relation to the human body.

My installations are large, colourful, chaotic, vivid playgrounds that conflate the two-dimensional moving image with the threedimensional arrangement of objects in a space. I like to distract the audience with visually-striking sculptural elements that probe the fuzzy boundary between abstraction and decoration. I am inspired by everyday materials, found objects and patterns. I enjoy creating unexpected juxtapositions, with hyperboles of form and colour that make the familiar seem strange. I like to choose bright colours and bold patterns, as these suggest imaginary spaces or hallucinations amidst the electric mania of modern life. The sculptural pieces I used within the LIMITLESS installation were also used throughout the filming process, reaffirming links between the video and the space in which it was presented. The viewer is invited to immerse themselves in this space, enabling them to form a relationship with the video, while highlighting the ongoing dialogue between identity and technology and the fusion of our physical and digital selves. I am currently expanding on

this idea of audience engagement with the use of sensors, sound and improvisational performance.

My background in dance, music and theatre, informs the performative aspects of my work. After studying at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, I became interested in the composition of music, which led me to learn different instruments and experiment with recording and distorting sound digitally. As a result, my videos are both sonically and visually distinctive. I consider sound to be the most important aspect of my editing process, and in the early stages of developing a new body of work, I am always thinking musically. I have been experimenting with the idea of an interactive live performance piece which would involve a large group of people and objects, and would incorporate sound, movement, technology and costume. Over the next few months, I want to find ways of interlinking my skills in theatre and digital media. As part of this work-in-progress, I have been collaborating with Dublin Youth Dance Company’s Artistic Director, Mariam Ribón, on a new piece that will be performed by her senior company at the opening of LIMITLESS in Draíocht.

I am also currently working on a commission for the Royal Academy of Arts in London for two separate digital works which will be exhibited in June and August as part of their RA Lates programme.

I am in discussions about a solo exhibition later this year in New York, where I hope to have the opportunity to be more ambitious and playful regarding the scale of my work. I am sure that my ongoing practice will be affected, both technically and aesthetically, by the evolution of technology and that unprecedented levels of interactivity and audience engagement will be achieved through modern technologies such as sensors and holograms. Capitalising on these innovations will allow my work to connect with audiences in new and exciting ways.

My practice as an early career artist embodies some of the principles central to the new visual arts programme at Draíocht arts centre, developed by curator-in-residence Sharon Murphy. Draíocht has commissioned me to adapt LIMITLESS for the main gallery this summer and has invited me to co-curate Draíocht@Night – a summer evening’s extravaganza of performance, art, music, dance and food that will take place on the opening of my exhibition on 7 July.

Aoife Dunne is a visual artist currently living and working in Dublin. aoifedunne.com

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

IVARO

Art After Death: The Artist’s Estate IVARO MANAGER ALEX DAVIS DISCUSSES ISSUES AROUND THE ARTISTS’ ESTATES AND LEGACIES. LOOKING after an artist’s legacy is crucial for our future cultural heritage. The family and heirs of an artist often suddenly become responsible for managing the artist’s legacy – not an easy role to assume. Some of the tasks of an artist’s estate include authenticating works, identifying forgeries, managing requests to reproduce artworks, maintaining records, providing information for exhibitions and catalogues and managing websites.

The work of an artist’s estate can be made much easier if artists consider the issue of estate planning during their lifetime and make a will providing clear guidelines on their wishes for the future management of their life’s work. A will sets out your intentions for the disposal of your property after your death and there are numerous good reasons to make one. It will allow you to decide who to appoint as executor, how your artworks and personal archives will be distributed and who benefits from your copyright. By arranging your affairs, you can also minimise the tax liabilities. Revoking a will is straightforward and making changes to your will at any time is also possible. If you don’t make a will, not only will your estate not pass in accordance with your wishes, it may lead to disputes after your death and will certainly lead to unnessesary delay and expense for the beneficiaries.

are infringed. Moral rights include the artist’s right to be identified as the creator of their work and to object to deragatory treatment of their work.

Copyright lasts for 70 years after the artist’s death and can be a very important asset for an artist’s estate. In the case of internationally famous artists, copyright can be very valuable indeed. For example, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has annual licensing revenues of $19m per year. Copyright is a distinct asset that exists independently of the physical artwork. Therefore, when planning your estate, you may choose to give the physical artwork to one person but give the copyright in the work to another. Copyright and other intellectual property rights should be specifically discussed and addressed in any visual artist’s estate plan, with respect to minimising estate taxes and building a legacy.

showing that attempts have been made to locate a will. When appointed, they must pay the funeral expenses, debts, liabilities and taxes and dispose of your artworks according to the laws of intestacy.

Dying intestate may lead to disputes after your death, causing unnessesary delay and expense for the beneficiaries. If you do not have any surviving next of kin, the intestacy rules do not allow your estate to pass to a friend or a charity. Instead, your estate passes to the government.

THE RESALE RIGHT Since January 2012, Irish artists have a new asset which they can bequeath in their will to their heirs or beneficiaries. The Resale Right gives the creator of an artwork a right to receive a royalty payment on the resale of their work, thus providing artists with an ongoing stake in the value of their work. A resale royalty is applied only when artworks resell for €3,000 or more through the art market. The seller of the artwork is liable to pay the royalty. Art dealers and auction houses must supply the information required to enable the royalty to be collected any time up to three years from the date of sale. Collecting the resale right is one of the services provided by the Irish Visual Artists Rights Organisation (IVARO) to its members. In nearly all EU countries, the royalties are collected by a dedicated artists’ collecting society.

The Resale Right forms part of the artist’s esate and can be passed on by will (or in accordance with the rules of intestacy if there is no will). It’s important to remember that copyright and the Artists’ Resale Right are two distinct assets and should be referred to seperately in your will, even if the beneficiary is the same person. The Right only applies to any sale of a work following the first transfer of ownership by the creator. If an artist leaves a work by bequest in a will, this counts as the first transfer of ownership and will attract a resale royalty when the beneficiary comes to sell it.

Managing an artist’s estate will be the topic of a conference to be held in Dublin this November. Organised by IVARO, the event will look at strategies for managing the artistic legacy and will consider questions such as: What role can museums, galleries and archives play? Can artists’ heirs cooperate and learn from each other? How can living artists best prepare their legacy? The event will draw on the expertise of a wide range of practitioners from private, public and academic institutions. Details of the event will soon be available on ivaro.ie.

SETTING UP A TRUST OR BEQUEATHING WORKS Another option is to set up a trust, where the trust deed specifies how works will be managed. Trust funds are generally invested to produce income over a long period of time, enabling you to benefit a person or institution. For example, in your will you can set up a trust for your young children, so that artworks can be held for them and divided between them at a later date. Alternatively, you might direct your trustee to sell your artworks over a period of time, using the proceeds INVENTORY, COPYRIGHT & APPOINTING AN EXECUTOR An essential step in planning ahead is to get your records in order. for the maintenance and education of your children. Artists can set up Making an inventory of your property (bank accounts, insurance a trust during their own lifetimes, the advantage being that it would policies, title deeds, artworks, consignments, copyright etc.) will make allow the artist to clearly guide the work of the trust over time, it easier for you to plan your will, and should simplfy the task for those ensuring that their ideas and wishes are continued after their death. who look after your estate when you die. An inventory of your work The disadvantage of simply relying on a will is that the artist is no allows the executor to establish which artwork you are referring to, if longer around to check that the will is actually being implemented as you have decided to leave certain works to certain people. Your she/he intended.

Bequeathing works to an institution is another popular option. executor will have to get the work valued, which will be easier if each work can be readily located and identified. A detailed inventory will Gifts of artworks to a public institution such as a museum, gallery or also assist in your artworks being readily acknowledged as yours in library may enhance an artists reputation; however it is important to future years. This may impact on the potential curatorial and sales check that the institution is in a position to accept the artworks. Many value of your work. An inventory is also a useful source for museums and galleries have policies around what kind of work they will accept. There are tax benefits associated with trusts which vary, authentication of your artwork.

You may appoint one or more executors. For example, you may depending on how the trust is structured and how funds are disbursed. appoint one executor to deal with all matters relating to your artworks In order to know exactly which benefits are connected with a specific and another to deal with the remaining aspects of your estate. In type of trust, it is important to seek legal advice.

If you don’t make a will or write an invalid will, then your appointing your executor (who can also be a beneficiary under the will), choose someone who you trust, is likely to outlive you, artworks will be disposed of accoring to the rules of intestacy. If you understands your artwork and will carry out your intentions. The die intestate, as a general rule, assets are frozen until a grant of Alex Davis, Manager, IVARO. duties should be entrusted to persons who do not have a personal administration is approved, followed by a lengthy probate. Your ivaro.ie vested interest in your estate. You may also want to authorise the relatives must ask the court to appoint themselves as ‘administrators’ executor to manage your moral rights and to take action if these rights of your estate and will have to prepare a number of legal documents,

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

33

FESTIVAL

The Primal Voice CHRIS CLARKE INTERVIEWS MATT PACKER, CURATOR OF TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS 2017, ABOUT THE RESEARCH BEHIND THIS YEAR’S THEME.

Atlantis House, Burtonport , c.1977; image courtesy of Pat Langan, The Irish Times

Chris Clarke: You’ve titled this iteration of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts ‘They Call Us Screamers’. Where does this title come from and what does it refer to?

Matt Packer: The title of the exhibition borrows from the title of a book written by Jenny James, who established a radical ‘primal therapy’ commune called Atlantis in the west of Ireland in the mid 1970s.

The community of Atlantis focused on ‘de-programming’ themselves from the modern world through self-sufficient farming, collective living and psychotherapeutic exercises that took inspiration from Wilhelm Reich and the People Not Psychiatry movement. They were nicknamed the ‘Screamers’ in a 1976 Sunday World article, referring to their practice of primal scream therapy – a form of psychotherapy developed by Dr Arthur Janov that sought to re-enact the traumas of birth, reversing the neurosis that follows in later life. John Lennon and Steve Jobs were among the many advocates of primal therapy during this same period.

Soon after arriving in Ireland, Atlantis became embroiled in controversy, with accusations of cultish behaviour, kidnapping, child neglect and physical abuse. There were bomb threats, reports of traumatised ex-members and calls in the Daíl to have them deported. The book tells the story of their time in Ireland from James’s perspective.

CC: There is a perception of Galway as a place that exerts a certain pull: it attracts artists and writers, young people, surfers, spiritualists, eccentrics and outsiders (not to mention tourists). How did this inform your approach?

MP: Yes, Galway has a lingering reputation as a place of hippies and drifters. In many ways, this is an unfair generalisation, but at the same time I wanted to scratch at the foundations a little. I wanted to think through the legacies of the lifestyle revolutions of the late 1960s and 70s as a refusal of mid-twentieth century Modernism. I was interested in the possible futurity of that position, that refusal, within an Irish context. Galway is the perfect place for those kinds of enquiries.

CC: It’s also a peripheral space, located on the fringes of Ireland and Europe, while facing towards the vast emptiness of the Atlantic Ocean. Do you think that this sense of isolation, of outwardness, influences its attractiveness?

MP: Well, the Screamers were never based in Galway, but further north in Donegal – initially in the small fishing village of Burtonport and then later on a small island called Innisfree. I’m not sure if those details matter, really. More important was the sense of opportunity that was promised by the west coast of Ireland: the opportunity to live without the encroachments of a modern and competitive society.

CC: I know you’re still in the process of curating the exhibition

and its participating artists but, based on what you’ve seen so far, would you say that this sense of opportunity that you describe is something that resonates with contemporary artists? Is there still a feeling among artists that new forms of living are desirable and that the commune might offer this?

MP: In a sense, I feel that the kinds of hippyish refusals that I’m trying to get at have very little legacy within contemporary art and its discourses in general. It’s more common to look back and point out the failures and ideological corruptions of the period, or to point out that they were all supported by trust funds or whatever. At the same time, I’ve become a bit frustrated with the idea that contemporary art should have a critically competitive relationship to a world defined by capitalism, commercialism, instrumentalism etc., yet the options for refusing that structure of competitiveness are too often seen as positions of self-indulgence and irrelevance. There are lots of artists that are trying to work through that idea as a paradox and there is also a resurgent interest among artists (and others) who seek to develop alternative structures of family or forms of collectivism.

political condition of the body undergoing a hunger strike and the body undergoing a primal therapy process seemed to be worlds apart in the same time and place.

CC: The idea of building an exhibition or festival around the concept of the commune feels almost counter-intuitive. It’s making public that which is generally secretive, secluded and bound by its own codes and conventions. Is this something that is acknowledged in ‘They Call Us Screamers’ and, if so, how did you approach it?

MP: Firstly, I don’t think all communes are alike. Secondly, I don’t have the sense that communes (if it’s possible to be general about them) are secret and secluded. I spent some of my early life in a commune in west Wales and perhaps that’s conditioned my positive view of people trying to live together differently.

There’s no sugarcoating some examples, however. Atlantis House (the name of the house where the Screamers’ were based in Burtonport) seemed to have been a very volatile place, full of abuses of power, rash behaviour and bad tempers. At the same time, they were radically CC: How about the practice of primal screaming itself? The very hospitable, open to all sorts of characters and had a constantly shifting idea seems to imply a process of catharsis, of pure expression, (unofficial) membership and network of affiliates. that has its own relationship to art historical practices, particularly in abstract painting. Certainly, this notion has come under CC: TULCA includes an open call for artist submissions as part of sustained critique by various artists, critics and curators, but do its process. What criteria did you set for artists applying to paryou see a space for it in contemporary arts discourse? Does the ticipate this year? How many artists are involved in ‘They Call Us Screamers’? primal scream still have creative potential?

MP: The exercise of primal screaming was a famous part of the MP: The project is quite open, despite having a very specific starting Screamers’ identity, but it was also a relatively popular ‘self-help’ point. There are ideas here that are about the lifestyle approaches of approach at the time. Essentially, the principles of primal screaming the 1970s, but there are also things that connect to ideas of the primal maintained that most of our waking lives are spent in repression of voice, imaginations of Ireland, modernism and its refusal. That open trauma and resentments of our own birth that we learnt to manage in and multi-tangential approach was reflected in the huge number of childhood. Primal screaming provides the opportunity to unlock that submissions we received through the open call process. In terms of repression. It’s not the most straightforward of the psychotherapies criteria, it came down to quality of work, thematic relevance and the and neither is it the most radical. In many ways, it does have some limits of the budget. Compared to previous editions, it’s a more comparity with the work of the abstract expressionist painters, but there is pact list of artists, which has also meant that it’s been possible to suptypically no emphasis on representation or image-making in the pri- port larger-scale work and more commissioned work in general. mal therapy process.

The project is certainly not an attempt to resuscitate primal CC: Which venues will TULCA take place in this year? therapy or imbue abstract expressionism with any new relevance. As MP: The confirmed venues are Galway Arts Centre, the Connacht an important aspect of the Screamers’ founding philosophy, it made Tribune building, Nun’s Island Theatre and 126 Artist-Run Gallery. sense to try and work with it. There’s something interesting for me We’re still a few months ahead, so there may be some further changes about this idea of the primal scream that can speak of historical trau- yet. The festival runs from Friday 3 to Sunday 19 November. ma, but without language. It was told to me that during the hunger Matt Packer is curator of this year’s TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. strike protests in the North, most houses in Burtonport demonstrated He will commence a new role in June 2017 as Director of EVA solidarity by flying a black flag from their windows. This was all hapInternational. Chris Clarke is a writer and critic and Senior pening while the Screamers’ were living in the village. The primal and Curator at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork.

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The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

HOW IS IT MADE?

Remains of the Day JONATHAN CARROLL INTERVIEWS THE TEAM BEHIND ‘ROSC 50 - 1967/2017’ AT IMMA.

Marta Minajin, Joyce’s Tower, Rosc ‘80; photo by Dorothy Walker

Poster image for ROSC ‘80

‘ROSC 50 – 1967/2017’ was presented at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and the National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL) from 5 May – 18 June 2017. The exhibitions form part of an ongoing collaborative research project undertaken by the two institutions to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first ROSC international contemporary art exhibition in 1967. In my view, this exhibition should have been an obligatory visit for all curators. It was a lesson on what remains after an exhibition finishes and how this might be received or remembered.

Many of the protagonists involved in the original ROSC exhibitions have passed on, yet material is still being uncovered and archived, and there is still continued interest in its legacy. There is a palpable sense that this project is a race against memory loss.

ephemera interesting by actively prompting people to re-evaluate their own memories or memorabilia. We will be hosting an ‘archive drive’, similar to the 1916 commemoration event promoting the collection of material culture.

Brenda Moore-McCann: I was appointed the IMMA/NIVAL ROSC 50 researcher (February – November 2017), which involved looking through NIVAL’s archives (including those of Patrick Scott, Dorothy Walker and James Johnson Sweeney), as well as the Patrick J. Murphy, and RTÉ archives relating to ROSC. The research was conducted under several headings, including: the ambition of ROSC, people’s memories of ROSC and the contexts for ROSC, as well as its legacy, audiences, critical engagement (national and international), media responses and public responses. Samples of archival material have been laid out in IMMA’s Project Spaces and an evolving selection will be presented over the summer.

might include: contribution to the existing archival material; critical responses, digital projects, questionnaires, actions, objects, performative events etc. We are also programming a series of talks and events to explore themes relating to ROSC, including its impact, audiences, critical reception and legacy. A symposium in the autumn will be informed by these earlier events.

JC: ROSC relied on the energy of several strong personalities for its continuation over two decades. How will you convey this in the project?

LM: This aspect is evident in many accounts of ROSC. We hope to include some of these key players in the programme as it unfolds, potentially through public talks, written responses or the symposium.

However, we also hope to look beyond the big stories and personalities, to reconsider ROSC’s complexity and nuance. We have also invited some of the people involved to contribute new material. For example, we are screening the film ROSC: A Poetry of Vision, directed by independent filmmaker Ciarín Scott – daughter of Michael Scott – who developed the film from footage of the first three ROSC exhibitions. One of the things I found interesting, when reading through the archival correspondence, is the extent to which the organisers were personally involved, inviting critics and artists for meals or to stay in their homes. Another way we explored these personalities was through working with students on the MA in Art and Research Collaboration at IADT. ARC’s project explores ROSC ’92 – the ROSC that didn’t happen – through the construction of several fictional characters who take on some of the characteristics of the real organisers. Aspects of the ARC project are presented in the Project Spaces.

JC: Have there been other attempts to revisit ROSC? SK: The original idea for Dublin Contemporary in 2011 was to revisit ROSC. The exhibition ‘more adventurous thinking… from the archive of Dorothy Walker’, with an artist’s response from Seamus Nolan, was organised by NIVAL and shown at the NCAD Gallery in 2013.

LM: There have been many changes in the Irish cultural landscape since the first ROSC. Other important initiatives, such as EVA International (1977), address some of the same concerns as ROSC.

JC: What is the most important legacy of ROSC? SK: IMMA of course is one of the legacies of ROSC. What is remarkable are the changes in art between 1967 to 1989, when IMMA was founded and Declan McGonagle was appointed director. McGonagle’s JC: Why did you choose to use the Project Spaces at IMMA, rather socially-informed practice was diametrically opposite to ROSC. A notable legacy has been the increasing professionalism within Irish than the regular exhibition spaces?

LM: Initially, the idea of an exhibition was considered; however, the arts institutions, following the difficulties of ROSC. An example is the subject of ROSC seemed ideal as a vehicle to test out ways of working use of expert panels, which ensure more discursive methods for selectwith NIVAL. This archival approach offered more opportunities to ing artworks and artists. The collections of both IMMA and the Hugh revisit accounts of ROSC and to examine its legacy as open-ended Lane have benefited from the ROSC artworks purchased by Gordon Lambert. For example, the purchase of Agnes Martin’s work was conresearch. troversial at the time, but it is now one of the jewels in the Hugh Lane’s collection. Numerous people who worked on ROSC have since been JC: Will you present artworks originally shown at ROSC LM: There will be no actual artworks in the Project Spaces. We will absorbed into new institutions or have opened their own galleries. have some original archival material from NIVAL, but most will be copies of documentation. This will invite people to read into the sub- JC: With the recent deaths of Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz JC: What were your aims for the collaboration and how did they ject of ROSC, while conveying the wealth of material and the impor- and Irish artist Brian King (both included in ROSC ’80), is there a tance of archival resources like NIVAL. We are also screening film renewed sense of urgency to record some of the stories relating to evolve? the ROSC exhibitions?

SK: One of the main aims was to generate new primary sources, so we material from RTÉ’s archive. did a callout for material during the project. We are inviting people to JF: We hosted a special open day at NIVAL, partly in response to what BMcC: I am presently interviewing the international artists who email us with their memories of ROSC or to submit letters, photo- is or isn’t shown in IMMA. We are showing some actual artworks, like showed in ROSC. I have interviewed as many as I can face-to-face, askgraphs, budgets, diaries and other ephemera. At the end of the project, Patrick Scott’s Floating Hand 1 (1981), which came to us as part of the ing them three specific questions: what they thought of ROSC, what they showed and how ROSC compared with what was happening this material will be given to NIVAL. Another key aim was to empha- recently-donated Patrick Scott archive. sise that archives are living things that develop through use. We will SK: My first draft of the display at IMMA contained several original internationally at the time. publish all the talks and lectures in a four-part digital magazine, The artworks, but this was not really what we wanted to focus on; rather JF: What I am most concerned with is the lack of visible correspondwe wanted engagement with the archive (as opposed to objects) and ence relating to contemporary exhibitions. While we have some very Digital Digest, as well as disseminating them via SoundCloud. responses to ROSC, both from the viewing public and the media. insightful correspondence from the ROSC committees (including eloJC: Jennifer, you spoke about projects like this providing an During the preparation phase, we also received new material relating quent typed letters between Dorothy Walker and Clement Greenberg), opportunity to identify gaps in the collection. An example is the to work shown as part of ROSC. For example, Christo provided new we have little or no written communication surrounding contempomissing ROSC ‘67 poster (the ‘71, ‘77 and ‘80 posters are displayed images (of his Wrapped Walk Ways at St. Stephen’s Green in 1976) rary exhibitions. This is something that should concern any curators making exhibitions today. which he deemed superior to those we already had. at IMMA).

Jonathan Carroll: How did this collaboration between IMMA and NIVAL come about?

Lisa Moran: The collaboration with NIVAL will evolve over a two-year period and will be informed by this initial research phase. IMMA is interested in developing its role as a site for research and learning. This collaboration offers opportunities for IMMA and NIVAL to work together in ways that are complementary and mutually beneficial. An important precedent was ‘Mobile Encounters: Documenting the Early Years of Performance Art in Ireland’, which was jointly curated by IMMA and NIVAL in 2015.

Seán Kissane: We use NIVAL a lot because it is a fantastic resource. The materials displayed at IMMA are not meant to comprehensively tell the story of ROSC; rather, they outline the collaboration and reflect NIVAL’s archival holdings.

Jennifer Fitzgibbon: Another good example is when we found (among a recent donation of items) a second copy of Young Rosc ‘84 with a text

by Carl Andre to the young people of Ireland. We previously only had one copy, and therefore could not have lent a unique item to IMMA for display. Ultimately, this was a chance for us to add histories. History is not static – there is always room for reinterpretation – so there is a good argument for NIVAL’s existence into the future. We can make

JC: The project title implies a continuation of the ROSC project.

Can you discuss the new artworks you have commissioned and any other ways you will be contemporising ROSC? LM: We are inviting a number of artists to submit proposals in response to the theme of ROSC. NIVAL pointed us to artists who had previously shown an interest in their collection. Potential outputs

Jonathan Carroll is an independent curator based in Dublin. Lisa Moran is Curator of Engagement and Learning at IMMA. Seán Kissane is Curator of Exhibitions at IMMA. Brenda MooreMcCann is an art historian, writer and researcher of the ‘ROSC 50 – 1967/2017’ project. Jennifer Fitzgibbon is an art historian and administrator of NIVAL.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

35

PUBLIC ART ROUNDUP

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

film, live and recorded sound, sculpture and spoken word in an atmospheric guided trail through tunnels, vaulted ammunition stores and engine rooms – spaces that were opened to the public for the first time.

SÍOLAD

#DRAWMEDOCKLANDS Artist’s name: Chris Judge Title of work: #DrawMeDocklands TORPEDO Commissioning body: Dublin City Council, Business to Arts, Docklands Arts Fund project Description: DrawMeDocklands is artist and illustrator Chris Judge’s latest commission by Dublin City Council with the Docklands Arts Fund. The mural is constructed on metal sheets attached to hoarding which is 120 feet in length. The hoarding will be in place for the next two years and is a colourful addition to Custom House Quay. Judge’s tribute to Dubliners in Dublin’s Docklands includes 60 unique life-size Artists’ names: Fiona Coffey and Liz McMahon portraits of people who took part in the #DrawMeDocklands social Title of work: Síolad (an old Irish term meaning to sow seed) media campaign run by Dublin City Council and Business to Arts in Commissioning body: Gaelscoil Na Mi, Ashbourne Date advertised: 2016 Budget: €12,000 Commission type: Per Cent for Art Project partners: Gaelscoil Na Mi, Ashbourne, Project Manager/ Curator Rina Whyte Description: In creating Síolad, artists Fiona Coffey and Liz McMahon Artists’ names: Marie Brett, John McHarg engaged with students and staff at Gaelscoil Na Mi, as well as researchWork title: Torpedo ing the area in which the school is located, before embarking on the Date sited: 17 – 18 June 2017 project. Their research led them to the name ‘Ashbourne’, which was Budget: 20,000 named after the Ash tree by Frederick Bourne in 1820 – the word being Commission type: Self-initiated socially engaged project funded by a combination of his name and that of his favourite tree. In researchthe Arts Council (via an AIC award administered by Create) and Cork ing how the Ash tree came to Ireland, the artists found that shortly County Council Economic and Social Development after the Ice Age when the weather warmed up the birds and animals Photo (detail) by Enda Kavanagh Project partners: Camden Fort Meagher, Cork Midsummer Festival carried ash seeds across land bridges from Britain and Europe, firmly Description: Torpedo was the latest artwork by collaborative partner- Autumn 2016. During the campaign people were encouraged to sub- rooting them in Irish soil. The artists proposed the making of a sculpship Marie Brett and John McHarg, produced in collaboration with mit portrait selfies using the hashtag #DrawMeDocklands. The aim of tural artwork that would capture birds carrying seeds in their beaks. community members of Camden Fort Meagher. It was a live arts event the project is to create artwork on available hoardings around the The children of Gaelscoil Na Mi drew birds carrying seeds in their staged underground in a coastal fort in Cork Harbour. Inspired by perimeter of construction sites to enhance the public domain using beaks and those drawings became the source of inspiration for the Foucault’s pendulum and the Brennan torpedo, the event spanned vibrant and dynamic artwork relevant to the local community. realisation of the visual element of this artwork.

36

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

July – August 2017

OPPORTUNITIES

Opportunities JOBS 3D ANIMATOR: BROWN BAG FILMS Brown Bag Films are hiring a 3D Animator. Key areas of responsibility: work closely with the director to create high standard of animation for broadcast; must be have strong communication skills and be willing to take notes and direction; work to tight deadlines; work closely with rigging team to troubleshoot and problem solve the rigging pipeline; work well individually as well as part of a larger team. Person specification/requirements: 3+ years CG animation experience; ability to problem solve and predict potential problems with assigned tasks; thorough knowledge of Maya and/or 3DS Max; excellent organisational and communication skills.

Deadline 19 July Web iftn.ie/jobs/filmtvjob, brownbagfilms.ie ADMIN/PRODUCTION ASSISTANT: MOPHRAT, BRUSSELS Mophradat is an international nonprofit contemporary arts association that creates opportunities for thinking, producing and sharing among contemporary artists from the Arab World and their peers everywhere.

Requirements: fluent in English, excellent French or Dutch; five years in administration of an arts organisation is preferred; experience with basic accounting and budgeting; experience of general office administration; impeccable organisational skills; enthusiastic interest in contemporary arts; understanding of the needs and work processes of a small organisation. Responsibilities: day-to-day administration of the office and the activities (filing, inquiries, mail, personnel, minutes, contracts etc.); organising and preparing the accounting for the external accountant (including organising the director’s cashboxes, expense reports etc.); update and management of support infrastructure for the programming, including contact lists, press releases, etc.; assisting in organising events; organising staff, artists and collaborators travels; managing personnel administration; assisting with other project-based production demands as they arise. Please send your application (cover letter and CV) to office@mophradat.org indicating ‘vacancy’ in the message subject.

Deadline 10 July Web mophradat.org/who/job-vacancies DCCOI EDUCATION & OUTREACH The Design and Crafts Council of Ireland (DCCoI) is currently recruiting for an Education and Outreach Officer. Re-

porting to the Education Manager (with strong working link to Exhibition and Programmes Curator) the Education + Outreach Officer will manage, develop and co-ordinate targeted education initiatives that raise awareness, increase skills, critical thinking and understanding around National Craft Gallery exhibitions such as: talks programmes, masterclasses, workshops, conferences/ seminars and National Craft Gallery schools programmes.

This is a two-year fixed-term appointment for 19.5 hours a week (including some weekend work), commencing July 2017 with a six-month probationary period. The successful candidate will be required to be based in Design and Crafts Council of Ireland Offices/National Craft Gallery, Kilkenny, with occasional travel nationally/internationally.

Deadline 12 noon, 7 July Web dccoi.ie/education-outreach-officer

OPEN CALLS ILIGHT MARINA BAY iLight Marina Bay, Asia’s leading sustainable light art festival, returns for its sixth edition in March 2018. Organised

by Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, the three-week festival will illuminate Marina Bay’s urban spaces with innovative and sustainable light art installations designed by creative talents from around the world. The organisers are now inviting submissions from local and international artists, designers, creative industry practitioners, equipment suppliers, business and educational institutions. The budget available to shortlisted artists to produce and deliver light art installations of varying sizes and scale is Singapore $15,000 each, including different expenses (artist fees, artistic production, artist airfare and accommodation outside of what is provided by the festival etc.).

Deadline 31 July Web ilightmarinabay.sg REGIONS Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre is seeking affordable artworks for a series of showcase exhibitions in the gallery’s foyer retail space. Regions will give local artists from across the catchment area, at all stages of their career, an opportunity to showcase their work in seven installments, each four weeks in duration and each focusing on a particular region. West Cork Arts Centre covers the Skibbereen and Bantry urban and rural area, which stretches from the Beara Peninsula in the west, to Clonakilty in the east, from Dunmanway in the north,

to the islands of Cape Clear and Sherkin in the south. Submissions are open to any artists living or working within the region. The next installment of the Regions series will feature the Baltimore and the Islands region.

Submitted artwork must be for sale at a retail price of between €10 and €400, and must be no bigger than 80cm on its longest edge. The exhibition will run from Thursday 3 August – Wednesday 30 August 2017. Please email jpeg images of the artwork you are submitting, no more than three images per artist, with full details of each artwork, your contact details and a short artists bio/statement for publicity purposes.

Deadline 10 July Web westcorkartscentre.com Contact Alison Email info@westcorkartscentre.com Telephone 028 22090

RESIDENCIES BLUEPROJECT FOUNDATION Blueproject Foundation opens its yearly call for artists-in-residence, a public programme open to all types of formats, ideas, artistic and cultural proposals.

The residency programme at Blueproject Foundation is one of the main focuses of the foundation, its objective being to offer support in the production of new projects and give visibility to emerging artists. This call is open to any artist interested as an individual or on behalf of a group or company, regardless of their age, nationality or creative discipline. Economic contribution of a total of €16,000 net (all charges included) to be shared among the three winning projects, used to cover the project costs or any other expenses directly related to the purpose of the proposal (assembly, exhibition mechanisms, flights, accommodation and expenses, in the case of artists that do not reside in Barcelona, etc.).

Deadline 26 July Web blueprojectfoundation.org

video, installation, performance, choreography, theater, music or street art.

Residency includes: a grant for development and implementation of project ($700 USD); compensation of air ticket and/or railway fare ($385); compensation of the project materials (up to $140); accommodation in a furnished studio apartment; a workshop (33 metres square); PR support and assistance in coordination of the developing project.

Deadline 31 August Web zaryavladivostok.ru/en/artists-support AKIYOSHIDAI As a base for expressive and creative activities of both international and domestic artists, Akiyoshidai International Art Village (AIAV) was constructed August 1998, in Shuho Town next to the Akiyoshidai National Park, a beautiful limestone landscape formed over 300 million years ago. Participating artists are expected to bring new ideas to the local culture and people while they, in turn, will hopefully acquire new perspectives. The residence program at Akiyoshidai International Art Village is intended to become a space for artists to go beyond cultural borders and expand their outlooks, exchange their unique understandings and establish relationships with fellow artists.

Theme: ‘The Future of This Land’.

Residency period: 14 January – 9 March 2018. Number of artists accepted: three artists (two international and one Japanese), 40 years old or under (born on or after 2 April, 1977). Applicants may apply as a group no larger than two artists. Support includes: travel expenses (a one-time round trip from your neighboring international airport to AIAV); accommodation at AIAV (private room with bath/toilet); studio (assignment will be arranged after due deliberation; artists may have to share); production expenses: 200,000 yen (For each group); per diem: 2,800 yen x days of the program (per person).

Deadline 31 July Web aiav.jp/english

COMPETITIONS ZARYA ZARYA artist-in-residence programme, based at ZARYA Center for Contemporary Art in Vladivostok, Russia, is a project aimed at provision of support to professionals in the field of contemporary art that welcomes artists regardless of their preferred genres and techniques, as well as age and nationality. The ZARYA residency offers the young artists an opportunity to live and work in a new environment conducive to intensive work.

Applicant requirements: individual artists or teams (age requirements – not younger than 18 years) working with painting, sculpture, graphics, photo and

DIG WHERE YOU STAND Galway Film Centre is delighted to announce a new funding scheme for young filmmakers in Galway City and Galway County called Dig Where You Stand. Through Dig Where You Stand, the plan is to develop a pool of young filmmaking talent in Galway and to offer emerging local filmmakers a chance to develop their talent as documentary filmmakers.

Filmmakers are encouraged to look at the broad themes of ‘migration’, ‘landscape’ and ‘language’, which resonate not just in Galway but throughout Eu-

rope, and tie in with the themes invoked

by Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture. The Dig Where You Stand project will also provide opportunities for young and emerging filmmakers from diverse backgrounds to link into the Screen Talent Europe Network and the project will offer a professional progression route for filmmakers with opportunities to connect with their European counterparts.

Two individual short documentary films, 10 to 15 minutes in duration, will be produced, with one based in Galway City and one in County Galway. Participating filmmakers must be based in Galway and be under 35 years of age. A budget of up to €6000 is available per film. The participating filmmakers will be mentored by established documentary filmmakers. Galway Film Centre will provide support through equipment, advice and assistance.

Deadline 5pm, 7 July Web galwayfilmcentre.ie/dig-where-youstand

COURSES / WORKSHOPS / TRAINING SOFTDAY 4TH ANNUAL ACOUSCENIC LISTENING INTENSIVE Softday (Sean Taylor and Mikael Fernstrom) decamp to the stunning setting of the Burren College of Art to host their annual one-day Acouscenic Listening Intensive. This intensive will focus on the study of listening, creative soundwalking and the mindful meditative practices of Tai Chi and Qigong.

The intensive is intended to enhance the participant’s perception of sound and silence, offering a unique approach for situated soundscapes, as well as offering movement/sound/and listening improvisations and strategies. These strategies are designed to enhance our skills in mindfulness, listening and attuning to place, body and voice as instruments of creativity and wellbeing.

There will be time and space for individual and group creativity, playfulness and improvised performance to emerge.

The intensive is designed for participants to have the opportunity to be with oneself and to also have the support and camaraderie of the group.

This workshop is open to all cultural producers and members of the public who are interested in exploring Acouscenic Listening as a creative tool. €50 (waged). €30 (unwaged/OAP/student).

Lunch provided. Maximum 14 places.

Date 19 August Web softday.ie/acouscenic Email patricia.moriarty@ul.ie Telephone 0868930919

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

Summer 2017

ROI

We have just come to the end of our Spring/Summer programme of professional development events. During the last few months we have run 13 continuing professional development events around Ireland and have met with over 220 artists at these events, supported and hosted by the following local partners organisations: Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology; Fingal County Council Arts Office; Sligo Arts Service; Royal Hibernian Academy School; Tipperary County Council Arts Office; Damer House Gallery; Uilinn: West Cork Arts Centre; Kerry County Council Arts Service; KFest Killorglin; Bealtaine Festival; Galway City Council and Galway County Council Arts Offices and Clare County Council.

Dublin City GET TOGETHER 2017 Fri 15 Sept @IMMA. Places: 200+. Cost: tbc.

DEVELOPING CREATIVE PROPOSALS In partnership with RHA Autumn date tbc @RHA. Places: 10 – 12. Cost: €80/40 (VAI members).

PEER CRITIQUE SCULPTURE & INSTALLATION In partnership with RHA Autumn date tbc @Royal Hibernian Academy.

Places: 6. Cost: €80/40 (VAI members).

Further topics planned for Dublin: Autumn/Winter 2017 Writing About Your Work Tax & Self Assessment Health & Safety for Visual Artists Marketing & Social Media for Visual Artists Peer Critique: Painting

Fingal SUSTAINING YOUR PRACTICE: MID TO LATE CAREER ARTISTS In partnership with Fingal County Council Date/venue tbc

Galway VAI INFORMATION SESSION & ONE-TO-ONE CLINICS ON A RANGE OF TOPICS In partnership with Galway City Council & Galway County Council Arts Offices Date/venue tbc

Offaly VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFÉ / SHOW & TELL In conjunction with Birr Vintage and Culture Week Sat 5 Aug @Birr Theatre & Arts Centre. Places: 20+. Cost: FREE.

Tipperary WORKING WITH DIGITAL IMAGES WITH TIM DURHAM: ROSCREA In partnership with Tipperary County Council Date tbc, 10.00 – 14.00 @Damer House Gallery.

Places: 10 – 12. Cost: €40/20 (VAI members).

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

Further regional events planned: Autumn/Winter 2017 Marketing & Social Media for Visual Artists Writing About Your Work Regional Artist 1-to-1 Clinics: Legal, Financial & Career Advice Child Protection Awareness Training Handling, Packaging & Storing Your Work Peer Critique: Mixed Media Visual Artists’ Cafe (including prof practice talk) Creative Proposals: Regional Documenting Your Work: Dublin Health & Safety for Visual Artists Peer Critique: Sculpture/Installation

VAI Show & Tell Events VAI will schedule a further two Show & Tell events during Autumn 2017 and invites interested artists groups, venues or partners to get in touch if interested in hosting a Show & Tell.

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

Tell us about your training needs!

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

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

BOOKINGS/INFORMATION Monica Flynn, Professional Development Officer, Visual Artists Ireland 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 MAKING SOCIAL MEDIA WORK 29 Jun @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 an established presence that they wish to develop further.

VISUAL ARTISTS’ HELPDESKS 19 Jul & 16 Aug @VAI Belfast Office. 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.

PEER CRITIQUE August/September @Belfast venue tbc. This event for six artists will allow an in depth review of current practices or projects, facilitated by an established invited curator.

VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFE: COLLABORATIVE ART September @Belfast venue tbc. Collaborations can take many forms and artists frequently work with others within their discipline or in other disciplines to challenge their own processes and make experimental new work. This event aims to look at the why and how of collaboration in all its forms.

BELFAST OPEN STUDIOS 14 Oct: Studio Fair @The Black Box 21 Oct: Belfast Open Studios 4 Nov: Speed Curating @Belfast Exposed Belfast Open Studios is an invitation to the public to come and see how artists work, take a glimpse into the creative processes and meet 150 artists working in the city. You will discover new work being made and gain insight into the creative processes that lead to the work you see in galleries around the world. Enjoy a Belfast Brew on arrival, sponsored by Suki Tea.

Bangor & Ards VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFE: FACILITATION SKILLS FOR ARTISTS WORKING WITH GROUPS 14 & 21 Aug, 6-9pm @venue tbc. Cost: £5 / £10 (VAI members). This event will explore the theory and practice of facilitation skills, which can be applied to both group and individual activities and collaborations in social and community contexts.

VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFÉ: LET’S MAKE IT HAPPEN! September (evening event) @Bangor venue tbc.

Cost: FREE. This is a fun, lively, social networking event with a twist. Belfast-based artist Charlotte

Bosanquet has something unusual up her sleeve to get your creative juices flowing, kick out the old and get inspired to make things happen.

VISUAL ARTISTS’ CAFE: INTRODUCING ARDS 6 Dec, 6pm – 9pm @Newtownards. 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 19 Jul @Flowerfield Arts Centre. This workshop aims to develop photography 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 23 Aug @Roe Valley Arts & Cultural Centre. This workshop will look at ways artists can use free internet tools to support their overall professional development, and to promote specific exhibitions.

CREATING OPPORTUNITIES & BUILDING PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS Sept @venue tbc. Artists will talk about their practice, sharing information on how they have overcome professional challenges and maximised opportunities in order to develop their careers. We will also look at ways artists can build relationships with curators and galleries.

VISUAL ARTISTS’ HELPDESK Oct @venue tbc. 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.

CURATING EXHIBITIONS Nov @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 to the audience experience.

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