Visual Artists' News Sheet - 2019 July August

Issue 4: July – August 2019

The Visual Artists' News Sheet

Inside This Issue LISMORE CASTLE ARTS THE 58TH VENICE BIENNALE INTERVIEW WITH PAUL O’NEILL INTERVIEW WITH ANNIE FLETCHER

Contents On The Cover Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Swinguerra, 2019; film still courtesy of the artists and Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

First Pages 6.

8.

Roundup. Exhibitions and events from the past two months.

News. The latest developments in the arts sector.

Columns

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Skills. Plein Air Painting. Cornelius Browne provides insights into the practicalities of painting outdoors.

Skills. Subversive Stitch. Contemporary textile artist Laura Angell discusses the Bargello embroidery technique.

Research. Making Support Structures: Who Gets to Speak? Sarah Lincoln discusses The Mothership Project Project’s latest research.

Regional Focus: Derry City 12.

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Clarendon Street Studios. Anne-Marie McKee, Founder.

Art Arcadia. Paola Bernardelli, Programme Manager.

Lifting Grounds. Gail Mahon, Visual Artist and Educator.

Training for Spontaneity. James King, Performance Artist.

Nerve Visual. Declan Sheehan, Visual Arts Manager.

CCA Derry~Londonderry. Catherine Hemelryck, Director.

Art Fair / Biennial 15.

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Environmental Outlook. Pamela Lee reflects on the participation of Irish galleries at Art Basel and VOLTA Basel 2019.

A Geography of Sound. Joanne Laws reports on the Venice Biennale.

Staged Authenticity. Alan Phelan navigates gender identity in Venice.

Residency 18.

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Outgrowths. Lucy Andrews discusses her residency and at LSC. New Haunts. Jonathan Mayhew on the TBG+S and HIAP residency.

Introduction WELCOME to the July – August 2019 issue of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

For VAN’s summer issue, Joanne Laws and Alan Phelan provide thematic appraisals of the 58th Venice Biennale, while Pamela Lee reports from Art Basel and VOLTA Basel art fairs.

This issue includes a number of timely interviews with artists and curators. Chris Clarke speaks to Richard Proffitt about his recent installation, May the Moon Rise and the Sun Set, for Cork Midsummer Festival, and Paul McAree interviews Niamh O’Malley, whose exhibition is currently showing in St Carthage Hall, as part of the Lismore Castle Arts programme.

Pádraic E. Moore speaks to Annie Fletcher, who has recently been appointed as the Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, while Philip Kavanagh interviews Rua Red Director Maolíosa Boyle about the organisation’s recent exhibitions and collaborations. Manuela Pacella also interviews Paul O’Neill about his curatorial practice and his artistic directorship at PUBLICS in Helsinki.

Also focusing on the Finnish art scene, Jonathan Mayhew reports from Helsinki, about his experiences taking part in the TBG+S and HIAP International Residency Exchange. Similarly, Lucy Andrews reports from her recent residency and exhibition at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, while Ian Wieczorek contextualises his latest exhibition, ‘Transgress’, at Ballina Arts Centre.

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Publicness. Manuela Pacella interviews Paul O’Neill about his curatorial practice and his artistic directorship at PUBLICS, Helsinki.

People, Politics and Place. Philip Kavanagh interviews Maolíosa Boyle, Director of Rua Red. Museum of Free Space. Pádraic E. Moore interviews Annie Fletcher, Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

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Arts Engagement 31.

Artistic Collaboration. Jan Powell discusses collaboration.

Interdisciplinary Skills. Ann Quinn outlines a new art school in Donegal offering masterclasses in painting and printmaking.

As ever, we have details of the upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public art roundups, news from the sector and current opportunities.

CEO/Director: Noel Kelly Office Manager: Bernadette Beecher Northern Ireland Manager: Rob Hilken Communications Officer: Shelly McDonnell Membership Officer: Siobhan Mooney Publications: Joanne Laws, Christopher Steenson Professional Development Officer: Monica Flynn Opportunities Listings: Shelly McDonnell Exhibition Listings: Christopher Steenson Bookkeeping: Dina Mulchrone

Get Together 2019. Rob Hilken reports on the 2019 VAI Get Together.

Vaults & Rituals. Chris Clarke interviews Richard Proffitt about his recent installation for Cork Midsummer Festival.

Lismore Castle Arts. Paul McAree talks about Lismore Castle Arts and interviews Niamh O’Malley.

Porous Borders. Ian Wieczorek contextualises his latest exhibition, ‘Transgress’, at Ballina Arts Centre.

Reviewed in the Critique supplement are: Hannah Fitz at Kerlin Gallery; Karen Daye-Hutchinson at ArtisAnn Art Gallery; ‘See you tomorrow’ at Sirius Arts Centre; ‘Social Commons’ at Liberty Hall; and ‘A Visibility Matrix’ at Void Gallery, Derry.

Visual Artists Ireland:

How is it Made?

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The Regional Focus for this issue comes from Derry City, with profiles from Art Arcadia, Clarendon Studios, Nerve Gallery and CCA. Derry-based artists James King and Gail Mahon also discuss their practice and recent work.

Features Editor: Joanne Laws Production Editor/Design: Christopher Steenson News/Opportunities: Shelly McDonnell, Siobhan Mooney

VAI Event 25.

Insights into arts engagement are also provided by Jan Powell, who explores the processes of artistic collaboration, and Ann Quinn, who profiles her ongoing masterclasses in painting and printmaking. We also hear from our VAI Northern Ireland Manager, Rob Hilken, who reports on the artist talks and panel discussions, held as part of the VAI Get Together 2019, which took place on 14 June at TU Dublin Grangegorman.

The Visual Artists' News Sheet:

Profile 20.

In columns for this issue, Sarah Lincoln discusses research recently undertaken by The Mothership Project. In two fascinating Skills columns, contemporary textile artist Laura Angell discusses the Bargello embroidery technique, while Cornelius Browne provides insights into the practicalities of painting outdoors.

Board of Directors: Michael Corrigan (Acting Chair), Michael Fitzpatrick, Richard Forrest, Paul Moore, Mary-Ruth Walsh, Cliodhna Ní Anluain Republic of Ireland Office

Northern Ireland Office

Visual Artists Ireland Windmill View House 4 Oliver Bond Street Merchants Quay, Dublin 8 T: +353 (0)1 672 9488 E: info@visualartists.ie W: visualaritsts.ie

Visual Artists Ireland 109 Royal Avenue Belfast BT1 1FF T: +44 (0)28 958 70361 E: info@visualartists-ni.org W: visualartists-ni.org

Last Pages 32.

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Public Art Roundup. Art outside of the gallery.

Opportunities. Grants, awards, open calls and commissions.

VAI Professional Development. Upcoming VAI workshops.

Principle Funders

Project Funders

Corporate Sponsors

Project Partners

Critique Supplement i. Cover Image: Hannah Fitz, GOING BALLISTIC, 2019. ii. ‘See you tomorrow’ at Sirius Arts Centre. iii. ‘Social Commons’ at Liberty Hall. iii. ‘A Harlot’s Progress’ at ArtisAnn Gallery. iv. 'A Visibility Matrix' at Void. iv. ‘OK’ at Kerlin Gallery.

International Memberships

6

Roundup

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS FROM THE PAST TWO MONTHS

Dublin

Belfast

GREEN ON RED

From 11 Apr to 18 May, Green on Red Gallery presented the group exhibition ‘Screentime’, which featured works from a cast of internationally-recognised artists, including Paper Rad & Cory Archangel, Alan Butler, Ben Jones, Conor McGarrigle, David O’Reilly and the UK collective They Are Here. The exhibition aimed to survey the ways in which artists address issues surrounding real and virtual space, the role of new technologies and the impact of technology on our physical and social environments.

PALLAS PROJECTS/STUDIOS

Marie Farrington’s latest solo exhibition ‘Fore, fold’ ran at Pallas/Projects Studios from 10 to 25 May. According to the press release, ‘Fore, fold’ uses a “ghost story, embedded in the history of Marsh’s Library, to unpack the exchanges between myth, language, material and place.” Referencing philosopher Martin Heidegger’s idea of the ‘Fourfold’ (mortal human’s interlinking with the earth, sky and divinity), Farrington’s objects point to a multiplicity of histories that are present in objects, forms and places.

greenonredgallery.com

PROJECT ARTS CENTRE

From 26 Apr to 15 Jun, Project Arts Centre presented the first Irish solo exhibition by the artist, writer and filmmaker Rosee Rosens.

According to the press release, ‘Exorcisms’ “negotiates alternate forms and practices of devotion, possession and politicised demonology”. Presented as part of this enquiry is Out / (Tse) (2010), a film framed as an erotic BDSM session in the mundane setting of a living room, which references political statements made by the right-wing Israeli politician, Avigdor Lieberbaum.

Charles Tyrell’s exhibition ‘LINE’ ran at Taylor Galleries from 31 May to 22 Jun. The body of work presented was developed over the past year in Tyrell’s Allihies studio, as well as during two residencies at Cow House Studios, Wexford, and the RHA, Dublin. Whilst always a underlying motif in Tyrell’s work, the use of the grid took centre stage in ‘LINE’. Working with indian ink and impasto acrylic, these grids were rich with distortions and imperfections, detailing systems of “mini-grids”, layered on top of one another to reveal three-dimensional illusions.

‘Post Truth’ was a group exhibition, curated

by Belfast Exposed Chief Executive, Deirdre Robb, which featured work by 19 national and international artists who completed the 2019 MFA Photography programme at Ulster University. The works on display each intersect upon themes pertinent to the ‘post-truth’ climate, exploring ideas of separation, mortality, nature and spirituality. The exhibition took place from 29 May to 7 Jun, and was featured as part of the 2019 Belfast Photo Festival programme.

pallasprojects.org

RATHFARNHAM CASTLE

‘The Invention of Memory’ was a group exhibition that ran from 5 to 30 May at Rathfarnham Castle as part of the tenth PhotoIreland Festival. Exploring the role of the human mind as a generator of memories, the exhibition looks at the ways that memory is susceptible to influences from our identities, ancestry, natural landscapes and patriarchal histories. Curated by Julia Gelezova, the exhibition featured works by Lucie Khakhoutian, Clare Lyons, Yvette Monahan and the duo Benedetta Casagrande and Leonardo Falascone.

projectartscentre.ie

TAYLOR GALLERIES

BELFAST EXPOSED

‘Staring forms’ was a group exhibition showcasing the work of four artists who each engage with space, interiors and site, using their own distinct methodologies. The exhibition ran from 3 May to 28 Jun and featured: Andreas Kindler von Knobloch’s Japanese-inspired sliding panel doors; Tanad Williams’s tectonic plate sculptures; largescale, site-responsive textile works by Miranda Blennerhasset, inspired by female labour, domestic environments and craft histories; and Alana Egan’s sculptural assembleges, which channel literature, design and cultural iconography.

taylorgalleries.ie

Sinead Aldridge, the sky is falling, 2019, oil on linen on board; courtesy the artist

templebargallery.com

‘Speechless Action’ is a group exhibition of new works created by the artists Sarah Boulton, Maïto Jobbé duval and Kate Murphy. Spanning mediums of video, drawing, printed matter and writing, the exhibition seeks to draw connections between the works of different artists through their layout, context and relationshp to the viewer. The works explore the “development of meaning through juxtaposition, sequence and series, and an interest in how information, in the widest sense, relates”. ‘Speechless Action’ continues at Catalyst Arts until 18 Jul.

belfastexposed.org

CULLODEN ESTATE

‘Art in the Garden’ (15 to 30 June) was an exhibition of works by internationally important artists, including Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Banksy, Damien Hirst and Grayson Perry. Organised by Gormley Fine Art, the exhibition took place in Culloden Estate in Hollywood, County Down. Featuring 14 pieces from the Dali Universe in Switzerland, it was the largest collection of Dali’s work ever seen in Ireland. Irish artists featured also included Peter Monaghan, Stephen Johnston, Stephen Forbes, Kenneth Webb and Orla De Brí.

2019.photoireland.org

TBG+S

CATALYST ARTS

belfastexposed.org

FENDERESKY GALLERY

Sinéad Aldridge’s exhibition, ‘the sky is falling’ ran at Fenderesky Gallery from 16 May to 14 Jun. The exhibition presented 15 new paintings, which explored complex imagery, alluding to the landscape and the figure. Aldridge’s work is a dialogue about the language of paint; she works with colour and gesture to create a controlled internal order on the canvas’s surface. As described by Slavka Sverakova, it is an “unusual harmony between hues, tones, marks and shapes” that Alridge forms to “create a fragement of the world that does and does not simultaneously exist outside the image”.

gormleys.ie

GOLDEN THREAD GALLERY

Golden Thread Gallery recently presented a new exhibition by Susan MacWilliam, titled ‘The Telepaths’ (2 May to 22 Jun). Presented as an installation comprised of sculpture, video and photographic work, ‘The Telepaths’ continues the artist’s ongoing research interests by exploring “ideas and imagery related to historical investigations of telepathy and extra-sensory perception”. Accompanying the exhibition was the launch of MacWilliam’s new book, Modern Experiments, published by F.E. McWilliam Gallery and Studio, designed by Peter Maybury. goldenthreadgallery.co.uk

Lucie Khakhoutian, Holy Trinity, 2017, collage; courtesy of the artist and PhotoIreland

fendereskygallery.com

PLATFORM ARTS

‘Normal Position, Show Position’ (9 to 25 May) was a group exhibition, showcasing the work of Ulster University’s first year MFA Fine Art students. The exhibition included works by Jennifer Alexander, Stephanie Tanney, Andy Athanasiou, Chloe Austin, Nollaig Molloy, John Connolly, Gemma Kirkpatrick, Dominic McKeown, Lorene Ple, Sinead O’Neill-Nicholl, Saffron Monk-Smith and Vasiliki Stasinaki. During the opening night, the experimental choir, HIVE, performed in collaboration with Nollaig Molloy’s video work. platformbelfast.com

Alan Butler, Death Valley (detail), 2018; courtesy of the artist and Green on Red Gallery

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Alan Magee, Celestial Machines (detail), 2019; installation view, Castor, London; photograph by Corey BartleSanderson, courtesy of the artist and Castor

Roundup

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Stephen Dunne, Worms in Your Head, 2018, ink on paper, 50 × 35 cm; courtesy of the artist and Courthouse Gallery & Studios

Susan Hughes, Raithlin Island, Coastguard’s Hut, 2019, audio and visual installation; photograph courtesy of the artist

CASTOR, LONDON

COURTHOUSE GALLERY & STUDIOS

Regional & International

BIENNALE WARSZAWA 2019

The first edition of the Biennale Warszawa, titled ‘Let’s organise the future’ ran in Warsaw, Poland, from 13 May to 30 Jun. As part of the biennale prgramme, the ‘Exhibition of Foreign Artists Living in Poland’ sought to investigate the influence that these artists have on Polish culture, given the far-right’s claims that Poland needs to be protected from foreign influence.

Among those featured was Irish performance artist Léann Herlihy, who performed her piece, the Giantess. The exhibition was curated by Jan Simon and ran from 6 to 30 Jun. biennalewarszawa.pl

GARTER LANE ARTS CENTRE

The group exhibition ‘Wish Me a Wonder’ recently ran at Gartern Lane Arts Centre, Waterford, from 11 May to 30 Jun. The exhibition featured: a series of paintings exploring personal attachments and anxieties, by Emma Hayes; the tactile and materially diverse paintings of Sarah O’Brien; the consumer-critiquing sculptures of French artist Liliane Puthod and a series of portraits by painter Sven Sandberg. Each artist featured in the exhibition is represented by Berlin Opticians Gallery. The exhibition was accompanied by a programme of educational events. garterlane.ie

RATHLIN SOUND MARITIME FESTIVAL

Artist and musician Susan Hughes recently presented a series of new works as part of the Rathlin Sound Maritime Festival on Rathlin Island. ‘Sea in the Lighthouse’ (24 May to 2 Jun). Recordings of found sounds on the island (such as breeding birds, the drone of the ferry, the wind) were used as the foundation for fiddle improvisations performed by the artist. The visual assemblages incorporated underwater photographs, which were placed within the concrete arcitecture of the island’s Coastguard Hut. rathlincommunity.org

London-based gallery Castor, recently presented Irish artist Alan Magee’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Titled, ‘Data Dust, Dust Data’, the exhibition encompasses a diverse range of processes including virtual realtity, robotics, video and ceramics, in order to explore “ideas of technology, materiality and the agency of the labouring body”. The work for this exhibition was developed through a Sculpture Bursary Award with Fire Station Artists’ Studios in Dublin. ‘Data Dust, Dust Data’ ran at Castor from 3 May to 8 Jun.

Following recent solo exhibitions in RHA Ashford Gallery, Dublin, and Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, Stephen Dunne’s latest solo exhibition is currently on show at The Courthouse Gallery & Studios, Ennistymon. Presenting a new series of drawings and works on paper, ‘Worms on Your Head: A Journey’ focuses on a mysterious character who navigates a number of difficult paths and challenges as they make their way through the hills and mountains. ‘Worms in Your Head: A Journey’ continues at The Courthouse Gallery & Studios until 6 Jul.

castorprojects.co.uk

KUNST-STATION SANKT PETER, COLOGNE

Kathy Prendergast’s spacious installation, Atlas is currently on show at Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Cologne, Germany, until 28 July. The installation contains over 100 copies of a standard AA road atlas of Europe, which the artist has painstakingly drawn over with black ink, removing everything but the small dots, representing cities and communities across the continent. Borders, rivers and names disappear, probelmatising ideas of ownership, territories and past colonial conquests. As such, the installation reminds viewers that borders are merely human constructs.

‘Transition’ (11 Apr to 18 May) was an exhibition of works from the Arts Council of Ireland Collection, curated by fifth year students from Loreto Convent Secondary School, Clonmel.

Taking place in South Tipperary Arts Centre, the project aimed to engage students with the process of curation. The resulting exhibition featured works by Melanie le Brocquy, Jennifer Brady, Michelle Brown, Amanda Coogan, Dorothy Cross, Anita Groener, Dragana Jurišić and Helena Kelly, amongst others. southtippartscentre.ie

Ireland-based British artist, Helen Kirwan’s new video installation perpetuum mobile, is currently on show at European Cultural Centre, Venice, as part of the group exhibition ‘Personal Structures’. This performance-based work sees Kirwan journeying on foot through ancient forests and deserts, in order to explore the experiences of mourning and loss. The film is soundtracked

by Dublin-based composer, Tom Lane. The work will remain on show at the European Cultural Centre for the duration of the 58th Venice Biennale, which continues until 24 Nov.

thecourthousegallery.com

MERMAID ARTS CENTRE

Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, is currently showing a group exhibition of three-dimensional artworks. Titled ‘Conspicuous 4ms’, the exhibition features the work of James Horan, Helen O’Connell, Martha Quinn and David McGlynn. Using “mass, weight, volume, composition and balance”, the artists draw on their influences from aspects of life to explore themes of “nature, science, social observation and travel”.

‘Conspicuous 4ms’ continues at Mermaid Arts Centre until 13 Jul.

sankt-peter-koeln.de

SOUTH TIPPERARY ARTS CENTRE

EUROPEAN CULTURAL CENTRE, VENICE

europeanculturalcentre.eu

THE POOL, BRUSSELS

‘I am so Mulptiple in Nights’ is a group exhibition running at The Pool Project Space in Brussels. Curated by Pádraic E. Moore, the exhibition features work by Mehraneh Atashi, Babette, Fiona Hallinan, Allen Jones, Graham Kelly, Perri MacKenzie, Liam Morrow, Gregory Polony and Sophie Varin.

The title of the exhibtion is derived from the words of Emmy Hennings (who was affiliated with the Dada movement and the co-founder of Zürich’s Cabaret Voltaire), whilst also referring to the idea of “the self as a continually evolving and expanding entity”. The exhibition continues until 27 July.

sankt-peter-koeln.de

ST LUKE’S CRYPT

Running from 12 Jul to 4 Aug, Dearbhail Connon will be presenting a new body of work at St Luke’s Crypt in Cork City. The exhibition, called ‘Beyond Form’, is a body of work six years in the making and was instigated by the artist’s loss of her only son, Leon Connon, in 2014. The exhibition takes the form of an installation – comprising painting, photography, writing, light and sound – that attempts to grapple with the question of what lies beyond this world and how one deals with death. fundit.ie/project/beyond-form

sb34.org

VILLA ROMANA, FLORENCE

‘Exploration... of what...’ (1 Jun to 23 Aug) is an exhibition of works by Italian artist Paolo Fabiani and Irish artist Janet Malarney, which is currently on show at Villa Romana, Florence. The work of these artists is installed in a glass pavilion placed inside the grounds of Villa Romana’s gardens.

Mularney is exhibiting some of her iconic anthropomorphic sculptures, referencing fragility and strangeness. Presented on unconventional plinths, such as cartons, plates or electrical appliances, Fabiani’s light-handed and playful sculptures attack the seriousness of art and life. villaromana.org

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News

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

THE LATEST FROM THE ARTS SECTOR

General News

‘ARTS MATTER’ REPORT

A recent report published by the Houses of the Oireachtas’ Joint Committee on Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht has recommended greater support for the arts. The report, titled Arts Matter, makes a number of recommendations on how the State can support the arts and recognise the inherent value that the arts have within society.

In undertaking the report, the Committee met with 30 witnesses representing government departs, private and public art agencies and individual artists over a period of one year.

Findings note that the arts are often marginalised with regards to funding, with stretched resources meaning that aspects of the arts are still inaccessible to large swathes of Irish society.

The report recommends that “staff and funding for the art funding bodies, representative organisations and individual artists be restored to 2008 – 2009 levels”, reiterating a promise made by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in December 2017, when he committed to doubling funding for the arts over a seven-year period. The Committee also stated that the Government should implement a longitudinal research programme on arts participation, so as to provide real evidence on the impact of the creative arts on society. The report also recommends for tax legislation to be amended, by giving tax benefits to private citizens donating money to arts organisations. With regards to education, it was stated that local authority arts officers should have greater representation in education and training boards and that a greater emphasis on ‘arts literacy’ should be incorporated into the existing education curriculum. This final point echoes a recent assertation made by NCAD Director Sarah Glennie, who has stated that teaching arts and creativity may be more important that STEM subjects in preparing students for future employment.

NEW ART GALLERY IN BELFAST

Sea Holly Gallery is a new Belfast-based art gallery, which recently opened on 21 March. Based in the heart of the city’s Cathedral Quarter, Sea Holly Gallery is a new venture by Commercial Court Inns Ltd, who also run local bars in the area, including: The Duke of York; The Dark Horse; The Friend at Hand; The Harp Bar; and The New Orpheus. The gallery is part of a recent extension to the Harp Bar and incorporates rescued features from the old art deco Orpheus Ballroom building, which was demolished in 2015 to make way for the redevelopment of Ulster University. Among the features salvaged from the Orpheus Ballroom are the building’s stained glass windows and ballroom floor, which are now fitted in the gallery’s exhibition space.

Sea Holly Gallery is a privately-run space, which aims to support the careers of local artists at all stages of their careers. Local artist Julian Friers’s exhibition, ‘Resonance’, served as the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, taking place from 21 March to 28 April. Future exhibitions include a ‘Pride’ exhibition, which will run from 20 July to 5 August, as well as exhibitions by Shauna Fox (11 to 31 August); Gallery 545 (12 to 26 September); Ulster Watercolour Society (2 to 16 October); Konrad Pawlaszek (1 to 28 November); and Sharon Millar (1 to 23 December). For more information on the gallery, visit dukeofyorkbelfast.com

NCAD RAISE MONEY FOR CHARITY

ART BUYING EMAIL SCAM

ARTLINK RESIDENCY WINNERS

NEW FACILITY FOR ENGAGE ART STUDIOS

On 13 May, the second year Fine Art Students held a ‘one night only’ exhibition at NCAD Gallery. Titled ‘Trajectory’, the exhibition aimed to celebrate the academic achievement of all 37 students at the end of their final semester of the academic year. Each of the Painting Department’s students’ paintings were for sale as part of the exhibition, with all proceeds being donated to the Rape Crisis Centre in Dublin.

In total, €1,120 was raised for the Rape Crisis Centre through the sales of students’ work, as well as through public donations made on the night and over the following days. Collette Schutz, Co-ordinator of Fundraising for the Rape Crisis Centre attended the opening event, and spoke to the audience about the centre’s educational outreach programme, as well as addressing the central theme of consent in her remarks. Also in attendance for the exhibition were Head of School of Fine Art, Philip Napier; NCAD Director, Sarah Glennie; Head of Painting, Mark O’Kelly; and NCAD Gallery Curator, Anne Kelly.

Arts organisation Artlink, based in Inishowen, Donegal, have announced the successful applicants of their 2019 residency programme. The programme offers residency opportunities to one international artist, two Ireland-based artists and one Norway-based artist. The artists awarded residencies this years are: Matthew Kersaint Giraudeau (International); Lucy Andrews (Ireland); Emily McFarland (Ireland); and Christian Skagen (Norway). The artists were selected from over 592 applications.

Each of the artists selected will be take-up residency at Artlinks between April and December 2019. During this time, each resident will develop new work or new ideas based on the unique site, and engage with local artists and Artlink members. The artists will also receive a generous fee of either €6,500 (for Norway-based and international artists) or €5,000 (for Ireland-based artists).

The selection panel for the residencies were: Mary Cremin (Void Gallery, Derry); Sara Greavu (CCA Derry~Londonderry); Shelly McDonnell (Visual Artists Ireland); and Steven Lewis (Artlink).

ZURICH PORTRAIT PRIZE IN CORK

For the first time, the Zurich Portrait Prize exhibition (formerly known as the Hennessey Portrait Prize) will travel to a second venue outside of Dublin. It was announced at the end of May that The National Gallery of Ireland and Crawford Art Gallery have formed a new partnership, which will bring the Zurich Portrait Prize to Cork from 31 January to 13 April 2020, after it opens in the National Gallery on 5 October 2019.

The move to show the exhibition in new venue outside Dublin is part of National Gallery’s plan to “grow its national footprint”, according to Director Sean Rainbird. Speaking on behalf of Crawford Art Gallery, Director Mary McCarthy noted that due to the broad appeal of the prize, bringing the exhibition to Cork will encourage audiences to engage with Crawford’s own collection.

Artists should be aware that there seems to be an increase in the number of scams targeting artists in Ireland. Art Scams begin with email contact from a scammer looking to buy your work having seen it online. These scams are becoming more sophisticated by the day and it is very important for you, as an artist, to protect your art as well as your money. One way to ensure you are not out of pocket is to never accept payment by cheque and never give your bank details. Only accept payment from email queries through Paypal or Stripe.

Before agreeing to a sale it’s a good idea to Google the email address with “art scam” to see if it pops up in any forums. You can always send it on to VAI at info@visualartists.ie for a second opinion if you are still unsure. Scammers often use a variety of names and addresses and if an offer seems too good to be true, it most likely is and it is worth investigating before exchanging money or art.There is a helpful article in the How To Manual on the VAI website, which you can also read.

Engage Art Studios, Galway, recently launched their new facility on 25 May. The new facility is located in Churchfields, Salthill, and contains studio spaces, as well as a new gallery space and workspace, where Engage will host a number of workshops in the future.

The launch event for the new facility included an open studio event and a number of free workshops, such as demonstrations of drypoint printmaking, bookmaking and stop-motion animation. The day also included the launch of a group exhibition, titled ‘Where we are lost, you are sídhe’, which ran until 29 June and included work

by Monique Blom, Zara Lyness, Ilaria Pellizzaro, Anushiya Sundaralingam and Ruby Wallis.

RCSI AWARD WINNER

Mary A. Kelly has been awarded this year’s Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) Art Award for her painting Add and subtract the marks, poke my fingers and even my head all the way through. As part of the award, Kelly will receive a €5,000 cash prize, the RSCI silver medal, as well as a commission worth €10,000 to make a new work for the RCSI collection.

Kelly’s work was selected as the winner from over 500 paintings currently on display at the 189th RHA Annual Exhibition. The other artists shortlisted for the award included: Taffina Flood, Joy Gerrard, Vera Klute and Jennifer Trouton. Established four years ago in partnership between the RSCI, the RHA and The Irish Times, the purpose of the RCSI Art Award is to celebrate artworks that recognise the relationship between “art and healing”.

Kelly’s painting focuses on the chair as a “physical object, to spark a conversation about relationships with people, objects and self ”.

The work is notable as a departure from Kelly’s previous work, where she has generally worked with lens-based media. Kelly holds an MA in Fine Art from the National College of Art and Design, as well as degrees from Dún Laoghaire College of Art and Design (film), and UCD (philosophy and psychology). Until recently, Kelly was also the Chair of Visual Artists Ireland’s Board of Directors.

NEW SCULPTURE FOR GRANGEGORMAN

The Grangegorman Development Agency (GDA) have recently announced that artist Garett Phelan has been appointed to undertake a significant new contemporary artwork. The work, currently titled THE GOLDEN BANDSTAND – Sculpture, is to be installed on the Grangegorman campus of Technological University Dublin (formerly Dublin Institute of Technology), with an expected completion date of autumn 2020. It is the first major art commission planned for the Grangegorman campus.

Speaking about the work, Phelan stated that he arrived at the idea of THE GOLDEN BANDSTAND – Sculpture after being influenced

by Dr Joseph Lalor, a Medical Superintendent at the Grangegorman site in the 19th century, when the area still was home to St Brendan’s Hospital – the main psychiatric hospital serving the greater Dublin region. According to Phelan, Dr Lalor used to sing, paint and read, as a central part of his therapeutic practice. Phelan stated that he sees Lalor as a “visionary of his time” and has “an affinity with his view of the importance of engagement with creativity and beauty to our emotional wellbeing.” Continuing, Phelan stated that the Golden Bandstand concept “connects this aspect of Lalor’s historical practice with the present transformation of the Grangegorman site as a centre for new models for creative education and community activity”.

In this way, Phelan believes that his sculpture “respectfully acknowledges a past, fully embraces the present and will act as a positive contemporary work of art for creative engagement and collective escapism into the future.”

The open call for the commission attracted a total of 48 applications, who were whittled down by a jury comprised of: Ciarán Benson (Chair and Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University College Dublin); Katerina Gregos (International Curator, Brussels); Anita Groener (Irish artist); Cliodhna Shaffrey (Curator and Director of Temple Bar Gallery + Studios); and Des McMahon (Irish Architect and designer of Croke Park).

MERRION PLINTH AWARD WINNER

The winner of the Merion Plinth Award has been announced as Orla Whelan. Whelan will receive a grant of €5,000 for the creation of a new piece of work, which will be displayed in the Garden Foyer of the Merion Hotel in Dublin for the next two years.

An expert panel of judges – consisting of Lochlann Quinn (Chairman of the Merion Hotel), Patrick Murphy (Director of Royal Hibernian Academy) and Oonagh Young (Director of Oonagh Young Gallery) – selected the winner after an open call process, which took place in February this year. The roster of artists shortlisted for the prize included: Marcel Vidal, Alva Gallagher, Lee Welch, Jane Rainey.

The Merrion Plinth Award is a biennial contemporary art prize, which is planned to take place again in 2021. The aim of the award is to provide a platform for supporting the work of living artists and for their work to be seen by new audiences, whilst being presented alongside the significant private collection of 19th and 20th century Irish art owned by the Merrion Hotel.

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Columns

Skills

Skills

Plein Air Painting

Subversive Stitch

CORNELIUS BROWNE PROVIDES INSIGHTS INTO THE PRACTICALITIES OF PAINTING OUTDOORS.

CONTEMPORARY TEXTILE ARTIST LAURA ANGELL DISCUSSES THE BARGELLO EMBROIDERY TECHNIQUE

PLEIN AIR PAINTING, at root, is about leaving oneself open. Under Irish skies, without shelter, unable to control light, accidents multiply and planning goes out the proverbial window. Many painters tell me that this is their idea of a nightmare. Approached in the right frame of mind, however, potential drawbacks become fuel.

I am an art shop magpie. My paint purchases have never been guided by any premeditated plan. Colours catch my eye, sometimes oddly-named and oddly-hued, and I take a gamble.

I have little loyalty to brand. The same magpie instinct pilots my choice of brushes. When I’m out painting, it can happen that a gut feeling prompts me to grab a pristine brush and I wonder “what made me think of buying this oddity?”

The ground on which I paint is of the greatest importance, as it marks the beginning of each painting. I work on hardboard and canvas, making my own gesso primer. There is a ritualistic aspect to this time-consuming preparation of surfaces, which I enjoy. Also, during weeks when severe weather keeps me from working much, I’m able to maintain a link to the act of painting.

Invariably I paint on a brilliant white surface, eschewing the toned grounds I was guided towards in art college. Oil paint in time becomes more transparent, and the ground will tend to show through, and if it is a light ground this showing through will counteract the natural darkening of the oils and the brilliance of the work will not suffer. Also, my ultimate goal as a painter being to emulate daylight (unless I’m painting after dark), I am forever in pursuit of luminosity. This explains too why all my landscapes are painted wet-on-wet, in single sessions, with no retouching afterwards. Only this method guarantees the vitality of surface I seek.

Each painting is a complete and one-off experience. The objective is not to illustrate nature, rather to make paintings that are themselves part of nature.

Heading out to paint, I load the car with a variety of these beautiful white rectangles, ranging from ten-centimetre-wide boards to metre-wide canvases. Until I’m actually committed to a pic-

ture, I can never be sure if I’ll be attempting to paint a symphony or the smallest of chamber pieces. Weather dictates everything and even the shortest car journey can involve driving through seasons.

On a map, my subject matter is five kilometres of lake-strewn countryside, narrowly attached to the mainland and held in the wild embrace of the Atlantic. Human settlement in West Donegal began in the Neolithic period five thousand years ago, a story told amid the fields and along the coast in a series of landmarks that continually nourish my paintings. Wind and water have sculpted this landscape – a notable recurring feature in my work are the trees growing away from the prevailing wind, branches leaning to the east – and geologically the area is a gift to any artist digging the feet of their easel into rough earth, whose flora delights in bursting into feral song.

Painting on this patch of earth is no leisurely pursuit; it is, in fact, usually the antithesis of the clichéd image of the Sunday painter that sometimes dogs perceptions of plein air. The exposed nature of the place necessitates working at breakneck speed. There is no time for preliminary drawing – dashes and dots serve that purpose. The light is in a constant state of flux – I’ve witnessed skies change in ways that are nothing short of miraculous – and the paint chases these changes. Often I paint cattle or other livestock, and they are never still. Human presences are rare, but when they do appear, they are usually specks of paint working on boats, there fleetingly. I am working towards the point where the paint no longer feels like paint – that moment of alchemy where I cease to exist and what is happening on the canvas is entirely beyond my control. It doesn’t always occur, but it’s the thing that keeps me painting. No words can describe this sensation. It exists only in paint.

Cornelius Browne is a Donegal-based artist who studied painting at the National College of Art & Design.

Cornellius Browne painting in situ; photograph courtesy of the artist

Laura Angell, Double Headed Ram (detail), bargello on canvas; courtesy of the artist

AS A TEXTILE ARTIST, I am always on the

lookout for new crafting techniques to keep my work interesting. My practice tends to take on traditional techniques, adding a fine art sensibility that elevates domestic items into contemporary artworks. In medieval times, embroidery was held in the highest regard, but the Renaissance changed all that – The Royal Academy actually banned embroidery, because they thought it was too ‘womanly’. The Victorians later relegated embroidery to merely a suitable ‘feminine pass-time’. I like subverting the idea of ‘woman’s work’ by celebrating it through experimental textile practice. It may also help to explain that I was born in the North of England in the 1970s, where the dying industries of the Industrial Revolution (men’s work) still pulse in the air like a metronome.

Craft manifests in my work in many ways: I stitch into photographs and postcards, generating new meaning; I use cross-stitch, known as ‘subversive cross-stitch’ (which I prefer); and I have recently started machine knitting – a craft that has dwindled since the 1980s, however small pockets of women still use knitting machines and provide useful internet forums for information and sharing. With a nod to suffragist and feminist movements, I am currently making text-based banners, which allow me to deliver short, punchy statements with multiple meanings. My previous ‘anti-pornography installation’, titled Awkward Position, evolved out of my own anger and used fabrics, cushions and net curtains, all drawing on the domestic.

I happened upon Bargello by chance, while looking for alternative embroidery techniques.

Also known as Hungarian Point or Florentine Stitch, Bargello is a type of needlepoint embroidery consisting of upright flat stitches, laid in a mathematical pattern to create motifs. The name originates from a series of chairs found in the Bargello Palace in Florence, dating from approximately 1430 AD, which were decorated with a ‘flame stitch’ pattern. Designs are very colourful and use many hues of one colour, which produces intricate shading effects. I am drawn

to geometry, tessellation, repetition and straight lines, so when I saw Bargello embroidery, I was excited to try it. Information was scant, but I managed to find a couple of vintage books from the1960s – I do love a manual – and a few internet images to work from. I loved its technicality but also the linear quality of the stitches themselves, and the 3D effects that are possible when selecting the right colour combinations.

I was also pulled in by its repetitiveness, which appeals to my compulsive and obsessive nature. I was going to lose myself in this...

Bargello is considered one of the most challenging embroidery techniques, because it requires commitment to mathematical pattern, in order to accurately execute the designs. Initially, I have to set the first line of stitching in, which is the most complicated part – if this is wrong, the whole piece will go awry. After that, it’s simply a case of repeating the line directly above or below (or occasionally around). What I have learned – and relearned, to my cost – is to check, recheck and check again, otherwise you will often find yourself unpicking two day’s work, losing hours searching for the original mistake. Mostly, the process is a push and pull motion through fabric.

After a while, it becomes meditative and automatic; intense concentration happens and then the next thing you know, six hours have gone by and the problem becomes stopping.

Mostly my head is filled with a cacophony of ideas, thoughts and anxieties. Stitching helps to calm my mind, blocking out worries and dayto-day irritations. The repetition helps me to concentrate and to think slower, as I lose myself in counting and the motion of stitching. The entire process is productive, not only for the piece that I am working on, but for thinking about subsequent pieces. Through the act of making, I get new ideas for future work. The counting, the repetition, the accuracy and the industry of my sewing mirrors the filing of my ideas, as the stitches are set in place.

Laura Angell is a visual artist, originally from Sheffield and now based in Galway.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Research

Making Support Structures: Who Gets to Speak?

SARAH LINCOLN DISCUSSES RESEARCH RECENTLY UNDERTAKEN

BY THE MOTHERSHIP PROJECT. WRITER DONNA HARAWAY is exasperated with the limits of criticism. She is frustrated that our most sophisticated thinkers and critics expend their energy developing more and more nuanced ways of describing the seemingly hopeless societal and ecological binds in which we find ourselves. The challenge, according to Haraway, is to apply the force of our thought to proposing creative and inclusive solutions to these problems.1 We are indebted to The Mothership Project – a collective of parenting artists based in Ireland, founded in 2013 – for stretching to meet a provocation like this with energy and action.

In May, The Mothership Project launched their report, Satellite Findings, in which 145 parenting artists responded to a range of questions about their professional lives while parenting. Of the respondents, 92% were mothers, with 80% feeling that parental responsibilities were having a negative impact on their arts practice.

Professor Eileen Drew (Director of Trinity Centre for Gender Equality and Leadership at Trinity College Dublin) contributes an important essay to this report, in which she highlights broader societal realities around parenting in Ireland. In Dublin, the average cost of full-time childcare is currently €1,047 per month for each child, while the average salary is approximately €3,800 per month. The survey outlines how parenting artists have responded to these financial pressures by undertaking this caregiving themselves. The snapshot captured by this survey describes how this task is largely being undertaken by mothers, with 42% of those surveyed spending 10 hours or less a week working on their artistic practice. What emerges through the survey is the harsh impact upon artists who parent, as well as the frustration being felt at this broad correlation of parenting with a ‘silencing’ of one’s professional life. As one respondent states: “the unwritten rule for being a successful artist is ‘don’t have kids’”.

The Mothership Project is explicit in its aims: it seeks “societal and institutional change” to make space for the voices of parenting artists. Drew’s essay sketches out practical solutions to some of these pressures, while being mindful that these changes can only find traction through political support. She identifies a few areas of progressive and achievable change, noting that while parental leave in Ireland is generous in terms of duration, it is underpaid; she cites Nordic models, which means-test childcare costs.

Some of the recommendations emerging from Satellite Findings include the suggestion that arts organisations do more to check who might be excluded from engaging with their programmes, due to a range of factors, including practical ones, such as the time of day at which activities occur – art openings typically happen at children’s tea time or bed time. There is also a call to child-proof professional offers such as residencies. Has enough lead-in time been given to parenting artists to either organise childcare, or perhaps provide family-friend-

ly supports within these offers? Are funding bodies genuinely supporting parenting artists by accepting budgets which include childcare costs within them?

There are multiple quotes in the report from parenting artists who describe, in negative terms, their understanding of their sector’s perception of them as a parenting artist: “you weren’t taken seriously as an artist if you were a mother too”.

In a sense this issue of perception is the most insidious current running through the report. It indicates a type of embarrassment at not being able to unhook oneself from lived experience; it implies that ‘real life’ experiences – like caring – are too inappropriately personal to call into visibility within a professionalised art world. Surely one of the beautiful potentials of the art space is that it can hold within it the true messiness of life – that we can bring our biographies with us?

That the unruly and awkward can be held, in the belief that these qualities contain within them the potential to generate new forms and, in so doing, enrich our creative spaces.

I remember an evening last November at the Cow House Studios, where I was lucky enough to be taking part in ‘Satellite Residency’, organised by The Mothership Project.2 There was wildness in the air. We were giddy, knowing that we were part of a new shape taking form and we were drinking in the excitement that this created. I was arranging images at the kitchen table, while having a conversation with Alla about women-friendly workwear. Ruth was operating a power tool in a shed across the courtyard, while Ruby and Linda were sketching out their studio rhythms to each other. Food was being prepared in an adjoining space and between all of these activities, our children were being minded. Our children, part of this project, were feeding it and being fed by it. I remember pausing for a moment and enjoying the unashamed eccentricity of the scene: thinking (hoping) that the support structures which had formed around us, through this residency, could somehow become part of the future for parenting artists in Ireland.

Sarah Lincoln is an artist living in West Waterford.

Notes 1 Donna Haraway in the documentary film, Donna Haraway: Storytelling for earthly survival (2016), directed by Fabrizio Terranova.

2 ‘Satellite Residency’ was a pilot residency for 15 parenting artists at Cow House Studios, Wexford, which was rolled-out over Autumn / Winter 2018. The residency included the payment of a small stipend. Accommodation, childcare and meals were provided onsite. The artists taking part in the residency were: Dorota Borowa, Stephen Dunne, Niamh Davis, Sarah Lincoln, Ruth Lyons, Ciara McMahon, Susan Montgomery, Celina Muldoon, Niamh O’Doherty, Sally O’Dowd, James O’hAodha, Una Quigley, Linda Quinlan, Ruby Wallis and Kate Warner.

Regional Focus Derry City

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Art Arcadia Paola Bernardelli Programme Manager

Clarendon Street Studios Anne-Marie McKee Founder

THREE YEARS AGO, I came back home to

Strabane, after studying an MA in Drawing at Glasgow School of Art. I recognised the need for artist studios in the region and subsequently founded Clarendon Street Studios in 2017, which currently provides long-term, affordable studios for five professional artists in Derry city centre.

There are three phases to this long-term project. The first stage was to get the studios up and running, which was completed in April 2018.

We are currently undertaking the second stage, which encompasses a number of different goals, the first of which is to open a public gallery and project space that will exhibit ambitious work by contemporary, experimental and emerging artists. We then intend to support research by artists, with the aim of identifying ways in which Clarendon Street Studios can support, promote and enhance the artistic community living locally. The third stage of the project – which will be completed in about five years time – is to restore the tumbledown stables at the back of our listed building, allowing us to provide residencies or live-in accommodation for artists. Residencies and live-in accommodation will add to the arts infrastructure in Derry, support local artists and help grow and consolidate an international exchange of artists in the northwest of Ireland.

This is a long-term project and it is still early days. The studios are in constant use, which shows the great need for studio provision in the area. We have received some funding from Derry City and Strabane District Council to make the ground floor accessible with a wheelchair ramp and modified bathroom. The public aspect of this project – the ground floor gallery and project space – will open in the next few months with a separate identity from the studios. The

current board is made up of Mary Cremin (Director of Void, Derry), Ronan McKee (musician) and myself. The board directs the activities and policies of the studios, with help from the studio artists, John Kerr (Arts and Culture Manager at Derry City & Strabane District Council) and discussions with local artists.

At present, Clarendon Street Studios provides workspaces to five artists at different stages of their careers, who work across a range of media. Paolo Bernardelli is an Italian lens-based artist. As well as exhibiting locally and internationally, she is also a founding member and Programme Manager of Art Arcadia – an artist-run social enterprise and residency in Derry.

Damien Duffy is an artist, educator and curator, who has played an important role in Derry’s visual art scene. Joining Void Gallery in 2007, he established and led Void Arts School between 2007 and 2015. As a member of Void’s curational committee, he has curated significant exhibitions by Cathy Wilkes, Dan Hays and Matt Collishaw, amongst others. As an artist, he has exhibited internationally and has received various awards. He is currently developing new work for a group exhibition in Germany later this year.

Mhairi Sutherland is a visual artist and curator who works with video, drawing and site-specific installation. Recent projects include a commission for the Hasselblad Foundation and Valand Academy, Sweden, as part of the research project and exhibition, ‘Drone Vision: Warfare, Surveillance and Protest’. Mhairi also had a trio of exhibitions in Gothenberg, Lahore and Nicosia in May 2018, while her site-specific research project, ‘The Dome’, will be exhibited at Artlink, Inishowen, in October. Aimee Melaugh recently graduated from Ulster University with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting. Melaugh’s work will be shown in the upcoming Belfast Print Workshop group exhibition in PS2, Belfast, in July. Finally, John Robinson is an artist whose work is grounded in landscape painting. Alongside his own practice, John works as the artist for Boundary Brewing, and facilitates creative art programmes for youth initiatives. clarendonstreetstudios@gmail.com

Mhairi Sutherland, ‘Drone Vision: Warfare, Surveillance, Protest’; photograph by Cecilia Sandblom; courtesy of the artist

Sue Morris, ‘The Past Runs Very Close’, installation view; photograph by Paola Bernardelli, courtesy of Art Arcadia

ART ARCADIA IS an artist-run organisation

providing local and international artist residencies, with an associated programme of exhibitions and public events. Active since 2013, Art Arcadia has developed organically, weaving together an international network of artists and organisations to form a constituted organisation in 2016. Since then, Art Arcadia has continued to grow, with sites in Italy and Canada and, most recently, St Augustine’s Old Schoolhouse in Derry.

Art Arcadia emerged as a reaction to the lack of provisions in Derry, such as exhibition facilities and affordable studio spaces – a situation that was exacerbated in the wake of City of Culture 2013 and the failure of the local council to follow-up on its legacy commitments. It is not a coincidence that the foundations of Art Arcadia initially lay elsewhere.

In the years leading to 2018, we organised residencies and post-residency exhibitions in Belfast, Winnipeg and Rome. We have also carried out projects at our site in the village of Pietrafitta – a remote location in central Italy where we host resident artists once a year. In 2016, Mak9 (Belfast), followed up their Italian residency with an exhibition at St Martin’s, Belfast, in collaboration with Ulster University. In 2017, Irene Bindi (Canada), went on to exhibit her work in Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, and at LICA in Winnipeg, Canada. In 2018, Sara Riel (Iceland) later exhibited her work at Kling & Bang, Reykjavik; and most recently we have hosted Derry-based visual artist Sue Morris.

A major opportunity came in 2018, when we secured a partnership with a local heritage site, St Augustine’s Church, located along Derry’s city walls. We invited five local artists – Pascale Steven, Sue Morris, Stephanie Gaumond, Gail Mahon and Anne-Marie McKee – to take up residency at the Old Schoolhouse, a building adjoining the church and old graveyard, bringing contemporary art to a location mainly known as a heritage attraction. What began as a one-off programme, taking place over a sixmonth period, has become a great success and, as a consequence, we were invited to run an ongoing programme there.

Our 2019/2020 programme began in April with Sue Morris at our site in Italy and then continued in May with Italian lens-based artist Valeria Pierini at St Augustine’s Old Schoolhouse. June saw Sue Morris return to Derry to exhibit the work she produced in Italy.

In July, St Augustine’s old graveyard will take the centre stage with Nicola Renzi’s interventions, while August will inaugurate our new partnership with the Liverpool Irish Festival.

Derry-based artist Locky Morris will travel to Liverpool for a residency, culminating in an exhibition during the Festival in October. At the same time, Paul Sullivan (Director of Static Gallery, Liverpool) will take up residency at St Augustine’s Old Schoolhouse, with an exhibition opening on Culture Night.

The programme will continue with artist collective CAAKE (Gail Mahon and Tara J. Murphy) from November 2019 to January 2020, through a series of collaborations, workshops and film nights. February 2020 will see the return of Locky Morris at the Old Schoolhouse.

Our current programme ends in March 2020 with French lens-based artist Philippe Grollier.

In a city where opportunities for artists are limited, we believe our initiative is generating a fertile and inspiring environment that can benefit artists – both local and international – as well as the wider community. Our programme is unique in the city (and the region). There are only two other artist residency opportunities in Northern Ireland – both based in Belfast – and to our knowledge, there are no exhibition residencies like the one we facilitate in the whole of Northern Ireland.

Our partnership of situating contemporary art within one of the most important heritage sites in Derry has also enabled public access to an otherwise unutilised building. This has only been possible thanks to a new, forward-looking strategy adopted by the local council. After years of stubborn determination, Art Arcadia has finally found a home, right in the heart of the city.

artarcadia.org

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Regional Focus

Lifting Grounds

Training for Spontaneity

Gail Mahon Visual Artist and Educator

James King Performance Artist

THE ROOTS OF MY work are where touch,

sensation and kinaesthesia coalesce to create a language of embodiment, which describes how actions, intersected with materials, can produce new and emerging spaces of meaning. My hybrid practice has evolved multiple interests (such as anatomy, archaeology, ecology, architecture, material culture and phenomenology), which became a combined perspective during my MA at the Royal College of Art in 2015. A direct knowledge of materials with performance interactions, influenced by Art Povera and Fluxus movement, continually unfolds and reveals itself in my process, leaving residual objects and installations that communicate across various arrangements of installation works, combining ceramics, sculpture, time-based media and photography.

Living and working five miles west of Derry and having a peripheral relationship to the city, but not of the city, increasingly changed with creative opportunities. A year ago, I was invited by Art Arcadia’s Paola Bernardelli to be artist-in-residence at St Augustine’s School House.

My proposal, titled ‘Controchasm: Circling the Vernacular’, intended to mediate the anatomy of architecture, silent labour and resonant repetitions; I aimed to seek out tensions between the grounds of St Augustine’s, as a sixteenth-century monastery, and the more recent white-walled art space it has become. The architecture of St Augustine’s became a liminal space for these responses, providing a follow-on (thematically and technically) from recent collaborative work I had been doing with London-based artist Kim Norton for the exhibition ‘In Search of the Vernacular’ (28 July to 13 October 2018) at Oriel Myrddin Gallery, Wales. Within this body of work, performative interactions, largescale latex and clay-covered canvases became surfaces to transient, shifting structures. Elements following on from this work will be collectively shown again in Thames-Side Studios, London, from 3 to 10 August.

Comparing our bodily architecture to buildings and spaces outside of ourselves helps orientate us in proximity to the world. Climbing up walls and pressing my body to the wooden floor of St Augustine’s activated a visceral acuity; the

spatial connections became amplified and instinctively I followed the flow of materiality. Another latex cast presented itself: St Augustine’s floor. Peeling off 12 metres of latex and muslin took weighted effort. I was rewarded by what was underneath – something that enabled me to access a form of self-archaeology. Within the somatic layers of the latex, I became complicit in the fabric of its make-up. The latex and the muslin dust particles became marks upon the surface skin – a shared skin where clear separation of surface and structure, person or place, the space and I, were no longer clearly defined.

The cast taken from St Augustine’s evolved a more primal nature once it left the residency and returned to my studio, becoming more shaped and punctuated with individual strands of horse hair. It was shown in ‘Dissolving Histories: New Histories’ (8 December 2018 to 19 January 2019) at Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast.

In this new context, it was titled Grounding the Vernacular, and was shown alongside an additional performance film. I will continue further primal explorations of the city later this year, as I work towards another photographic series, based around the walls of Derry. ‘LitmusStone’ will investigate a manifold of conditions, formations and substructures that closely examine an individual’s relationships to place and the city. This series of new work will be curated by Gregory McCartney and shown at Verbal Arts Centre, Derry, in February 2020.

A great source of development within my practice has been due to Art Arcadia. The collaborative partnership between Tara J. Murphy and myself, called CAAKE, has been invited to curate a three-month residency at St Augustine’s. As a catalyst for multidisciplinary practices across creative arts, health and physical wellbeing, CAAKE will present ‘FL*OOOW: Orient, Ornament, Order’, which emphasises experimental and improvisational practices responding to adaptive challenges within our changing environments. CAAKE’s residency programme runs at Art Arcadia from November 2019 to January 2020. gailmahon.com

Gail Mahon, Controchasm: Grounding the Vernacular, 2018; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artist

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James King with Peter O’Doherty, BBeyond Equinnox Performance at Cultúrlann Uí Chanáin, Derry, September 2018; photograph by Jordan Hutchings, courtesy of the artist

My street performances in Derry began in the early ‘80s. These were mainly in collaboration with Eamonn O’Donnell. A record of performances between 1988 and 2007 is published in Moving Pitches: Street Art Performance (2008). To quote from my introduction to the book: “The purpose of our outings was to respond to events and the environment in a positive and creative way, expressing our collective and personal response in a variety of forms, e.g. Walkabout Theatre (literally walking around the town in role with props and/or costume, sometimes directly interacting with the public); Performance Art (a broad category, basically an artform in which the artist becomes part of the artwork); Junk Sculpture... and singing and chanting about our perceptions in the moment.”

Later, open mic performances (hosted by Tina McLoughlin in Mason’s Bar) led to a sustained investigation of sound poetry and the discovery of strategies, such as Syllable Stews and gibberish. I collaborated with various colleagues: Caroline Murphy with violin and percussion; Gerard Donnelly, beat box; and word play with Rory McSwiggan. The work with Rory, which still continues, draws upon Action Theater strategies. Action Theater has underpinned much of my performance work. Essentially, it consists of scores involving voice, movement and sound (see: Ruth Zaporah, Action Theater: The Improvisation of Presence, 1995). In performing these scores, there is total freedom and no specified content. It is a training for spontaneity.

Upon retirement as a lecturer in Community Drama at the University of Ulster, I expanded my interest in performance art. This has been largely through my engagement with the Belfast-based performance collective, Bbeyond. In monthly open improvisation events, their emphasis is upon freedom to BE, in relation to the audience and the others within the performing group. These events take place in a variety of locations, whether in the street, beach or art gallery.

Within the last few years, some colleagues and I have established Beebeedeebee: Bbeyond Derry Branch (BBDB). We meet weekly in Society Street and put into practice Bbeyond’s methodology, in a very convenient paved area,

adjacent to trees and bench seats. In group performance art practice, I generally use my voice and improvised sounds, in response to external stimuli and my internal promptings. I also create visual configurations using my body, found objects or materials brought along. I value freedom: freedom of thought and freedom of action.

I aspire to be open to intuitive cues and hunches.

I abhor authorities. I love play and playfulness – particularly with voice, words and their elements. I would encourage individual risk within the safety of a supportive ensemble.

My most recent performance project is in collaboration with members of the Monday Lab – an experimental Performance Art group, spawned by BBDB members – which has produced several significant works over the last year. On 27 April, the Monday Lab participated in Filip Markiewicz’s ‘Celebration Factory’ at CCA Derry~Londonderry. On 29 March, myself and Peter O’Doherty performed as La Bratts in the Online Festival of Performance Art, live on YouTube. On 15 June, we performed an eight-hour durational piece, as guests of Art Arcadia in St Augustine’s Old School House. The essence of these performances is controlled spontaneity, in the exploration of the interplay of vocal distillations.

I feel that Derry is very conducive to my work as an artist. The general public are open and receptive to our activities, notwithstanding the occasional bantering comment, such as: “There’s wiser aitin’ grass!” or “There’s better locked up!”

The formal galleries are also welcoming.

In 2016, Void Gallery hosted an installation/ performance by myself and Sandra Corrigan Breathnach. Bbeyond also performed at CCA for eleven hours that November, as part of my ‘Cumulator’ project (each month an additional person performed for an additional hour, until twelve people performed for twelve hours in December). The December ‘Cumulator’ took place in the studios of Echo Echo Dance Theatre, which has hosted several of our performances. Businesses and community venues, such as St Columb’s Park House, are also supportive and welcoming. bbeyond.live/james-king

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Regional Focus

Nerve Visual

CCA Derry~Londonderry

Declan Sheehan Visual Arts Manager

Catherine Hemelryck Director

THE DEVELOPMENT OF a vibrant visual arts ecology in a city requires several diverse elements, including access to art education and training, studios and galleries. It is important to also note the role of the art museum: as distinct from the gallery, which is dedicated to contemporary art, a museum engages more prominently with the educational, historical and the retrospective, within a contemporary context. Since launching in 2016, Nerve Visual in Derry – the visual arts facility developed by the long-running media and digital arts education organisation, the Nerve Centre – has been expanding its presence as a hybrid art gallery/museum space, establishing an essential and unique presence within the region’s visual arts ecology.

Since its beginnings, Nerve Visual has organised projects ranging from artists residencies and training opportunities to touring exhibitions.

The gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Anne Tallentire’s project ‘Shelter’, was a major collaborative commission with 14/18 NOW, which toured to the Ulster Museum and the University of Limerick. Other early projects included a major 1916/2016 centenary exhibition, ‘Making History’, which I curated for the Nerve Centre’s partnership with the Ulster Museum. This was accompanied by another contemporary exhibition in the adjacent gallery, titled ‘A Name Unmade: Francis Ledwidge (1887–1917)’, which was curated by Sabina McMahon for Solstice Arts Centre and explored the life and work of poet Francis Ledwidge in Navan. Across Nerve Visual’s two galleries, visitors encountered contemporary work by Patricia Burns, David Farrell, Clare Langan, Mick O’Dea, Niamh O’Malley and Sasha Sykes, as well as archival material relating to 1914–18 Ireland. Of course, the physical context of Nerve Visual in the city’s decommissioned Ebrington Barracks (spaces in fact redeveloped as galleries by Tate for the 2013 Turner Prize), where Ledwidge had himself served as a soldier, added a unique site-specific charge to the project.

Later projects at Nerve Visual have continued to engage with regional archives. In 2017 the project ‘Film Makers’ toured from Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive, featuring

makers responding to footage of Northern Ireland’s rich filmmaking tradition.

Partnerships with National Museums NI, the Tower Museum and the Gallery of Photography, Dublin, have also resulted in a number of touring projects. ‘The Lost Moment’ was curated

by Sean O’Hagan – writer on photography, art and culture for The Guardian and The Observer – and co-curated and researched by me in Derry and Trish Lambe at Gallery of Photography.

This project used the 50th anniversary of the North’s Civil Rights Movement to contextualise that struggle alongside other international street protests that made 1968 such a tumultuous year.

Other exhibitions at Nerve Visual have included Colin Davidson’s ‘Silent Testimony’, a series of portraits of 18 people connected by their experiences of loss during the Troubles.

‘Speeches, Strikes and Struggles: Curating Conflict’ presented rarely seen material from the Tower Museum’s Peter Moloney Collection, documenting the cultural heritage of the Troubles from 1968 to the present day. ‘Troubles Art’ featured works from the Ulster Museum and National Museums NI collection, presenting responses to the Troubles by artists including Willie Doherty, Rita Duffy, Gladys McCabe and Mary McIntyre. Most recently, ‘Field Notes from the Border #3’, toured from the Gallery of Photography to Nerve Visual, featuring work by Anthony Haughey, Dragana Jurišić, Kate Nolan, Kevin Fox and Raymond B. Newman.

This specific focus on Northern Ireland’s civil rights struggles, the Troubles, and the border, finds an appropriate postscript with Locky Morris’s exhibition, ‘once a day every day all day long’, which runs until September 2019. During the 1980s, Morris’s work engaged with the local realities of life during the Troubles. However, this exhibition focuses on the artist’s practice since 2010. This period saw a shift away from explicitly political subjects towards the more banal, absurd or intimate aspects of everyday life, referencing changes in the artist’s circumstances, but also transformations in Northern Ireland’s post-conflict landscape. nervecentre.org

‘Troubles Art’ (19 January – 28 April), installation view, Nerve Visual; courtesy of Nerve Visual

‘Urgencies’ (19 January – 9 March), installation view, CCA Derry~Londonderry; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of CCA

I MOVED TO Northern Ireland in August last year, to take up my new role as Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry (CCA). CCA is situated within Derry’s City Walls and comprises three interconnecting gallery spaces and a library/workshop space. We also work offsite across the region. Our mission is to create opportunities for audiences to experience ambitious, experimental and engaging art, and for emerging artists to develop successful careers. We do this through our exhibitions, public programmes, publishing, research, residencies, Continual Professional Development (CPD) and more. We work with artists from Northern Ireland and international peers with a range of lived experiences. We support artists to develop their practices, both practically, in terms of the nuts and bolts of living and working as artists, as well as engaging with artists critically through peer critiques, raising ambitions and creating a nurturing environment for artists to take risks.

Our exhibition programmes pursue various inquiries and ideas, creating cumulative experiences throughout loosely thematic seasons, accompanied by longer-term projects running in parallel. ‘Urgencies’ (19 January – 9 March), was the first exhibition I curated as Director of CCA. Taking an open-call format allowed me to orient myself to local practices and ideas that artists found urgent now, as I began to learn more about the social, political and cultural context of the region. The topics included in the first edition of the exhibition included the border and Brexit and also the collapse of Stormont, crises in care and housing, gender representation, bodily autonomy, pollution, trauma and identity.

‘Urgencies’ is now becoming a biennial opencall, which will aim to gauge the concerns of emerging artists. Over time, I believe ‘Urgencies’ will serve as a pertinent snapshot of this period of history, in terms of both artists’ interests and the shifts occurring in their practices. The next call for ‘Urgencies’ will take place in Autumn next year.

Another core element is in development at the moment: Reciprocal Residencies. In a very simple act of exchange, we are creating opportunities for artists from NI to work in different contexts

abroad and we will receive artists from those countries. At a time when populism is on the rise and borders are potentially closing, we want to ensure that opportunities for international exchange and dialogue are maintained. This ethos of sharing and exchange threads through all of our exhibitions and public programmes.

Our public programme has two strands: one relating to the exhibitions and the other responding to wider developments as they unfold, in terms of artistic activity and global events, curated by our Head of Public Programmes, Sara Greavu. Recent events have included talks and screenings by Turner Prize nominee Naeem Mohaiemen and curator Eszter Szakács, who discussed the arts in the increasingly autocratic context of Hungary. These events shared international experiences that resonate with our own city and locality. A regular feature of our Public Programme is our intermittent reading group, ‘booksvscigarettes’, which has been running since 2016. Taking its name is from the George Orwell essay and through collective reading, the group digest, interpret and discuss each text. ‘booksvscigarettes’ takes place not only at CCA but also as a guest event at other venues, such as the University of Atypical and OUTBURST Festival in Belfast.

I am also very pleased that we continue to run our schools programme, bringing local primary school children (reportedly living with the highest levels of deprivation in Europe) to participate in workshops in CCA, led by practicing artists. We aim to ensure that each young participant knows that contemporary art is open to everybody, while firing their imaginations.

So far my time in Northern Ireland has been both challenging and rewarding. I have been particularly struck by the collegiate attitude of arts organisations here. At a time of diminishing public funding, I have been heartened to witness how mutually supportive organisations and artists are of one another. We share equipment and resources, promote each other’s projects and we want everyone to thrive because our city and region will be all the stronger for it. cca-derry-londonderry.org

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Art Fair

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Environmental Outlook PAMELA LEE REFLECTS ON THE PARTICIPATION OF IRISH GALLERIES IN ART BASEL AND VOLTA BASEL 2019.

AT ANY GIVEN time, there are traceable motifs present in the

psyche of contemporary art, reaching across concept and industry practice. Over the last two years, the most ineluctable have encompassed the thundering drive for female and African American equality, the ever-present rumblings in remonstration to nationalism and xenophobia, and the devastating impacts of forced human migration. Entwined within these narratives, we’ve witnessed a trend towards curatorial retribution, revisionist examination and retrospective correcting of artists previously bypassed in art history. Of course, across the 290 galleries partaking in Art Basel – and the 79 galleries at its younger, more exploratory sibling, VOLTA – many of these themes were present. However, during Basel Week, it is really the curated exhibitions and programming that drive the principal mood across the global fair and its subsidiaries.

This year there was an undeniable propensity towards a common theme of ecology – a motif that has been underpinning the contemporary art consciousness for some time.

‘Unlimited’ is Basel’s exhibition of supersize artworks.

Curated by Gianni Jetzer – Curator at Washington DC’s Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden – the showcase was abundant with ecologically-focused monuments. Guiseppe Penone’s six-metre tall Cedar wood sculpture, Cedro di Versailles, manifested the subtle dynamic between man and nature. Through Anne and Bernhard Blume’s photographic series, Im Wald (In the Forest), viewers found themselves surrounded by towering gelatin prints in which doll-like humans were ensnared in the ragged shards of splintering trees, revealing violence in the destruction of nature. Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher’s Highway Gothic – an immersive installation of floating textiles, luminescent light boxes and rolling film projection – explored the destructive impact of the US interstate 10 freeway. Meanwhile, Sam Falls’s expansive series of paintings, California Flora, (National Forest Condensation Wall, North to South), was a silent and hopeful testament to the preservation of nature across the world.

‘Unlimited’ is known to largely influence the choice of artists exhibited by galleries; it’s a commercial no-brainer.

Congruently, the old adage proclaims: “See in Venice, buy in Basel”. Environment was a hot topic at Venice this year.

Whether intentional or not, ecological consciousness seemed to emerge within the booths of mega galleries and first-timers alike, with the Irish galleries being no exception. Within the panoramic installation at the mother’s tankstation booth, there were several of Jessica Homer French’s meticulous oil paintings, in which she explores archetypes of death, nature and rural life. Her series ‘Prescription Burns’, depicting forests amid a fiery blaze, were set alongside more monochromatic illustrations of rural settlements, with metropolitan skylines in the distance. Adjacent hung the dreamy luminescent flowering still-life paintings of Mairead O’hEocha. The words ‘it does matter’ (with the preliminary two words scribbled out) whispered from Lee Kit’s misty blue canvas. Simultaneously, at floor level sat Yuri Pattison’s Image Circulation Series, depicting desolate cityscapes. Presented as glossy catalogues in Perspex boxes, their apocalyptic aura was echoed by Hannah Levy’s transubstantiated creatures of fleshy silicone and steel, which sauntered through the space. And all the while, Noel McKenna’s poignant domestic animals seemed to gaze out with reproach from their dignified painterly settings.

At the spacious Kerlin booth, hung the sweeping blackand-white photographs of Gerard Byrne’s ‘Beasts’ series. Shot inside the Biologiska Museet, Stockholm, they depict choreographed scenes from the museum’s 360-degree diorama of taxidermy animals. The largest work captures a striking antlered moose; in others, a snow leopard peers through the trees at a small bear or an arching bird of prey. The eccentricity of an exhibit, unchanged since 1893, teamed with the use of fragile, archaic film, creates an uneasiness that is hard to pinpoint. Beautiful yet disconnected, there is something unearthly about these creatures that prompts viewers to ques-

tion their misguided fate. On an effacing wall, a tall woven, mythical Lion Man howls mournfully, even empathetically, at the moon in Isabel Nolan’s Lowenmensch under the moon.

This scenario was benevolently lifted by the contrastingly lackadaisical disposition of Hannah Fitz’s life-size sculptures, one of which basked under the colorful glow of a vast Liam Gillick sculpture, installed on the ceiling. This was complemented by the bold lyricism of an expressive, abstract work

by Liliane Tomasko on the external wall, allowing visitors to depart the booth with a spirit of optimism.

On entering VOLTA, visitors were greeted by an informative installation on the Verbier 3-D Foundation. The Sculpture Park and Artist Residency Programme aims to unite artists, scholars, scientists and the public to chronicle the impact of the surrounding glacial environment, in relation to our current era of the Anthropocene. This introductory statement quickly established VOLTA not only as euphoniously in tune with the ethos of the larger fair, but also as the space for discovery and enquiry.

In prime position, stood the Green on Red Gallery booth, which seamlessly merged nature with domesticity through Damien Flood’s canvas, Slumber, depicting foliage and clouds through the window of a disjointed space, blending the boundaries of interior and exterior, landscape and figuration. The painting was grounded through the metallic glazed, sylvan pots unassumingly installed on the floor below. The artist’s interest in philosophy, theology, alchemy and the natural sciences was consolidated with Potter, a metallic glazed sculpture in the form of an endearing double-faced Gargoyle, spouting a crop of flowering succulent from his head. Rooted through a dusted copper stand, this enchanting figurine is reminiscent of a garden gnome, who we interpret as keeper of our domestic outdoor environments. Facing this mythical allotment was a cyanotype by Alan Butler, featuring what appeared to be microscopic cactaceae plants floating in a sea of blue, insinuating deeper explorations into biological life.

The environmental motif was also palpable within the Gibbons & Nicholas presentation. Visitors were instantly transported into an immersive and ephemeral world, through Siobhan McDonald’s large luminescent, Lunula, a moonlike sheet of calfskin decorated with 24 carrot gold leaf, which appears to float against a backdrop of woven basalt and black smoked seismograph paper. Artist-in-residence in the School of Natural Sciences at Trinity College Dublin (2017–2019), McDonald’s work is focused on current ecological concerns and the consequences of climate change. An enchanting series of small painted wooden panels depict illusory forests, as part of the project ‘The Trees are Whispering to One Another’, which sought to capture the innate environment-sensing capacity of plants. Drawing these works together was the sculptural installation, Study for a Volcano, an unrefined glass prism that becomes seductive and mysterious, as hazy video footage of billowing clouds of volcanic smoke is projected through it, creating a lambent glow. Across the space hung an expansive, embroidered visage of earthly cosmos by artist George Bolster. Two Suns Generate Double Rainbows on Tatooine depicts a vibrant planetary skyscape, as two sweeping rainbows cross the composition, while satellite dishes point upwards. Bolster completed a residency at the SETI Institute / NASA Ames, and this illustrious textile work explores our knowledge as a species and whether we can continue to evolve amid the wreckage of the Anthropocene.

It is somewhat reassuring to see the realities of global climate change being addressed across the programming of such a commercial deity as Art Basel. Eco-conscious art is nothing new; however, an eco-conscious art fair would be radical. We can only hope that this year’s leitmotif is not superficial, and that it will become earnestly embedded in the evolving topography of the world’s most esteemed art fair.

Pamela Lee is an writer, curator and art consultant.

Top: Kerlin Gallery at Art Basel 2019, Booth M15, 13–16 June. Pictured: Liam Gillick, Hannah Fitz and Isabel Nolan; photograph courtesy of the artists and Kerlin Gallery Middle: George Bolster, Two Suns Generate Double Rainbows On Tatooine, 2019, jacquard, hand-cutting and embroidery; courtesy of the artist and Gibbons & Nicholas gallery Bottom: Green on Red Gallery at VOLTA Basel 2019, Booth 01, 10–15 June. Pictured: Xavier Theunis, Caroline McCarthy Damien Flood; photograph courtesy of the artists and Green on Red Gallery

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Biennial

A Geography of Sound JOANNE LAWS PROFILES SOUND ART AT THE 58TH VENICE ART BIENNALE THE 58TH VENICE Art Biennale 2019 makes great strides in

averting criticism of previous editions by delivering a roughly equal gender balance, while featuring only living artists. This significant gesture is further augmented by a strong representation of younger artists, manifesting slick new media and interdisciplinary practices. Deviating from past iterations, curator Ralph Rugoff has assembled dual exhibitions across the two main spaces – an effective presentation strategy that allows each of the 79 artists to reveal multiple strands of their practice, while creating more memorable dialogue between the two traditionally autonomous venues.

Several press reviews have lamented the inclusion of many works previously shown elsewhere; however, I did not find this problematic. It was rewarding to revisit standout pieces previously encountered in other contexts – like Suki Seokyeong Kang’s enigmatic textile sculptures, shown at last year’s Liverpool Biennale, or Shilpa Gupta’s haunting sound installation, originally commissioned by Edinburgh Arts Festival. Substantial new audio-visual commissions from The Store X The Vinyl Factory are premiered, including Data Verse 1 (2019), a multi-sensory installation with a minimalist soundtrack based on white noise, by Japanese electronic composer and artist, Ryoji Ikeda, who also installed spectra III – a Kubrick-style, fluorescent light corridor, embodying a ‘blizzard of data’ at the entrance to the Central Pavilion. In addition, Hito Steryl’s epic new multi-screen installation, This is the Future (2019), mines the psychedelic mythologies of ancient and futuristic civilisations, in search of answers to current global anxieties (like hate speech, austerity propaganda and social media addiction), noting that “entering the future is a massive health hazard”.

Further responding to current geopolitical instability, many artists present timely works exploring borders, prisons and other forms of enclosure. A fractured concrete wall, topped with razor wire, is one of the first barriers encountered by viewers, when entering the cluttered frenzy of the Central Pavilion. Titled Muro Ciudad Juárez (2010), by Teresa Margolles, this wall previously provided a backdrop to the drug war in Ciudad Juárez – a Mexican town bordering the USA. Perhaps using the physicality of walls as a provocation, the biennale includes an unprecedented array of sound art, creating acoustic environments that reverberate fluidly throughout the vast exhibition spaces.

As noted by Lebanese artist and composer, Tarek Atoui – whose interactive sound work, The GROUND (2018), is installed in the Giardini – the ‘abstraction of sound’ is pulling us away from the ‘weight of the image’, thus liberating us from a visually-saturated world. Drawing on the legacy of 1960s composers like John Cage, Atoui seeks to expand notions of listening, through spatially responsive and durational sound performances. Within Atoui’s tactile and aural environment, handcrafted musical instruments produce sound autonomously, based on field recordings made by the artist along the River Delta in China. Audiences, musicians, instrument-makers and other improvisors come and go, yet the performance holds momentum, as a collaborative interface and as a sonic forum for active research.

Among national participations, the more successful sonic works include Panos Charalambous’s installation for Greece’s National Pavilion, which comprises 20,000 drinking glasses, configured to form a floor-based, transparent stage. As visitors walk across the platform, they generate layers of tintinnabulation, which echo throughout the pavilion like a vortex.

Sculptural elements, such as megaphones and a taxidermy eagle, function as remnants of Charalambous’s previous sound performance, described as an ‘ecstatic ultrasonic dance’, aimed at playfully recomposing forgotten histories, silenced by hegemonic power structures. In the Japanese Pavilion, black and white video projections by Motoyuki Shitamichi depict ‘tsunami boulders’ washed up on shorelines, while a series of wall texts convey anthropological allegories, based

on folklore linked to the tsunami. These elements are unified by a score, reminiscent of birdsong, performed on automated recorder flutes to imagine a sonic ecology in which humans and non-humans can coexist.

Rumbling throughout the Giardini are periodic crashes from Shilpa Gupta’s mechanised residential gate, which cause the supporting wall to crumble and crack. Gupta frequently explores the physical and ideological function of borders, as well as the structures of surveillance permeating these sites.

Gupta’s second sound installation, located in the Arsenale, consists of 100 hanging microphones. Rather than acting as recording devices, they function as speakers, transmitting an immersive and layered soundscape of whispers, static and clapping. Giving voice to 100 poets who have been imprisoned or executed for their political alignments, the haunting recital includes readings in different languages, while fragmented verses, inscribed on pages, are violently pierced by metal spikes. Among the gentler soundscapes is an enchanting vocal, emanating from an installation by South African artist, Kemang Wa Lehulere. This tribal song forms part of a male initiation ceremony, traditionally performed by the Xhosa people, who were oppressed by colonial and Apartheid governments. Speakers are embedded within a school chair, while birdhouses, fabricated in wood from salvaged school desks, channel current critical debate in South Africa, regarding the decolonisation of school curricula.

Less successful sound works included Dane Mitchell’s Post Hoc for the New Zealand Pavilion, in which an inventory of vanished, extinct or invisible phenomena is electronically broadcast in frustratingly muffled tones, via tree cell towers located around Venice. This list is printed concurrently in the otherwise empty Palazzina library, highlighting the vacuity of this underwhelming sonic encounter. Grating sounds emanate from Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s equally vexatious robotic artworks in the Giardini and Arsenale, while horrendous automatons resurface in the Belgium Pavilion – fashioned as a 1940s heritage museum and flanked by prison cells – as traditional harpsicord players generate music to ‘soothe the condemned’.

Also addressing the ‘acoustics of incarceration’, Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s compelling video installation, Walled, Unwalled (2018) was a standout work that helped me consolidate my thinking regarding the biennale thematic. Set within the Funkhaus sound studios in East Berlin – from which East German State Radio was once broadcast – the film features Abu Hamdan’s lecture-performance on the ‘politics of listening’. He chronicles the Cold War and the Regan-Thatcher era as precursors to current global border fortification, before outlining legal cases in which evidence took the form of sound heard through walls. He relays the experiences of prisoners, who train their ears to surpass the walls of their cells. With the prison complex operating as an echo chamber, sounds of interrogations and torture happening in other rooms are amplified exponentially, generating an ‘architectonic form of torture’.

As described by Salomé Voegelin, in her book, The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening (Bloomsbury, 2018), “a geography of sound has no maps; it produces no cartography. It is the geography of encounters, misses, happenstance and events; invisible trajectories and configurations between people and things”. Porous and immaterial, sound has the capacity to permeate, transcend and defy inescapably solid structures. If the emerging sensibilities of sonic materialism are without social boundaries, then the convergence of so many expanded sonic practices in Venice this year generates extreme positivity and hope. This polyphony of voices, both harmonic and dissonant, offer ways to resist segregation or enclosure, by visualising and enacting a more connected world.

Joanne Laws is Features Editor of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet. The 58th International Venice Biennale continues until 24 November.

Top: Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, 2009, MS Mobile Gate, installation view, 58th International Art Exhibition Middle: Pavilion of Japan, Cosmo-Eggs, mixed media, installation view, 58th International Art Exhibition Bottom: Kemang Wa Lehulere, Flaming Doors, 2018, mixed media, installation view, 58th International Art Exhibition All photographs by Francesco Galli, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Biennial

17

Staged Authenticity ALAN PHELAN NAVIGATES GENDER IDENTITIES AT THE 2019 VENICE ART BIENNALE. THE BIENNALE OPENED a week before the Eurovision. In

terms of kitsch nationalism and tone-deaf politics, there could not be a better analogy. Difficult national politics can get artwashed – or tourism promotion can have a stronger grip than the art – but this year, these were outweighed by strong feminist voices or, better still, work that had opposing values to the country they were representing or the curatorial theme they were nestled into. The ‘big show’ that tackles the ‘big ideas’ of the day can easily lose out in a city littered with hundreds of shows, exhibits, projects and even performance artists baying for attention – but it does generate many starting points.

When rumours began circulating about the €30 million cost of Christoph Büchel’s raised migrant boat, Barca Nostra, the artist had succeeded in playing the art crowd. Gossip replaced information, followed by moral outrage and indignant memes. Eventually, facts followed in a slew of articles (see theartnewspaper.com for a good overview) but spectacle was the real winner. This is part of the backstory, as it tied directly into Rugoff ’s theme, despite nobody seeming to get that – this was art fake news in action.

In many ways, there are 89+ individual attempts at museum standard shows competing with the main biennale themed exhibition which, despite only having 79 artists in this edition, is still enormous. There is a lot to describe but there is already a slew of ‘top ten reviews’ which do that job very well. A simple search will yield many such lists – I can recommend artsy.net, domusweb.it, news.artnet.com, as well as vogue.co.uk (featuring a profile on female artists at the biennale, in which includes Eva Rothschild, who represented Ireland).

What generally happens however, outside of the firm winners and favourites, are the accidental patterns that emerge outside of the great curatorial plan, like the prevalence this year of gender/queer work, science fiction and dance music across the city. I must confess, these are part of my subjectivity, informed by my interests as an artist – the results of my internal filter that tries to resist the pushy media packs of press week.

It sometimes feels that misinterpretation is the only way to navigate the flood of art. Crowds are dense during press week and tempers and patience can be short. But as this is art, some artists deliberately misdirect – making one thing, saying another and then publishing an entirely different array of ideas.

Sometimes by plan, sometimes by mistake, as press release and wall text lingo gets garbled between language translation, art theory and hyperbole. Many interpretative skills are required.

Brief descriptions of all works can be found at labiennale.org however, split between the national reps and the big show, plus the collateral pay-to-be-there and special projects.

For the national shows, many will generally have taken the best part of two years to realise and are, in many instances, a culminating point or pinnacle in an artist’s career. Many will have an advanced visual vocabulary or be at the height of their popularity, which has led to that national representation and pavilion. Good examples from the Giardini’s ‘Empire Avenue’ would be France, Great Britain and Germany – Laure Prouvost, Cathy Wilkes and Natascha Sadr Haghighian, respectively. These three artists offered emotional and conceptual arrangements of displacement and loss, each charting differing courses through national identities in their signature styles and all demanding different durational commitments.

Provost did fun climate change; Wilkes did sad domestic and Sadr Haghighian was someone else.

Between spectacle and anti-spectacle, all three were extremely sophisticated and nuanced presentations of well-oiled practices and all three left me content but a little cold. I got drawn to the dance music in the Korean pavilion instead, a thumping hard techno soundtrack by Siren Eun Young Jung in a rear room, to a video showing four characters performing gender, disability and DJing. It should have been trite, but a very polished visual edit and music mix made it work.

A special edition of Harper’s Bazaar Korea, like the special edition Monopl magazine at Germany, did not help any in-

terpretative questions I had, but acted as a good reminder of a blander commodity culture underwriting so much of what is on show at Venice.

The nearby pavilions of Switzerland and Spain, who both had collaborative groups, also played out a gender/queer fuckery with a trickster dance tone. It’s difficult to ‘present as’ counter-culture in such a bourgeois setting, but both functioned to unnerve the heteronormative bias that otherwise dominates.

So, when Austria failed to make the mark of reviving a feminist genius, nearby Brazil excelled at presenting the liveliest and somehow most authentic show. Clearly in defiance of the Bolsonaro government, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca presented a proud trans-gendered ghetto war dance, ‘horizontally’ created with participants, reappropriating Beyoncé moves to push back pop culture, to own it and ‘serve’ it.

The piece succeeded with ‘realness’ in a way that Shu Lea Cheang at Taiwan could not quite muster. Despite a huge, complex and super-camp production, the work felt like a literal rendition of curator Paul B. Preciado’s writings, channelling Foucault with a panopticon video display in a prison with gender and sexual outlaws. It was cutting yet funny, but too close to texts like Testo Junkie. A live version of the piece – with many of the performers, served with penis cake – was apparently more successful, so said a colleague who managed to attend it on San Servolo, the ‘Island of the Mad’.

If you lived between London and Berlin in the last few years, you would have seen it all, so another colleague said.

As I only live in Dublin, the Arsenale and Giardini Central Pavilion are a great way to catch up on the works of Arthur Jafa, Kahil Joseph, Hito Steyrl, Teresa Margolles, Nicole Eisenman, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Rosemarie Trokel and many more. These works are all too eclectic to describe or discuss here, but those dealing with aspects of social justice and gender politics were strongest. Similar themes occurred with other artists around robots, sauerkraut juice and weepy CGI, but did not work as well.

Science Fiction operated between the AI aspirations of the main show, from the ridiculous Halil Altindere space refugee, or tedious Mars diorama by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, to the sublime Larissa Sansour at Denmark. And then there was Stan Douglas; his quantum identity-swapping character fared better in an exquisitely made B-movie, successfully questioning race in space. The Mexican pavilion could be seen as a deranged time-travelling, Bible re-enactment epic, but that was not the intention of artist, Pablo Vargas Lugo. Larissa Sansour’s work has long dealt with finding parallel Sci-Fi narratives for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, yet her film for Denmark provoked a long online conversation with a friend, who pointed out that the the eco-disaster theme was actually anti-Semitic and not the ‘radical alterity’ proposed by the curator.

One of the last shows I saw was Charlotte Prodger, who represented Scotland. The 39-minute video was slowly paced and the opposite of Laure Prouvost’s 20-minute film which was of a frenzy of edits. Both works share an authority of self-conviction, that kind of public self-belief unironically riddled with self-doubt and diary structures, probable humility and apparent intimacy. Both let the cameras roll around their largesse and the people and places important within their narrative. It reminded me why Lithuania won the Golden Lion, as that work had a different and decided generosity.

The singing beach goers were casually directed, giving the impression they really were enjoying their day out, singing about climate change and the end of the world. Maybe it was the collaborative nature of the piece, from production to performance, that brought me back to the staged authenticity that worked so well for Brazil, offering a fresh twist on what post-truth can become.

Alan Phelan is an artist based in Dublin. His trip to Venice was self-funded with press accreditation arranged through VAI.

Top: Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Swinguerra, 2019; film still courtesy of the artists and Fundação Bienal de São Paulo Middle: Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Moving Backwards, 2019, installation with film, Switzerland Pavilion Bottom: Sun & Sea (Marina), 2019, Pavilion of Lithuania; photograph by Andrea Avezzù, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Residency

Outgrowths LUCY ANDREWS DISCUSSES HER RECENT RESIDENCY AND EXHIBITION AT LEITRIM SCULPTURE CENTRE. MY EXHIBITION ‘OUTGROWTHS’ (17 May – 12 June) was

the culmination of a residency at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Manorhamilton, which took place between March and May of this year. The new body of work I produced during this residency combined plant matter, industrial materials (such as plastics and aluminium), and those of a more ambiguous status, such as bitumen and liquid chlorophyll extract. I was thinking a lot about the provenance and longevity of such materials and their transformations over time. These sculptural components were later assembled into an architecturally responsive installation, presented as a disharmonious ecosystem, in which the grown and the made would contaminate each other and coalesce into semi-solid formations.

At the heart of this body of work was the form of the burr – a bulbous growth which develops around damaged trees like scar tissue. I started collecting these objects in the run up to the residency and found other specimens during my explorations of the local area. I used them in various iterations, growing out of the walls of the exhibition space, as well as in conjunction with other pieces of refined timber, as a way of subverting a structured, manufactured object, and bringing it back to its original state. In the piece, spontaneous generation, a branch was turned on a lathe. The weight of the burr caused the line of the branch to become erratic, creating tension between the slow forces of nature and the rapid rotation of this machine.

Another piece, Still, involves a wooden trestle with burrs around its legs, being ‘fed’ liquid chlorophyll so that the point at which the living matter of the tree becomes a dead material is made ambiguous. These deformities were further echoed in found plastic objects, such as bottles and containers, which had been heated into irregular air bubbles, their forms echoing the toxicity and abject nature of the material.

Leitrim Sculpture Centre occupies a unique position in the northwest of Ireland. It was first established in the late 1990s, focusing mainly on sculptural work in stone, wood and bronze. During the period from 2006 to 2008, the centre expanded considerably, moving into its current factory site, which houses a workshop for the production of glass, a metal workshop with a foundry and forge, and a facility for mould-making. There is also an impressive exhibition space of more than 300 square metres, which lends itself well to large-scale sculpture and installation work. The centre is constantly transforming and is currently expanding its facilities in woodwork and ceramics.

LSC also encompasses the nearby Sheehan’s building on Main Street, which has a large printmaking studio, as well as a digital media centre and darkroom. Next door is McKenna’s house, where artists can be accommodated on both a shortterm and long-term basis. There is studio space for around ten artists, who work there on a longer-term basis and who can also make use of the workshops.

The centre is still a place for excellence in traditional practices (running courses in stone carving, blacksmithing and glass blowing) but also facilitates contemporary art practices in all kinds of media. The artists in residence (from Ireland and abroad) are selected through an application process and fall into two strands: The exhibition residency (in which I participated) involves a two-month residency leading up to an exhibition. The programme tends to focus on site-responsive ideas relating to the social or physical environs of Leitrim; and the professional development residency, which encourages artists to further their work or experiment in a given field for around one month. All resident artists are given a stipend and are accommodated on-site. There is also an extensive programme of exhibitions and events outside of the residency programme, such as a performance art festival, titled ‘Somatic Distortion’, taking place 4–5 October, in LSC and other venues in Manorhamilton.

Manorhamilton is a town of only around 1,500 people which very much punches above its weight in a cultural sense,

due to LSC, the Glens Centre (a venue for theatre and music) and the high proportion of visual artists and musicians who are active in the locale. Another attraction for artists is the town’s position within the dramatic landscape of north Leitrim, close to the glacial valleys of Glencar and Glenade and the coastlines of Sligo and Donegal. I spent time exploring lakes rivers and woods in the area, taking photographs and collecting materials. I felt that the unique geographical context impacted on my work and aesthetic during this time, offering me a space to work in, but also the visual space of the landscape beyond.

During my time at the centre I wanted to make the most of its technical facilities and expertise. As artist in residence, I was given one-to-one tuition in mould-making, blacksmithing and woodwork, and I also took part in some of the weekend classes (which are open to the public) where I learned about sand-casting in aluminium and glass. Some of these endeavours went on to inform the finished body of work; in other cases, I saw this technical instruction as an opportunity to learn (in a hands-on sense) more about certain processes, which gave me a greater understanding of what’s possible, with a view to future projects. The LSC also draws upon the knowledge of local artists and craftspeople, and visiting artists are able to connect with these people for specialist tuition in various media. I was interested in these crossovers between the contemporary and traditional within the culture of the centre – the generous passing on of long-practiced techniques and skills, as well as a willingness to experiment with them.

Lucy Andrews is a visual artist based in Ireland.

Top: Lucy Andrews, Still, 2019, beech wood, beech wood trestle, plastic tubing, liquid chlorophyll, water container, water, installation view, ‘Outgrowths’, Leitrim Sculpture Centre Middle: Lucy Andrews, Vegetablemineral, 2019, bitumen, burnt tree roots, steel chains, bleach, rock, avocado seed, golf balls, aluminium, installation view, ‘Outgrowths’, Leitrim Sculpture Centre Bottom: Lucy Andrews, spontaneous generation, 2019, beech wood, broom, dust [foreground], installation view, ‘Outgrowths’, Leitrim Sculpture Centre All photographs by Fred Corcoran; courtesy of the artist and LSC

The Visual Artists' News Sheet

Critique Edition 44: July – August 2019

Hannah Fitz, GOING BALLISTIC, 2019, steel, card, plaster, fibreglass, resin, paint, scarves; photograph courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

‘See you tomorrow’ Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh 2 May – 7 July 2019

Sirius Bakery, installation view, ‘See you tomorrow’; all photographs by Kevin Leong, courtesy of Sirius Art Centre

‘SEE YOU TOMORROW’ – an ambitious collec-

tion of public projects, led by Australian artists Elizabeth Woods and Kevin Leong – has transformed Sirius Arts Centre into a hub of activity.

On first impression, the space was busy and alive, albeit slightly confounding. Bread machines whirred in one corner of the room, while leaflets were scattered across a table in another. A video work depicting a serious looking performance of semaphore occupied one end of the space, while at the opposite end, a pile of booklets lay under a bell jar. Amidst the frenetic activity, I was invited to engage with the exhibition’s bakery and to taste the fresh bread being made onsite – a proposition that allowed me the time and space to digest my surroundings.

‘See you tomorrow’ is impressive in both range and scale. The exhibition forms part of ‘This Must be the Place’, an annual event in Cobh and Great Island that encourages participation in the arts centre’s activities. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the amount of information presented, yet there is also an underlying simplicity to the exhibition. Literature is provided (with the entire project having been documented by Professor Patricia Hoffie) however, engagement with the gallery staff helped to further illuminate the details of the various projects.

Leong and Wood have a well-established collaborative practice, focusing on site-specific and community-based arts projects, with ‘See You Tomorrow’ being one of their most expansive projects to date. Each of the projects involved collaboration with residents and local artists, with Leong and Wood acting as both facilitators and co-creators. The artists’ primary research began in 2016, when they conducted interviews

with locals, posing the following two questions: What would you like to change about Cobh?

What would you like to keep? These recorded interviews – entitled Evolution Interviews – were screened as part of the exhibition. In addition, the different concerns raised by interviewees were mapped out statistically and displayed on the gallery wall, providing a useful visual aid.

Two new publications aimed to promote a positive relationship between the younger and older communities in Cobh. The booklets were developed in collaboration with artist Peter Nash and emerged from workshops with local

‘The Long Table’, as part of ‘See you tomorrow’

Top: ‘The Vacant Building Appreciation Society’ tour of Cobh, as part of ‘See you tomorrow’. Bottom: ‘The Green Light’, as part of ‘See you tomorrow’

youth groups. Elsewhere, a video performance by local artists Lynne-Marie Dennehy and Nicole Flanagan, titled Sign Bearers, saw the artists using flag semaphore to communicate a poem.

As Cobh is a maritime town, the visual language of semaphore is part of the local heritage. This project articulates concerns over the loss of traditions and identity within the community. A hieroglyphic, digital-looking translation of the poem – which imagines the mythical Hawthorn Tree awaking to a future Ireland – was displayed on a wall adjacent to the video. This project also assumed an autonomous identity during the ex-

hibition, with the artists performing at various locations in Cobh town centre.

To the right of this screen, were chairs and a table, suggesting the remnants of another performative project. A series of election-style posters occupied the wall, detailing a public event, titled The Long Table. As part of this project, politicians running in the local elections were invited to speak at the arts centre. Each candidate was given the opportunity to discuss their plans for the future of Cobh. The concept for the event originated from concerns raised by interviewees about a widespread disillusionment with local politics.

This project also brings the political motivations of the exhibiting artists to the fore, with the philosophy that the ‘personal is political’ resonating throughout the exhibition, through a social examination of the Cobh community.

Addressing a similar concern was a real-estate style display of vacant buildings in Cobh.

Images of each property were accompanied by textual descriptions of imagined future purposes. ‘The Vacant Building Appreciation Society’ accepted submissions from locals, who dreamed up everything from alternative nightclubs to activist art collectives. In addition, a large-scale mural by artist Mark Hathaway is slowly being completed during the exhibition, adding a further sense of activity to the space. Another project, ‘The Green Light’, invited Cobh residents to participate in installing green lightbulbs in the gallery – a wonderfully simple gesture signalling that they are giving the ‘green light’ to the future.

Sarah Long is an artist and writer based in County Cork, who recently graduated from Crawford College of Art & Design.

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Karen Daye-Hutchinson ‘A Harlot’s Progress’ ArtisAnn Gallery, Belfast 2 May – 1 June 2019

‘Social Commons’ Liberty Hall Theatre, Dublin 2 – 12 May 2019 PRESENTED IN THE congenial lobby, stairs and

bar areas of Liberty Hall Theatre, ‘Social Commons’ was curated by Kathryn Maguire and Siobh McGrane for May Fest – SIPTU’s “celebration of workers’ culture”. Where the ‘commons’ denotes a shared physical resource, ‘social commons’ can mean a dispensation of peer-topeer relationships, parallel to private and State structures, aimed at promoting a ‘general good’.

The term refers not just to redistribution, but to transformative communal self-understanding.

At the base of Liberty Hall – a monument to Irish socialism and nationalism – the notion conjured unbounded scale. A tension was felt between consummate, utopic vision and piecemeal inflections of potential.

Kate O’Shea’s Hardwired (2018) was a pivot for such unfurling schemas. Planted inside the glass doors and winding around the stair column, O’Shea’s installation of imbricated ink-printed pages reached the upper landing.

With dislodged, floating political text, these zesty monochromes relayed urban or construction signage. The effect – frenetic but sanguine, like ‘80’s graphics – was calmed at the lower reception area, through the display of artworks by young people from Kilbarrack Sphere 17 Youth

Top: Francis Fay, The Knight of Mirrors, 2019, performance, 2 May; photograph by Kathryn Maguire Bottom: ‘Social Commons’, installation view’; photograph

by Kathryn Maguire

Centre (sphere17.ie). Six Portraits (2019) were tall and arresting works on paper. Carly Greene rendered a face with shuttered eyelids, her temples massaged by fingertips and displaying a patch of gaffer tape at the mouth. Alphabet of Sexuality (2019) was a considered, personal index of concepts relating to sexuality and identity, comprising a hefty stapled handbook of entries and sprightly letters affixed to the wall.

The juxtaposition of young and amateur artists alongside trained and professional counterparts provided a compelling expression of inclusiveness. Upstairs, on windows overlooking Burgh Quay, were columns of small, acetate letters. This was Double Disadvantaged (2019), impactful spoken-word text developed by young Travellers associated with Sphere 17: You say, why should I stay in school/I say, education informs me, stop treating me like a fool/ You say, our traditions are backwards, outdated, stuck in the past/ I say we value our singing, our story-telling and long may it last… Amid The Garland of Worries (2019) – teary crêpe paper wind chimes, also created by Sphere 17 – was Safe Space (2019).

These photographed clay sculptures and collages – with visages of Eminem, Tweety Bird and other characters – were made by children from an anonymous homeless hub in Ireland.

Eve Olney, a member of the Athens-based ‘Urban React’ architecture group, presented videos works, entitled Kaisariani (2017). They document an innovative, ad-hoc regeneration project in this area of Athens and illustrate structures and relationships befitting a ‘social commons’.

With local government tolerance, and backing from Bern University and crowdfunding sources, the project was endorsed by local residents, whose participation gave them direct access to Urban React. Founder Dimitri Panayotopoulos states that, returning to Greece as an unfamiliar immigrant without a social network, he began to orient himself through activities deriving from moral instinct, rather than habit. Áine ní Chíobháin’s Remedy for Wild Atlantic Dismay and A Lament for an Empty Sea (both 2019) were brittle ruminations on found and organic material; tenebrous disk-like forms on little supports. They were earthy and awkward in this artificial and frenzied environment (my visit coincided with an ‘Alternative Ulsters’ punk event), connoting policy and environmental dysfunctionality. The exhibition’s universal political concept was frequently disturbed like this, by showing the close proximity of social issues. In an untitled photograph by Daniel Idini from 2018, a figure in a sleeping bag blocks a doorway, with a plastic bag under their head and a paper cup close by. Food packaging is wedged in the door handles, while in the window, a ‘Jelly Babies’ poster displays an anti-racism message – “we’re all made of the same stuff ” – evoking the dismal emergence of xenophobia and racism with competition for resources. By imbuing its prone subject with surreal beauty, the photograph reveals insidious powers of objectification and distancing. Such reflectiveness was also inescapable in Francis Fay’s opening-night performance, The Knight of Mirrors (2019), borrowed from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in which Fay loitered absurdly outside the building’s entrance, wearing a white suit with trailing sleeves and trouser legs, with mirrors for his face and hands.

Danny Kelly is an artist based in Dublin.

‘A HARLOT’S PROGRESS’ refers to William

Hogarth’s series of the same name – a moral tale of the short life of one Moll Hackabout, who travels from the countryside to London, falls into prostitution, and succumbs to syphilis and death. Artist Karen Daye-Hutchinson’s interpretation of the sequence goes beyond the scope of Hogarth, not only in comprising 12 etchings (as opposed to Hogarth’s six engravings), but also via a prologue in which we learn the motivations of the young woman to leave her ‘shit hole’ of a village and seek her fortune in the big city by following her father’s suggestion (and against the will of a ‘disapproving mother’) to attend art college.

In Where you came from, our young protagonist stands awkwardly in a dark space of her own – a foreshadowing of the slab she will later lie on.

Buildings loom in the background – one pencil-like (a reference to art college?) and turreted like Rapunzel’s or St Barbara’s tower. Is the horse her mode of transport (as with Hackabout), or a reference to the village, or a symbol of her father next to a Guernica-like face in profile which strains to follow her, the mother perhaps?

Leopard on a pedestal features the eponymous large cat, next to what appears to be a Dyson ‘pedestal fan’. Posed odalisque-like on the floor is our writhing protagonist, seemingly entranced by the lures of the metropolis. The horse and floating face observe in silence. The marriage sees her dressed in a simple white gown and oversized shoes beside the ghostly figure of the groom. On the left, an ominous black bird with splayed wings perches above a tasselled rug with a snake pattern. The presence of man, woman and snake is like the premonition of the fall from grace.

In Under the spotlight, the heroine is sexier and more confident, reclining with a drink in her right hand. A child-like silhouette on the floor unsettles the harshly lit scene. Without volume it is like a stain, or a miscarriage, a shed skin, or the artist herself. On a pig’s back recalls the dog in Hogarth’s Bridewell Prison scene, or the decadence of Rops’ ‘Pornokratès’. The Orgy features, we assume, the husband and wife from plate four, sharing a bath with a bloated grinning hyena and a pale diaphanous female figure. The outline of the bath passes unobstructed through both of these figures: they are transparent, illusory or symbolic. In The wicked: they wait, malevolent creatures seem poised to attack.

The hyena returns in The onlookers, accompanied by another in the shadows. The animals are beautifully executed – the artist applying a tone using aquatint, and then burnishing it back to create soft chalky lines. In The cat and the blackbird, a white figure lies Marat-like on the ground in an ambiguous eyrie-like space, watched over by a white cat and a black bird. In The ascension, the blackbird is now a dove taking flight – the conjunction of both birds reminiscent of Delargy’s Beckett series. A head (or two?) emerges from a flickering bonfire, while a shadowy angel conjures the apparition from the flames or simply warms his hands beside the fire. The background is a gorgeous velvet black speckled with stars where the artist has perhaps applied a hand-shaken aquatint or spattered the area with stop-out varnish.

As with Horgarth’s final scene, The beginning or the end has a cyclical quality to it. We seem to be back in the countryside of the prologue or the afterlife. But this is no ‘shit hole’; rather a bucolic landscape with the heroine reclining

Top: Karen Daye-Hutchinson, The wicked – they wait, artist proof 36 × 31 cm Bottom: Karen Daye-Hutchinson, Where you came from, artist proof 36 × 31 cm; all images courtesy of the artist and ArtisAnn Gallery

under a tree, in Moll’s hat and nuzzled by sheep.

The father and mother figures reappear but seem softened.

From Joyce to Atwood or indeed David Hockney – who interpreted Hogarth’s ‘A Rake’s Progress’ (recently exhibited in Belfast) – the use of a prototype source has been employed by the artist as a framework for inspiration. Although conceived in the same spirit, with similar use of animals as symbols, snippets of text, and biblical and contemporary references, Daye-Hutchinson’s suite of works is not a modern retelling.

Her print cycle is more elliptical, steeped in mood and symbolism, and she shows compassion towards her young heroine. There is much to take in here. Like Hogarth’s, the prints ask to be read; yet their meanings can never be pinned down. In terms of technique, the works are a masterclass in printmaking, with a balance between premeditation and spontaneity. The catalogue urges viewers to consider each print as a complete work in its own right; however, to only view the pieces in isolation would deny us of the subtle interplay and enduring impact they achieve as a whole.

Jonathan Brennan is a multidisciplinary artist based in Belfast. jonathanbrennanart.com

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Sven Anderson and Gerard Byrne ‘A Visibility Matrix’ Void Gallery, Derry 16 April – 8 June 2019 I’M STANDING IN a dark forest. I can hear an

ambient rustling and that distinct murmur of the wind, only audible to a fabric microphone.

Disconnected rectangles of leaves and sky are visible at eye level; I can briefly feel the forest as I look up towards the grey-blue light diffusing onto the walls. Then a voice declares: “Abort!

Lacking power or effect” – and it’s gone.

A forest of identical televisions is installed in pairs throughout Void’s galleries – some are back to back, others at perpendicular angles.

Each screen is accompanied by a speaker, either directly below or elevated to the side. The speakers broadcast, in unison, a narrator issuing commands at intervals: “Randomise – Harmonise – Reverse!” The onscreen footage changes from a forest, to a landscape, streetscape or aerial view, presenting scientific data, and a range of other content from a network of contributors across diverse fields. Some footage is simultaneous across the displays (“Harmonise!”), while other footage is spread in patterns, sometimes related and sometimes not (“Randomise!”).

Drawing inspiration from early video-installation work from the late 1960s and early ‘80s, A Visibility Matrix is directed by artists Sven Anderson and Gerard Byrne. Working with an editorial team, they propose a space for crowdsourced video content as an alternative to social media, generating a kind of offline, ‘back-tothe-future’ experience.

A migratory project, it has so far been situated at The Douglas Hyde Gallery (Dublin), Le Printemps de September (Toulouse) and Secession (Vienna), until pitching up here in Derry, at Void. Its evolution has, we are told, been shaped by this journey, but the markers of evolution are unclear: has the content library grown?

Have more editors become involved? Have the audio-visual combinations changed? It seems unreasonably difficult to determine this on observation alone – the work’s accumulative nature is imperceptible, its mechanisms obscured. Of course, there is absolutely no requirement for any artist to work with transparency, but if we’re discussing a media platform, the processes become a matter of public interest.

The televisions are physically connected through a bundle of black cables that engorge exponentially as they snake through the galleries, ending in a smaller, darkened space where

they separate and climb upwards into an unseen mezzanine. On an adjacent wall is a vertically aligned panel, displaying command-line text that appears to instruct the exhibition through code. But is this an authentic command-line?

The syntax is more ‘plain-English’ than any programming language I know of, and the font is proportional, not the monospace font regularly used in programming interfaces. If other critical elements of the project are only referenced, not documented, then why relay the digital backend with this screen of pseudo-code? A large, wooden spindle of black cabling sits next to the data cables but is physically disconnected from them. It’s just there, and unless it has Wi-Fi, I doubt it’s an active part of the system. Maybe its inclusion further symbolises the ‘obscured physicality’ of digital media – a point that is already abundantly made. This final space illustrates the backend of the system in a way that betrays conceptual purity for aesthetic gestures, revealing the ‘hand of the artist’.

Of all the narrator’s interventions, it is the W.B. Yeat’s line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”, from The Second Coming, that stands apart for its poetic gravitas, amid the otherwise prosaic commands. It is the strange fate of The Second Coming to have been absorbed intravenously by popular culture, such that even complete ignorance of Yeats or poetry-in-general is no barrier to knowing what these words mean. Their spectral reoccurrences here, semantically out of place, symbolise the pathology of viral culture.

It is proposed that A Visibility Matrix “speculates on an alternative to the […] subject + smartphone + online-video-sharing-platform” paradigm. It aspires to abjure social media, but the immediate viewer experience actually mirrors it: both are driven by an obscured, proprietary algorithm. The idea of systemic content generation is a priori; it seems accomplished, so long as we respond using the language provided. But if we dissent, there is a messier, more human authorship to be glimpsed amid the occasionally sublime moments that occur outside of the system.

Kevin Burns is an artist and writer based in Derry.

Sven Anderson and Gerard Byrne, ‘A Visibility Matrix’, installation view, Void; photograph by Tansy Cowley, courtesy of Void

Hannah Fitz ‘OK’ Kerlin Gallery, Dublin 23 April – 25 May 2019

Hannah Fitz, ‘OK’, installation view, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin; courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery

HANNAH FITZ’S EXHIBITION, ‘OK’, comprises eight crudely sculpted life-size figures of boys cavorting clumsily around the spartan environment of the Kerlin’s white cube. The premise for the gathering is a mob of football fans on match day, as they crouch, stand, jostle, show off and celebrate, alone or in pairs around the gallery.

One can’t help feeling pity for their rudimentary facelessness and gawky execution in dirty white plaster, while at the same time trying to figure out the relevance of their lumpen physicality and apparent worthlessness. The few props that dress some of the characters – including a pair of runners, a t-shirt, football scarves and a baseball cap – don’t reveal any further insight.

Neither do they manage to inject conceptual coolness or visual appeal.

The titles of the works are relatable idiomatic wisecracks – such as HERO, LIAR LIAR or ALL HAIL – that in another artist’s hands would provide layers of metaphorical meaning.

But in ‘OK’, they simply collide with the work’s strange and creepy physicality. The exhibition is genuinely weird, ugly and unsettling.

If Fitz is concerned with anatomy, it could be from the perspective of her childhood self.

Rectangular torsos and log-shaped limbs look as though they have materialised from a primary school painting. It doesn’t really matter which angle they are viewed from: like popup cut-outs, they seem to absorb their own three-dimensional form. At the heart of Fitz’s oeuvre is an intuitive impulse to make art from inside her head, rather than from observation. It is as though her ideas form into arcs of electricity from her mind that are moulded urgently into physical form, while dispensing with formal considerations such as gravity, proportion and weight.

In ‘OK’, the football fans existence is paradoxical and fleeting, not unlike Morph – the stop motion animation from the BBC’s 1980s children’s television show Hartbeat. The smiley, wide-eyed miniature plasticine man could pour, stretch, flatten and roll himself into a ball, yet he always returned to his thickset amorphous form in double-quick time. That illusion of being able to observe the ‘live’ emergence of this little character’s antics is somehow approximat-

ed in Fitz’s ungainly figures, who might unravel, flop or crumple into an unrecognisable mass at any moment.

In an interview with Eimear Walshe in 2016, Fitz described how she thinks of groups of her work as forming themselves into a “gang” in which individual works might be “falling in and out of relations” with each other.1 ‘OK’ could be viewed as a failed test of this concept in the Kerlin’s laboratory-like environment.

While it is evident that placement is important and spatial relationships are active between individual works, what is not clear is if they really are ‘relations’, or if they are in fact the opposite of relations (if that’s possible).

More likely is that each individual or pair have been compulsively positioned to existentially avoid acknowledgement of each other.

They seem only aware of their own singularity, formed in a simultaneous moment of creation in Fitz’s hands, which could just as instantly collapse or disappear without reference to others in the group. Of all of the unsettling aspects of the exhibition (putting aside the coarse rendering and crude limbs) it is this disassociation between the characters that undermines the viewer’s attempts to empathise or understand their relevance or the artist’s intentions.

Though not pretty, an equivocation of Fitz’s ideas is executed in material form. She puts it up to the viewer to think, to examine, and to feel something in the face of her very unattractive work. They are not quite clever or funny enough to be conceptual, nor loose enough to be expressive, nor attractive enough to be lyrical. While Fitz does not come across as self-consciously keeping pace with the inexorable expansion of visual possibilities pursued by some of her peers, she is still well up in the race, casually causing breaches in the pack with her in-between, neither-here-nor-there ideas.

Carissa Farrell is a writer and curator based in Dublin.

Notes 1 Eimear Walshe, ‘Ruff Around the Edges – Hannah Fitz’, Totally Dublin, 16 March 2016.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Residency

New Haunts JONATHAN MAYHEW TALKS ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES SO FAR, AS PART OF THE TBG+S AND HIAP INTERNATIONAL RESIDENCY EXCHANGE. IT’S EARLY IN a late spring and I’m about two-thirds of the

way through my residency at HIAP (Helsinki International Artist Programme) on the island of Suomenlinna, just off the coast of Helsinki. The films of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki were my only experiences of Finland before arriving here. Landing late in the evening, it was strange being driven through a cityscape I wasn’t expecting. My first night was spent in a hotel that felt like it hadn’t left the ‘70s – in a good way. Neither had the dinner menu – in a bad way.

The next morning, the first boat ride over to the island was exciting, breaking the ice as we crossed the sea.

HIAP’s main studio spaces and offices are based here, amongst 800 residents, hares, flocks of geese and visitors roaming the four islands that make up Suomenlinna. Built

by Sweden in 1748 as a fortress to protect against Russian expansionism, Suomenlinna was added to the cultural UNESCO World Heritage Site list in 1991 as a unique monument of military architecture. A history of war has scarred and produced this landscape. Odd bumps and lumps run along its coastline, hiding old bunkers, with guns still on show. War haunts the island in visible ways, with canons repurposed as decoration and old large shells – hopefully disarmed – now functioning as doorway markers. Tourists and locals picnic and stare at their phones, as they navigate the various islands and stonewalls of the fort I currently reside in.

You end up in odd rhythms controlled by boat timetables when you live here. Some days that’s the only time that matters. Suomenlinna feels like a place where time slips. The island council of Suomenlinna wish to preserve the island, akin to 1918, when it was still under Swedish rule. Public lighting is limited to an estimation of how it was during that time, leaving some areas dark and haunting at night. Empty tunnels wind their ways through the old fort walls. Some mornings, I have been greeted by people in ‘ye olde costumes of yore’ or by SkyRim cosplayers, wandering past the studio windows; large tour groups march through, as if they’re on a film set or theme park. Some days here, it’s oddly surreal.

Time is interesting for its narrative-building qualities; more often though, like island life, time feels like it’s broken into loops. Bits and pieces link together, making disconnected stories, echoing how we get our news. Different portals present various narratives for us to engage with or not – social media guiding us through the world, an excavated past,

Jonathan Mayhew, Facebook Remembers, 2019; photograph by Sheung Yiu / HIAP; courtesy of the artist

dug up like old tweets. Kaurismäki’s films feel haunted too; they’re mostly quiet with sparse dialogue – minimal, like the characters are out of sync with the world. Kaurismäki’s cinematography bleeds into the real here in Helsinki, with his two bars called Corona and Kafe Moskova. Walking into Kafe Moskova is like walking back in time. Sadly, now its time is nearly up, as the building has been sold for redevelopment. It will live on in memories.

I’ve been working on a writing project here – a homage to the American writer and artist Joe Brainard. He wrote a book, a kind of memoir, called I Remember (1975), about all the things he remembered from his life. Nowadays technology holds our memoires – Facebook’s algorithm shows me my ‘memories’ daily. In a procedural writing process that documents my life in a way that compresses and expands time, I describe what’s in my Facebook feed – images or links, whatever happens to have appeared. I’m planning on featuring this writing as part of a performance for the Open Studio at HIAP in late May. You can be part of another version on the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios’ Instagram account, following my ‘takeover’ in April.

I’m also developing some sculptures that involve hidden technologies and a video work, My Mother: D/a/e/i/monology, which explores the unseen or unnoticed operating systems that occur in natural, occult and digital worlds. Each has its own demon running in the background. The demons of capitalism are hard to escape. We live in an age where we have 24/7 access to everything at our fingertips and yet, with all this knowledge, truth and fiction are starting to become blurred. Information has become an increasingly important commodity and everything is now generating or collecting it.

I’m very interested in how narrative has become intertwined with our everyday lives in this Web 2.0 world.

I’ve met some really great people in Helsinki, like Marjolijn Dijkman. We have some plans afoot, looking at speculative futures through ‘Solarpunk’ science fiction and developing ideas and works for positive futures in the face of the impending crisis of climate change.1 Also, Jack Persekian, with whom I will hopefully be working on a project in the future.

I have had invaluable input and conversations about my practice with Laura Toots and Marten Esko from EKKM Tallinn – the curators for the spring/summer season at HIAP. There’s also been really great talks at Paul O’Neill’s PUBLICS space:

Tony Cokes, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, to name a few.

Since the partnership began in 2007, TBG+S and HIAP have supported over twenty artists and curators from Ireland and Finland through the exchange programme. The residency for Irish artists is usually announced at the start of each year but keep an eye on TBG+S’ website for up-to-date information. HIAP has three spaces in Helsinki – the villa for shortterm guests, the Cable Factory in town and Suomenlinna; the residency has alternated between the Cable Factory and Suomenlinna in the past. HIAP is aiming to lower its carbon footprint in many ways and is engaged in projects that hope to realise this, one of which is lengthening this residency from six weeks to three months. The TBG+S and HIAP International Residency Exchange is supported by the Finnish Institute in London and the Arts Council of Ireland. Many thanks to HIAP and EKKM for selecting me and for all the wonderful support of TBG+S and the Arts Council of Ireland.

I’m not going to lie; it’s been amazing so far and any other residency I might undertake in the future will have to live up to this one. The HIAP staff have been wonderful, supportive and generous in so many ways. I lucked out and got the big studio, which is larger than most places I’ve lived in recently.

Being a good ‘Xennial’, I’ve been endlessly moving in loops between places for the last few years. I will not forget the sunsets from the balcony. Another kind of Corona from the past now haunts my mind: “This is the rhythm of my life, my life, oh yeah, this is the rhythm of my life”.

Johnathan Mayhew is an Irish artist and ocassional writer based in Dublin. Later this year, he will exhibit in VISUAL Carlow, Black Church Print Studio, Pallas Projects/Studios and Bomb Factory, London. jmayhew.com

Notes 1 Solarpunk is a movement in speculative science fiction, art and activism that looks to answer and embody the questions “what does a sustainable civilisation look like, and how can we get there?” The aesthetics of Solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and wild earth. Solarpunk works look toward a brighter future (“solar”) while deliberately subverting the systems that keep that brighter future from happening (“punk”). The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin can be seen as a precursor of the genre. Collections like Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World and Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-speculation are good introductions to the themes.

Jonathan Mayhew, Still from Work in Progress, 2019, digital video, 20 mins 30 secs, HIAP; courtesy of the artist

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Liam Gillick, Eat the Rich, 2018, outdoor lightbox commissioned by PUBLICS; photograph by Noora Lehtovuori; courtesy of PUBLICS

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Top: ‘Coalesce: Happenstance’, 2009, installation view, SMART Project Space, Amsterdam; photograph by Paul O’Neill/Suzanne Mooney; courtesy of Paul O’ Neill Bottom: We are the Center for Curatorial Studies, 2016-2017, installation view, The Hessel Museum of Art, the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, USA; photograph by Chris Kendall; courtesy of Paul O’Neill

Publicness MANUELA PACELLA INTERVIEWS PAUL O’NEILL ABOUT HIS CURATORIAL PRACTICE AND HIS ARTISTIC DIRECTORSHIP AT PUBLICS IN HELSINKI.

Manuela Pacella: Your practice is characterised by multiple overlapping interests. I agree with you that the definition of a ‘research-oriented curator’ can be quite reductive.

You unify the various strands of your research as simply ‘the curatorial’ – what does this term mean for you?

Paul O’Neill: Many arguments in relation to ‘the curatorial’ were played out in discussions in the mid-2000s: Irit Rogoff talked about the curatorial as a ‘critical thought’ that does not rush to embody itself, rather it unravels over time; Maria Lind discussed the curatorial as going beyond that which is already known; Beatrice von Bismarck framed the curatorial as a continuous spaces of negotiation; while Emily Pethick described the curatorial as allowing for things to merge in the process of being realised. I found these four propositions important, in asserting the exhibition as a collaborative research action. I think that the curatorial exists in all aspects of my work as a teacher, writer, researcher, exhibition-maker, event organiser, organisation director and so forth. But I am also using the curatorial as a kind of contested term – not yet fully disclosed or constructed – which captures forms of curatorial practice that don’t necessarily result in exhibitions, objects or material forms. Exhibitions can be really productive outcomes, but I think that exhibition-making is only one part of the curatorial constellation.

MP: Perhaps you could discuss your forthcoming book, Curating After the Global: Roadmaps for the Present (edited with Lucy Steeds, Mick Wilson and Simon Sheikh)?

PO’N: The book (out in September) is the third anthology in a publishing series between the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Luma Foundation and MIT Press.

The first book was called The Curatorial Conundrum: What to Study? What to Research?

What to Practice?; the second was How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse, which examined prominent institutional practices being developed globally by small and medium-scale art organisations. This third anthology emerged out of a symposium held at Luma Foundation in Arles in 2017. It looks at the dynamic relationship between politics, curating, education and research practice within institutions, and how these relations reimagine the intersection between the local and the global, the regional and the national, during a moment of political fragility for human rights across the world. The book addresses curating with respect to this new

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

global condition, defined by issues of locality, geo-political change, the reassertion of nation states and the hardening of national borders. It profiles local initiatives that are engaging with the global in different ways, beyond the constraints of nationalism, sectarianism or protectionism.

MP: The idea of ‘co-production’ has become increasingly important within your practice. Can you discuss the rationale and relationships underpinning some of your long-running projects?

PO’N: ‘Coalasce’ was an open exhibition model in which many different artists collaborated under the thematic: “How can we build an exhibition together?” ‘Coalesce’ is a metaphor for the exhibition as ‘landscape’, which functions as a structuring device for the three different groundings: the background, which surrounds the viewer who moves through it; the middle ground as the place where the viewer can partially interact with it (thinking about lighting, exhibition furniture, wall labels, seating, display cabinets and so forth); and the foreground, being that which contains the viewer in the space of display. Artists were commissioned to engage with one of those special coordinates. It began with three artists in 2001 at London Print Studio and ended with maybe 100 artists in 2009 at SMART Project Space in Amsterdam. It was an evolving exhibition which expanded over time, as artists invited other artists, creating different layers and cross-fertilising different artistic positions into the project.

Conversely, in the first phase of ‘We are The Center for Curatorial Studies’ at Bard College, each of the invited artists (30 at that stage) were invited to exhibit, research and teach (with the exception of William McKeown, who is no longer with us). Primarily, they exhibited work which could be defined as curatorial, bringing together a constellation of differences; giving lectures, workshops or seminars with the students of the Graduate Program at CSS; and carrying out research with students and staff. We explored ways for the final exhibition form to emerge over a long period of time, with artists visiting at different stages. The exhibition itself became a teaching and learning environment for the students; every phase provided opportunities to learn about constructing an exhibition, working and collaborating with artists and so forth. There was also another exhibition called ‘We are the (Epi)Center’ which happened at P! Gallery in Manhattan. Several artists did performances, screenings or talks there, as well as working at Bard College, which is almost two hours outside the city.

MP: The closing event of the free-school project, ‘Our Day Will Come’ (2011) at University of Tasmania, was held in a nightclub, involving a symposium and a disco.

How do you think the two different ‘publics’ perceived these experiences?

PO’N: ‘Our Day Will Come’ was a response to an invitation to take part in a monthlong series of public art projects, curated by David Cross, called ‘Iteration Again’ in Hobart, Tasmania. I worked as an artist-curator, setting up the project’s ‘free-school’ structure with curator Fiona Lee, and inviting Sarah Pierce, Gareth Long, Mick Wilson, Jem Noble, Rhona Byrne and many others to participate along with local actors, agents and school members. Each week of the month-long project began with a question: What is a School? (Week One); What is Remoteness? (Week Two); What is Autonomy? (Week Three); What is Usefulness? (Week Four). These four inquiries structured our activities, with a school each week. Our small school building was set in an old labourer’s tearoom, inside the central courtyard of the University of Tasmania, where the art school is based. We worked with existing school activities – from classes and workshops to school dinners – and we published a school zine at the end of each week, edited, designed and printed with the expanding group of participants. We also had some formal lectures and a school radio station, developed by Garrett Phelan. The school disco was the final project, formally titled Death of a Discourse Dancer, which juxtaposed two simultaneous discursive forms: the night club and the conference.

Each of the conference speakers also deejayed. I was interested in these two different audiences: one coming for the symposium, which looked at the thematic of schooling, remoteness, autonomy and usefulness; the other coming to the nightclub, where people could just dance. I was very interested in this space of publicness – the coming together of different constituencies amid moments of contestation. I had previously enacted this project at Club One in Cork in 2005, at the invitation of Annie Fletcher, Charles Esche and Art/not art. It was initially called ‘Mingle Mangled, Cork Caucus’ and worked really effectively, with everybody embracing the event. Whereas in Hobart, there was a bit more conflict or antagonism, because many of the regular visitors to the club in Hobart were not as amenable to this coming together of different audiences during their nocturnal festivities.

MP: The term ‘Publics’ has become increasingly important for you, not least since your appointment as Artistic Director of Checkpoint Helsinki. Perhaps you could discuss how the organisation’s legacy and core activities have informed this new phase?

PO’N: About 18 months ago, I was appointed Artistic Director of Checkpoint Helsinki, an initiative set up in 2013. The invitation was to reimagine how Checkpoint Helsinki could evolve and develop in the future. Checkpoint Helsinki was established as an association by a group of artists and activists to resist the Guggenheim coming to Helsinki. They developed public art projects, conferences and publications and brought international curators and practitioners to engage with Finnish art and to show

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alongside local artists. As an activist organisation, another priority was to monitor how decisions are made in the city, in terms of the distribution of funds towards culture and the arts. Some of these elements and commitments – like critical and social thinking, working together and being engaged in emerging debates – are still very important to PUBLICS. I proposed to the board that we could change the name to something more proactive and positive. The term ‘publics’ suggests a constellation of different practices, projects and productions. There are many diverse groups of people that constitute the public, whether imagined or abstract, real or actualised. The public means different things in different parts of the world and has diverging implications for various disciplines, from sociology and anthropology, to contemporary art and philosophy. Always plural, the term ‘publics’ is also maybe moving away from this binary of private and public, suggesting that all spaces are public in some way, while linking with contested spatiotemporal locations and discourse across the world.

We now have a physical space and it’s the primary site for the PUBLICS Library (designed by Julia studio who also designed PUBLICS’ identity). We have a specially commissioned lightbox sign – called Eat the Rich (2018) by Liam Gillick – which sits outside PUBLICS. It can be seen when approaching the space and is sited above one of PUBLICS large, open, highly visible, street-level windows, allowing the passer-by to have a sense of what happens inside. PUBLICS is situated in a mainly residential area, traditionally a working-class area, in a moment of early gentrification. Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts is just a ten-minute walk, so we collaborate a lot with them, through teaching and library access. The library – which currently has about 6,000 publications – is unique within the city and possibly Europe, with such a specific focus on the curatorial, publicness, activism and the spaces where philosophy and political-thinking intersect with contemporary art. Talks, events and performances happen regularly at PUBLICS, often in collaboration with other organisations in the city, regionally and internationally. The backbone of our programme is the commissioning and co-production of public artworks outside the normative spaces of galleries and museums. Sometimes PUBLICS is an exhibition space, a cinema, a school, sometimes we remain a library or a gathering space. We have previously exhibited work with artists such as Chris Kraus (when we installed all of her films), Harold Offeh, the Karrabing Film Collective, Kathrin Böhm and held screenings with Tony Cokes, and many others – however, PUBLICS is not primarily a gallery.

MP: How do you feel PUBLICS is resonating, both within the local context of the Finnish art scene and internationally?

PO’N: It is definitely resonating significantly within the local scene. When we set it up, we did a lot of public talks and events and we were always packed out. We want to bridge certain discussions that are happening in the city already, with the conversations we want to have around inequality in the arts and with discrimination in all forms. Our focus is to try to diversify audiences for the arts, so that means taking on issues relating to gender politics, queer politics and so forth. We held ‘listening sessions’ where we brought together people (who may or may not have known each other) to listen to one another. Our ‘Parahosting’ events have been another way to highlight issues that weren’t so well represented before PUBLICS. ‘Parahosting’ can be everything from a book launch, residency or durational performance, to a reading group, week-long conference or pop-up installation. Parahosting is about PUBLICS giving up its programme to the work of others, and to those initiatives who are in need of space to practice and to support the realisation of their projects publicly. PUBLICS becomes the host to other people, other bodies and their ideas; it is taken over and on many levels is preoccupied by them. We try to fully engage with the local scene, operating as a kind of fulcrum for diverse and relevant critically located discussions, but we are also thinking more widely about the Nordic region and the Baltic region. In trying to ‘de-centre’ Helsinki, we are currently working on collaborative projects with Index in Stockholm, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art in Riga and Oslo Biennial in Norway.

Our current focus is financial sustainability and bridging the gap between smallscale organisations and the larger institutions, such as museums, across the city. There is very much a project-based culture here, where organisations and initiatives are funded for maybe three to four years, and then you have these big infrastructures, like Kiasma or HAM, that are secured beyond that. In the middle, there is very little activity. We are trying to grow our organisation into a medium-scale organisation, as a way of supporting the ongoing, sustainable and long-term economic system of support for culture and contemporary art in the city and region. For ‘Today is Our Tomorrow’ – an annual cooperative festival project initiated by PUBLICS taking place in September – we are trying to establish a collaborative methodology whereby different organisations can collaborate on representing diversity and difference. This might end up being a substantial annual project, as a new model for working locally and internationally, in order to sustain small-scale organisations.

Manuela Pacella is a freelance curator and writer based in Rome.

Dr Paul O’Neill is an Irish curator, artist, writer and educator. He is the Artistic Director of PUBLICS. publics.fi

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

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kennardphillipps, ‘Finnegans Woke’ (25 January – 29 March 2019), installation view, Rua Red; photograph by Kasia Kaminska, courtesy of Rua Red

People, Politics and Place PHILIP KAVANAGH INTERVIEWS MAOLÍOSA BOYLE, DIRECTOR OF RUA RED.

Philip Kavanagh: I understand you are very busy at Rua Red right now?

Maolíosa Boyle: Yes, we have just launched ‘The Second Coming (Do What Thou Wilt)’, by South African artist Kendell Geers on 14 June. The exhibition is curated by Sylwia Serafinowicz of a/political. The show brings together a number of the artist’s interests: the occult, mysticism, magic, spirituality and Yeats, and the work also engages with the stories and myths that surround the Hell Fire Club located on Montpellier Hill, just outside of Tallaght. Geers makes connections with the site, the ghost of Leo Africanus a 16th-century Berber diplomat/cartographer and William Butler Yeats. Rua Red and a/political embrace ambitious projects and this installation has completely transformed the gallery space with the presence of a huge metal pyramid that visitors are encouraged to enter.

We have also just completed a conference in Latvia, ‘Reality Turns’, which was the conclusion to our three-year Creative Europe project EUCIDA – European Connections in Digital Art. EUCIDA supports artists’ development by providing opportunities to expand their practice through travel, international exhibitions, residencies and symposiums. It is a three-year project funded by Creative Europe, led by Rua Red in partnership with Le Département du Territoire de Belfort (France) and Rezeknes Novada Pasvaldiba (Lativa). Over the last three years, we have installed seven exhibitions, disseminated twenty-one artist travel awards and provided nine artist residencies, between the three partner countries. The programme has enabled Rua Red to expand internationally as an organisation and develop deep connections towards future projects.

PK: As the EUCIDA project draws to a close, what sort of emerging mobilities have you observed and how have they manifested?

MB: EUCIDA has evolved in directions that we couldn’t have envisaged at the start of the project. One of the unplanned outcomes was the impact on our Latvian partners in Rēzekne, a city in the Latgale region of eastern Latvia near the Russian border.

The project has transformed the region’s engagement with digital and contemporary art practice, which has in turn impacted the syllabus of the local art college. The students’ work was presented as part of exhibitions and conferences over the last two years. EUCIDA is influencing a new generation of young artists and impacting their

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

career choices. The EUCIDA conference was based in Lūznava Manor, a beautiful art nouveau building. After it was built in 1905, the manor became an artist’s retreat centre; however, in 1915, it became the headquarters of the Imperial Russian army and the home of the Soviet Union Authorities from 1917 to 1919. Only within the last few years has the manor been restored to an arts and cultural centre and EUCIDA has been a big part of this.

PK: The ongoing collaboration between Rua Red and a/political has been a prominent aspect of Rua Red’s programming since you started as executive director in 2017. Can you explain the evolution of this collaborative programme?

MB: I wanted to build a programme that would reflect the concerns of the communities of Tallaght and South Dublin County; a programme that is relevant to this place and its people. From the start, I was taken by the strong sense of community here and the passion the people have for their locality. People look you straight in the eye and tell you what they think. I have a lot of respect for that. There’s an honesty and generosity of spirit that I immediately relate to, coming from Derry, that made me feel very welcome. I have always believed that galleries should make a difference to their community through engagement and discussion, as places of neutrality where vital and sometimes difficult conversations take place. This is how the ethos of ‘people, politics and place’ came to underpin the programme strategy. I had previously worked with a/ political when I was Director of Void and instinctively knew they would be interested in working with Rua Red. I believe in grassroots organisations that are born out of the passion of the people – Rua Red is such a place and a/political share these concerns.

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to how she is symbolised within historical works and texts mainly by men and how she has influenced church and state’s view of women. In the mid-1990s, I undertook a body of photographic research into the Magdalene laundries in Ireland while I was a student at NCAD. At that time, Sean MacDermott Street Laundry (the last laundry in Ireland) was closing. I was a young single mother myself, so I felt very close to the research I was undertaking. I later documented The Good Shepard Laundry in Derry, exhibiting the work at the Orchard Gallery in 1998.

Marina Warner’s seminal book, Alone Of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary, had a singular impact on my art practice at that time and remained a reference point that I carry with me into the curation of this programme. The commissions will form a year-long series of exhibitions and interventions starting in mid-2020. The group meet every few months to discuss individual and collective research – a new way of working for all of us, which adds another dimension to the project. We created a reading list and are building a shared collection of books and publications. A few weeks ago, the group had a research day led by Lisa Godson, which was fantastic. These group gatherings are bringing a stimulating openness to the project.

Philip Kavanagh is an artist and writer based in Dublin.

Maolíosa Boyle is Executive Director of Rua Red. ‘The Second Coming (Do What Thou Wilt)’continues at Rua Red until 16 August.

PK: How integral has Rua Red’s role as a community hub been to these exhibitions?

MB: It’s critical that the new work created in Rua Red is influenced by its context.

It’s crucial that the artists come and spend time, to get a sense of Tallaght and the community. The work is then produced in response to their understanding of this place, and so the work becomes embedded. Our most recent collaboration with a/political was an exhibition by Kennard/Phillips (Peter Kennard and Cat Phillips) called ‘Finnegan’s Woke’ (25 January – 29 March). They have been collaborating since 2002, when they joined forces to create work in protest to the British invasion in Iraq. ‘Finnegans Woke’ spoke of the hypocrisy, greed and trauma that is driving world politics today. The artists created an open studio – ‘The War on War Room’ in Gallery 2 – where individuals, groups, families and school children could create work that also became part of the exhibition in Gallery 1, forming the sails of a massive raft, representing civil resistance.

Groups we worked with included Spirasi, Clondalkin Intercultural Centre, Tallaght Intercultural Centre and New Horizons. The Balgaddy Residents Group created work based on their concerns relating to their housing conditions. At the end of the exhibition, we invited the County Council’s Housing Department to view their work.

The exhibition created an alternative avenue for their voices to be heard.

PK: With the fifth a/political exhibition currently showing at Rua Red, how has the collaboration measured up to your expectations?

MB: The collaboration has gone beyond our expectations and is always a fluid, open conversation. We bring together a fresh confluence of ideas and discussions to each piece of work that we undertake. The artist is placed at the centre of everything we do.

We are interested in both the process of enquiry and where that leads in art practice.

An excellent example of site-specific artistic research was Democracia’s ‘Order’ – a three-part opera that radically critiques the conventions and injustices of capitalism.

The opera was presented in three acts: Eat the Rich/Kill the Poor; Konsumentenchor; and Dinner at the Dorchester. All three acts were filmed interventions in public and private sites. The first act was filmed in London and the third in Texas, while the second act was filmed in a shopping centre in Tallaght, commenting on the ills of capitalism and the role that consumerism plays within this. The work was exhibited at Rua Red (27 April – 23 June 2018) and has since been shown at the Spilt Film Festival, Croatia, and is currently installed in the Station Museum in Houston, Texas.

PK: Has your relocation to Tallaght prompted introspection regarding your own curatorial practice?

MB: Change is good, for people and for organisations. In Rua Red, I work on multiple projects. At any given time, I am working with dancers, choreographers, musicians, writers and filmmakers, and this work extends beyond the gallery. It is a different approach and it has expanded my experience, skills and practice. One of our current projects documents a group of MMA fighters – led by retired MMA fighter Paddy Holihan and a group of dancers from Liz Roche Dance Company – who come together in an exchange friendship, ideas and movement. Joyce Dunne from Rua Red conceived this project, which will also involve a TV documentary. This way of working through collaborations and many artforms has expanded my practice in directions that I wouldn’t have envisaged three years ago, which is very rewarding.

PK: Last year, Rua Red announced a series of new commissions inspired by Mary Magdalene that will feature artists Amanda Coogan, Rachel Fallon, Jesse Jones, Alice Maher and Oona Doherty. How did the concept for these commissions come about and how is the work progressing?

MB: Mary Magdalene has fascinated me since I was a child. I think it’s the contrasting qualities in her representation. She is defined as both noble yet humble, strong yet morally weak, beautiful yet haggard, passionate yet penitent, erotic yet reclusive, one who loved many and was yet seen as superficial, a sinner who sought redemption, someone of extreme vanity yet lived in a cave covering herself and hiding from humanity. I’m drawn

Top: Kendell Geers, Third Word Disorder (One Lux), 2019, installation view, Rua Red; photograph by Kasia Kaminska; courtesy of Rua Red Bottom: Santa France A Matter of Respiration, 2018, from ‘Land/Sea/Signal’ (20 July – 22 September 2018; curated by Nora O’Murchu); photograph by Dave Reilly; courtesy of Rua Red

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

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Museum of Free Space PÁDRAIC E. MOORE INTERVIEWS ANNIE FLETCHER, DIRECTOR OF THE IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART.

Fergus Martin, ‘Here and Now’, installation view, IMMA, 2019; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of IMMA

Pádraic E. Moore: Do you think it’s possible to attract newer, less experienced audiences to Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), without ‘dumbing down’ the programme?

Annie Fletcher: Certainly, because a museum can tell people their own story and provide them with insights into the world around them. Obviously, some of the conversations that take place within the context of a museum can seem rather esoteric and perhaps even elite, since they are ultimately disciplinary.

While those conversations have to be supported, the fact is that IMMA is a populist institution and must therefore fulfill a shared civic role that actively attends to the needs of different kinds of audiences. I feel that the collection might be one of the keys to achieving this.

PEM: Is there is still an onus on museums to acquire new works for a collection?

AF: That’s a brilliant question and one that there is of course much debate about, at this point. On one hand, I would say yes, completely, partly because what we decide to collect and archive can ultimately contribute directly to how memory is constructed. There is something important about memory and the opportunity to look back at an archive. So that’s one aspect that is really attractive about it. Yet, on the other hand, looking forward to the future of the twenty-first century, there are so many aspects that make the realities of collecting objects extremely problematic and perhaps even unsustainable. While I do acknowledge the importance of the collection, I also wonder if perhaps there might be more sophisticated ways of collecting and sharing resources? At the moment, one sees a great deal of recuperative strategies in which there is a desire to resurrect overlooked or forgotten artists and perhaps even retrospectively construct a canon. Yet maybe what we really need to do is reject the idea of a canon and focus upon why these gaps exist, in a very resonant way, which in turn represents the society that we’re in.

PEM: From an architectural perspective, the Royal Hospital Kilmanham is a very unique venue. What are your thoughts on the idiosyncrasies of the site?

AF: I think the site is fascinating and I am interested in the various problems that the venue can pose. The question is how to utilise these challenges and, of course, artists and curators have already been doing this for years. Sometimes people suggest that the building is unsuitable – because of the layout

Betsabeé Romero, Amarillo al Cubo, installation view, IMMA; photograph by Ros Kavanagh; courtesy of IMMA

as a former hospital – but I genuinely find this more inherently interesting than a white cube. I’m intrigued by the imperial ghosts that seem so very present and I think there are nuanced ways in which we can reflect upon our history via the building.

PEM: Can a museum help to provide Irish artists with international exposure?

AF: Certainly, this is one of the reasons why I took the job. There is very little consciousness of Irish art and the Irish story outside Ireland, for example, in Europe. This is something that I have found rather disappointing over the years – the absence of an Irish presence in major European biennials and so on. I do think that there is a lot of work to be done. I believe that contemporary art practice in Ireland is more robust than ever and I am confident that, through dialogue and exchange with other similar institutions, we can begin to spend time articulating our own history and our own senses of expertise.

PEM: IMMA seems to be one of the few public spaces left in Dublin that hasn’t been co-opted by commerce. I would suggest that the city needs a (free) space like this museum more than ever.

AF: Yes, as you know, many of the other organisations that offered space for conviviality and civic gathering have been decimated in recent years. I really believe in thinking about resources and possibilities, while trying to work towards that collective notion, even if it sounds terribly romantic. One of the positive aspects of the museum is that there is now a public recognition of it as a free and open asset. I certainly want to ratchet up this notion of a free space. There is still much interest in keeping the mechanisms of the museum alive, but one thing that has changed since the ‘90s is the fact that there is now much more of a need to raise funds from corporate sources.

PEM: Does this have an impact upon how provocative a programme can be? In Claire Bishop’s book, Radical Museology (2013), she argues that the museum can be site where ‘societal change is considered’ and ‘dissent is fomented’. What are your thoughts on this?

AF: I would say all of the great provocations that emerge from museums are initiated by artists. On one level, if we just do our job and follow what artists are doing – which is incredibly important and often politically sensitive in always

trying to open up new space – then we’ll probably end up there anyway; I suppose the question is how much we can really go for it. I have worked on several politically fractious and contentious projects over the years and I do believe that it is important that the creative sphere remains a space in which important – and indeed inflammatory – conversations take place. It’s important that visual art is not merely dismissed as a recreation, because it can also be a catalyst for change.

We as a museum are an institution, a legal entity; we have capacities that allow us to survive and this provides certain possibilities. However, I understand the vulnerability of artists in relation to that and I believe a crucial thing to avoid is the instrumentalisation of the artist. So, I think one has to be really careful about not shoving them out on the front lines, without backing them up.

PEM: Is there anything in particular that you would like to address or touch upon in the future?

AF: I’m very interested in Ireland’s relationship to race and our unresolved relationship with our own colonial past; we were colonised but we were also colonisers and missionaries.

I am eager to address this issue and to work on a programme that relates to ideas around the subaltern / settler duality.

‘The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis’, currently showing at Van Abbemuseum until 18 August, will come to IMMA in the future and I’m also planning a solo exhibition by the incredible American artist, Howardena Pindell. I’d like to try and organise some dialogue to celebrate the 30th year anniversary of the foundation of the museum in 2021. The idea would be to engage in conversations with several other museums that were established around the same time. Many museums were born in that postmodern moment that was romantic about globalization. There was definitely a kind of common language of contemporary art at that particular time. We’ve gone through tumultuous changes since the ‘90s.

Finally, I’d also like to make the fantastic asset that is the IMMA residency programme even more visible. There’s an incredible hive of activity in the city and a constant flow of amazing people with incredible talent – I think this is another way that the museum makes contributions.

Annie Fletcher is director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Pádraic E. Moore is a writer, curator and art historian.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

VAI Event

Get Together 2019 ROB HILKEN REPORTS ON THE VARIOUS TALKS AND PANEL DISCUSSIONS AT THIS YEAR’S GET TOGETHER, ORGANISED BY VISUAL ARTISTS IRELAND. GET TOGETHER 2019 – the national day for visual artists – took place at TU Dublin’s Grangegorman campus on Friday 14 June. The North House venue had recently hosted the university’s Fine Art degree show and much of the students’ work was still on display. These artworks served to amplify the theme of this year’s Get Together: Experiment. Spread over three floors, the event hosted artist talks, panel discussions, Speed Curating sessions, Project Clinics and over 30 arts organisations from all over the country, who set up stalls in the Visual Artists’ Café.

Ben Crothers, curator of the Naughton Gallery at Queen’s University Belfast, chaired the first panel discussion of the day on the subject of illustration. Crothers often features comic books and illustration alongside other artworks in the group exhibitions he curates at the Naughton Gallery.

This type of work helps attract new audiences and he enjoys challenging people’s expectations about what they might expect to find in an art gallery context. For the discussion, Crothers was joined by illustrators Fiona McDonnell, Holly Pereira, Jacky Sheridan and Stephen Maurice Graham, some of whom have been featured in Crothers’s exhibitions, and who each belong to the Belfast-based illustration agency, UsFolk. Each gave insights into the processes involved in working with clients and to a brief. They talked about how self-initiated projects can find large audiences on social media and explained that these types of projects are helpful for establishing their reputation, developing their style and can often lead to new jobs and commissions. In this visual art context, it was unusual to hear artists talk so frankly about how they consider audiences when developing both commercial and personal projects. The panellists suggested that the recent acceptance of illustration within galleries and institutions parallels the rise of audience-focused social media platforms, such as Instagram.

The morning session of ‘Artists Speak’ saw four artists give fifteen-minute presentations about their work. Even though these artists tend to work across a wide variety of media – including video, painting, performance, installation and sound – what thematically connects their work is the representation of identity. Dan Shipsides shared some of his early works focusing on the activity of mountain climbing. He also discussed his frequent collaborations with artist Neil Beggs, as

Shipsides and Beggs Projects. This partnership grew out of a desire to negate competition between the two artists, as they share similar research interests. Shipsides also discussed some of the recurring motifs in his work, such as the star, which is often found on national flags, and is symbolic of identity within his practice.

Mary Duffy led us through her journey to becoming a painter, from her childhood beginnings to the present day, including a period as a performance artist, for which she found international acclaim. Her early work was concerned with identity politics including her own identity as a disabled female artist, having been born without arms. Facing financial difficulty, she put her career as an artist on hold and, after ten years working as a radio journalist, she found a new passion for painting, most recently experimenting with cold wax mediums. Basil Al-Rawi continued the investigation of identity with his photography and moving image works. As an Irish artist with Iraqi paternal heritage, Al-Rawi constructs works using gaming and simulation technology to address post-conflict identity and perceptions of Iraq.

Cecilia Danell’s recent body of work reimagines the area surrounding her home farm in Sweden. Her paintings and installations depict semi-fictionalised landscapes, with the medium itself becoming equally as significant as the original source material and her own memories.

The second panel discussion looked at how the boundaries of art and science can become fertile grounds for research and artistic experimentation. Tere Badia (Secretary General of Culture Action Europe) gave an overview of Hangar’s research and communication platform, Grid Spinoza. She then went on to discuss Wirkt – a framework that allows people working in different disciplines to collaborate in research.

Artists Robin Price and Marta de Menezes both discussed projects involving close collaboration with scientists. Price’s recent body of work involved creating light painting photographs that visualise levels of air pollution around the world.

Price’s research into this technique began when working with environmental scientist Professor Francis Pope (University of Birmingham). The photographs from Delhi, Mexico City, Nairobi, Central Kampala and the artist’s hometown of Port Talbot in Wales, have been featured in Source Magazine, The Guardian, New Scientist and were recently acquired by the

Tere Badia (Secretary General of Culture Action Europe) speaking as part of the panel discussion ‘Research and Experimentation’

Speed Curating; all photographs by Jonathan Sammon

Arts Council of Northern Ireland for their collection. Portuguese artist Marta de Menezes has been developing the use of biology and biotechnology as a new media artform. Her experimental projects include genome editing (Truly Natural, 2018), modifying live butterflies to aesthetically enhance their wing patterns (Nature? 1999–2000) and exchanging skin grafts with her partner and collaborator, scientist Luís Graça (Immortality for Two, 2014).

The keynote speaker for this year’s Get Together was the Iranian film theorist and critic, Asal Bagheri, who discussed post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, outlining the ways in which filmmakers are resisting state censorship by developing new cinematic grammar and codes. These strategies include the use of symbolic and inanimate objects, veiled gestures, off-camera actions and implied behaviour to reference taboo subjects that are forbidden by the religious establishment.

Throughout the presentation, Bagheri gave insights into her research, in which she analyses cinematic depictions of relationships between men and women. She concluded by pointing out that the strategies of resistance used by Iranian filmmakers are now being further subverted to hint at homosexual relationships, which are still persecuted by the state.

The afternoon session of ‘Artists Speak’ introduced four more artists, commencing with Belfast-based photographer Victor Sloan, who has documented many significant moments in the political history of Northern Ireland. His photographic techniques involve using bleach, paint and scratches to alter the negatives before printing, which is often done on a large scale. Margaret Tuffy’s varied practice includes video, sculpture, installation and printmaking, alongside painting.

Tuffy has drawn inspiration from artist residencies that she has undertaken, and her work often relates to space and the environment. Artists Comhghall Casey and Tinka Bechert both take different approaches to painting. Casey’s meticulous observation of the objects he chooses for his still life paintings contrasts with the wild experimentation of Bechert’s large abstract works. The dry humour of Casey’s delivery opens a door to understanding the quiet relationship he has with is subject matter, while Bechert’s exuberant presentation style is similarly reflected in her work.

Rob Hilken is the VAI Northern Ireland Manager.

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How is it Made?

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Richard Proffitt, May the Moon Rise and the Sun Set, 2019, installation view, University College Cork Department of Music; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of the artist and the Glucksman

Vaults & Rituals CHRIS CLARKE INTERVIEWS RICHARD PROFFITT ABOUT HIS RECENT INSTALLATION FOR CORK MIDSUMMER FESTIVAL.

Chris Clarke: Your recent installation at University College Cork was entitled May the Moon Rise and the Sun Set. Can you tell me about this title and its significance to the project?

Richard Proffitt: I was thinking about this recently. The main overriding theme of the exhibition was this idea – both theoretically and physically for a viewer – of creating a space to where you can escape. It’s this immersive environment within which you can acquire some degree of solace. So, May the Moon Rise and the Sun Set was a kind of narrative device, suggesting that you can escape to a new place, a kind of non-descript landscape or environment that exists within your own consciousness or psyche, rather than a physical place. The title also recalled the idea of blessing a place, of wishing a place well for the future.

CC: Your work mixes different materials, references, codes, symbols, and you’ve previously talked about spirituality and subcultures as informing this approach. What about the visitor who is unable to decipher some of these associations? Is that decoding important to you, or do you consider the general, overall effect to be the predominant feature here?

RP: There are always going to be references within my work to particular forms of subculture that I’m interested in, whose origins may not be initially apparent to the viewer. But I don’t envisage that as being a problem. I guess the viewer often acts as somebody who stumbles across something; they can then decide whether they want to piece the different elements together. These ideas might be familiar to some viewers – who might have a passing or a keen interest in some of the themes – but I think the more interesting stance is when a viewer approaches the work as if it is purely alien to them. It becomes this combination of codes, symbols, signs, slang, different types of language, that forms a puzzle.

CC: The use of sound played a significant part in the installation. Can you tell me about your process of composition and how you see its role in creating an immersive effect?

RP: My composition of music uses a technique that is very similar to the way in which I make visual work. It is a collage technique, using pieces of sound sourced from a variety of places, including old and degraded cassette tapes that are specifically selected and cut up, looped and distorted. In some instances, they’re unrecognisable from their

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

How is it Made?

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original form, becoming ambient, trance-like snippets of music and voice, repetitions and drones. The sounds sourced from tape loops are often collaged with field recordings and improvised instrumentation, to create this fluid, mournful, drifting soundtrack that appears to be from a time period that couldn’t have occurred, and, in this way, it has certain hauntological characteristics. The combination of sound and lighting is crucial, in generating an atmosphere which leads to immersion. I think sound is the most emotionally immediate of the senses; it changes the place it inhabits instantly, while also altering a person’s perception of that place. It functions like the idea of a ghost – it’s there and it’s felt, but it’s rarely seen.

CC: The installation was situated in the very particular site of St. Vincent’s Church – which has been taken over by UCC’s Music Department – with the main installation happening in the basement space of O’Riada Hall. How did the context and the physical architecture of that building inform your choice of materials, effect and layout?

RP: I don’t know if this relates to the place itself, or if it comes from my experience of being immersed in Irish culture, but there were more references than usual to Christianity in that work. A lot of the stuff that drives the work is the accumulation of materials and often these are selected for their purely aesthetic condition. So, if you’re sourcing materials in Ireland that reflect upon or have reference to faith or belief, then 90% of the time, they’re going to be Christian in their appearance.

CC: But a very particular Christianity – there is that sense of ritual or mystery that seems inherent to Catholicism.

RP: That’s something that I have become more interested in. I grew up as a lapsed Protestant, so I had no idea of the ritualistic aspects of Catholicism – the whole smoke and mirrors, the sense of theatre and occasion. So perhaps that fed into the work but, essentially, it was still embedded in this ongoing quest to restore elements of spirituality to contemporary art, in a way that doesn’t only use those references ironically. I’m not trying to make light or to joke about these things. It’s trying to emphasise their good qualities.

CC: There was a real sense of trajectory from the upstairs entrance and corridors, into this crypt-like basement, where the artwork was installed. Could you expand on this sense of passing over or descending into the work? Is this primarily a means of creating anticipation, or a ritual in its own right – a way of initiating the visitor into this ‘other’ space?

RP: Well, the building has this very strong sense of character anyway, but yes; the entrance doors and corridors, with the pattern-tiled flooring, gave way to a feeling of being in an ‘other’ place and I guess the visiting public are not usually privy to this building. It has a feeling that, once all the students and lecturers go home and it’s just the caretaker left, it could well be home to many spirits, returning to the building’s religious origins. But before entering the O’Riada Hall – a magnificent space in its own right, with its huge neo-gothic windows and ceiling arches – I think it was necessary for this gradual descent into the main space to occur. It relates to that feeling of discovery, of something being amiss, of a ritualistic entering of a tomb, if you will; a space with a very determined atmosphere, an experience encouraged by the presence of the sound work, which reverberated along the corridors leading to the O’Riada Hall.

CC: You mentioned the installation as something that the visitor surrenders or escapes to. Does this connect in any way with your strong interest in contemporary popular music and the specific sub-genres and subcultures around music?

RP: Subcultures become religions for a lot of people. They obtain or acquire their own set of rituals, beliefs, props or ways of dressing.

CC: There was a suggestion of entering something otherworldly, transcendental and beyond the prosaic rituals of everyday life. Was there a sense that the installation – as an enclave or a site of refuge – allowed one to step away from the mainstream world outside?

RP: I think that aspect of the work comes from the way that I personally expect to experience art. I want it to take me somewhere else; I want to feel like I’m somewhere else when I’m in an exhibition. Paintings can do that when you’re transfixed on a work – the same with sound or a video piece – and I think that all the best art does achieve that.

It takes you away from where you’ve been, and you forget that you’ve just stepped in from the street. I want the viewer to experience something that they weren’t expecting or haven’t felt before, a way of experiencing objects or materials in a way uncommon to them.

When I was young, I was always a child that would stupidly travel across the railway tracks, if it was the quickest route somewhere, or wander along the embankments, where you weren’t supposed to be and where you would see all kinds of discarded and forgotten things – I’ve always been like that. I was interested in the idea of great discoveries, like the tombs in Egypt and this idea that, behind this locked door, or behind this gate or fence, lies an entrance point to something that people have not experienced before or didn’t realise was happening. It’s like stepping into a cave in the south of France and discovering paintings from thousands of years ago or stumbling upon a burnt-out car on a wasteland. These are experiences that have always fascinated me.

Richard Proffitt’s installation, May the Moon Rise and the Sun Set, was curated by Chris Clarke for the Cork Midsummer Festival. It took place from 14 to 23 June at University College Cork’s Department of Music, Sunday’s Well, Cork. richardproffitt.net

Top: Richard Proffitt pictured inside his installation, May the Moon Rise and the Sun Set; photograph

by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of the artist and the Glucksman Bottom: Richard Proffitt, My Flag On The Moon, 2019, oil on paper, collage; courtesy of the artist and the Glucksman

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How is it Made?

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Niamh O’Malley, Production Still, 2019; courtesy the artist and Lismore Castle Arts

Lismore Castle Arts PAUL MCAREE DISCUSSES THE EVOLUTION OF LISMORE CASTLE ARTS AND INTERVIEWS NIAMH O’MALLEY, WHOSE EXHIBITION IS CURRENTLY SHOWING IN ST CARTHAGE HALL.

LISMORE CASTLE ARTS (LCA), a not-for-profit gallery, was founded in 2005 in

Lismore, County Waterford. We are committed to the presentation of contemporary art across two separate exhibition venues. The main gallery space within Lismore Castle hosts one major exhibition of international art per year. In 2011, a second venue opened in St Carthage Hall – a former Victorian church hall in the heart of Lismore town – which presents a diverse programme of contemporary Irish and international art and graduate work, as well as learning and community projects. LCA has also developed an offsite programme, including partnered exhibitions in Ireland and overseas. We seek to be a major contributor to the cultural and visitor economy of Lismore and the region, offering unique experiences with contemporary art.

In 2005 the long-derelict West Wing of Lismore Castle, the private family home of Lord and Lady Burlington, was transformed into a state-of-the-art contemporary gallery. To date, LCA has commissioned and presented unique projects by Gerard Byrne, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Anne Collier, Dorothy Cross, Rashid Johnson, Richard Long, Wilhelm Sasnal and Pae White, amongst others. We have also occasionally invited national and international curators to lead our main gallery exhibition programme, including Aileen Corkery, Polly Staple, Mark Sladen, Kitty Anderson & Katrina Brown, Allegra Pesenti and Charlie Porter. Lismore Castle Arts’ main gallery exhibition for 2019, ‘Palimpsest’, is curated by Charlie Porter and features Nicole Eisenman, Zoe Leonard, Hilary Lloyd, Charlotte Prodger, Martine Syms, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Andrea Zittel, many of whom have created new work for the show.

The unique location of the castle gallery within a seven-acre site means exhibitions can spill into the castle’s gardens, offering the potential for outdoor work. Almost every exhibition we have hosted has seen work extend into these gardens, with the most notable instance being Rashid Johnson’s exhibition in 2018, involving the presentation of seven outdoor sculptures, which were gradually overcome by plants as the summer progressed. Luke Fowler also presented a new sound work in a tower in the gardens in 2017 – a unique work researched and developed across multiple visits to Lismore and presented in collaboration with the Nasher Sculpture Centre, Dallas, Texas.

In 2013, Dorothy Cross exhibited Eye of Shark at St Carthage Hall, an installation of nine reclaimed cast-iron baths which had their scum-line painted gold, along with a tabernacle embedded in the wall containing a shark’s eye. The work subsequently toured

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

and expanded to include 12 baths. The installation is now permanently housed at Lismore Castle and will be open to view on 6 July and 3 August. Core funding for Lismore Castle Arts programmes is provided by Lord and Lady Burlington, with additional funding sought from the Arts Council of Ireland and Waterford City and County Council. Going forward, LCA will continue to present evermore exciting and ambitious contemporary art, while expanding the offsite, learning and events programmes.

For LCA’s 15th anniversary in 2020, our main gallery exhibition will be multi-sited across Lismore town.

The following is an interview with Irish artist Niamh O’Malley, whose solo exhibition is currently showing in LCA’s St Carthage Hall (1 June – 25 August).

Paul McAree: Perhaps you could discuss your current areas of interest – what are you working on and what materials are you using?

Niamh O’Malley: There is a current compulsion in my work to make something still and to make something solid. I think perhaps this comes out of anxiety; a sense of a rapidly changing, unreliable planet. I’m not sure what it means to be absorbed and to scrutinise – to give attention to making in this circumstance – but that is what I’m finding myself doing. In terms of material, I’ve been stretching lines in steel, making polished wooden handles and sanding the edges of slivers of glass. I’ve also been working on a film which feels quite fidgety and agitated – but that’s for later in the year.

PM: Your solo exhibition for Lismore Castle Arts is currently showing in the small chapel-like space of St Carthage Hall. Later this year, you will exhibit in the large space at the RHA. How does the contrasting scale of exhibition spaces affect your approaches and thinking?

NO’M: I really enjoy the challenge of working with different kinds of architecture, and solo shows offer you a particular opportunity to position the viewer. St Carthage Hall feels very intimate, as a space. It is a building which was evidently conceived to contain thought and reflection. There are windows but you can’t really see out and, perhaps because you step down to enter, it also feels very grounded and calm. It has definitely impacted on my decision to focus on mostly floor-based sculptural works.

Because the development of a large body of new work has coincided with invitations into these contrasting spaces, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to occupy the volume of a room. In both venues, I am using steel as an obvious component for the first time; its structural capacity and strength will hopefully allow me to create complex delineations within both venues. I’m trying to find techniques to choregraph and locate the viewer, without building or relying on the walls.

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RHA, I have the luxury of developing an exhibition in the city I live in, so I can call in regularly and terrify myself with the scale of that room. I can also remind myself of how it feels to walk into the venue from the busy city centre. This is all more difficult with a single site visit to an international venue. I think different kinds of venues in a diversity of places all add to the wealth of our potential experiences with art.

PM: How do you feel artists are resourced in Ireland (regarding fees, production and technical support) compared with our international counterparts?

NO’M: Over the years my practice has been generously supported by Arts Council bursaries, studio awards and residencies in places such as MoMA PS1 (New York), Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, HIAP (Helsinki) and IMMA. I think, in many ways, I have been privileged to work in Ireland. Most of the public institutions I have worked with in Ireland and abroad are genuinely working hard to resource the artists they work with – within their limited means. The reduction in funding post-crash continues to hurt everyone but I am relieved that galleries, in the main, recognise that to pay artists means to support the wider artistic ecology. Without artists there will be no work and even if we had a rich commercial environment, I would not like to see us relying on it as barometer or funder. Who gets to make art, show art and to look at art, matters and I do worry that the opportunities I have had – such as free education, Arts Council grants (to help me to live, work and pay childcare), free access to galleries and artists’ fees – are not something we can take for granted. It is important that we continue to talk to each other and advocate for each other.

Paul McAree is Curator at Lismore Castle Arts. Niamh O’Malley’s exhibition continues at St Carthage Hall, Lismore, until 25 August. ‘Palimpsest’ continues at Lismore Castle Arts until 13 October. lismorecastlearts.ie

PM: You recently used the phrase ‘furniture’, when discussing your new work, which incorporates beautiful pieces of wood; can you explain this idea of artwork as furniture, or vice versa?

NO’M: I’m mostly interested in the idea of furniture because of its relationship to the body. While obviously taking in a wide variety of objects, the term connotes positioning, touch and a sense of habit. My works won’t necessarily provide the functionality of a chair or a table, but I like the idea that they might feel familiar; that you will know how it feels to run your finger across the surface. There is also a stillness and stability to furniture: it produces place from space; gives you handles to facilitate your encounters with the world.

PM: How do you balance your interests in film and sculpture? How do they work together and how do you think about an exhibition that doesn’t contain any film work?

NO’M: Recently when I have presented video in gallery spaces, it has been displayed on monitors, occupying a similar physical status to the sculptural objects and flat work – except that moving image produces a different kind of activation in the viewer. I’m interested in the idea that in a show made up of many different materials and things, the insertion of movement and time can activate the solidness and stillness of the others.

I decided early on not to show any film in St Carthage Hall – the space seemed too small, in a way, and a video would always be too present and distracting. There is also the proximity to the street – the door opens onto the village. I think that that closeness of life and movement is operating as the film in this show.

Dorothy Cross, Eye of Shark, installation of 12 reclaimed cast-iron baths, now permanently housed at Lismore Castle; photograph courtesy the artist and Lismore Castle Arts

PM: Over the last few years, you have experimented with handmade glass. How has this developed within your practice, as a material, tool or symbol?

NO’M: Glass is of course a very ancient material, somewhat magical, produced from sand. It is a molten translucent liquid caught in solid form. I began using it as an optical filter in front of the video camera and it gradually made its way in front of drawings and into sculptures. Having the glass lying around the studio, I became more aware of it as an object with edges and depth and form – not just something which directs us to look through, but something which we can look at.

PM: You are from Mayo, live in Dublin and have two solo exhibitions this year, in Dublin and Lismore. Does the setting and location of a space matter?

NO’M: The setting and location definitely affect the encounter. I was invited to show as part of the ‘Mayo Collective’ exhibition in 2013. It’s a really innovative exhibition initiative, curated in my case by Patrick Murphy, which involves five visual arts venues in the county working together. (Áras Inis Gluaire, Customs House Studios & Gallery, Linenhall Arts Centre, Ballina Arts Centre and Ballinglen Arts Foundation). In that situation the work’s relationship to the landscape became heighted; the journey between the venues inevitably formed part of their reading. In Lismore, the village and gardens and the journey (if you’ve made one) will also reframe the work. Preparing for the

‘Palimpsest’, installation view, main gallery, Lismore Castle; photograph courtesy Lismore Castle Arts

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

How is it Made?

Porous Borders IAN WIECZOREK CONTEXTUALISES HIS LATEST EXHIBITION, ‘TRANSGRESS’, AT BALLINA ARTS CENTRE.

Top: Ian Wiezorek, Night Crossing, oil on canvas, 120 × 180 cm Middle: Ian Wiezorek, In Balance, oil on canvas, 150 × 125 cm Bottom: Ian Wiezorek, Compulse, video still; all images courtesy of the artist

‘TRANSGRESS’ IS AN installation of paintings, video and 3D work recently shown at Ballina Arts Centre in County Mayo (7 March – 3 May). The show is an exploration of the phenomenon of borders, reflecting both current socio-political events and a continuing narrative within my work: the border as a physical barrier, its implications and its porosity – a theme I have been researching over the past ten years. While recent events in various parts of the world have injected a fresh significance and relevance, borders have existed since the earliest times; and they have always been crossed, regardless of the level of difficulty presented. Avoiding commentary of an overtly politicised nature, my work engages with the subject as a reflection of the human condition. It proposes the act of crossing or ‘transgressing’ borders as a biological impulse that is hard-wired into our genetic makeup, rather than simply the result of any specific localised situation. The biological success of the human species would seem to be based, at least in part, on an innate tendency towards trialand-error exploration and adaptation (as may be observed in behavioural traits that begin to manifest early in childhood) – an idea that is now finding scientific credence in the search for a gene linked to “risk-taking and adventurousness”.1 The works presented in ‘Transgress’ are based on traces that result from this permeability. A major strand of the exhibition comprises paintings based on low-resolution reportage images harvested from the internet that depict figures in the act of scaling and traversing fences, walls and barriers at different border locations. Dissociated from their original ‘stories’ or context, these images transcend their original documentary function and assume a more malleable subjectivity, offering a more universal reflection on humanity’s resilience and perseverance. The paintings – including works from the ongoing ‘Crossing’ series (elements of which featured in EVA International 2018) and associated works based on infra-red video stills, such as Night Crossing – are created through the application of multiple layers of thin oil paint glazes, which build up and coalesce into a blurred ambiguity that echoes the original character of the low-resolution originals. As a corollary, the works also establish a dialogue between a perceived ‘traditional’ medium and contemporary digital mediation, inviting the reappraisal of ‘found’ low-resolution digital images as objects of aesthetic consideration in their own right.

The paintings featured in the exhibition were integrated with other mixed-media works to create an installation environment. Echoing the infra-red aesthetic featured in some of paintings, Compulse is a looped video work obtained from an infra-red surveillance system, that shows the night-time movement of people towards and through a wall or barrier. As a consequence of the low-quality technology of the surveillance equipment on which it was originally recorded, the shifting and indistinct imagery echoes the implicitly covert nature of their activity. Without reference to location or context – mirroring the blurred quality of the paintings – the work invites consideration in its universality, rather than in its specific details. The blurred pulsing effect of the figures’ movements recalls the imaging of ultrasound and other scientific scanning techniques used in the study or monitoring of biological processes.

CROSSTALK and Memento offer a more sculptural response, based on the semiotic and physical manifestations of border environments. The works reference border markings, both official (like signage) and unofficial (such as the simple cross markers erected in Mexican border towns), and also associated physical structures (such as chain-link fencing or the ‘Czech hedgehog’, anti-vehicle hardware and border fortification device that featured as part of the Berlin Wall). The works bring together a variety of materials – printed vinyl, wooden models, roughly painted unprocessed boards – that offer aesthetic modulation within the dynamic of the installation.

HERE/THERE is a digitally-animated text work, project-

ed onto a pair of canvases, that offers a pared-down analogy of subjective experience: ‘HERE’ describes where we are now, be it geographically or socio-culturally; and equally ‘THERE’ describes a location beyond ourselves, either physical, experiential or ideological. HERE/THERE simply demonstrates that one person’s ‘here’ is another person’s ‘there’ – a matter of perspective, with the transient ‘T’ migrating between these binary terms to illustrate the subjective point of view.

‘Transgress’ represents an extension of both the scope and materiality in my artistic practice, to further explore the implications of digital technology and its increasing influence on social and cultural identity, particularly in relation to context and meaning. The work acknowledges Lyotard’s writings on the internal erosion and fragmentation of the metanarrative, and Baudrillard’s proposal that we construct our worldview through simulacra – series of symbols and signs – rather than through direct experience. According to Baudrillard, we live in the hyperreality of ‘simulation’, a virtual world of our own subjective experience, mediated by technology. My work also finds resonance in German filmmaker Hito Steyerl’s excellent writings on the ‘poor image’, which she defines thus: “The poor image is a copy in motion… Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea… compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution… Its genealogy is dubious…

It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright… It mocks the promises of digital technology.” 2 This research has provided a step-off point for various series of work, which first crystallised in 2011 with my solo exhibition, ‘Citizens of the State of Mediacy’, at Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar. Subsequent series included: ‘Closed Circuit’, based on CCTV stills, offering unplanned, frozen moments captured in the public arena; ‘Missing’, a series of snapshot portraits taken from ‘missing person’ posters (of people linked only through events that had not yet occurred); and ‘Autopyre’, which posits the burning car as a universally recognised symbol for the breakdown of societal order, with references to the writings of British novelist, J.G. Ballard, and Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek.

It was during the group exhibition, ‘Undertow’, at Ormston House, Limerick in 2011, that I gained first-hand confirmation that my paintings could be successfully exhibited in juxtaposition with video and multimedia work. Since then, I have created a number of installation-based public artworks that have given me invaluable experience: Sepulchre (part of Mayo Greenway Sculpture Trail); Everything that Rises Must Converge (selected for Mayo County Council’s temporary public installation project ‘FIND’); and IUXTA and 00040 (in association with Larroque Arts Festival in France). Several residency opportunities – most recently a month at AIR Artist-In-Residence in Krems, Austria – have also proved fertile environments in which to broaden the scope and ambition of my work. These experiences have coalesced in the making of ‘Transgress’, which presents presents a rich seam of new directions for my practice going forward.

Ian Wieczorek is a visual artist, curator and writer based in County Mayo.

Notes 1 Pearson, A., ‘Out-of-Africa migration selected novelty-seeking genes’, New Scientist Magazine, Issue 2811, published 7 May 2011, newscientist.com 2 Steyerl, H., ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, eflux Journal no.10, 2009, e-flux.com

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

Arts Engagement

Masterclass

Collaboration

Interdisciplinary Skills

Artistic Collaboration

ANN QUINN OUTLINES A NEW ART SCHOOL IN DONEGAL OFFERING MASTERCLASSES IN PAINTING AND PRINTMAKING.

JAN POWELL DISCUSSES THE PROCESS OF COLLABORATION AMONG VISUAL ARTISTS.

IT IS A DREAM come true for myself and my partner, printmaker Daniel Lipstein, to launch our Painting-Printmaking School of Art in Raphoe, County Donegal. The area has always been home to me, and my parents’ farm is within walking distance of our house. I was based in Dublin for over twenty years and am thrilled to now be back in Donegal. Since returning to the area two years ago, I’ve wanted to run an art school from our home studios. We want to combine our experience and skills in painting and printmaking to offer professional and comprehensive courses that will benefit our students.

I received a BA in Fine Art from NCAD in 2000 and have been delivering painting masterclasses at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, since 2013. My most recent solo shows include ‘The Human Presence’ (31 August to 22 September) at Taylor Galleries in 2018 and I have also previously exhibited at The Dock and RHA Ashford Gallery, Dublin. Daniel Lipstein teaches a traditional printmaking course at Trinity Arts Workshop, Trinity College Dublin. Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, Daniel has lived in Ireland for most of his life, graduating from NCAD with an MA in Fine Art in 2009. His recent shows include ‘One-Off ’ (22 March to 14 April 2018) – a three-person exhibition of monotypes at Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin.

Our first weekend masterclass will run at our home and studios at Spring House in Ballylennon on 27–28 July, and again the following month, from 24–25 August. These two-day workshops will run from 11am to 5pm each day, with a maximum of four participants. The masterclasses will provide students with one-to-one tuition in oil painting and printmaking and, in many cases, they will end up with finished artworks. Students can focus on both painting and printmaking disciplines or choose to specialise in one particular area. The masterclasses will have a broad remit, but in the case of more experienced artists, we will tailor activities according to their needs and skill base. Participants are advised to discuss their requirements with us in advance, so we can prepare the materials and equipment necessary for specific techniques. For students focusing on printmaking, all materials will be provided, including copper plates. The course offers a range of technical information, so participants are advised to bring notebooks.

Oil painting demonstrations will focus on explorations of mediums (toxic and non-toxic), prepared surfaces, composition and colour theory. Participants will be encouraged to experiment with various implements (as alternatives to brushes), while also selecting colours according to their own instincts and intuition.

The traditional printmaking techniques on offer include soft-ground and hard-ground etching, sugar lift and aquatint, as well as non-chemical techniques like dry-point, carborundum, monotype and multi-plates registration. Daniel will demonstrate how to: study proofs, in order to decide if supporting plates are necessary; wipe

COLLABORATION BETWEEN ARTISTS can be

Ann Quinn, Arrival at Dusk (detail), oil on fabriano paper; courtesy of the artist

plates using different garments and techniques, with the aim of getting the best out of intaglio and dry-point; combine different techniques, towards the creation of accomplished prints.

All these elements help printmakers to decide if a print is ready for editioning, or whether it should be further developed in different ways.

We will also deliver collaborative demonstrations that will highlight creative connections between the disciplines of painting and printmaking – with surfaces, underpainting, pigments and mediums providing important points of intersection. Natural interdisciplinary formats include: painterly monotypes, which can be created using brushes and printed with or without a press; mixed media paintings, which use elements of collage; and multi-plates registration, which corresponds with the logic of expressionism, combining several surfaces to create one image.

Early printmakers like Rembrandt understood that the practice of etching deepens the ability of the artist as a draftsman and a painter. The two disciplines are deeply related, and this combination can charge students with great energy and ideas. The course will tackle both abstraction and representation, using mainly photographic source material, while also allowing the unpredictability of paints, mediums and chemicals to guide the artist. The philosophy and spirit of the school supports open dialogue and the natural flow of creative ideas, with the aim of inspiring spontaneous interdisciplinary engagement.

For more information on the masterclass weekends, contact Ann Quinn (annquinn. org) or Daniel Lipstein (daniellipstein.org).

undertaken in different ways. Pre-existing artworks can be brought together, or new works can be co-authored; artists can contribute to a single piece simultaneously or pass work back and forth. When the collaborative process is successful, the dialogue between participants comes across as genuine and engaging to the viewer.

My initial involvement in collaborative processes began with Limerick-based artist Kate McElroy, after she visited my show, ‘Dissonance’, at The Engine Room Gallery, Belfast, in 2016. In ‘Dissonance’, Kate found parallels with some of the themes she was pursuing in her own work. After contacting me, we began emailing on a regular basis, uncovering many further points of intersection within our work. Kate suggested we combine our work for an exhibition, selecting pieces that reflected our shared interests and preoccupations.

The resulting body of work, entitled ‘Plexus’, was shown at Galway City Gallery in 2017. Happy with the affinity between our work, we decided to embark on a long-term partnership to produce new work collaboratively. As described by Kate: “When it comes to showing together, you begin to view your work through a curatorial lens. You are not just making work for yourself; you also need to consider how it will look and what it will conjure up, when placed alongside the work of another artist.”

Another example of the collaborative process in action has been vividly illustrated through long-running exchanges between artists Gail Mahon and Kim Norton from Haptic/Tacit – a UK-based collective of artists and writers (haptictacit.com). The duo made work for the exhibition, ‘In Search of the Vernacular’ at Oriel Myrddin Gallery in Carmarthen, Wales (28 July – 13 October 2018). Geographically, the partnership between Norton and Mahon spans London, Northern Ireland and West Wales.

Their correspondence is rich, detailed and underpinned with diverse references. The value of their interactions lies in the differing perspectives each artist brings to a body of work, leading to a multi-dimensional exploration of their subject matter.

In 2017, I began another long-term collaboration with Lurgan-based artist Dwyer McKerr. Drawing lends itself particularly well to the shared process and as part of our collaboration, we made some joint drawings on single sheets of paper, changing and melding the images as they appeared. We went on to make paper sculptures, an idea arising directly from the work and our discussions around it. This new body of work was presented in March during our exhibition, ‘Ovid, Metamorphoses’, at The Engine Room Gallery, Belfast – a venue that supports and encourages artistic experimentation. Reflecting on the differences between working alone and collaborating, Dwyer stated that the main benefit is “having another artist’s vision to take account of and learn from”. With the realisation that the

31

Kate McElroy and Jan Powell at the MAC, Belfast; photograph taken by Kate McElroy

work is “not all about you”, he explained that “one’s praxis is necessarily modified”, with collaborative activity providing an “essential dialectic” to the development of new work and ideas.

As Dwyer and I live relatively close to each other, collaborating is not difficult. Yet geographical distance need not be a problem. Kate is based between Limerick and Dublin. We meet up whenever possible but find that emailing one another is a good way to keep ideas flowing.

Even though Kate spent most of 2017 in Asia, our dialogue continued uninterrupted.

Finding someone to make work with should preferably come about naturally, where a common bond is evident. Once established, artists should implement plans in a way that is flexible and manageable for both. Benefits are not solely artistic but practical too. There may be exposure to new disciplines and skills, and opportunities to exhibit further afield. The support that comes from having a partner when arranging a show is extremely helpful. Galleries should be receptive to showing joint work, if artists demonstrate compelling reasons to do so. It is also important though that exhibiting artists be treated equally, in terms of publicity and coverage. Collaboration allows for in-depth communication between artists to try out ideas, test theories and enable creativity to flourish. If there is mutual respect, curiosity about each other’s work and a shared commitment to the integrity of the project, then it will be an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Jan Powell is an artist based in Gilford, County Down. She has exhibited widely, and her work is held in many permanent collections.

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Public Art Roundup

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

ART OUTSIDE OF THE GALLERY

Home of Insects and Memories

Shopping In The Forest

Artists’ names: Robin Price and Tonya McMullan Work title: Home for Insects and Memories Site: Ten locations throughout Belfast Commissioning body: Belfast City Council Date advertised: February 2019 Date sited: 28 February to 3 March 2019 Budget: £12,000

Artist’s name: Rory Harron Work title: Shopping In The Forest Site: Glogauer Str. 16, Kreuzberg, 10999 Berlin Commissioning body: GlogauAir Art Program, Kreuzberg, Berlin Date sited: 24 April 2019. On display until 1 May 2020 Commission type: Unpaid Invitation Project Partners: GlogauAir Art Program

Description: Home for Insects and Memories was a project that attempted to capture the evolving landscape of Belfast, a city dealing with massive environmental change. Thinking about the city as a home for both people and wildlife, artists Robin Price and Tonya McMullan created ten interactive ‘Homes’ , which were sited at various urban locations throughout Belfast.

These structures served a double function as prototypical pollinator for insects inhabiting the city and as a sound sculpture. By pressing a button, the public can listen to sound recordings of older people, recounting their experience of growing up in and around nature in the city. These stories were collected from people all over Belfast, including members of East Belfast Engage with Age group and the North Belfast Men’s Shed. Each site for the ‘Homes’ was chosen based on its unique biodiverse inner-city setting, which was informed by the stories and recollections from the people who took part. These locations included: Peas Park, Fairholme, Cliftonville Men’s Shed, Templemore Swim and Fitness Centre, Vault Artist Studios, the Lagan Towpath, the Botanic Gardens, Waterworks Park and Sailortown. Audio recording of people’s stories was assisted by the artists Jasmin Märker and Charlotte Bosanquet.

Description: Rory Harron is an artist and writer from Derry, currently based in Donegal. He is one of ten artists currently on residency at GlogauAir Art Programme in Berlin. During his residency, Harron was invited to create a public art installation within a wall on Glogauer Straße which ran concurrent with Berlin Gallery Weekend (26 to 28 April).

The work, titled Shopping in the Forest, consists of florescent lighting, branches, a glass box, power cables, sand and general detritus alongside a model bar or disco with representations of a Macaque monkey with a puppet, mannequins in conversation and a dancing figure in fancy dress. Kreuzberg, close to central Berlin was once a forest, later encircled by the Berlin Wall - just in the west, a poor area infamous for punks and immigrants and identified proudly as SO36. Identification and ownership are important concerns in his work. The work explores estrangement, harmony and simulation through fabricating or simulating a surreal, parallel microworld. It is of course not a forest and no one is shopping. The monkey appears content with its puppet and the mannequins appear in jovial conversation. The strange encounter of the self and the other both online and offline are central to the work’s meaning – where harmonies and divisions in everyday life are as significant or illuminating as geopolitical fractures.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

The New Wing

Artist name: Bryan Gerard Duffy Work title: The New Wing Site: Sacred Heart Hospital, Castlebar Commissioning body: Health Service Executive (HSE) Date advertised: December 2017 Dates carried out: December 2018 to April 2019 Budget: €11,564 Project Partners: Per Cent for Art, Sacred Heart Hospital, Castlebar; St Joseph’s Secondary School, Castlebar; St Louis Community School, Kiltimagh.

Description: The New Wing art project by Bryan Gerard Duffy explores the turbulent past of the Sacred Heart Hospital (‘The Home’), which dates back to ‘the workhouse’ during the Great Famine.

It has gone through different stages in its history, but now boasts a new contemporary wing, which can house 74 long-stay residents. The New Wing is a multifaceted public art project showcasing an array of materials and engagements, with the involvement of the service users, staff, visitors and the extended community.

The New Wing focuses not just on the history of the hospital, but embraces the stories of the old dancehalls in Ireland, the symbolisms of the Crane Bird, and the important role art has played in preserving its identity. Some of the works featured are: audio recordings of the old dancehalls told by the service users; instruction dance steps peppered across the corridors of the hospital; handmade flipboxes capturing the dancehalls days through moving images; documentation of all the old paintings in ‘The Home’ in flipbook format; and a memorial of 1,000 origami cranes, constructed by local schools as part of an intergenerational project with service users of the day centre. This is the new phase in the story of ‘The Home’.

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Opportunities

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2019

GRANTS, AWARDS, OPEN CALLS, COMMISSIONS

Residencies

Commissions

Open Calls

IMMA PHOTOGRAPHY RESIDENCY

PER CENT FOR ART: PORTLAOIS

CREATIVE JOURNEYS BILLBOARD PROJECT

The Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) are offering a photographer or a visual artist working with photography a chance to participate in three unique residencies through one single award. The opportunity will provide institutional support across two established residencies in partnership with Light Work photography organisation and residency in Syracuse, New York, and will incorporate a third peripatetic residency as proposed by the applicant.

The first element of the award is a period of up to three months living and working on IMMA’s Residency Programme. It includes free studio and accommodation at IMMA and a bursary of €1,000 per month (approx.). The second stage will involve a self-organised international journey. IMMA will support this stage by offering €5,000 towards travel and insurance, accommodation and material expenses.

The final stage of the award is a one-month residency at the internationally renowned Light Work photography organisation and residency in Syracuse, New York. This stage includes free accommodation and access to the digital lab facility, as well as €5,000 towards travel, living and materials expenses.

Laois County Council is commissioning two permanent public artworks under the Per Cent for Art scheme. The first is for the new Cultural Quarter in the centre of Portlaoise. The budget for this project is €52,000. The brief asks the applying artist/s to address the following considerations, when expressing their interest in this commission: the historical and current context of Portlaoise; as well as the Gaelic, medical and aviation heritage of Portlaoise.

Public participations during the project’s development is required.

The second is the Roundabout entering Portlaoise at O’Moore Park on the Abbeyleix Road from exit 17 off the M7 in Portlaoise. The budget for the project is €71,000. As a gateway into Portlaoise, this permanent public artwork should capture the essence of Portlaoise, its history and current cultural themes for its local population, visitors and people undertaking business in the town.

Both commissions involve a two stage process. Those who progress to Stage 2 will be paid a concept development fee of €250. For for information on both commissions, contact Curator/Project Manager, Rina Whyte.

Dublin Airport, National College of Art and Design (NCAD) and Business to Arts are inviting artists to submit works for selection for the Billboard Project. The project is aimed at bringing an enhanced public art programme to the airport. Over the next two years, the Creative Journeys partnership will enable artists to showcase their ideas and work to international audiences, while providing Dublin Airport passengers with unique insights into contemporary Irish art.

Seven sites have been chosen across the airport campus to host works developed as part of Creative Journeys. The sites are located in landside and airside areas to allow both departing and arriving passengers to view the works of art.

The landside sites will enable members of the public who are at the airport, but not travelling, to view the art installations. Each of the selected artists for the Billboard Project will receive a set honorarium fee of €1,250. For further information on the submission process, visit the Creative Journeys website.

Deadline 17 July, 3:00pm

Deadline (Stage 1) 9 August, 12 noon

Deadline 31 August, 5:00pm

Web imma.ie

Email rinawhyte@yahoo.com

Email creativejourneys@staff.ncad.ie

Tel 01 612 9900

Tel 087 238 9591

Web creativejourneys.ie

FIRE STATION RESIDENTIAL STUDIOS

PUBLIC ART IN GRANGEGORMAN

LINEN LAB PROJECT

Fire Station Artists’ Studios has recently announced an open call for four residential studios, available in late 2019 and early 2020.

Fire Station Artists’ Studios (FSAS) offers city centre, subsidised, live/work, residential studios for professional visual artists. The studios are let from a period of between one year and two years nine months. One studio is available in December 2019, one studio in March 2020 and two studios in May 2020. Subsidised rents includes utilities, waste disposal, parking, internet access, and site security. Residents can avail freely of the facilities in the digital media centre, as well as rent digital equipment and workshop spaces at reduced rates.

There is a competitive selection process for the studios. Our selection panel includes: FSAS representatives, an external curator and an independent artist. Applicants will be notified by the start of August 2019. Check the FSAS website for studio information and residency rental rates, application procedure and FAQs.

‘The lives we live’ Grangegorman Public Art are currently inviting artists and curators to apply for one of three commission opportunities associated with three distinct building projects currently in development at Grangegorman.

The stakeholders for these buildings, the Health Service Executive (HSE) and Technological University Dublin (formerly DIT), are seeking tangible art that holds a lasting presence in these venues once they are completed. It is hoped that these three new artworks or interventions will significantly contribute to an enrichment of the social environment and attract interaction between people and place. The three proposed sites are: TU Dublin West Quad, TU Dublin Central Quad, HSE Residential Care Neighbourhood.

This is a one stage only competition. The total overall budget is €240,000. It is envisaged that this will be shared between the three commissions and no single commission will cost less than €60,000 to €80,000. The Public Art Working Group will recommend an all-in budget allocation to each artist or curator.

Deadline 14 July, 12 midnight

F.E. McWilliam Gallery is seeking proposals from artists, designers and researchers who wish to participate in the Linen Lab project. This yearlong programme of innovative creative collaboration and engagement will culminate in a gallery exhibition in Autumn 2019.

F.E. McWilliam Gallery hope to inspire a new generation of young people to try out a range of experimental approaches to working with linen, with the support and guidance of artists, designers and researchers. The creative team assigned to the project will be challenged to put local young people at the centre of activity, as they develop their own work for the Linen Lab exhibition. Collaboration, playfulness and experimentation are essential to the success of the engagement activity.

The project is part of ‘Connected’, a new audience engagement initiative being delivered across the borough of Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon in 2018/19 and is co-funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Local Government Challenge Fund. The maximum fee for each successful proposal is £3,750, based on a daily rate of £125 per day and a maximum of 30 days’ involvement in the project. For full details, email Louise Rice.

NCAD IRELAND GLASS BIENNALE 2019

The National College of Art and Design (NCAD) is holding an open call for the 2019 NCAD Ireland Glass Biennale (IGB). The IGB will open on 24 October 2019 at the Coach House Gallery, Dublin Castle Gardens, and will run until 5 January 2020.

The IGB seeks to present and provoke international perspectives, explorations and manifestations of glass as creative expression. The open call invitation extends to established and emerging practitioners. This event will be supported through a series of talks and events expanding the ideas and thematic of the exhibition.

The final selection will be made by a panel of expert jurors. There is no fee to apply. There is no artist fee to exhibit. A fully illustrated catalogue with commissioned essays will be produced. The IGB is co-funded through the Creative Europe project: Imagining Sustainable Glass Network Europe (ISGNE). For more information and application details please visit the IGB website.

Deadline 1 August Web irelandglassbiennale.wixsite.com/website

Funding

ARTS COUNCIL PROJECT AWARDS 2019

The Arts Council will offer Project awards in the following: Architecture; Arts Participation; Circus; Dance; Film; Music; Street Arts and Spectacle; Theatre; Traditional Arts; and Visual Arts.

The Arts Council’s Project awards support specific project activities under each of the above artform/arts practice areas. The award guidelines for each award can be downloaded from the available funding section of the Arts Council’s website. The award is open to individuals and organisations.

Organisations currently in receipt of funding under the Arts Council’s grant programmes (Strategic Funding, Venues Funding and Partnership Funding) cannot apply. Organisations and individuals currently in receipt of Arts Grant Funding, unless otherwise specifically advised by the Arts Council, can also not apply.

Organisations cannot apply to both the Project Award 2020 and Strategic Funding 2020.

Deadline 15 August, 5:30pm

Tel 01 855 6735

Deadline 30 August, 12 noon

Email artadmin@firestation.ie

Email public.art@ggda.ie

Deadline 16 July

Email awards@artscouncil.ie

Web firestation.ie/studios/apply

Web ggda.ie

Email louise.rice@armaghbanbridgecraigavon.gov.uk

Web artscouncil.ie/available-funding

Tel 01 6180 200

lifelong learning Summer/Autumn 2019

Northern Ireland

Republic of Ireland Dublin City

Wexford

Belfast

PEER CRITIQUE

Lifelong Learning events planned for Wexford include: • Writing About Your Work • Presentation Skills • Working with Curators

VISUAL ARTISTS HELPDESK/ PROJECT CLINIC

Other Lifelong Learning events planned for Belfast include: • Finances & Tax for self-employed with Louise Gorman • Pricing Your Work with Louise Gorman

ACNI: INFORMATION ON SIAP FUNDING FOR ARTISTS

Fermanagh & Lakelands

with Maryisa Wieckiewicz-Carroll Date/Time: 4 Jul. 10:30 – 17:00.

Location: RHA Friends Room.

Places/Cost: 8. €75 / €50 (VAI members).

Further Lifelong Learning events are planned as part of our Autumn/Winter programme in the following locations: • Kerry • Kildare • Limerick • Tipperary • Westmeath Please visit visualartists.ie for more infomration, when these events have been announced.

Events planned as part of our Autumn /Winter programme will cover: • The Landscape of Opportunities • Career Review • Business Skills • Visual Artists Café – networking and mentoring • Writing About Your Work • Presenation Skills • Working with Curators

Date/Time: 17 July, 13 Nov. 11:00 – 16:00.

Location: VAI Belfast Office.

Places/Cost: 7. £5/£2.50 (VAI members).

with Joanna Johnston Date/Time: 3 Jul. 11:30 – 13:00 (TBC).

Location: VAI Belfast Office.

Places/Cost: 15. FREE. PEER CRITIQUE: PAINTING

with Ronnie Hughes Date/Time: 7 Aug. 12:00 – 17:00.

Location: VAI Belfast Office.

Places/Cost: 6. £20/£10 (VAI members).

BELFAST OPEN STUDIOS 2019

Date: 19 Oct. Location: Citywide.

SPEED CURATING

Date/Time: 26 Oct. 12:00 – 17:00.

Location: Belfast Exposed.

Places/Cost: 100. £20/£10 (VAI members).

TALK: BJÖRN HEGARDT (FUKT MAGAZINE)

Date/Time: 30 Oct. 18:00 – 20:00.

Location: VAI Belfast Office.

Places/Cost: 25. £5/FREE (VAI members).

PEER CRITIQUE: CONTEMPORARY DRAWING WITH BJÖRN HEGARDT*

Date/Time: 30 Oct. 18:00 – 20:00.

Location: VAI Belfast Office.

Places/Cost: 6. £20/£10 (VAI members). *Fully Booked

ROI Bookings and Information To register a place or to find information on any of our upcoming Lifelong Learning events in the Republic of Ireland, visit: visualartists. ie/professional-development-_

Lifelong Learning Partners

NI Bookings and Information To register a place or to find information on any of our upcoming Lifelong Learning events in Northern Ireland, visit: visualartists.org.uk/booking

VISUAL ARTISTS CAFÉ: INTRODUCING THE LAKELANDS

Date/Time: TBC. 13:00 – 17:00.

Location: Waterways Ireland HQ. Places/Cost: 30. £10/FREE (VAI members).

Ards & North Down VISUAL ARTISTS CAFÉ: INTRODUCING THE CREATIVE PENINSULA

Date/Time: 15 August. 19:00 – 21:00.

Location: Ards Art Centre, Newtownards.

Places/Cost: 30. £10/FREE (VAI members).

BEING CREATIVE: TOOLS IN HOW TO MAINTAIN CREATIVITY AND OVERCOME BLOCKS

with Miriam Logan Date/Time: 22 August. 10:00 – 16:00.

Location: Ards Art Centre, Newtownards.

Places/Cost: 20. £40/£20 (VAI members).

Derry & Strabane VISUAL ARTISTS CAFÉ: INTRODUCING THE NORTH WEST

Date/Time: TBC. Location: Void Gallery, Derry.

Places/Cost: 30. £10/FREE (VAI members).

Fees VAI members receive preferential discount of 50% on fees for all VAI, training and professional development events.

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 Lifelong Learning web page. We often repeat workshops when there is a strong demand for a topic.

VAI Show & Tell Events VAI will schedule Show & Tell events during 2019 and invites interested artists, groups, venues or partners to get in touch if interested in hosting a Show & Tell. E: info@visualartists.ie

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 Lifelong Learning Programme. For details go to our training registration page and click on Register for the Artists’ Panel.