The Visual Artists' News Sheet – July August 2022

Virginia Overton, Untitled (cascade), 2020 Ladders, painted aluminium, steel drum, Uni-strut, water, pump, hose, sandbags and hardware Dimensions overall: 277 x 663 x 150 cm. Courtesy the artist and White Cube. Install photograph at The Mill by Jed Niezgoda.

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St Carthage Hall Chapel Street, Lismore Co Waterford, P51 WV96 For opening times of each location: www.lismorecastlearts.ie

Lismore Castle Lismore Co Waterford, P51 F859

Virginia Overton: Untitled (Cascade) 28 May - 21 August 2022 The Mill

Caoimhe Kilfeather: Experiments in Living 28 May - 3 July 2022 St Carthage Hall

The Mill Lismore Co Waterford, P51 A2R5

girls girls girls 2 April - 30 October 2022 Lismore Castle Sophie Barber, Louise Bourgeois, Elene Chantladze, Petra Collins, Sian Costello, Dorothy Cross, Genieve Figgis, Iris Haeussler, Eimear Lynch & Domino Whisker, Roni Horn, Cassi Namoda, Sharna Osborne, Josiane M.H. Pozi, Cindy Sherman, Alina Szapocznikow, Harley Weir, Francesca Woodman, Luo Yang. Curated by Simone Rocha

Lismore Castle Arts Programme Summer 2022

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet

VAN Issue 4: July – August 2022

Inside This Issue

AT HOME STUDIOS 59TH VENICE BIENNALE DEPT OF ULTIMOLOGY ELEANOR LAWLER AT MART

A Visual Artists Ireland Publication

The Visual Artists' News Sheet July – August 2022 On The Cover

Tinka Bechert, installation view, ‘Readymade #1’ [L to R]: Killer Whale Song, 2020 and Mini-Winners, 2022; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist and Oonagh Young Gallery.

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First Pages

Roundup. Exhibitions and events from the past two months.

News. The latest developments in the arts sector.

Columns

Seven Steeples. Cornelius Browne reflects on Sara Baume’s latest novel.

Family Lines. Introducing the Angelica column series.

What Role for Artists in a Time of Climate Change?

Environmentalist John Thorne outlines some of the practical ways in which artists can make more sustainable choices.

Irish Exit. Kate Strain reflects on the stuff of endings Contraindications of the Cross. Day Magee discusses their recent performance at Pallas Projects/Studios.

Material Histories. Eve Parnell considers a set of Project Arts Centre posters from the NIVAL Collection.

Creative Friction. Paul Roy considers how the impediments of chronic illness can be harnessed within artistic practice.

Object Permanence. Irlaith Ni Fheorais discusses a recent dance presentation by Kat Hawkins

Venice Biennale

Long Live Degenerate Art. Frank Wasser considers the legacy of surrealism at the 59th Venice Biennale.

Bingo Biennale. Alan Phelan reflects on the 59th Venice Biennale.

Artist-Led

Being Present. Orla Whelan outlines the evolution of AtHomeStudios.

Art & Activism

Collective Struggle. Kate O’Shea reflects on the project, ‘Multistory – Creative Engagement for Housing Change’.

Critique

Pádraig Spillane, What Passes Between Us V2.0, (2017/21) Helena Gorey, ‘Understory’, Highlanes Gallery.

Patrick Graham, ‘Transfiguration’, Hugh Lane Gallery.

Tinka Bechert, ‘Readymade #1’, Oonagh Young Gallery.

Sean Scully, ‘SQUARE’, Kerlin Gallery.

Backwater Artists, ‘C L O S E R’, Lavit Gallery.

Exhibition Profile

Project Funders

SUPERUNIFICATION. We profile Ruth E Lyons’s new public sculpture in Dún Laoghaire.

Visual Artists Ireland: CEO/Director: Noel Kelly Office Manager: Bernadette Beecher Advocacy & Advice: Shelly McDonnell Membership & Special Projects: Siobhán Mooney Services Design & Delivery: Alf Desire News Provision: Thomas Pool Publications: Joanne Laws Accounts: Dina Mulchrone

Republic of Ireland Office

Organisation Profile

Solas Nua. Miranda Driscoll outlines the evolution of Solas Nua in Washington, DC. Building Momentum. Olivia O’Dwyer discusses some of her motivations and influences.

History is Written by the Victorious. Paul MacCormaic reflects on his working methods and values as an artist.

It Can Never Be the Same Again. Eamonn Maxwell responds to the practice of Hina Khan.

Looking for Light. Julie Corcoran outlines aspects of her photographic process.

Corporate Sponsors

Editor: Joanne Laws Production/Design: Thomas Pool News/Opportunities: Shelly McDonnell, Thomas Pool Proofreading: Paul Dunne

Michael Corrigan (Chair), Michael Fitzpatrick, Richard Forrest, Paul Moore, Mary-Ruth Walsh, Cliodhna Ní Anluain (Secretary), Ben Readman, Gaby Smyth, Gina O’Kelly, Maeve Jennings, Deirdre O’Mahony.

Public Art

Member Profile

The Visual Artists' News Sheet:

Board of Directors:

Textile Tensions. EL Putnam discusses a retrospective at MART Gallery celebrating the work of Eleanor Lawler Black Sea, Blue Smoke. Manuela Pacella offers exhibition highlights from her latest visit to Northern Ireland.

Shouty Snow Echo. Laura Kelly outlines some ideas underpinning her latest solo show.

Page 29 Principal Funders

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Visual Artists Ireland The Masonry 151, 156 Thomas Street Usher’s Island, Dublin 8 T: +353 (0)1 672 9488 E: info@visualartists.ie W: visualartists.ie Northern Ireland Office Visual Artists Ireland 109 Royal Avenue Belfast BT1 1FF T: +44 (0)28 958 70361 E: info@visualartists-ni.org W: visualartists-ni.org

Project Partners

International Memberships

Beyond Drawing Felicity Clear, Marleen Kappe, Romy Muijrers, Kiera O’Toole, Marisa Rappard, Mary-Ruth Walsh Curated by Arno Kramer

Uillinn

West Cork Arts Centre

23 July to 8 September Monday to Saturday 10.00am - 4.30pm www.westcorkartscentre.com

Marleen Kappe, Untitled, graphite, iron wire, acrylic, collage on paper

Fingal, A Place for Art

Superprojects: connecting young audiences with contemporary art & artists Get to know our work and sign up to our newsletter here:

www.superprojects.org Email: info@superprojects.org IG: @superprojects_ FB: @SuperProjectsIreland

Fingal County Council and Graphic Studio Dublin Fine Art Print Residency Award Fingal County Council Arts Office in partnership with Graphic Studio Dublin are offering a Fine Art Print Residency for a professional artist at any stage of their career, working in any discipline, who is interested in exploring print processes.

The two-week long residency will provide an ideal environment for the development of a creative project in printmaking, working with a master printer.

Closing date for receipt of applications: Thursday 29th July 2021 at 4.00pm

To be eligible to apply, applicants must have been born, studied or currently reside in Fingal.

For further information and an application form please contact Graphic Studio Dublin by email at info@graphicstudiodublin.com or by phone on (01) 817 0938.

www.fingalarts.ie www.fingal.ie/arts ArtistsSS2021_VAI_Landscape_255.04x164.012mm_OD140621.indd 1

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Are you an artist working collaboratively with a community? Are you an artist or community group with an interest in working on a collaborative, socially engaged project?

The Arts Council’s Artist in the Community (AIC) Scheme, managed by Create, offers awards to enable artists and communities of place and/or interest to work together on researching, developing, and delivering projects.

Closing Dates Round One: 28 March, 2022 Round Two: 26 September, 2022

www.create-ireland.ie Image: Otolith. Ruairí Ó’Donnabháin and the community of Cape Clear Island, Goldsmith Helle Helsner and Composer Seán Ó Dálaigh. Photo: Debbie Scanlon

Fingal, A Place for Art

Fingal County Council and Royal Hibernian Academy RHA School Studio Award Fingal County Council Arts Office in partnership with the RHA School are offering an opportunity of a funded studio space for a professional artist for a period of one year, commencing in September 2021. The award is open to practising artists at all stages in their professional careers working in visual art.

The award offers an artist the opportunity to develop their practice within the institutional framework of the RHA School and covers the cost of studio rental and administration.

To be eligible to apply, applicants must have been born, studied or currently reside in the Fingal.

Closing date for receipt of applications: Sunday 25th July 2021 at 5.00pm

Visit www.rhagallery.ie to complete an application form.

For further information please contact RHA School by email at info@rhagallery.ie or by phone on (01) 661 2558.

www.fingalarts.ie www.fingal.ie/arts ArtistsSS2021_VAI_Landscape_255.04x164.012mm_OD140621.indd 2

16/06/2021 11:36

M ADE X N W 02/07 – 28/08, 2022

Alice Lyons Dee Barragry Grace Weir Jo Conway Mark Garry Nick Miller

Orla McHardy Patrick Hall Paul Hallahan Ronnie Hughes Tommy Weir Walker and Walker

www.thedock.ie

The Otolith Group

XENOGENESIS 07 July 2022 - 12 February 2023

Tickets from €8 | Book Now imma.ie

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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Exhibition Roundup

Dublin

Belfast

Kevin Kavanagh Gallery Geraldine O’Neill’s ‘Solastalgia’ was on display from 26 May to 18 June. Geraldine O’Neill is one of Ireland’s most recognisable and celebrated artists. An associate of the RHA and a member of Aosdána, her work hangs in leading cultural institutions.

As an artist she is drawn to Albrecht’s term solastalgia - a hybrid of ‘solace’ and ‘nostalgia’, devising her own visual language to acknowledge and find meaning in a prevailing sense of change and loss in the world, but she ultimately counters despair and negativity.

Olivier Cornet Gallery The Olivier Cornet Gallery presented ‘Swoon’, a solo exhibition of paintings by Mary A. Fitzgerald. Mary A Fitzgerald’s paintings are born from her encounters with external spaces – her eyes gathering patches of colour, shifts in light, blurred shapes on passing buses. A yellow plastic bag “floating right at me.” She does not take or work from photographs of the ephemera, rather she pays close attention. On display from 8 May to 5 June.

ArtisAnn Gallery ‘Drawing: A Comparison’ is an exhibition, by five eminent artists, showing that drawings can still hold their own in the world of modern art. Reflecting on the human figure, the forces of nature, protest marches and wild landscapes, each artist presents a different aspect of the medium, displaying the raw talent and power in a pencil. The show includes works by Frank Eyre, Joy Gerrard, Andrew Haslett, Terry McAllister and Gail Ritchie. On display from 1 June to 2 July.

kevinkavanagh.ie

oliviercornetgallery.com

artisann.org

Project Arts Centre ‘Clear Away the Rubble / Glan an Spallaí ar Shiúl’ is an open research project about housing, one of the most critical issues conditioning the lives of artists and others in Dublin, and Ireland, today. ‘Clear Away the Rubble / Glan an Spallaí ar Shiúl’ is an exercise in ‘learning in public’, the first iteration of a multi-year programme about housing. The project commenced with a screening programme, organised in collaboration with AEMI. On display from 21 April to 4 June.

RHA Ireland’s largest and longest running open submission exhibition of visual art returns for its 192nd year. This year, the RHA saw a total of 4,038 works of art submitted from which, following two rigorous rounds of selection, 378 works were accepted and are being exhibited throughout all gallery spaces alongside works by RHA Academy Members and Invited Artists. On display from 23 May to 24 July.

Golden Thread Gallery ‘HOW DID WE GET TO: KNOW SO LITTLE?’ is a collaboration between Golden Thread Gallery and Docs Ireland 2022.

This exhibition of artist moving image works explores how museums and archives perpetuate western colonialism through categorisation and collecting objects, and hopes to engage with the ongoing dialogue about the politics of the museum. The exhibition is curated by Golden Thread Gallery Director Peter Richards. On display from 12 May to 9 July.

projectartscentre.ie

rhagallery.ie

goldenthreadgallery.co.uk

Rua Red Gallery The Tower is a new work by artist Jesse Jones, and the third exhibition in the Magdalene Series at Rua Red, curated by Maolíosa Boyle. Jesse Jones’s new film installation is the second part in a trilogy beginning with Tremble Tremble, which was commissioned for the Irish Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. The Tower turns to the figure of the mystic and the heretic and questions ‘Who came before the witches?’

On display 27 May to 27 August.

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Lauren Gault’s exhibition, ‘Galalith’, is an expanded staging of her sculptural installations, responding to Temple Bar Gallery + Studios internal gallery space and the building’s external, environmental context.

The exhibition incorporates sunlight caught by a street facing solar panel, a threaded assemblage featuring unused galalith stock, recycled rubber safety surfacing, large scale suspended sculpture and a human/non human soundscape (solar controlled). On display from 19 May to 2 July.

The MAC Claire Barclay is a visual artist recognised for producing large-scale sculptural installations created in response to specific contexts. In her exhibition ‘Thrum’, Barclay includes a series of tactile sculptural environments, where large-scale forms, made predominantly from fabrics and metals, “suggest textile narratives and explore our complex relationships with cloth.” Within the exhibition combs, bowls and mirrors are a recurring motif. They provide a degree of universality that can be manipulated. On display from 15 April to 3 July.

Vault Artist Studios In his exhibition ‘What’s He Building in There?’ Leo Boyd has combined computers, rubbish photocopiers, screen printing and cardboard cutouts to create a series of interactive scenes within scenes that invite the audience to become a part of the art work.

Built in situ in the Vault Canteen Gallery, ‘What’s He Building in There?’ is a rubbish wonderland. On display from 27 May to 7 June.

ruared.ie

templebargallery.com

themaclive.com

vaultartiststudios.com

Geraldine O’ Neill, Bánaithe, 2021, oil on canvas, 40 x 45 cm; image courtesy of the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.

Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich Cultúrlann McAdam O’Fiaich presented the first solo exhibition from Euan Gébler, ‘Disturbances’, at the Gerard Dillon Gallery. Euan was the recipient of the 2021 Cultúrlann McAdam O’Fiaich Student Graduate Award. ‘Disturbances’ is an exhibition exploring the relationship between culture and landscape. Using photography and sculpture Euan explores the uncertain boundary between the natural and the man-made; how we shape the world around us and how it shapes us in return.

On display from 5 May to 9 June. culturlann.ie

QSS Artist Studios ‘Future/Forward’ is a long-term studio programme and series of three exhibitions featuring new collaborative works by QSS members. Conceived as a response to the pandemic, the programme paired 35 artists together to create experimental work, and to re-galvanise the studio community following the disruption of the past two years.

The focus for this series of exhibitions is on representing artists’ working methods, of process and exchange, and the significance of creative dialogue. On display from 2 June to 28 July. queenstreetstudios.net

Euan Gébler, Neamhshaolta II, 2021, 50x40cm, Giclée print on Hahnemuhle Baryta Satin; image courtesy of the artist.

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Exhibition Roundup

Michael Geddis and Joanna Kidney, Concertina 1 and Concertina 2; photograph by Paul Tierney, courtesy of the artists and Mermaid Arts Centre.

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Sue Morris and Greg McLaughlin, Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Free Derry Corner, June 2022; photograph courtesy the artists.

Conor O’Grady, The Night before Muirburn (Skye Waters), 2021, watercolour, water from Loch Sligachan and Loch Bracadale; image courtesy the artist.

An Táin Arts Centre ‘Threading the Táin’, an inter-county community, visual arts, textile project where five tapestries were created to celebrate the Táin Bó Cúailnge, was on display in An Táin Arts Centre from 23 April to 11 June.

Funded by Creative Ireland and produced

by An Táin Arts Centre in association with Creative Spark, each tapestry depicts a scene from the great epic that relates to each of the five counties that the Táin March Festival march through every year, namely Roscommon, Longford, Westmeath, Meath and Louth.

Áras Inis Gluaire ‘Silent Signals’ was a multidisciplinary exhibition by Conor O’Grady. The exhibition, which featured paintings, photography and sculpture, was created during a fellowship at Ballinglen Arts Foundation, and a Jon Scheuler Scholarship on the Isle of Skye. The exhibition and its related research examines the shared folklore, mythology and historical connections with Scotland, reflecting in particular Gaelic, rural and migrant experiences. On display from 9 June to 11 July.

Bord na Móna SULT Artist-led Collective exhibition ‘Life Goes On’ opened on 16 May, exactly 100 years after the withdrawal of British troops.

At 10:30 a.m. on 16 May 1922, the British Army withdrew their forces simultaneously from the barracks in Naas, Newbridge, Kildare and the Curragh. The collection of original paintings, fine art prints, sculptures and mixed media installation is accompanied by an illustrated limited edition book combining artwork and historical background. On display from 16 to 29 May.

antain.ie

arasinisgluaire.ie

sultartists.com

Centre Culturel Irlandais Storytelling and social justice are an integral part of photographer Deirdre Brennan’s work. ‘Following Ulysses’ uses the map and structure of James Joyce’s novel to consider politics, race and class in modern Dublin. For its courtyard exhibition, the CCI has selected eighteen photos from this large body of work, one representing each chapter of the novel. The black and white images deliver a strong message. On display from 3 February to 16 June.

Crawford Art Gallery Crawford Art Gallery hosted the Zurich Portrait Prize for a third consecutive year in partnership with the National Gallery of Ireland from 23 April to 17 July. Sponsored by Zurich, this annual competition is open to artists working in Ireland, and Irish citizens based abroad. Submissions are not restricted by media; however, all entries must have been completed within the last three years. The winner of the competition will receive a cash prize of €15,000 and will be commissioned to create a work for the National Portrait Collection.

Droichead Arts Centre ‘Objects and Oscillations’ by Brian Hegarty was presented by Droichead Arts Centre in association with Drogheda Arts Festival 2022 from 30 April to 25 June. Hegarty’s practice is an exploration on the transverse between the visual and sound, using a combination of collage, appropriation and audio elements. Over the last few years the vinyl LP cover has become his medium of choice, folding together an interest in cultural imagery and a love of music.

crawfordartgallery.ie

droichead.com

Galway Arts Centre Declan Clarke’s ‘The Last Broadcast’ centred on the history of electronic communication, its development over the last century, and how this legacy manifests itself currently in an unsteady, evolving Europe.

As contemporary European generations continue to define nationhood within the confines of globalism, reflections between past and present are more significant than ever. As in previous bodies of work, Clarke combines narrative and documentary with elements of noir and espionage. On display from 29 April to 25 June.

Luan Gallery Luan Gallery presented ‘The Soul of Matter’, a solo exhibition by Meath-based artist, Derick Smith, from 12 April to 23 June.

‘The Soul of Matter’ is the first exhibition curated by Luan Gallery’s recently appointed Curator and Programming Coordinator, Valeria Ceregini. It represents an opportunity to introduce Smith’s exclusive series of mixed media works which demonstrates the artists’ careful attention to materials.

His practice is focused on the basis that art is accessible to everyone.

Mermaid Arts Centre ‘mergeemerge’ is a collaborative drawing project by Michael Geddis and Joanna Kidney. The project began as a purely visual conversation by way of a series of small drawings posted back and forth between the two artists. What emerged from this silent contemplation is a grand expression of the convergences and divergences in the work of Michael Geddis and Joanna Kidney. What has emerged from their combined memory, intuition and imagination are intertwined otherworlds. On display from 7 May to 18 June.

Triskel Arts Centre ‘A Prayer of Progress in the Light’ by Jennifer Lewandowski and Samuel Levack is on display at Triskel Arts Centre from 28 April to 17 July. Their practice encompasses media such as film, performance, photography, text and music, and explores questions of the personal realm, from emotions to affections, as well as themes of utopia and spiritualism. They use image-making and storytelling techniques to create dream-like visions of territories, whether landscapes or urban settings, which operate as poetic meditations on nature and social life.

Regional & International

centreculturelirlandais.com

Garter Lane Arts Centre Garter Lane Gallery in partnership with SETU Waterford presented a curated exhibition of artworks from the annual BA (Hons) Visual Art Degree exhibition entitled, NINE22. After two of the most extraordinarily challenging years, NINE22 showcases a selection of artworks by graduating students. The exhibition draws on an array of diverse and thought-provoking themes and ideas, with artworks ranging in mediums from drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation, and video work. On display from 28 May to 25 June. garterlane.ie

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mermaidartscentre.ie

CCA Derry~Londonderry Sue Morris and Greg McLaughlin presented a two-part work, Your Silence Will Not Protect You (2022), which explored personal, collective and political responses to traumatic events. In the CCA Project Space (13 – 21 June), a multimedia installation represented a typical domestic space, but one regularly used as a campaign base. At Free Derry Corner (7 – 21 June) a banner was displayed, utilising the language of popular protest and campaigning. The work was commissioned and funded by the Bloody Sunday Trust and Arts Everywhere. ccadld.org

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News

PLATFORM 31 Recipients Announced The 2022 recipients of the PLATFORM 31 nationwide artist development scheme have recently been announced. Following the success of the inaugural Platform 31 programme in 2021, this innovative scheme has returned for 2022, showing the commitment of Local Authority Arts Offices, together with the Arts Council, to support the continued development of artists throughout Ireland.

PLATFORM 31 is designed to support artists to reflect on and develop their practice or to make work in a new way, while being connected with and supported by peer practitioners, advisors and mentors. The 31 participating artists – one from each Local Authority area in Ireland – were announced on Tuesday 31 May. Developed by the Association of

Púca Statue Unveiled in the Burren A controversial bronze statue has been unveiled in the Michael Cusack Centre in Carron in the heart of the Burren. Depicting a mythical, half-man, half-horse creature from Irish folklore, The Púca (2022), created

by Dublin-based artist Aidan Harte, was originally commissioned by Clare County Council for Ennistymon in County Clare.

However, the sculpture received strong opposition last year from some residents, a number of politicians, and even the local priest, who denounced it from the pulpit at Sunday Mass.

After the statue was criticised locally, the council commissioned a survey of local opinion, which ultimately resulted in the artwork being rejected in Ennistymon.

Since then, there have been proposals from other towns in County Clare to house the statue, including the Ballyvaughan Community Development Group, and even folklorist Eddie Lenihan, who proposed that the statue be relocated to Crusheen.

The committee felt that the community-run Michael Cusack Centre would be an ideal location for the statue, as the townland was historically known as Poulaphuca (Poll an Phúca). The interpretative centre will deliver an educational programme, providing visitors with information on the the Irish tradition and folklore collection of the Púca. The two-metre statue is also expected to play a key role in the centre’s annual Samhain/Púca Storytelling Festival in November.

Commenting on the statue’s new home, Aidan Harte stated: “The Burren was always a hideout for renegades and outsiders, so it’s the perfect haunt for a fairy rogue…

Of course, anyone brave enough to rub the Púca’s toe will have seven years’ luck. And as for the locals who kindly gave my lovely horse a home, they’ll have good luck on tap – hospitality is gold to The Good Folk.”

Arts Council Launch EDI Toolkit The Arts Council of Ireland recently launched their new Equality, Human Rights and Diversity (EHRD) Policy and Strategy. It sets out their commitment to “taking actions to actively deepen our understanding of inequalities in the arts and develop substantive ways to address them”. The

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

THE LATEST FROM THE ARTS SECTOR

Local Authority Arts Offices (ALAAO) with the Arts Council, PLATFORM 31 offers two elements of support – financial and developmental – for artists across all disciplines.

Jenny Sherwin, Wicklow County Council Arts Officer, said: “The Chief Executive of Wicklow County Council, Mr Brian Gleeson, is pleased that Wicklow is in a position to host this scheme on behalf of the 30 partner local authorities once again in 2022.

The quality of the applicants and mix of artistic disciplines represented in the selected group showcases the very finest range of artists in Ireland, who are deeply committed to their practice.”

Sinead O’Reilly, Head of Local, Place and Public Art at the Arts Council, said: “The Arts Council is proud

to support the second year of this very thoughtful bursary programme for artists in partnership with local authorities; the response from last year’s artists to the networking and mentoring elements was very heartening and reflected back the benefit of an holistic approach to supporting artists of all disciplines as they navigate new opportunities for their practice.”

PLATFORM 31 is managed by Wicklow County Council on behalf of The Association of Local Authority Arts Officers, in collaboration with the Arts Council. For more information see: platform31.localartsireland.ie

[L-R]: Performance artist Maïa Nunes, the Wicklow participant in this year’s PLATFORM 31 with Jenny Sherwin, Arts Officer, Wicklow County Council

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Toolkit gathers examples of good practice, in order to support arts organisations across Ireland in promoting EDI. This toolkit is intended to support organisations in implementing positive policy measures to promote equality of opportunity, access and outcomes for everyone living in Ireland regardless of their age, civil or family status, disability, gender, membership of the Traveller community, race, religion or sexual orientation. These are the nine protected characteristics under the Equal Status Acts 2000-2018, and the Arts Council furthermore notes the ground of socio-economic background as a further basis for which equality of opportunity, access and outcomes must be guaranteed.

This toolkit has been produced to support arts organisations to prepare and produce their Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy and Action Plans, and it is intended to help organisations to embed EDI as values that underpin their actions.

Expansion of National Collection New funding to acquire contemporary artworks for the National Collection, in new media and on pressing issues including climate change, diversity and global migration, has been announced by Minister Catherine Martin.

From the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media: The Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media announced an ambitious new fund of €1.5m for the Crawford Art Gallery and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The purpose of the award is to address significant gaps that remain in the National Collection following years of limited acquisitions. This funding will enable both national cultural institutions to acquire works that ensure that the National Collection is more representative of the diverse communities of contemporary Ireland.

The 2022 acquisition fund will support the purchase of works by generations of Irish and international artists formerly missing from the National Collection.

The new acquisitions will also include multi-media works and installations that reflect recent developments in contempo-

rary artistic practice. This award builds on the €1 million fund provided to the Crawford Art Gallery and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2020, which was designed to support artists based in Ireland throughout the most challenging period of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Annie Fletcher, stated: “Minister Martin’s granting of this acquisition funding is truly momentous for IMMA. We can now begin again to invest in building and expanding IMMA’s collection of modern and contemporary art for the nation. The scale of the grant shows that our Department is as ambitious for Ireland’s National Collection as we are, and this is to be welcomed. We are delighted to re-engage with our colleagues in the Crawford in developing world-class collections in Ireland.”

Director of the Crawford Art Gallery, Mary McCarthy, said: “This major investment by the Minister and the Department recognises the significance of the visual arts and the National Collection within the Department’s priorities. It represents a real opportunity to engage with contemporary artists and create new conversations within the Crawford Collection across the centuries. It is an important commitment to building significant collections for the public to enjoy now and into the future.” €380,000 funding for Culture Ireland €380,000 in funding has been announced for Culture Ireland’s promotion of Irish arts globally. From The Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media: Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin TD, today announced funding of just under €380,000 for the promotion of Irish arts globally through Culture Ireland’s Grant Programme. 70 projects covering architecture, circus, film, music, theatre and visual arts will benefit from this funding.

Announcing the awards, Minister Martin said: “Ireland is known worldwide for our artists and it is so heartening to see them return to reach international audiences in person strengthening cultural connections around the globe. I am delighted that the Culture Ireland funding announced today will assist Irish arts to be enjoyed

on world stages at an unprecedented level since the pandemic.”

For full list of grant recipients please visit cultureireland.ie Bolay Residency 2022 The Linenhall Arts Centre is very pleased to announce visual artist Dominic Thorpe as the recipient of this year’s Bolay Residency. Thorpe is the third recipient of the annual residency and was selected from 98 other applicants, with the selection panel noting a very high standard of applications received this year.

Thorpe works in performance art, as well as drawing, video, photography, installation, and relational processes. He has performed and exhibited extensively across Ireland and internationally. Commenting on the award, Thorpe said: “I feel very grateful and excited to be awarded the Bolay residency at this time. For several reasons, I have largely withdrawn from making and showing new work in recent years. The resources, space and time afforded through the Bolay residency is an incredible opportunity to fully re-engage with my practice in new ways. The intention is to make a new body of work related to perpetrator trauma and the Irish civil war. Sculptural and installation works will be developed by employing embodied processes often utilised within performance art processes”.

The Bolay Residency encompasses a purpose-built studio, accommodation, tailored mentorship, a purpose-built digital suite, an artist fee of €8,000, a materials budget of €2,000 and an exhibition opportunity at the Linenhall in 2023. Linenhall Interim Director, Fiona Neary, said: “The Linenhall is excited to support Thorpe in his practice… Hosting residencies is a very important part of our role at The Linenhall Arts Centre. We are excited at the potential for practice exploration and development for Thorpe”.

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Columns

Plein Air

Angelica

Seven Steeples

Family Lines

CORNELIUS BROWNE REFLECTS ON SARA BAUME’S LATEST NOVEL, PUBLISHED BY TRAMP PRESS.

ALICE REKAB REFLECTS ON AN ONGOING PROJECT WHICH EXPLORES BLACK AND MIXED-RACE IDENTITIES IN IRELAND. ‘FAMILY LINES’ IS a multi-platform project

Cornelius Browne reading Seven Steeples by Sara Baume; photograph by Paula Corcoran, courtesy of Cornelius Browne.

SEVEN YEARS AGO, as I was painting my

first solo exhibition, ‘Weathering’, for the McKenna Gallery in Omagh, Sara Baume published her debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither. This author’s magic, I felt, was the ability to tune her readers into the music that lies just outside the noise of human life. With oil paint, I was hoping to achieve something similar.

Dramatic skies this spring have invigorated my canvases, but frequently they are building towards landscape-extinguishing cloudbursts. Rain pelting the car, wet painting on the back seat, I reach into the glove compartment. I am protective of my painting time, and opening a book admits another presence into my space. Lately, this invitation was confined to poets Mary Oliver and Dorothy Molloy. The publication of Baume’s new novel, Seven Steeples, has seen me welcome a new sheltering companion.

John McGahern thought the novel the most social of all art forms, yet Seven Steeples appears unsociable to the point of becoming an antinovel. A couple, Bell and Sigh, rent a remote house in the countryside, and cut themselves off from the world.

Seven years pass, an aeon of apparent stagnation and neglect, during which time Bell and Sigh intend to climb the mountain that witnessed their arrival, yet always another year slips by. A sense grows that the narrative voice and this high vantage point may be entwined. From the opening sentence, the mountain is spirited, “full of miniature eyes” belonging to creatures who inhabit its slopes. Non-human life animates the pages that follow, the house becoming an insectarium, as if Baume is actually extending the parameters of sociability.

I have been a Baume devotee since her second novel, A Line Made by Walking; particularly the line where the narrator remarks that it took “five years of formal education to figure out that what I truly wanted to be was an outsider artist.” This was also my experience, and it was heartening to see it in print. ‘Weathering’ was painted along

the same road to the shore that my wife and I had walked daily for a decade before I began to paint. One of Baume’s points of departure in writing Seven Steeples was wondering if an entire novel could be written about a single road.

Baume is a visual artist who doesn’t fence off the objects she creates from the books she writes. She described her non-fiction debut, handiwork, as a lovechild of her art and writing practices. That book, a profound meditation on living as an artist, centres on the carving and painting of hundreds of model birds. Recently, Baume has been working on a series of model container ships with sails. As I form this sentence in my head, in my hand I am holding one of the mountains made by Baume to celebrate the publication of Seven Steeples.

During the first lockdown of 2020, I began communing each morning with a twelfth-century Benedictine nun. Aged fourteen, Hildegard of Bingen became an anchorite, insulated from the outside world.

As the world closed, I found solace in her choral music and mystical writings. It was into the aura emanating from this material that the then newly published handiwork reached my hands. The fit was seamless.

Seven Steeples breathes this same air. Bell and Sigh withdraw from the world as surely as Hildegard. They build shrines, their unvarying walks become pilgrimages. Bell lightly touches elements of her world as a form of blessing. Baume intimates, I feel, that it is possible to put oneself in the way of art, in the same way that cloistered individuals place themselves in the way of religious experience.

Dorothy Molloy saw her poems as “little models” that she makes every day – “little, precise objects.” As the rain clears, and I resume painting, it pleases me to think of my glove-compartment poets enjoying the company of Bell and Sigh.

Cornelius Browne is a Donegal-based artist.

I have developed with the support of the Douglas Hyde Gallery and the Arts Council of Ireland. It takes the form of a solo exhibition of newly commissioned work; a public programme of workshops, developed in collaboration with Éireann and I (a community archive for Black migrants in Ireland); public screenings, featuring works by Martina Attille, Black Audio Film Collective, Larry Achiampong, Jennifer Martin, Holly Graham, Zinzi Minott, and Salma Ahmad Caller; and public billboards by Henrique Paris in collaboration with Cypher Billboard, London. ‘FAMILY LINES’ explores experiences of migration and survival within the family unit and focuses on Black and Mixed-Race life in Ireland across generations.

I am the white passing child of a mixed marriage born into a very white space.

Dublin in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a monoculture and I was the only one I knew with a Black dad and grandmother.

I learned our story by heart – who we were and where we came from. I carried a photo. I taught people how to say our surname, Rekab. A section cut from a larger piece, a core sample, a brief inventory: Temne1, Sierra Leone, Magburka2, Syria, labneh3, granat stew4, trading cloth, Dublin, boarding school, elocution lessons, nuns, my dad playing guitar, my mum an artist. These were fragments of lives remembered and retold, woven together into a cohesive story in response to that interrogating inquiry: “Where are you really from?”

Because of my light skin tone, people questioned if I was my father’s child. I told different parts of my family story to different people. This auto-redaction was an editorial-process-as-defence-mechanism; it made me up as a new person every time.

It was a method of storytelling that came from knowing that not all of me was wel-

9

come in one space.

The work I have made for ‘FAMILY LINES’ is part of a process of reclaiming this auto-redaction and auto-becoming as an experimental method of making art.

Through this exhibition I want to transform the negation of having to re-tell who I am differently each time, within the dynamism and fluidity that come with being MixedRace and Irish. The films, sculptures and prints in the exhibition reference objects excavated from my personal past as well as shared cultural histories. They connect with this idea of making something new and coherent out of fragmented images from different points in time. Figures and objects phase in and out of visibility, are layered and brought together in ways that would not be possible outside the image.

‘FAMILY LINES’ is about struggling to piece together who you are in the culture you grew up in. It is also about finding yourself through your family’s journey and trying to make a space for yourself in proximity to your ancestors. Each element of the program connects with and elaborates on these ideas in their own distinct and nuanced ways, weaving them together with personal and political concerns and presenting works that interrogate, nurture, love and remember who we are and where we come from.

Alice Rekab is an artist based in Dublin. alicerekab.com

Notes 1 My grandmother is Temne – an indigenous Sierra

Leonean People.

2 Magburka is a small town in rural Sierra Leone, where my grandmother was born.

3 A traditional Levantine dish of fermented milk curds served with garlic and olive oil.

4 A traditional Sierra Leonean stew made with peanuts.

Alice Rekab, Samir’s Prism, 2021, Digital Drawing Collage; image © and courtesy the artist.

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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Columns

Ecologies

Ultimology

What Role for Artists in a Time of Climate Change?

Irish Exit

ENVIRONMENTALIST JOHN THORNE OUTLINES HOW ARTISTS CAN CONTINUING THE ULTIMOLOGY COLUMN SERIES, KATE STRAIN MAKE SUSTAINABLE AND INFORMED CHOICES. REFLECTS ON THE STUFF OF ENDINGS. WE CAN FEEL overwhelmed by Climate

Change and other crises affecting our society. We feel a lack of agency to change anything, or to make a meaningful impact.

We’re asked to do things such as recycling which we know won’t fix it. All this leads to ‘climate distress’ and denial of what is going on, which just makes us feel worse.

We need to change our ways; to design a better, more inclusive and equitable world; to communicate the need for change; to put forward what are meaningful actions; and promote a positive future vision.

I am an environmentalist, but I work at Glasgow School of Art because it’s full of creative people who interpret and connect us to these complex concerns. Artists can make us feel anger, pleasure, disgust, joy – a wide range of emotions. Humans are beautiful, imperfect, emotional, illogical beings and we need art to unite us within ourselves, to each other and to wider nature.

Art is not a luxury. We need art.

As an artist you can link us emotionally to a subject, and through your choices of materials or subject matter, you can help people to care and take action within their own lives and professions. Climate Change and other crises need everyone to understand the need for action, and to demand it, whatever their role.

Environmental problems do not exist alone but as part of an interconnected web, which an artist can use to question their own practice and deepen their understanding of their lives. Social justice issues of gender, race and sexuality are intertwined with wellbeing and environmental impacts; often when we look at an environmental question, we see a deep cultural and social history behind it, for example in land use, or how we create the materials, clothing, housing, food, work, and transport we use.

Every artist already goes through a creative process of deciding subject, medium and materials for any project. Just doing so, from an environmental perspective, is powerful. We can balance the impacts of a piece to its societal benefits.

Everything we do or say has an environmental impact – whether talking to friends, typing or reading these words, going to the supermarket. When creating work with an environmental theme, we will often be open to charges of hypocrisy. Do not accept those charges. We all live within a broken, capitalist system, and we can’t help but do so. We are all hypocrites, every one of us.

However, we can choose to use our skills to better society, and to minimise negative outcomes.

In Scotland, we have Scrap Stores. Initially established to provide children’s nurseries with cheap materials, they have expanded their membership to include organisations like our art school. We pay a small membership fee, and any student or staff member can go down to sort through

rescued, reused and recycled stuff. These range from old shop fittings, fabric, paper, paints, furniture, beads, to the dismantled boxes Commonwealth Games medals came in – all cleaned, processed, sorted and offered for sale. They both collect and sell items, and you can donate excess materials.

We also support the ‘Circular Arts Network’ in Glasgow. A ‘free eBay’, the site allows artists to both offer time and unwanted materials. Glasgow Tool Library offers tools for hire, instead of buying them.

Why do we all need a drill when the average household’s drill is used for approximately two hours in its entire lifetime?

(Mine even less).

Within GSA, we offer ‘rummages’ where departing Halls students can donate kitchen and arts materials, and we pass on clothing and electricals to charity. If these initiatives don’t exist where you are, test demand by having an informal rummage or a materials swap, or add it to an existing event or place, a café or library. Try it out and expand from there.

Students often sadly exhibit climate distress at their perceived environmental impacts when making art. I say: make art. Make it well, with consideration and awareness. Journal, record and publish your thinking and process as part of the work.

Choose the least-worst options and say why; it will change how you make. It will certainly give you greater insights, and I’ve seen it make deeper and more meaningful art, and happier more engaged artists.

At GSA we are always questioning the status quo and asking: why? Approaches including Queer Theory and Feminism can help us identify and address inequalities locally and globally, creating a future that is healthier, cleaner, more secure, makes use of and is inclusive of diverse people’s skills and potential, and cultivates lives more in sync with nature. Designers offer future solutions, and artists inspiration, to create a more positive, innovative society.

Whether you are interested in environmental or social justice, you will find an interconnectedness that, when explored, will enhance and broaden your practice and your future creative careers. But most of all make art. Unapologetically. We need art.

John Thorne is Sustainability Coordinator at Glasgow School of Art. gsasustainability.org.uk

47 OVER-SIZED ART books, 22 artist publi-

cations, 11 novels, three soft bags of bags (including nine totes), two shoe-boxes of documents, one bag of chargers and leads, one cardboard box of receipts, one plastic box of business cards, two market baskets, one bubble-wrapped sculpture, two framed paintings (glass), five framed prints (Plexiglas), 14 rolled posters, one fan, one standing lamp, one melamine tray, one bathmat, one double duvet cover, one cushion cover.

My five-year role as Artistic Director of Grazer Kunstverein officially ended in September 2021, although I’d been physically distanced from my position since March 2020. In June 2022 I returned to my former place of work in the Austrian city of Graz to bid a final farewell to colleagues, and to quickly sort through the last of my belongings, listed above, that were not urgent enough to be sent to me by post, but too seemingly important to discard.

These belongings were abandoned when, in March 2020, I left my apartment for what was supposed to be a three-day trip to visit my family in Ireland, but owing to a pandemic-induced global standstill, I never made it back to Graz. My initial absence was further prolonged by a string of extenuating circumstances: pregnancy, lockdown, maternity leave, more lockdowns, delay with the baby’s passport, covid. The contents of the apartment I’d been renting pre-pandemic were packed into four enormous suitcases and a bunch of cardboard boxes. These have been taking up space in the institution’s small storage room for 820 days.

Finally, back in Graz, I am confronted by the material stuff from an entire lifetime ago. A colleague of mine once said that it doesn’t matter how you start a new position within an institution, what matters is how you leave it. Funny then, that I (a self-declared Ultimologist, concerned with and dedicated to the study of endings) might have had such an unceremonious end to my tenure at Grazer Kunstverein. The events that conspired to keep me away, made my ultimate departure feel akin to slipping out the side door at a party, in the spirit of what Irish Americans call ‘an Irish exit’ – a way of removing yourself that avoids any awkward farewell conversations with those you are leaving behind.

Seeing my things packed up in the storage space, arranged carefully but not by me, awaiting collection, disposal or dispersal, reminds me of the inevitable process that follows many endings and almost any death, when that which remains, the stuff, matter and mess of a person’s personal effects, are gathered and sorted, held, contained, quarantined or counted, before being distributed, disputed, packed away, passed on, doled out, boxed up, or binned.

In a recent Instagram post, the artist Every Ocean Hughes wrote about their estranged

father’s sudden passing, and how they “… had to ‘death clean’ his truck which was 100 full all over. His life was inside. And we had just a few hours and a roadside dumpster in Abilene [Texas]. And now that truck is my inheritance”.

In their artistic practice, Hughes examines some of the inequalities of the death industry such as the financial drain of funerals, racism in healthcare and afterlife practices, and the bureaucratic hurdles that affect queer communities and inhibit individual agency in death. Full of humour, grief, unknowing and a desire for justice, Hughes’ work encourages us to pay attention to that which we too often try to avoid.

The living’s relationship to the belongings of the dead is one that is tenderly contemplated by another artist, Mikala Dwyer, whose deceased mother’s ashtrays and whiskey bottles sometimes find their way into her ongoing series of sculptural assemblages, titled ‘The Additions and Subtractions’. These earthly possessions act as carriers of the supernatural, a link between bodies living and lifeless. According to Dwyer, “After my mother died, I had to pack up all her stuff. I had to do it way too fast. I thought, what if, instead of putting all her letters into the bin, I could burn them and say a prayer, and somehow embody the ancestral knowledge in a more meaningful, osmotic manner.”

Rituals such as these, brought to life in the form of artworks, may enable us to tune into the frequency of orphaned material, to credit our possessions for their ability to hold and carry meaning, and to potentially tap into a way of channelling matter to somehow transfer that embodied knowledge contained within. Understanding how something ended seems key to grasping the essence of what it was. The stuff I’ve come to sift through is like an accidental preview of what I would leave behind in death. And so cast within the guiding spirit of Ultimology, this column captures and records my inventory of abandoned belongings, and in doing so, becomes the ending I never had to my former life as Artistic Director of Grazer Kunstverein. Ultimology gives me the tools to recognise the importance of endings – even the sly ones that slip almost silently out the side door.

Kate Strain is an independent curator and co-founder of the Department of Ultimology, an ongoing project with artist Fiona Hallinan.

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Columns

Arts & Disability

Visual Culture

Contraindications of the Cross

Material Histories

11

DAY MAGEE DISCUSSES THE MOTIVATIONS UNDERPINNING THEIR EVE PARNELL CONSIDERS A SET OF PROJECT ARTS CENTRE POSTERS FROM THE NIVAL COLLECTION. RECENT PERFORMANCE AT PALLAS PROJECTS/STUDIOS. archive called The National Irish Visual Arts Library; we call it NIVAL (pronounced phonetically N-eyeval). NIVAL is a public research resource dedicated to the documentation of twentieth and twenty-first-century Irish visual art and design. We collect, store and make accessible for research an unparalleled collection. You don’t need to be a member or pay to access the archive.

NIVAL’s collection policy includes Irish visual art from the whole island, as well as Irish art abroad and non-Irish artists working in Ireland. We acquire information on artists, designers, galleries, arts organisations and institutions, critics and other related subjects. The collection contains documentary material in all formats including books, catalogues, videos, slides, artists’ papers, and ephemera in print and digital formats.

It began in the 1980s when Edward Murphy, the popular and colourful NCAD Librarian, received many requests to attend art and craft exhibitions and began to save the printed invitations in a bankers box.

It didn’t take long for the box to overflow, especially as Eddie began to add the critic’s reviews and other newspaper clippings.

Another box joined the party, and that’s how NIVAL started.

Today, we have a vast empire of information. In most cases, we have paperwork that can only be found in our archive – from books and letters to press releases and catalogues. There are handwritten notes by Jack B. Yeats; letters from William Orpen; a book by Grace Gifford, created when she was a student in the Metropolitan School of Art, featuring caricatures of her tutors.

There are publications, illustrated by, for example, Maud Gonne, Harry Clarke, Elizabeth Rivers, Gladys Maccabe – right up to unique, contemporary artist’s books.

NIVAL can be described as a library, but we have much more than books! Amongst the shelves and archive boxes, we also have posters. One box, labeled “60s and 70s Posters: Project and Misc”, contains a small but fascinating collection. The distinctive bold cockerel logo of the Project Arts Centre leaps out joyously. These posters were printed to go on walls, doors, maybe lampposts.

Some have little holes in the top or corners made by tacks or nails. Vibrant two-colour prints tell us about the production process before colour copiers (when printing one colour became the same price as full colour).

Studying the posters, I realise the designer has been clever with the budget; some of them are one ink on a heavy coloured paper, giving the impression of two colours. Relatively inexpensively produced, these small posters are not uniform in size, ranging from 43.5 x 21 cms to 35 x 25 cms. The paper is heavy because these posters had to take some rough and tumble, as they were pinned up and displayed in busy locations.

NCAD HOUSES AN

Day Magee, ‘Contraindications of the Cross’, 2022, installation view; photograph by Day Magee, courtesy of the artist and Pallas Projects/Studios.

‘CONTRAINDICATIONS OF THE Cross’ was

a performance-centred, multimedia installation, premiering at Pallas Projects/Studios in April, as part of the gallery’s 2022 Artist Initiated Projects programme. The work spanned a range of media from performance, video, and sculpture, to painting and the written/spoken word. These different elements dramatised the lived intersections of a queer person with a chronic illness, raised in Evangelical Christianity.

From memory, and its speculative psychoanalysis, I divined and illustrated a history. The making functioned as a selfstylised ritual, while the resultant work was a form of personal iconography. It continued an ongoing series of applying my queer, sick body to sandpaper in an exfoliant process. Onto the surface I then painted imagery reflecting my subjectivity.

The triptych, Three studies for the Foot of a Bed, invoked the aesthetic of Francis Bacon, embodying a homoerotic violence and self-destruction. Traumas are acuities of experience, congestions of memory where, if unresolved, they may fester in perpetual feedback loops, even leaving the body’s orbit to encompass others. Live renditions and performances to camera were witnessed by the audience.

Blister packs of opioids, prescribed for chronic pain, were nailed to the wall in cruciform, measuring their five-year traversal of my body. A performed stream-of-consciousness, written by me in convalescence, formed the soundscape. Its title, A World Without Chloroform, referenced theologian C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain (The Centenary Press, 1940), a book attempting to reconcile God’s existence with human suffering. The recording narrated my self-mythology as understood through trauma, mirroring God’s creation of the world in Genesis, and pain’s necessitation of language. Speakers aimed the monologue at my live performing body, the site of the myth’s conception, its repetition into absurdity rendering a conceptual plasticity and enabling new narratives to take form.

Queerness, illness, and their intersecting histories, characteristically deviate from normative social narratives. In Judeo-Christian theology, such deviancies are historically conflated with sin, depicted, if not as

wilful abominations, then as symptomatic of humanity’s fall from grace. Evangelism hinges on ideological virality, spreading from one convert to another. Healing is a central analogy to the gospels, its constituent surveillance culture personified in an omniscient deity. This medicalised imagery also infers a moral imperative. To the sick at the pool of Bethesda, Jesus asked: “Do you want to be made healed? Take up thy bed and walk”, posing free will as a reparative vehicle, the acceptance of Christ as elective redemption.

The history of medicine parallels these ideas in its pathologisation of queerness.

Moral value is ascribed to health’s representation, even where this conceit fails to encompass the complexities of illness and the limitations of medical advancement, however exponential. Doctors replace priests. Where once we submitted personal information in confession, we now surrender bodily data to someone who, in effect, knows more about our bodies than we do.

Chronic pain is increasingly understood as co-morbid with trauma, as survivors face their own crisis of faith in being believed.

Pain cannot be measured, and so the patient relies on their doctor’s capacity for faith.

Similarly, the artist imparts data in their work to the audience, where its viability is determined. Hence, I consider faith to be a prospective material of my practice. Queer and sick subjectivities are acutely individuated by virtue of their minority. Lacking narrative templates of themselves in culture – beyond romanticised martyrdom or dysfunction – a queer sick body must author its own conceptual congruity. It must convince itself of itself, through imposed narcissism.

The internet supplements this process, facilitating the online reproduction of identity politics to canonise identities based on trauma, while pooling their data to induce a culture. My practice enacts my interior logic, where dysfunctions may yet be identified in an automatic surveillance culture. In its reproduction, motivations may be revealed and undone. In telling my story, I may change it, along with its ending.

Day Magee is a performance-centred multimedia artist based in Dublin. daymagee.com

They have lasted well.

As stated on our website: “A visit to NIVAL is recommended to researchers seeking a comprehensive view of the actual files”. This is due to Eddie’s vision of providing as much access as is reasonably possible to the often-unique material housed in the archive. This is particularly pertinent to students, artists or professional researchers, because visitors can often handle the actual ephemera – whether a telegram from the early 1900s, or a mind bogglingly expensive, limited-edition tome by Sean Scully.

Diverse collections within NIVAL include textiles, fashion, the linen industry, the Arts Council, murals, graphic design and Kilkenny Design; Special Collections include the Irish Trade Board, the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, and the sculptor, Oliver Sheppard. We even have packaging from Odlums flour and Mainie Jellett’s spectacles!

When handling the Project Arts Centre posters from the 1960s, the researcher can feel the texture, judge the weight of the paper, squint at imperfections in the lettering, absorb the intensity of the brightly coloured inks, and of course, turn them over to reveal old sticky tape, with bits of paint from the wall still attached! These are just some of the discoveries awaiting visitors to NIVAL. Eve Parnell is Artists Database Editor/ Library Assistant at NIVAL. nival.ie

Project Arts Centre poster, 1967, housed in the NIVAL collection; image courtesy of NIVAL.

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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Columns

Arts & Disability

Arts & Disability

Creative Friction

Object Permanence

PAUL ROY CONSIDERS HOW THE PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL IMPEDIMENTS OF CHRONIC ILLNESS CAN BE POSITIVELY HARNESSED WITHIN ARTISTIC PRACTICE.

IARLAITH NI FHEORAIS DISCUSSES A RECENT DANCE PRESENTATION BY KAT HAWKINS FOR LIVE COLLISION.

WE ARE, DUE to the nature of our phenom-

KAT HAWKINS IS a queer crip director,

enological relationship with our surroundings, compelled to perpetually interact with the physical world. We are not unbound; we are beholden to gravity, reliant on oxygen, our time constrained by cellular degeneration. We are also in perpetual direct contact with our emotional surroundings, constantly reacting, on a spectrum ranging from fear to ecstasy.

Because of this, the body and mind experience a persistent friction, engendered through interactions with the environment – a surface contact that is the unavoidable nature of materially existing in a physical world. We are also simultaneously immersed in the emotional stresses and strains of words and actions, wherein every possibility is at play, and everything has the potential to “rub us up the wrong way”.

In my previous column, ‘Anticipatory Time’ (VAN May-June 2022) I examined how it is often necessary for the ill body to negotiate and anticipate the additional considerations of constrained time. In many ways this can be viewed as an additional friction which drags against our progress. However, we must also consider that, in the much broader sense, there is also a non-physical friction evident in action between an artist’s intent and their subject matter. This friction relates not just to how the body is in conflict with its surroundings, but also to the challenges the artist must negotiate, when trying to express their creative intention.

An artist might be constantly struggling with the base materiality or physicality of their work, and illness can add additional coarseness to this interaction. This is also applicable emotionally, manifesting in a sense of grief for one’s pre-illness wellbeing, the body’s lost capacity, and the necessity to negotiate the emotional fallout of freshly realised inability. Where the able body can glide relatively smoothly through most challenges, the ill body has the potential to more easily snag on simple obstacles, both physical and emotional.

Of course, friction is generally necessary for movement; we need it to push along our progress. However, when friction becomes too great, causing us to become snagged and trapped, this can be problematic. Friction is also our way of ‘getting a grip’, as well as ultimately being necessary for us to stop when we need to.

In this way, we might consider the creative process as a series of interactions between our intentionality and these physical and emotional surfaces. Sometimes we will glide; other times we will be shredded by a sense of impossibility. Within both the creative process and physical enacting, we constantly strive for the ideal rate of progress, wherein we move fast enough to get things done or reach our destination, yet we do not zoom through too quickly, so as to

crash, overshoot or be split apart.

From my own perspective, I have all the usual considerations of any artist, about materials and translating from mind to eye to hand. However, I think about how I can deliver ideas into a readable form, whilst simultaneously watching my time, trying to uphold my energy, keeping warm, and staying comfortable. All these little frictions are to be negotiated and I often find that moving slowly over a rough surface can be turned into a relatively painless process, once one becomes familiar with the appropriate pace.

In some ways, illness can behave like an exaggeration of the trials of creativity. It is the sharper thorns and more forebodingly high walls, yet it is negotiable. An understanding of how we interact with the frictions of progress through the physical world, engenders an understanding of artistic processes.

In mechanical processes, friction between surfaces often results in ‘swarf ’ – a grit of stone or metal filings, produced by a machining operation. When considering long-term illness, the ‘swarf ’ of my interactions with the physical world, is often one of discomfort, pain or exhaustion. However, much like the reclaimed and recycled detritus of manufacturing, this also has practical applications. Sometimes the frictional interactions between my artistic intentions, subjects and materials can generate unexpectedly positive by-products. Produced by the constrained necessity of process, this swarf becomes central to my work. Where the complex grind of oil-painting would be impossible for me, the smoothness of printmaking or digital work presents a more negotiable route. The net result of the process – the unexpected run-off, if you like – is that I am efficient and clean, and my intentions are clearly realised.

In this way, it becomes possible to simply reflect upon one’s progress, despite impediments; to see how the emotional and physical by-products of processes and actions can be reused as valuable resources. Once you see the swarf, acknowledge the friction and its inherent possibilities, you can more easily react advantageously.

Paul Roy is an artist and writer living in Westmeath, who recently graduated from NCAD with an MA in Art in the Contemporary World. paulroy.eu @artistpaulroy

dance artist and PhD researcher looking at non-normative bodies in contemporary dance settings. They create work focused on access, bodies, transcending bodies, time, and the spaces in between. We first met on the set of Dorothy Allen-Pickard’s Material Bodies (2020), a short film on amputees’ sensual relationship to their prosthetic limbs, beginning a conversation on disability, kink, dance and queer crip ways of learning and making.

Kat and I worked on a movement workshop for the Special School learning programme at Outburst Queer Arts Festival 2021, where Kat shared their approach to slow and accessible dance. Aligning with my research on crip practices and slowness as an access methodology in curating, I approached Kat about the possibility of producing a performance. Supported through the Agility Award 2021, Object Permanence (2022) was Kat’s first solo dance presentation that asks questions about the time it takes to do things. It was shown at Project Arts Centre on 28 April for the LIVE Collision International Festival 2022. Building a landscape of cripness, Kat explored the intimate relationship between the disabled body and assistive devices, revealing a world of joy, companionship and sensuality.

Working with different physicalities, Kat reframes the relationship to their assistive devices, bringing care, aggression and ecstasy into movement.

Speaking with Kat, they share that ‘object permanence’ is a term used “as a way to describe the symptoms of neurodivergence,” particularly the out of sight, out of mind phenomenon which affect some people with ADHD. Kat continues that “during covid I struggled to integrate and marry my perception of reality with that of others and I wanted to mark that in this piece.” This term also speaks to the intimate ways in which Kat interacts with their assistive devices on stage, recalibrating the relationship with these objects. As a PhD researcher working with Candoco Dance Company – a dance company working with disabled dancers – Kat had been thinking about “cripping everything… existing under capitalism” and “what the world would look like if disabled people were centred.” Questions around production and producing also led to conversations around the agency of disabled dancers, power dynamics, and what crip dance could be, in terms of flexible outcomes.

Considering these questions, we decided on an improvised approach, with Kat and I developing a dramaturgy of movement through a six-month development and rehearsal period in an old school in Bethnal Green, London. This crip improvisation allowed Kat to respond to their pain and energy levels with “movement becoming more embodied and relationships between

assistive devices shifting.” This improvised approach demanded an ongoing conversation and negotiation between Kat and I. As a producer I would be there to ask questions, offer insights, creatively challenge and keep focus, but also engage in an offstage dialogue around pacing and rhythm.

Through this approach, Kat could give the work “an intimacy [I] didn’t really know would be possible.”

With lighting design by Nao Nagai and music by Bernice, Object Permanence is broken into three scenes. The 40-minute performance begins with Kat placing their assistive devices on stage, including a wheelchair, crutches and stubbies – a form of prosthetics legs without feet. Kat then proceeds to loop the stage at varying speeds whilst a monologue on pain and time is played, changing assistive devices every third loop, and finishing with a crawl.

As the intensity of the house music builds, Kat moves as if in the ecstasy of a nightclub, basking in an orange light. As the music builds to a cacophonic peak, Kat switches to the left side of the stage, trashing, pulling up and throwing themselves back to the ground, ending up at centre stage, laying in exhaustion. The music stops, the lights go out but one spotlight shines on Kat, who lies panting. Slowly the pulsing rhythm of Róisin Murphy’s Incapable (2019) plays, when Kat reaches out to their prosthetic legs, beginning a tenderly erotic sequence with each assistive device. Kat finishes by looping the stage one last time, looking back at the scene as if walking home after a night of exuberance.

This dance presentation was made possible with the support of the LIVE Collision team, with thanks especially to Lynette Moran for championing this work. The Production Manager Stephen Bourke and Lighting Manager Eoin Lennon masterfully facilitated our improvised vision. In terms of access, LIVE Collision Producer Alex Legge and Kat’s support worker Imogen Fox ensured our access needs were met throughout. As a still developing work, Object Permanence will travel to London for the Liberty Festival in July before another development period in autumn. As stated

by Kat, their vision for the work is that “audiences take away something from a crip perspective. Because it’s very much within everything I do, informing who I am and where I come from. I believe that crip perspectives and the centering of disabled people is a key that can unlock so much potential for real change, around ways of caring, working, sharing and organising.”

Iarlaith Ni Fheorais (she/her) is a curator and writer based between Ireland and the UK. @iarlaith_nifheorais

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Venice Biennale

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Long Live Degenerate Art FRANK WASSER CONSIDERS THE LEGACY OF SURREALISM AT THE 59TH VENICE BIENNALE. APPROACHING THE 100TH anniversary of the first sur-

realist manifesto, written by André Breton and Yvan Goll in 1924, there are major surrealism exhibitions being staged across the world. Notably, ‘Surrealism Beyond Borders’ at Tate Modern and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (24 February – 29 August 2022), posits Surrealism beyond the parameters of nationalism, Dalí and Freud. The legacy of Surrealism is ever-present at this year’s Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani. The biennale title, ‘The Milk of Dreams’ is taken from a book by surrealist artist, Leonora Carrington, in which she suggests the landscapes and relationships of the world can be re-made through the power of imagination alone.

Across the central pavilions of the Giardini and the Arsenale, there are meticulously curated mini-survey exhibitions of female surrealists that rival the needlessly lavish and bloated surrealism show at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Dorsoduro. There are small, slickly designed rooms with gold carpets curving upwards towards polished museological displays which, although a bit at odds with the work, help to create isolated footnotes or cadences throughout the biennale.

Historic and academic, these small exhibitions successfully platform some of the most overlooked artists of the twentieth century. Florence Henri, Eileen Agar, and Gertrud Arndt stand out for their striking contemporary, eerie aesthetic. Importantly, of the 213 artists across Alemani’s exhibition, only 21 are men. This has never happened before in the biennale’s 127-year history, and represents a shift in keeping with the real mantra of surrealism – radical change.

Many of these artists invite viewers to reconsider the rationales of the dominant culture. Egyptian artist, Amy Nimr (1898-1974), returned to Egypt having studied under Walter Sickert in England and exhibited alongside British and French surrealists. Upon her return, Cairo was engulfed by a dynamic art community resisting the spectre of war in Europe. This community would eventually form Art et Liberté, the surrealist party of Cairo. In keeping with the group’s 1938 man-

ifesto, Long Live Degenerate Art!, Nimr’s work often depicts bodies caught up in the calculated mechanics of violence. Untitled (Underwater Skeleton) (1942) depicts skeletons sinking to the bottom of the ocean to be feasted upon by strange fish. The absurdity of writing about this painting in a city that is disintegrating is not lost upon this writer. Where is the sense of urgency that should surely be present in a biennale that unfolds amid so many crises in a city which is, itself, literally sinking? (Incidentally, the answer to this question cannot be found in Nicolas Bourriaud’s woefully curated satellite show, ‘Planet B’).

The legacy of surrealism is clearly visible in Marianna Simnett’s The Severed Tail (2022), which shifts between human and non-human actors to tell the story of a piglet’s journey through playfully fetishist worlds, at one point appearing to unfold underwater. A large hairy tail protrudes from red curtains to lead visitors into the space of this three-screen moving image work.

Inside, the tail becomes seating for weary viewers. The body of the animal, perhaps a large rat, is not visible, but there is the smell of something rotting nearby.

Delcy Morelos’s Earthly Paradise (2019-20) is a pungent minimal soil sculpture made from cassava flour, cacao powder, spice cloves, and discarded coffee grinds, among many other substances. Its damp and earthy aroma lingers in the heavy heat. On my final day at the biennale, I noticed that mould had started to appear in one of the sculpture’s dark corners – undoubtedly a headache for the curators in the months to come.

The piece serves as a reminder that nature is not something autonomous from the activities of humans, while strangely upholding the principles and sensibilities of both surrealism and minimalism.

There is a sense of a suspension of disbelief being offered up by some of the younger artists at the biennale – escapism or making something other in the everyday. This is epitomised in Joanna Piotrowska’s psychologically charged photographs which investigate human behaviour and the dynamics of familial relations. Adults shelter in forts made from living

Delcy Morelos, Earthly Paradise, 2022, site-specific installation, mixed media: soil, clay, cinnamon, powder cloves, cocoa powder, cassava starch, tobacco, copaiba, baking soda and powdered charcoal; photograph by Ela Bialkowska, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.

room furniture, like the ones a child might construct to escape the domestic world. These works feel connected to the world of the original surrealists, but this world has not yet passed, since the brutal force of the state is never far away.

On 28 February, four days after the barbaric invasion of Ukraine, the curators of the Russian Pavilion announced their withdrawal from the biennale in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. On 22 April, curator Ivor Stodolsky, one of the founders of Artists at Risk – an organisation which has helped hundreds of artists across the globe to escape state oppression (artistsatrisk. com) – announced on Instagram that a short unsolicited performance, titled The Member, would take place at the Russian Pavilion, performed by the Ukrainian theatre actor, Aleksey Yudnikov. Yudnikov is supported

by Artists at Risk, but he self-funded his trip to Venice.

As promised, Yudnikov showed up. Fully clothed and wearing a mask, Yudnikov spoke in English and Russian, quoting from Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 satirical short story, The Nose, and opening his overcoat to reveal a mask of Putin on his crotch. He hid in the bushes outside the pavilion for an outfit change, before re-emerging dressed in a vest and gold chain, this time wearing the Putin mask on his face. Shortly afterwards, he was aggressively escorted from the Giardini by armed riot police. Most visitors, including wellknown artists, curators and journalists, watched on in silence. Without any protest, they moved on to the next national pavilion.

While this biennale will rightly be remembered as a critical success for its inclusivity and diversity, many questions remain about the lack of robust conversations on nationalism and decolonisation in contexts such as the Venice Biennale. Perhaps, Delcy Morelo’s sculpture is not wholly responsible for the smell of something rotten.

Frank Wasser is an Irish artist and writer who lives and works in London.

Marianna Simnett, The Severed Tail, 2022, video installation; photograph by Roberto Marossi, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.

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Venice Biennale

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Pavilion of France, Les rêves n’ont pas de titre / Dreams have no titles, 2022, installation view, 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, ‘The Milk of Dreams’; photograph by Marco Cappelletti, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.

A FRIEND SENT me a great Venice Biennale Bingo Card as I set

Bingo Biennale ALAN PHELAN REFLECTS ON THE 59TH EDITION OF THE VENICE BIENNALE.

off for the airport, and not long after my arrival it was filling up.1 There are patterns that repeat every two years at this monster show, tensions between the market and public funding, shouty PR and actual art, with lots of inequality and excess. The super busy retro Austrian pavilion encapsulated so many of these contradictions, accompanied by a catalogue that was more furniture magazine than manifesto, but strangely both.2 As you may have heard, the 59th edition shifted its historic gender imbalance towards women, with an 80% dominance in artistic director Cecilia Alemani’s Arsenale and Central Pavilion exhibitions. Putting the emphasis on women artists does not mean the curatorial agenda was above critical reproach however, as the work was very mixed with strong modernist overtones. Meanwhile, the independently curated national pavilions did not follow suit and had a roughly equal three-way tie of women, men and group shows.

The enormous Simone Leigh sculptures dominated and punctuated all exhibition venues.3 A firm favourite and Golden Lion winner, the simplicity of form and message in these works are complicated examples of cultural appropriation with decolonising potential. The huge financial support to realise these sculptures sharply contrasts with the meagre budgets from some African nations and other indigenous artists’ projects who struggled for visibility.

Within the strange geography of the national pavilions, G7 not G20 nations still rule – former colonial powers and their pavilions mostly prevail. There is a pretend level playing field which The Netherlands chose to act on and gave their Giardini space to Estonia, who have no permanent building. The gesture did not pay off so well, as the Dutch ended up beside the Victor Pinchuk

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Foundation funded show, which even had President Zelenskyy Zooming in for the opening.4 Despite propaganda weighing heavy over a range of practices and art stars there, the adjacent Melanie Bonajo film installation was rendered incredibly self-indulgent, despite touch, intimacy and loneliness being so relevant and post-Covid. Estonia did not fare much better with a squabble between artist and curator, which made for a very confused show.

More money does not always make the best art but , my favourite pavilions were France and Italy (who have budgets that run into millions of euros.). Zineb Sedira’s movie set installation and biopic film contained content I found missing from the main curated shows. Her life story told through militant film and underground dance culture, shifted styles and techniques with a good humoured density that should not have worked but did brilliantly. The French5 pavilion was part cinema and film set – dressed as living room, bar, film storage area and more, where the work was shot. Similarly the Italian5 presentation accentuated the former warehouse setting, turning it into an abandoned post-industrial factory, with a strange mix of redundant machinery, air-conditioning hoses, sewing machines and a dark watery pier with simulated fireflies. While it was an amazing immersive installation that kept you guessing, once I read more about the main sponsors being a couture fashion house and superyacht manufacturer, Gian Maria Tosatti’s narrative seemed compromised and made the work oddly literal or complicit.

I may have drawn some connections to the war in Ukraine, but it was too recent a catastrophe to be reflected in exhibits that were three years previous in the making. The biggest elephant in the room was not

Venice Biennale the Katharina Fritsch sculpture (of a large elephant at the entrance lobby in the Central Pavilion) but the pavilions of Germany and Spain, who kind of had the same show. They both had architectural interventions, resulting in empty galleries, and instead provided guides and maps of the city for visitors and tourists.

Germany showed sites of resistance and war memorials and Spain showed places to collect free books. These anti-spectacle gestures, rooted in detailed research, made for better catalogues – a difficult gamble to make at an event such as this.

Between them in the Giardini ironically, was the empty Russian pavilion, from which curators and artists withdrew just as the biennale banned their participation. The constant police presence and visitors photographing the closed building sadly created something from nothing. I witnessed a very dynamic shoot of a cleaner with a wheelbarrow of rubbish bags, which no doubt made some kind of statement on a social media feed. Opposite was the Nordic Pavilion which has temporarily become the Sámi Pavilion, populated for the press days by many happy, ethnically dressed folks.

Participation rather than presentation seemed key here as the artworks appeared incidental to this grand gesture of the Nordic nations, who share this indigenous population and culture. Australia and New Zealand had strong indigenous acknowledgements and content, offering a welcome burst of sonic, strobe and camp.

In an era of Instagram friendly post-internet art, the best works were surprisingly un-photographable. The viewer was required to be physically present to experience the work. A series of laser and prisms projected ticker-tape text across the entire Japanese pavilion interior by the collective Dumb Type, flashing words

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and dots, making it super hard to read and impossible to capture.

The main curated shows offered many works with highly crafted details that were at times overwhelming but mostly exasperating. The maze of works had an emphasis on making, with a clatter of modernist narratives that I found difficult to parse with contemporary art and thinking. What made wonderful sense after the long walk through the Arsenale was Niamh O’Malley’s Irish Pavilion.6 It was here that the hand crafted, elegant and sparse work spoke more to me than the maximalist main show. The works have a different sophistication which was absent elsewhere that also rejected the abject. O’Malley’s show hit the right notes, connecting better than the biennale curator could articulate in her selections.

Alan Phelan is an artist who lives and works in Dublin. His trip to Venice was self-funded with press accreditation provided by VAI. alanphelan.com

Notes: 1 See: hyperallergic.com/725426/venice-biennale-bingo-card 2 Austria (biennalekneblscheirl.at) 3 USA (simoneleighvenice2022.org) 4 See: new.pinchukartcentre.org/thisisukraine 5 Italy (notteecomete.it) 6 Ireland (irelandatvenice2022.ie)

Pavilion of Austria, Invitation of the Soft Machine and Her Angry Body Parts, 2022, installation view, 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, ‘The Milk of Dreams’; photograph by Marco Cappelletti, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.

Pavilion of Italy, Storia della Notte e Destino delle Comete / History of Night and Destiny of Comets, 2022, installation view, 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, ‘The Milk of Dreams’; photograph by Andrea Avezzù, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.

Niamh O’Malley, ‘Gather’, 2022, installation view, Pavilion of Ireland, 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia; photography by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Ireland at Venice.

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Artist-led

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Myra Jago’s studio, 2022, Wicklow; photograph courtesy of the artist.

ATHOMESTUDIOS (AHS) IS a collective of visual artists practicing

Being Present ORLA WHELAN OUTLINES THE EVOLUTION OF ATHOMESTUDIOS.

from studios located in their own homes. As an artist, there are many advantages to working from a home studio – low cost, convenience, increased productivity, comfort, privacy, and more connection to daily life. There are also disadvantages, such as isolation, lack of peer critique, lack of social and networking opportunities, a perceived lack of professionalism, and an acutely felt sense of invisibility. This collective was set up as a proactive step to address some of these concerns.

AtHomeStudios was formed in 2013, after I placed an open call with Visual Artists Ireland and the Mothership Project – then a newly established network of which I was a founding member.1 The call-out sought to connect with other professional artists working from home studios, who felt isolated or cut off from the centralised institutions and who were missing the casual interactions, constructive criticisms, pertinent conversations or just general camaraderie – things I had previously taken for granted in group studios or shared workspace environments where artists generally convene.

The collective originally consisted of myself and five other female artists, who each had children and who each worked from a studio at home, primarily for that reason, at that time. In the nine years since then, AtHomeStudios has grown to include artists who are not parenting, male artists, and artists from outside the Dublin area. Our various motivations to work from home studios now include affordability, family commitments, illness, lack of suitable or affordable workspaces locally, and personal preference.

AtHomeStudios currently comprises 15 contemporary visual artists: myself (Orla Whelan), Sandy Kennedy, Janine Davidson, Cecilia Bullo, Judy Carroll Deeley, Jules Michael, Paul Roy, Myra

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Jago, Margot Galvin, Ciara McMahon, Jane Glynn, Dermot Hallahan, Rozzi Kennedy, Margaret Meagher and Naomi Taitz Duffy. Our individual practices are varied and include work in film, installation, painting, drawing, photography, printing, sculpture, collaboration and socially engaged projects.

We are diverse in age, geographical location, career stage, and educational background. For this reason, we have focused on peer support, rather than pursuing opportunities to exhibit or create work collaboratively, as is often the case with artists’ collectives. That said, we aim to create a space which fosters the development of peer relationships and allows for all types of exchanges to occur. Occasionally, smaller groups of artists within the collective work together.

As a collective, our primary activity is to hold meetings every two months, with members coming from all over Ireland to attend. Like everyone else, we ‘met’ on Zoom out of necessity during the pandemic, but being present in the same room, connecting, mingling, and responding to each other is important to us. Since 2017, VAI has provided us with meeting space at their offices in central Dublin for our bi-monthly meetings. The format of our two-hour meetings has developed over the years as we continuously revaluate what is working for us and what is most beneficial for our members.

Each session includes a discussion of an article or text which I circulate in advance. This is usually an excerpt from a novel, a critical essay or a recent article or podcast on contemporary art. Texts discussed in the past 12 months have included essays by Olivia Laing, Martin Herbert, Eduardo Kohn and Joan Didion. We have found this format to be a really fruitful way to generate meaningful conversations amongst the group, and to build relationships by revealing common areas of interest. After an equally important opportunity to

Orla Whelan in her studio, 2022; photograph courtesy of the artist.

Artist-led mingle informally over tea and biscuits, the final hour is usually given over to one artist to present their own work for peer critique. This enables members to get feedback on new work in a constructive, supportive environment.

Our model is primarily one of peer support, which includes creating a space for critique and dialogue. It is also one of advocacy, aiming to raise the profile of professional artists working from home. After professionals in so many different industries have been working from home in recent years, due to the pandemic, the idea of an artist working from home sounds fairly orthodox. However, the gendered and negative connotations often associated with the domestic space are something in which I am particularly interested.

Making visible alternative models of the professional artist and workspace, and unpacking concepts of career, success and agency, remain ongoing concerns for many of us in AtHomeStudios, and are subjects to which we frequently return in our discussions.

Being a collective provides a platform from which to lobby for opportunities for our members. In 2019 VAI enabled us to host a number of visiting curator sessions, aimed at introducing curators to the collective, and to our individual work and practices. On three separate occasions that year, we invited independent curators Mary Conlon, Linda Shevlin and Rachael Gilbourne to attend specially devised meetings in which they introduced us to their curatorial practices through informal group presentations. They then held one-to-one speed dating-style meetings with up to ten individual artists to whom they offered feedback or advice.

These exchanges were seen by the group as valuable and important introductions from which future opportunities may arise. We were unable to hold such events in 2020 and 2021, but I am delighted that we have the

opportunity to welcome a number of visiting curators again this year, which began in May when we hosted a session with Irish-based, Italian curator, Valeria Ceregini.

As we continuously refine and adapt what we do to suit our members’ needs, we are mindful of the exciting possibilities to be had by working with others in new and as yet unexplored contexts. With that in mind, we are interested in hearing from curators, writers or anyone interested in working with us to explore the potential of AtHomeStudios, or in inviting us to participate in future events, projects or exhibitions. As our tenth birthday approaches next year, we are happy to connect and share our experiences with other artists and collectives.

For more information about AtHomeStudios, please visit our website which has links to each artist’s individual website, as well as information about our meetings, texts, Instagram and contact information. athomestudios.wordpress.com @athomestudiosdublin

Orla Whelan is a visual artist based in Dublin.

She is founder of AtHomeStudios, and the artist’s book publishing project, Whale Dust. orlawhelan.com @orlawhelanartist

Notes: 1 The Mothership Project is a network of Irish parenting visual artists and art workers. themothershipproject.wordpress.com

Judy Carrol Deeley in her studio, 2022, Dublin; photograph courtesy of the artist.

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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Art & Activism

Collective Struggle KATE O’SHEA REFLECTS ON HER PARTICIPATION IN THE PROJECT, ‘MULTISTORY – CREATIVE ENGAGEMENT FOR HOUSING CHANGE’.

Fiona Whelan, Feidlim Cannon, and Housing Action Now, The Apology, 2022, film still; image courtesy the artists.

LIKE ALL STORIES of structural violence, the housing crisis in Ireland was carefully and strategically written into existence; layered with multiple facades that hid the root of its creation. Through the actions of consecutive governments, we have seen multiple policies that have at their core a single principle: to protect the profitability of housing over the wellbeing of communities. It is abundantly clear that the Irish state sees our laws, tax code, shared resources, and infrastructure as tradable assets for financial interests, regardless of the social cost. The protection of profit is the reason why the state continues to define ‘affordability’ as a percentage of price, not income.

The housing system is broken and as those in power continue to ignore and actively erase the stories from outside the dominant social narratives, people are pushing back. In sites of resistance, people are digging up buried archives and constructing messy spaces and practices with them. People are mapping stolen land and silenced histories. People are speaking of erasure and cleansed narratives. And people are creating processes to reveal repressed and hidden stories, and new imagined stories that interrupt the dominant narrative.

‘Multi-Story – Creative Engagement for Housing Change’ is one such project.

In May 2020, I joined ‘Multi-Story’ via Zoom, from my brother-in-law’s farm in Kerry. The project was developed by Housing Action Now (HAN) and artists Fiona Whelan and Feidlim Cannon who set out to work with housing activists to develop new creative approaches that highlight the realities of the crisis.1 I distinctly remember the first time Fiona invited us to write a response to a prompt about a place we called

home, and immediately read it aloud. I read out my text and listened to the others. With each session, and each exercise we did individually and collectively over those months, I felt something significant happening – the process unearthed a practice of deep listening and solidarity building that I hadn’t encountered before.

‘Multi-Story’ created a nurturing space that is essential for those working in activist campaigns. The methods used by Fiona and Feidlim connected to participants’ individual experiences, while building a deep sense of connection. It is what happens when there is no time to filter our thoughts, and a story is allowed to flow freely, when one feels “the very process of thinking unfolding… far away from the calculating mode of thinking”.2 At each session, people were surprised by the power of their own words, and of those they listened to. Sometimes, Fiona or Feidlim would thread our words together and read them back to us as one layered narrative. These moments always managed to shift how we were thinking about the collective struggle.

Further tasks invited reflection on policy, alternatives, other imaginaries. Multiple stories emerged in tandem.

‘Multi-Story’ successfully transported a diverse group of activists, community workers, artists, organisers, and individuals affected by the housing crisis, into a shared space of movement building. Having worked in different ways over the years with groups like HAN, Movement of Asylum Seekers Ireland (MASI) and Community Action Tenants Union (CATU), it was powerful to be in a space with people from these groups and others, threading experiences together.

What I found particularly exciting for a group of activists accustomed to working on targeted campaigns

driven to create change, was how people stayed with the discomfort and ‘unknowing’ that accompanied this artistic process. What will it be? Will it do what it needs to do? Will it do anything? Is it enough? This for me is where the strength often lies in bringing collaborative art and activism together. In grassroots organising, “time is an onslaught” and it is hard to justify the need to stop, to have space to just be together, as this can slip down the list of urgencies.3 The time it takes to do a project like Multi-Story could be seen in traditional activist terms as simply taking too long. Shifting away from familiar, reliable and tested forms of organising can be challenging, but there lies the potential to crack open space for alternative ways of building solidarity, while allowing new narratives to emerge.

On 22 February, Multi-Story Act 1: The Apology was presented at an online gathering of over 300 people, united via Zoom to witness an imagined apology that publicly acknowledged the failures of the Irish State, regarding housing policy and provision in this country.4 Emerging from the two-year collaboration between Fiona, Feidlim and HAN, The Apology – a 12-minute performance delivered by HAN member Paula Kearney – presented a new story, uniting diverse housing experiences to create one narrative which highlighted systemic failure. As we listen to each other, we “hear the old world cracking”, and we make space to imagine another story, one that threads together other worlds of struggle.5 Since its first presentation, with goosebumps I watched Senators Lynn Ruane, Eileen Flynn and Alice Mary Higgins read it into the public record at Seanad Éireann, as part of a Seanad Private Members Motion on Housing. I witnessed The Apology open CATU’s AGM and watched it screened in the AV room at Leinster House. I’ve heard stories of The Apology being read live, screenings at community activist meet ups and in homes, as well as its presentation at the Butler Gallery, all prompting conversations or workshops focused on ending the housing crisis. As our shattered, individualised systems unravel before us, it is essential to make space for the multiple forms of collective action and to seriously consider the role of artistic practice within that. As Multi-Story Act 1: The Apology continues to unfold, the process purposefully allows space for a collective imagining of Act 2. To be continued...

Kate O’Shea is an artist with a social practice which includes printmaking, publishing, and the production of social spaces. howmuchisenough.online

Notes: 1 Housing Action Now (HAN) is a collective of community workers,

researchers and activists concerned with the growing housing crisis in Ireland. The project was supported by Create, the national development agency for collaborative arts, through the Arts Council of Ireland’s Commissions Award 2020.

2 Alexia Defert, ‘Institutional interdisciplinary in theory and practice’, an interview with Julia Kristeva in Alex Coles and Alexia Defert (eds), De-, Dis-, Ex-. Volume Two: The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity (London: BACKless Books in association with Black Dog, 1998).

3 Kae Tempest, Hold Your Own, Track 7 on The Book of Traps and Lessons, 2019.

4 The Apology can be viewed on vimeo.com 5 Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014).

The Visual Artists' News Sheet

Critique

Edition 62: July – August 2022

Pádraig Spillane, What Passes Between Us V2.0, 2017/21, Mesh Print & Calibration Weights; photograph by James Hallinan courtesy of the artist(s) and The Lavit Gallery.

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2022

Helena Gorey ‘Understory’ Highlanes Gallery 29 April – 18 June 2022 of Helena Gorey’s exhibition of paintings and works on paper, not only frames a collection of works but offers a mechanism for looking. The artist’s statement and individual titles point to characteristics and features of a place; general enough to be anywhere and specific enough to carry a consistent homage and respect for the natural landscape. Gorey’s paintings capture something between a sense of place, the works’ original home, their birth, their reason for becoming, and the experience of engaging with them. They trace histories of abstraction, most notably Mark Rothko (1903-1970), by being an event of looking, as much as resolved pieces of work.

Contemporary iterations of abstraction emphasise painting’s ability to poetically declare an unknowable experience, or at least unknowable to anyone but the artist.

Gorey works in the natural environment, indicated by small black and white photographs of her process which were displayed on entry to the exhibition. Prominently hung, Proscenium (2017) adorned a thick, black-like border which pushed a heaving hue of deep reds peeping through the top of the surface and gently appearing in parts, where the eye allows – supported by a dominant off-white, warm square of loaded nothingness.

A cluster of works suggested arrangements in a natural landscape. Cloudy whites were supported by leafy greens and purples. Solid but never impenetrable hues held the fort on what could have been the upper part of a horizon. Suggestive greens and earthed growth emerged in the likes of Spinney. Blues credited daylight and darker hours, hanging comfortably while edging on eye level. Blossom had its own horizon line, inviting the viewer to locate it from a bespoke distance. A small-scale, glossy-red piece, titled Woodbine, emulated the earth’s core and a deeply purpled work, Brindled, leaned on the wall, extending an already limitless series into the present moment, sharing the same gallery ground as anyone engaging with it.

Scope of sky and detail of a world underfoot were brought side by side in the same scale; Twilight (2017) had a charged white, like snow stuck to the surface of the sky, while Moss had a looser finish, dripping in seductive greens, as if making top-level piles out of nature’s carpet. Raw, nutmeg coloured linen played a part with neon lime and mystery colours in Seed. Bindweed (2011) and Blackberry (2013) showed how Gorey experiments with compositional decision-making, offering an irregular form. Mist was probably one of the most profoundly glowing works, echoing the beaming yellows found in the work of William McKeown (1962-2011) only here, variations on white glowed as if they had the same metaphysical reach as McKeown’s yellows. The exhibited paintings were like windows, only they didn’t just offer a sense of looking through but a sense of looking under, beneath the artist’s application, her decisions, her gaze and her lived experience of the natural landscape. Through this, she reveals her attention to subtle differences in light and the fulcrum of hand, brush, and ‘UNDERSTORY’, THE TITLE

surface.

A separate, perhaps inherited, piece in the space which worked very well, was Caoimhe Kilfeather’s But a Hercules (2010), a mass of charcoal protruding from the wall, installed at a liminal height assuming a presence like a citation or a brief, swollen tangent. There was a similar approach to physicality of form in Gorey’s series of oil works on potato bags in which the crinkles and creases informed the compositional tones and lines.

A series of five works on paper echoed drawings by Agnes Martin (1912-2004).

Small watercolour squares carried a horizon each, making multiples out of what could have been a singular sighting. A second room displayed small works, titled Darkening I-V, modestly on bulldog clips, in company with larger oil works, Sky (2017) and Night (2017), which offered a stark contrast of night and day, as if comparing the sky we cannot see at night, and the sky that is actually there.

What strikes me about Gorey’s painting is how her early introductions of colour skim the final applications of paint, making initial decisions complementary to later stages of the work. Once the eye clocks a bit of underlying colour, a trust in the invisible kicks in, making surface a breathing thing.

A range of literature, including Gorey’s past exhibition catalogues, accompanied the exhibition, acting as reminders of the significance of this work, its own history, and how abstraction can extend, and make portable, the essence of a specific place.

Jennie Taylor is an art writer living and working in Dublin. jennietaylor.net

All images: Helena Gorey, ‘Understory’, installation view, May 2022; photographs by Jenny Matthews [top and bottom] and Eugene Langan [middle], courtesy the artist and Highlanes Gallery.

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2022

Patrick Graham, ‘Transfiguration’ Hugh Lane Gallery 17 March – 10 July 2022

Patrick Graham, The Life and Death of Hopalong Cassidy, 1988, Mixed media on canvas (tetraptych); photograph by Denis Mortell, courtesy of Blaise and Dolores O’Carroll and Hugh Lane Gallery.

IN 2016, WHEN I was invited to curate the

Mayo Collaborative’s exhibition to commemorate the 1916 Easter Rising – specifically the life and work of a rebel Mayo doctor, Kathleen Lynn – I knew one thing immediately, and that was that whatever about either 1916 or Kathleen Lynn, one thing had to be in it: Patrick Graham’s diptych, The Ark of Dreaming (1990). It had to be there because it seemed to sum up the history of that place for millennia, before Kathleen Lynn was born. Patrick generously agreed and with that lynchpin in place, we could go about the work of commissioning other artists to respond to more specific moments of historic and contemporary relevance. Asking this artist, above all others, to represent this history is laden with irony, since Paddy Graham has always resolutely rejected the history of his own discipline, the history of art. He had to do that to escape the straight jacket of academic success, which his precocious talents and failures of imagination in the National College of Art in the 1950s and 60s were forcing on him.

Rather like Malevich wiping the historic canvas clean and covering it instead with white, an invitation to artists to imagine a meaningful future, Graham, initially inspired by Nolde, tore his canvases apart, reversed and upended them, pulled their innards out onto the floor, smashed their supports, added found material and generally said “a curse on all your houses”. But he did it in the colours of the Irish landscape, of a real, if unspecified, place. Even as he was obscuring the landscape with lines, nets, grids or scrawling words across it, what sang out of it all was a kind of dis-remembered history – something he

himself referred to as “the keening in the boreens”. This is especially resonant in his use of titles and fragments of folk songs, quietly anti-heroic but enduring. It spoke for everything that had gone before, from the earliest inhabitants to the famine and on to contemporary, defining events.

This important survey exhibition at the Hugh Lane Gallery, curated by Michael Dempsey, puts all that on show. It takes us through work from the 1970s, through the years of depression, of internal as well as external conflict, when critical recognition was simply a spur to rail even louder against his demons. Ultimately Patrick Graham’s work is rooted in an existentialist crisis that is both personal and universal.

It’s hard to use the word ‘universal’, since so many claims were made in the past about the universality of artworks, when what the claimants meant was that it reflected establishment values. Here, however, it is the drive behind the artwork that is universal.

Following philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and the writer Primo Levi’s harrowing account of Auschwitz in If This Is a Man (De Silva, 1947), it is no longer possible to dwell on those old, confident questions about how mankind might control and shape the world. Like them, Patrick Graham turns the question onto mankind itself. What does existence actually mean? What is the nature and role of the individual? How should we make art in the age of anxiety and what does it mean to be human? Only a handful of artists have truly grasped the implications of these enquiries, and Graham is one of them.

As the paintings in this exhibition clearly show, nothing in life is static. To live is to be in a state of change; nothing is resolved, and

who we are changes from minute to minute, always in a process of becoming. The Life and Death of Hopalong Cassidy (1988), shatters old certainties once and for all. The hero is dead; the painting spills its guts onto the gallery floor. But no matter how murky or obscured our vision of reality is, paintings like Half Light I (2013) manage to offer enough seductive light to keep us going, so that when we get to Half Light II (2013) we are almost ready for the sudden radiance of yellow, even if it, too, carries the textures of unresolved references. ‘Fail again, fail better,’ they say; a positive thing since for Graham, it is important to embrace failure – to reject the promise dangled in front of him as a student. It takes courage to grasp that, but he believes it is the only honest position. For some, that knowledge might let them off the hook; not so here. These paintings struggle to deal with pain, death, the decay of beauty, the weight of history, even as the artist knows that whatever he can do will fall short of what he wants.

The artist’s unresolved struggle and the viewers’ experience are both visceral and intellectual. As Dermot Healy once said about this work, “the ribcage watches”. The tension in the ribcage derives from the need to find unreachable solutions, but in this exhibition, it offers a supreme reward. Graham said, “the greatest art in the world is just the stuff that just fails – but that reveals its humanity – its wonderful, awe-inspiring humanity.”1 In this, Graham and Samuel Beckett share a world view, and it is worth noting that Graham sees Beckett’s writing as ultimately optimistic. It is, also, entirely appropriate that this exhibition takes place on the other side of the wall from the detritus that makes up Francis Bacon’s

studio. The bible claims that out of chaos, God made the world. Paddy Graham made the transcendent, heart-lurching image of Cowslips (2016), part of the ‘Lacken Series’, not out of the great tradition of art history, but out of human need. Their fragile beauty and tenacity give us a glimpse of our vulnerability and therefore of our humanity.

This show is essential and rewards many viewings, especially when human feeling and intimacy are under threat from social media, new technologies and lifestyles.

Catherine Marshall is a curator and art writer, former head of collections at IMMA, and co-editor of Art and Architecture of Ireland, Twentieth Century (2014).

Notes: 1 Catherine Marshall, Connected/Disconnected/Re-connected – The art of Patrick Graham and John Philip Murray, (Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, 2010) p 16.

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2022

Tinka Bechert, installation view, ‘Readymade #1’ [L to R]: Killer Whale Song, 2020 and Mini-Winners, 2022; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist and Oonagh Young Gallery.

‘READYMADE #1’ BY Tinka Bechert at the Oonagh Young Gallery

Tinka Bechert ‘READYMADE #1’ OONAGH YOUNG GALLERY 28 APRIL – 7 MAY 2022

makes dual references to readymades, both as a welcome series of short successive exhibitions, and in the objet trouves, stacked in totemistic forms, placed in relation to the wall-mounted works and textiles throughout the space. The former is an agile and immediate platform that mainlines the work of four artists straight from their studios to the gallery context; it emphasises the dearth of opportunities for artists to show work while it is fresh, in the context of advanced gallery schedules and limited open submissions. The latter makes reference to real found sources which punctuate the language that, while incorporating textiles and installation, can be positioned in contemporary abstraction.

Abstraction has had a chequered reception in critical discourse over the last decade. While not coining the terms himself, Jerry Saltz popularised the snarky putdowns ‘Crapstraction’, ‘Aesthesized Loot’ and ‘Zombie Formalism’ in his critique, ‘Zombies on Walls’.1 Saltz offers a reductive view of current abstract painting as overly commodified and domesticated – a comforting and accepted aesthetic that litters art fairs throughout the western art world and has lost its ability to challenge or progress – perhaps the painting equivalent of ‘landfill indie’.2 It is easy to see how abstraction’s critical edges have been burnished by each iterative revolution throughout the twentieth century, a dying star that is far removed from the white-hot radicalism of its inception. Yet there are many examples of abstract practices that make persuasive cases for the ongoing vitality and potential of this area of painting practice. In the Irish context, these include Ronnie Hughes’ pin-ball eye candy or Fergus Feehily’s esoteric provisionality, which knowingly factor in some of the doubts of current abstraction to critically nudge the parameters of the genre forward.

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2022

Bechert’s approach to abstraction is closer to the models of the Bauhaus or the Black Mountain College – both educational cultures embedded in the ideological purity of modernism as a framework for the impurity of play, creativity and experimentation. Many of Bechert’s works create a relationship between sculptural objects and two-dimensional abstract works that are mostly modest in scale and format.

Mini Winners (2022) is a precarious stack of found objects resembling bowling pins; Stack is a freestanding assemblage of small odd-shaped canvases which sits upright upon hand-painted wedges. A second Mini Winners arranges hand-built ceramics, a bespoke stepped plinth, and found objects in spindle-like forms.

A purple ceramic space invader icon from the seminal video game sits incongruously on top of one stack (the variability of the pitch and range of that game’s sound is a worthwhile consideration in relation to consistent tonal shifts in range and approaches of the paintings). Untitled (2022) is a freestanding screen of found material with a crescent pattern that is sewn together and reveals its processes from behind.

There are motorik visual loops and contrasts running throughout the exhibition, such as exposed supports and pentimenti. The works seem to be founded upon reduced graphic monochromatic strata that then shift gear to secondary colour and hot pinks, cold yellows and cobalt blues, creating a distinct colour tonality.

Grids are played against circular gestural application and stripes. There is pattern that does not seem to follow a logical systemic formula; often areas of under painting continue to be overlaid in a different colour.

Paint is applied in a myriad of ways: blended, sprayed, dragged. In this way they recall the systemic corruption of abstract painters such as Thomas Nozkowski or Phillip Allen, with their reverse engineered take on high modernist art and design.

While there are certainly consistent forms and beats that create a visual spine, they resist settling into seriality and formalism, each work subtly shedding skin or shifting perspective to form a relationship to another. There is a haptic intuition that acknowledges the speculative aspect of play between materials and forms.

They utilise various modes of display, emphasising the performativity of individual works. Bechert seems to be critically aware of the pitfalls and formulas of current abstraction, and she incrementally probes the possibilities within their own frames of reference, and while they may not solve the discontents of the paradigm of abstraction as a whole, they are awake and alive to its continued potential.

Tinka Bechert, Untitled, 2022 [detail]; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist and Oonagh Young Gallery.

Colin Martin is an artist and RHA Head of School.

Notes: 1 Jerry Saltz, ‘Zombies

on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?’, New York Magazine, 16 June 2014.

2 The term ‘landfill indie’ was coined in 2008 by Andrew Harrison of The Word magazine to describe the saturation of homogenous guitar bands in the UK charts.

Tinka Bechert, installation view, ‘Readymade #1’ [L to R]: Topple, 2021, Cartoon Mind, 2020, Ebb and flow, 2020, Untitled, 2022; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist and Oonagh Young Gallery.

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2022

Sean Scully, ‘SQUARE’, installation view; photograph courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery.

FROM KAZIMIR MALEVICH to Josef Albers, the square has been

Sean Scully ‘SQUARE’ KERLIN GALLERY 14 MAY – 25 JUNE 2022

valued for its objective flexibility, helping to shape ideas from the purely optical to the iconic. In this show of 100 works, presented non-chronologically and spanning more than five decades of Sean Scully’s career, the ‘square’ is also a useful, common denominator.

Our place in time is important to Scully, who in a recent interview asserts, “The question is, are you wrapped rigidly in the cloth of your time, or can you fly out of it and travel time, and I was always very aware that I wanted to do the latter”.1 Time may be the arbiter, but in the swim of the here and now, no one asserts the authority of Sean Scully better than Scully himself.

The most surprising thing here is Wrapped Grid Orange (1972 – remade 2020), an aluminium lattice, tightly wound in strips of coloured felt. The metal grid (it was originally made of wood) is softened and – à la Christo and Jeanne-Claude – made extra-visible for being hidden. The variously coloured fabric complicates the uniformity of the structure, with an uneven corner of orange giving way to areas of dark red, grey and black. The work is genuinely odd; a curious mixture of repressed feeling and matter-of-fact form, like a prosthetic limb coddled in superfluous bandages.

Also mysterious, but more conventional, a large painting on loan from IMMA is called Brennus (1979). Named for a fearsome Gaul, its sombre bands of wine and black are a shadowy blind, drawing you into darkness. To its left, the much smaller, punchier, monochrome canvas, Small Blue Painting #3 (1977) is equally austere, with very thin, slightly wavy horizontals creating a finely corrugated surface you want to strum.

Scully’s work oscillates between the monumental and the intimate, a dichotomy most obvious when he switches to paper. The absence of large statements in his prints, pastels, and waterco-

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2022

lours lends them subtlety, a quality that can feel overwhelmed by the grander aspirations of his more forceful works in other media. A recent watercolour, Robe Diptych (2020) is beautiful. Rectilinear in overall shape, the composition contains 24 squares of muted colour, snugly contained in a horizontal grid. I was reminded of a watercolour set, the cakes of colour side by side in functional, unwitting harmony. I’ve no idea if this allusion to its own making is intentional, but it makes looking at it particularly satisfying. Beside it, the larger watercolour, Black Square 1. 26. 20 (2020) looks flat by comparison, its five differently coloured bands lacking sufficient tension to lock or be locked into place by the below centre, titular shape.

Several paintings are on aluminium panels. A little one, Black Square Coloured Land (2021) is perfectly proportioned – it’s about the size of a large format book – with jellybean-coloured bands punctuated by a black insert. But somehow it feels slightly off, as though the metal support was uncomfortable in its jacket of paint.

That might sound odd, but the variety and proximity of works in the gallery prompt you to notice such details.

Impervious to atmospherics, an aluminium panel has the advantage of stability, but it’s an autonomy unsympathetic to paint, the support seeming to tolerate more than welcome it.2 The paintings on linen – the luminous, Wall Pink Blue (2020), for example – feel more at ease, the material and support more reciprocal.

In a large series of archival pigment prints made on the artist’s iPhone, ‘The 50’ (2021), the screen may have been touched, but the drawings printed out from that surface encounter lack any real sense of feeling. Blown up in scale, they become smoothly homogenous, like ghost-works in search of a body.3 With feeling more intact, the most recent work here is also the roughest. Wall Plena (2021) holds butty oblongs of broadly brushed paint in a jostling configuration of jarring colours. The liquid paint drips and runs into neighbouring areas, a sense of contamination increased by constellations of small bumps and paint fragments, dispersed like floaters across your vision. However time flies, this painting – along with many other works here – maintains a sense of arrival, the often difficult experience of coming into the world.

John Graham is an artist based in Dublin.

Notes: 1 Quoted

in Kelly Grovier, On The Line: Conversations with Sean Scully (Thames and Hudson, 2021).

2 Blinky Palermo’s paintings on aluminium fare better; perhaps because the panels themselves are more discreet.

3 Andrea Büttner’s more successful iPhone prints avoid this problem by translating her initial – and incidental – touching of the screen into the more physical medium of etching.

Sean Scully, Inset, 2021, archival pigment print on paper, edition of 40, 71.1 x 55.9cm; photograph courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery.

Sean Scully, ‘SQUARE’, installation view; photograph courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery.

Sean Scully, ‘SQUARE’, installation view; photograph courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery.

Sean Scully, ‘SQUARE’, installation view; photograph courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery.

Sean Scully, Wrapped Grid Orange, 2020, aluminium and felt, 190 x 175 cm; photograph courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery.

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2022

Backwater Artists, ‘C L O S E R’ Lavit Gallery, Cork 5 – 28 May 2022 AT THE LAVIT Gallery in Cork, rectangular mirrors are placed at face-height on the sides of the structural support pillars that run the length of the gallery. They reflect the room and the artworks, but also you, the visitor to the show. As part of a group exhibition, entitled ‘C L O S E R’, this series of small, unframed reflective surfaces added the watcher, being watched, the looker, looking back, to a curated selection of 16 artworks by ten members of Backwater Artists Group – a studio group located in a three-story warehouse on Wandesford Quay (backwaterartists.ie). With a viewing crowd, the mirrors framed visitors to the exhibition in evermoving shots as they milled about. For solitary viewers, the mirrors added images of only you to the show.

Suggesting that visitors were not only at the show, but in the show, the mirrors were a neat intervention by the exhibition curator, Janice Hough, curator of Residency and Artist Programmes at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Appropriately, ‘C L O S E R’ was a show about bodies, presence, and place. Rachel Daly’s largescale closeup shot of head and hands opened the exhibition, proclaiming that one of the other main themes being explored here was touch. Daly’s photograph, Crashing Me By, hung alongside Claire Murphy’s Ring of Fire (2022), a photo print of a woman lying cruciform on her back on a bed, barefoot, eyes closed.

The yellow-red colour flare seeping from the bottom edge of the print added dreamlike layers, implying some kind of spiritual, ghostly, or hallucinogenic state.

On the floor, Natasha Pike’s A concrescent order of celestial bodies that do not know their own purpose was an installation of conical gold beanbags, spread subtly like a collection of stalactites and stalagmites, accompanied by square concrete tiles neatly arranged like a bank of rare geoforms.

On the wall, Sean Hanrahan’s two-metresquare handmade flag presented a black star like a magnified pinhole with the title Memory Anthem (2021).

Much of the work in the exhibition explored dualities between nearness and distance, connection and disconnection, what is felt and not felt, clearly seen and not well seen, weighted and light. A wall text produced by all ten artists collectively listed ways of being close, or not: “CLOSER to fragility… to distance… to knowing… to the unknown,” it read. “CLOSER to the sea… to home… to a concrescent order of things… to the break… to discovering… to knowing there is no bridge, CLOSER together, CLOSER.” A quietly urgent show of quietly urgent work, it included Joseph Heffernan’s oil painting of three huddled figures, standing close, looking wary, looking over their shoulders, defensive, called The Performance; two of Izabela Szczutkowska’s deliberately mysterious, indistinct photographs, Stardust and Machine; and works from Sean Hanrahan’s ‘Q Series’ of flower photographs, a selection of which were also showing concurrently nearby, in ‘Parklife: Biodiversity in Contemporary Irish Art’ at the Glucksman Gallery. For ‘C L O S E R’, Hanrahan presented darkly beautiful flower photos in

a digital slide show, mounted in a wooden box sitting proud from the wall. The effect mimicked the experience of looking at backlit glass photographic plates.

Hanrahan’s gothic-looking blooms were not the only artworks functioning like memento mori in this show. Angela Gilmour’s stunning photopolymer etchings, depicting glaciers retreating, melting, or dying, had a snow-bleached quality like ancient artefacts. The Retreat of Mayerbreen, and Samarinvagen, where once there was a glacier seem like records of a time past, but the time is now. This question of time passing was explored too by Ciara Rodgers, whose Wait, Less, Ness (2020) series of framed polaroid shots captured a shelf and a dropper bottle.

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s floor sculpture, Element from Inscriptions V, and wall-hung print, Untitled (fragment), held the same kind of delicacy and concern with weights and measures as Pádraig Spillane’s What Passes Between Us V2.0 (2017/2021).

Where Ní Bhriain’s work played with relationships between objects in space, and the gaps between them, Spillane’s hanging print showed a repeat image of the palm of a hand cropped close. Included at its base are four 500g weights and one 100g, leaving viewers with questions about veils, curtains, blinds, the weight of expectation, the weight of exchange, the nature of intimacy – all appropriate inquiries for a delicately curated show, exploring the possibilities associated with, and the meanings we might attach to, the word ‘closer’.

Cristín Leach is an art critic, journalist and radio and television presenter. Her memoir, Negative Space (2022), has recently been published by Merrion Press, an imprint of Irish Academic Press. irishacademicpress.ie

‘C L O S E R’, installation view, The Lavit Gallery, May 2022; photograph by James Hallinan, courtesy of the artists and The Lavit Gallery.

‘C L O S E R’, Installation view, The Lavit Gallery, May 2022; photograph by James Hallinan, courtesy of the artists and The Lavit Gallery.

Claire Murphy , Ring of Fire, 2022, Analogue print on Archive Paper; photograph by Claire Murphy, courtesy of The Lavit Gallery.

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Exhibition Profile

27

Textile Tensions EL PUTNAM DISCUSSES A RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION AT MART GALLERY CELEBRATING THE WORK OF THE LATE ELEANOR LAWLER. I FIRST MET Eleanor Lawler in an apartment in Jamai-

ca Plain, Massachusetts, in August 2013, only weeks before I moved to Dublin. She was in Boston for an artist residency with Katherine Nolan, visiting the Mobius Artists Group, of which I am a member. During this time, a group of us shared a three-hour performance improvisation session, which left me drained and exhausted. However, Eleanor was not ground down by the duration. Instead, she was fuelled by it, which was a persistent feature of her practice that I have long witnessed – being enraptured with the gestures of performing, an aesthetic playfulness that delights in processes of shared creation.

Over the years, I was fortunate to experience Eleanor’s generosity with a line between art and life that is blurred with kindness, care, support and compassion.

‘Textile Tensions’ (14 May – 3 June) was a retrospective exhibition of her work at MART Gallery & Studios, in the remodelled fire station in Rathmines, which contained photographs and videos of performances, conveying the shifting nature of her performance practice.

For Eleanor, performance functioned as a means to connect with others, to invite people in, but also to face what makes us uncertain and uncomfortable, including discomfort with the ageing female body.

I would describe Eleanor’s practice as an aesthetics of hospitality. Hospitality here is not just about making comfortable, but instead is “an important practice through which we can articulate a different relation between self and other”.1 For instance, Eleanor regularly performed nude, breaking taboos for aging women, while also inviting people to ‘be with’ her aging

body in a non-confrontational manner. In the work, Intimate Gazing (2015, 2018), audience members are asked to stand and face the wall of the gallery space.

Nude, Eleanor approaches audience members whose gaze is averted from her, and lifts their hands, tactilely inviting them to touch her body. Here, performance art enables an intimate, haptic engagement, as this relation cultivates connection through shared vulnerability.

Such features are also manifest in the video, The Invisible Woman (2016). She moves through a derelict stone cottage like a ghostly spectre of emotional paradoxes and tensions, a kind of claiming place coupled with a slipping out of sight – a playful intervention that illuminates uncertainties and discomforts with ageing. Again, such a gesture is not confrontational, but through playful engagement with the hyper-visibility and invisibility of the aging female body,2 Eleanor critically engages with unacknowledged biases of ageism and sexism.

This aesthetics of hospitality also extended to her curatorial work, in which emphasis was placed on inclusion of others, meeting them where they are. In a short piece she wrote about Livestock – the performance art platform she organised with Francis Fay since 2011 – she states: “I don’t curate, I facilitate: good, bad, and occasionally awful performances (purely subjective). However, I will fight for facilitation for every last one of them. Facilitating space for real, exciting, vital, embodied voices is not an option for me, it’s an absolute essential”.3 She embraced a love for the uncertainties that performance art brings, describing it as the magic of the art form.

Eleanor Lawler, We Are Bodied, 2015, with Dr Katherine Nolan, 126 Artist-Run Gallery, Galway; photograph by Amber Baruch, courtesy of MART Gallery.

Viewing the exhibition, I saw many photographs and videos of works that I’ve either witnessed or heard her share her experience of performing. A performance is not over with the applause of the audience, but traces of that experience linger in the retellings and the media that capture it. There was one series that was unfamiliar to me though: four untitled black and white photographs by Amber Baruch, exhibiting the play of light and shadow evident in Eleanor’s work in Butoh, including performances she created for the Moving Bodies Festival. In these images, the chiaroscuro is brought to an extreme, as a single light source catches glimpses of her body through a semi-transparent veil. Moving down her nude figure, these images build a picture that is still incomplete. This series lingers in my mind like the presence of light within the images themselves, and the many memories I have of Eleanor Lawler as an artist, curator, and friend.

EL Putnam is an artist and writer based in County Westmeath.

Notes: 1 Irina Aristarkhova, Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedi-

cine, and Culture (Columbia University Press, 2012) p 4.

Kathleen Woodward, ‘Performing Age, Performing Gender’, NWSA Journal, 18(1), 2006, pp 162-89.

3 Eleanor Lawler, ‘Curating, a great big onion of a thing that’s all a bit earthy’, in:Action, 24 March 2016 (inaction.ie)

2

Eleanor Lawler, Elemental, 2017, at Moving Bodies Festival, Turin; photograph by Fabrizio Bastimento, courtesy of MART Gallery.

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Exhibition Profile

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Claire Barclay, ‘Thrum’, installation view, April 2022, canvas, steel, steel wire, rust on linen fabric, linen thread, machined aluminium, grease; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy the artist and The MAC, Belfast.

FROM THE SUMMIT of Cave Hill, the peak overlooking Belfast,

Black Sea, Blue Smoke MANUELA PACELLA OFFERS EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS FROM HER LATEST VISIT TO NORTHERN IRELAND.

it is possible to catch glimpses of Scotland’s west coast. I was so impressed when I first saw this view, that I immediately understood the reason for the productive exchange between Scotland and Northern Ireland. I wanted to reach that coast as soon as possible, crossing the North Channel by ferry.

The sea I come from is the Mediterranean. This sea brought me back to Northern Ireland and Derry, thanks to the sound project, ‘Black Med’, by Invernomuto – an artistic duo founded by Simone Bertuzzi and Simone Trabucchi in Milan in 2003.

‘Black Med’, short for ‘Black Mediterranean’, is an expression coined in 2012 by Alessandra Di Maio, a scholar of postcolonial studies, which takes its cue from the book, The Black Atlantic (Verso, 1993) by Paul Gilroy. ‘Black Med’ describes the sea as a place of cultural hybridisation – as fluid as sound and a mnemonic container of the centuries-old crossings of goods, individuals, cultures, and religions.

‘Black Med’ has been an ongoing project since its inception in 2018 for Manifesta 12 in Palermo. The project takes the form of listening sessions, and a website in which an algorithm selects music tracks associated with texts and images from an ever-expanding archive.

The duo presented a solo exhibition, ‘BLACK MED SECCO’, at Void Gallery in Derry (9 April – 4 June). A soundscape derived from the website was transmitted in the gallery, while a projection occupied one of the rooms. Visitors were invited to listen by sitting on large limestone rocks, as if they were perching on a breakwater barrier, watching the seascape.

While the reference to the Mediterranean roots me to my birthplace, Belfast (which has been a second home for years) welcomes

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

me with a direct question: “Do you call this place home?” This sentence is printed on one of the postcards in the Process Room at Golden Thread Gallery. It forms part of the exhibition, ‘How Did We Get To: We Are Here’ (19 March – 30 April), a collaborative project with the Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda, featuring a selection of artists’ films from the British Council Collection and LUX. The films on display are by Ayo Akingbade, John Akomfrah, Duncan Campbell, Susan Hiller, and Rehana Zaman, each thematically exploring the representation of marginalised communities. Among the films I most enjoyed were: Susan Hiller’s The Last Silent Movie (2007), an audio montage of extinct or endangered languages; and John Akomfrah’s The Silence (2014), which brings together the film, Education of the Deaf (1946), and other footage from the British Council Film Collective.

As a continuation of this exhibition, Peter Richards also curated ‘How Did We Get To: Know So Little?’ in collaboration with Docs Ireland, Belfast Photo Festival, and the Cathedral Quarter Festival, which continues until 9 July. The central work is the 1953 documentary, Statues Also Die, by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Ghislain Cloquet, interrogating the one-sided, colonial methodology upon which Western museum collections are largely based. Video works and a screening programme alternate in dialogue with the French essay film.

Relationships to the landscape are explored in ‘Blue Smoke’ at Naughton Gallery, with works by Hannah Casey-Brogan, Faith Couch, Aidan Koch and Poot Mendes (7 April to 29 May). The curator, Ben Croth-

Exhibition Profile ers, was inspired by country singer Dolly Parton and her nostalgic relationship with the place where she was born, the Great Smoky Mountains region of eastern Tennessee. Blue Smoke is the title of a 2014 song and related album by Parton that visitors can play on a turntable in the exhibition, among eight other albums displayed. A portrait of the singer by Laura Callaghan opens the exhibition, dotted with vinyl wall texts featuring lyric excerpts from Parton’s songs.

As distant as country music culture is from my own sensibility, there is something about the exhibition – embedded in the singer’s words and among the details of the artworks – that moves me. This probably has to do with a sense of belonging, whether nostalgia for childhood or our relationship with our immediate landscape. This can be a dreamlike belonging in Hannah Casey-Brogan’s drawings, collages, and paintings, or the all-too-realistic sense of an ancestral place, such as the indigenous Serrano land, where Aidan Koch moved to shortly before the pandemic, only to become trapped in the claustrophobic joint experience of lockdown and the El Dorado Fire.

Faith Couch’s photographs are serene and revolve around the relationship of the body, specifically the black body, with the landscape, often observing the body itself as a landscape. They dialogue very well with Poot Mendes’s collages in which concepts of sexuality and masculinity are analysed within the Irish context, intermixed with American iconic elements.

The ancient relationship between Scotland and Northern Ireland, the exchange of knowledge, and ancestral memory, are all explored in ‘Thrum’, the solo exhibition of Scottish artist Claire Barclay, which occu-

pies all three spaces of The MAC (15 April to 3 July).

Known for her environmental installations, in which the exhibition space is both the source of inspiration and the place of realisation, Barclay is exhibiting a series of site-specific sculptures in fabric with metal inserts that communicate with the print works presented on the walls.

Recurring domestic forms – including combs, mirrors and bowls – appear throughout the exhibition as inserts that evoke a close relationship with our bodies.

They are familiar forms that have always existed and have not changed their function much; their immediate recognition connotes mundanity in the relationship with the viewer, despite the magnificence of some sculptures. For instance, in the Sunken Gallery, the large linen sheets look as if they have just been pulled out of the ground, while the cuts or crevices within them prompt us to navigate the secrets of our intimacy.

This interiority is also present in the Tall Gallery where some of the artworks, especially those that use quilts or fabrics filled with feathers, allow for a warm and active physical interaction between the space and the sculptures. On the contrary, the large-scale piece in the Upper Gallery recalls a sort of industrial archaeology in its colour, size and shape, with the metal comb motif made monumental.

Inevitably, I return to the question on the postcard at Golden Thread: “Do you call this place home?” My response is yes, when a place is filled with warmth and respect, you can call it home.

Manuela Pacella is an art writer, lecturer and curator based in Rome, Italy.

Invernomuto, ‘BLACK MED SECCO’, installation view, Void Gallery, April 2022; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy the artists and Void Gallery.

‘Blue Smoke’, installation view, Naughton Gallery [L-R]: Faith Couch, from the ‘Beach’ series, 2015, photograph; Aidan Koch, Chilopsis linearis and Datura wrightii, both 2020, Intaglio prints; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy the artists and Naughton Gallery, Belfast.

Aidan Koch, Flames Climbing San Jacinto, 2021, soft pastel, oil pastel, and gouache on fabric; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artist and the Naughton Gallery.

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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Exhibition Profile

SHOUTY SNOW ECHO LAURA KELLY OUTLINES SOME OF THE IDEAS UNDERPINNING HER LATEST SOLO SHOW. ‘SHOUTY SNOW ECHO’ at Mermaid Arts Centre (21

March – 30 April) was my fifth solo show and in it I continued to adopt an experimental approach to drawing – in this case to evoke imaginary snow-covered, transient and speculative landscapes. In making my process-driven work, I’m constantly straddling conceptual boundaries. To paraphrase Robert Rauschenberg’s description of his ‘Combines’ series, it’s “drawing that wants to be sculpture”.

For this exhibition, I used assemblages of materials (including paper, graphite, pencil, watercolour, wood, and PVC) in a large drawing installation, combining both abstract and representational elements. Aspects of the pictorial landscape tradition – including the horizon line, vignettes, panoramas and vistas – featured in work that alluded to snow-cover and its role in creating ambiguity in our perception of a landscape. Such ambiguity is amplified in expansive, disorientating terrains such as snowfields and desert because normal perceptual processes become disrupted. This body of work was the culmination of research in expansive snow-covered landscapes during Winter Residency Awards at the Banff Centre, Canada, in 2016, and Vermont Studio Center, USA, in 2018.

I installed the piece over an eight-day period, which was both an exciting and challenging task. There is an exhilaration in making new site-specific work that can be accompanied by a simultaneous sense of trepidation! As the process is intuitive, the outcome is never fully known in advance and although I make component pieces beforehand, they don’t always perform in the gallery space as expected, and sometimes have to be discarded. It’s a process of improvisation which brings to mind jazz, and saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s quip: “How can you rehearse the unknown?” For me, using an experimental process combines control and lack of control, leading to a raising of the stakes for both the viewer and I. Having only had very intermittent access to temporary studio spaces for the two years prior to the exhibition made the process even more high-risk!

In this show (and in my work generally) a number of elements came into play: a drifting point of view; shifts in scale and perspective, from large to small, near to far; the use of fragmented and ephemeral materials; a fragile sense of attachment; and drawing that crossed two spatial systems – the wall surface and the surface of objects attached to the wall. The viewer was invited to consider the experience of being in a snow-covered landscape as something elusive and uncontainable.

Framing was discarded. Picture cord, d-rings, and fragments of wood – all part of the framing apparatus – were deconstructed and instead used to attach components. The result was a spilling beyond any attempt at proposing boundaries in much the same way that the natural world defies containment.

Various types of perceptual processes informed the work. I alluded to Inuit and Australian Aboriginal navigational practices in expansive landscapes which use both egocentric (what’s directly in front/behind the body) and allocentric (objective, map-like) perceptual approaches. My use of fragments of fluorescent colour referenced both human intrusion (and destruction) in the wilderness, as well as a perceptual hierarchy of seeing in expansive landscapes that prioritises colour, form, and motion in that order. Also in the mix was a Japanese approach to landscape depiction which considers two levels of perception – that of detail, texture and mark-making when static, and that of form while in motion.

A series of short experimental animations exploring

transience and perceptual ambiguity was also screened as part of the exhibition. In addition, Mermaid Arts Centre commissioned artist and writer James Merrigan to write an accompanying essay, entitled ‘WASTE-BASKET AESTHETICS’ (smallnight. org). It was very useful to get this unmediated response and discover how the exhibition was communicating itself.

From an art historical perspective, the Romantic landscape tradition has been suggested as an influence because of my work’s subject matter. Although I haven’t consciously set out to achieve this, I can identify with some of its tenets. The Romantic vocabulary of boundless energies and limitless spaces has definite resonances. Hito Steyerl’s essay, ‘In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective’, has also been influential (e-flux.com). More fundamentally though, at the heart of this exhibition – and my wider practice – lies a sense that the world (and our place in it) is fragile. I’m familiar with this on two levels. As a child I developed peritonitis and came very close to death and soon after that, my father became bankrupt, ultimately resulting in the loss of the family home. Journeying across imaginary, expansive, sometimes hostile landscapes summons up similar sensations – dislocation, temporary occupation, and fragile, fragmented attachment to life and to place.

These were experienced realities which have subsequently helped to shape the work I make.

Post-exhibition, I’ve returned to working on a new Arts Council-funded experimental animation along with mentoring from filmmaker and animator, Orla McHardy. Orla has been a very generous mentor and has opened up exciting new avenues of exploration for me in this area, so I’m excited about completing this work and exhibiting it.

Laura Kelly is a visual artist who creates drawing-based works of varying scale, and experimental animation. With a studio in Dublin, she lives in Bray, County Wicklow. laurakellyartist.com

All images: Laura Kelly, ‘SHOUTY SNOW ECHO’, 2022, installation view, mixed media drawing installation - paper, newsprint, paint, pins, watercolour, wood, graphite, pvc, cardboard, picture cord, d-rings, hinges; photography by Paul McCarthy, courtesy of the artist and Mermaid Arts Centre.

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Kevin Atherton The Return

Aug 6th - Oct 2nd 2022

In partnership with Kilkenny Arts Festival

SUPERUNIFICATION

Video still from 'Boxing Re-Match' - film/ performance, 1972-2015.

Kevin Atherton in conversation with artist Sonia Shiel: Sunday, August 7th, 3pm, Parade Tower, Kilkenny Castle. Book at kilkennyarts.ie Butler Gallery

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Evans’ Home

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John’s Quay

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Kilkenny

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R95 YX3F

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butlergallery.ie

INVITATION to the OPENING of 8 Cows

Gallery

Ruth E. Lyons, SUPERUNIFICATION, 2022, Painted Carbon Steel; all photographs by ImageWorks Photography, courtesy the artist and curator.

Visual Artist: Ruth E. Lyons Artwork Title: SUPERUNIFICATION Commissioning Body: Cosgrave Developments Budget: €180,000 Site: Honeypark, a residential development on the grounds of the original Dún Laoghaire Golf Course Date Sited: May 2022 Commission Type: Private Commission Project Partners: Claire Power (Project Curator) The recent unveiling of a major new public sculpture, SUPERUNIFICATION, concludes a three-year process through a competitive tender, adjudicated by an art curator and panel of local stakeholders. SUPERUNIFICATION is made of mild steel that is hot dip galvanised and painted in a gradation of colours. It is a strong work of contemporary art that is ambitious and aesthetically compelling, with a meaning and significance that will endure over time.

At 12 metres in height, SUPERUNIFICATION connects the sky to the ground. The colour gradient of the structure from black-blue at the top, through ultramarine to white at the base, appears as a seamless fade that draws the land and sky into conversation with it. Its elevation allows it to be seen from many perspectives and from a great distance. From an aerial view, the curved form is a placeholder, boldly marking this residential hub located between the sea and the mountains.

SUPERUNIFICATION draws upon ideas from cosmology and theoretical physics.

SUPERUNIFICATION links to similar forms within the lexicon of symbols in our culture, such as the double helix of a DNA strand and the looping figure eight of infinity.

From every perspective, the curve appears to take on a different form, at once simple and surprisingly complex.

As the artist explains: “SUPERUNIFCATION is an abstract sculpture. It is inspired by the study of our universe and a search for a ‘theory of everything’. For me, the sculpture is about unifying the large and small scale in our lives, keeping in mind the unfathomable nature of existence while going about our daily toils. In its fluid form, the sculpture also ties different perspectives – those of the sky, sea, and land that surround Honeypark.”

Allihies, Friday 1st of July, 19:00 Exhibition

Tommy's House Timeless fragments of a simple life

Nadette Charlet The show and gallery will be open in July and August, every day 13:00 to 17:00, or on appointment: Nadette 087 7942413

8 Cows Gallery

Allihies Beara Co. CORK

Nadette Charlet Artist website: nacharlet.com Contact: nadette@nacharlet.com

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Organisation Profile

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

In the Middle of the Fields by Deirdre Kinahan, 2021, directed by Layley Lippard; photograph courtesy of Solas Nua.

SOLAS NUA IS a multi-disciplinary arts organisation that presents

Solas Nua MIRANDA DRISCOLL OUTLINES THE EVOLUTION OF SOLAS NUA IN WASHINGTON, DC, AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR IRISH ARTISTS IN THE US.

Irish arts in Washington, DC. Founded in 2005 by Linda Murray, originally as a theater company, its first production, Disco Pigs, introduced Enda Walsh to Washington, and was later remounted Off-Broadway at 59E59. Solas Nua is not bound by four walls, but rather works in a multitude of site-specific spaces, each carefully chosen to suit the content of the work. This nomadic style allows the organisation to be versatile and flexible, and, while at times challenging, bringing work to unlikely locations lends a certain fluidity.

Work has been presented in partner theatres, galleries, bookshops, bars, churches, car parks, a floating pier, the great outdoors, a swimming pool and of course the boundless virtual space of the digital realm. Not being burdened with the weight and responsibilities of a venue certainly had its advantages during the countless lockdowns of the pandemic.

While mostly known for its site-specific theatre programming – led by Artistic Director of Theatre, Rex Daugherty – in recent years Solas Nua has expanded into more multidisciplinary work, becoming known locally for commissioning, producing and presenting work in all disciplines throughout the year. The Capital Irish Film Festival (CIFF), produced by Solas Nua, has been running almost as long as the organisation. CIFF is an annual event that brings together viewers and filmmakers to celebrate new Irish film.

The visual arts programme, run for many years by Irish visual artist and curator Jackie Hoysted, has had major exhibitions at many galleries, including recently at the Katzen Museum at American University. Recent work includes exhibitions with Alice Maher and Aideen Barry, curated by Tina Kinsella in 2019, and Brian Maguire in 2020. Visual artists in residence have included Nevan

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Lahart and Sean Lynch. The literature programme has brought writers and poets such as Jan Carson, Kevin Barry, Lucy Caldwell, Sally Rooney and Anne Clarke to DC, and collaborations have been undertaken with the Stinging Fly, Tramp Press, Poetry Ireland, Holy Show, and Fallow Media.

I joined Solas Nua in 2020 as Executive Director. I’ve been pleased to lead the team through a big moment of change, which was of course made more challenging by the pandemic. The organisation had been voluntarily led by a hard-working board who did everything from fundraising to programming. I was asked to restructure the organisation and since 2020, the board has focused mostly on governance; we have doubled our budgets and have rebranded; we now have 2.5 staff and are just about to hire a contractor to run the film festival; and we now have a longer-term programming vision and strategy.

On the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s great modernist novel, Ulysses, our programme considers the profound influence that great early-twentieth-century works continue to have on contemporary Ireland, and the many artists that call Ireland home.

This year’s programme touches on themes of movement and place throughout. In a newly commissioned work, Yes and Yes (2022), choreographer Liz Roche explores themes in Ulysses through dance and the body; issues of immigration arise in a modern-day retelling of The Playboy of the Western World; and the exhibition ‘The Space We Occupy’ considers our place and tenuous relationship with Earth.

I’ve heard more than once from Irish visual artists living and working in the US that they feel increasingly

Organisation Profile disconnected from the Irish arts sector and have few formal connections with their Irish peers in seeking opportunities to show their work at home. Shipping costs are exorbitant and not many funding streams are available to bring work in the opposite direction – from the US to Ireland. Knowledge and understanding of the Irish visual arts sector in the US are still developing; the perception remains that the performing arts and literature are the dominant art forms in Ireland.

As a curator and director of an organisation, I’m interested in finding ways to keep lines of communication open for artists in Ireland and Irish artists living in the US, through residencies, partnerships, exchanges and of course, funding opportunities on both sides of the Atlantic.

From 2020-22 I was visual arts curator-in-residence at the Irish Arts Center in New York, bringing two new shows to the US. ‘The Space We Occupy’ (featuring artworks by Neil Carroll, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Colin Crotty, Katie Holten, Fiona Kelly and George Bolster) was the inaugural exhibition in the new Irish Arts Center building, representing the depth and breadth of contemporary visual art being made in Ireland today and by the many Irish artists who call the US home.

At the time of writing, Maud Cotter’s solo exhibition, ‘a consequence of ~’ has just opened. It presents a body of work developed from 2015, through exhibitions in Limerick City Gallery of Art, The Dock, and the Hugh Lane Gallery.

While there is no dedicated gallery space at the new Irish Arts Centre, most of Maud’s work is installed in their stunning new flexible theatre space. If this large black box space can be offered annually to the visual

arts, it promises to be a really valuable opportunity for artists to present their work in New York, outside of the white cube and with support from a long-established arts organisation and the Irish government. While Maud’s show is opening in New York, ‘The Space We Occupy’ is on its way with Solas Nua to Washington, DC, to occupy the spectacular Whittle School and Studios (9 – 31 July 2022). Formerly used as the US headquarters of the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat), the building is known for its futuristic, high-tech, environmentally conscious and energy saving architecture.

It’s important that not only does Solas Nua present work in diverse and interesting spaces, but that we also offer opportunities to make new work, through residencies and commissions. Earlier this year we launched the Norman Houston Project in memory of Northern Ireland Bureau’s former Director, Norman Houston, who died last year. This two-pronged project offers an award to a short film from Northern Ireland at CIFF, plus a residency and commission of new work to an artist selected from an open call. As recipient of the 2022 commission, visual artist Niamh McCann, is currently spending six weeks in DC, and we eagerly look forward to her return next year to present the commissioned work.

Miranda Driscoll is Executive Director of Solas Nua. solasnua.org

Maud Cotter [L-R]: a dappled world, one to three, 2017, and without stilling, 2017-2018, installation view, ‘a consequence of ~’, Irish Arts Center, New York; photograph by Adam Reich, courtesy of the artist and Irish Arts Center.

Maud Cotter, a breather of air, installation view, ‘a consequence of ~’, Irish Arts Center, New York; photograph

by Adam Reich, courtesy of the artist and Irish Arts Center.

George Bolster, You Are Made of Stardust, 2021, kinetic sculpture, installation view, ‘The Space We Occupy’; photograph by Nir Airelli, courtesy of the artist and Irish Arts Center.

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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Member Profile

Building Momentum OLIVIA O’DWYER DISCUSSES SOME OF HER MOTIVATIONS AND INFLUENCES.

Olivia O’Dwyer, Wounded Soul, 2021, 30x25cms, acrylic on canvas; photograph by Lar O’Toole, courtesy of the artist.

Olivia O’Dwyer, Golden Gate, 2022, 40x50cms, oil on canvas; photograph by Lar O’Toole, courtesy of the artist.

I AM A painter originally from Limerick, now living in

County Wexford. I attended Limerick School of Art and Design but did not practice for years after graduation. My dad was an artist, and my brother also went to LSAD. It was always on the cards that I would be an artist too, but I think I rebelled against the idea. I had children in my late twenties, and they became my main focus. I grew increasingly unhappy in my thirties, which led me to paint again. At first it was therapeutic, but it grew into a career with determination. I had my first solo show in 2015 and have been painting seriously ever since.

Up until two years ago, my work was driven by an interest in the landscape. Now it is open to all subject matters in painting, from the figurative to the surreal.

I often make references to culture and contemporary ideologies from a female perspective. I work with a sense of urgency; this gives the work a certain directness. I examine ideas around quotidian daily experience, observations drawn from the world around me, and more intimate or personal thoughts. The paintings are often an amalgam of images and text which may vary from the humorous to the confessional. The text is frequently rendered in loose brushstrokes, which help to convey the concept of the painting in a more direct way. They reflect the tensions we all experience, and the vulnerability of our innermost thoughts. My work is a visual diary which documents my everyday life.

I am interested in ‘Bad Painting’ – a purposely raw style of painting developed in the 1970s, in which the idea and the immediacy of the work is most important.

My influences are painters like Philip Guston, Rose Wylie, and Norbert Schwontkowski. It’s difficult to know what is influencing you directly; in some paintings I purposely allow those I admire in and get it out of my system. Jean-Michel Basquiat said: “Influence is

not influence. It is simply someone’s idea going through my new mind”. I write ideas down rather than sketch; a sentence or a word will resonate with me. Usually, an idea is gestating and forming for a while. I am a firm believer in timing.

I used to work every day, but from experience, I now find the best thing is to let the momentum build and I will often produce a couple of paintings in a few days.

I instinctively lean towards a single image against an amorphous background. The late great American painter, Susan Rothenberg, is quoted as saying: “A painting needs three things; a figure, ground, and something else”. I hope I get the ‘something else’ from time to time. I am excited by this new approach in the work.

The paintings are eclectic, and each one has a different subject. The thread that connects the paintings is the idea behind them and, I hope, my recognisable hand.

The perks of being an artist are not defined by financial gain for the most part, but from the interesting opportunities. For instance, sitting in a café one day with a friend, he asked if I wanted to go to Nepal.

“Yeah, sure” I replied, laughing. It did happen and a group of us travelled to Kathmandu for two weeks in 2018, to exhibit at Siddhartha Art Gallery, supported by Culture Ireland and Wexford Arts Centre. The trip is still feeding my work. I am looking forward to a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre later this year.

To spend uninterrupted time in beautiful surroundings and connect with other artists is not a bad day at the office. I am also an art educator, working on the Living Arts Project this year – a fun and rewarding experience that introduces students to contemporary art practices.

Olivia O’Dwyer is an artist living and working in County Wexford. oliviaodwyer.com

Olivia O’Dwyer, Swan Lake II, 2022, 30x25cms, oil on canvas; photograph by Lar O’Toole, courtesy of the artist.

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Member Profile

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History is Written by the Victorious PAUL MACCORMAIC REFLECTS ON HIS WORKING METHODS AND VALUES AS AN ARTIST.

Paul MacCormaic, The School Run, 2012, acrylic and oil on canvas 45x60cm; photograph © and courtesy the artist.

I AM 61 years of age and am currently enjoying the pub-

licity that my portraits of Catherine Corless and Vicky Phelan have brought me. Better late than never, and perhaps better late than early, as I have seen many a young artist make quality art in their twenties and go stale and repetitive. The irony of the very welcome publicity and the recent acquisition by the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI) is that I am not a portrait painter as such. I do not generally seek or accept commissions.

My work is a form of political and social commentary, and the main output is painting and collage about contemporary life. I recently presented my ninth solo exhibition, ‘Icons II’, at the Courthouse Arts Centre in Tinahely, County Wicklow (15 May – 12 June).

I am essentially self-taught, although I read History of Art and History at UCD and went to IADT for fourth year (exempt from the first three years). Students were not taught how to paint then, but fortunately I had three solo shows before entry in 2005. Research and theory were emphasised there.

The pivotal moment in my practice came when Catherine Corless – the historian who uncovered the Tuam Mother and Baby Home scandal – lifted the phone and agreed to be the first person in the series, ‘The Vanquished Writing History (VWH)’. Up to then, I had had a few blips, such as inclusion in the 1986 Guinness Peat Aviation Emerging Artists Awards, but they all came to nothing. The Portrait of Catherine Corless, Historian and Human Rights Activist (2021) was painted in my usual photorealist style and was shortlisted for the 2021 Zurich Portrait Prize. Although I did not win the competition, I received a lot of attention, and it was purchased by the NGI. Vicky Phelan, the women’s health campaigner, also agreed to be part of the series and her portrait was selected for the 192nd RHA Exhibition. The series, which will take about two years to complete, is a response to the well-known fact that history is writ-

Paul MacCormaic, The Poverty Line Setter, 2017, acrylic, oil and wood on board; photograph by Gillian Buckley, courtesy of the artist.

ten by the victorious. They form the established version. There were attempts to silence Corless and Phelan and the many others who will feature in ‘The VWH’, including survivors of The Troubles.

I work from photographs, which I project and trace.

I do as much of the painting as possible in acrylic but inevitably, subtle tones such as those in the hands and face have to be done in oil. I use glazes to get the final look. My studio is a shed in my back garden in Kilbarrack. Although only three-metres square, it is my happy place. I have no rent, it is well-insulated and lit, and I can listen to the radio and CDs. The disadvantage is isolation and the fact that no curator has ever visited me, despite countless invitations. The shared spaces in artist’s studios have those advantages but are a financial haemorrhage that I cannot afford.

A body of work, which recently came to fruition, was exhibited at the Courthouse Arts Centre in May. The exhibition comprised 23 paintings in the shape of traditional icons. A closer look reveals my recurring themes and interests. Ethics are at the conceptual core of ‘Icons II’, but also religiosity and women’s work. My source material is largely the mass media. I have a large archive of cuttings dating back to the 1980s. With the demise of the printed photograph, latterly, I have to take my own photos. I re-present images in the tradition of Dada to form an anthropological study that is twenty-first-century Baroque.

Paul MacCormaic is an artist living and working in Dublin. paulmaccormaic.weebly.com Paul MacCormaic, Portrait of Catherine Corless, Historian and Human Rights Campaigner, 2021, acrylic and oil on canvas; photograph by Paul MacCormaic, courtesy of the artist and the National Gallery of Ireland.

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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Member Profile

It Can Never Be the Same Again EAMONN MAXWELL RESPONDS TO THE PRACTICE OF HINA KHAN.

Hina Khan, Serhadain, 2022, triptych, gouache, watercolour, tea wash, 88x180 inches; photograph by Oskars Samoilenko, courtesy of the artist.

IN HIS BOOK, Postnationalist Ireland (Routledge, 1996),

Richard Kearney states: “We cannot think forward without at the same time thinking back”. This phrase kept coming back to me as I drove home from my studio visit with Hina Khan, in Kinsale County Cork, last March. Our past is always there as we try to move on with our lives, and this is particularly true in the work of many contemporary artists. That tension between the past and present, and indeed the future, is critical to Hina’s work. It drives her.

As we think about the past, we know that history is riven with examples of conflict around borders and the chaos they cause, from Ireland to Palestine to Ukraine and, for Hina, the impact of the border created by the British in 1947, leading to the formation of India and Pakistan. Of course, anyone growing up in a region traumatised by the legacy of colonialism has an acute awareness of politics and protest, but Hina’s work deals with those issues in quiet, subtle ways. In her work we might see portals that hint at the doors of homes burnt down by invading or retreating armies. She wants the viewer to have empathy with the difficulties that schism caused.

Hina completed her MFA at the prestigious Fatima Jinnah Women University (FJWU) in Pakistan, with a major in Miniature Painting. From a Western perspective, we know very little about this method of making art. It is thought to date back to the ninth cen-

tury and was used to illustrate early manuscripts. Typically, miniature paintings are small, intricate, ornate, and highly coloured works of art, often anonymous. In certain societies and cultures, miniature paintings are the only works of art that women are allowed to make, with more traditional paintings on panel or canvas only permitted to be made by men. During her time at FJWU, Hina learnt the history, techniques and style of miniature paintings, but from early on in her studies she wanted to bring a contemporary approach to this classical method. That constant experimentation within the confines of miniature painting, remains in Hina’s work today.

Hina arrived in the West of Ireland with her family in 2015 and the intervening seven years have had a major impact on her career. When I first met Hina in 2017 she was mainly still working on the modest scale that miniature paintings are associated with but was beginning to explore how this might be scaled up.

Those techniques have remained core to her practice even though her most recent work is far from miniature. In a sense, she is staying true to the history of miniature painting but is breaking through the preconceptions, even borders, of the genre. She seems to be questioning whether something monumental can be miniature or vice versa.

Hina’s current work is primarily about migration, identity, and borders. She is asking us to consider the

possibility of a world without borders, and not always the obvious geographical ones. In her recent solo exhibition, ‘No Serhadain’, at Cork County Council’s LHQ Gallery (19 May – 17 June 2022) she presented three very large works that she has been working on since the end of 2021. The central work was a large triptych, Serhadain (2022) that is an imaginary map of a world without edges, barriers, borders. As we gaze upon these paintings, we are confronted with an often-uncomfortable past, yet there is wonderment in these works too.

By creating these wonderful fictional landscapes, Hina wants us to see a world beyond the historical and political delineations made by generations of male leaders.

She is inviting us to construct our own domains.

Eamonn Maxwell is an independent curator, advisor and mentor based in Kilkenny.

This text is an abbreviated variation on a longer essay written by Eamonn and commissioned by Cork County Council.

Visual Artists’ News Sheet | July – August 2022

Member Profile

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Looking for Light JULIE CORCORAN OUTLINES ASPECTS OF HER PHOTOGRAPHIC PROCESS.

Julie Corcoran, King, 2022, digital photograph, Archival Print, Hahnemühle Museum Etching, 350g, Edition of 5, 50cm x 50cm unframed; photograph © and courtesy the artist.

Julie Corcoran, Ophelia, 2020, digital photograph, Archival Print, Hahnemühle Museum Etching, 350g, Edition of 10, 25cm x 25cm unframed; photograph © and courtesy the artist.

MY JOURNEY AS a conceptual photographer began

Julie Corcoran, Carry Me, 2022 [detail] digital photograph, Epson Digigraphie Archival Print, Hahnemühle Museum Etching, 350g, Edition of 10, 25cm x 25cm unframed; photograph © and courtesy the artist.

when I gained my LIPF Distinction in 2015 with the Irish Photographic Federation, progressing to an AIPF Distinction in 2017. It was the requirement to explore and develop my own photographic style that pushed me to develop a practice based on bringing concepts in my notebooks to life in the form of high-quality photographic prints.

In 2019 I secured representation with my first gallery, ArtisAnn in Belfast, and it was gaining representation with SolArt in Dublin in 2020 that encouraged me to present my work in a larger format. This pushed me to develop my practice further by looking at how to present my work. I make photographic prints that look like paintings, utilising computer manipulation.

Once an idea for a piece materialises in my mind, I cannot rest until I’ve made it. I sketch out an idea based on a word or concept, figure out a suitable location, wardrobe and props. Initially my daughters were my models but that’s grown to include anyone who can follow my thinking. Gestures and posing are all extremely important to me in the communication of ideas to the viewer. I use a second-hand Canon 5D Mark iii with a 50mm Sigma Art lens to capture my subjects, backgrounds and textures; it gives me all the pixels I need to play with.

My archival prints are produced by Damien Hand of Hand Imaging, Mullingar. He uses the Epson Digigraphie Certification system with an Epson SC-P9000 series printer on Epson certified Hahnemühle Museum Etching 350g paper for my limited-edition pieces.

I love the feel of the print on textured archival paper and the look of the print finished with deckled edge float mounted in its slick black frame, protected behind clarity glass. That, for me, is when a piece is finished – its final incarnation as a precious object. I currently

present my work in three sizes and editions: 25cm x 25cm in editions of ten, 50cm x 50cm in editions of five, and 95cm x 95cm in editions of two.

My current solo exhibition, ‘Looking for Light’ at Íontas Theatre and Arts Space in Castleblayney, County Monaghan, was officially opened by art curator and activist, Noelle McAlinden, on 20 May with a performance by classical singer, Niamh McCormack.

The large exhibition foyer has been transformed into a cathedral for the soul with sixteen of my pieces in total. Fifteen limited edition prints adorn the walls with the centre piece of the show, a large chiffon translucent print of an ascending woman, levitating below a roof window, bathed in natural light streaming down from the heavens. ‘Looking for Light’ runs until the 9 August. It is open from Monday to Saturday and late nights on the weekend during performances. You can ring Íontas on 042 975 3400 to check specific dates.

I am very grateful for the continued support of Cavan Arts Office who awarded me a professional artist grant in 2022 and I also wish to thank Epson for their support in producing the accompanying publication. I’m also developing creative workshops and artist talks to run in conjunction with the exhibition. I will present work in the group exhibition, ‘Awash with Colour’ with AAEX (Arts as Exchange) and MOPOSOGS (Monaghan Poets and Songwriters Group), which will run from the 4 to 27 August 2022 in An Táin Arts Centre, Dundalk. In addition, I have begun facilitating Irish Sign Language (ISL) creative photography workshops with AAEX, CHIME, An Táin and Droichead Arts Centre.

Julie Corcoran is a conceptual photographer based in rural Cavan. juliecorcoranphotography.ie

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Workshops | Exhibitions | Open Studios Creative Peninsula in the Square Virtual Artist Talks and more...

August 2022

creativepeninsula.andculture.org.uk

Ruth Osborne Art

€10 (STG£9)

WWW.IRISHARTSREVIEW.COM

Liliane Tomasko SPELLOFTHEWOOD 2 July – 20 August 2022 www.highlanes.ie

updated_paper advert.pdf

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22/06/2022

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BREAKING BORDERS

July 2021 - Dec 2022 Cavan County Museum

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MUSEUM OF BROKEN THINGS presents

THE CORRACANVY HOARD

by Jane McCormick

Opening times - Tues to Sat 10am - 5pm www.cavanmuseum.ie / Phone 049 8544070 Virginia Rd. Ballyjamesduff A82YP70

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2 July – 25 September 2022 FEATURING ARTISTS:

Nicola Anthony, Trudi van der Elsen, Bernadette Hopkins, Benedict Hutchinson, Myra Jago, Vukašin Nedeljković, Beata Piekarska-Daly

LUAN GALLERY

Luan Gallery, Elliott Road, Athlone | www.luangallery.ie Tues – Sat 11 – 5pm Sun 12 – 5pm Tel: 090 090 6442154 info@luangallery.ie

28 AUG

2022.PHOTOIRELAND.ORG

7 JUL

CAIN

photoirel and

PHOTOIRELAND FESTIVAL 2022 Rita Duffy, Jesse Jones, Alice Maher, Eleanor McCaughey, Na Cailleacha, Kathy Prendergast, Ruby Wallis © Amanda Doran, Self-Soothing, 2021, acrylic paint on canvas board, diameter 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist

Sarah Jayne Booth, Myrid Carten, Dorothy Cross, Amanda Doran,

Image copyright by Daragh Soden from the series Ladies & Gentlemen