Visual Artists' News Sheet – 2020 January February

Issue 1: January – February 2020

The Visual Artists' News Sheet

Inside This Issue TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ART EVA PLATFORM COMMISSIONS SINGAPORE BIENNALE INTERVIEW: KADER ATTIA

Contents On The Cover Dianna Copperwhite, Alpha (detail), 2016, oil on canvas, 180 × 320 cm; photograph by Gillian Buckley, courtesy of the artist and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.

First Pages 6.

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Roundup. Exhibitions and events from the past two months.

News. The latest developments in the arts sector.

Columns

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Skills. Nature Painting Cure. Cornelius Browne reflects on what the New Year can bring, both in life and in painting.

Skills. On Failure & Ritual. Child Naming Ceremony discuss the origins of their artist collective.

Moving Image. No Longer Peripheral. Emer Lynch reflects on a recent event, organised by aemi.

Internationalism. Imagined Communities. Matt Packer considers the distributive powers of art world communication.

Artist Publishing. Currency, Transaction, Exchange. Jo Melvin discusses ‘Publication Scaffold’ at Dublin Art Book Fair 2019.

Artist Publishing. From Where the Heart Is. Byran Hogan discusses his recent photobook.

Regional Focus: County Wexford 12.

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Birr Theatre & Arts Centre. Emma Nee Haslam, Manager.

Offaly Arts Office. Sally O’Leary, Arts Officer.

Places are made better by people. Julie Spollen, Community Artist.

Fort Culture. Brendan Fox, Curator and Visual Artist.

36 Views of Croghan Hill. Veronica Nicholson, Visual Artist.

Golf Courses as Wind Farms. Micheál O’Connell, Artist.

Soul Portraits. Claire Guinan, Visual Artist.

Introduction HAPPY NEW YEAR and welcome to the Janu-

ary – February 2020 issue of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

The first issue of 2020 introduces Visual Artists Irelands’s new discursive programme, ‘VAN Chats’, which aims to further emphasise our publishing activities through a series of public talks and events. Following a screening event at Project Arts Centre organised by VAI, Lívia Páldi interviews artist Kader Attia about his research and practice. Also in this issue, Joanne Laws interviews Kunstverein Braunschweig curator Raoul Klooker, ahead of group critique workshop and talk on queer artistic practices, which takes place on 7 February at Visual Artists Ireland’s Dublin office.

Continuing his column on plein air painting, Cornelius Browne reflects on what the New Year can bring, both in life and in painting. In his ongoing column, dealing with the subject of internationalism, Matt Packer considers the distributive powers of art world communication, while Emer Lynch reflects on ‘No Longer Peripheral’ – a screening event and symposium organised by aemi. On the subject of artist publishing, Bryan Hogan discusses the themes underpinning his recent photo book, From Where the Heart Is (2019), while Jo Melvin discusses ‘Publication Scaffold’ – a series of talks and events she organised (in collaboration with Irish artists Michelle Horrigan and Sean Lynch), as part of Temple Bar Gallery + Studios’ Dublin Art Book Fair 2019.

This issue features three festivals profiles. Offering a glimpse of the international scene, Logan Sisley reviews the Singapore Biennale 2019. In the Irish context, Hilary Morley reviews Galway’s TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2019 and we also hear from some of the artists developing new work for the 39th EVA International as part of the biennale’s Platform Commissions.

In other feature articles, Susan Thomson profiles the work of the Belfast art collective Array at Jerwood Arts in London; Aidan Kelly Murphy interviews Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll about the evolution of Berlin Opticians Gallery; while artists Sarah Browne and Vanessa Daws each reflect on their recent public art projects.

The Regional Focus for this issue comes from County Offaly, with insights from Birr Theatre & Arts Centre and Offaly Arts Office, as well as visual artists Julie Spollen, Brendan Fox, Veronica Nicholson, Micheál O’Connell and Claire Guinan, who each reflect on the evolution of their respective practices.

Reviewed in the Critique Supplement are ‘Over Nature’ at Rathfarnham Castle; Eoin McHugh at Kerlin Gallery; ‘Scaffold’ at The Bomb Factory Art Foundation; Camille Souter at Custom House Studios Gallery; and Doireann Ní Ghrioghair at Pallas Projects/Studios.

As ever, we have also have details on upcoming VAI Lifelong Learning workshops, recent exhibitions, public art roundups, news from the sector and listings of current artist opporunities.

Career Development 16.

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Hidden Objects. Following a screening event at Project Arts Centre, Lívia Páldi speaks Kader Attia about this research and practice.

Artistic Genealogies. Joanne Laws interviews Raoul Klooker.

Profile 18.

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As Others See Us. Susan Thompson profiles Belfast’s Array Collective at Jerwood Arts, London.

Nomadic Gallery. Aidan Kelly Murphy interviews Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll about Berlin Opticians Gallery.

The Visual Artists' News Sheet:

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

Visual Artists Ireland:

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

Festival / Biennale 20.

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Tactical Magic. Hilary Morley reviews TULCA Festival of Visual Arts.

The Golden Vein. Joanne Laws speaks to artists developing new work for the 39th EVA International Platform Commissions.

In the Interregnum. Logan Sisley reviews the Singapore Biennale 2019.

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

Art & Health / Public Art 27.

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One Chance. Pauline Keena reflects on the evolution of her art practice and her recent participation in a conference in Canada.

Public Feeling. Sarah Browne discusses her recent project, commissioned through SDCC’s public art programme.

Beyond Islands. Vanessa Daws reflects on her recent public event and wider practice to date.

Last Pages 32.

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Public Art Roundup. Art outside of the gallery.

Opportunities. Grants, awards, open calls and commissions.

VAI Professional Development. Upcoming VAI workshops.

Republic of Ireland Office

Northern Ireland Office

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

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

Principle Funders

Project Funders

Corporate Sponsors

Project Partners

Critique Supplement i. ii. iii. iii. iv. iv.

Cover Image: Eoin McHugh, io, pigment ink on paper.

‘Over Nature’ at Rathfarnham Castle.

Eoin McHugh at Kerlin Gallery.

‘Scaffold’ at The Bomb Factory Art Foundation.

Camille Souter at Custom House Studios Gallery.

Doireann Ní Ghrioghair at Pallas Projects/Studios.

International Memberships

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Roundup

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS FROM THE PAST TWO MONTHS

Dublin

Belfast

DRAIOCHT

Continuing at Draiocht, Blanchardstown, until 29 Feb, artist Ann Ensor is presenting a new commission for the twelfth edition of Amharc Fhine Gall (in collaboration with Fingal Arts Office). In the immersive installation, titled ‘HOLDFAST’, Ensor continues her interest in the environment by exploring the aesthetic properties and significance of kelp seaweed.

Kelp serves an important function as a wave barrier and helps to prevent coastal erosion, but has come under threat due to increasing storms, pollution and mechanical cutting.

GOETHE-INSTITUTE IRLAND

‘Sideways Movement and Other Attempts at the Boundary’ (13 Nov 2019 to 4 Jan 2020) is a group exhibition currently on show at the Goethe-Institut Irland in Dublin. The exhibition is curated by NCAD Art in the Contemporary World student Nathan Cahill, who has invited four artists to respond to Harun Forocki’s video work, Parallel II (2014). The responding artworks by Marian Balfe, Eimear Murphy, Rachel Lavelle and Conor O’Sullivan use a variety of media to interrogate ideas around space, identity and rationality.

draiocht.ie

THE HUGH LANE

Currently showing at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane is ‘The Redaction Trilogy’ by artist duo Kennedy Browne (Gareth Kennedy and Sarah Browne). It is the duo’s first solo museum exhibition in Ireland, serving as an important milestone in their collaborative practice, now spanning 15 years. The exhibition focuses on the impact of digital technology on labour and politics, through the presentation of three installations made by the artists between 2010 and 2018. ‘The Redaction Trilogy’ continues at The Hugh Lane until 26 Jan.

The annual exhibition, ‘Periodical Review’ at Pallas Projects/Studios, provides a survey of Irish art from the past year. The artworks are selected for inclusion within the exhibition in collaboration with two invited curators – this year Séan Kissane and Workhouse Union. Amongst the varied roster of selected artists are: Lucy Andrews, Dorje de Burgh, Graeve Collection, Helen Hughes, Helio Léonm, Marielle MacLeman, Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland, Liliane Puthod and Katie Watchorn. ‘Periodical Review #9’ continues until 25 Jan. pallasprojects.org

‘Eleven Voices’ (21 Oct to 21 Dec 2019) was a two-week residency and exhibition by Magnum photographer Antoine d’Agata. The artist was commissioned by Belfast Exposed to create an exhibition responding to modern Belfast. D’Agata did this by exploring the city’s centre and suburbs, interviewing 11 people from different backgrounds and combining their narratives into a text that represented contemporary life in the city. The exhibition also featured a series of photographs by d’Agata, documenting the artist’s journey through Belfast.

goethe.de

NCAD GALLERY

‘In the Age of Conscious Makers’ is currently showing at NCAD Gallery, Dublin until 6 Jan, which features works of contemporary art and design, alongside research specimens on loan from Trinity College Dublin’s Geological Museum collection. With work by Bassam Al-Sabbah, Ruth E. Lyons, Fiona McDonald and Niamh O’Malley amongst others, the exhibition “draws attention to material use and processes of making in contemporary visual arts practice”.

The exhibition is part of 2019 NCAD Ireland Glaas Biennale.

SWORDS CASTLE

Michele Hertherington was the recipient of Fingal County Council Arts Office’s 2018 Art Graduate Award, receiving a one-year studio space with BLOCK T. Her site-specific exhibition ‘Talk Softly’ was presented at Swords Castle from 7 to 11 Nov 2019. The exhibition focused on the philosophy of sound and the heightened sense of explorative perception that manifests in silence. Dealing with architectural space, an immersive soundscape was presented in the Chapel room of the castle, accompanied by a text piece and 30 durational paintings. arts.fingal.ie

Antoine d’Agata / Magnum Photos, ‘Eleven Voices’, installation view, Belfast Exposed; photograph courtesy of Belfast Exposed

CATALYST ARTS

‘Hyperobjects’ (7 Nov to 11 Dec 2019) was a group exhibition, curated by outgoing co-director Edy Fung, which ran at Catalyst Arts.

Combining a multidisciplinary range of practices, including bio-art, sound art, installation and video, ‘Hyperobjects’ looked at environmental concerns from non-human perspectives, featuring artworks, performances and presentations by Art Research Matters, Baum & Leahy, Jez Riley French, Joey O’Gorman, Jasmin Märker, Matmos, Robin Price, Saša Spačal and Mark Peter Wright.

belfastexposed.org

FCBSTUDIOS

Pauline Little’s solo exhibition, titled ‘Resilient Earth’, is currently on show at Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios (FCBStudios) until 19 Jan. The exhibition is “both a documentation of and a mediation on the dormant winter garden”, which is explored through a series of paintings that fluctuate between figuration and pure abstraction. The active forms of life found in this fallow time of year attest to the simultaneous vulnerability and resilience of the earth’s ecology, mirroring humankind’s own tenacity during times of hardship.

ncad.ie

hughlane.ie

PALLAS PROJECTS/STUDIOS

BELFAST EXPOSED

fcbstudios.com

PS2

Freelands Artist Programme participant Michael Hanna’s solo exhibition, ‘Looking Backward’ ran recently in PS2 (29 Nov to 21 Dec 2019). The artist used the 1888 novel Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy as the exhibition’s starting point. In this story, the narrator wakes up in the year 2000 to a now-impossible future where people live in harmony, without inequality. Hanna considered “ideas of promised futures and the relationship between utopia and the local” through a series of photography, text, painting and moving image-based works. pssquared.org

catalystarts.org.uk

PLATFORM ARTS

‘And when he came to’ was the fourth and final iteration of a series of collaborative exhibitions made by Dublin-based artists Lee Welch and Paul Hallahan. Looking at ideas of utopia and the end of perceived history, these exhibitions have been marked by the artists’ differing approaches and styles, with Hallahan’s abstracted landscape paintings and video works complementing the flat and subtractive approaches to figuration found in Welch’s paintings. ‘And when he came to’ ran at Platform Arts from 7 to 29 Nov 2019. platformartsbelfast.com

ULSTER UNIVERSITY GALLERY

Outburst Queer Arts Festival ran across venues in Belfast from 8 to 16 Nov 2019. As part of the festival programme, Kevin Gaffney presented his film Far from the reach of the sun (2018) at the Ulster University Gallery from 8 to 29 Nov. Referencing the pseudo-medical practices of ‘gay conversion therapy’, the film is set in a nottoo-distant future, where a new drug has been introduced by the government, which can alter a person’s sexuality. Gay people at a cruising resort, which doubles as a correctional facility, are targeted with the drug. ulster.ac.uk

Paul Hallahan, Holy the supernatural extra brilliant kindness of the soul, 2012–2019, installation view, Platform Arts, Belfast; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artist

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Roundup

Evgenia Martirosyan, Under Your Skin 1, 2019, discarded bicycle tyres, inner tubes, thread, bitumen paint, installation view, Triskel Arts Centre, Cork; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of the artist

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Enda Bowe, photograph from the series ‘Love’s Fire Song’, C-tpye print; courtesy of the artist

Regional & International

AU MUSEUM, WASHINGTON DC

From 9 Nov to 15 Dec 2019, acclaimed Irish artists Alice Maher and Aideen Barry presented their joint exhibition ‘fair is foul & foul is fair’ at The American University Museum in Washington DC. The paradoxical title – which is taken from a line spoken by the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth – is implemented as a summation of both artists’ inquiries, where the fair and foul intermingle in the investigation of social history, femininity and carnality. The exhibition was accompanied by a screening of the 2018 docu-drama, Citizen Lane.

CCA DERRY~LONDONDERRY

‘Escape Sequence’ (26 Oct to 20 Dec 2019) was a solo exhibition by artist Robin Price, which ran at CCA Derry~Londonderry. The exhibition was a survey of Price’s recent practice, spanning interactive electronics to club music. The exhibition featured Price’s ping-pong table artwork, titled This is not a Table, as well as Waves on Water – a gesture-responsive digital canvas. Of the most absurd artworks was Price’s Feline Mobile Disco, a club environment-cum-off-site-sculpture designed for cats, which was transported to pet owners’ homes upon request.

american.edu

THE DOCK

Two exhibitions by artists Alan Phelan and Jeff Gibbons recently ran at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon from 16 Nov 2019 to 4 Jan 2020. Phelan’s exhibition, ‘Red Lines’ showed photographs that revive the Joly Screen process.

The photographs were made in collaboration with Dunboyne Flower and Garden Club. Spanning work made over the past 20 years, Gibbons’ exhibition, ‘NowHere Factual Nonsense’, displayed paintings by the artist, notable for their wordplay and humour, with phrases culled from song lyrics and art-historical discourse.

Running at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, until 21 Jan is ‘Eliptical Affinities: Irish Women Artists and the Politics of the Body, 1984 to the Present’. The exhibition focuses on Irish women artists and how they have positioned themselves within important political and social issues relating to the body. Amongst the artists are Sarah Browne, Amanda Coogan, Dorothy Cross, Jesse Jones, Breda Lynch, Alanna O’Kelly and Kathy Prendergast. A symposium will take place in Droichead Arts Centre on Fri 17 Jan to mark the closing of the exhibition. highlanes.ie

Ian Wieczorek’s solo exhibition ‘Traverse’ is currently on show at the Courthouse Gallery & Studios, Ennistymon, until 18 Jan. ‘Traverse’ focuses thematically on the act of crossing borders “as a biological impulse or tendency”. A significant part of this exhibition consists of paintings based on low-resolution images found online.

The scenes depicted – such as those found in his ‘Crossing’ series – show solitary figures stripped from their contexts and surroundings, resulting in a “more universal reflection on the resilience and perseverance of the human condition”.

cca-derry-londonderry.org

DORTMUNDER U, DORTMUND

‘The Other Side – Borderlands in contemporary Irish art’ opened at Dortmunder U, Dortmund, Germany on 20 Dec 2019. Featuring work by Enda Bowe, Willie Doherty, Seán Hillen, Jesse Jones, Dragana Jurišić and Kathy Prendergast, and curated by Anne Mager, the exhibition features a selection of artists from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, who each provide unique vantage points on the subject of borders by focusing on their “personal, geopolitical and cultural effects”. The exhibition continues at Dortmunder U until 17 Mar.

thedock.ie

HIGHLANES

COURTHOUSE GALLERY & STUDIOS

Martina O’Brien’s seven-channel video installation, ‘Quotidian’ is currently on show at NUI Maynooth’s Illuminations Gallery. The work enquires into ideas of location, ritual and living archives by focusing on seven people based in County Kildare, who contribute to the national Weather Observation Network – a group of volunteers who collect data for Met Éireann through the use of privately-installed rainfall stations. The work touches upon the volunteers’ role in the face computational technologies and automation. ‘Quotidian’ continues until 29 Jan. maynoothuniveristy.ie

‘A quiet mutiny’ is a new exhibition of work

by Daphne Wright for Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. Furthering the artist’s interest in sculpture, ‘A quiet mutiny’ features fragile objects made from dry unfired clay. Also included are two new video works. Songs of Songs “investigates the relationships of care adults have with more vulnerable family members”. Is everyone okay focuses on an older man’s poor health, his face painted like a lion, referencing the mental scars of a life spent working in middle management.

The exhibition continues until 16 Feb.

thecourthousegallery.com

F.E. MCWILLIAM GALLERY

‘Together Now: The Engagement Project’ is a large group exhibition by Kilkenny Collective for Arts Talent (KCAT), which is currently showing at F.E. McWilliam Gallery, Banbridge.

KCAT is a grouping of artists from diverse practices who have been working together through residencies and other engagement projects since 2014. Curated by Catherine Marshall, ‘Together Now’ features the work of 26 artists, ranging from painting, drawing, installation and film, aiming to encourage awareness of diverse arts practices. The exhibition continues until 1 Feb.

dortmunder-u.de

ILLUMINATIONS

CRAWFORD ART GALLERY

crawfordartgallery.ie

HAMILTON GALLERY

‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ was a group exhibition featuring 129 artists who each made artworks responding to W.B Yeats poem of the same name. The exhibition was originally shown at Hamilton Gallery, Sligo, from 18 Jul to 7 Aug 2019, before travelling to Consulate of Ireland, New York City, from 25 Sept to 8 Nov 2019.

The exhibition returned to Hamilton Gallery for a final showing from 7 to 31 December 2019.

Amongst the extraordinary number of artists on show were Yoko Akino, Nuala Clarke, Eamon Coleman, David Dunn and Alison Pilkington.

femcwilliam.com

SIRIUS ART CENTRE

Two exhibitions recently ran at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh. ‘Everything is in everything’ was a group exhibition of Ireland-based painters.

Curated by Claire Ryan, the exhibition sought to highlight “painting [as] a prime example of the mixture of mind and matter, bodily motion and creative expression.” It featured works from Kevin Cosgrove, Susan Montgomery and Kathy Tynan, amongst others. Also showing was a new Super-8 film, Personal Growth, by artists Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain. Both exhibitions ran from 9 Nov to 20 Dec 2019. siriusartscentre.ie

hamiltongallery.ie

TRISKEL ARTS CENTRE

‘Under Your Skin’ was a recent solo exhibition

by Evgeniya Martirosyan. Using discarded bicycle tyres as her primary material, the artist “explore[d] the transformative potential of repeated actions and the evocative power of materials in a state of rejection”, in order to create large-scale sculptural forms in the gallery space. The final installation was suggestive of organic growth, with the material knotting and twisting through the space. Also exhibitied was a video work, featuring sounds of manipulated rubber and paint.

The exhibition ran from 7 Nov to 20 Dec 2019. triskelartscentre.ie

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News

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

THE LATEST FROM THE ARTS SECTOR

General News

ACNI ACES AWARDEES

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland recently announced the 2019/20 recipients of their Artists Career Enhancement Scheme (ACES).

ACES is an annual funding grant, supported by the National Lottery, that aims to fund Northern Ireland’s most talented and promising emerging artists. Each artist recieves a grant of up to €5,000. They are also partnered with a professional organisation or leading artist, at home or abroad, to help the recipients develop and deliver their work.

This year’s awards included five literature awardees, four musicians, two visual artists, one drama awardee and one dance awardee. The visual arts recipents were Edy Fung and Paul Moore. Fung has recently concluded her co-director role at Catalyst Arts, Belfast. She was also previously chosen to curate a number of exhibitions as part of Visual Artists Ireland’s New Spaces programme in Derry/Londonderry. As part of her ACES award, Fung will receive mentorship from Golden Thread Gallery and Sonic Arts Research Centre, exploring non-anthropocentric thinking towards ecological relations, through the use of sound.

Paul Moore is a visual artist based in Belfast.

Moore’s project will focus on creating multisensory, interactive and participatory artworks, using emerging technologies, such as augmented reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence systems. These technologies will be used to explore narratives inherent within his practice, related to gentrification, modernity and mythology and its effect on personal and social identity.

He will receive mentorship from Golden Thread Gallery. Moore is also a board member of Visual Artists Ireland.

SOLSTICE VISUAL ARTS AWARD 2019

Dunboyne-based artist Annabel Potterton has been announced as the overall 2019 winner of Solstice Visual Arts Award. Potterton received the award on Saturday 8 November at the launch of ‘SURVEYOR’ – an open exhibition that invites artists from or living in the region of County Meath to exhibit in Solstice Arts Centre. This year, the exhibition was selected

by Kevin Kavanagh. As part of the award, Potterton received a bursary of €2,000 to support her practice.

FLAX ART STUDIOS WORKSHOP FACILITIES

Belfast-based Flax Art Stuidos have launched new a suite of workshop facilities for professional artists and creatives. The new facilities include a sculpture workshop, fabrication area, woodworking area, mold and casting facilties, a textiles room and a dedicated area for digital fabrication. As Flax is based in the old UTV broadcast building, they also have a film studio, projection room and photography studio that artists can rent. Each of these different workstations have a number of different tools and equipment, as well as storage space/lockers for materials and personal belongings. Daily, weekly and monthly hire can be availed of, costing between £10 and £80, depending on individual needs and the facilities required. Full details on the workshop can be obtained by contacting Martin at flaxartstudiosfacilities@gmail.com.

PLATFORM ARTS LOSE BUILDING

Belfast-based artist-led gallery and studio group, Platform Arts, announced in November 2019 that they will be losing their building. Platform stated, via thier social media channels, that they have three months to vacate thier building at 1 Queen Street after being told that the building has been sold. Platform have been resident at 1 Queen Street for the past 10 years, having established themselves as a vital part of Belfast’s artist-led visual arts infrastructure. After recently completing their open call for exhibitions as part of their 2020 programme, Platform have now had to cancel all planned exhibitions for the coming year. Their final exhibition in 1 Queen Street will open in January 2020. They are now searching for a new space in the city.

HEADFORD LACE CURATOR APPOINTED

Headford Lace Project are delighted to announce that Fiona Harrington has been appointed as curator for their international lace exhibition which will be held in Headford, County Galway, in late 2020. The Headford Lace Project has been created as a way of reviving lace-making tradition in Headford, which dates back to as early as 1795. Farrington will lead a programme of events celebrating lace-making practices in the region. The project is funded by Galway 2020’s Small Towns Big Ideas Programme.

KING PING PONG 2019

King Ping Pong is an ‘inter-art-organisation’ table tennis tournament that takes place every year. The eighth annual competition took place on 29 November 2019 at Pallas Projects Studios, Dublin, featuring a custom-made ‘krazy table’ by artist Dáire McEvoy. The crowning champion of this year’s tournament was Barry Lynch, who represented Dublin City Council Arts Office.

Lynch took the trophy this year after a fierce final round face-off with last year’s King Ping Pong champion, Paraic Leahy.

A total of 16 different arts organisations that took part in this year’s tournament were: LAB Gallery, IMMA, Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin City Council Arts Office, OPW State Art Collection, PhotoIreland, 126 Artist-Run Gallery, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Molesworth Gallery, Talbot Studios, Complex, Burgh Quay Studios, Friary House Studio, Schloss Solitude, Stream and Difference Engine. King Ping Pong takes places in different arts venues every two years, and has previously taken place in Monster Truck, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. Having been held at Pallas for the past two years, it is planned the competition will move to The Complex, Dublin, for 2020/21.

The winners roll for previous years of the tournament is as follows: 2018: Paraic Leahy (Friary House Studio) 2017: Jerome O Drisceoil (Green on Red) 2016: Will Curtis (Project Arts Centre) 2015: Peter Prendergast (Monster Truck) 2014: Nick Miller (Rubicon Gallery) 2013: Mark Durkan (Solstice Arts Centre) 2012: Peter Prendergast (Monster Truck) ARTS COUNCIL OF IRELAND APPOINTMENT

The Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Josepha Madigan, T.D. has announced the appointment of Teresa Buczkowska for a five-year term to the Arts Council of Ireland. Buczkowska has wide-ranging experience in relation to equality, diversity and inclusion. She currently works as the Integration and Anti-Racism Coordinator at the Immigrant Council of Ireland and has led many comprehensive anti-racism projects, from training and research, to advocacy and campaigning.

TBG+S PROJECT STUDIOS

Four artists have been awarded Project Studios at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin. Project Studios are usually awarded to artists at an early point in their career, who can use the TBG+S’s studio facilities and professional development opportunities (such as visits from international curators and artists) for one year. The four artists who have been awarded studios for 2020 are Lynda Devenney, Ann Maria Healy, Liliane Puthod and Eimear Walshe.

Lynda Devenney’s practice incorporates moving image, sculptural objects, sound and performance. She explores the human body as an interface between space, objects and movement. Ann Maria Healey works in video sculpture and text. She is interested in the power of history and narrative to reccurently embed itself within the human psyche. Eimear Walshe uses writing, performance, sculpture and video.

Their wide-ranging research draws on ideas from queer theory and feminist epistemology.

Liliane Puthold’s practice is interested in ideas surrounding mass production and the perceived value of objects. Puthold uses both handmade and industrial materials to create large-scale installations and sculptures that often draw on the display and language of merchandising. Each of the awarded artists will begin their studio tenure between January and July this year.

ARC-LAB GALLERY SCHOLARSHIP

The LAB Gallery, Dubin, in partnership with the Institute of Art, Design & Technology Dún Laoghaire (IADT), have announced Róisín Power Hackett as the recipient of their ARCLAB Gallery Curational Scholarship. Power Hackett will work with LAB curator Sheena Barett on programming and research into curational strategies and will develop a self-initiated curational project at the LAB Gallery, which will be presented in 2021, as part of the gallery’s public events programme. Power Hackett will also be funded as a full-time student on the Art and Research Collaboration (ARC) MA at IADT, which is taught in the LAB, covering tuitions fees of €6,000. She will also receive a €15,000 stipend, along with a dedicted desk and research space in Dublin City Arts Office, mentorship and professional guidance from the LAB Gallery and research supervision from IADT.

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Columns

Skills

Skills

Nature Painting Cure

On Failure & Ritual

CORNELIUS BROWNE REFLECTS ON WHAT THE NEW YEAR CAN BRING, BOTH IN LIFE AND IN PAINTING.

CHILD NAMING CEREMONY DISCUSS THE ORIGINS OF THEIR ARTIST COLLECTIVE.

LIKENING THE NEW Year to a blank canvas is old hat, yet for many people, it bespeaks a genuine yearning. As a plein air landscape painter, undeniably there is a symbolic element to walking along the shoreline carrying a pristine canvas during the early days or weeks of January.

For my first painting every year, I stand facing the sea. I will move inland and uphill as the year progresses. Nature, even here in rural Donegal, retreats in the face of human encroachment. It is for this reason that the first line I draw each year depicts the Atlantic horizon. The ocean is the wildest part of our landscape now remaining, enduringly untameable. Within me, a superstitious, or perhaps primitive, kernel believes that the painting that begins the year will radiate its influence over the prospective calendar. This talismanic picture, I always hope, will keep my as-yet-unpainted work wild and untamed.

Some mornings, like some years, dawn innocently, yet by midday, or midsummer, the world has changed beyond recognition. My life now remains moored to one such morning of July 2016. A hospital appointment consecrated this ordinary day, which now rises above all other days with the loftiness of a mountain peak, when my wife, and fellow painter, was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. A thumbnail sketch cannot describe the hand we were dealt, as a family with young children; suffice it to say that the following year unfolded in claustrophobic spaces – hospital corridors, waiting rooms, chemotherapy ward, examination rooms, cancer buses, and so forth. Daylight, treasurable always at this time of year, was absent entirely from our chemo winter.

My wife’s courage was the motor that kept us moving forward. As she commenced upon the path towards healing, however, I found myself dipping severely. The only part of each day I truly relished was locking the door for the night.

In the wild, many creatures under threat pass, for self-defence, into states resembling death or sleep. It’s a short-term tactic, the hedgehog curling up, which in humans can grow prolonged.

My doctor diagnosed depression, yet I refused antidepressants, recoiling from more drugs entering the household.

Taking stock, I saw I was developing a fear of outdoors. Rather than pills, I resolved to paint.

My previous exhibition – ‘Weathering’ at McKenna Gallery, Omagh, in 2015 – had been painted entirely outdoors, in a fairly leisurely manner. My latest exhibition at the gallery, ‘An Invite to Eternity’ (16 November – 25 December 2019), charted one year in our small coastal village and its environs, following each fluctuation in nature over four seasons. I painted subfreezing mornings, predawn stormy mornings, scorching afternoons, rainy evenings, and, most excitingly of all, for the first time I painted outdoors at night. I am a carer still, and painting became part of my life on a par with cooking and cleaning, the line between life and art dissolving. During painting sessions, I began to dissolve too, into wind and rain and oil paint. Painting outdoors incessantly began fusing me to nature, reconnecting me to this airy globe where the seasons come and go forever.

Studies point to the unhealthiness of our increasing detachment from nature. As this century emerges from its teens, it strikes me that one of the most significant cultural artefacts of the last decade is a children’s picture book. The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane, gloriously illustrated by Jackie Morris, was created in response to the Oxford Junior Dictionary removing nature words such as ‘acorn’ and ‘dandelion’ from its pages, to make way for technological words like ‘broadband’ and ‘database’. Since publication, The Lost Words has inspired grassroots campaigns, aiming to place a copy in every British primary school, and charities have furthermore donated copies to every hospice in Britain and every care home in Wales. One hospital, conscious of the clinical benefits of nature, has reproduced the book floor to ceiling across its walls. Doctors maintain that the relationship between nature and healthcare might now be considered a flourishing field.

On New Year’s Day, I hope to carry a blank canvas towards the sea. I will draw a line. The horizon. With no idea of what lies beyond.

Cornelius Browne is a Donegal-based artist.

Cornelius Browne, Young Girl Looking Out To Sea, 2019, oil on canvas; courtesy of the artist

Child Naming Ceremony; photograph courtesy of the artists

WE CAME TOGETHER as a group, having met during the course of our MA studies at NCAD between 2013 and 2016. Over the following years, we hinted towards forming a collective and eventually began holding meetings in early 2018, exploring what the basis of our group would be, and identifying our shared interests and concerns. Our early meetings took place in each other’s studios, homes, residency settings, a city hostel and a rented countryside apartment.

We are nomadic in the sense that we have no set place or time that we regularly meet and work. Most members of the group are based in Dublin, however one member lives in Donegal, while another has recently relocated to Estonia, continuing to correspond by email and audio recording.

We began to travel towards one another creatively, thematically and geographically. Our gravitations led us to a first weekend of collective activity with a visit to the Northwest. We had set each other a list of creative tasks to generate material, ideas and actions. Outcomes included jumping pogo around a concrete studio for punk therapy; interrupting a trad session to sing to tourist visitors of the town; running semi-naked into the Atlantic Ocean and discovering that one of our members has a secret phobia of sea creatures, as they stood retching in the shallow waters. From there, we went further north and delivered performative presentations to one another in Prehen Woods, on the outskirts of Derry City, where a dipped area in the forest floor provided a natural amphitheatre.

This was an emotive sharing experience for us; an intimate encounter that further solidified our group and brought us closer together.

We naturally veered towards thematic considerations of failure, disruption and fragmentation. Recurring points of discussion were around concepts of family portraiture, and the development of personas and alter-egos. Dissecting these common shared interests, we agreed and

disagreed over the course of many meetings. We worked from a place of collective desire to move beyond our individual practices, to take risks and embrace new modes of working, supported by our developing bond of co-authorship. We always begin from a place of not knowing, and a chaotic array of materials and possibilities. Failure, by definition, takes us beyond assumptions and what we think we know. Artists have long turned their attention to the open-endedness of experiment, rejecting the unrealisable quest for perfection, using both dissatisfaction and error as means to rethink how we understand our place in the world.1 Our first assignment from the world beyond our informal gatherings was an invitation to contribute to ‘ORPHANS’, as part of ‘ARRANGEMENTS’, curated by James Merrigan, at Pallas Projects/Studios (21–29 November 2019). Production for this took us on the road again, to a forest on the grounds of Cow House Studios, Wexford, where one member of our group was on residency. Inhabiting different characters, we produced a group photograph that fell somewhere between family portrait and band image – formats that we actively explore together. Ways of doing this included a karaoke session, as part of our rehearsals for ‘HOST’ – a live event at Studio 6, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (17 October 2019). Our first public outing, we worked together for two days testing, moving, playing, messing, singing, crashing. Combining improvisation and rehearsed performance, we brought together an experimental visual, aural and olfactory experience for our generous audience.

By now, our inquiry had expanded to include explorations of ‘ceremony’ and various rituals of tradition and anti-tradition.2 We considered the failures of societal and familial constraints and other related dysfunctions. We travelled across time to messily rebirth funereal dishes of the past. We leaned on one another in an anxious yet comforting lump and moved in tandem, responding to each other’s bodies. We shared moments of elation with strained efforts of expression and communication. Ultimately, we surprised ourselves with how successful our starting point of an acceptance of failure could become. Pushing forward with our intentions, we plan to continue developing erratic, playful and experimental encounters, while also bringing attention to the buds of discomfort in our collective belly.

Child Naming Ceremony are a collective of artists working collaboratively across various disciplines. The group includes Ella Bertilsson, Michelle Hall, Austin Hearne, Ulla Juske, Celina Muldoon and Frances O’Dwyer.

Notes 1 Lisa La Feuve, ‘Introduction/Strive to Fail’, FAILURE: Documents of Contemporary Art (Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2010) p.12.

2 Our group’s name, ‘Child Naming Ceremony’, speaks to a rejection of methods of naming that are bound to tradition and religion. It also refers to the process of producing new titles for many things, like a collective, a band, or a body of work for exhibition or publication.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Columns

Moving Image

Internationalism

No Longer Peripheral

Imagined Communities

EMER LYNCH REFLECTS ON A RECENT EVENT, ORGANISED BY ARTISTS’ EXPERIMENTAL MOVING IMAGE (AEMI).

MATT PACKER CONSIDERS THE DISTRIBUTIVE POWERS OF ART WORLD COMMUNICATION.

‘NO LONGER PERIPHERAL’ was a day-long event hosted by aemi (Artists’ and Experimental Moving Image) that took place on 2 November 2019 at the Robert Emmet Theatre in Trinity College Dublin. Supported by IADT’s MA Art and Research Collaboration (ARC) and funded by the Arts Council, the event took place in association with The Douglas Hyde Gallery and was devised by aemi Co-Directors Alice Butler and Daniel Fitzpatrick in close collaboration with writer, researcher and lecturer Maeve Connolly from the faculty of Film, Art & Creative Technologies, IADT. The idea behind ‘No Longer Peripheral’ was to facilitate dialogue and deepen connections between moving image cultures in Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland. These places are intrinsically interconnected through shared experiences relating to the fight for independence, language and migration. ‘No Longer Peripheral’ gave representation to these three places and established a platform for cross-community critical discussion, peer support and research.

The event was a live research process, comprising screenings curated by aemi, LUX Scotland and AMINI (Artists’ Moving Image Northern Ireland), followed by panel discussions and responses from invited respondents and the audience. After introductions by aemi and The Douglas Hyde Gallery’s Georgina Jackson, the first screening programme commenced with four short films, drawn from two 2019 aemi touring programmes. These works – by artists and filmmakers Moira Tierney, Vivienne Dick, Sarah Browne and Saoirse Wall – dealt with body politics, agency and relationships to place.

The follow-up panel had a historical and theoretical focus. Points of connection between practices and the changing models of archives were amongst key concerns brought to the fore by Maeve Connolly, University of Glasgow’s Sarah Neely and CCA Derry~Londonderry’s Sara Greavu during the discussion, chaired by Valerie Connor of TU Dublin. Artist and filmmaker Myrid Carten, the first respondent, reiterated the need for access to archives and collections and, as some of the panellists suggested, greater belief in the generosity of peripheral positions.

She spoke about tensions between amateur and professional practice, as well as her zeal to see experimental film culture encouraged, highlighting the roles of stakeholders in this regard.

After lunch, artist, researcher and curator Alberta Whittle presented between a whisper and a cry (2019), a film addressing climate trauma and fear, colonialism and memory, and geographical privilege. She introduced this film, created with Matthew A. Williams, by quoting American writer, Saidiya Hartman, proposing multiple understandings of the term ‘wayward’, such as: “the errant path taken by the leaderless swarm, in search of a place better than here”. Whittle propositioned the audience: “How can we refuse numbness as a survival strategy?” She admitted to feeling galvanised when discussing political methods of refusal (especially considering the Brexit extension a few days earlier).

Whittle’s presentation influenced the frank

and discursive nature of the second panel. Whittle and artists Emily McFarland and Saoirse Wall spoke openly about their experiences of making work in different places across the UK and Ireland. Sarah Durcan from NCAD chaired the discussion, which led into interesting territory around autonomous learning and exhibition making. The panellists discussed artist-led education, legitimising practices, privilege, access to archives, and the pressures of making work in these similar-but-different contexts. Emily McFarland commented on the potential for ‘periphery’ to slip into isolation. Likewise, the respondent, Isobel Harbison of Goldsmiths, problematised the aspirational nature of the event’s title, as well as Northern Ireland’s geopolitical position becoming sidelined.

The final segment was hosted by AMINI. Co-founder and artist Jacqueline Holt introduced artist Emily McFarland, who in turn introduced her film, commissioned by EVA International 2020. Curraghinalt (2019) depicts the valley and farmland around Greencastle People’s Office – a collection of caravans in the mountains of West Tyrone – and airs personal testimonies from a community of anti-mining protesters. The voices in the documentary-style video speak of political representation, solidarity, sovereignty, capitalism and colonialism, all experienced through their perspectives. This work shifted the tone of the event and offset a dominance of female representation.

The ensuing panel, chaired by Maeve Connolly, focused on the potential futures of the three represented organisations, and Jacqueline Holt, Alice Butler and Daniel Fitzpatrick were joined

by Kitty Anderson of LUX Scotland. Connolly posed questions around the organisations’ futures: how to make connections beyond the regions they operate in; and the main challenges faced by moving-image cultures in each context.

The sustainability of voluntary and funded work, reliance on people-to-people relationships and a resilience to becoming over-institutionalised were also discussed. As respondent, Prof Laura Rascaroli of UCC acknowledged paradoxical positions and practices that are both marginal and assume a centrality, that thrive upon the battle not to become relegated. Rascaroli reiterated the need for networks and suitable conditions for artists and spoke about the positive and negative fluidity that digital technologies bring to tangible interactions and relationships.

Overall, the day was an accumulation of substance and confidence around artists’ moving image on the island of Ireland and in Scotland.

We were happy with the format and the open nature of the panel discussions. Ideally ‘No Longer Peripheral’ was a starting point to wider conversations about producing and archiving moving image works in these contexts, which we look forward to developing.

Emer Lynch is curator (maternity cover) with aemi. aemi.ie

IN HIS LANDMARK and often-cited book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson describes the links between the development of the printing press and the birth of public national consciousness. He describes how the facility of printing text in vernacular languages became instrumental in identifying, conceptualising and shaping an audience of readers. The strategies of producing and distributing books and newspapers from the 16th century onward became a way of qualifying the reach and bounds of that languagecommunity, in the logical evolution towards a self-conscious form of nationalism that would find its full expressions years later. Anderson describes the ceremony of the reader being aware that their reading is “replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he [sic] has the slightest notion”.1 He goes on to suggest that this kind of readership became a model of community itself.

In our own time, the development of the internet as a space of shared discourse has done something similar to shape the imaginary locus of a transnational community. Extending Anderson’s logic to the specific context of the ‘art world’, it is easy to understand how art’s increasingly-online and monoglot communication media has accelerated the possibility of thinking about the art world as a world, with a reinforced sense of global plurality and synchronicity of artistic practices and discourses wherever they seem to be occurring (provided that it’s communicable in English, typically). As Alix Rule and David Levine have noted for the writers, commentators and PR people that input into this system, “the distributive capacities of the internet now allows them to believe – or to hope – that their writing will reach an international audience”, despite the full awareness that English is not the primary language in most countries, nor is there anything globally universal about internet access.2 At the receiving end of these communications – whether it’s a critical appraisal of a new biennial in Turku, or the promotion of a seminar series in Skopje – this saturation of international art communication rarely corresponds to the possibility of our attendance or direct participation, regardless of where we’re based or the opportunities at our disposal. A lot of what is trafficked through our inboxes and social media feeds can often feel designed to adhere to recognitions of value, relevance and discourse that is both suggestively within our own interests, and yet calculated beyond our reach.

It is difficult to measure the impact that e-flux has had in shaping these conditions and worldly self-perceptions, since it was established

by Anton Vidokle in a Holiday Inn in New York’s Chinatown in 1998. Describing itself as “a publishing platform and archive, artist project, curatorial platform, and enterprise” its outputs include a news digest, events, exhibitions, schools, journal and books, with a mission to produce and disseminate “strains of critical discourse surrounding contemporary art, culture, and theory internationally”.3 It is best known

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for its email announcements that arrive three times a day, each of which are paid-for by selected public arts institutions and larger-scale arts initiatives, whose exhibitions and projects are promoted to over 90,000 subscribers across the world.4 The significance of e-flux goes further, if we consider that many colleges encourage undergraduate students to subscribe to e-flux, to help build professional awareness, while the announcements themselves have become a communication culture of their own – somewhere between a press release and a proto-generator of artistic discourse itself. It was enough to warrant the publication of The Best Surprise is No Surprise in 2006, a printed selection of previous email announcements, selected by curators, writers and artists including Nancy Spector, Molly Nesbit and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Daniel Birnbaum’s essay for the book describes the ‘e-flux effect’ as a mixture of enchantment, curiosity and hope that now feels dated with the political ethics of peak neo-liberalism: “Since many of these things seem to take place in distant locations where I have never set foot … those punctuations, which seem to hint at new possibilities for art (at least in my fantasy), make me curious and full of hope: strange and radically new things are going on out there in the world”.5 Here in Ireland, there is a general sense that the distributive powers of art world communication are located elsewhere. There are only a few visual arts organisations based in Ireland that have the capacity to circulate their work internationally, whether promotionally or otherwise.

There are no art magazines or journals (print or online), blogs, listserv, information portals, or specialist communication agencies based in Ireland that have comprehensive international distribution and reach. The print edition of CIRCA Art Magazine – still cited and memorialised as an important discursive vehicle for contemporary art in Ireland – during its highpoint in 2005, had only 52 international subscribers beyond Ireland and the UK, taking into account both individual and institutional subscriptions.6 When we imagine the possible international publics for our work and the remote community of discourse that we see ourselves being part of, we should also be aware of how these imaginings are both constructed and administered into reality.

Matt Packer is the Director of EVA International.

Notes 1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, (London: Verso, 1983).

2 Alix Rule and David Levine, International Art English (Triple Canopy, 2012).

3 e-flux website 4 Ibid. 47% in Europe, 42% in North America and 11% Other (South America, Australia, Japan, etc) with a demographic breakdown of 18% writers/critics, 16% galleries, 16% curators, 15% museum affiliated, 12% artists, 10% consultants, 8% collectors, and 5% general audiences.

5 Daniel Birnbaum, ‘Temporal Spasms or, See You Tomorrow in Kiribati!’ in The Best Surprise is No Surprise (Zürich: e-flux and JRP Ringier Kunstverlag AG, 2006).

6 Email conversation with Peter Fitzgerald, former editor of CIRCA Art Magazine.

Regional Focus County Offaly

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Offaly Arts Office Sally O'Leary Arts Officer

Birr Theatre & Arts Centre Emma Nee Haslam Manager

SINCE OPENING OUR doors in July 2000, Birr Theatre & Arts Centre have provided space for visual artists to exhibit. While initially the space at the arts centre was very small – just a lobby area and stairwell (the Suas on Staighre space) – an extension to the building in 2010 provided for a larger foyer space, in which to exhibit work produced by the many artists living in the area and further afield. A call for submissions for solo shows is issued approximately every 18 months, with a number of group shows programmed to provide for all levels of visual arts practice.

The visual arts are well embedded in the community of Birr through the activities of the Birr Art Group. Established in the early 1960s, the group presented an annual exhibition wherever they could find space (usually in a local hotel) during the annual Birr Vintage Week. As the festival grew, so did the region’s arts practice and in the early 2000s, the festival name was changed to Birr Vintage Week & Arts Festival, to acknowledge the growing numbers of artists in the area, particularly within the visual arts.

Over the years, the festival has invited guest curators to produce a visual arts programme in numerous venues throughout the town, from the old workhouse to the new technology centre. Paintings, photography, ceramics, craft, filmmaking and contemporary installation work are all included in the annual show. The festival also programmes a guided Visual Arts Trail, which allows audiences to enjoy work from over 80 artists each year.

1980 saw the amalgamation of the three local secondary schools into one community school, which also gave an opportunity to expand the curriculum, with art and design being offered to students for the first time. A very large art room

was included in the new design for St Brendan’s Community School, which incidentally has just this year been awarded a grant from the Getty Foundation’s ‘Keeping It Modern’ scheme, to research its restoration and preservation. It is the first building in Ireland to receive this accolade, alongside this year’s other awardees, the Gateway Arch in St Louis, Missouri, and the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. The number of students taking art classes in the school grew steadily over the years and the art department now has three art teachers in the school, some of whom are past students.

Birr Theatre & Arts Centre is delighted to be part of the visual arts programme in the town, providing a space for audiences to see the work of artists all year round. While programming approximately six solo shows by practicing artists each year, the arts centre has set aside a period in August during the annual festival for up-and coming-artists to exhibit. The wonderful illustrator, Shannon Bergin, exhibited in August 2019 and we look forward to August 2020 when we will show new work by portrait artist, Owen de Forge. Birr Theatre & Arts Centre also provides space for local artists in the form of an annual show, called ‘Common Ground’, which is held in December and January, with work being submitted through an open call and selected by a guest curator. The theme for our twelfth annual exhibition this year is Climate Change, which runs until 31 January 2020. The show has been curated by artist, Emma Barone and was officially opened by Caelan Bristow, Eco Architect.

Past artists have included Tina Claffey, Hazel Greene, Jock Nichol, Caroline Conway, Emma Barone, Damase Morin, Natalie El Baba, Emma Campbell and many, many more. We look forward to including Clare Hartigan, Lucy Butler and others in the coming year. If artists would like to be included in the call for submissions for solo shows, they should email Birr Theatre at info@birrtheatre.com to be added to our mailing list. We expect the next open call to take place in February 2020, with proposed solo shows happening from September 2020 onwards. birrtheatre.com

Opening of ‘Climate Change’ Annual Exhibition at Birr Theatre and Arts Centre; courtesy of Birr Theatre & Arts Centre

OFFALY COUNTY COUNCIL’S Arts Office aims

to support the development of the arts and artists in the county with key priorities outlined in the Offaly Arts Strategy 2018–2022, Inspire-Imagine-Involve. This strategy recognises the value of supporting creativity embedded and integrated into the lives of people living in County Offaly.

Support for artists and arts practice is also underpinned through the Offaly–Arts Council of Ireland Framework Agreement. The implementation of Inspire-Imagine-Involve, focusses upon: providing support for a wide range of artists to pursue their individual practices; ensuring that people from all backgrounds, abilities and ages can participate and engage with the arts; and enabling the arts to take place in a variety of rural and urban locations in the county, while exploring and identifying opportunities to provide suitable spaces for artists to work in.

These priorities ensure that artists are offered opportunities to work in and with the community through the Arts Office programme; whether that be through public art, commissioning, residencies, festivals, exhibitions and art projects, etc. Artists can also apply for a range of supports through our professional artist award scheme.

The Professional Artists Support Scheme is designed to assist artists working in all art mediums (i.e. visual art, literature, dance, film, digital media, sculpture, drama) born in or domiciled in Offaly. The scheme calls for applications in: Continuing Professional Development, providing opportunities for artists to apply for further training, mentoring, attendance at workshops, travel grants within Ireland and abroad,; and for the development of new works in any genre, this can include materials assistance research and development production costs or for Audience Development Initiatives e.g. audience development research, documenting and recording development, assistance towards publication and exhibition assistance, arts practice development in conjunction with arts or community groups.

Support for artists also comes via our information service, the Arts Office has a very active social media page with a strong following. Artists can both receive and submit information and opportunities for distribution via our database and networks. The publication of Midland Arts and Culture Magazine is another source for artists to promote the work they are doing, while hearing from other artists through a regional network. 2019 saw a collaboration with Visual Artist Ireland to provide a new series of workshops for artists through 2019/20. Two workshops were held in Tullamore Library, the first, ‘Landscape of Opportunities’ with Maeve Mulrennan, offered practical advice on assessing different opportunities. The second workshop, ‘How to Apply for Funding’ with Neva Elliott, helped participants identify the different kinds of funding available to them and advised them on how to make the best case for their projects.

The programme continues into 2020 with a planned Visual Artists Café event to take place in February – providing an opportunity for networking and peer-to-peer dialogue.

Places to exhibit in Offaly is of current concern for artists; Offaly County Council has an exhibition space in the county buildings in Tullamore. The Atrium is a large light-filled

Both: Julie Spollen, 'Activate a conscious place for living', installation view, The Atrium, Áras an Chontae; courtesy of the artist

purpose-built space hosting an annual exhibition programme which offers local professional artists, community groups, schools and art organisations an opportunity to showcase their work. Managed by the County Council Arts Office, the exhibition space hosts six exhibitions over a 12-month programme. Artists are invited to submit proposals to exhibit annually. Also available in the county to exhibit work is Birr Theatre and Art Centre, who host a number of exhibitions throughout the year, county library spaces and festivals which host exhibitions both in dedicated and non-dedicated spaces. On the horizon will be the opening of the Tullamore Community Art Centre which, once completed, will provide exhibition space as part of its programming. Alternative spaces are also under consideration in collaboration with the library service for future provision.

Offaly County Council Arts Office is also working in partnership with Bord na Mona on the reinvigoration of Lough Boora Sculpture Park, towards a programme of new commissioning opportunities and educational programming.

The Arts Office also advertise and manage Public Arts Commissions when these arise through capital developments, which offer further opportunities for artists. Finally, the Arts Office are part of the Offaly County Council Creative Ireland team, and are able to generate commissioning opportunities for artists through this programme, aiming to ensure that communities and individuals have the opportunity to engage and work with artists in a cross-disciplinary way through projects that spans arts heritage and communities to facilitate a culture of creativity. offaly.ie

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Regional Focus

Places are made better by people

Fort Culture

Julie Spollen Community Artist

Brendan Fox Curator and Visual Artist

LIVING JUST OVER an hour from Dublin, on the east to west thoroughfare, I should be interacting with contemporary art practices for learning and social engagement much more than I currently do. Thank heavens for broadband, when it works. Locally in Offaly there are lots of arts and cultural activities but they currently have no formal site or resources to progress and blossom. My belief is that these supports should come in the form of a creative hub that can raise the profile of the arts in the area and generate new opportunities. Since 2007, I have campaigned alongside many others for a purpose-built community arts centre in central Offaly that will enhance local arts and contemporary culture, whilst promoting Offaly as an accessible area nationally. The approved plans of a disused large store on High Street were given the green light last May during local elections and presently the Council are evaluating the tendering process. In light of this recent advocacy, the aim now is to ensure that the vision and logistics of the centre and its spaces will be optimised for all members of our community.

As an artist, I work in community and care settings. This ‘socially-alert’ practice is durational and focuses specifically on artistic interactions with older participants. I practice collaborative critical thinking in art and design contexts, aiming to enhance social health for participants and the wider community. It instigates and nurtures partnerships with an evolving collective of professionals and institutions to advocate for the role of place in cultural engagements and environments. I know that sustainable communities need opportunities for social connection, equity and inclusion. A spatial identity, with an ambition for living generously together, motivates me. Community spaces in the public realm need to be adaptive for usage and fundamental freedoms. I really enjoy being with people and ensuring they explore the tangible benefits of the arts and how the design of an area may impact and enhance their lives with the activities they are involved in. I believe you should never un-

dervalue your work as an artist in the community. You should invest in people.

Mentored by Dr Owen Douglas (an Urban & Rural Planner at University College Dublin), my recent project ‘Activate’ aimed to inform Offaly County Council and the Local Executive about community spaces and feed into a county development plan via a community wellbeing survey. The project aimed to highlight the necessity of tactical place-making and the potential of an artist’s role during the public consultation and design process. ‘Activate’ investigated accessible and inclusive public spaces, public seating and the voice of the community, with regard to feedback on the new arts centre. The project was unpacked through a series of art workshops, get together sessions and conversations. Seating in the public realm came up frequently during these discussions. Public seating affords a place for people to stop and meet one another and – to put it simply – sit and ‘smell the roses’. The outcomes and artistic responses were surveys, a display of notes and references from my research, large collaborative collages, individual paintings, testimonials and benches that were formally and strategically exhibited in the Atrium at the Áras an Chontae, as part of my solo show ‘Activate a conscious place for living’ (18 October to 18 November 2019).

This year I also collaborated with Rowena Keaveny in the co-authorship of a Creative Charter for older people. A first draft of this document is on display in Offaly County Council as part of the exhibit and on the Anam Beo Facebook page (facebook.com/anambeo). It is a privilege to work with an evolving collective of partnerships and professionals who also advocate the role of place in artistic engagements. It has been a rollercoaster to secure a fundamental community space for engagement and there is much to look forward to, regarding contemporary arts and local culture. Artists are great enablers. The community arts centre build will start in 2020. juliespollen.com

Julie Spollen, 'Activate a conscious place for living', installation view, The Atrium, Áras an Chontae; courtesy of the artist

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Brendan Fox, In Lieu of a Blindfolded Mountain, Games for Artists and Non-Artists, 2019; photograph by Dejan Karin

I MOVED TO Dublin eleven years ago after leav-

ing London, but I grew up in Tullamore town, in a busy house with ten people and I was obsessed with finding a quiet place to draw or make. There was what I can only describe as a ‘fort culture’ back then. You might build a fort in a clearing in a hedgerow, or hang out in a cave near the quarry, and that became the place to escape to – to write or draw or smoke cigarettes with your friends. For me, these were integral liminal spaces to occupy creatively, places to think, to revolt, away from societal and familial expectations.

My curatorial projects have always been informed by the politics of place and the development of discursive hybrid platforms. I graduated from NCAD in 2012 and started Foundation Arts Festival in Tullamore the following year, with the support of Offaly Arts Office. At that time there were dozens of empty retail units in the town. We invited 30 artists to come to Tullamore to create or install work there. I remember walking down the main street and feeling like I was on the NCAD campus – there were artists everywhere. Over three years the festival grew and in 2015 I designed and curated a project, in collaboration with IMMA, called ‘Quantum Leap’ that saw ten works from the IMMA collection make up part of the exhibition, alongside the work of a further 50 Irish and international artists. It was important that the exhibition allowed recent graduates and established artists to occupy the same terrain. For me, this lends energy to the discourse around emerging contemporary arts practice and exhibition-making.

It is an evolving territory that no particular party may claim ownership of. Sinead O’Reilly, who was Offaly Arts Officer at the time, was endlessly supportive of the project. The main gallery space that housed ‘Quantum Leap’ was kindly donated to the project free of charge.

We worked on the huge three-story building day and night for three years, around the time of Foundation Arts Festival. Local electricians, carpenters and volunteers would come in after work and help us, sometimes past midnight.

The project was hugely sociable and inclusive.

We worked with local schools, and many chari-

ty-based organisations and groups, giving them a platform to interact with artists, the exhibition and the local community. I began to see the exhibitions as a nucleus for broader discussions around the role of the arts and arts practice in the area. That particular building has now been purchased and financed through a €2 million grant from the ACCESS II scheme, administered by the Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, and will open as a permanent art centre in 2022.

I have subsequently worked with a number of artists and groups. Last year I was invited to curate the MFA NCAD exhibition, ‘Come Back to Me’, which took place in Rua Red, Tallaght in 2019. I am always so fascinated by the synergy that emerges when a group of artists are working in close proximity. Through painting, video and sculptural installation, ‘Come Back to Me’ was a pre-apocalyptic lament, contemplating place, identity, the imposition of new borders and the impending catastrophe of the Anthropocene.

My own arts practice is anchored in video installation and performance. I live in my studio and I am always surrounded by my work. At present, I am pursuing an MA in Art in the Contemporary World at NCAD. My current research project, ‘Games of Artists and Non-Artists’, takes the shape of a series of curated workshops and collaborations, drawing on Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed that will culminate in an exhibition in May of 2020. I became interested in Boal’s mode of working 15 years ago, when I was directing theatre. I have been facilitating workshops with groups and artists using his techniques ever since. This particular project is supported by and will take place at IMMA from January to May 2020. By using an artwork or performance as an impetus for the development of a point of inquiry or narrative these workshops intend to create a platform for collaborating artists and minority groups to grapple with questions of institutional territory and collective interpretations as outcomes. brendanfoxart.com

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Regional Focus

36 Views of Croghan Hill

Golf Courses as Wind Farms

Veronica Nicholson Visual Artist

Micheál O’Connell aka Mocksim Systems Interference Artist

IN 1984 I bought a camera and have been taking photographs ever since. I’ve never gotten tired of it and I’m as enthusiastic about it now as I was 35 years ago – it keeps me sane! My practice over those years has taken various routes, including still life, interventions in the landscape and more straightforward landscape photography, but my real interest is in photographing people in the documentary tradition. I have exhibited my photographic work extensively, both nationally and internationally, in places like Gothenburg, Sweden; Victoria, Australia; Phoenix, Arizona; and Paris, France. I have also been teaching photography for over 20 years, including being Head of Photography in the Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughan for two years. I was also one of the founders and directors of The Courthouse Gallery & Studios, Ennistymon.

I moved to Offaly in 2010 to live on the farm where my mother grew up near Rhode, whilst completing a MFA in Art in the Digital World at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin. I had spent all my childhood summers on the farm but I didn’t really know Offaly that well, so the first thing I did was to walk the length of the Grand Canal – albeit in stages. A year later I was traveling down the Canal on a boat for a documentary film called A Grand Experience (2012), which was commissioned by Offaly County Council and screened on RTÉ. The film followed three artists: a writer, a songwriter and a visual artist (myself ) as we journeyed the length of the Grand Canal from Shannon Harbour to Edenderry, telling the history of the people who worked on the Canal, and our responses to the journey. I created a series of photographic collaborations with the other artists involving writing with light and stop-motion animation, with a soundtrack of the people we met along the way. The exhibition of the artist’s responses were shown in Offaly, Dublin and Enniskillen.

Three years later, in 2015, I was awarded another commission from Offaly County Council to do a book of photographs that aimed to create a visual account of life in Offaly today, so I was on the road again traveling all around the county for a year. It was a dream project, as I had permission to immerse myself in the life of

the county, and pursue my love of documentary photography. The book, titled Observing Offaly (2016), has been exceptionally well received and a series of twenty photographs from the book were exhibited in Offaly and Laois.

While I was traveling and making photographs for Observing Offaly, I began to notice that I could see Croghan Hill from nearly every place in the county. It’s actually a very small hill, but because the surrounding countryside is so flat, it can be seen for miles around. This experience brought to mind Hokusai’s famous series of woodblock prints, ‘36 Views of Mount Fuji’ (c.1830–32). Inspired by this, I decided to make my own photographic series, titled ‘36 Views of Croghan Hill’.

These were exhibited in The Atrium at Offaly County Council (1–31 May 2019) as part of the PhotoIreland Festival 2019, before being exhibited in Edenderry Library (4–31 July 2019).

Overall, I have had wonderful opportunities living in County Offaly, and I feel very grateful for them. In terms of exhibition opportunities in Offaly, I have had great support from the Arts Office in Offaly County Council. I live in the east of the county and so my experiences have been mostly with The Atrium at Áras an Chontae in Tullamore and the libraries in Edenderry and Tullamore. The Atrium is a good dedicated space for visual art but it is closed on the weekends. The libraries can also be restrictive in terms of access. The news of the creation of a new arts centre in Tullamore, with a dedicated gallery space, is very welcome. There are also plans for an arts centre in Edenderry.

The provision of shared studio spaces is an issue within the county. I was unable to find a one in Offaly but was lucky enough to find a studio in Athlone, County Westmeath, in Shambles Art Studios. However, this space proved to be just too far away so I had to give it up which was a pity as I do miss sharing a space with other artists and the interaction that comes with that.

I’m currently travelling in Asia for a few months in India and Nepal, which may result in a new body of work ‘36 Views of the Himalayas’! vnicholson108.wordpress.com

Veronica Nicholson, photograph from the series ‘36 Views of Corghan Hill’; courtesy of the artist

Mocksim, TurboGolfing (video still), 2019; courtesy of the artist

MY PARENTS MOVED to Clara in the late 1990s and, at that point, I was living in Britain. I grew up in Cork and maintain close links with friends and family there. This summer, for instance, was taken up with a two-month residency at the West Cork Arts Centre: Uillinn. My father, who has since died, was enchanted by Clara and the surrounding area, impressed by its Quaker benevolent-industrialist history and drawn to the charms of the unusual flatlands and biodiverse bogs nearby. My mother and he quickly integrated into the local community, which included many interesting characters: prominent politicians, sports people and even an astronaut.

I have adopted my parents’ fondness for the area, though all my knowledge is based on visiting for periods of days or occasionally weeks. This experience of passing-through is not to be trivialised, however. From an artistic standpoint, it can be advantageous to be a stranger in a place. Also, presumably Clara’s position – and that of Offaly generally – as a node of sorts, with canal, road and rail links extending east and west, is one of its important defining features.

I previously produced a series of street photography books in the wake of having had an exhibition selected for Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles 2011. One of those publications did contain imagery captured in and around Tullamore. However, most of my artistic activity relates to technological systems, meaning not only the much-discussed computational network but also the heavier machineries and overarching supply chains. Unquestionably, platforms such as Amazon, eBay, Uber, Deliveroo, map apps and other tools have caused dramatic changes for existing industrial and agricultural processes, for transport and travel, and within the leisure and cultural sectors. My practice typically involves intervention, what might be called ethical hacking, appropriation, a ‘tactical media’ and low-tech approach to readily available platforms, including Google applications like Street View and so forth.

Technological change is no less a factor in rural areas than urban ones and, during my residency in West Cork, I began wondering about the increasing presence across Ireland of monu-

mental wind turbines. Simultaneously, triggered by media excitement about Clara’s Shane Lowry winning The Open Championship in July, I became interested in the thought-experiment that golf courses could be converted into wind farms. I have produced several works connected with this theme and am continuing with linked initiatives. Toy and model wind turbines were ordered with a view to incorporating these into experiments I might carry out. In fact, the ordering and delivery system itself led to the production of one book comprising a collection of the ‘point of delivery’ signatures, completed when couriers eventually arrive. I have also created a short looping film, which combines motifs related to wind-farms and golf, with a soundtrack composed of recordings of actual turbines in motion. More recent activity has included making submissions on TripAdvisor of golf courses, with mock-up images showing wind farms installed, and a proposal that the game of golf be adapted to include one turbine at each hole. One of these is, at the time of writing, available for Castle Barna Golf Club in Offaly.

It seems appropriate to be conducting such inquiries (if you can call them that) in the Irish midlands, given the way new forms of energy production are replacing, as the County Offaly Arts Strategy document puts it, “traditional usage of peat extraction as the main source of combustible energy, which had assured employment opportunities for generations of Offaly people”. Certain responses to environmental crisis, ironically, include strategies that rapidly industrialise the rural landscape. Wind turbines are lauded by some, opposed by others; accusations of NIMBY-ism are made on one side, whereas activists suspect corruption and ‘greenwash’. A fundamental role of artists has always been to observe things ‘warts and all’ and present awkward truths back to the world. In my case the observation arises out of adopting clownish and comedic strategies, which are hopefully not read as cynical, nor trivialising serious contemporary matters. mocksim.org

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Soul Portraits Claire Guinan Visual Artist

AS A CHILD, I was always painting or making

something. I grew up in Tullamore, surrounded by art and music. I drew inspiration from my parents – my mother was a dressmaker, who encouraged creativity, while my father, a maths teacher, balanced this artistry with a logical mindset that still informs my work today. I decided at an early age, that I was going to pursue a career in the arts.

I applied to Limerick School of Art & Design in 2001 and was accepted. When taking a module in printmaking, I fell in love with lithography and etching, and later graduated with an Honours Degree in Fine Art, Printmaking.

I then moved to Edinburgh and worked as a warder in The National Galleries of Scotland.

When I moved back to Tullamore in 2007, there were no printmaking facilities close by, so I decided to focus on figurative painting and portraiture instead. While teaching art classes, I started working on my first solo exhibition, ‘Figure it Out’, which opened in Áras an Chontae in Tullamore, a few weeks before I started my Masters in Cultural Policy and Arts Management at University College Dublin. During this time, I undertook an internship in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, where I initiated a new archival system, assigning a colour coding key and setting up a retrieval and recording system for all the works in the collection.

In 2012 I took a break from painting and completed a jewellery design course in NCAD. After that, I worked for nearly two years for a jeweller, before deciding to take the plunge and work for myself as an artist, illustrator and jeweller. I began to work on a project that combined my two loves in life: music and portraiture. I made a list of musicians and started sending emails. This is how my current body of work began. My recent exhibition, ‘Heart and Soul: Portraits of Irish Musicians’, featured 16 largescale portraits of prominent figures from the Irish music scene. I used large canvases to create a connection between the subject and the viewer.

I met all the sitters, so that I could capture them in a more relaxed and natural environment. The

musicians featured are spread over different genres of Irish music: Mick Flannery, Christy Dignam, Gavin Friday, Imelda May, John Sheahan, Damien Dempsey, Paul Brady, Lisa Hannigan, Conor O’Brien, Cathy Davey, Gavin James, Mundy and The Coronas. My work has always been heavily influenced by the idea of the soul. To me, music is a reflection of the soul, which I try to capture in each of these portraits.

An opportunity arose earlier this year to exhibit my collection at the Rock and Roll Museum in Temple Bar, Dublin, and to add a new portrait to the collection, of Thin Lizzy’s legendary frontman, Philip Lynott. On 14 February, I visited Phil’s mother, Philomena, who gave me a selection of photographs that have never been seen before, along with other references. After I mentioned I was also a jewellery designer, she asked if I would recreate two pieces of jewellery that Phil used to wear – a silver heart and disc pendant and a bracelet. Using these references, I returned a few weeks later with sketches and ideas. Philomena picked the design she wanted me to work from and gave the final measurements of the jewellery pieces. Philomena and Graham (Philomena’s nephew) both stated that they would like the painting to be unveiled around 20 August 2019, which would have been Phil’s 70th birthday. Philomena sadly passed away on 12 June, before the portrait and jewellery were completed.

The exhibition opened in the Rock and Roll Museum on 14 August 2019, just as Philomena and Graham had wished. The centre piece was my portrait of Philip Lynott, Still in love with you. Phil wears both the heart pendant and bracelet in his portrait. A limited edition of 70 prints was made to celebrate Philip’s 70th birthday, along with Phil’s jewellery, both of which are available through my website and social media pages. The exhibition continues until 11 January 2020.

claireguinan.com

Claire Guinan at Rock and Roll Museum, Dublin; photograph by Nick Bradshaw

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Career Development

Hidden Objects FOLLOWING A SCREENING EVENT ORGANISED BY VISUAL ARTISTS IRELAND, PROJECT ARTS CENTRE’S LÍVIA PÁLDI SPEAKS TO KADER ATTIA ABOUT HIS RESEARCH AND PRACTICE. Lívia Páldi: The legacy of colonialism, specifically French colonialism, is one of your main artistic concerns, with an extensive inquiry that builds around the concept of ‘repair’.

How do you reflect on a decade of work exploring the concept’s genealogy, as well as its political, aesthetic and architectural expressions?

Kader Attia: It didn’t start as strategic research, rather was born out of my various interests. If I had not become an artist, I would probably have worked as a historian. I’ve always been curious and didn’t want to be jaded into a single field. My materials come from very different sources and places. This is what I see as key problem we again face with current fascisms: the refusal of diversity; the refusal of the other. I mention this because one of the core states of ‘repair’, as it has been thought about by Western white male modernity, is this idea of supremacy on time and history. The idea that we are able to re-enact by returning to the ‘origin’; to the state before the ‘accident’, before the ‘injury’; that we are able to own time. It’s an incredibly false myth and also impossible.

For me, the notion of return – as derived from the Latin root of the verb reparare [‘restore’, ‘put back in order’] – is extremely dangerous, as it could equal theories of fascism; the idea of returning to the very early moment. That’s why I think the concept of ‘repair’ has an important political subconscious that we have to dismantle. I’ve become aware that by doing artistic research, you observe objects, people, human bodies, scars – in fact scars have this incredible power. As Cormac McCarthy used to say: “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” To translate all these into an artwork is complex because one must address the status and potentiality of art today. My method has always been to avoid a denial of the past, of the genealogy. It’s especially important now amid a current fascination with technology in the arts.

It is extremely important to elaborate on a corpus of work that is in dialogue with our significant genealogy because it is another part of fascism to deny the layers of history by only focusing on what we must return to and ignoring the in-between.

LP: Your research has involved long-term conversations, building over the last decade and feeding into your researchbased moving image works and large-scale sculptural installations and environments.

KA: It is something that one cannot control. Sometimes I start by finding a broken plate and repairing it, as recently happened to me in Berlin. For three weeks the pieces were lying on my studio desk and after a trip, I started to glue them together. It took me three days. The practice of being an artist is neither the meditative moment of drawing, which I like a lot, nor this sort of determinist thing that you know what you want to do. For me this plate is also research: you leave, come back, revisit, stay with. I showed it to a fantastic restaurateur, Anne Göbel, in the Dahlem Museum Ethnological Museum (Berlin). She said it was badly done because the cracks were showing; if she had done it, there would have been no visible signs. I think the dialogue we had was very interesting because of course she is a ‘soldier’ of the ‘order of the perfect’.

For me, the injuries tell me plenty of things. These small objects I collect or repair, help me breathe within the ongoing processes of research. If all of my life’s work was a single book, then these small pieces would serve as punctuations. I have a heightened sense of care for objects but don’t spend the same amount of time or intellectual energy on them as I would with a film. My films and installations may take up to three years to develop. But both are very important.

LP: Often you employ everyday materials – such as cardboard, wire mesh, mirror fragments, couscous – to build installations and to employ various objects.

KA: I believe in everyday objects as metaphysical entities – as having emotional and symbolic power. I think one of

see certain African objects at the Musée du uai Branly (Paris) or the Metropolitan Museum (New York). These objects are philosophy – and thus part of a complex cosmogony of conscious and subconscious symbolisms – even though the indigenous religions that produced them were colonised.

When it comes to speaking of the non-rational, I very much respect the work and flexible thinking of Stefania Pandolfo, who links two discursive traditions – Islam and psychoanalysis – when speaking of illness, trauma and healing.3

Kader Attia, Untitled, 2017, ceramic, metal wire, diameter 25.3 cm; photograph by Ela Bialkowska, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua

the stronger ruptures between the pre-Modern moment and Modernity is not just the rationalisation of our relations with others but also our relations to objects, in the sense that the hegemony of reason has cut us from the possibility of living with an invisible or parallel world. In our everyday life, it often translates as fear of being ridiculed. In his book, African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude, Souleymane Bachir Diagne writes that in African civilizations, where systems of writing did not exist, masks and sculptures were philosophies.1 I really do think that this works the same with each and every object. Everyone refers to some objects as special, due to familial and other relations.

This is how objects carry this philosophy and mythology.

LP: Can you discuss your involvement in projects that look at changing our perception of objects in ethnological museums, regarding the way collections represent them as artistic or ethnologic material?

KA: I have a continuous pilgrimage to inquire into the ‘hidden’ collections of museums – the forgotten items – and to excavate those objects that have been repaired and stored away. I met Clémentine Deliss (then director of the Weltkulturen Museum) in 2012, when I arrived in Frankfurt to explore the whole parcours of museums.2 We continued to collaborate, as she was also interested in the question of giving new life to these ‘hidden’ objects. For me, she is a very exciting director for an ethnographic museum – which has generally been a very conservative and often reactionary context up until now – opening up ethnography to contemporary art.

I also like the Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel (MEN), where, as part of your research, you can touch the object and this ‘patina’ becomes part of the object’s existence. This is a legacy of the ethnographer and former director, Jean Gabus.

LP: Your research into the ‘repair’ also connects to how decolonisation and understandings of restitution are addressed.

KA: I’ve been working with these issues for over a decade and still (re)discovering different aspects of the repair concept. What is crucial to make clear, when we speak about restitution, is what these objects (colonial artefacts) really are, and to map their epistemology, making visible the hijacking of the non-Western epistemology by the Western one. The whole problem of restitution is that it concerns an ‘imaginary’ that has been colonised. Some of the objects might be considered powerless by now and might not be reclaimed, but then you talk to people who avoid going to

LP: La Colonie (the space you established in Paris in 2016) strongly relates to your questions and research. In Le Monde, La Colonie was described as the headquarters of the ‘decolonial intelligentsia’.

KA: For me it’s an unlearning place. It’s been a long missing part, a phantom limb, that now links debates on the Anthropocene, decolonialism and feminist critical work. The space is located by Gare du Nord within an ocean of diversity.

I left Paris 11 years ago and have been working on the subject of colonialism for almost two decades, but I was not invited to exhibit there until recently. There has been a strong denial in France of that colonial history, and I thought the most efficient would be to create a space for ‘invisible’ topics, as well as for communities. I have strong networks in the banlieues and universities, artists, thinkers. I started by inviting activist organisations, which later extended into projects such as the ‘Decolonial School’.4 LP: Do you want programmes and debates, such as the ‘Decolonial School’, to influence current political conversations?

KA: It’s complex. On the one hand, over 600 people come for a debate on colonial issues, but on the other hand, we need to work on extending our network of competencies (e.g. to involve legal experts). I am currently having a series of conversations with my colleagues about the future of La Colonie. And though we have been attacked by some of the academic bodies, we have a great hope that the French academia will eventually introduce decolonial studies into their curricula.5 This is where I see a real task to be done, to affect the system.

On 25 November 2019, VAI, in partnership with Project Arts Centre, welcomed Kader Attia to present a screening of Réfléchir la Mémoire / Reflecting Memory (2016), followed by a Q&A. Lívia Páldi is the Curator of Visual Arts at Project Arts Centre, Dublin.

Kader Attia (b. 1970) grew up in Paris and Algeria and spent several years in Congo and South America.

These formative experiences fostered Attia’s intercultural and interdisciplinary research on colonial histories and immigration. kaderattia.de lacolonie.paris

Notes 1 Published by The University of Chicago Press in 2012.

2 Clémentine Deliss is a curator, publisher and cultural historian. Between 2010 and 2015, she directed the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, instituting a new research lab to remediate collections within a post-ethnological context.

3 Stefania Pandolfo is professor and director of the UC Berkeley Medical Anthropology Program on Critical Studies in Medicine, Science and the Body at the University of California, Berkeley. Her anthropological work unfolds at the interface of psychoanalysis, critical theory, Islamic thought and local healing traditions.

4 Proposed by the Frantz-Fanon Foundation (Paris) and convened by independent scholar, educator, and decolonial feminist activist, Françoise Vergès, and poet, playwright, novelist and director, Gerty Dambury.

5 The conversation on decolonisation has been accused of a new type of racism. See: www.lemonde.fr

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Career Development

Artistic Genealogies JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS CURATOR RAOUL KLOOKER, AHEAD OF HIS VAI EVENT IN FEBRUARY.

Honey-Suckle Company, Eswerde/Rosasprich, 2003/19, installation view, Kunstverein Braunschweig; photograph by Stefan Stark

Joanne Laws: Perhaps you could begin by discussing your background and training?

Raoul Klooker: I first studied Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic for two years but changed my major to History of Art and added a second minor, History of African Art. At the time I was working in a queer activist group that was based in the student union’s building. While in the final year of my BA, I co-curated a group exhibition on queer genealogies in contemporary art at nGbK in Berlin. Before working on that exhibition, it never occurred to me that curating could be an actual job option. An English friend of mine told me to apply to the Royal College of Arts’s Curating Contemporary Art MA programme, rather than doing an MA in History of Art in Germany. I was lucky to get some financial support through a German government scholarship, which covered a large part of my tuition and living costs and enabled me to co-run a project space on the side, called clearview.ltd.

JL: Can you describe your previous involvement with the Counter-Histories film programme at Tate Modern?

RK: I began working on the ‘Museum of Clouds’ programme (as part of Counter-Histories) while doing a curatorial internship at Tate Film with Andrea Lissoni and Carly Whitefield in 2018. The internship was supposed to be six months long, but got extended by four more months, so I could work on the screening series. Andrea came up with the title while thinking about an interconnected group of filmmakers, curators and programmers who have been collaborating and making films together in different constellations over the last ten years, without every formally establishing themselves as a movement or a fixed network. I researched the works of Gabriel Abrantes, Basma Alsharif, Alexander Carver, Benjamin Crotty, Mati Diop, Beatrice Gibson, Shambhavi Kaul, Laida Lertxundi, Matías Piñeiro, Ben Rivers, Ben Russell, Daniel Schmidt, Ana Vaz and Phillip Warnell (this list could have been longer of course, but we had to end it somewhere), and came up with different combinations of their films.

I looked at the ways in which these artists actively collaborated by co-directing, sharing resources, or even acting in each other’s films. We also focused on common themes and shared formal interests that emerged when looking at these artists’ solo works together. In the end we grouped the films into six short film screenings, each with a different theme.

We also invited as many of the included artists as possible,

Richard Sides, Site-specific wall sculpture, 2019, installation view as part of ‘Dwelling’ at Kunstverein Braunschweig; photograph by Stefan Stark

as well as a number of international film programmers and writers who have championed these artists’ works in recent years. During the screening programme at Tate in October 2018 they came together to publicly discuss their shared ideas and ways of working for the first time.

JL: What is your current role at The Kunstverein Braunschweig?

RK: I’m an assistant curator, working alongside a curator and the director. As a small team of three curators, delivering eight exhibitions per year across two buildings, we collaborate on bigger exhibitions and also get to curate our own projects every year. I’m also in charge of the Kunstverein’s press and social media, while my colleague manages the institution’s learning programme. The first project I worked on in Braunschweig was a group show focusing on collaborative art practices. I curated a display of two film series by the anonymous Mexican collective, Colectivo Los Ingràvidos, and invited the Berlin-based group, Honey-Suckle Company, to produce a new installation of automated instruments, photography and sculpture, which was their first institutional show in over ten years.

The first solo exhibition that I have curated at Kunstverein Braunschweig is ‘Dwelling’ by Richard Sides, which opened on 6 December 2019 and will remain on show until 16 February. For this exhibition, Sides has built an entire wooden house within the gallery space. Inside the house, is a screening of an experimental fictional documentary. Sides also constructed a faux concrete wall outside the building which makes it look like our garden has been privatised and turned into a real estate development. Next summer I’m organising a solo project by Markues, a Berlin-based artist who is currently researching the history of a now closed Berlin bar that had been putting on cabaret shows by trans women and cross dressers for 50 years, between 1958 and 2008. Later this year, we’re also going to be presenting a solo exhibition by Gili Tal. JL: In terms of your ongoing curatorial research, which art historical and contemporary themes/discourses are you particularly drawn to?

RK: I’ve been interested in the ways in which queer culture and queer history can be represented in contemporary art exhibitions and institutions. I co-curated a group show in 2016 that was specifically looking into the ways in which queer discourse can reframe artistic genealogies. I think a

driving motivation behind this was the very patriarchal art school system in Germany, in which certain male painters have passed on their status as genius enfants terribles to their straight male students/assistants, while often reproducing sexist and homophobic attitudes.

Although queer art is a recurring interest of mine, I wouldn’t say it’s my main specialism. Recently, I’ve worked with a lot of different artists who work across site-specific or reproducible media to think about the ways in which neoliberalism affects our consciousness and the culture we live in.

Even though artists like Colectivo Los Ingràvidos, Richard Sides and Gili Tal are all from very different backgrounds, with very different practices, what is politicised in these artists’ works is not (just) the themes or the content of their work, but also their material form.

JL: Are you interested in artist-led or collectivist exhibitionmaking practices?

RK: Even during the first curatorial project I was involved in I was part of a collective of five friends, organising a queer group show at nGbK in Berlin in 2015/16. When I joined the project space clearview.ltd in London a year later, the collective aspect of our work was even more important, as we lived together while putting together exhibitions. From the beginning, we actively decided that we would not publicly communicate who initiated each show or event. I don’t want to romanticise artist-led spaces entirely, as they often require a lot of unpaid labour and self-exploitation. But I do think that project spaces are often the most interesting exhibition sites in bigger cities, because they can often be more spontaneous, experimental and politically outspoken than formal institutions. They also usually exhibit younger artists, whose work isn’t as commercially driven. Working in bigger institutions is often a lot more hierarchical, by comparison.

Raoul Klooker is part of the curatorial team at Kunstverein Braunschweig in Germany.

On Friday 7 February, Raoul will deliver a presentation and group critique on Queer Artistic Practices during a day-long event at Visual Artists Ireland’s Dublin office. kunstvereinbraunschweig.de visualartists.ie

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Profile

As Others See Us SUSAN THOMSON PROFILES THE WORK OF ARRAY COLLECTIVE AT JERWOOD ARTS IN LONDON. IT’S THE MOMENT for collectives. The climate crisis tells us

that the path of individualism, competition and profit is not working, and that we must find a global collective approach, for the sake of our planet. Collectives, both political and artistic, and those which sit somewhere between, have long existed – from Dada and Bauhaus, to Fluxus and the Guerrilla Girls, Assemble and Extinction Rebellion – with the Turner Prize 2019 recently being awarded collectively for the first time, at the request of the four nominated artists.

Art collectives embody a political energy, a sense of fun, creative freedom and offering (when they work well) vibrant social models. A timely exhibition of early career artists at Jerwood Arts in London, entitled ‘Jerwood Collaborate!’ (2 October – 15 December 2019), brought together four groups, each nominated by invited curators from different regions of Britain and Northern Ireland.

A collaboration between the artist collective Keiken and CGI artist George Jasper Stone, the CGI augmented reality installation, Feel My Metaverse, is a mesmerising, technically impressive satire, set in a room with a mirrored floor and a green foam archipelago for the viewer to sit on. The genderless characters exist in a post-biological future, run by a corporation, where for example, a character chooses to have a scar placed on their arm, not because of any biological event such as a vaccination, but in order to represent an event. Technology available to the characters as they wander through deserted landscapes includes ‘Uber 3000 Moral Compass’, a bubble spaceship with a planet inside, which performs data mining on, say, the theme of suffering, downloading billions of users’ samples so that memories of events they never had play out in their brains, before certain examples are selected.

In this post-human future, the human becomes a desirable commodity and so are emotions, of which one would think we would wish to rid ourselves.

Towards a Black Testimony: Prayer, Protest, Peace is a new film by the London-based artistic and curatorial collaboration, Languid Hands. The work presents a collage of lo-fi archival footage of black funerals, marches, voodoo ceremonies, and is accompanied by a voice-over reading texts from wellknown black figures, such as Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The footage itself is raw and powerful and at times features people literally wailing or screaming at funerals and marches, but it doesn’t quite match the voiceover which sounds a little too produced, monovocal and academic. It would have benefited from the archive of the authors themselves reading, or further musical sound design; however, the idea of a collaged ‘Black Mass’ is a creative and important one.

Foregrounding the issue of collaboration itself, Fill the Void: Developing Our Creative Practice is a workshop-style, process-based installation by Manchester collective, Shy Bairns.

They document their own learning, or ‘filling the gaps in their knowledge’ through teaching one another skills, having interviews, discussing zines and queer issues, and writing letters of apology, which seek to semi-jokingly diffuse the inevitable tensions in a collective. There is a refreshing honesty to this, and some institutional critique, including the foregrounding and itemisation of the artists’ fees given to each group to make the show (£2000 per group), though the piece works better as the take-home book than in the installation itself.

Also developing satirical political reflection with humour is the collective Array from Belfast, an artists’ studios and activist art collective, whose work revolves around political issues in the North of Ireland, particularly those relating to the criminalisation and control of bodies – abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights – as well as politics of the post-Troubles landscape. Fictional and mythical characters appear in a video installation, taking part in street protests (such as Pride) or performing on the streets of London and Northern Ireland.

Array draws from pre-Christian folklore of Ancient Ireland: ‘Bán Bídh’, the sacred cow, ‘The Long Shadow’ embodying

Array, ‘As Others See Us’, 2019, commissioned for ‘Jerwood Collaborate!’; photograph by Anna Arca, courtesy of Array

trauma and loss, and ‘The Morrigan’ about the female experience, referencing mother and hag. Bán Bídh wears a conical-shaped straw mask and a black and white cow costume, dragging two pink milk-full udders, heavy bags through the streets. The choice of going back to a period before Christianity also alludes to a pre-sectarian era – a time of seeming wholeness. The videos are surrounded by banners with black feathered fringing, featuring abstract images from the costumes, and recalling banners on sectarian marches.

It is in these darker elements that Array really come into their own, when the costume or character becomes enigmatic as opposed to too literally political. The same is true with the glitter ribboned mask of ‘The Long Shadow’, in which someone in a grey hoodie and tracksuit, follows a man through the streets of London in a menacing way, evoking too an LBGTQ+ double life, as well as working on both literal and metaphorical levels in representing the trauma of the Troubles. This sinister edge is apparent too in the strange hobbled knees of the woman, a kneecapped, pregnant ‘hag’, walking towards Westminster stroking her belly. She has dinosaur polystyrene scales on her back and black feathers around her neck, and a glitter triangle over her mouth. Belfast itself excels in a very dark humour and the installation continues this.

Each video cuts back to the sea, which seems fitting, given the proposed post-Brexit customs border in the Irish Sea. The videos are overlaid with archival TV footage relating to the Troubles and the fight to change the laws on abortion.

The audio is a composite of archive, traditional Irish songs, TV footage and anonymous voices. This superimposition of images and sounds immediately invokes a historical layering, an archaeology, but can at times feel a little cluttered, especially over all three video monitors. In addition, the use of video, the DIY aesthetic and the ‘retro’ politics of Northern Ireland, can make the installation seem at times a little dated. However, the energy of the group is palpable, as well as their political commitment. A glance through Array’s Twitter feed reveals other characters developed for recent protests, including a head, breaking through a glass ceiling; Big Ben with a pram; Mother Ireland who demands bodily autonomy; and several bakers carrying large cardboard cupcakes, to protest the notorious ‘gay cake’ legal case involving Ashers Bakery in Belfast.

The law on both abortion and equal marriage changed in Northern Ireland, on 22 October 2019, shortly after the exhibition began, through inaction sadly on the part of Stor-

mont which still lies empty, though apparently an end to the suspension of Parliament is on the horizon. I do feel that Array missed a trick here in not updating their archive library which also forms part of the installation, sending video/documents electronically during the ten-week run of the exhibition. It would have given the library a much more alive and activist feel, rather than being reduced to historical document or spectacle.

That said, a symposium organised by Array in December really brought the issues alive. Malachi O’Hara, of the Green Party, Ann Rossiter, feminist activist and writer, Electra La C*nt, queer drag artist and journalist Una Mullally spoke on a panel. It was an emotional discussion for those involved, and Ann Rossiter, who has for years helped Northern Irish women travelling to the UK for abortions, asked pointedly: “Are we history now?” Others mentioned the appalling statistic that more people have died from suicide since the Troubles (over 4,400, a figure recorded in 2018) than died as a result of the conflict. There was also discussion on the role of the Republic in the struggles of the North, and of education and Trans rights as the next frontiers there. At times though the evening felt a little insular – Irish and Northern Irish people talking to themselves, albeit in London. It would have benefited from inviting for example a British politician involved in the recent legislative changes. Interestingly, the chair talked of how she, Jane Wells, and Emma Campbell of Array, lobbied Labour MP Stella Creasy on Twitter and then met with her to discuss abortion rights in Northern Ireland, at a point when Creasy was unaware of the issues, but concerned about the recriminalisation of abortion in the USA. Creasy went on later to table the bill which together with Labour MP Conor McGinn’s motion on equal marriage has resulted in the legislative change. As the idea of the collective has eroded in our social and political arena, it feels ever more necessary to re-establish the notion of community and collective action in our cultural sphere and society.

Susan Thomson recently directed the short film Forbidden City (2019) and the feature length documentary Ghost Empire § Belize (2020). This forms part of the Ghost Empire trilogy, which explores the legacy of British colonial laws on LGBTQ+ rights around the world. susanthomson.co.uk

The Visual Artists' News Sheet

Critique Edition 48: January – February 2020

Eoin McHugh, io, pp. 49–54, pigment ink on paper six pages, 15 × 20 cm each; courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

‘Over Nature’ Rathfarnham Castle, Dublin 14 November – 21 December 2019

Beata Piekarska-Daly, Untitled, 2019, oils and gold leaf on canvas; courtesy of the artist

Kathy Herbert, Sampling, 2019; photograph by Shane Finan

ARRIVING LATE TO view ‘Over Nature’ at Rathfarnham Castle means settling into a very particular viewing condition – namely one of silence. First encountered in this group show (curated by Valeria Ceregini) is an installation

by Shane Finan. In an unrestored dining room, a projector casts landscape video footage onto a faint and skeletal painting that spans two large canvases. The projector is controlled by the viewer through a small touchscreen device, upon which a grid of options appears, displaying geometric symbols. Each of these options is linked to a separate video. The painting – a somewhat ghostly transposition of William Turner’s Rye, Sussex (1794-7) – is at times almost buried under the strong fluttering hues of the videos cast onto it. In quieter frames however, its marks become more apparent, and there is a back and forth of pictorial prominence, fluctuating between states of visibility.

This optical dichotomy is effective at first but soon becomes drawn out. These fluxing visuals repeat without building anything, and unfortunately there is little introduced in the way of textual connection to engage with outside of this mechanic. However, these particulars tell only half of the story. External to the work is the dining room itself, unrestored and engulfed in deep and old silence. The echoes and reverberations that would normally carry in a white cube seem to have been subsumed into these cold bare walls. In this potent silence, the work resonates in some way, but through means outside of its own intervention.

Continuing on, the viewer enters the Long Gallery where the majority of the works are on display. Again, the space as it exists, independent of any artwork, is powerful. The silent void of the previous derelict space has given way to a restored, yet comparably intimidating, Elizabethan parlour. Embedded into the decorative

Reflecting the prominence of mixed media processes in her work, Kathy Herbert presents several works based on the Dodder River in a stripped-back and straightforward manner. A large drawing of rippling water is draped in front of a window; a process notebook sits on a plinth; a series of small vials containing water samples is displayed on a table, and a linear series of digital photographs capture instances of the river’s flux.

Opposite these, the graphite of some smaller river drawings glisten and reflect the November sun. Further up this opposing wall, Mary O’Connor’s abstract canvases attempt to flatten and cool with subtle motions of blue.

Notions of ‘The Anthropocene’ drive the exhibition, and there is an implicit call (as stated in the exhibition press release) for the collective to grasp at “the material formalisation of the possible”. Relative to this end, Herbert, for example, specifically references Félix Guattari’s Three Ecologies as a formative work in her pro-

ceiling are ten paintings by Patrick Touhy, commissioned by the Jesuit Order in 1913, which depict the life of Christ. They peer down onto the exhibited works in an unforgiving manner, imbued – as iconography often is – with a weight through that which is unsaid.

Louis Haugh presents a visual display of a spruce tree on a monitor, framed centrally and only mildly disturbed by a breeze on an anonymous hilltop. Placed next to the fireplace is Haugh’s second work: a jagged-edged collage of silver gelatine prints that coalesce to depict a scene of dispersed branches and twigs. Meanwhile, paintings by Beata Piekarska-Daly, titled Arras I and Arras II (2019), line the floor and crawl up the far wall. These sprawling linens, saturated with heavy applications of acrylic, are at once inviting but tonally subdued. Shown alongside them is a more measured and similarly decorative effort – this time with oil and gold leaf on canvas.

Louis Haugh, Radio Tree Antenna, 2018; photograph by Shane Finan

cess. This text presents a sensitive case regarding ‘selfhood’, claiming that as we are increasingly reliant on forms of mass signification, we will be continuously and increasingly reduced to a subjectification of passivity and repetition. With art, the sort of narrowed subjectification Guattari is referring to proliferates through the usual tropes we encounter, whether they be material or conceptual. Considering then that as an exhibition ‘Over Nature’ seeks to formalise new possibilities, one would assume these tropes to be subverted, or at least tested, where and when they are devised. Instead, there is little that emerges throughout the show, formally or otherwise, that could be construed as effective when considered in this light. The choice of going back to a period before Christianity also alludes to a pre-sectarian era - a time of seeming wholeness.

Philip Kavanagh is a writer on art based in Dublin.

Guillaume Combal, Ubiquity, 2019, video installation; courtesy of the artist

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Eoin McHugh ‘Loge, Jelo, Laso’ Kerlin Gallery, Dublin 25 October – 7 December 2019

‘Scaffold’ The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, London 23 October – 3 November 2019 YOU DON’T NEED me to recap the stories –

Eoin McHugh, Orzchis caldemia (detail), 2018–2019, acrylic ink and watercolour on paper, 56 × 72.5 cm; courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery

SPEAKING ON LUKE Clancy’s ‘Culture File’ on RTÉ Radio 1, Eoin McHugh offered ‘Loge, Jelo, Laso’ (Red, Yellow, Blue) as straightforwardly phonetic, like all of the words in Toki Pona, a philosophical language invented – believe it or not – to make things easier to understand.1 McHugh’s titles have previously referenced poetry and psychoanalysis, in an oeuvre rich with allusions to both. Clearly interested in language and how it relates to our perception of art, he complicates things considerably here by choosing titles – our traditional access points – every bit as esoteric as the images themselves.

Maybe that’s the point. Approaching an image through familiar language inevitably alters our perception; we see the image overlain with language, we ‘read’ it, and perhaps the artist wants to confound this tendency by presenting us with words we don’t understand.

McHugh’s previous Kerlin show (‘The Skies Will Be Friendlier Then’ in 2014) was commanded by an ungainly black beast. Unearthed from some despicable ground, the hybrid figure was both threatening and oddly vulnerable. On the walls nearby, two Persian carpets had been stripped of their woven logic and touched-up with a kind of analytic violence. The air in Toki Pona land is less fraught. Paintings and drawings – there are no scary sculptures here – are divided equally between framed and unframed, abstract and figurative, colour and black and white. The anxious air of old has been replaced with an idea of order.

Seven small oil paintings are equally spaced along the gallery’s north flank. Of similar size and treatment, their colourful surfaces are smooth and blurry, like out of focus night scenes or botanical details too close for the eye. Of course they might be just paint, ordered by intuition and formed into pleasing abstractions.

Introducing them, the gallery press release states that: “Research and source material are largely bypassed in favour of experimentation and direct expression…” This might be applied to any number of painting practices, and is difficult to square with McHugh’s previous habits of allusion and metaphor. Of course things change, but their sense of a probing, underlying restlessness suggests these paintings are less about experimentation than a world waiting to be born, hovering on the brink of comprehension.

On the opposite wall, a series of more than 100 black and white notebook drawings are displayed in a row of elegant, white frames.2 Hinged so they sit out from the wall, each frame carries two sets of six drawings arranged in neat grids on opposing sides. Made during and after therapy sessions, the pages have a doodling, obsessive quality, with birds, human figures, and other, freakier creatures, all set amidst explosions of marks and lines. Here and there words appear – ‘floating’, ‘glowing’, ‘nerves firing’ – and these, along with the serial format, bring comic books to mind (and zines, á la Raymond Pettibon, for instance). A grander imaginative leap might take us to Goya, and his etching series, ‘Los Caprichos’ (1799). An early comic book of sorts, the most talismanic work from that set, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, would feel perfectly at home here.

McHugh is a gifted draughtsman, adroitly capable of making even the most outlandish scenarios seem, if not exactly natural, at least on the brink of credibility. In a separate, larger drawing, called Orzchis Caldemia, a bald and naked man sleeps beneath an orgy of spiralling figures and abstract shapes. While he sleeps, his erect penis, topped with a miniature version of his own head, appears distinctly awake. This miniature knobhead is, in turn, a platform for a tiny songbird, one of a myriad of avian creatures (some with penises of their own) swirling within the centrifugal image. In an additional twist, the entire scene appears to be emanating from the eye sockets of a ghost-like, human skull. A previous work by McHugh, Little Hans Nightlight (2014), with its light projecting eyes, seems a forerunner to this macabre image. I’m also reminded of John Ashbery’s long poem, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, where the poet describes a captive soul, restless to go further than the eyes can see. “But how far can it swim out through the eyes”, he asks, “And still return safely to its nest?”

John Graham is an artist based in Dublin.

Notes 1 First published in 2001, Toki Pona (‘Good Language’) was invented by Canadian linguist, Sonja Lang.

2 The series of drawings is collectively titled ‘io’, from the aUI language, invented by W.J. Weilgart as an aid to psychoanalysis.

the promise of the internet turned sour – but perhaps it was always heading that way? What began as a research project by the US military, in the heat of the Cold War, has metastasised into an elaborate, sophisticated surveillance network. The mainstream news is littered with reports of data mining, privacy violations, election hacking, and workers’ rights being deleted. Suddenly the internet is everywhere, inescapable and bad for us...

Over the last decade, the response from artists to a looming dystopia, shaped by tech giants and gurus, has typically taken a handful of predictable forms: fantastical scenes of techno-apocalypse, highly stylised portraits of alienation and dejection, and a more recent addition to the genre – ‘data dumps’, aimed at countering the prophets of Silicon Valley. Loosely connected to this current critical discourse, the exhibition ‘Scaffold’ thankfully offers something beyond the familiar tropes that have taken hold. The exhibition is curated by Seamus McCormack, featuring works by artists Kate Fahey, Adam Gibney and Jonathan Mayhew. The term ‘scaffold’ offers a useful architectural metaphor, as something that can control, contain and support the structures that govern our lives, particularly with reference to digital technologies. Through sound, video and sculptural installation, the artists riff on the symbolic value and consequences of information, its systems and its politics. Little here is made, but rather found and assembled, installed and juxtaposed – fabrication hardly makes sense, in an immaterial world of posting, scrolling and searching.

Jonathan Mayhew has contributed two separate works: one, a white vinyl text piece which reads “I think I’ve forgotten this before”, fading into the white of the gallery walls; the other, titled This is water, is a collection of decorative ceramic vases, dotted carefully around the floor, which hold USB sticks like flowers. Memory takes a tangible quality – it is hidden, stored, slipping from your mind. Instead of simply externalising our memory, like writing does, Mayhew’s vessels remind us how algorithms shape, prompt and mirror our own. Identity flows between user and avatar, with the pots and text acting as proxies.

Adam Gibney also addresses the urgency of information, appropriating scientific frameworks to examine how knowledge is constructed. In Affirmation 3: Understand(ing), a microphone is suspended over a text on String Theory – a theoretical framework for questions of cosmology and fundamental physics. We can hear a computer-generated voice repeating the phrase “I understand” from a speaker cone embedded in the printed text. The text is blurred at the edges, as if being gradually eroded by the swaying pendulum or some deeper entropic force. The computer-generated voice slowly consumes itself as it gets lost in a feedback loop from the broadcast of the speaker and the reception from the microphone. This tension between human knowledge and our systems of meaning is continued in Gibney’s second piece, Problem 5: A Space within this Place. In a narrow corridor towards the back of the gallery, a radio skips through different FM broadcast stations, searching for signals offering empirical descriptions of space. While both of Gibney’s pieces are explicitly about science or technology in some way, it’s through the process of installation that wider metaphors come to the fore, relating not just to what we know, but how.

Kate Fahey’s two-channel video installation, I could feel that my eyes were open, addresses how we process information. One chunky TV is perched upon another, with the top screen showing a finger pushing against the flesh of its own body. Below, zoomed-in footage of drone warfare drags across the screen, as if someone is moving the image with a mouse, inspecting the edges and details of this recording of distant violence. On the wall behind the two TVs is a small copper hand with rubber tips on two of the fingers. Through detached limbs and absent bodies, distance, alienation and presence are woven together, across media, places and experiences. Fahey reminds us that as information is so readily available, it is all too easy to become desensitised.

While it may seem that a consensus has calcified around a critique of the internet and the titanic corporations it has spawned, a growing awareness of the problems doesn’t seem to have created any kind of agency. The uniformity of much of the critique happening in contemporary art, merely serves to show how the internet has once again captured our attention. The artists in ‘Scaffold’ find something else – not an escape, retreat or even an attack – something approaching a heightened awareness, a scrambling for the tools to make sense of it all.

Chris Hayes is an Irish writer and editor based in London.

'Scaffold', installation view, The Bomb Factory Art Foundation; photograph by Tom Carter

Kate Fahey, I could feel that my eyes were open, installation view, The Bomb Factory Art Foundation; photograph by Tom Carter

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Camille Souter & Frank Morris Custom House Studios & Gallery, Westport 19 October – 1 December 2019 ANY EXHIBITION FEATURING Camille Souter’s work is going to have immediate visual impact, and her recent retrospective at the Custom House Studios in Westport was no exception. Curated by her biographer, Garrett Cormican, the exhibition featured 24 works, ranging in date from 1955 to 2015, grouped by decade throughout the ground floor gallery.

Several paintings – including When the Mist Comes Down (1964), The Musical Clown at Duffy’s Circus (c. 1966–67), My Father’s Garden (c.1970) and My Father’s Greenhouse (c.1970) – engaged with the concept of memory, and were shown alongside work that explored environmental and political issues, all of which confirmed Souter’s artistic status among her peers, and among her viewers.

The exhibition encompassed five sculptural works by Souter’s late husband, Frank Morris (1928 – 1970), which were a revelation for their quality. Carved from wood, Morris’s sculptures are quietly monumental. Four of the works, abstract in form, were displayed together. The fifth, a figurative work, titled Busheltits, was exhibited on its own in the second room. Well-known in artistic circles during his lifetime, Morris died young and has been somewhat sidelined since.

Now fifty years since his death, Morris is a prime candidate for further research, and a larger-scale exhibition of his work.

The central focus of the show is Souter, for whom the figurative, or rather elements from reality, form the initial basis of her work, from which she then creates her highly individual style of abstraction. Influenced by international abstract expressionists, Souter paints on various types of paper (including newsprint) and board, using various combinations of oil paint, printers’ ink, plaka paint and aluminium paint. Harlequin (1955), for example, painted on newsprint, calls to mind the work of Cubist artists, several of whom worked directly onto text or sheets from contemporary newspapers, as a means of commenting on political issues and war. Souter visually comments on war too, evident in Target Aim and Fire (c.1982–84), which at first glance, is an attractive landscape, until the grey aeroplane and the red, poppy-shaped fields emerge.

Another example, Desert Shield (c.1992), the title of which references the Gulf War, features a

caravan of combat vehicles in formation across the scorched desert. Landscape, particularly that of her home, Achill Island, is a recurring theme for Souter; The Rape of the Achill Quartz Quarry (1992), for instance, demonstrates the artist’s ability to investigate landscape in cross section, and yet it visually criticises the physical destruction and environmental devastation caused by commercialism on the island. So too, and although gaily titled, The Achill Wedding (1989) quietly remonstrates against the number of cars on the island, while Now Find Shannon Airport (1979), painted as if from a bird’s eye view, encourages viewers to question the obliteration of the natural world for the purposes of imposing a modern runway. At the same time, Souter’s sense of humour is evident in a small painting, titled Self-Portrait as a Cod’s Head (1993), in which she plays with ideas of being a ‘cod’ or ‘codding’, an Irish expression for having a laugh, or making a joke.

Garrett Cormican, and the team at the Custom House Studios, are to be warmly congratulated for the excellence of Souter’s retrospective, installed to celebrate her ninetieth birthday. All of the paintings, with one exception, were on loan from private collections in Ireland. The selection of work was well thought out, and wellgrouped. While Cormican’s biography of the artist was available to purchase, a minor gripe was that the handout for the exhibition was disappointing; the images were too small, and the information about the artist and her work was sparse. Souter is one of the most significant artists of her generation. A Saoí of Aosdána, she is widely considered to have made a “sustained contribution to the visual arts in Ireland”, to quote Cormican’s text. In my view, the excellence of the work on show highlights the merits of a far larger, full-scale retrospective, that would situate her 64 years of sustained practice within its national and international abstract expressionist context. As the Custom House Studios exhibition proved, Souter may live far from the perceived artistic centre, but her artistic sensibility merits universal celebration.

Dr Éimear O’Connor HRHA is a curator, art historian and author. eimearoconnor.ie

Camile Souter & Frank Morris, installation view, Custom House Studios & Gallery; photograph by Conor Mc Keown, courtesy of the artists Custom House Studios & Gallery

Doireann Ní Ghrioghair ‘Declaration of the State Metropolis at Tara’ Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin 31 October – 16 November 2019

Doireann Ní Ghrioghair, Declaration of the State Metropolis at Tara, 2019, 3D print & laser-cut MDF, installation view, Pallas Projects/Studios; photograph by Kasia Kaminska, courtesy of the artist and Pallas Projects/Studios

DOIREANN NÍ GHRIOGHAIR’S recent exhi-

bition, ‘Declaration of the State Metropolis at Tara’, presented a series of new sculptures, which reimagine the work of architect Daithí Ó hÁinle, who mapped plans for a new capital city for Ireland at Tara, County Meath, in 1942. Ó hÁinle was a member of Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, a far-right political party formed in the same year, whose stated aims included transforming Ireland into a fascist, one-party Catholic state, where emigration would be criminalised and the speaking of English forbidden. As no actual drawings exist for Ní Ghrioghair to work from, she took inspiration from Ó hÁinle’s florid title for his project, ‘Maoidheamh ar Árd-Cathair Stáit I dTeamhair’ (Declaration of the State Metropolis at Tara), and his patriotic nomenclature for individual elements, such as a ‘National Avenue’ and ‘A Garden of Heroes’, which would house the ‘Column of the Resurrection’, destined as a location for “important national displays”.

Having recently undertaken a research residency at UCD’s College of Architecture & Engineering, Ní Ghrioghair based her version of the Garden of Heroes on the Garden of Remembrance, which Ó hÁinle was latterly responsible for. The city plan included amongst other civic buildings: a City Hall, Parliament Building, Sports Stadium and a Cathedral – Ní Ghrioghair’s model was based on the Basilica at Knock, which Ó hÁinle designed in 1976.

During his time as Dublin City Architect from 1959 to 1965, Ó hÁinle completed a number of social housing complexes, which Ní Ghrioghair uses as templates for his proposed ‘seven-floor flats in which there will be lifts’ – identical to the Kevin Street Lower flats, around the corner from Pallas. It is unsettling that Ní Ghrioghair could draw so easily from Ó hÁinle’s actual work to elucidate his bizarre and unsettling vision for Tara. Setting aside retrospective judgement on the absurdity of Ó hÁinle’s dystopian proposition – elements of which were eventually realised and became iconic in Dublin – Ní Ghrioghair favours a skilful reinterpretation.

Her sculptural installation becomes a form of ‘disclosure’, unpacking a Pandora’s box of cognitive and emotional confusion about the origins and intent embodied in the architectural heritage of the city.

At Pallas, the architectural models are placed on modern white tables, arranged in a neat rect-

angular grid, each one accompanied by a short bilingual description in green vinyl lettering.

On one side, the text is presented in Irish (using Cló Gaelach typeface) and on the other, in English, suggesting that the project should be viewed as an ‘international expo’. The models are 3D printed in a shiny black material (not specified), hardened into delicate miniatures in various architectural styles, from neo-classical to modern. They are smaller than one would expect for a ‘mock-biennale’ showcase. Amid fairly dim ambient light, the tables and models are spot lit, casting dynamic shadows in many directions onto the various surfaces in the space.

The models are dark and inky and in this environment require very close observation to appreciate the extraordinary level of detail Ní Ghrioghair has achieved – multiple layers of miniature arcading, tiny columns, the dome of the Parliament, spires topped with spheres, the startling familiarity of the ‘seven-floor flats’, and the hospital crowned with a disproportionately large cross. Throughout the buildings there appears the repeated use of the Ailtirí na hAirséighe emblem, made up of the Cló Gaelach ‘E’ (for ‘Éirígí’, meaning ‘rise up’), with a vertical stroke through the middle producing sinister associations with the German Swastika.

The text descriptions emphasise how each building would be placed strategically within the topography of Tara and be visible from different approaches to the site. Ní Ghrioghair used contoured MDF layers, to mimic the rise and fall of the landscape.

The accumulated impact of components – which are so exact, detailed and perfectly crafted – clashes conceptually with the background story. Historians have documented the phenomenon of sympathetic fascist sentiment and popular support for the Axis powers during the 1940s in Ireland – Ailtirí managed to secure nine council seats in the 1945 elections.

Ní Ghrioghair has dredged the complexity of this by her matter-of-fact presentation of what could have been, and what actually was. Using keen judgement and attention to detail, she has disturbed our emotional connection to our built heritage with great power and subtlety.

Carissa Farrell is a writer and curator based in Dublin.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

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Nomadic Gallery AIDAN KELLY MURPHY INTERVIEWS MARYSIA WIECKIEWICZ-CARROLL ABOUT THE RATIONALE AND EVOLUTION OF BERLIN OPTICIANS GALLERY. Aidan Kelly Murphy: Launched in late 2018, Berlin Opticians is an Irish gallery with a primarily online presence, supported by periodic physical exhibitions. What were the origins of the gallery?

Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll: The rationale for Berlin Opticians dates back to 2015 and conversations I had with a number of artists about the need for another commercial gallery in Dublin. There was this group of artists who graduated around 2009 and into a period when everything seemed to collapse; and while there were opportunities to show work in DIY spaces, there wasn’t that link to the commercial sector, to facilitate the sale of work. Around this time, everything started to change; places like Broadstone Studios closed, and from there it snowballed, with more and more studios and galleries closing. This all fed into those conversations around creating another gallery, which could create new opportunities to show and sell work – this was very important from the start.

AKM: How did the lack of affordable space in Dublin influence the decision to proceed with Berlin Opticians?

MWC: In 2015, I was still tied to the idea of a physical space.

But then I began to realise that it was impossible to move forward with a traditional approach, as a permanent physical space in Dublin was unattainable. The sustainability of the project was a significant factor, as was where to focus my energy. If you have a permanent gallery space in the city, it costs a lot of money, and 90% of your energy will go towards sustaining it. For me, a curator’s role is to care for the artist, so a major incentive was to showcase artists while supporting them in a way that would see the money going back into their pockets.

AKM: How were the ten artists selected?

MWC: There is a generation of artists who graduated around ten years ago, that were ‘emerging’ but are now actually more established, with a number of solo shows under belt.

Coupled with this is a set of energetic and compelling recent graduates, creating a diversity of artists that generate exciting conservations between both groups. During the studio crisis, Gerard Byrne was talking about the importance of studio spaces and the sense of community they create. I see Berlin Opticians as this type of community, offering the potential for support and exchange. Gender balance was also important to me. I’m not trying to make any political statements – I just wanted to make sure that male and female artists had equal space and say in the gallery.

AKM: How does Berlin Opticians situate itself, in relation to a burgeoning lack of physical interaction with art?

MWC: I think in a way, Berlin Opticians is a reaction to how we all view art these days. When conceived, it was very much ‘attached to a space’ – partially because that’s how I tend to interact with shows. However, we all look at magazines and read reviews, imagining artworks and exhibitions in our heads. And let’s be honest, Instagram has become a dominant platform for interacting with art. We all have our favourite artists, yet we may not necessarily have even seen their work in reality. I think if you look back, there has always been interactions with art using different media, and that would not always involve the physical. We’ve balanced the physical with the digital, intertwining physical shows with online only exhibitions – this documentation can be found on our website. I’m not trying to eliminate a physical interaction with artworks, I think that’s absolutely necessary.

AKM: As a gallery without a permanent base, do you feel you are more open to exploring the use of temporary spaces?

MYC: Definitely. As a nomadic gallery, I think we’re more open to possibilities; and whilst it requires a lot of flexibility, it is also exciting. Although the architecture of the first set of

Berlin Opticians Gallery, Inaugural Exhibition, 18 – 20 October 2018, 63 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, installation view; photograph by Lee Welch, courtesy the artist and Berlin Opticians Gallery, Dublin

spaces was predominantly Georgian, they were all drastically different. In the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, it was like walking into a house, with a sense of the domestic and an aura of comfort, which worked particularly well with contemporary art. In the Irish Georgian Society, we found ourselves in a setting that was designed for exhibiting but had an interesting tension in how the traditional lent itself to the modern, with its difficult salon hang. For the third show in Poetry Ireland, this was a unique space, but one that had a specific role. You have to be able to respond to the places that are available. It becomes a scouting operation, and while you might be preoccupied with space, it is not everything. There is a wider identity to the gallery.

AKM: What are the advantages of using a model like this?

MWC: By forming a group, you are highlighting their activity, which in itself creates a springboard. As you don’t have a fixed home, people are offering and welcoming you into their spaces, which adds to the experience. Next year we will appear in different locations, some of them outside of Dublin, like Lismore Castle Arts, and that’s really exciting.

Not having a preoccupation with a single space provides a chance to expand beyond Dublin, potentially even beyond Ireland in the future.

AKM: Conversely, have any challenges arisen?

MYC: As the gallery inhabits a new space for each exhibition, there is no time to develop an intimate knowledge of it. Visits can be arranged beforehand, but the spaces are not always empty, so it might be hard to imagine what the exhibition would look like. You need to react intuitively and adapt to any restrictions that might suddenly appear. It’s hardly ever a clean white space, and you can’t always intervene or change it, as you have this limited amount of time. The idea behind it was never to pretend that you were in a white cube. When you bring art home you don’t necessarily paint your walls white, it lives in the space you provide it with. Another aspect to not having a fixed space is that we are continuously reintroducing our presence, so sustaining that engagement is something

we have to work hard on. On the plus side, there is neither the time nor space to develop habits, so we can continually reinvent the gallery’s identity, which is fun.

AKM: Would you encourage others to follow a similar approach?

MWC: Absolutely. It has been such an exciting journey, making space for art in a city where it feels like we’re being continuously eradicated. It takes a little courage, as it’s timeconsuming and there is risk, but that is also part of what makes it exciting.

AKM: Can you discuss your plans for 2020?

MWC: 2019 was very much about establishing the gallery, marking our presence and making sure we were visible. My first dedication is to the ten artists, but the latest show in Poetry Ireland in November saw an invited artist for the first time, Linda Quinlan. In 2020, the plan is to feature more invited artists and begin to open up the project, ensuring that Berlin Opticians continues to be a welcoming and accessible structure. This year we will also have a couple of solo shows in grand settings: Sven Sandberg in Rathfarnham Castle at the end of February and Alicia Reyes McNamara in Lismore Castle Arts in August. We’re also hoping to bring about something utterly different, but for now it’s still a secret.

Aidan Kelly Murphy is a writer and photographer based in Dublin, and the Associate Editor of CIRCA Art Magazine.

Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll is a writer and independent curator based in Dublin. The initial lineup of Berlin Opticians artists includes David Beattie, Neil Carroll, Paul Hallahan, Emma Hayes, Barbara Knezevic, Alicia Reyes McNamara, Sarah O’Brien, Liliane Puthod, Sven Sandberg and Lee Welch. The gallery’s first exhibition took place at 63 Merrion Square from 18 to 20 October 2018. berlinopticiansdublin.com

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Festival

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Helen MacMahon, Scintilla, 2014, light installation, dimensions variable; cut glass crystals, motor, tripod, LED pinspot lights,installation view, NUIG Gallery; all photographs by Jonathan Sammon, courtesy TULCA Festival of Visual Arts

THERE IS NO better place to experience the transformative and disruptive effects of

Tactical Magic HILARY MORLEY REVIEWS TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS 2019.

contemporary art than in Galway during November. Visitors wind their way through streets and alleyways, as TULCA Festival of Visual Arts negotiates its way into every available space in the city. In its seventeenth year, this curator-led festival occupied the city’s repurposed buildings and sparsely available galleries, sometimes operating without any heat while rain fell inside, as well as out.

Having performed ambitious interventions through her own artistic practice, which have earned her a brave and disruptive reputation, the appointment of artist Kerry Guinan as curator of TULCA Festival 2019 was an inspired choice. Guinan likes to research and examine the relationships between art, capital and place, in an age of grabwhen-you-can capitalism. For TULCA, she explored human manifestations around belief – a particularly pertinent inquiry at a time when beliefs are becoming more polarised. “Those [beliefs] that we thought were laid to rest, are re-emerging”, stated Guinan, during her opening speech. “The inspiration for the festival is my belief that art is effectively ‘magic’ and that it has a profound effect on the world”.1 Enter ‘TACTICAL MAGIC’ – the theme chosen by Guinan for this year’s festival (which ran from 1–17 November 2019) – featuring 15 artists, four specifically commissioned works and 12 associated events, spread across 14 venues. From a giant site-specific mural, and a socially engaged film project, to a spectacular light installation, all manner of exciting works were waiting to be discovered. The launch party at the Festival Gallery on 1 November was a significant event in itself, as was the date, which coincided with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, officially marking the start of winter.

Discovered and transformed by the Galway International Arts Festival, the miraculously repurposed GPO on Eglinton Street was the latest in a long line of temporary art spaces commandeered by TULCA. At the launch, the limited lighting gave the main venue a dark, cavernous feel; it was as if we had descended into a deep grotto, adorned with mysterious artefacts. The atmosphere was unearthly and magical. During Samhain, the division between earth and the otherworld is at its thinnest, as spirits make their journey from one world to the next. That night I felt I may have made that same journey – two performances on the opening night corroborated this.

Artist Mark Cullen began by using amplified sound. A haunting chant was the backdrop to a sort of sacred ceremony. Central to this was his Metal Slug Seer, a sculp-

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Festival

tural entity, made from expandable air-ducting and aluminium – a “member of a biomorphic underclass”, which operated as a “motorised priest” for the future.2 It expelled plumes of incense into the space. Subconsciously, I was back at Candlemas in the cold of lent. I adored the mystique, the flames, the miracles – and the survival of church was never in question.

A little later, the gaunt and ghost-like figure of Day Magee appeared from the shadows, beginning an extraordinary performance within his Keening Garden Door – a wooden structure adorned with quartz stones, standing in a mound of dense brown clay. A ritual traditionally assigned to women, Day’s keening recital ushered piercing cries that tore at our very core. Mourning the recent loss of his father, the artist also seemed to be expressing emotions around the discovery of his own sexual identity. It was heart-wrenching and powerfully poignant.

Given ample space to breath in this impressive space, Diana Copperwhite’s large polychromatic canvasses were a highlight for me at TULCA. Her paintings are an amalgam of abstract shapes, influenced by media, digital technologies and personal memory. She is a master of surface, adding and removing paint at immense speed, using large strokes. Deep within these marks are windows and portals into alternative perceptual realities. They make us think about how we construct images of the world, questioning what is real and what is not.

Katherine Sanky mirrored some of Copperwhite’s shapes in her intricately engineered sculpture, Desmosome, which stood tall at the back of the gallery. A twisted trunk of a whitethorn tree, its extremities morphed into immaculate copper piping, circled spaghetti-like in the space. I considered how modern engineering processes may not be so removed from those of nature. The form was ‘heart-like’ and I perceived water (a symbol of life) flowing in and out of the lifeless tree. Sanky’s small video piece, entitled Transposon, also challenged our beliefs, regarding reality and digital creation.

Throughout ‘TACTICAL MAGIC’, Guinan extensively referenced how art allows us to suspend our disbeliefs and reminded us of our understanding around nature, science, the afterlife, our own private rituals, and even how we go about making things. In his video, Slip of the Line, Anri Sala was being mischievous. The film shows a magician disrupting the uniformity of the conveyer-belt system of glass-

making – bending stems of pristine wine glasses using only his mind. I wondered about the glassblowers; their magical powers to create are now utterly lost to a contemporary system of mass production.

Across the festival, I was intrigued by many of the artists’ material references, manifested through the use of natural, found or human-made objects, transformative technologies, or even gestures of immateriality, conjured in the mind.

Copper, water, plants and light were commonplace. Helen MacMahon’s immersive light installation, Scintilla, at NUI Gallery, was inspired by the divine spark of human feeling or idea-making. Pinspot lights, trained on a cluster of lead crystals, casted reflections (taking the form of tiny snowflake-like rainbows) upon the walls, floor and ceiling of the darkened room. The work referred to the incendiary potential of human ideas, including ancient attempts to transmute ordinary metals into gold. The effect was other-worldly.

TULCA has delivered a highly successful education programme over many years, and a county schools project in partnership with Galway Public Libraries. I got involved as an intern for the 2014 festival, when I saw the transformative effect of a guided tour given by the T.Ed Co-ordinator.3 I was enraptured by the responses of children and young people to the works and over subsequent years as an Education Officer, their interpretation and exchange of ideas has never ceased to amaze me. The programme is an introduction to contemporary art, incorporating gallery tours, activities and in-school projects, and all types of conversations are sparked through the shared experience of looking together. During the first week of TULCA 2019, I witnessed twenty or so nine-yearolds looking at the sizeable Climate Series mural by the art collective, SUBSET, on the gable of a building near Spanish Arch. Some children thought it looked like a computer game, while it reminded others of a spaceship or a magical island. The greener elements represented nature and new life.

The grey ‘shadows’ were telling us how we are all “making the world dirty”. I could not think of a better analogy.

Other festival partnerships resulted in a display of magical artefacts in Galway City Museum and use of the Hall of the Red Earl, 126 Artist-Run Gallery and Engage Art Studios as exhibition spaces. There was a significant programme of events this year, encompassing music, film, performance, curator tours, workshops and an activity space specifically de-

Day Magee, Keening Garden Door, 2019, structure (200 × 90cm): ply, silicon, quartz, and soil from the artist’s father’s grave, mixed with fresh souls, TULCA Festival Gallery, 1 November 2019

Mark Cullen, Metal Slug Seer, 2018, sculptural entity, 90 × 70 × 30 cm; aluminium, aluminium tape, 12V motor, plastic pipe, PVC tape, mylar sheet, expandable air duct, incense, asymmetric timer, TULCA Festival Gallery

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signed for families. Environmental scientist, Nikita Coulter, combined scientific and folk techniques in a unique weather-reading demonstration. We were reminded about our ancestors’ abilities to predict the weather without meteorological aids, as if by magic, reading the clouds, the movement of animals or the direction of the winds.

Social engagement was celebrated in a newly commissioned film and installation by folklore collector Michael Fortune, entitled The Plants, Flowers and Trees of our People, which recorded “plant-based beliefs” in East Galway. Made in collaboration with a district heritage group near Tuam, this gently paced film shows local people describing the origins and magical powers of plants in their gardens and surrounding landscape. Some talked about their guardianship over certain trees, and why some specimens have survived because of local folklore or connections to past events. As a viewer, I felt the effects of this footage intuitively – that the footsteps of previous generations still resonate, thus influencing our belief systems.

As I immersed myself in ‘TACTICAL MAGIC’, it was hard not to be convinced by Guinan’s proposition – that we can open ourselves up to the possibility of art as magic, by suspending our disbeliefs and investigating the intangible caverns of the mind. In honing our ability to look, to imagine and to trust the instincts of artists, we can indeed be transported to magical places.

Hilary Morley is a visual artist, curator and the editor of MAKING.ie. She has worked as an Educational Officer with TULCA Festival of Art for the last five years.

Notes 1 Extract from opening speech by Kerry Guinan, TULCA Festival Gallery, 1 November 2019.

2 ‘TACTICAL MAGIC’ festival catalogue, p.28.

3 T.Ed: TULCA Education Programme was originated by Joanna McGlynn. After six years, she has handed the baton to Dee Deegan, who co-ordinated the 2019 programme.

Top: Diana Copperwhite, Alpha, 2016, 180 × 320 cm, oil on canvas, TULCA Festival Gallery Bottom: Subset Collective, Climate Series, 2019, large format public artwork, Quay Lane, Galway (commissioned by TULCA in partnership with Galway City Arts Office)

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Biennale

Áine McBride, research images, 2019, 35mm and iPhone photographs; courtesy of the artist

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Laura Fitzgerald, Meeting of Rock Uprising I, 2019; courtesy of the artist

Joanne Laws: What was the rationale behind your original project proposal, particularly with reference to the ‘Golden Vein’ thematic, outlined in the commission brief?

The Golden Vein JOANNE LAWS SPEAKS TO THE SOME OF THE ARTISTS DEVELOPING NEW WORK FOR THE 39TH EVA INTERNATIONAL PLATFORM COMMISSIONS.

Áine McBride: My motivation to respond to the thematic was the potential it offered for an abstracted response. The strip of land of the Golden Vein approaches an ideal(ised) state, offering a framework for conceptual projections around broader notions of land and landscape, place and site.

The perceived perfection of this area allows it to be considered in a way akin to a fictional space. How could this space of thought be manifested physically?

Laura Fitzgerald: My project will explore ideas relating to land use, inheritance, capital and survival, amongst members of the farming community in the Golden Vein area. I will be conducting interviews with farmers and using stones collected from the area, in order to discuss these issues. These themes will be further explored by antropomorphising the rocks I’ve collected and situating them within a variety of domestic, office and studio scenarios. I have long wanted to compare administrative aspects of the art world (such as funding applications) to those of the farming community, and the mentality that accompanies this quest for survival, both in practical terms but also in physiological terms, reimagining this as the stones’ ‘personal weather’.

Emily McFarland: At the start of 2018 I began collecting material documenting a series of actions taken by members of a small rural community living in the Sperrin Mountains of West Tyrone, close to where I grew up, in response to plans submitted by a Canadian mining and prospecting company, called Dalradian Gold Ltd, to the Department for Infrastructure in 2017. Particular conversations taking place within the community at that time and research I was doing overlapped with

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

the starting point for the 39th EVA International – thinking through ideas of land and its contested values within the context of Ireland today.

Eimear Walshe: The Golden Vein, as a historic term used to describe a fertile area of land in Munster, kind of romanticises the yield and value of the land in agricultural terms. Of course, it is a very urgent time to rethink (and materially alter) how land is valuated, shared, distributed and inherited, and Irish history provides us with a lot of illuminating precedents for this. Colonialism, migration, famine, economic vacillation and cultural trauma all play their part in where we find ourselves today. However, I’m specifically interested in how the libidinal economy impacts our relationship with land and housing; how our desire for intimacy, privacy and sexuality informs (and possibly restricts) our vision for how to live together.

JL: Can you discuss some of your ongoing research inquiries and methods? ÁMcB: My ongoing considerations are relatively broad and concern ideas of architecture, our relationship to space and place, and how these concerns may be communicated.

Identifying a suitable site for the artwork is also ongoing. This search is being done in tandem with the gathering of visual research. I’ve began collecting a set of digital and analogue images from direct and indirect observation, which are serving to drive the work in a formal capacity and may be a potential form of output in themselves.

Biennale my own trajectories of movement across the country. To try and gain better emotional understanding of the subject, I’ve been learning to sing traditional and country songs that deal specifically with romance, sexuality, class mobility and housing. Another aspect of the research has been in the gaining of knowledge about the social, political and affective consequences of having sex in different sites in Ireland: public, private, rural, urban, humble, monumental.

JL: How do you envisage the public manifestation(s) of this work, in the context of EVA 2020? ÁMcB: The work is conceived of as an outdoor work. The material and form of the work will be suited to, and informed by, the site. I think there is an option here to engage with the prospect of change. Could the work be manipulated to weather/develop/have a non-static form that could evolve over the course of the biennial’s two-month run? The work’s manifestation is likely to focus on creating a landscape onto which other works might be sited. A constructed ground might gather on its surface, in reference to construction foundations.

How might the creation of a surface draw together various strands of past, present and future? And ultimately how can elements of these be juxtaposed to produce or provide space for poetic thought?

LF: I am hoping that the video will be shown on an analog television set that people used to have in their homes – now more or less defunct, having been widely replaced by HD flat screen TVs. It might take the form of a series of separate

videos relating to each season – so four videos in total. These pieces may end up chaptered on one TV or screened on four separate TVs. I’d like to install the work in the kinds of places where members of the farming community might make pilgrimage to when visiting the city. Potential sites could include the main branch of a bank, the dairy aisle of a supermarket, a hardware store, or even a ‘Cafe Kylemore’style restaurant within Limerick City – any of these places might be appropriate.

EM: Right now, I am in the process of producing a sequence of short films and a longer single-channel video, which I see as fragments in a series. The films will be shown alongside ephemera and artefacts from informal archives compiled by individual community members since the beginning of their actions and establishment of Greencastle People’s Office.

EW: I’m making videos and drawings at the minute. I’m also writing about the affective relationship between modes of housing and sexuality from a more personal perspective, which I’ll publish in some capacity. I’m especially excited about EVA’s immersive and adaptive approach to sites within this iteration of the biennale, especially considering how the location and thematic are so intertwined. I’m hoping I can respond appropriately to that context in the installation of the work.

The 39th EVA International will run from 4 September to 15 November, across venues in Limerick city and beyond.

LF: I just bought a Ladybird ‘Learning to Read’ book called The Farm, which I’m planning on weaving into my new film. I also recently attended the Teagasc National Dairy Conference on 3 December 2019, to gain insights into the contemporary concerns of farmers working in the industry. I completed a project in September 2019 for Cashel Arts Festival, called ‘Rock Stars’ (curated by Emma-Lucy O’Brien), which has played a pivotal role in consolidating my thinking about the tone of the project. I made two postcard images, called Meeting of Rock Uprising I and II, that depict scenes of a group of rocks discussing how they could ‘take back’ ownership of the Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary – the seat of the Golden Vein. So, the premise of the project is very much within the ‘hands’ of the rocks, imagining things from their perspective and trying to understand how they would reorganise the use of land in the contemporary age. Preliminary research and production methods will build the actual content of the film itself, which for me is embedded within procrastination and the fear of making new work – in particular, new video work.

Some of the self-reflexivity referenced in the film will include a fear of failure – channeling the disappointment of farmers, of the stones, and of the curator, Matt Packer – and using an overarching theme of ‘imposter syndrome’.

EM: As part of my ongoing research, I have been looking at ways in which shared collective memories, cultural narratives and material histories are produced and what gets preserved or lost at a specific historical conjuncture. Bearing witness to the ecology of a particular landscape, preserving embodied memory by recording it, forming a contingency archive of a place in time, is something I’ve been thinking about as a method for resistance and transformation. I have been collecting moments of testimony from rural activists currently occupying land acquired by the mining company, forming the Greencastle People’s Office – a collection of caravans high in the mountains overlooking a valley of farmland, and utilising documentary forms to note particular details in the topography, non-human life, voice and song from the camp and surrounding mountains of West Tyrone. The dialogue shifts between shared experiences and personal accounts, converging with wider notions of solidarity, sovereignty, circulation of capital, ideologies of capitalism and particular legacies of historical colonialism, intersecting the global and the local.

EW: I’ve been learning about the history of the Irish Land Wars and the life of Land League co-founder, Michael Davitt. I believe the Land Wars are an under-discussed aspect of Irish history that feels very pertinent today. I’ve also been filming in sites related to these histories and sites along

Eimear Walshe, video still (research image), 2019; courtesy of the artist

Emily McFarland, Curraghinalt, 2019, video still; courtesy of the artist

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Biennale

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Jen Liu, Artwork Activation of Pink Slime Caesar Shift (Gold Edition), 2019; all images courtesy of Singapore Art Museum

In the Interregnum LOGAN SISLEY REVIEWS THE SINGAPORE BIENNALE 2019.

THE SEVENTH EDITION of the Singapore Biennale, titled ‘Every Step in the Right Direction’ (22 November 2019 – 22 March 2020), is thoughtfully curated by a team led by Artistic Director Patrick Flores. As the organising institution, Singapore Art Museum, is closed for refurbishment, the principle venues are the National Gallery of Singapore, Gillman Barracks – a campus of art organisations outside the city centre – and the Institute of Contemporary Arts at LASALLE College of the Arts. A small number of projects are hosted by other institutions or installed in public spaces across the city.

Flores has spoken of how he wanted to move away from the canons of art history dominated by European and North American artists, and to champion Asia as a continent where art is created and disseminated. His desire to engage with art history makes the National Gallery of Singapore an apt venue and the biennale sits well alongside its collection displays of Singaporean and South Asian art. These include narratives on the recent emergence of Singaporean art internationally, and on performance art in Singapore. A 1994 work by Josef Ng, Brother Cane, is cited as critical, in terms of the production and reception of contemporary performance, as the artist was fined due to the work’s gay themes (homosexuality remains illegal in Singapore).

These National Gallery displays provide a useful backdrop to experiencing the biennale, where performance and its traces feature strongly. Flores sees the biennale as both exhibition and seminar, and while numerous events are programmed during its run, the experience of the exhibition is not dependent on them. Action is implicit in this year’s title, ‘Every Step in the Right Direction’, which references Amanda Heng’s ‘Let’s Walk’ series, in which she facilitates workshops exploring the fundamental act of walking.

The body in movement features in Untitled (Theresa’s last work), a series of black and white photographs by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Working at

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Biennale

Sharon Chin, In the Skin of a Tiger: Monument to What We Want (Tugu Kita), 2019

the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1981, she photographed fragments of Renaissance, Mannerist and Baroque paintings with a focus on the positions of hands of various figures. The work was intended for a 1982 exhibition, not realised due to her death. At the National Gallery of Singapore her work hangs adjacent to Min Thein Sung’s ‘dust paintings’. These are created by the accumulation of dust on the surface of canvases, quietly composed of the smallest particles we perceive in our environment.

Another poignant examination of the relationship between time and place is Desire Machine Collective’s two-channel video, Nishan II, exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The collective is based in Guwahati in India and the work is part of a long-term project focused on Kashmir. Over a decade they collected images of an abandoned house in the contested region, which at times became a hideout and bunker during periods of war. The space is shown empty yet laden with history and as an endless loop, accompanied by a soundscape of the city.

Attentiveness to the details of daily life is encountered throughout the biennale. Intrusions into the everyday are explored by Karolina Breguła in Square, a multi-screen installation that transports the viewer to a Taiwanese town. Daily routines are interrupted by the presence of a strange sound-emitting object, hidden in the bushes in a public square, provoking reactions ranging from curiosity to antagonism.

In Opera of Kard (Market) by Thai artist Arnont Nongyao, the sounds and scenes from a local market in northern Thailand are crafted into a musical and visual score. Sound also features in Zakkubalan’s portrait of the creative process of the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. Played across 24 video screens in a darkened room, sound and image combine to create an intimate audio-visual collage. These installations are among many works that use montage techniques, spilt or multiple screens, which collectively privilege multiple vantagepoints over a single point of view.

Many voices contribute to Sharon Chin’s large-scale banners, installed in the vast atrium of the National Gallery.

Sewn from fabric salvaged from discarded political flags collected after a Malaysian general election, their colours represent different political parties and ideologies. Members of the public were invited to gather and sew something on these banners, although the scale of the work and the distance from which it is viewed render these messages invisible. The work is titled In the Skin of a Tiger: Monument to What We Want (Tugu Kita), 2019, yet what the ‘we’ want cannot be grasped.

The use of testimony as an artistic tool is encountered throughout the biennale. In Relic 3 – part of Larry Archiampong’s ongoing project about the fictitious Relic Travellers’ Alliance from the African Union – a time-traveller from the Alliance recounts the testimony of a migrant worker in post-Brexit Britain. In an earlier work in the series, coincidentally shown concurrently at ArtScience Museum, one of Archiampong’s characters states that knowledge can be lost in two generations.

Nabilah Nordin, An Obstacle in Every Direction, 2019

Dennis Tan, Many Waters to Cross, 2019

That sentiment is echoed in Dennis Tan’s Many Waters to Cross, which comprises a kolek – a traditional timber racing sailboat – and a video documenting its construction and attempted voyages. Kolek racing was a popular sport in Singapore in the mid-twentieth century but has largely disappeared. Over eight months, Tan built the boat in public without plans, through trial and error. The initial attempts at sailing the boat as it fills with water are compelling. In a fast-changing world, new knowledge may be created but much is also lost in the process.

The changing city is explored by Post-Museum, a Singapore-based collective co-founded by Jennifer Teo and Woon Tien Wei, whose installation at Gillman Barracks includes a stage set and props animated by a virtual reality experience.

It revisits a 2011–2014 campaign to save the Bukit Brown Cemetery from road developments. Bukit Brown Index #132: Triptych of the Unseen uses theatrical recordings viewed through VR headsets to explore the controversy from different perspectives. It is a local story of competing priorities in urban development, but one echoed the world over.

The title, ‘Every Step in the Right Direction’, might imply that all paths have a positive outcome, yet other readings are possible, and the crisis point that has resulted from our collective path of environmental degradation has not been ignored.

This is most evident at Gillman Barracks where thoughtful groupings of artists occupy several buildings. Ruangsak Anuwatwimon’s Reincarnations (Hopea Sangal and Sindora Wallichii), 2019, shows the artist’s research into two species of trees endemic to Singapore which are now critically endangered.

His recreation of recently felled trees at first glance appear unremarkable but closer inspection reveals a process of care and repair, of piecing together, figuratively and literally.

Elsewhere at Gillman Barracks, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore presents ‘The Posthuman City: Climates. Habitats. Environments’, a collateral event that sits well alongside the core programme, as does ‘2219: Futures Imagined’ at ArtScience Museum. This dramatically staged exhibition uses the speculative curatorial premise of looking back over 200 years of history from 2219, highlighting damage done to the planet but also its adaptation. It opens in the present moment with John Akomfrah’s stunning six-screen installation, Purple, exploring climate change through archival and newly-shot film, with a richly layered soundtrack.

Speaking on the opening weekend he talked of the “poetics of the interregnum”, referring to the period of crisis when the old is dying but the new is yet to be born.

Akomfrah also spoke of images as “promissory notes” to ourselves. There is a certain degree of hope inherent in making images; hope that someone may view them at a future moment. This dynamic between past, present and future is felt throughout the biennale, where hope is mingled with doubt and trepidation. Nabilah Norden’s installation is emblematic of this – literally an obstacle course for which she reworks the biennale’s theme in her title, An Obstacle in Every Direction.

Logan Sisley is Exhibitions Curator at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Columns

Artist Publishing

Artist Publishing

Currency, Transaction and Exchange

From Where the Heart Is

JO MELVIN DISCUSSES ‘PUBLICATION SCAFFOLD’ AT DUBLIN ART BOOK FAIR 2019.

BRYAN HOGAN DISCUSSES THE THEMES UNDERPINNING HIS RECENT PHOTO BOOK.

IDEAS AND EXCHANGES, congruent and discontinuous, emerged throughout ‘Publication Scaffold’. Scaffolding enables constructions, metaphorically and literally. The artist publication, as an exhibition in itself, revitalises exhibition sites. Functioning like a magazine insert within the Dublin Art Book Fair at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, ‘Publication Scaffold’ transformed Studio 6 and its hallway into an exhibition, performance, lecture and seminar space.

Pages turn, thoughts are uttered. Sound fills the space. Artists, curators and designers came together to exchange practices of production.

Two vitrines displayed material from the forthcoming book, Yes Yes Yes Revolutionary Press:‘66–‘77, a compendium of radical Italian press, curated by architect and publisher, Emanuele de Donno. Another vitrine showed several self-published books by American painter, Gene Beery, from the 1970s–80s, when he didn’t have a studio. Beery combines image and text to satirise the art market, aesthetics, politics and connoisseurship. Barry Flanagan’s lino prints, funds (1969), are authenticated by a blue thumbprint, the traces of a performance called take home pay piece (1971) and the notation for a silent concrete poem, O for Orange U for you (1965), filled the fourth vitrine.

Wayne Daly’s research in the Sitterwerk Art Library, Switzerland, generated ‘supporting matter’, a sequence of art-book captions on film.

Daly designed a flyer with the line “Gimme a hard copy right there” from the 1982 cult sci-fi film, Blade Runner, which was set in November 2019. Sounds from John Carson’s Evening Echoes (1993–1995) punctuated the space. The Northern Irish artist enlisted composer and musician Conor Kelly, to record and photograph newspaper vendors across 23 cities in the UK and Ireland. Carson included this vast psychogeographic work in a 1995 exhibition at TBG+S, when the vendors’ calls could be heard in the street. The story goes it provoked fisticuffs between two men, thinking one was insulting the other. Gareth Bell-Jones spoke about John Latham’s critique of received knowledge through his theories of time and economics.

Latham was a leading British Conceptual artist who, in 2003, designated his home and studio, Flat Time House (FTHo), as a living sculpture.

Interconnections between art and society, a central tenet of Latham’s practice, is kept alive in FTHo’s curatorial ethos.

Juan Sandoval joined Emanuele de Donno via Skype to discuss collaborative processes and Sandoval’s current projects with community groups to extract clay from former industrial sites and places of contested ownership, build kilns and fire ceramics. He sent a selection of these to be handled. Ramon Kassam presented a critique of neoliberal cultural infrastructures in Ireland, beginning with “an origin story of the end of painting in Limerick”. Incorporating images and video clips to navigate the terrain, he showed his strategy to paint within an expanded field, to reconnect with the concept of the artist as a creative subject.

Vukašin Nedeljkovic was housed through

Direct Provision between 2007 and 2009, while seeking asylum in Ireland. He later founded Asylum Archive to expose and document social conditions of asylum seeker accommodation.

He collaborates with asylum seekers, artists, academics, activists and immigration lawyers to create documents that critically foreground accounts of exile, trauma and memory. Elisabetta Benassi engages twentieth-century news archives, personal and collective memories as medium for the production of sculptures, film, books and slides. These diverse sources reconfigure ‘history’ in the broad sense, with smaller, forgotten histories. Benassi’s book, All that I remember, is a compilation of press captions, showing the backs of photographs and annotations.

Renata Pękowska performed her continuing research on the role and history of artists’ books in Ireland. Inspired by Giacomo Leopardi’s ‘Thoughts’, Pękowska’s performance imagined a casual exchange of views observed on Dublin’s streets, using images and graffiti to imagine the artist’s book caught in an identity crisis. Dan Starling joined from Vancouver to read from The Culture Industry and the Propaganda Factory – his rewrite of Roald Dahl’s, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Dahl reportedly rewrote the book, replacing the African workers at Willy Wonka’s factory with the Oompa Loompas.

Starling imagines subsequent revisions in which the “unknown trauma” becomes increasingly less possible to cope with. Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty’s spoken performance invoked a mythic-fictive-realist walk, along the abandoned Great Western Railway line between Sligo and Limerick, to explore popular visions of ‘The West’ as a frontier in both Irish and American imaginations. Cesare Pietroiusti joined by Skype to activate Non-functional Thoughts, (1978– 2018), a book accompanied by a website of approximately one hundred incongruous ideas that could be realised as art projects by anyone.

Adam Chodzko concluded with a performance lecture, ‘Ah look, you can (still) just about see his little legs (still) sticking out from it all’.

He took us on a journey to explore conscious and unconscious behaviour, social relations and collective imaginations and to optimistically rethink our bleak global situation. The programme also included the launch of John Hutchinson’s new book, Countercultures, Communities and Indra’s Net. Hutchinson takes his readers through a non-chronological history uncovering simultaneity within utopian communities, from the Beatles and William Blake to Shaker art. Like a spider’s web, or a methodological construct, once you are a caught fly, you cannot escape the discursivity and network of transactions and exchanges. In different and distinctive ways, each of the contributors to ‘Publication Scaffold’ worked with memory and documentation to confront personal histories with received histories.

Jo Melvin is a curator and writer based in London and director of the Barry Flanagan Estate. She co-curated ‘Publication Scaffold’ with artists Michele Horrigan and Sean Lynch.

FROM WHERE THE Heart Is (2019) is a

self-published photobook I began developing around three years ago. The project stemmed from an interest in taking photographs of houses in my area, and around different Dublin suburbs. Ideas for the publication began to develop further when I took part in a joint exhibition with Aila Harryson-Lorgan – ‘Lonely Nights’ at A4 Sounds in May 2018 – in which we each showed previous photographic projects. My series, titled ‘Hyper American’, is a collection of images conveying the hyperactive simulation we’ve come to associate with American cinema.

The series captures stylised instances and vibrant colour palettes, conveying dreamlike fantasies of very real places. Aila’s series, ‘No More Lonely Nights’, explores love and longing, and the spell cast by the performance of love rituals – a beautifully solitary and intimate experience.

Through conversations with Aila, a concept crystallised. We decided that we’d love to create a photobook that would portray various living spaces through the lens of longing and desire.

Many people of our generation are all too familiar with the homely suburban aesthetic of our upbringing; yet as adults, we have little prospect of becoming property owners in the near future.

This contradiction – desiring something that we’ve been brought up to believe is essential for comfort, family-building and living – creates a strange perspective. With this in mind, we set about reconceptualising suburban houses as something elusive that we may never have. Despite this somewhat cynical approach, we wanted From Where the Heart Is to have a celebratory tone, conveying our love for the suburbs. My imagery in the opening chapter adopts a radiant style, with bright colourful houses bathed in sunlight, against luminous blue skies. Aila’s chapter, titled Suburban Lights, embraces the dark aspects of desire, with nocturnal photographs cloaking the suburbs in darkness. This change in atmosphere evokes the growing distance between us and the object of our desires.

I’ve always been very impressed by the power of juxtaposing imagery with text. This format was something we wanted to explore in the book, in order to emphasise a nostalgic mood. I

put out a call across my networks and Alex Sinclair and Edel Marie Brady got in touch. Their short stories really enhance the overall impact of the photographic work. Edel’s text, 11 Oaklawns, draws from a rich well of nostalgia, describing a dreamlike vignette in her old estate in ‘90s Ireland. Alex’s piece, Nobody Else Will be There, is a similarly sentimental story which uses strong visual language to transports us into a suburban setting, where we carefully observe the other inhabitants. I later reached out to Miami-based visual artist, Sierra Grace, whose unique photographic work I’ve admired for a long time.

Sierra’s marriage of tumblr-esque poetry and photographs of Miami residences was a perfect addition to the book.

The book was designed by Anne Moloney and printed as a limited edition of 100 copies

by PurePrint in Dublin. The front cover design lends itself perfectly to the theme of the book, with the bold red typeface reflecting a hyper-stylised, gothic influence, found in real estate photography and wider Americana. The narrative structure of the book unfolds across a series of chapters. Images and text with Irish associations appear in the opening sections, followed by photographs I took a few years ago in a residential area of Los Angeles called Pacific Palisades. With white picket fences and tended gardens, houses in this area resemble the stereotypical American homes, depicted on TV and in popular culture. However, house prices in this area make home-owning inaccessible for a significant number of people, echoing the current property market in Dublin and many other cities across the world. This section is followed by images documenting holiday homes in Lahinch on the west coast of County Clare. These picturesque and eerily clean homes, springing up in the lush green countryside with no permanent inhabitants, echo a duality between transient residences, attainable for short periods, and a generation priced out of the property market, who possess a longing for permanent space.

Bryan Hogan is an amateur photographer from Dublin who graduated with a PhD in Chemistry in 2015.

Photograph from From Where the Heart Is, 2019; courtesy of Byran Hogan

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Art & Health

One Chance PAULINE KEENA REFLECTS ON THE EVOLUTION OF HER ART PRACTICE AND HER RECENT PARTICIPATION AT A CONFERENCE IN CANADA. A BACKGROUND IN nursing, both here and around the

world, has provided me with vast experience and substantial knowledge, which continues to inform my practice as a visual artist. What interests me is the human form – the human subject in the body – in terms of its physicality, power, chaos and interiority. Because we all have a body, and we live our lives through this body, it is the location at which the subject is involved in all social practice, and where the whole of our human existence unfolds.

The practice and science of nursing involves continuously working with the body. Very often, I had significant reason to consider how ‘the self ’ might be articulated and accounted for, in terms of the lived experiences of human existence.

Where do the contexts exist and how is language created to facilitate that articulation of self at the boundary of our existence, beyond what might take place and be accounted for in the medical/scientific model?

I’m particularly interested in those submerged, embodied narratives of self that exist beyond the resolve of conscious thinking and verbal language. I want to find a way to locate, to articulate and to create visibility around the narrative self, at those moments of our human existence when the unspeakable enters, and our identity (and sometimes life itself ) is threatened – when we find ourselves at the boundary of our existence, as in a terminal diagnosis or serious illness.

I have two Masters degrees in Fine Art, the first from Leeds University, where I came into contact with the work of linguist and psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva, and embraced the processes of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The second Masters was the culmination of a research-based art project, for which I received a scholarship to examine an area of Kristeva’s work, by implicating and mapping the concept of language as embodied experience onto the materiality of my own practice.

As well as creating a body of work and a substantial theoretical component, I wanted to extend this enquiry by applying these Kristevan concepts in an experiential lived experience. It was in this context that I set up an artist’s studio in the Rotunda Hospital in 2008 and began a collaborative participatory project with four bereaved mothers, all of whom had lost a baby. Kristeva’s ideas on the maternal, the mother’s body and language in the mother’s body were central to this enquiry at the Rotunda Hospital.

This work culminated in ‘The Green Room’ project, focusing on the experience of grief as a creative process.1 I wanted to look at the vocabulary of the bereaved mother whose baby has died, the process of her grief as embodied state, and how that might be made available to look at, to engage with and to observe. I wanted to investigate and explore – through engagement with ideas, processes, proceedures and materials – how certain structures, both physical and conceptual, could be established, within which the physicalness of grief could be languaged into a vocabulary specific to the mother’s body.

The work created in the context of this project was shown in an exhibition in the Rotunda Hospital in 2009. Small sculptures made by the participants were suspended overhead, the narrative work was published in a catalogue, and a neon drawing (created by myself and one of the mothers with her children) was included as well.2 The work was transferred to Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, where a lecture series arising in the context of the project was presented at the invitation of the Medical School at Trinity College Dublin.

I am currently engaged in an enquiry into the physicalness and process of the failing body in terminal illness. This work documents and demonstrates how contemporary art practice provided the framework within which a young woman who was terminally ill could engage with and examine the process and reality of self in the body, when “overwhelmed in dying”.3 I was invited to work with this young woman in 2011/12, shortly after she had been diagnosed with Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma in her mouth and salivary glands. This experiential collaborative relationship, which took place over a one-

Pauline Keena, One Chance, 2019, neon work; courtesy of the artist

year period, created a structure and a place of thinking, so as to trace and create narrative and language around the physicalness of her illness and her experience of living in the failing body, while still being a person in the world in a meaningful way. As well as that, she found a way to redefine and experience herself beyond her illness and definitions of herself as a dying woman. In this enquiry – which took place through practice and was externalised through visual and narrative methods – a model of self emerged that could coexist with and enhance the medical record and story of her illness.

In September 2019, part of this project, entitled ‘One Chance’, was selected for the World Congress of Psycho-Oncology at The Center for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Alberta, Canada (23–26 September), in association with The International Psycho-Oncology Society and The Canadian Association of Psychosocial Oncology.4 The mission of this annual global gathering is to foster the science and practice of psycho-oncology through partnership, research, public policy, advocacy and education. New research was presented by 300 speakers from 40 different countries – including physicians, oncologists, scientists, epidemiologists and researchers – in an environment that encouraged new global partnerships and strategic dialogues within multi-diciplinary teams.

The title of my submission was: ‘How autonomy and meaningfulness became present for a young woman who was terminally ill, through participation in a contemporary art practice.’ The presentation included four images, two depicting artworks created by the young woman who participated in the project, and two images showing work I created in response to the collaboration. This particular research did not produce any resolution but posed further questions about how art practice can engage the territory of the failing body and contribute to knowledge surrounding the end of life process. There was also consideration of the following questions: a. To what extent can an artistic endeavour, such as this, be brought to work synergistically with more rigorous scientific methods in the promotion of health and the management of illness, specifically within end of life services?

b. To what extent can this work develop a body of knowledge around the transformation of our loss/dying experience and our understanding of that experience, so as to extend our knowledge of the matrix of illness? c. How can knowledge and learning from this continuing endeavour be used in the context of research, education and art practice for further development in the future?

Presenting work at this major international meeting and engaging with other participants enabled me to see innovative ways of working and thinking. I encountered new outlets for publishing my research and created new contexts for showcasing work. I had the possibility to consider new partnerships across different disciplines of science and medical oncology, extending boundaries and redefining creative practice in this area of research. Working collaboratively with a medical scientist, for example, would allow me to create a practice of dialogue and exchange across the traditional boundaries of my beliefs, disciplines, positions and subjectivities. I believe it would enable me to consider my practice in new and innovative ways. In the process of this interface, there is the possibility to encounter new materials, processes and ways of thinking. I want to open questions and new ways of imagining within my practice, so that different languages can emerge, informed by and extended from the outside, by the rigour of the medical scientific model of research, understanding and knowledge.

Pauline Keena is a visual artist based in Kildare. Her work engages sculpture, drawing and performance and combines art practice, research and education.

Notes 1 Pauline Keena ‘The Green Room Project’, 2009, p.6.

2 This work was later shown in The Science Gallery, in the context of ‘Trauma: Built to Break’ (20 November 2015 – 21 February 2016), an exhibition and series of events created by artists and staff at Trinity College, Dublin.

3 Siún Hanrahan, ‘One Chance’, catalogue text, 2019.

4 See: ipos2019.com

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Public Art

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Public Feeling SARAH BROWNE REFLECTS ON HER RECENT PROJECT, COMMISSIONED THROUGH SDCC’S PUBLIC ART PROGRAMME, IN CONTEXT 4.

15 November 2019 Dear Public, At the time of writing, Public feeling is half-way through its run of Sundays in November. The first two Sundays were hosted by Tallaght Leisure Centre; the second two Sundays will be in Clondalkin Leisure Centre. I’m still driving around looking for you, making phone calls, writing emails, sending WhatsApp messages, putting up posters.

Some of you I know, and some of you I don’t. The artwork depends on you being there to move and breathe and sweat into it: it won’t mean anything without you all being in it together.

“Public feeling is a project about health and austerity, shaped by fitness choreography… Public feeling is a participatory experience. By booking a ticket, you are agreeing to take part in a fitness class, with an understanding of the risks involved in undertaking physical exercise. Please discuss any illnesses or injuries with your instructor before the beginning of the class. This will be confidential.”

This is part of the text that you encounter when you book a ticket, hosted on a theatre booking website (not Eventbrite), although the pages are designed, in this case, to fit the vocabulary of a leisure centre or gym. Tickets cost €7, a little less than the walkin price for a class. They’re free for leisure centre members and community groups: really, the €7 is just to create a moment of decision-making, so that we can track numbers and know how to greet you as you arrive. It’s not about generating revenue. As much as possible I’ve tried to think about these communications with you as part of the aesthetics of the project, because they matter so much to your experience.

I’ve imagined the three performances (classes) as a three-act cycle: BREAKDOWN (a virtual spin class); FALLOUT (a circuit class); and RESILIENCE (an aquafit class).

FALLOUT can accommodate 16 participants and RESILIENCE can accommodate 20.

So, it is a relatively small number of you that encounter the work most directly in the leisure centres over the four Sundays in November. (BREAKDOWN will be an instructional video, distributed online at publicfeeling.org for your individual use on a mobile device in another gym, or at home.)

I’ve been curious about the gym as a space of physical learning and transformation for some time now, with its distinct grammar of scripts, sounds, textures and objects, its own culture and – I felt sure – politics. I addressed the In Context 4 commission as an opportunity to site this enquiry in a particular place. Public feeling is situated in South Dublin County, where in 2018, it was found that while self-reported health has stabilised since the end of the recession, not everyone has benefitted equally: stress and mental ill-health remain higher in areas of greater deprivation. Carer burden is now the single largest factor impacting on wellbeing, and half of households in Tallaght in-

Anne Berot in rehearsal; photograph by Miriam O'Connor, courtesy of Sarah Browne

Neill Fleming in rehearsal; photograph by Miriam O'Connor, courtesy of Sarah Browne

clude a person with chronic illness. Conversations with community workers and health professionals in the Tallaght-Clondalkin-Ballyfermot area also drew attention to the pressures of the housing crisis and a new demographic of maternal suicide that is not represented anywhere else in the country. It is the first time, anywhere in the State, that women are taking their own lives in the same numbers as men. In the same areas, gyms and new churches are drawing new traffic into industrial estates, where many fitness businesses have been developing since the recession.

There is an extraordinary series of photographs taken by Sasko Lazarov in Clondalkin in 2009, depicting a housing estate littered with all kinds of rubbish, with glimpses of some children playing in it. It requires a read of the caption to understand that this was a result of residents being instructed by bogus leaflets to leave out unwanted household goods for collection, by collectors falsely claiming to be from the local council. The next day, men (who were not council employees) arrived and began taking certain goods which were of value and leaving the rest. These photographs were a kind of warning for me; both about the instability of appearances of dereliction and waste, and the difficulty of articulating a trustworthy voice through printed matter. As the project developed, the decisions I’ve made have been a series of moves away from representation or addition, and towards rearrangement. I wanted to avoid what a workshop participant described as ‘trauma tourism’, adding to or repeating representations of a community in crisis. Public feeling might present you with an odd mixture of objects and experiences, but it is an honest invitation and a promise to do no harm. It is up to you to make sense of it for yourself and identify value where you can. Public feeling is as much about the discussions that happen between you in the changing rooms afterwards, as the class that is staged.

While the process of casting performers for the project began as a conventional search for actors or dancers (albeit with personal training qualifications), I quickly decided to work with actual fitness instructors from the county instead. This involved a number of months of being a ‘secret shopper’ in all kinds of fitness classes in the area, learning about local inter-gym politics and feeling around for the right energies to bring into the project. Any doubts I had about my hunch that gyms can be politicised spaces were corrected with the election of Paddy Holohan (a former MMA fighter and gym owner in Tallaght) as a local councillor during the summer, joining Kenneth Egan

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

(former Olympic boxer and now an addiction counsellor in Clondalkin) in the move from gym into public office.

I knew from the beginning that I needed perspectives other than my own to bring into the scripting process, and I commissioned poet Colm Keegan to develop a piece of writing for the circuit class. A meeting with Senator Lynn Ruane in Leinster House led to an invitation to work out with her in her gym in Brookfield Enterprise Centre, and I later asked her to write a contextual essay for the In Context 4 book. This text, Rich in Resilience, articulated the complex experience of post-austerity gym communities so well I used extracts of it within the curated music selection for the aquafit class. Sound designer Bee Akkerman developed a new composition that featured field recordings and audio samples from austerity-era protests in the area (notably the water protests and the Greyhound lockout), all still conforming to the musical requirements of a fitness class. Colm and Lynn’s voices animate the leisure centre spaces in a very powerful way: they are generous, critical and hopeful. Their scripted voices interact with live coaching by Gareth Francis (Kickstart Fitness) and Eleanor Young (Terenure College), who lead the FALLOUT and RESILIENCE class respectively. Gareth and Eleanor take really good care of everyone that comes to take part, from the gym-phobic to self-declared fitness geeks. People tend to leave sweaty, rinsed out and smiling. As an artwork, this feels like an unusually pleasurable and wholesome thing to be responsible for.

Some of you prefer to communicate by email or in writing. Individual phonecalls and face-to-face meetings tend to be a lot better though, especially if I do it myself. So I drive around the Long Mile Road and the Nangor Road and many other roads that are similarly full of industrial estates (that are full of auto suppliers and without other points of orientation), stopping at community centres in housing estates with footballs stuck on the roof and always, always the sound of traffic whooshing somewhere close by. My little car is stuffed full of the objects that are repurposed into fitness equipment for the classes every weekend: a washbasket full of towels, weighted with concrete; a pair of 2l milk jugs and 5l jerry cans; a sock full of coins and something that feels like a pen-knife; a bunch of keys with a photo memorial for a loved one; a pair of beige anti-slip bathmats; some builder’s buckets and beer crates; 50 empty husks of 1l plastic milk bottles; a stack of exam papers and books; a milk trolley that carries everything.

(All these objects were found in skips, or reconstructed from observations of things I’d seen, heard talked about or found thrown out in gym car parks.) Did you know that dumb bells found their name from the movement of (silently) ringing a bell? A dumb bell. So, there are also weighted megaphones used in the classes, filled with concrete and incapable of speech.

Public Art

Fallen horse, Tallaght Leisure Centre; photograph by Sarah Browne, courtesy of the artist

Grief / machine / repetition / work / devotion / lifestyle / anticipation / endorphins / exertion / f itness / excitement/ self-conf idence / training / head above water / lane dominance / limitations / expectations / surprises / wet / joy / play / pace / action / together What is your first memory of your body? For a lot of people, it’s when something ‘goes wrong’, when there is sickness or illness or hurt. Colm told me this, when we were developing writing workshops in the leisure centres and reading The Body Keeps the Score

by Bessel van der Kolk. Over the summer I’ve been interested in sharing this #gymreading research through the rehearsals, so that readings and poetry exercises (like the word association above) and discussions about the semiotics of tracksuits can become normal activities on the pool side and in the aerobics room, as well as the more usual physical movement. I also know that some of you aren’t able to take part in a project like this. I’m going to be thinking about this more in future work, what kinds of bodies and experiences fit comfortably inside the ‘general public’ description, and what kind do not.

The ephemera of the project – posters, pamphlets – act as traces of the artwork, for those of you who cannot be there, for whatever reason. This includes photographs by Miriam O’Connor and an extract of the script by Lynn Ruane, designed by Peter Maybury. Filmmaker Jenny Brady has followed the rehearsal process so that there will also be a document that attempts to capture something of the project’s overall intentions, the atmosphere of its making, and allow for some reflection afterwards by people who have been ‘inside’ it. I brought on board an excellent producer, Aisling O’Brien (not a common enough support in visual arts projects, in my view) who was instrumental in securing coverage online and in printed press (RTÉ, the Tallaght Echo, Totally Dublin).

Lynn’s essay was published in The Irish Times, in the ‘Health and Family’ supplement.

Gareth has asked to use Colm’s commissioned poem, Body As, during his own classes back at Kickstart, so once the project is over in the leisure centres, an echo will persist.

Public feeling is as much a proposition and a rumour for you as it is an experience. As much as bodies can hold onto trauma, there is the possibility of learning and practicing different ways to move.

Rehearsal 3, photograph by Miariam O'Connor, courtesy of Sarah Browne

Yours sincerely, Sarah Public feeling by Sarah Browne was commissioned by South Dublin County Council through IN CONTEXT 4 – In Our Time and funded under the Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government’s Per Cent for Art Scheme. Thanks to Emer O Boyle, UCD Parity Studios, Jenny Richards, Bettina Persson, Marabouparken Konsthall and Michael Birchall, Tate Exchange Liverpool who supported the project in its development.

Sarah Browne is an artist based in Dublin. sarahbrowne.info

Rehearsal 1, photograph by Miariam O'Connor, courtesy of Sarah Browne

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Public Art

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Vanessa Daws, Beyond Islands, 2019; photograph by Brian Cregan, courtesy of the artist

I lie on my back and float in the dark water; around me swimmers tread water and bob. In the distance, I can see a long procession of people carrying an array of lanterns and sea creatures; they walk past a large blue wall where a black horse is rearing up, afraid to go into the boat and be taken off the island. The sea creatures beckon.

‘BEYOND ISLANDS’ WAS a participatory nighttime event that took place

Beyond Islands VANESSA DAWS REFLECTS ON HER RECENT PUBLIC EVENT.

in Skerries, County Dublin, on 21 October 2019. It was the culminating event in a series of swims I have undertaken over the past few years, to and around Lambay Island, as part of an expanded art project.1 My art practice explores ‘place’ through swimming – place being the watery spaces that are navigated and swam through, the littoral space surrounding, and the social space created by this shared activity. Swimming, journey, encounter and conversation are the starting points for my projects. I’ve been describing my process as ‘Psychoswimography’ – a watery drifting and reimagining of place.

‘Beyond Islands’ took people on a journey, with participants choosing whether to travel by land (walking) or by water (swimming). Along the way, the audience encountered performances and readings of commissioned and archival texts, video and animation projections, illuminated floating sculptures and a large shadow wall. The event started across the bay on the South Strand as the sun went down. After an introduction by the narrator, Rosaleen Ní Shúilleabháin, the swimmers and walkers parted ways, with Rosaleen guiding the walkers. The swimmers followed a smack of illuminated, flashing jellyfish towards the sea, where they encountered a performance by synchronised swimmer, Aoife Drumm.

Meanwhile, the walkers met Ian Fleming, disguised in a mound of seaweed, who read ‘King Fish’, adapted from Natural History of Lambay, written by Robert Francis Scharff, who was part of the Praeger expedition that spent a summer researching the flora and fauna of Lambay in 1907.

Scharff ’s text describes how the King Fish was found on the shores of

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

Lambay, and how this rare and beautiful fish can still be seen in Dublin’s Natural History Museum, although it has lost its silvery hue, now more a brownish-yellow colour of old varnish.2 Dominic Gilmore read this same text to the swimmers from the Currach ni Sceirí, lit by a beautiful King Fish lantern, made by Carol Martin from Skerries. Later on, after the walkers had passed the large shadow wall, Emer McLoughlin read a text written by myself, while the swimmers could be seen passing by. The final destination for both the walkers and swimmers was The Springers Bathing Area, a natural auditorium. At the Springers, 50 metres out in a boat on the water, Landless (a group specialising in unaccompanied four-part harmonies) sang The Ramparts Against Uncharity, a ‘siren shanty’ written by Landless member Ruth Clinton especially for the project.2 Landless sang as the ‘voice of Lambay’ who, like a siren, calls the listener to turn away from the signs of ecological collapse; the song warns of the perils of doing so. The swimmers listened while floating in the water, and the walkers listened from the shore.

My art projects start with a swim in the particular body of water I’m interested in. This embodied form of artistic research allows a sense of acceptance. Before submerging, I talk to local swimmers about the best to place to enter and exit and what the tides are like. I see swimming as a social activity and the swimmers are a crucial part of my projects. Springers is situated on Red Island, a tombolo that used to get cut off by the high tide, before it was developed, and a road built as part of Skerries town. Lambay can be seen from the Springers. The main attraction to the Springers was the Skerries Frosties, a group of local sea swimmers who meet daily at this site for swimming all year round. I’ve been swimming with the Frosties for many years and love their energy, camaraderie and booming laughter.

During the making of ‘Beyond Islands’, the longer I spent in Skerries, the more the project gathered momentum, fuelled by enthusiasm and support from the community. The project couldn’t have happened without all this good will. In particular ‘Teddy’s Shed’ – a large garage behind Teddy and Aisling’s house – was generously made available for the fabrication and storage of sculptures and lanterns. I facilitated lantern-making workshops with the Skerries Foróige, Prosper Fingal and in Skerries Mills.

For most of my art projects, I’m the sole organiser, administrator and producer. ‘Beyond Islands’ was the most ambitious project I’ve undertaken to date, and it was a massive learning curve, trying to navigate the red tape, logistics, permissions and safety procedures for events in the public realm – made even more complex by having the swim after dark, and with musicians out on the water. I worked with Swim Ireland on safety and insurance for the night swim. As a member of CREATE, I have artist’s insurance with JLT Ireland, which covers public liability, costing approximately €250 per year. I had to get permission from Fingal County Council for a public event and conducted a risk assessment. A problem arose when the company I had arranged to supply the pontoons told me (late in the day) that no one was actually insured to be on them. I was then faced (two weeks before the event) with trying to find someone to insure the grey area between land and water. After many emails and phone calls, thankfully JLT added this requirement to my policy.

‘Beyond Islands’ was scheduled to take place on 7 October 2019, but Hurricane Lorenzo had different ideas, so I had to change the date to 21 October to get a similar tide time and height. However, on the night, the weather was perfect. The Skerries Sea Scouts gave us kayak safety cover, Carol Finlay and Kinny from Swim Ireland kept the night swim safe.

ILDSA lent us tow floats, and there were little last-minute miracles on the day, like Geraldine’s horse box that turned up unannounced, to help move all the sculptures. Over 100 people of all ages took part, with some travelling from as far as Belfast. I enjoy the chance encounters that working in the public realm allows, such as the people out running or walking their dogs who come across an art event unexpectedly.

Public Art

Vanessa Daws, Beyond Islands, 2019; photograph by Brian Cregan, courtesy of the artist

Vanessa Daws, Beyond Islands, 2019; photograph by and courtesy of the artist

Vanessa Daws is an artist based in Dublin. ‘Beyond Islands’ was funded by the Arts Council of Ireland. Her next swim project will explore the English Channel, following her own Channel swim attempt in 2019. The project will involve a series of live events and a touring exhibition.

Notes 1 I have been swimming at Low Rock, Malahide, every week since moving to Dublin in 2011. Eight kilometres out from Low Rock, is the privately-owned Lambay Island and, for a swimmer, an island is a lure. I started a series of swims as a way to explore and research the island. The first swim was in 2014, as part of the CREATE Artist in the Community scheme. The sea swimming community from Low Rock swam relay-style until we reached the beach in Lambay harbour, where we swam the last 500 metres together. The second swim was during a residency at UCD in 2015. I swam a solo swim from Low Rock to Lambay, inviting members of the scientific and artistic communities to act as my support crew and to respond to the swim as they would in their professional practices. The third swim was a circumnavigational swim in 2016, when I became the first known person to swim the 8.2 km around Lambay.

2 Robert Francis Scharff, Natural History of Lambay, 1907.

3 ‘Ramparts Against Uncharity’ was the nickname given by architect Edwin Lutyens to the circular wall he built surrounding the castle and woods on Lambay Island.

Vanessa Daws, Beyond Islands, 2019; photograph by Brian Cregan, courtesy of the artist

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Public Art Roundup

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

ART OUTSIDE OF THE GALLERY

amphitheatre for introverts (and others)

AAEX Installations

Alice Lyons, amphitheatre for introverts (and others), 2019; photograph by Michael McLaughlin

AAEX Installations, installation view, 41–41 Clanbrassil St, Dundalk; image courtesy of AAEX

Artist name: Alice Lyons Work title: amphitheatre for introverts (and others) Site: Lough Lannagh Leisure Complex, Castlebar, Co. Mayo Commissioning body: Mayo County Council Date sited: July 2019 Budget: €45,000 Project partners: Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport (under the Per Cent for Art Scheme), Punch Engineers, Padraic McTigue Contractors, Castlebar & Granstone, Robbie Maguire (Castlebar Swimming Pool Complex architect)

Artists’ names: Anna Marie Savage, Bernhard Gaul, Caoimhe O’Dwyer, Caroline Duffy, Ciara Agnew, Geraldine Martin, Grainne Murphy, Heather Cassidy, James McLoughlin, Jebun Nahar, Jenny Slater, John Moloney, Michael Stafford, Niamh Gillespie, Niamh O’Connor, Omin, Petra Berntsson, Samantha Brown, Susan Farrelly, Úna Curley Title of work: ‘AAEX Installations’ Sites: 41–42 Clanbrassil Street and selected public locations in Dundalk Dates carried out: 15 to 29 November 2019 Project partners: Dundalk BIDS, Creative Spark, Dundalk Credit Union, Local Enterprise Office Louth, Ronan Halpin, the corridor, MAD Youth Theatre

Description: Sligo-based writer and visual artist Alice Lyons was commissioned by Mayo County Council to develop the public art commission, amphitheatre for introverts (and others), at the new Castlebar Pool and Leisure Complex on the shore of Lough Lannagh. The amphitheatre is designed as a public space for quiet, lakeside contemplation, as a compliment to the high-energy physical activity that will take place inside the new pool complex. The amphitheatre’s terraces are made of Kilkenny limestone and the lines from one of Alice’s poems is sandblasted into the limestone.

Lyons stated that her vision for the project was to “create a quiet yet significant intervention in the landscape, one that could hold a poem and a civic space that was in keeping with the overall atmosphere of tranquility of the place […] It is also anticipated to be used as a space for performances, gigs and readings by the local community.” A programme of events took place to coincide with the launch of the artwork in October, which included drawing sessions, meditation, a poetry reading and a workshop on creative process with Lyons. The artwork is the latest addition to the ongoing programme of public artworks for the county.

Description: AAEX (Art as Exchange) is an artist-led collective, founded in 2016. In November 2019, AAEX teamed up with Dundalk-based curator and lecturer, Anne Mager (curator of the corridor – an online platform for artists and cultural initiatives), to develop an ambitious exhibition of installation art, exploring alternative public spaces in Dundalk. An empty shop at 41–42 Clanbrassil Street was used as a central exhibition space, hosting a variety of art installations, including photo and video projections, murals, sculptural objects and performances. This was accompanied by satellite installations at the Demesne, the Long Walk Shopping Centre, the route from the Train Station through Park Street and the County Museum, connecting the town and its history with the central exhibition.

As part of the exhibition Anne Mager and Marcel Krueger (the corridor) hosted a panel discussion, titled ‘Where is the Art in Dundalk?’, which discussed the infrastructure, needs and challenges for artists in the region and why there are not more opportunities and experimental spaces for visual artists in the area. The discussion panelists were: Tom Muckian (Roe River Books, Dundalk), Paraic McQuaid (visual artist and lecturer), Úna Curley (visual artist, AAEX).

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Opportunities

Open Calls

Funding/Awards

KILKENNY EMERGING CURATOR

WEXFORD COCO EVENTS GRANT SCHEME

Kilkenny County Council Arts Office is inviting applications from emerging curators for their 2020 emerging curators programme. The opportunity will allow curators to gain direct experience of curating three six-week exhibitions at the Kilkenny Arts Office Gallery. Curator Eamonn Maxwell will also mentor the successful candidate. The candidate will receive a curator’s fee of €6,300, as well as a separate budget for exhibitions.

To apply, applicants must write a 500-word letter of interest, outlining their curational experience and how their programming will: benefit Kilkenny artists; benefit Kilkenny, its creative sector and wider community; and engage with and build audiences. A 250-word statement outlining how the opportunity would benefit their own career is also required, as well as submitting an up-to-date, two-page CV and two professional references. For more information, contact Kilkenny Arts Office.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | January – February 2020

GRANTS, AWARDS, OPEN CALLS, COMMISSIONS

The Wexford County Council Arts Office grant scheme for ‘Small Arts Festivals and Experimental Events’ is now open. The scheme aims to promote and support a diverse range of small arts festivals and experimental events throughout Wexford County. The focus is on festivals/ events of high artistic quality that are innovative and have a strong emphasis on public engagement. The Arts Office also welcome applications promoting cross-disciplinary artistic collaborations and experimentation.

The total fund for the scheme is €20,000.

Applicants may apply for funds in the region of €1,000 to €3,000. These funds are to be used to cover administrative costs and supports costs associated with the festival/event. The festival/ event must be completed by mid-December 2020. For more information and to apply, visit the Wexford County Council website.

OFFALY COCO ARTS FUNDING

Offaly County Council are currently seeking applications for two funding schemes. The ‘Professional Artists Support Scheme’ is designed to support the careers of artists who were born in or are domiciled in County Offaly. Applicants can apply under three categories (A: Continuing Professional Development; B: New Works; and C: Audience Initiatives). The average grant available is between €500 and €1,000. Consideration will be given to a limited number of exceptional projects that require additional funding.

‘Arts Act Grants’ provide funding for artist groups who are proposing arts projects within the community. Applicants should be based in County Offaly and undertake their proposed project/event within the county. Applicants can apply for up to €800. Full information on both the schemes can be found by visiting the Offaly County Council website.

MARKIEVICZ AWARD

Applications for the Countess Constance de Markievicz Award will open on 7 January 2020. The purpose of the Markievicz Award is to: honour Countess Constance de Markievicz as the first woman to be elected to parliament; and to provide support for artists (from all backgrounds and genres) to buy time and space in order to develop new work that reflects on the role of women in the period covered by the Decade of Centenaries and beyond.

Markievicz Award recipients will receive €20,000 and awards will be made to up to five applicants each year. Joint applications are welcomed. The award is administered by the Arts Council on behalf of the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and is open via a public call to artists working in all arts genres supported by the Arts Council. For more information, visit the Arts Council website.

Deadline Friday 31 January Email arts@offaly.ie

Deadline Monday 20 January, 9am

Web offaly.ie

Deadline Thursday 6 February, 5:30pm

Email deirdre.southey@kilkennycoco.ie

Deadline Monday 13 January, 4pm

Web kilkennycoco.ie

Email arts@wexfordcoco.ie

Tel +353 (0)57 779 4547

Web wexfordcoco.ie/arts-and-culture

Address The Arts Office, Offaly County Council, Áras an Chontae, Charleville Road, Tullamore

SCIENCE GALLERY DETROIT, USA

ARTLINKS BURSARIES 2020

VISUAL ARTS BURSARY AWARD (ROUND 1)

TRAVEL AND TRAINING AWARD

Deadline Thursday 30 January, 5pm

Deadline Ongoing

Email justine.harrington@artscouncil.ie (Visual Arts)

Email justine.harrington@artscouncil.ie (Visual Arts)

The Science Gallery Detroit (SGD), USA, are seeking proposals for projects for their forthcoming exhibition ‘Future Present: Design in a Time of Urgency’. They are particularly interested in projects that explore design at the intersection between art and science that address a wide range of subjects and themes.

Experimentation, provocation and research are central to SGD’s values. The exhibition aims to explore the practice and concept of design through the lens of artists, psychologists, storytellers, digital gamers, molecular biologists, performers, neuroscientists, designers, computer scientists, nurses, engineers, musicians, mathematicians, architects and young people.

Proposals can be for an existing artwork, performance, workshop or some other form of creative/research-based output. SGD strongly encourage that a target audience of young people aged between 15 and 25 years are kept in mind and that interactive or participatory elements are included in the applicant’s proposal.

The majority of SGD’s projects are funded up to around $3,000 USD, which includes all artist fees, materials, equipment, shipping and travel.

Wexford County Council, in partnership with Artlinks partners Waterford, Carlow and Kilkenny, are currently accepting applications for Artlinks Bursary Award 2020. Artlinks provides professional development opportunities and bursary supports for established and emerging artists who are resident in the four partner local authority areas. There are bursaries available in the following areas: the Emerging Artist Award (for those commencing a career in the arts); the Professional Development Award (for professional artists): and the Collaboration Award (for collaborative projects between Artlinks members).

To avail of the awards, artists must be members of Artlinks. Membership is free and is open to artists who are resident in the four partner local authorities. If not a member, contact your local arts office for registration details.

Registrations after 13 January 2020 will be ineligible for the above awards. For full details on each of the awards, visit the Wexford County Council website.

Deadline Wednesday 22 January / Monday 30 March 2020 (Collaboration Bursary)

Tel +353 (0)57 9346 800

Applications are now open for The Arts Council of Ireland’s 2020 Visual Arts Bursary Award (Round 1). The purpose of the award is to support professional artists to develop their art practice. It provides artists with the time and resources to think, research, reflect and critically engage with their art. The maximum you may apply for is €15,000.

You may apply for only one artform or arts practice area Bursary Award in any one calendar year. You may not apply to Round 1 of the Bursary Award in 2020 if you were awarded a Bursary Award in the second round of 2019.

You may not apply for a Bursary Award in 2020 if you were awarded a Next Generation Artists Award in 2019. In addition, you may only apply to one of the following awards in 2020: Bursary, Round 1; Bursary, Round 2; Next Generation Artists Award; and Markievicz Award.

Email justine.harrington@artscouncil.ie (Visual Arts) Web artscouncil.ie/available-funding Tel +353 1 6180200

Applications are now open for The Arts Council of Ireland’s 2020 Travel and Training Award.

The ‘outbound’ strand of the award is to support individuals who wish to avail of training and other professional development opportunities abroad (outside the island of Ireland). The priority is for the development of the individual’s own arts practice, including: participation in once-off training opportunities, specialist courses or masterclasses, as well as other professional development opportunities such as short-term research projects, residencies, participation in workshops, mentoring programmes, attendance at conferences/seminars, and so on.

Applications for the award are accepted on an ongoing basis through 2020 for planned travel and training activities this year. The maximum amount that can be applied for within the visual arts is €3,000. Applicants seeking support are recommended to submit their application as far in advance of their proposed date of travel as possible, but no later than four weeks before their proposed date of travel.

Deadline Friday 31 January 2020, 6pm EST

Email arts@wexfordcoco.ie

Web artscouncil.ie/available-funding

Web artscouncil.ie/available-funding

Web opencall.sciencegallery.com/design

Web wexfordcoco.ie/arts-and-culture

Tel +353 1 6180200

Tel +353 1 6180200

lifelong learning Winter/Spring 2020

Republic of Ireland

Northern Ireland

Dublin City

Belfast

Derry City & Strabane

VISUAL ARTISTS HELPDESKS / PROJECT CLINICS

VISUAL ARTISTS CAFÉ

GROUP CRIT: QUEER ARTISTIC PRACTICES

with Raoul Klooker Date/Time: 7 Feb. 10:30 – 16:30.

Location: Visual Artists Ireland.

Places/Cost: 12. €60 (VAI members) / €120 (Non-VAI members).

VAN CHATS: RAOUL KLOOKER

Date/Time: 7 Feb. 18:00 – 19:30.

Location: Visual Artists Ireland.

Places/Cost: 30. €5(VAI members) / €10 (Non-VAI members).

HOW TO PHOTOGRAPH YOUR WORK (INTRODUCTION)

with Tim Durham Date/Time: 18 Feb. 10:00 – 17:00.

Location: Visual Artists Ireland.

Places/Cost: 12. €60 (VAI members) / €120 (Non-VAI members).

PREPARING PHOTOS OF YOUR ART (INTERMEDIATE)

with Tim Durham Date/Time: 11 Mar. 10:00 – 17:00.

Location: Visual Artists Ireland.

Places/Cost: 12. €60 (VAI members) / €120 (Non-VAI members).

GROUP CRIT: SCULPTURAL PRACTICES

with Helen Pheby (Yorkshire Sculpture Park) Date/Time: 7 Apr. 10:30 – 16:30.

Location: Visual Artists Ireland.

Places/Cost: 12. €60 (VAI members) / €120 (Non-VAI members).

VAN CHATS: HELEN PHEBY

Date/Time: 7 Apr. 18:00 – 19:30.

Location: Visual Artists Ireland.

Places/Cost: 30. €5(VAI members) / €10 (Non-VAI members).

Upcoming in 2020 We have Lifelong Learning events planned in the following areas for 2020: • • • • • •

Limerick, Clare & Tipperary Kerry Kildare Offaly Westmeath Wexford

Lifelong Learning Partners

PLANNED FOR 2020

The Landscape of Opportunities Communicating Your Practice Working With Curators Career Review How to Photograph Your Art

Lisburn & Castlereagh VISUAL ARTISTS CAFÉ

Date/Time: 8 Apr. 12:00 – 17:00.

Location: Island Arts Centre, Lisburn.

Places/Cost: 30. FREE. ASSESSSING THE LANDSCAPE OF OPPORTUNITIES

SPEED CURATING

FINANCES & TAX

Fermanagh & Omagh

VISUAL ARTISTS HELPDESK / PROJECT CLINIC

Peer Critique and Portfolio Reviews.

A series of 8 group sessions with visiting curators from across Europe.

Places/cost: 12. £30/£15 (VAI members).

Date/Time: October (TBC).

Location: Belfast Exposed.

Place/Cost: 10 Curators. £3 per appointment.

VISUAL ARTISTS HELPDESK / PROJECT CLINIC

INTRODUCING VAI

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

Date/Time: March (TBC).

Location: Void Gallery, Derry.

Places/Cost: 30. FREE.

CURATOR PROGRAMME

Date/Time: 3 Mar. 12:00 – 17:00.

Location: Strule Arts Centre, Omagh.

Places/Cost: 8. £5 / £2.50 (VAI members / Resdidents of Omagh & Fermanagh).

For updates and information on our 2020 programme, visit visualartists.ie and subscribe to our mailing list for regular updates.

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

Date/Time: 15 Jan, 12 Feb, 11 Mar, 15 Apr, 13 May, 10 Jun. 11:00 – 17:00.

Location: VAI Belfast Office.

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

Date/Time: 22 Apr. 12:00 – 17:00.

Location: Island Arts Centre, Lisburn.

Places/Cost: 20. £20 / £10 (VAI members / Residents of Lisburn & Castlereagh).

Date/Time: 6 May. 12:00 – 17:00.

Location: Island Arts Centre, Lisburn.

Places/Cost: 20. £20 / £10 (VAI members / Residents of Lisburn & Castlereagh).

Date/Time: 20 May. 12:00 – 17:00.

Location: Island Arts Centre, Lisburn.

Places/Cost: 8. £5 / £2.50 (VAI members / Resdidents of Lisburn & Castlereagh).

Ards & North Down

Date/Time: 3 Mar. 19:30 – 21:00.

Location: Strule Arts Centre, Omagh.

Places/Cost: 30. FREE.

VISUAL ARTISTS HELPDESK / PROJECT CLINIC

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

Tell us about your training needs!

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

VAI Show & Tell Events VAI will schedule Show & Tell events during 2020 and invites interested artists, groups, venues or partners to get in touch if interested in hosting a Show & Tell. E: info@visualartists.ie

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

Date/Time: 22 Apr. 12:00 – 17:00.

Location: Ards Arts Centre, Newtownards.

Places/Cost: 8. £5 / £2.50 (VAI members / Resdidents of Ards & North Down).