The Visual Artists' News Sheet – January February 2023

Fingal, A Place for Art

Fingal Artists’ Support Scheme 2023

Fingal County Council invites applications from artists for up to €5,000 of an award towards travel and professional development opportunities, a residency, or the development of work.

The award is open to practising artists at all stages in their professional careers working in music, visual art, drama, literature, film and dance.

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

The funding is for projects or initiatives which will take place between 1st May and 31st December 2023.

Closing date for receipt of applications: Friday 24th February, 2023 at 4.00pm

For further information and to apply please visit: www.fingalarts.ie or www.fingal.ie/arts

Alternatively, please contact Eoghan Finn at Fingal Arts Office by email at eoghan.finn@fingal.ie or by phone on 087 773 8427

www.fingalarts.ie

On The Cover

Isabel Nolan, Desert Mother (Saint Paula) and Lion, 2022, water-based oil on canvas; photograph by Lee Welch, courtesy the artist, Kerlin Gallery, and Void Gallery. 6. Roundup. Exhibitions and events from the past two months. 8. News. The latest developments in the arts sector.

First Pages

Columns

9. The Signature of All Things. Cornelius Browne discusses the origins of artistic anonymity. Mashq. Kip Alizadeh outlines their participation in ACNI’s Minority Ethnic Artists Mentoring and Residency programme.

10. Through Care, Towards Access. Iarlaith Ni Fheorais introduces the radical potential of access in the visual arts. Curating in a Negative Spectrum. Matt Packer discusses the history of international curatorial invitation in Ireland.

11. Practical Magic. Siobhán Mooney outlines the 12th iteration of Periodical Review at Pallas Projects/Studio. We Need to Talk About Painting. Karen Ebbs reports on a series of talks she recently organised at IMMA and The Complex. 12. The Kerr Shoe Collection. Eve Parnell considers a collection of twentieth-century Irish shoes housed in NIVAL. Direct Support. Elida Maiques outlines her participation in Mermaid Art Centre’s Transform Associate Artist Scheme.

Casa Dipinta. Brenda Moore-McCann discusses the Italian townhouse owned by Brian O’Doherty and Barbara Novack.

Organisation

14.

The Space to Grow. Members of TBG+S consider the organisation’s continued importance on its 40th anniversary.

Ireland’s St. Ives. Martina O’Byrne outlines the evolution of Artform School of Art in Dunmore East in Waterford.

20.

32.

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19. Tinka Bechert, Handlanger, 2018, mixed media on raw canvas. Page

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

Critique

‘UPHOLD: New Collections’ at 35DP

Grace Dyas ‘A Mary Magdalene Experience’ at Rua Red

‘In and of Itself – Abstraction in the age of images’ at The RHA

Kevin Mooney ‘Revenants’ at IMMA

Brian Fay ‘The Most Recent Forever’ at LCGA

Re_sett_ing_s. John Graham reviews a recent exhibition by Jaki Irvine and Locky Morris at The Complex, Dublin.

Corban-scale. Jennifer Redmond reviews Corban Walker’s solo show continuing at Crawford Art Gallery until 15 January.

Flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict. Kevin Burns reviews Isabel Nolan’s current solo exhibition at VOID Gallery, Derry.

Get Together 2022. Joanne Laws and Thomas Pool report on VAI’s annual networking event for visual artists.

The World Was All Before Them. Emma Campbell interviews Clare Gormley about her curatorial vision for TULCA 2022.

EVA International 2023. Thomas Pool interviews the EVA Platform Commission artists making new work for the festival.

Defining an Arena. Lucy and Robert Carter on Grilse Gallery. VAI Member Profile

The Man Who Sees Through Shadows. Mike Bunn.

Up in the Sky with the Swallows & Swifts. Gillian Deeny.

Oonagh Latchford. Catherine Marshall on Oonagh Latchford.

CEO/Director: Noel Kelly Office Manager: Grazyna Rzanek Advocacy & Advice: Elke Westen Membership & Projects: Siobhán Mooney Services Design & Delivery: Alf Desire News Provision: Thomas Pool Publications: Joanne Laws Accounts: Grazyna Rzanek

Board of Directors:

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

The Visual Artists' News Sheet: Visual Artists Ireland: Republic of Ireland Office

Visual Artists Ireland The Masonry 151, 156 Thomas Street Usher’s Island, Dublin 8

T: +353 (0)1 672 9488

E: info@visualartists.ie W: visualartists.ie

Northern Ireland Office

Visual Artists Ireland 109 Royal Avenue Belfast BT1 1FF

T: +44 (0)28 958 70361

E: info@visualartists-ni.org W: visualartists-ni.org

Exhibition Roundup

Dublin Copper House Gallery

Sean Fingleton’s exhibition ‘Musicians and Landscapes from Donegal to Clare’ ran from 17 to 24 November 2022. Fingleton says: “My drawings of the musicians originate from visits to the Willie Clancy Festival. They are developed through the medium of oil pastel with gestural expression and colour to the fore. The drawings are from recorded impressions of live musicians done in sketch books, executed in pencil, and later transposed into larger works in oil pastel and mixed media in the studio.”

thecopperhousegallery.com

LexIcon

‘Heirloom’ is an installation created by artist Rachel Doolin at the LexIcon in Dún Laoghaire. Doolin has been artist in residence for the last two years with the Irish Seed Savers Association, Ireland’s only public seed bank. As risks from the climate crisis and global conflicts escalate, seed banks are becoming an increasingly precious resource that could one day prevent a worldwide food crisis. The exhibition continues until 5 March.

dlrcoco.ie

NCAD Gallery

‘‘Why be an artist?’ (after Leigh Hobba and Noel Sheridan)’ is an exhibition and film project by Oisín Byrne and Vaari Claffey with Kevin Atherton, Isadora Epstein, Gary Farrelly, Leigh Hobba, Séamus Nolan, Grace Weir, and Noel Sheridan. The invited artists respond across a variety of registers, both paying homage to and challenging Sheridan’s narrative content and performative approach. The exhibition continues until 15 February.

ncad.gallery

Photo Museum Ireland

Photo Museum Ireland presents ‘The Light of Day’, the first major retrospective of Tony O’Shea, who is regarded as a legendary figure in documentary photography and one of Ireland’s most important contemporary photographic artists. Curated and produced by Photo Museum Ireland, this retrospective exhibition brings together for the first time his seminal bodies of work. The exhibition continues until 18 February.

ArtisAnn Gallery

Julie Corcoran’s recent solo exhibition, ‘Looking for Light – The Heroine’s Journey’, took viewers on an epic journey. The protagonist, in a beautiful dress, journeys deep within and is resurrected achieving divine unity of the feminine and masculine. Each of Julie’s images are born out of an emotion or concept. The artist combines digital photographs in layers to produce pieces that look like they were painted, rather than manipulated on screen. The exhibition ran at ArtisAnn Gallery from 30 November to 17 December 2022. artisann.org

Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich

After Brexit, under EU food safety rules, sausages are no longer allowed to enter Northern Ireland from Great Britain. Belfast-based, Japanese artist Shiro Masuyama has realised a new social intervention using sausages to highlight the Irish Sea Border (which was created after Brexit) in his exhibition ‘Brexit Sausages’. Following international residencies in the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Flax Art Studios, Masuyama (who was born in Tokyo) moved to Belfast, where he’s been based ever since. The exhibition continues until 26 January. culturlann.ie

Catalyst Arts

Catalyst Arts recently presented their first member’s show in their new space at 6 Joy’s Entry, near Cornmarket in Belfast city centre. The exhibition was titled ‘it feels hairy to start from nothing again’ – perceived as emphasising the precarious position of artist-led spaces in the city – and presented audio-visual work by four Catalyst members: Peter Glasgow and Sun Park, Niamh Seana Meehan, and Reuben Brown. ‘It feels hairy to start from nothing again’ was the final show of the year at Catalyst Arts and ran from 1 to 15 December 2022.

catalystarts.org.uk

Golden Thread Gallery

‘Hold on Tight’ is a provocative exhibition of corporeal artworks by four female artists working in performance and moving image: Sinéad O’Donnell, Katherine Nolan, Jayne Parker, and Hollie Miller. Each of these artists work in response to their bodies, questioning the vulnerability of human flesh through lived and sometimes violent experience. ‘Hold on Tight’ presents the different ways in which these artists use materials and how they can be manipulated by, or alongside the body. The exhibition continues until 14 January.

goldenthreadgallery.co.uk

SO Fine Art Editions

The group show, ‘Winter Exhibition’, presents new work by Yoko Akino, Emma Berkery, Cathy Burke, Niall Cullen, Niamh Flanagan, Mary A Fitzgerald, John Fitzsimons, Taffina Flood, Debbie Godsell, Sophie Gough, Alison Kay, Allan Kinsella, Richard Lawlor, Stephen Lawlor, Sarah Long, Bernadette Madden, Marie-Louise Martin, Eoin Francis McCormack, Matthew Mitchell, Mary O’Connor, Shane O’Driscoll, Sorca O’Farrell, Emma O Hara, Padraig Parle, Tom Phelan, Linda Plunkett, Luke Reidy & Colm Toolan (SEK2). The exhibition continues until 7 January. sofinearteditions.com

The LAB

‘The Swinging Pendulum’, by visual artist Joanna Kidney, brings the immediate language of mark-making and line into the complex language of painting. To this end, the malleable nature of encaustic paint (molten pigmented beeswax) enables both a distillation and a materiality in the work. The paintings enfold a lexicon, gathered continually from the everyday, and the sensory experiences of touch and proprioception – the sense of self-movement, force, and body position. On display from 18 November to 17 December 2022.

dublincityartsoffice.ie

The MAC

To mark the end of their 10th anniversary celebrations, The MAC presents a group exhibition of new work, titled ‘New Exits: 10 Years of Painting Shows’. Whilst set within the context of the many significant painting exhibitions The MAC has presented since its inception, the exhibition is primarily an opportunity to draw attention to and celebrate the painting practices that have emerged and continue to flourish through the work of graduates of the BA and MFA Fine Art courses at Belfast School of Art since 2012. The exhibition continues until 26 March.

themaclive.com

Ulster Museum

The 141st Annual Royal Ulster Academy exhibition was on display at the Ulster Museum from 14 October 2022 to 3 January 2023. The RUA is the most enduring body of practicing visual artists in Northern Ireland. The exhibition showcases work from established artists and new artists from all over the world, alongside work by RUA Academicians. Now in its 141st year, this exhibition continues to provide a relevant platform for contemporary painting, sculpture, film, printmaking, installations and photography.

ulstermuseum.org

Joanna Kidney, Knowledge that comes from the dancing feet 2022, encaustic on panel, 60x60cm; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy the artist.

Shiro Masuyama, Brexit Sausages video still; filmed by Helmut Lemke, courtesy of the artist.

photomuseumireland.ie

Regional & International

CCA Derry~Londonderry

CCA Derry~Londonderry’s group exhibition, ‘Fugitive Seeds’, was curated by Borbála Soós and was on display from 19 October to 21 December 2022. ‘Fugitive Seeds’ considered how endemic, alien, and fugitive seeds connect to colonial histories, including those in Northern Ireland and more specifically Derry/Londonderry and its port. The presented works helped to unearth layered histories around plant and human migration and border ecologies.

ccadld.org

Chapel Hill School of Art

‘Technically Art’ was an exhibition of work by the technical support staff of the Crawford College of Art & Design in Cork. Spanning a variety of materials and concepts, traditional and contemporary, the exhibition reflected their own artistic ideals and expertise, practiced on a daily basis in college and in their own personal studios. It is clear from the presented work that the staff are invested in both art education and the vibrant, cultural community they contribute so much to. On display from 2 to 16 December 2022.

chapelhillschoolofart.ie

Galway Arts Centre

Reverberate is an oral history project devel- oped by Éireann and I, a black migrant community archive, in collaboration with members of Galway’s African diaspora. The project invited Black migrants settled in Galway to recount their journeys to Ireland, their relationship with the city, and to reflect on whether they have developed a sense of belonging. Reverberate documents the legacies of migration as they happen, giving narrative agency and equal centring to each perspective. On display from 3 to 22 December 2022.

galwayartscentre.ie

Highlanes Gallery

‘The Tyranny of Ambition’ is a group exhibition at Highlanes Gallery, curated by Graham Crowley, on display until 18 February. The idea and subsequently the title for the exhibition was inspired by the film Florence Foster Jenkins (Stephen Frears, 2016). One of the central characters declares that once he had faced up to what he called ‘the tyranny of ambition’, only then could he start to live and be happy. Crowley’s intention as a practicing painter and curator of this exhibition is to share with a wider audience some less well-known work.

highlanes.ie

KAVA

The annual postcard show by Kinvara Area Visual Arts (KAVA) ran from 2 to 11 December 2022. The artwork by KAVA members was anonymously displayed, and all works were for sale. When the artwork was collected, only then was the name of the artist revealed to the buyer. Having proven in previous years to be great fun, and an ideal way to shop locally to find a unique Christmas present for someone special, KAVA were delighted to be able to put on the show again this year.

kava.ie

Mermaid Arts Centre

‘Púca in The Machine’ is an exploratory collaboration between three artists, coordinated and organised by Shane Finan. The artists have worked on new interpretations, creating artworks that respond to the unique and unusual history, mythology and ecology of the Poulaphouca Reservoir. The artists are Alannah Robins, Niamh Fahy and Finan. First exhibited at Blessington Library in February 2022, the exhibition continues at Mermaid until 7 January.

mermaidartscentre.ie

Triskel Arts Centre

Róisín O’Sullivan’s exhibition ‘I See Skies’ features a new series of paintings that began at the Tony O’Malley residency in Callan, County Kilkenny. There, the artist spent over a year immersed in nature, embracing each intimate surface in the studio as an emotional response to the complexities of life. O’Sullivan makes paintings and objects that reflect the natural world around her, taking a deep interest in collecting and responding to materials such as wood and leaves. The exhibition continues until 26 March.

triskelartscentre.ie

The Courthouse Gallery and Studios

‘Curdle’ by Kevin Gaffney, Bassam Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan, was on display from 4 November to 3 December 2022. Each artist has a surreal approach to storytelling with images, texts and voice-overs bending reality to a breaking point, mirroring how trauma distorts, remakes and retells lived experience in its own image.

To curdle is to render something ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’, or ‘to spoil’. Curdling represents this condensing of a reality gone sour through the different image-making methods in the exhibition.

thecourthousegallery.com

The Model

The Model presents ‘Portrait Lab’, a thematic exhibition exploring representation through the expanded field of portraiture. The show questions how portraits function, who is reflected and who is overlooked.

‘Portrait Lab’ includes artworks by Irish and international artists and is presented on the occasion of ‘The Sunset Belongs to You’ – a major creative initiative that commissioned Geraldine O’Neill and Mick O’Dea to create oil portraits of 18 Sligo children for The Niland Collection. Exhibition continues until 21 January.

themodel.ie

glór

‘Abigail O’Brien Selects…’ was a group exhibition at glór in collaboration with the RHA. Abigail O’Brien, the first female president of the RHA in its 200-year history, selected an extraordinary line-up of artists from the RHA council, including: Una Sealy, James English, Vivienne Roche, James Hanley, Eithne Jordan, Colin Martin, Pat Harris, Alice Maher, Dorothy Smith, Mick O’Dea, and Abigail O’Brien. The exhibition continues at glór until 14 January.

Regional Cultural Centre

‘Swallowing Geography’ was an exhibition at the Regional Cultural Centre and Glebe House & Gallery in Donegal. The intent of the exhibition was to observe the dynamics between belonging and exclusion in response to the Donegal context. It presented the lived and imagined experiences of inhabiting space, and geographical, domestic, and digital worlds. It featured new work by Donegal artists Cara Donaghey, Laura McCafferty, Eoghan McIntyre and Jill Quigley. On display from 15 October to 17 December 2022.

regionalculturalcentre.com

The National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art

Daphne Wright’s sculpture, Primate (2009), is currently showing as part of the group exhibition ‘Hot Spot – Caring For a Burning World’, curated by Gerardo Mosquera at The National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome. Primate is a cast of a male rhesus monkey, dressed in a silk coat of blunt ended thread-hairs with its face painted. This artwork was originally supported by the Art Council Ireland and Carlow County Council. The exhibition continues until 26 February 2023.

glor.ie

Niamh Fahy, from the series 'Edgelands', 2022, Lithographic print on paper; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy the artist and Mermaid Arts Centre.

Geraldine O’Neill, Is feidir le cat Schrödinger an dá thrá a fhreastal, 2014, detail, oil on canvas; image courtesy the artist and The Model.

Zurich Portrait Prize 2022

David Booth has won the Zurich Portrait Prize 2022 for his painting, Salvatore (2021) – a portrait of fellow artist and friend, Salvatore of Lucan. Booth said of his winning artwork: “I spotted Sal one morning while in the studio. He was suited in a brilliant red Adidas one-piece tracksuit, his hair jet-black, and his pointed features solemn and reflective. I sat Sal down and took his picture. The life of an artist is characterised by intense ambitions and doubts. With this portrait I wanted to convey this, and the way in which Sal is resting into contemplation.”

The annual competition showcases contemporary portraiture and is open to artists from across the island of Ireland, and Irish artists living abroad. Booth received a cash prize of €15,000 and was commissioned

Graphic Studio Appoints Director

The board of Graphic Studio Dublin (GSD) announced the appointment of Laura Garbatavičiūtė as the new Executive Director. In her role, Laura will lead the organisation and assume the responsibility for the strategic vision, artistic development and operational management of the charity, comprising both the studio and gallery.

Laura is an award-winning entrepreneur, published author, mentor and multidisciplinary artist with a strong track record in cultural development, arts leadership and brand curation. Laura was most recently a Consultant at Design Skillnet and prior to that worked at the award-winning web agency Artizan Creative Ltd as a Mentor and Growth Consultant.

Her experience as a co-founder at Block T in Smithfield for over eight years prior to that will be extremely relevant to the Executive Director role at Graphic Studio Dublin. Block T was ground-breaking as a progressive arts organisation that subsidised a community of 120, supporting artists during the midst of a severe economic downturn. During her tenure there, Laura led the team that was responsible for producing over 500 projects, provided over 5000 mentorship hours to Block T members and students, won Cultural Attraction of the Year at the Dublin Living Awards (2011) and numerous other awards. Laura has a BA Hons Degree in Fine Art Media from NCAD.

Graphic Studio Dublin is Ireland’s oldest and largest printmaking studio with currently over 90 members. It was founded in 1960 to provide printmaking facilities to Irish artists and to facilitate the development of successful working practices for artists through all stages of their careers. Currently located on North Circular Road in Dublin 1, GSD offers printmaking facilities with technical and peer support to artists in etching, screen printing, photo intaglio, carborundum, linoprint, woodcut, Japanese woodblock, letterpress, mezzotint, and digital print. The gallery in Temple Bar was founded in 1988 and is an important unique selling point of the organisation, as no other Irish print studio has a professional stand-alone gallery space. GSD is the only gallery in Dublin dedicated solely

THE LATEST FROM THE ARTS SECTOR

to create a work for the National Portrait Collection, for which he will be awarded a further €5,000. Two additional awards of €1,500 were given to the highly commended works of Cara Rose and Gavin Leane.

The exhibition features the shortlisted artists: Rachel Ballagh, Zsolt Basti, Shane Blount, Patrick Bolger, Enda Burke, Aisling Coughlan, Catherine Creaney, David Creedon, Ian Cumberland, Barry Delaney, Aodán Feeney, Alexis Pearse Flynn, Vanessa Jones, Bernadette Kiely, Vera Klute, Emily McGardle, Fiach McGuinne, Tom McLean, Mick O’Dea, Liz Purtill, Sorcha Francis Ryder, Marie Smith and Marc O’Sullivan Vallig.

The exhibition will travel to the Regional Cultural Centre in Donegal from 3 June to 2 September 2023.

to the promotion of contemporary fine art print.

Creative Climate Action Fund

In late November 2022, Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin, and Minister for the Environment, Climate, Communications and Transport, Eamon Ryan, launched a €3 million fund to support imaginative creative projects that build awareness around climate change and empower citizens to make meaningful behavioural changes.

Applications for the scheme opened in December 2022 at creativeireland.gov.ie. The successful teams will include experts from the climate science, community engagement, as well as the arts and culture sectors. The ‘Creative Climate Action II: Agents of Change’ programme is a joint initiative of the Creative Ireland Programme and the Department of Environment, Climate and Communications. The programme is calling for creative projects which address the following:

• Encourage everyone to rethink their lifestyles

• Connect with the biodiversity crisis

• Enable a fair and just transition in making lifestyle changes

• Assist citizens to understand the climate crisis

• Adapt to the effects of climate change

There are two funding strands:

1. Spark: This strand is for those looking to pilot a new idea, or who want to deliver a creative project at a local level. Organisations, community groups and creative groups who can inspire, build knowledge, skills and confidence are welcome to apply for grants between €20,000 and €50,000.

2. Ignite: This funding strand is suitable for those with experience in delivering public engagement projects at scale and are proposing durational projects with extensive public participation. Applicants may be eligible for grants between €50,000 and €250,000.

Minister Martin said: “In 2021 Ireland’s

Climate Action Plan outlined the steps that needed to be taken to create a more sustainable future for Ireland. That plan was ambitious and called on all sectors of society including the creative community to play their part in achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. I am proud that the Irish government has such an explicit link between national cultural policy and climate policy. The first Creative Climate Action projects have done much to capture the public imagination, mobilise communities and show how to make the changes needed. Climate change is humanity’s most important challenge, and we need creative projects such as these to galvanise positive action.”

Minister Ryan said: “Significant cultural and systemic change across all of society is needed to address the climate crisis. This change can only be achieved through fully exploring avenues for innovative and creative ways to inspire people to take action. The cultural sector has a unique part to play in this culture change and I look forward to seeing the exciting ways projects funded through the next phase of the Creative Climate Action Programme will engage people.”

Major Redevelopment at Crawford

The Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin T.D. announced the planning application for a major redevelopment at Crawford Art Gallery. This is a flagship project in the Minister’s programme of investments under the National Development Plan, which will see many of our much-loved National Cultural Institutions restored, renewed and future-proofed for generations to come.

Commenting on the planning application in late November 2022, Minister Martin said: “Today is an extremely important day not just for the Crawford Art Gallery, but for our wider cultural ecology. Today we are submitting a planning application for an ambitious project which will transform the Gallery, will create new public spaces for cultural expression and civic discourse, and critically, will see this heritage building restored and renewed to the highest standards of sustainability.”

The project has been designed by an interdisciplinary design team, led by award-winning Grafton Architects, with funding provided by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. The design will provide significant new exhibition and public spaces, a new Learn and Explore facility to engage new audiences, and a new public gallery providing panoramic views of the city. The project will also address long-standing challenges with the fabric of the historic building, will create fit-for-purpose storage spaces for our invaluable National Collection, and will significantly enhance the sustainability of the building to support meeting our national emissions reduction targets. Critically, the project will create a new entrance onto Emmet Place, opening the Crawford onto a new urban plaza at the heart of the cultural life of the city.

The project is being delivered as part of the Minister’s National Cultural Institutions Investment Programme under the National Development Plan. Under the Public Spending Code, day-to-day delivery of the project is being led by the Crawford Art Gallery and the OPW.

Film Artist in Residence at UCC

The Arts Council and University College Cork welcome Maximilian Le Cain as the newly appointed Film Artist in Residence for 2023. This role, based in the School of Film, Music and Theatre, is jointly funded by the Arts Council and UCC. It is designed to provide a film artist of distinction with a unique opportunity to develop their practice in a university environment, while offering students and staff of Film & Screen Media the opportunity to engage with a practising artist in a meaningful way during the course of their studies and wider cultural involvement in campus life.

Maximilian Le Cain is the ninth film artist to be appointed to the role and follows Carmel Winters, Gerry Stembridge, Hugh Travers, Mark O’Halloran, Pat Murphy, Alan Gilsenan, Tadhg O’Sullivan and Yvonne McDevitt who have enjoyed successful residencies at UCC since 2014.

Zurich Portrait Prize 2022 winner David Booth with his winning artwork, Salvatore 2021; photograph © Abe Neihum, courtesy the artist and National Gallery of Ireland.

The Signature of All Things

CORNELIUS BROWNE DISCUSSES THE ORIGINS OF ARTISTIC ANONYMITY.

Angelica Mashq

KIP ALIZADEH OUTLINES THEIR PARTICIPATION IN THE ACNI’S MINORITY ETHNIC ARTISTS MENTORING PROGRAMME.

MASHQ IS A visual art project focusing on how my queerness and Persian heritage intersect and overlap, explored through the mediums of mark-making and experimental publishing. I developed Mashq (2022) with the support of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Minority Ethnic Artists Mentoring and Residency Programme, and with extensive guidance from my mentor Emma Wolf-Haugh. In making final outcomes that involved textiles and Persian calligraphy, I sought the advice of textile artist Emily Waszak, as well as fellow queer Persian visual artist Sahar Saki.

up before doing final pieces. However, over time, these practice sheets evolved into an artform of their own. The sheets feature words and letter forms that are repeated regardless of meaning, purely for compositional and aesthetic value.

OVERWINTERING IN A log cabin, through which wind whistles, everything I’ve painted during 2022 becomes strange to me. As I check drying progress, my everyday self seems miles removed from the painter. Early one morning, just out of bed after a night of storm, I race to see if the leaky roof is still intact. Relieved that my cabin stands, I am visited by the oddest sensation as I pick up a crooked board, upon which wildflowers sway in a summer breeze. Who painted this?

Decades hence, should any of my paintings resurface towards a human eye, this same question may be asked. From the faces of my pictures my signature is absent, although it does always hide somewhere behind the scenes. The reasons for this are manifold; a feeling of inferiority, worn like a second skin throughout my life, is possibly the root. My cousin, Dr Margaret Rose Cunningham, on International Women’s Day 2019, publicly advocated taking a Dr Martens boot to barriers. Maggie is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Strathclyde and Editor-in-Chief of Pharmacology Matters magazine. She is an elected member of the RSE Young Academy of Scotland, and as a research scientist has won many awards, including the prestigious Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowship.

Originally, however, Maggie was an artist. Her secondary school years were punctuated by art retreats, and she secured an interview for Glasgow School of Art, which she decided not to attend. The reason, she told me, was that coming from Govanhill in Glasgow, she felt like an imposter. This is a commonplace experience among artists from working-class backgrounds, and one I share. It is only in middle age that I have felt confident enough to put my feet into barrier-defying boots.

So, there is the earthliness of oppression; however, I like to think there are also higher, brighter stars influencing my signature shyness. Heretical mystic Jakob Böhme, a shoe-

that the whole outward visible world is a signature, or figure of the inward spiritual world. Always, as a painter, I’ve had the sense of trying to reach something beyond the appearance of nature. Painting outdoors, I submit to the elements, relinquishing control and knowledge to such extent that certain works more truthfully bear the signatures of wind and rain. At most, I am co-painting with nature, developing a signature style for which I am merely the outward representative.

Böhme

Prior to Mashq, I had solely been an illustrator, mainly working in publishing. I have been illustrating picture books for young children for nearly ten years. Recent titles include: What Will You Be? / ¿Qué Serás? (written by Yamile Saied Mendez), Plenty of Hugs (written by Fran Manushkin) and World So Wide (written by Alison McGhee). I make my illustrations using a combination of traditional and digital methods, for example, pencil line work with colour added in Photoshop. This process evolved out of the need for my work to be easier to edit, when working with art directors and publishing teams to create final illustrations for books.

I began this project by using Persian poetry to explore the intersection of my queer and Persian identities through an anti-colonial lens. Then, through the embodied practice of abstract, gestural, expressive mark-making that instrumentalised Persian cultural practices like siyah mashq, I started to explore the ambiguity of existing as a queer person in the Iranian diaspora. Finally through a dialectical relationship with my mentor Emma Wolf-Haugh, I have explored various queer alternative publishing practices, such as zine-making and stickering, which express the subversiveness and imaginative possibility of being a queer Iranian person. I have drawn on the work of José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia, and Adrian Piper, specifically the essay ‘The Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists’1 in order to expand my thinking and language around my practice.

In a similar vein, Bard of Orkney, George Mackay Brown, reportedly avowed that the greatest ever poet is anonymous. Brown’s own poetry frequently lowers a bucket into the well of medieval art, native to the northernmost Scottish islands. Anonymity came as naturally as drinking water to artists of earlier times. A sense of humility may have stayed the signing hand of medieval artists, most of whom wore the robes of monks. Their artworks would have been used for liturgical, contemplative, or devotional purposes, so likely it would have seemed wrong for the artist’s name to be included in the image.

Of the poems, ballads, and folk songs composed outside monastic walls, Virginia Woolf ventured to guess that Anon, who wrote so many verses without signing them, was often a woman. As a painter of weather pictures, all my life I have loved weather poems. How amazing that the four lines of Western Wind have made their way to us across at least six centuries, without a name attached. Echoing Woolf, in the last months of his life, critic and poet Clive James guessed that it was written by a woman. Furthermore, he hazarded that she wasn’t the lady of a grand house. This anonymous poet was out there in the weather.

Cornelius Browne is a Donegal-based artist.

When making books, I create backgrounds, textures, and abstract marks using ink and graphite. In the summer of 2021, I started to create abstract zines and experimental standalone pieces using these materials. I was in an illustration rut and feeling uninspired, so it was a welcome change. I enjoyed this experimentation and felt I would like to broaden my practice along the lines of abstract mark-making. Therefore, with some encouragement, I decided to apply for visual arts funding. This necessitated a contextualisation of my experimentation, and so Mashq was born.

The title Mashq is taken from the Persian calligraphy practice of siyah mashq, which means ‘black practice’ and refers to calligraphic practice sheets that were originally used by Persian calligraphers to warm

One of the final outcomes of Mashq I’ve made is a denim jacket, which I consider a garment that correlates with my queer butch identity, decorated with siyah mashq style calligraphy. I feel in the performance of wearing it in the street – and therefore publishing a queer Persian identity to the world – the jacket “demands from viewers… the possibility of critical thinking and intervention.”2 In the future I would like to continue to explore the expansiveness of mark-making and publishing beyond traditional methods, do more large-scale mark-making, and more collaborative work.

Kip Alizadeh is an illustrator and visual artist living in Belfast.

1 Originally published in Next Generation: Southern Black Aesthetic (University of North Carolina, 1990).

2 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press, 2009) p 195.

Cornelius Browne painting in a field, 2022; photograph by Paula Corcoran, courtesy of the artist. maker of peasant stock with no formal education, wrote De Signatura Rerum in 1621, as part of an astonishing body of work. In these pages,

suggests

Kip Alizadeh, abstract mark-making based on siyah mashq calligraphy 2022, India ink and qalam pen on white paper; image courtesy of the artist.

Curatorial

Through Care, Towards Access

Curating in a Negative Spectrum

IARLAITH

NI FHEORAIS

INTRODUCES A NEW COLUMN SERIES ADDRESSING THE RADICAL POTENTIAL OF ACCESS IN THE ARTS.

THE LAST FEW years have been a highly visible moment for disabled and chronically ill artists in Ireland. However, visibility is a double-edged sword: on one hand, it focuses attention on work that has been ignored; but on the other hand, it plays into a shallow identity politics that allows concerns around access and labour conditions to go unchallenged. In my first column in this new series, I argue that we must move on from the narratives of depoliticised ‘care’ (utilised by many institutions) towards the radical potential of ‘access’.

Disabled and chronically ill artists have created the groundwork for how to make and show work accessibly, but that responsibility must now be taken on by the sector so that more people can access, make, participate in, and witness art. Otherwise, showing work by disabled and chronically ill artists will be a tokenistic affair that ignores the conditions of the people it claims to speak for.

Much of the current critical discourse on care is largely inspired by Black feminist, trans, and disabled writers and activists, who historically, have been systemically neglected or actively harmed by family and state. Writer and civil rights activist Audre Lorde famously stated that: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” This sentiment acknowledges that care is essential in the act of liberation but is also an essential part of achieving liberation. Conversely, artist Johanna Hedva claims that “not caring anymore” is liberating, when engaging with institutions, for whom the promise of ‘care’ and the fantasy of ‘healing’ has become a form of virtuesignaling. Through this tension, we can acknowledge the legacy of care and respect its political contexts, whilst understanding that art institutions are not the place where care can or should occur – and that institutions should concern themselves with ‘access’ instead.

A central methodology in accessible practice is making through disability, rather than about disability. A recent example in the Irish context is Sarah Browne’s film, Echoes Bones (2022), which saw the artist worked collaboratively with a group of autistic young people in North Dublin, in response to the work of Samuel Beckett. At its heart, the film is a portrait of a place which asks questions about representation. The two-year collaborative project began with watching films made by neurodiverse artists, such as Mel Baggs’s In My Language (2007), Sharif Persaud’s The Mask (2019), and Jess Thom’s Me, My Mouth and I (2018). This resulted in a project with and by neurodiverse people, made from a neurodiverse position, but not just about neurodiversity. The film foregrounds accessible ways of working that sidestep the tokenistic and exploitive value systems often at the

core of how these projects function. Importantly, the premiere of Echoes Bones at the Lighthouse Cinema, Dublin, in October 2022 was captioned, audio described, sensory friendly, and wheelchair accessible.

From a programming perspective, Chronic Collective at Pallas Projects, curated by Tara Carroll and Áine O’Hara, showed us how to centre disabled and chronically ill people in a learning environment. Their programme included workshops on performance, sickness and art, access riders, sound, and access in an artist-run organisation. As a programme that centred disabled and chronically ill audiences, access was at the core. This included everything from ISL interpretation of events, large print access statements, asking participants to wear a mask, and fostering a relaxed environment, which included a slow and flexible approach, allowing participants to move around, come and go, and make noise. Chronic Collective also asked attendees to fill out an access form beforehand, so they could try to accommodate a broad range of access needs. I would argue that such accessible programmes shouldn’t be the sole responsibility of disabled and chronically ill artists, but if we want to take care and access seriously, this is exactly how it should be done.

We also need to consider access in relation to the production of art. Some artists have access needs in making their work, which can include working with assistants or support workers. The Berlin-based Mexican artist, Manuel Solano, lost their sight in 2014 and has since worked with assistants to map out paint using pins and pipe cleaners, which they then paint over, using their fingers. This highlights the fact that questions of access arise long before the work arrives in a gallery, and that when planning an exhibition, curators must also consider the unique production needs of artists.

Many curators and organisations are eager to support disabled artists, audiences, and staff through access, but feel challenged by the limitations of funding, and the difficulty in finding the right advice. Through this new column series, I will detail how I work through access across various projects and contexts, including performances, exhibitions, festivals, learning programmes, and toolkits. I will expand upon ideas of working through disability, providing practical accounts of producing projects in accessible ways. These artists have shown us the way; it’s time to make access central in our work as curators, producers, organisations, and funders.

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

@iarlaith_nifheorais

MATT PACKER DISCUSSES THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL CURATORIAL INVITATION WITHIN IRELAND’S VISUAL ART SECTOR.

THE CELEBRATED CURATOR Germano Celant was one of several people who were bemused by, if not openly critical of, the invitation to adjudicate EVA in its early years. In his interview for the accompanying EVA ‘91 catalogue he described how he received EVA’s invitation by unsolicited fax; how he admired the invitation for being ‘very naive’, and how he accepted the decision as a ‘political gesture’ in favour of a poor country in Europe, rather than as an opportunity that would necessarily develop his curatorial profile. One of his initiatives that year was to reallocate funds for the restoration of an eighteenth-century painting by Richard Carver that was languishing in the Limerick City Gallery of Art collection.

Given the population of the country and the modest scale of its resources, Ireland has been a remarkably gregarious host to international curators since the 1960s. Some of the most significant large-scale visual arts events in its history – the ROSC exhibitions from 1967 to 1988, successive editions of EVA International (formerly ev+a) from 1979 to the present day, and major one-off projects such as Cork Caucus (2005) and Dublin Contemporary (2011) – have been led by a strategy of international curatorial appointment.

The reasons why might be located somewhere between Ireland’s ancient flair for hospitality, its open-spirited ambition for the visual arts to engage itself internationally, and the self-acknowledged limits of being able to achieve this in any structurally sustainable way. That, and Ireland’s deep love of curators, of course. Perhaps it was (and still is) simpler and more graspable to invite successive international curators to Ireland, than to conjure the new institutions and resource frameworks required to foster the same desired levels of internationalisation on home soil.

It is significant that Ireland’s hosting of international curators has operated from a legacy of underdevelopment in its visual arts infrastructure. Of the examples of large-scale visual arts events cited above, all were founded with a diagnosis of gaps and deficiencies in Ireland’s resources and reputation, to which the appointment of an international curator came to represent a temporary reprieve.

The architect Michael Scott, who founded the seminal ROSC exhibitions, famously deplored “the absence of an enlightened museum of modern art in Ireland” before appointing a jury of three international curators (James Johnson Sweeney, Jean Leymarie, and Willem Sandberg) to select artworks for its inaugural edition. Scott went on to say that “[u]ntil such an institution was established, there was a need to periodically bring developments in the visual arts in the wider world to the attention of the Irish public and the artistic community.”

In Cork, several decades later, Tara Byrne (then Director of The National Sculpture Factory) introduced her vision for Cork Caucus – perhaps one of the most important infrastructural experiments to take place within an Irish visual arts context this side of the millennium. The event had the explicit aim to “improve and develop the conditions of critical artmaking in Cork.” Charles Esche (Director, Van Abbemuseum) and Annie Fletcher (then a freelance curator based in the Netherlands) were invited to devise its programme, together with local curatorial partners, Art / not Art (David Dobz O’Brien and Fergal Gaynor).

In 2010, ill-fatedly announcing itself on e-flux, Dublin Contemporary described its ambition of “putting Dublin on the map as an international art destination… drawing on the expertise” of high-profile international curators appointed to the advisory committee, from Hans Ulrich Obrist to Okwui Enwezor. Today, EVA International – the organisation of which I am the Director – continues to operate from its founding statement to “provide the public with an opportunity to visit and experience an exhibition not normally available in the region and […] to stimulate an awareness of the visual arts here”, that has been co-extensive within an almost unbroken history of inviting international curators to adjudicate or curate successive editions.

Across a span of 50 years, the terms of invitation to international curators have been predicated on a negative spectrum of opportunity – whether addressing the absence of an enlightened museum (ROSC), or the need to improve and develop the conditions of critical artmaking (Cork Caucus), or to direct an awareness that was apparently lacking (Dublin Contemporary / EVA). While some of the inflammatory emphasis in the founding language of these events was undoubtably shaped by funding mandates and levelling up-style policy agendas, it carries the consequential risk of establishing a thought pattern of how we imagine future development for the visual arts and the role of curating within it.

Firstly, it risks disincentivising structural change by reinforcing and reproducing our sense of negative capability, plastering over the gaps with curatorial and programmatic outputs. Secondly, it risks creating a positivist and interventionist imperative upon curatorial practice. None of this is inevitable. Nor was it ever. We can either look back at a history of international curatorship in Ireland and see a shadow history of Ireland’s disadvantage and deficit; or we can look forward to ways of working with curators, in and out of Ireland, that are predicated on wants rather than needs

Matt Packer is Director of EVA International eva.ie

Curatorial Seminar We Need to Talk About Painting

Practical Magic

‘PRACTICAL MAGIC’ IS the 12th iteration of Pallas Project/Studios’ annual exhibition, ‘Periodical Review’. Each year, Pallas directors, Gavin Murphy and Mark Cullen, invite two peers to consider the artworks, practices, exhibitions, projects, events, artistic and community initiatives, collaborations, publications and performances encountered in the previous 12 months. The four selectors then nominate the works that stood out for them during the year, and these are whittled down via an editorial process to five selections each, giving a total of 20 artworks. This process of four selectors with subjective viewpoints and positions, choosing work independently of each other, can lead to a show with a feeling of the ‘exquisite corpse’ about it. This format has its challenges but also allows for instinctive and surprisingly rich narrative connections to develop between the work, without the pressure of having to conform to a strict overarching curatorial theme. ‘Periodical Review’ is loosely designed to suggest a magazine-like layout, and in this sense, the spaces between works and the edits are clear.

After an intense period of inaction and online interaction, 2022 saw an overdue abundance of exhibitions and events happening throughout the country. So, when Basic Space were asked to co-select this year’s ‘Periodical Review’, we approached this artistic bounty with a renewed intensity. For a few years, our lives shrank right down to the essential and the local, and since then, an increase in artistic practices focusing on the internal have flourished. The domestic and the corporal weave their way through the show, from soft pastels to shiny entrails. The multitude of crises that are at the forefront of the current global condition are also tackled head on. A selection of photographs from the now destroyed city of Mariupol in Ukraine, from the group TU Platform, is a particularly harrowing point in the show. In separate pieces, Cold War-era radios broadcast an imagined, but very likely climate catastrophe, and a cocoon of old family photos and sounds draw the viewer in, with nostalgia

being felt, both physically and spectrally throughout the gallery.

Striking palettes, aesthetics and ideas that lean towards the gothic enliven the space and lend a sense of unease: a punk Sheela na Gig and a silver tipped bean chaointe (or keening woman) sit across from each other; leather clad hands perform an unboxing video with feelings of the burlesque and the absurd, as box after surprising box are unveiled on a loop. Time and space are traversed in multicolour, from explorations of the conditions of Indian textile workers, to the recounting of past personal traumas. The walls are postered with monthly newsletters from an active community brimming with self-organised movement, ensuring the show is not without hope or humour – the essential strands that unify us and which we will need in abundance to survive and organise in the years ahead.

The contributors and artworks for ‘Periodical Review 12’ are: Kevin Atherton, Cecilia Bullo, Myrid Carten, Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty, Tom dePaor, The Ecliptic Newsletter, Eireann and I, Patrick Graham, Aoibheann Greenan, Kerry Guinan & Anthony O’Connor, Camilla Hanney, Léann Herlihy, Gillian Lawler, Michelle Malone, Thais Muniz, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, Venus Patel, Claire Prouvost, Christopher Steenson, and TU Platform.

The invited selector’s this year were Julia Moustacchi and myself as co-directors of Basic Space – an independent voluntary art organisation founded in 2010, which has programmed educational events, residencies, events and exhibitions, primarily working with emerging and early-career practitioners. The majority of projects are hosted or organised in collaboration with external institutions, where Basic Space acts as a critical force, challenging attitudes and policy and promoting a representative and inclusive framework.

Siobhán Mooney is an independent curator and co-director at Basic Space. basicspace.ie

KAREN EBBS REPORTS ON A SERIES OF TALKS THAT SHE RECENTLY ORGANISED AND CO-HOSTED AT IMMA AND THE COMPLEX.

LAST JUNE I began to explore the possibility of initiating and organising a talk series dedicated to painting. My idea was enthusiastically received, and, in the literal sense, doors opened when Lisa Moran (Curator of Engagements and Learning at IMMA) granted the use of IMMA’s Lecture Room. A series of educational talks, titled ‘We Need to Talk About Painting’, was supported by NCAD’s Painting Department and was hosted by myself and fellow MFA painting students, Cian McLoughlin and Caitlyn Rooke.

The purpose of these discursive events was to illuminate debate and new thinking surrounding painting practice, its educational context, its relation to the broader spheres of art, and its contemporary theoretical development. There was huge public interest, with each talk fully booked out within a week of being advertised. These invigorating and critical discussions attracted a far-reaching audience, with many attendees requesting that these talks be held on a regular basis. It is very clear that there is a community of critically minded artists, educators, curators, and art lovers, who have an appetite for live, open conversation and debate.

The talks were held on 27 October, 3 November, and 24 November 2022. The invited speakers were Mark O’Kelly (artist and Head of the Painting Department at NCAD), Colin Martin (artist, Head of the RHA School, and Lecturer at NCAD), Christina Kennedy (Senior Curator at IMMA), Beth O’Halloran (artist, Head of MFA Programme at NCAD), Mark Garry (artist, Lecturer TU Dublin), Donal Moloney (artist, Lecturer at MTU Crawford), and artists Isabel Nolan and Dominique Crowley.

At the invitation stage, I presented each speaker with a brief, which set out the talking points (listed below), which were explored and expanded upon throughout the events, elucidating core contemporary areas of inquiry from their informed perspectives, while simultaneously illuminating historical, contextual links. Each person spoke for 20 minutes, followed by a discussion, prompted by questions from myself, Caitlyn Rooke, Cian McLoughlin, and audience members.

Talking Points:

1.

Painting is not currently buckling under the weight of historical reference, nor is it bucking trends in an effort to create a ‘new movement’. So, what is painting’s current position in a contemporary context? What actually constitutes painting, which can be regarded as an action, an object and medium of consideration? Is there a revival of interest in and a revisiting of some of the ‘healthier’ concerns of modernism such as, for example, the formal elements in painting?

2. The importance of research in painting. Research has many categories, from academic and specialised areas of interest, to observational, material, process-based, and experiential examinations of the lived experience. What does research mean, how can it add layers of interest for the viewer, and how can it nourish an art practice?

3. When it comes to how painting is taught, teaching practices vary, with colleges and institutions adopting a breadth or depth of approach to facilitate specialist or non-specialist focus. The focus shifts along a scale from skills-based/technical accomplishment, to open interest-driven approaches with broad exposure to a variety of media. Could worldviews on diversity be driving a growing demand for agency and autonomy where painting is concerned? Shifting perceptions in colleges and institutions – regarding skills-acquisition and observational practices – are already paving a less prescriptive, middle path, to work in tandem with contemporary approaches to painting. Where this is the case, is it even possible to teach painting? If painting is recognised as an evolving overarching means of exploration and inquiry, does the question of how it is taught become a completely separate issue, guided by the needs of the artist/student?

4. In contemporary life, we are bombarded by a tsunami of technologically mediated imagery. Apart from painting’s own specificity, it has the capacity to absorb a digitally mediated world, the proliferation of images, and our increasingly virtual existence. Painting is resilient, adaptable and versatile and we believe that the current challenging environment presents huge opportunities in the evolution of painting. As embodied beings, we humans need physical interaction. Could painting’s continued allure be its directness, its accessible and unmediated relationship to the physical body, to materiality and to sense perception?

‘We Need to Talk About Painting’ served to highlight an appetite for discourse and debate on the subject of painting. These talks will be disseminated as online recordings and as a form of publication.

@karen.ebbs

SIOBHÁN MOONEY OUTLINES THE 12TH ITERATION OF PERIODICAL REVIEW AT PALLAS PROJECT/STUDIOS.

Karen Ebbs is a Dublin-based painter who is currently studying for an MFA at NCAD.

Venus Patel, Eggshells 2022, experimental short film; image courtesy the artist and Pallas Projects/ Studios.

The Kerr Shoe Collection

WHILE THE NATIONAL Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL) is predominately paper based, you might be surprised to learn that we have approximately 1,300 pairs of shoes! You may agree the staff in NIVAL are a fashion-conscious lot; however, these are not our shoes.

Housed in a room to themselves, these shoes are stacked on shelves from floor to ceiling. They are all stored in their original, individual boxes, which in turn provide fascinating examples of design, advertising trends, and styles. There is a feeling of time travel as NIVAL staff linger in the quiet space, peeping into the shoeboxes. Sensible school shoes, remembered from childhood, contrast with the vibrantly coloured, polyester, faux fur trimmed slippers, so popular in the 1980s. From pumps to iconic platforms, these once common examples of footwear are now rare historical artefacts. High heels, wingtips, and sandals demonstrate in a very real and tangible way, the myriad of talent and graft of the skilled practitioners.

Donated to the archive by artist Dr Helen McAllister and textile artist Millie Cullivan ANCAD, this collection originated from the Kerr Family shoe shop business, based in Mohill, County Leitrim. The shop was opened in 1956 and closed in the mid-90s, retaining shoes from across this 40-year time span. Not only is this an extensive collection but significantly, the vast majority of the shoes are Irish made, with a substantial amount manufactured in Leitrim and the surrounding counties. This is testament to the flourishing industry of shoe and shoe-related products that have since, essentially, disappeared in Ireland. The Kerr Shoe Collection is an important record of an indigenous manufacturing industry, which included shoe designers, networks for production, marketing, distribution, and graphic designers to create

attractive packaging and logos. Put simply, this archive reflects a vital social record, showing Irish fashion trends and societal norms over four decades.

Supporting this collection are a number of related articles and books kept in NIVAL. Visitors are welcome to book an appointment to study these books, files, and ephemera in our Reading Room, while books from the Edward Murphy Library are available for loan to members of the library.

One example is David Shaw-Smith’s 1979 documentary, Tutty’s Shoes, focusing on the famous artisan shoemaker, Tutty’s of Naas, who made hand-lasted shoes by measuring the foot, building up the wooden last, and completing the shoe. Other resources include Shaw-Smith’s book, Traditional Crafts of Ireland (Thames and Hudson, 1984), and a chapter titled ‘Shoemakers’ in Kevin Corrigan Kearns’s book, Dublin’s Vanishing Craftsmen (Appletree Press, 1986).

The Kerr Family was keen to find a future role for the shop’s contents. With the help of Mervyn Kerr, Helen McAllister, and Millie Cullivan, they catalogued, photographed, and created an archive of approximately 1,300 shoe models. Where possible, two of each shoe styles were taken, with one set going to NIVAL. The Kerr Shoe Collection was deposited to NIVAL by Helen McAllister in 2017.

Eve Parnell is Artists Database Editor/ Library Assistant at NIVAL. nival.ie

Artist Supports

Direct Support

ELIDA MAIQUES OUTLINES HER PARTICIPATION IN MERMAID ART CENTRE’S TRANSFORM ASSOCIATE ARTIST SCHEME.

THE FOUR TRANSFORM Associate Artists 2022/23 at the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray are writer and printmaker Shiva R. Joyce, theatre director and writer Chris Moran, actor and playwright Emmet Kirwan, and I. Three of us are Wicklow-based, while Shiva is resolutely nomadic, sometimes based in Cork. Funded by the Arts Council, TRANSFORM is a direct support scheme for artists. Each artist is hired to work on a part-time basis, 20 hours per week for one year. What we are required to do is simply to work in a self-directed way on our current art practice.

Care and thought have been put into hiring a group of artists from different disciplines, cultures, age groups, social conditions, and backgrounds. Everybody is busy, but we try to meet weekly or biweekly with artistic director Julie Kelleher or curator Anne Mullee. Our conversations include banter, troubleshooting, peer support, housekeeping, and a reading club. They seem to be pollen-rich: fresh projects are coming out of this already. The emphasis on collective wellbeing, while delivering a strong arts programme for Wicklow, is real and authentic.

To the scheme I bring my art practice, which in the last decade has expanded from drawing. Exploring the boundaries of drawing and comics, I have initiated collaborations with dancers and musicians. In 2015, a series of botanical drawings evolved into a long-term project, I Am a Forest, which includes seed-gathering, tree propagation, and wildlife art workshops with community groups such as local schools and the community planting project, Edible Bray.

TRANSFORM has supported me to pursue film festival distribution of the

short, I Am a Forest (2022). A direct result is its premiere in the Official Selection of the Morelia Film Festival in Mexico, one of the most important film festivals in Latin America.

Since 1999 I have run informal drawing and comics sessions; its current iteration is called ‘Fridayfest’, a drop-in drawing and writing session at the Mermaid. It is open to all, from the seasoned to the pencil-fearing. This relaxed session weaves conversation, drawing, writing, thought, and giggles. Drawing in company is one of the pleasures of life.

‘The Community Seed Ark’ is another project I am involved in. When the project’s initiator, artist Aga Kowalska, moved overseas, Bray Library invited me to become their Seed Librarian. Increasingly methodical about seed-saving, I am curating and keeping a community seed ark (vegetables, wildflowers, and garden flowers). People borrow seeds from Bray Library, grow plants and collect their seeds, returning some of them to the library.

The use of the word ‘transform’ for this Mermaid Ars Centre funding scheme is intentional and meaningful. It is transformative by supporting collaborations, research, travel, workshops, study time, and in generating opportunities for artists through direct economic support and trust. I find it also supports the communities around the artist, as we have the time and headspace to dedicate to them. The impact of art making cannot be underestimated, but it can be funded and carefully supported.

Elida Maiques is a Spanish-born (Guatemalan-Valencian) visual artist residing in Wicklow.

EVE PARNELL CONSIDERS SHOES HOUSED IN NIVAL THAT WERE HANDMADE IN IRELAND IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

Kerr Shoe Collection; image courtesy of NIVAL.

Elida Maiques, Tagged 2022, performance workshop; photograph by Eoghan Carroll, courtesy the artist and Vault Studios Belfast.

Casa Dipinta

BRENDA MOORE-MCCANN DISCUSSES THE ITALIAN TOWNHOUSE OWNED BY BARBARA NOVAK AND BRIAN O’DOHERTY.

THE RECENT DEATH of renowned artist Brian O’Doherty (1928-2022) (a.k.a. Patrick Ireland 1972-2008) will inevitably lead to more in-depth assessments of his spectacular range of work as an artist, critic, arts administrator, editor, and writer, which contributed so much to Irish and international contemporary art. While Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1967) and conceptual exhibition Aspen 5+6 (1967), as well as Patrick Ireland’s Name Change performance (1972) and environmental Rope Drawing installations are very well known, an evolving artwork in Italy for the past fifty years, is less so. Casa Dipinta (meaning ‘painted house’) is an eighteenth-century house, tucked away in the medieval town of Todi, Umbria, which the artist and his wife, art historian and painter, Barbara Novak, have owned since the mid-1970s. Over succeeding decades, O’Doherty/ Ireland gradually transformed the house into a unique artwork. Opened to the public as a museum a few years ago, it now ranks as one of Todi’s most popular sites with locals and tourists.

I first stayed in Casa Dipinta at the invitation of the artist and his wife in 1998, while on a research trip about O’Doherty/Ireland’s art. Many engaging conversations took place over breakfast of toast and truffle paste. This was followed since then by many other visits, which allowed first-hand observation of the organic way in which the house changed, as a new wall was painted, repainted or, sometimes, obliterated. While Novak initially wanted to keep the “white, silent, walls” she eventually relented. Beginning in 1977, O’Doherty/Ireland began to paint the house in a dazzling array of colours and linear configurations, all of which related, I discovered, to abiding concerns within his art.

In the late 1960s, language, specifically the extinct Celtic language of Ogham (c. 2nd, 3rd -7th A.D.) dominated O’Doherty’s conceptual art, and sometimes Ireland’s signature three-dimensional Rope Drawing installations. Both are found at different levels of Casa Dipinta. In the context of his Minimalist-Conceptual background, the artist reduced his artistic vocabulary to Ogham vowels – “the horizon of language” – and the triad of Ogham-translated words ONE, HERE, NOW. These dominate the ground floor alongside another constant concern, that of the self and other. This is found in painted panels of Ogham lines that address the viewer with ‘I’(IIIII) and ‘U’/You’(III). In others, the vowel ‘I’ alone dances across a gridded blue panel or in Dictionary of I in which it is depicted in a variety of configurations with the visual symbol of identity, the hand. Gradually, pristine white walls were replaced by walls that whispered vowels and the words ONE, HERE, NOW on separate panels throughout the first and second floors.

Importantly, as each level of the three-storey house was transformed into an artwork, daily life continued within. Simple, modest furniture, in stark contrast to the vibrantly coloured walls, clearly removed this house/ museum from that which O’Doherty had so cogently critiqued in the acclaimed essays, ‘Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space’ around the same time. Instead of the white cube’s quasi-religious, transcendental space, this was a lived-in space accompanied by the constant sounds of the surrounding city. The presence of the artist and his wife is strongly felt, not least by half-finished and full-length portraits in different parts of the house. Like Schwitters’ Merzbau (c. 1923-37), the house became altered from within. But in contrast to Merzbau’s ever changing collage of found objects, Casa Dipinta was transformed using house paint that became part of the architecture itself.

Yet, like Merzbau, it also became a non-static, living environment that constantly changed.

Barbara Novak insisted, since a large part of his work was ephemeral, that Casa Dipinta would be a place where key works of O’Doherty/Ireland’s art would eventually be on permanent display. The mural, One, Here, Now: The Ogham Cycle (1996, restored 2018) at Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, County Cork, is the only other permanent work open to the public (and dedicated to the Irish people in 1996). While important for this reason, Casa Dipinta does not, however, represent the full range of O’Doherty’s art, such as the large series of Ogham drawings on paper, Ogham wall sculptures, objects, chess-works, artist’s books, language plays, and labyrinths.

The art and culture of Italy informs the first-floor living room in the form of a single rope drawing, Trecento. Its painted triangular shape, a secular echo of the numerous pedimented roadside altars dotted around Umbria, is accompanied by rope lines that stretch out into the room where the viewer can find the spot where rope and painted configuration align momentarily. There are also Ogham NOW and HERE paintings on this floor that incorporate anomalies of architecture (seen in many Italian frescos), such as for example, in the NOW panel where a pre-existing oculus in the

wall becomes part of the work, while the HERE panel incorporates the entrance to a deep stairwell leading to the kitchen below. An Ogham Song of the Vowels painting lies opposite the stairwell.

There is no Ogham on the upper bedroom floor. This calm predominantly blue room is dominated by the theme of inside and outside with its painted shuttered windows revealing an Italianate cycle of the times of day. In a corner, the theme is carried further with a double door rope drawing, a contemporary nod to Duchamp’s 11, Rue Larrey (1927).

The next phase of this unique museum, with its rich library of art books donated by the artist and his wife, will be an artist’s retreat and a valuable resource for artists and scholars in the future. Thus, this anti-white cube museum will allow art and life to continue to live side-by-side as intended by O’Doherty and Novak. The house was recently given to the people of Todi by the couple.

Brenda Moore-McCann is an author, art historian, medical doctor and critic, based between Dublin and Tuscany. A bilingual (English/Italian) book on Casa Dipinta will be published by the author in 2023.

Bedroom in Casa Dipinta, Todi, Umbria, Italy; photograph by George Tatge, courtesy of the author.

The Space to Grow

FOR 40 YEARS, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (TBG+S) has been a bedrock for artists in Dublin. In this article, we hear from five of our current studio artists, who consider what TBG+S means to them personally. We praise all who made TBG+S happen in the first instance and wish to thank all who have contributed to the organisation over its 40-year history to make it such a special place – this includes over 500 Irish and international artists, as well as everyone who has worked here, every board member, all funders, and audiences.

It has meant a great deal to me to be a part of Temple Bar Gallery + Studios over the past few years. Being here has given me the security, freedom, continuous support, and attention that an artist requires to sustain their practice. This has had a significant and positive impact on my work. The appeal of a secluded artist residency is the opportunity to escape everyday life and focus on making. Outside of this context, I never would have thought it possible to find the optimum artmaking conditions of tranquillity, peace, and pragmatic focus. TBG+S provides all of this, not only in the midst of everyday life, but right in the bustling heart of Dublin, near many other major cultural institutions and organisations. TBG+S facilitates a community of artist peers to share ideas and inspire each other. One of the most unique experiences in a residency is watching projects by other artists develop over the same timeframe as your own. As spectators, we normally experience artworks in their final state of completion. Yet there is something inspiring about stepping into an artist’s studio and contemplating

Clíodhna Shaffrey, Director, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

Mairead O’hEocha, view of the artist’s studio at TBG+S; image courtesy of the artist. MEMBERS OF TEMPLE BAR GALLERY + STUDIOS

their work unfolding. My favourite part of artmaking is seeing uncertainty fade as ideas begin to solidify. It is a privilege to share this process as a member of one of Ireland’s major artist studios.

Atoosa Pour Hosseini is a Three-Year Membership Studio artist at TBG+S and will present a solo exhibition in the gallery in October 2023.

Being the recipient of the TBG+S Recent Graduate Award has been transformative. Sharing a space with a strong community of artists has given me confidence and a sense of solidarity – as well as confirmation that the path I’ve chosen to take is the right one. Learning through studio visits and informal conversations in the corridors, I benefit enormously from the support and feedback of other members. It has helped me re-imagine how I see my practice. It has encouraged the expansion of my work – off the screen onto the walls, in the form of large-scale images – which I hope will help to sustain my practice into the future. Having studied in IADT and living in the suburbs, a studio space in Dublin’s city centre connects me to the heart of the city and its artistic energy for the first time. Despite the noise from buskers and tourists, I enjoy the immediacy and vibrancy. As an emerging, working-class artist, I am very aware of the critical lack of affordable studio space and its impact on emerging and established artists. In this climate, the continuance of established, resourced, purpose-built studios like TBG+S is all the more important. Happy Birthday!

Every morning I leave the street and enter a lift which floats me up to an enchanted greenhouse that is the top floor of Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. Pushing back any giant leaves guarding my door, I feel as lucky as Jack in the fairy tale, when he finds the giant’s castle at the top of the beanstalk. TBG+S is unique because of the people who make it so. The team work incredibly hard to create a dynamic exhibition programme, while also providing immeasurable studio support to artist members. It is not just a material resource but an imaginative enterprise that expands on contemporary art themes of social engagement and community. They do this both inside and outside the gallery space. TBG+S was founded in the 1980s and unfortunately there has been nothing quite like it built in Dublin since. Purpose-built studios for artists in Ireland are in extremely short in supply. I have been exceptionally lucky to have a space in TBG+S. Artists need publicly funded spaces to allow them to rise above the constraints and grinding costs of living. I really hope the government’s promised plans for more studio spaces will build the magic castles that artists need right now.

Painting is a mostly solitary activity, and the necessary solitude and constancy to undertake this form of practice can be found in a studio. The messy materials and processes of painting can be left to stew there, and the changes, experiments and transformations can be observed – brought to boil or cool off – over daily visits to the studio. The process of blending liquid substances into solid form, while attending to the meaning of images in a changing world, is enough to drive one crazy, but the solidarity of knowing that others are engaged in similar pursuits in adjacent studios might be enough to keep one sane. I have had a studio in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios since it was established as a workspace for artists by Jenny Haughton in 1983. Previously, I had a studio on Ormond Quay, where I lived at the time. As a committed city dweller, the move across the river was very convenient and the advantage of joining

Luke van Gelderen is the 2022 Recent Graduate Resident artist at TBG+S.

Mairead O’hEocha is a Three-Year Membership Studio artist at TBG+S.

Atoosa Pour Hosseini, Cradle of Creation, 2018, Super8 film still; image courtesy of the artist.

Niamh O’Malley, view of the artist’s studio at TBG+S; image courtesy of the artist.

a community of artists was as much about opening up to new horizons, as about nourishing an existing practice. TBG+S has survived many trials over its 40-year existence and succeeds in consistently allowing artists the space to grow.

Robert Armstrong is a founder member at TBG+S.

I worked in a small, converted shed for eight years. It was useful because as an artist, part-time lecturer, and parent of a young child, I was able to snatch studio time at night and during short school hours. The space was tiny with very low ceilings; I longed for a room that didn’t also have the washing in it. When I moved back into TBG+S (I’d had a stint here 2009-12) it coincided with a career break from TU Dublin. Newly isolated from my academic colleagues, I was so grateful to be working again in a community, alongside other artists. This is a strange life to choose, and it helps to have companionship along the way. My practice shifted again, almost immediately. I have been able to expand my materials, experiment with scale and form, and allow for compositions of objects to shift, reconfigure and evolve. In the depths of the pandemic, for the Ireland at Venice project, Clíodhna Shaffrey, Michael Hill and I considered the nature of the studio. It is a space that is more important to some artists than others –but in pitching to show work in Venice, we wanted to highlight the role of TBG+S, of all ‘good studios’, in cultivating and facilitating practices that necessitate a fashioning of forms, a thinking through making. I will miss my beautiful, life-changing room so much.

Niamh O’Malley is a Three-Year Membership Studio artist at TBG+S. She represented Ireland at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, with a solo exhibition titled ‘Gather’, which was curated by the TBG+S Curatorial Team.

Established by artists in 1983, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios was one of the first DIY artist-led initiatives in Ireland. TBG+S was founded by Jenny Haughton (Founding Director) and a group of artists, who occupied and rented a disused shirt factory from Córas Iompair Éireann (CIE). As well as studios, the building housed an exhibition space, cafe, sculptor’s annex, and a print studio, influencing the atmosphere of Temple Bar in the 1980s and establishing the area’s reputation as a cultural hub. It was one of the first cultural organisations rehoused by the Temple Bar Cultural Quarter regeneration.

templebargallery.com

Luke van Gelderen, #future#content, 2021, UV Print on Dibond, Artificial Intelligence, 180 x 100 cm; image courtesy of the artist and The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin.

Robert Armstrong, view of the artist’s studio table at TBG+S; image courtesy of the artist.

Ireland’s St. Ives

MARTINA O’BYRNE OUTLINES THE EVOLUTION AND ASPIRATIONS OF ARTFORM SCHOOL OF ART IN DUNMORE EAST IN WATERFORD.

OVER THE LAST few years, the unique character of the seaside village of Dunmore East in County Waterford – with its red cliffs, strands, and coves – has been enhanced further by the creative presence of Artform School of Art. On a visit, you might find plein air artists, led by Dave West, working on Lawlor’s Strand; or a group of watercolourists having a lunch with John Short on the terrace of The Strand Inn overlooking Hook Lighthouse, in lively conversation with the inn’s owner and co-founder of Artform, Clifden Foyle. Around the corner at Artform, in a modern, spacious, lightfilled studio, Bridget Flannery could be showing artists her summer sketchbooks; Michael Wann could be introducing the medium of charcoal through some drawing exercises; or indeed Eamon Colman could be reading a poem to the artists before they experiment with pigment during his masterclass on colour.

Following a very successful pop-up art exhibition in December 2017, in a beautiful historical building at 44 The Quay, Waterford, Clifden Foyle and I established Artform School of Art. While the Annual 44 exhibition went on to become an important yearly event, the art school project, under the corporate governance of Clifden’s family hospitality business, brought together the Foyle family’s passion for art and long-standing support for artists, with our unique artistic, technical, and organisational skillset.

When Artform studio doors reopened after the pandemic, we ran several vibrant seasons with courses hosted by many excellent artists mentors. This included P.J. Lynch (still life, portrait and figure drawing, and painting in charcoal and oils); Tony Robinson (plein air in oils, portrait in oils alla prima); Julie Cusack, Bridget Flannery (abstracting the landscape in mixed media); Maurice Quillinan (sampling in international painting); Mary O’Connor (abstraction; silk screen printing); Aidan Crotty (painting from observation); Gabhann Dunne (painting between representation and abstraction); Shevaun Doherty (botanical painting in watercolours); Steve Browning (plein air in acrylics); Sheila Naughton (experimental drawing); Daniel Lipstein (traditional printmaking techniques); Neal Greig (landscape in oils and charcoal); Zsolt Basti and Salvatore of Lucan (combined course on double portraits, composition and painting); Brian Smyth (copying old masters); Mick O’Dea (working from life in any medium), and others.

We welcome semi-professional and contemporary artists on bursaries, plein air artists, hobbyists, individuals, and art groups. We strive to ensure that Artform course participants feel at ease, with 24-hour studio access available during their course. Class sizes are small, with a maximum of nine per course to facilitate individual exchange between participants and tutor. While our recent audience has been primarily resident in Ireland, due to the pandemic, we have previously hosted visiting artists from the UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the US, and Australia.

Artform is always searching for new opportunities for artists. Last summer, five Artform tutors were offered an Artform

mini residency to create work themed on Dunmore East. They then formed a judging panel to select work from an open-call competition, which became a summer show entitled ‘Painting Dunmore’, hosted by our accommodation partner, Strand Inn. The panel also awarded a Plein Air Prize to a selected artist.

In autumn, Artform took part in the Car Boot Art Fair in Russborough House in Wicklow, to which Artform both made a donation and hosted a stand exhibiting the work of five Artform tutors. Artform also contributed to the Imagine Arts Festival in Waterford City, staging a pop-up portraiture event called ‘15 Minutes of Fame’ with Artform tutors Zsolt Basti and Salvatore of Lucan, in response to a concurrent portraiture exhibition at Waterford Gallery of Art.

Artform recently supported its online partner, Big Look Art, in running an online mentoring scheme funded by Waterford Arts Office for six Waterford-based artists, and we also offered a year-long bursary to a displaced art college student from Odesa in Ukraine. Among other activities over the last five years, Artform have raised funds for the Peter McVerry Trust, through artwork sales in ‘Annual 44’; delivered outreach activities for Waterford schools; sponsored an artist residency for a project on inclusion in Waterford Cultural Quarter; run a free Plein Air Paint Out for Dunmore East Harbour Festival; and hosted 115 artists during the ‘Art in The Open’ international plein air festival.

In 2022 we made the difficult decision to reschedule our flagship exhibition, ‘Annual 44’, from winter to spring 2023, due to circumstances beyond our control. As a result of the conflict in Ukraine, war-afflicted refugees have been temporarily accommodated in our exhibition venue, and we struggled to find an alternative venue in Waterford. Next year, while continuing to offer a rich programme of workshops and masterclasses, we aim to appeal to more overseas markets through a marketing strategy that ties Artform as an experience destination within Ireland’s Ancient East. We plan to offer further residencies to artists looking for a space to work independently and develop the exhibition programme by continuing to foster strong contacts with the contemporary art world in Ireland. In all of this, we will continue our work in developing Dunmore East as a space for artists to meet, create, learn, show, and reflect on their art. We aspire to be a St. Ives in the South-East of Ireland.

Martina O’Byrne is cofounder and Programme Director of Artform School of Art. artform.ie

Artform artists painting on Lawlors’ Strand, photograph by T1Media.

Artform studio, photograph by T1Media.

Artform studio, photograph by T1Media.

Defining an Arena

LUCY AND ROBERT CARTER OUTLINE THE RATIONALE AND AMBITIONS OF THE GRILSE GALLERY.

THE GRILSE GALLERY opened in Killorglin in May 2022 as a screen-printing studio and gallery focused on contemporary prints and drawings. We decided to exhibit contemporary prints and drawings because we are printmakers ourselves, to differentiate the gallery, and because prints and drawings tend to be modestly priced, which makes them accessible to a wide public.

‘Grilse’ (pronounced ‘grils’) is the term for a oneyear-old salmon returning to its home river, which seemed appropriate for a gallery on the banks of the River Laune, in Lucy’s family’s hometown.

Our inaugural exhibition was ‘Between the Lines’(15 May to 17 July 2022), an installation of 100 rarely seen drawings spanning 20 years by Charles Tyrrell, an Irish painter of some renown and a member of Aosdána (as well as being an old friend), which lent us a high benchmark in establishing our credibility.

Most of the work was displayed unframed, many resting on shelves, giving an unusual immediacy and intimacy to the hang. Being primarily a painter, Charlie considers the drawings, although ‘finished’, as not necessarily ends in themselves, but ‘private conversations’ with himself, stating: “They inform me, feed me, and indirectly influence my paint thinking. While I do draw towards the paintings, it is drawing of a different kind. Plotting and planning, defining an arena in which I see possibilities for building with paint. This drawing can be strategic and pragmatic. A step on the way. Rarely seen as an end.”

The show ran from May to July, overlapping with Killorglin’s remarkable K-Fest, a weekend arts festival with an emphasis on emerging artists, using unoccupied spaces as pop-up galleries and venues. ‘Between the Lines’ was opened by Kate Kennelly, County Kerry’s

Arts Officer who warmly welcomed the establishment of a new independent gallery in the region. Her opening remarks reminded us of the scarcity of contemporary art galleries in Kerry, public or private, despite the large number of artists working in the county.

In between shows by invited artists, we screen-print and display our own work. In our previous careers as graphic designers, we have always been collaborators in the arts sector, working with our clients, fellow artists, and makers. We find this the most rewarding aspect of creative work, however satisfying the end result. We collaborated with Charlie on a screen-printed edition of one of his drawings. We have the beginnings of a saleroom with Fermoyle Pottery, displaying selected pieces and artist’s books by Lisa Fingleton and Jenny Richardson.

From October to the end of November, we showed Debbie Godsell’s ‘Residues’, an exhibition of beautiful unique screen-prints relating to the harvest, farm gates, turf reeks, and other distinctive rural elements, which she documented during solitary walks over the past two years. These are seen in the context of an Ireland that is slowly, reluctantly, stepping into the modern age. The sculptural piece, Thresh (2022), combines a 40-metre screen-print, circulating in a continuous loop around a wooden structure, reminding one variously of a printing press, agricultural machinery, and domestic processes.

Her show was opened by Aileen Galvin, one of Ireland’s most experienced arts consultants, having devised and managed campaigns for arts, culture and heritage, festivals and entertainments. She, again, warmly welcomed the addition of Grilse Gallery to the sector and gave a heartfelt call for supporting the arts in local communities.

We are planning to offer residencies to experienced screen printers, to invite guest curators to develop our repertoire, and to host community events. We have been welcomed by the town, which has a thriving culture of music, literature and drama, and by the visual arts community in Kerry. We are excited by the prospect of developing a wider network of friends, collaborators, and supporters.

December saw us staging a Winter Group Show featuring 20 established and emerging Irish artists working in a wide variety of media including embroidery, etching, and screen-printing, drawing, painting, photography, and sculpture. The exhibiting artists included Miriam Barry, Regina Bartsch, Paul Bokslag, Cormac Boydell, Edwina Bracken, Fermoyle Pottery, Debbie Godsell, Patrick Groneman, Con Kelleher, Denis Kelly, Rochelle Lucey, Sean MacCarthy, Ava McKenna, Deirdre McKenna, Niall Naessens, Ciara O’Connor, Alan Raggett, Eddie Ryan and Charles Tyrrell. Half of these are Kerry-based, and the gender ratio was equal. The show was introduced by Eamonn Maxwell, advisor to the Arts Council of Ireland.

Plans for 2023 include a two-person exhibition of work by Rachel Parry and Cormac Boydell at Easter; and later in the year, exhibitions of work by visual artist and designer Paul Bokslag, Aisling Roche, Niall Naessens, and by the late British artist, Gerald Laing.

Lucy and Robert Carter are codirectors of the Grilse Gallery in Killorglin, County Kerry. grilse.ie @grilsegallery

‘Between the Lines: 100 drawings by Charles Tyrrell’, installation view, Grilse Gallery, May 2022; photograph by Con Kelleher courtesy the artist and Grilse Gallery.

Niall Naessens, Artist Observing Sunrise 2018, etching aquatint on Zerkall 350g, 33 x 33 cm; photograph by Max Gay courtesy the artist and Grilse Gallery.

Critique

Tinka

Critique

SOMEBODY TURNED TO me and said: “It’s like when you see a gallery opening in an American film; it looks a bit like this.” We were three floors up, not quite a New York loft, rather a high-spec office block, with metallic flooring, industrial lighting, and whitewashed brick walls. Situated on Belfast’s main thoroughfare – and offering views over the city through floor-to-ceiling windows – the venue was buzzing on opening night with curators, artists, and potential collectors. On the walls, plinths, and floor was an impressive array of artworks by artists based in Northern Ireland. Yet, as they say, nobody had any ‘notions’ about themselves: prices started at just £10, with many pieces under £100, and I can’t remember the last time I saw Turner Prize-winning artists pouring the wine. This was ‘UPHOLD: New Collections’, the first physical exhibition by ‘UPHOLD’, a relatively new initiative by collectively-led art organisation, Household.

Household is run by independent curators Jane Butler, Ciara Hickey and Alissa Kleist. Their project, ‘UPHOLD’, emerged as the pandemic left artists suddenly without exhibition or residency opportunities. Taking inspiration from the Arts Council of Ireland (who funded several national institutions to buy contemporary art during the lockdowns), they began with ten artists, inviting them to showcase pre-existing work, available for sale, on a new online platform. Funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Belfast City Council allowed the project to expand, and new members were each paid an artist’s fee and a materials budget to create a new edition. There are currently 25 individual artists and two collectives. The not-for-profit model means that artists receive 80% of any subsequent sales, with the remaining 20% going back into the organisation to cover costs.

Alongside visual artists like Mark McGreevy, UPHOLD make a point of including those who tend to work in performance or installation (such as Array Collective or Michael Hanna), asking them to consider something commercial within their practice; there is a set of beer mats from Array’s The Druthaibs Ball (2021), and Hanna’s Yellow Uh Oh (2022), a handmade vacuum

form. Others are encouraged to reimagine work in a reproducible format in a way that does not compromise their practice. For example, a Phillip McCrilly’s wall painting (originally shown in CCA Derry-Londonderry) is recreated as a series of limited-edition silkscreen prints; while Rachael Campbell-Palmer’s sculptural pieces are presented as scaled down versions of her larger works, using similar forms and materials.

The Household team want to grow a culture of collecting art in Northern Ireland and for every edition that is commissioned, they keep an artist’s proof, so that they are also building a collection. The website encourages visitors to think beyond “a simple domestic decoration” towards “art that is […] intriguing, provocative, relevant, compelling, beautiful…”. This is facilitated by a streamlined online purchasing process, offering framing where relevant, and detailed photography that not only showcases individual pieces but also envisages them in domestic settings. That being said, it’s not all ‘sell, sell, sell’ – artist profiles are provided with statements on individual pieces, making the website just as much a resource for curators.

The ‘UPHOLD: New Collections’ exhibition comprised primarily the new editions described above (currently there are 20), with each artist given free rein on how they chose to interpret the brief. For example, there were glitchy, patterned, knotted-wool pieces mounted on board from Grace McMurray with titles referring to grief and feeling out of one’s depth; a grid of 12 mini, abstract, layered canvases by Susan Connolly from her series ‘Traces of an activity 21’; an edition of digital prints and 3D-printed and Jesmonite sculptures by John Rainey, referencing antique Graeco-Roman sculpture and exploring how museums display, restore, and acquire such works; photographic pieces from Jan McCullough recording site-specific studio experiments (and strangely reminiscent of Las Meninas by Velázquez); or a series of custom-printed mugs by Jennifer Mehigan with textual references to sources like the Irish Queer Archive and Famine-era print media. Incidentally, Mehigan was one of two artists (along with Emma Wolf-Haugh) invited to respond to

themes from the 2022 Outburst Queer Arts Festival.

Subtle curatorial decisions throughout were also a delight – such as the neon touches of reflective materials in Jill Quigley’s photographs being picked up in Susan Hughes’ screen-print employing, maritime high-visibility paint; or the grid pattern of a tablecloth in Thomas Wells’s installation interacting with a galvanised steel mesh flooring panel in work by Katie Watchorn – and in turn with the metallic floor of 35DP. The venue was on three-week loan from Haller-Clarke, a consultancy firm working with existing and new ‘good developers’, to value art in its capacity to introduce people to space and place. Aware of Household’s work and with similar aims and values, they knew it would be a good fit.

The plan for ‘UPHOLD’ is to add five new artists every six months, funding them to create more editions, and ultimately to continue to demonstrate the range and quality of work being produced in Northern Ireland while encouraging people to buy and collect. Another exhibition is planned for 2023.

Jonathan Brennan is a multidisciplinary artist based in Belfast.

jonathanbrennanart.com

‘UPHOLD’ is a not-for-profit online platform for selling and promoting work made by contemporary artists based or working in Northern Ireland.

upholdart.co.uk

‘UPHOLD: New Collections’ 35DP, 35 Donegall Place, Belfast. 3 – 20 November 2022

John Rainey, Erroneous Restoration Study #1 2022, Jesmonite and 3D Print; photograph by Chad Alexander, courtesy of the artist and Household.

Tara McGinn, Spilled Milk #7 2022, Terracotta clay, acrylic paint, polymer relief outliner (various), gilding wax, gloss varnish; photograph by Chad Alexander, courtesy of the artist and Household.

A MARY MAGDALENE Experience is a sharp and witty film installation by artist and activist Grace Dyas. The work was commissioned as part of the Magdalene Series at Rua Red, curated by director Maolíosa Boyle, that to date has featured solo exhibitions by artists Amanda Coogan, Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon, and Jesse Jones. In this work, Dyas collaborated with a team of women artists and activists including Clare O’Connor, Susan Quirke, Ella Clarke, and Jaro Waldeck. Dyas’s provocative, community-engaged works do not shy away from challenging topics that affect working-class communities. Adopting a feminist liberation theology perspective, A Mary Magdalene Experience draws inspiration from the Gospel of Mary, a gnostic gospel that offers what some understand as evidence of Mary Magdalene’s participation in the intellectual and spiritual Christian tradition and signals her suppression by patriarchal Church authorities. Consequently, the dynamics of power and silencing resonate throughout the work.

Entering the installation, the solemnly lit Gospel of Mary is displayed on large sheets of paper. A small pink rock, like a talisman, is on a nearby wall shelf, while inside a pink cove, a large mysterious rock containing Mary Magdalene’s essence releases an inner glow. In the second gallery, the film, starring Jordanne Jones, James O’Driscoll and Louise Lewis, screens in front of installed seating. Set in a present-day but imaginary Tallaght, where neoliberalism reigns supreme, and taking place against the backdrop of the #MeToo international social movement in response to sexual abuse and harassment, the film considers the deliberately tarnished reputation of Mary Magdalene. Tina Malone (Jones) is a sex worker engaged by John Brophy (O’Driscoll), a community activist turned politician with a ‘Jesus complex’, for A Mary Magdalene Experience. Brophy wants a woman he can save, for his own sexual pleasures, of course. But rather than play the harlot, Tina sees Mary Magdalene as a woman wilfully misaligned. John’s mother Bernie Brophy (Lewis), who pregnant at 13 received a vision that her son would offer salvation, believes John is the working class hero the world needs. She refuses to let anything thwart this, even serious allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse

of power.

Attempting to shift public opinion and resurrect his career, Brophy stages a durational tableaux vivant in Rua Red where he stands unmoving tied to a large wooden cross for three days. As a crowd gathers for Brophy’s public mea culpa, a woman stands at the foot of the cross wearing an ‘END MISOGYNY’ t-shirt. The crowd turns against him amidst cries of: “Get off the cross”, recalling the expression “get off the cross, we need the wood”, meaning no more tired spectacles of male martyrdom. But it is Tina’s captivating intervention, in a bid to vindicate Mary Magdalene, that ultimately steals the show. While Tina’s poses frequently cite art historical representations of Mary Magdalene by male artists, she becomes the creator of her own image when she bravely faces the crowd and says: “You can’t take away my demons, I am standing here with them”. The gallery’s cinema-style seating mimics a large jury box, to which viewers sit in judgement of insidious patriarchy and bear witness to the reclamation of Mary Magdalene.

The imagery of luminous Rose Quartz appearing around Tallaght becomes the literal touchstone in the film. When a woman jogger discusses with a local drug dealer its potential meanings, she cites the numerous abuses of the Catholic Church, to which he quips: “They are going to need a lot more rocks”. While Rose Quartz may represent compassion and healing, references to crack cocaine and crystal meth – drugs used as a form self-medication for some – are also evident. At night, the woman, transfixed by the rock, opens her pink bathrobe and gently presses her body against its surface. Later, in a ‘pietá moment’, Brophy’s sorrowing mother cries bitter tears in front of the quartz, while his body lies prostrate across it. Pondering the enigmatic essence of Mary Magdalene, the repeated return to the quartz as a site of contemplation, compassion and remembrance signals the multifaceted dimensions to Mary Magdalene, whom Dyas centres as a radical figure through which the potential for healing can occur.

Dr Kate Antosik-Parsons is a contemporary art historian and interdisciplinary scholar who writes about performance, gender and the body. kateap.com

Grace Dyas, ‘A Mary Magdalene Experience’ Rua Red Gallery

Grace Dyas, A Mary Magdalene Experience 2022, film still; image courtesy of the artist and Rua Red.

Grace Dyas, A Mary Magdalene Experience 2022, film still; image courtesy of the artist and Rua Red.

Critique

‘In and of Itself – Abstraction in the Age of Images’

Royal Hibernian Academy 18 November 2022 – 29 January 2023

WHAT CAN ONE say about an exhibition of abstract art? When faced with the seemingly inscrutable gestures and processes revealed in works positioned at an apparent remove from naïve representation, it’s a more than fair question, asked not only by the casual viewer, but the professional critic too. The challenge it poses is whether the asking constitutes an end or a beginning to our engagement with the abstract work presented.

A useful route out of the impasse is provided by Rosalind Krauss in her 1979 essay, ‘Grids’, which attributes to the grid an announcement of modern art’s “will to silence.”1 More precisely, she begins her discussion by describing the use of grids in modernist paintings, telling us that “the barrier it has lowered between the arts of vision and those of language has been almost totally successful in walling the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality and defending them against the intrusion of speech.”2 Baldly stated in today’s tech terms, modern art’s resistance to explication is not a bug: it’s a feature.

Approaching this show with Krauss in mind, we might say that the best thing to do, then, is to just look, and look closely. Upon entering the gallery, we first encounter the most atypical works of the whole bunch, a trio of wooden sculptures by Michael Warren, in which a delicate tension is maintained between formal austerity and the warm seductiveness of the materials: elm, oak, Spanish walnut. To the right we see a trio of large, shaped paintings by Richard Gorman. Two ovals and a large semi-circular work, composed of multiple canvasses, build upon a well-established vocabulary of colourful geometric counterpoint, done with a playfulness made even more explicit by the title of this grouping: the dead cat bounce

Directly opposite is another trio of works, this time by Charles Tyrell; large canvasses, the paint scraped and heavily worked over, forcing the dominant greywhite muted tones to be offset by traces and hints of under-layers in black, green, red and indigo. They also mark the appearance of a particular form that re-emerges frequently in the show – the very form that, not coincidently, Krauss was most concerned with in

her essay. Tyrell’s grids here have a strong three-dimensional quality. The lines feel almost etched out of the textured foreground and the grids have a torqued undulating quality that appear quite sculptural, especially when considered alongside Ellen Duffy’s delightful, free-standing, tubular pieces made from wire grid and coloured cord, as well as Corban Walker’s characteristically precise arrangements, particularly Untitled (Stack K) (2010) and Untitled (2x3 Cut Stack @ 116 Lafayette) (2022).

Throughout ‘In and of Itself’, grids are one of those things that, once seen, can’t be unseen. They appear everywhere – here submerged, there to the forefront, at times fragmentary, and other times continuous. In a pair of large canvases by John Noel Smith, a contrast between geometric forms and loose, messy paint-runs initially directs our attention, but these gestures are unified by the underlying grid formations that appear and disappear like traces of a fifteenth-century drawing machine. Both Taffina Flood, and in particular, Tinka Bechert, utilise a multiplicity of forms and strategies in strong colours, dominated by wide brush swerves and turns on the canvas, but here and there the grid cuts through, as colours and shapes vie for dominance.

Striking a different note, Helen Blake, Ronnie Hughes, and Samuel Walsh each present works characterised by a greater focus on discipline and control. All three seem to combine strategies variously associated with artists like Agnes Martin, Bridget Riley, Sol Lewitt and Brice Marden. In each of their works, grid formations dominate the entirety of the visual field, running from edge to edge in all directions. The grid is a remarkable form in that it is simultaneously emblematic of a certain finitude – a set of defined limits and controls of space – but also suggestive of a system that can, in theory, extend and continue to infinity. This feature is at the heart of its valence for modern art since, according to Krauss, the grid can be utilised in the artwork to underpin either a centripetal logic that controls and maps all that falls with terrain of the artwork, or it can facilitate a centrifugal logic in which “the work is presented as a mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily

cropped from an infinitely larger fabric.”3

Thus, Krauss is suggesting that the grid has the power to either cut off the artwork from the world around it, or to articulate a certain continuity between the work and the world. This is, I think, a valuable prism through which to view the works on show here, not only because of the grid’s prevalence, but also the manner in which the show is framed by the curator, RHA Director Patrick T. Murphy. The press release tells us that the works are wholly not representational; that they are each “self-referential; dealing with shape, colour, geometry, materiality, scale and weight” and more intriguingly, “the selection was made in the rigorous pursuit of abstraction and not the abstracted.” Self-referentiality is of course a classic statement of modern art since at least Abstract Expressionism, but a simple distinction between abstraction and ‘the abstracted’ is a little harder to unpack.

To my mind, one of the more interesting aspects, if not indeed a strength, of the show is just how hard it is to keep representation completely submerged. Grids can direct us both inwards and outwards; likewise, few works in this show seem wholly cut off from the world in which they take shape. The generally bright palette, with traces of neon and aerosol spray; the vigorous and varied movements of the paints; the use of all kinds of sculptural materials: these features animate a set of works begotten less by abstraction and more, to my mind, by the amalgamation of impressions flooding in from street and screen. Perhaps abstraction no longer stands in heroic opposition to the swamp and inundation of imagery that is the everyday. Perhaps it’s simply that our everyday experience, with its banks of screens and algorithmic intensities, has itself grown more abstract.

Aengus Woods is a philosopher and critic based in Meath.

1 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Grids’, October, Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979) p 50.

2 ibid, p 50.

3 ibid, p 60.

Sarah Wren Wilson, It's only a Game, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 120cm; image courtesy of the artist and the RHA.

Helen G Blake, Elysian Fields 2022, oil on linen, 40 x 50cm; image courtesy of the artist and the RHA.

‘REVENANTS’ AT IMMA continues Kevin Mooney’s enquiry into the absence of a distinct Irish history of visual art within the dominant Anglo/European paradigm from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Despite earlier attempts by the Roman Church, the Vikings, and the Anglo-Normans, it was the English who eventually dismantled the complex and nuanced Gaelic order by the sixteenth century, along with its rich cultural output. What followed was a period in which Gaelic culture was legally suppressed, buried within folklore, denigrated by the church, infantilised by the Anglo-Irish power base, and exported through emigration. Mooney’s project is to go back and compile a new visual lexicon of what might have been, if the English had been resisted. He mediates his research through a dazzling hybrid painting language borrowing from pre-Christian and insular art, Síle na Gigs, medieval architecture, the sagas, superstitions, and folk traditions.

‘Revenants’ brings together a tight selection of work, spanning from 2016 to 2022, in the cosy square rooms of the Courtyard Galleries at IMMA. The spaces are made homely with low lighting and feature walls of mustard, green, and pale ochres, complimenting the earthy tones in Mooney’s paintings. The six-year production period is reflected by dramatic differences in execution between works as Mooney mines his

way through research and experimentation. With skill he runs the gamut of visceral expressionism, surrealism, and trompe l’eoil realism, with good measures of cartoon humour, horror, and despair. The exhibition narrative is anchored by a small number of mythical creatures caught in a grotesque cycle of metamorphosis. Nothing of quality is lost in this amalgam of styles, due to the compelling skill and authenticity that Mooney brings to his craft.

Ilcruthach (2021) and Carrier (2021) are two giant supernatural characters – or perhaps one shapeshifting individual, as it negotiates its circumstances in varying states of vulnerability. Ilcruthach is a halfbeast hermaphrodite who sticks out its enormous torso of billowing pink flesh and exposes its genitalia. Mooney applies a sickly pink matt paint with sweeping brushwork that accentuates the naked ugly outgrowths, while the low angle view increases its monstrous deformity and floundering loss of control.

Carrier is akin to a wandering rag and bone man, his six-toed bare feet burdened with carrying a multitude of disembodied souls that cling to his torso. All that is left of them are eyes and skulls jostling to hang on until the journey ends. Both Ilcruthach and the Carrier have shrunk their heads backwards, protecting their conscious selves from this embarrassing spectacle. In Beast (2020) a donkey trots head down across the

canvas carrying skulls instead of turf. There is something ineffable or even sweet about Beast; Mooney has captured the loyal donkey in a jaunty, loosely painted silhouette, carrying its burden with positive determination. The brushwork is naïvely spirited and luscious, rendering the earthy tones of the Irish landscape.

A recurring feature of Mooney’s imagined histories are gleaming wide green eyeballs, rendered in uncanny depth and form. Despite being consistent in appearance, each eye brings an emotional tone of widely varying impact from painting to painting. Two of these, Blighters (2018-21) and Storyteller (2016), sit across from each other on walls of grey-cream and dark mustard respectively. Storyteller is a portrait of the seanchaí Peig Sayers, presented in glowing light, like a sacred heart; it is visible at the furthest point of the passage that connects the four exhibition rooms. Her likeness is minimal, represented by a shawl, hair, tobacco pipes and a pair of eyeballs embedded in a background of layered patterns, shapes and spirals. Its design structure, clarity and three-dimensional depth is tactile and mesmerising. It is a votive and playful tribute to Peig that challenges the clichéd misery and self-pity that characterised her in the past.

Blighters depicts a group of figures eating potatoes while sitting in a field and, just like the itinerant shapeshifters, is clearly a reference to the famine. The figures are prob-

ably already dead, as indicated by the white chalk-outlined silhouettes, and a single eyeball each. Any other features are obscured by hacked paint marks and bleached by multiple swirling suns. It is a powerful work that marks out a low point of Ireland’s colonial history.

Mutator (Head) (2022) is the first work to come into view in the exhibition. Part of it comprises a curious rostrum of steps (that could have come from an old dance hall) supporting a portrait of another shapeshifting créatúr bocht. Again, it is only identifiable by its profile outline as its features warp and distort in a vortex of swirling brushstrokes. In the context of the overall selection of work chosen for ‘Revenants’, this painting points not just to absence as a key theme in Mooney’s search for indigenous Irish art, but also to a continuous struggle for presence as it glitched in and out of the historical record. The exhibition is intense and beautiful but represents a tiny portion of the vast quantity of material Mooney has accumulated. At this point Mooney (and the viewing public) deserves a larger venue with a long lead-in time and adequate financial investment to fully realise the potential of this project. I look forward to it.

Carissa Farrell is a writer and curator based in Dublin.

Kevin Mooney ‘Revenants’ Irish Museum of Modern Art 1 December 2022 – 5 March 2023

Kevin Mooney, Mutator 2021, oil on canvas; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and IMMA.

Kevin Mooney, ‘Revenants’, installation view; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and IMMA.

Critique

DRAWING IS THE opening of form, in the sense of a beginning or a departure.1 Jean-Luc Nancy has put this concept forward not as a means to an end, but as a process with many junctures. The ideas underpinning award-winning artist Brian Fay’s survey exhibition, ‘The Most Recent Forever’, generously give viewers a gateway into multiple temporalities, primarily through the medium and action of drawing.

This touring exhibition is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland Touring Award. The three-part series commenced in the Highlanes Gallery (8 October – 12 November 2022) and is due to finish at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre (18 February to 25 March). Works from the Limerick City Gallery of Art permanent collection by John Cage, Willem de Kooning, Andrew O’Connor, Ann Brennan, Janet Mullarney and Mainie Jellett are also showcased within the second iteration of the exhibition.

Fay interprets existing collections and responds to contexts derived from specific venues, which in turn result in situated responses. The artist offers the viewer multiple processual and research-led returns which draw special attention to time, materiality, and the problematisation of restoration. This is achieved through the adroit referencing of existing artefacts and objects. The body of works are spread across four of LCGA’s gallery spaces and reflect Fay’s invested engagement with sites and context. This is also evident in his recent residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut, and his involvement with the Vermeer collection for the National Gallery of Ireland project, ‘After Vermeer’, in 2017.

His investigations are not premised on the initial intentions or undertakings of the creator but from the

“…process of removal and addition that the restorer enacted on the surface of the original painting.”2 This effort is clearly articulated by Fay in Three Stages of Restoration Vermeer in Non-Chronological Order (2011), a series of three graphite renderings of a section of Vermeer’s The Girl with a Pearl Earring – one of many highlights within the exhibition. Drawings based on existing and erased works by Rembrandt, Courbet, and Van Eyck validate Fay’s practice as one which does not recoil from self-insertion within the fiction of our chronological art histories and histographies. Fay’s concern is critical readings of conservation and restoration practices and the unpacking of multiple levels of intention and authenticity, especially in relation to temporal representations.

Restoration is described as ‘a compensation for losses’ by the Art Conservators Alliance.3 Fay’s work acknowledges such losses through the use of graphite, line, and hand-rendered representations of craquelure. This technique is most notable in Vermeer The Geographer Crack drawing (2012) and in his pencil drawings of nitrate film damage in Beyond the Rocks 1922 (2010). Fay’s cartographic-like compositions of damaged surfaces can be understood as further incisions on already damaged works; as representations of compromises and conflicts between time and materiality.

This engagement is most apparent in the works shown within LCGA’s South Gallery. The inclusion of Abstract Composition (n.d) by Irish modernist artist Mainie Jellett along with five of Fay’s works provides a platform for a visual and linguistic dialogue between Fay’s graphite portrait of Jellett, MJ 16 (2020), and abstract renderings which Fay derived from deterioration, perceived as flaws caused over time. Fay’s position

shifts slightly in these more recent works, where the cubist tool of translation and rotation (used by Jellett) is present. Through abstraction, distortion, rupture, fragmentation, and disjunction, imperfections are not only apparent in the materiality of the work but are also perceptible in the history of Jellet’s short life and career.

The impeccably curated exhibition and Fay’s meticulous explications on the opening night in conversation with Alice Maher, prompted the audience to consider the works in depth. Fay’s utilisation of historical artworks as a primary source resists the dangers of periodisation by focusing on “…what is still taking place, even though it is supposed to be in the past.”4 This interrogation of chronology through the lens of restoration ignites a conversation on traces – a vestige that, according to Nancy “... must always be discovered again – opened up, opened out, initiated, incised.”5

Gianna Tasha Tomasso is an artist, writer, and Assistant Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies in Limerick School of Art and Design.

1 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing (Fordham University Press, 2013)

2 Brian Fay, States of transience in drawing practices and the conservation of museum artworks, Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University (2014) p 164.

3 Caitlin O’ Riordan, ‘Art Conservation: The Cost of Saving Great Works of Art’, Emory International Law Review, Vol. 32, Issue 3 (2018) p 410.

4 Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975) p 33.

5 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing (Fordham University Press, 2013) p 2.

Brian Fay ‘The Most Recent Forever’ Limerick City Gallery of Art 1 December 2022 – 12 February 2023

Brian Fay, Vermeer The Geographer Crack drawing, 2012, pencil on paper, installation view, Limerick City Gallery of Art; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy the artist and LCGA.

Brian Fay, MJ 16, 2020, pencil on paper (on loan from the Collection of The Arts Council of Ireland) installation view, Limerick City Gallery of Art; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy the artist, Highlanes Gallery, and LCGA.

Brian Fay, Three Stages of restoration Vermeer in non-chronological order 2011, pencil on paper, installation view, Highlanes Gallery; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy the artist and Highlanes Gallery.

Re_sett_ing_s

JOHN GRAHAM REVIEWS THE JAKI IRVINE AND LOCKY MORRIS EXHIBITION AT THE COMPLEX, DUBLIN.

“WE THINK IN a world of inscriptions already there”, writes Jean-François Lyotard in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time.1 In other words, for many of us, thinking involves rethinking the same stuff over and over again.

In his introduction to this two-person exhibition, curator Mark O’Gorman describes his intuition of “hidden connections” between the practices of Jaki Irvine and Locky Morris. The exhibition title, in turn, refers to, Setting Out 3 (2021), an artwork by Anne Tallentire shown in ‘But This Material…’ – her exhibition last year at The MAC in Belfast.2 This other connection, which Irvine and Morris respond to in the formation of their own show, is an unusually direct tribute to a fellow artist and mutual friend, and also, perhaps, a way of working together that avoids simple binaries. Thinking with the thoughts of others, then, might be a way of escaping the self-perpetuating habits that Lyotard describes.

In his review of the Tallentire show for Paper Visual Art Journal, Francis Halsall writes how the artist’s beautiful work “neither asks for nor requires redescription”, and yet, here we are, considering an entire exhibition that does just that.3 It’s not that simple, of course, and Irvine and Morris extend their mutual starting point in directions and alignments more distinctly their own.

I remember seeing Irvine’s 8mm film, Eyelashes (1996) sometime in the late 1990s. With its distinctive voiceover and self-conscious performances, it was like watching an anthropological documentary by Chris Marker, with subject matter reduced to those tiny body parts. Mesmerised by its strange opacity, I was enchanted by something I didn’t quite understand. Something

similar happens when I look at images by Locky Morris. Their subject matter can seem odd or incidental, but the artist has the canny knack of imbuing his material with a playful profundity. Working together within the crucible of The Complex, this peculiar magic seems freshly compounded, with the dividing lines of the different practices all but eliminated.

The exhibition presents a panoply of looping images and sounds; a discursive array of interacting elements that, while tightly constructed, feels enjoyably lawless. The moving images – short sequences of raw footage, and footage combined with digital manipulations –appear on floor standing and wall-mounted monitors, the latter like animated windows to some quotidian beyond. There are no individual titles, no demarcations to suggest this or that. Weaving between the works, the overlapping sounds seem only loosely connected to the visuals, their idiosyncratic rhythms like an orchestra warming up – a subdued rehearsal of extended notes and short, percussive blasts. Some of these sounds appear diegetic upon closer listening, directly linked to specific images, and underscored with the hums and ruminations of some undisclosed machinery.

A metal strip chimes and tinkles against an elevated, steel framework. A shutter bangs and resonates inside a large, illuminated container. Emerging from some hidden depth, animated lines whip and writhe in the overcast air. A loop of cabling drops slowly onto a corrugated sheet. The metal is impossibly blue. The pulse of the landing repeats itself within the wider cacophony, the sounds softened as though transmitted from somewhere faraway. There are no people here, except for us, riding on the coattails of temporal ghosts who

play the landscape like a giant musical instrument.

On Luke Clancy’s Culture File, Locky Morris talked about the joy of being freed from the white cube gallery space, and how the work came alive in the more characterful setting of The Complex.4 On the same programme, Jaki Irvine spoke about “yearning for the world”, before quickly adding, “for something more than the world”. The world and its supplements are all around us, but how are they gained?

“In what we call thinking”, Lyotard writes, “the mind isn’t ‘directed’ but suspended. You don’t give it rules. You teach it to receive.”5 Perhaps that chiming, tinkling sound is not coming from that wind-blown metal strip. Rather, it emanates from the rigging of a vessel about to set sail – a vessel loosened from its moorings without thought, or compass, or map.

John Graham is an artist based in Dublin.

1 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (first published Editions Galilée, 1988), English translation (Polity Press, 1991) p 20.

2 Anne Tallentire, ‘But This Material …’, The MAC, Belfast (8 September – 21 November 2021).

3 Francis Halsall, ‘Anne Tallentire, ‘But This Material …’’, Paper Visual Art Journal, Vol 13, 2021, p 53.

4 Luke Clancy, Culture File, RTÉ Radio Lyric FM, 7 November 2022.

5 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (first published Editions Galilée, 1988), English translation (Polity Press, 1991) p 19.

Jaki Irvine and Locky Morris, ‘Re_sett_ing_s’, installation view; photograph by Kate-Bowe O’Brien, courtesy of the artists and The Complex.

Corban-scale

ENTER CRAWFORD ART Gallery and mount the nineteenth-century staircase, until you reach the dark wood-panelled Gibson Galleries on the first floor. There, standing sentinel, is Corban Walker as TV Man (2010) – a 65-inch screen with an animated video installation of the life-sized artist, encased in a plywood crate. The gimlet eyes hold your gaze, and you realise that you are entering the world of ‘Corban-scale’. Walker has developed a metric – his own golden ratio around the measurement of four feet (his height) instead of the average male height of six feet. Thus, he challenges the viewer’s interaction and appreciation of his work.

A transparent object on a low mirrored plinth dominates the floor of the first room. It is cuboid, architectural and delicate, made solid by the repetition of the grid pattern of its form. This is Cubed Dawn, Halved (2012) made of amber acrylic, and black screw posts (64.5 cm3). Lean closer. The mirror reflects your face and the ancient stucco pattern on the ceiling. In consternation, you may look from the sculpture to the room, at how the form, line, and reflectance in the work harmonise with the geometry and shine of the floor. The sculpture’s amber hue is echoed by the woodwork and offset by the black steps and ventilation grilles and by the space around it. The air is heavy with the residual weight of history pressing down from the empty walls onto the work, onto you, and all of this is the sculpture.

In the upper gallery there is drama; a stage is set. Mirrored polygons of silvered glass, wood, and steel in Beyond the Rail I-IX seem to lean precariously against the gallery wall, although closer inspection reveals that they are carefully secured. Untitled (2009) (10 x 4 metre) is low iron float glass in 40 elements – a ‘Corban-scale’ object and a structure of clear glass cuboids stacked in a seemingly nonchalant fashion. It appears hard-edged, masculine, but threatens

All images: Corban Walker, ‘As Far as I Can See’, installation view, Crawford Art Gallery; photograph © Aisling McCoy, courtesy the artist and Crawford Art Gallery

JENNIFER REDMOND REVIEWS CORBAN WALKER’S SOLO EXHIBITION ‘AS FAR AS I CAN SEE’, WHICH CONTINUES AT CRAWFORD ART GALLERY UNTIL 15 JANUARY.

to crumble if you touch it. Better to tiptoe around this one and on to the next. 129-40 is a low, dense grid of amber acrylic (40 x 129 x 129 cm) which stands directly on the floor, playing with reflections of the herringbone parquet. At this point you might notice that the silent sculptures are vibrating with some kind of geometrical life, in dialogue with the architectural elements in the room and with your movement around the work. The mirror installations are positioned precisely to invite and facilitate your intervention and the works begin to look like personages containing an animating force at their core.

In the final room, Observation (2012) dominates – a large cuboid, grid-like object (183 cm3). This space too is girded by the installation of low mirrors. The sudden appearance of parts of your own body reflected along with the limbs of the sculpture is an uncanny kinaesthetic experience, prompting the exploration of this object from every angle. Looking through the keyhole of the amber bars and down through the gallery, the tiny distant image of TV Man appears, framed Newgrange style in the gaps of amber uprights – hardly a coincidence in this carefully choreographed space. It might occur to you then, that the spark at the core of these objects is the essence of their creator, although not a trace of his hand is palpable in the work.

Walk back through the gallery, avoid eye contact with TV Man, and slip left into the Long Room. Here, Walker has selected 30 wall-hung works and six sculptures that reflect over a century of art from Crawford Art Gallery’s Permanent Collection. These are artworks and artists who populated his early home life and career. Walker has attached personal notes to some of the exhibits. He has marshalled the movement of the spectator by placing painted steel stanchions in the centre of the room, thus facilitating a reading of these works as an autobiographical record.

We all orientate ourselves through objects and environments with an unconscious disregard for inclusivity. Walker demonstrates this with his sensitivity to scale and his insistence on more fluidity in conventional systems of measurement.

Jennifer Redmond is an artist and writer based in Cork. theunbound.info

Flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict

PAINTINGS INTRINSICALLY COMMAND attention because they are ‘alpha-art’ – the most art that art can be – right there at eye level, usurping the authority of the wall. You can’t mistake a painting for anything other than art; the hand of the artist is always discernible if you look closer than you’re meant to. You could, however, mistake Isabel Nolan’s tiny sculptures at VOID Gallery for rusted artefacts, dredged from the bottom of the River Foyle. Or you might even, like one of my fellow audience members at Nolan’s recent Q&A with Declan Long, consider a table of drawings under a sheet of glass something to set your wine glass on.

The glass-covered tables display Nolan’s prolific, seemingly chaotic drawings, that cumulatively read as a staccato of figures, graphic design, mathematics, and written musings. Nolan’s drawings are densely packed allegories of idiosyncratic pattern and motif: spirographic waves unfurl from angry suns; stars emerge from dark patchworks of lead; and notes are written with discernible urgency around the margins. On the floor in the centre of one gallery is a glass case, about two metres square and a few inches tall, within which a grid of palm-sized clay objects are arranged over an undulating pale-blue silk cloth. These drawings and sculptures are symbolically contained by the rhythmic waveforms of Nolan’s paintings around the circumference of the galleries.

Oh Icarus (2022) is mounted high above eye level, by the top of the passage between spaces, as though deposited by a now-receded flood. About to take shape (2022) depicts hand-like tendrils clamouring in all directions above a layer of dripping waves, while a partially occluded orbicular form looks on from above. I can’t help but anthropomorphise this scene as a daily horror from the Mediterranean

Sea or English Channel, and wonder whether the cold disc in the sky looks on with compassion, or with indifference?

Isabel Nolan, ‘He could see behind himself’ (St Columba) 2022, water-based oil on canvas; photograph by Lee Welch, courtesy the artist, Kerlin Gallery, and Void Gallery.

KEVIN BURNS REVIEWS ISABEL NOLAN’S SOLO EXHIBITION CURRENTLY SHOWING AT VOID IN DERRY.

Isabel Nolan, Desert Mother (Saint Paula) and Lion 2022, water-based oil on canvas; photograph by Lee Welch, courtesy the artist, Kerlin Gallery, and Void Gallery.

The formality of paintings – the hauteur of their ‘wall-ness’ – is a cypher for locating ‘flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict’ within Nolan’s distinctive oeuvre. Desert Mother (Saint Paula) and Lion (2022) depicts the early ‘desert mother’ Saint Paula in a darkened cave at the bottom left corner of a rocky landscape. Outside sits a lion representing Saint Jerome, who is credited with first translating the Bible into Latin. However, here, it is Paula who labours over the good book in the darkness of the cave, not Jerome. Contemporary historians now credit both with the translation, but for most of Christian history, Paula’s contribution has, unsurprisingly, been obscured by misogyny. The flattened composition of this painting, with small, simple figures on alienating landscapes suggests at once Hieronymus Bosch, and medieval Christian icons of lonely struggles between saints and sinners.

Nolan isn’t excavating truth from the dirt of art history, nor depicting the truth in any discursive way, but bringing into focus the dirt piled on top of it. Nolan has remarked that she considers dust a beautiful material, a substance seen inhabiting complex worlds of its own, when viewed under extreme magnification. Considering this, we could view the self-evident beauty of Nolan’s paintings as panes of dust, of distilled dirt, through which we glimpse the characters beneath. Nolan isn’t painting beautifully, or decorating her subjects in beauty, but rather is painting beauty itself: objectifying it, examining it, taking it apart. This insight was foreshadowed in Nolan’s 2017 exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, ‘Calling on Gravity’, in which one painting jarringly depicts Tony Soprano in the pose of a renaissance Pope, affecting a vacillation between subject and the lens of its depiction. By uncoupling the conjoined formalities of painting, we can begin to separate subjects from the authority bestowed upon them by representational art. Or conversely, as in the case of Saint Paula, we can discern the layers of beautiful aggregate that have robbed others of posterity.

Kevin Burns is an artist and writer based in Derry.

Isabel Nolan’s exhibition continues at VOID until 18 February. derryvoid.com

Isabel Nolan, ‘flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict’, installation view, VOID Gallery; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artist and VOID Gallery.

Isabel Nolan, ‘flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict’, installation view, VOID Gallery; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artist and VOID Gallery.

VAI GET TOGETHER 2022 utilised a blended approach, comprising two days of online talks (16 and 17 November) and an in-person Speed Curating event on 22 November at The Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (RSAI) in Merrion Square. Speed Curating was extremely well attended, with hundreds of artists and dozens of curators travelling from all over the country to participate in fast-paced one-to-one sessions. There was a lively and friendly atmosphere as attendees received feedback and professional advice.

Local Opportunities

The first of three online panel discussions focused on local opportunities for artists. Róisín de Buitléar has been working as an artist for 35 years and considers her vast array of projects as an interconnected web of people, place, and materials. The artist is interested in problem solving through materials, and the history of the anonymous craftsman. She has previously undertaken public art projects for a range of institutions including healthcare settings, where pragmatic issues such as maintenance, cleanliness, and accessibility need to be considered when installing works of art. Róisín’s community engagement projects include ‘Caution! Fragile’, a collaborative project with factory workers from Waterford Crystal, focusing on Ireland’s glass-making heritage.

Ann McBride is a Clare-based artist, illustrator, and ceramic designer. Her background in graphic design lends itself to the decal technique, which allows her to transfer detailed figurative drawings onto assorted ceramic surfaces. She works closely with a printer in Stoke-on-Trent – an arrangement that has become more challenging in recent years. Ann’s ceramic work considers various themes: sea life, the natural world, movement and the body, the romance

Stephen Doyle, Dylan is ainm dom... 2018, detail, mixed media on board (oil and neon glass); image courtesy the artist and Crawford Art Gallery Collection.

JOANNE

and whimsy of folk art and fairy tales, as well as elusive and rebellious figures like Maud Gonne. Ann’s work is included in ‘Made in Ireland’ – a touring exhibition of the Design & Craft Council Ireland (DCCI) which continues at the FE McWilliam Gallery in Banbridge until 23 January.

Kate Hickey is a mentor with Dublin City Local Enterprise Office (LEO), which offers a range of opportunities for artists within Dublin City area. This includes subsidised training courses on starting a business, social media and marketing, web design and finances. An eight-month training programme on building your craft and design enterprise is being run through LEO in partnership with the DCCI. Artists can also avail of LEO’s mentoring programme, which offers advice on developing a business plan, strategy, or mission statement, attracting a customer base, identifying audiences, platforms, and funding streams.

National Opportunities

The second panel discussion, focusing on national opportunities, was opened by Megs Morley, Director of Galway Arts Centre (GAC). GAC offers professional development workshops, curated exhibitions for emerging and established artists, and an artist-in-residence programme. Morley also highlighted some of the other organisations in the region that support artists, such as 126 Artist-run Gallery, Engage, Artspace, Áras Éanna on Inis Oírr, Creative Place Tuam, TULCA, Misleór Festival of Nomadic Cultures, GMIT, and the Burren College of Art.

Anne Mullee, Programme Curator at Mermaid Arts Centre, gave a talk entitled ‘Arts Practice Initiatives’. Launched in 2021, Mermaid’s ‘Transform’ programme invites Wicklow-based artists to become part of the fabric of the arts centre, providing paid employment of 20 hours per week. The programme has helped various artists propel themselves into the next stages of their careers. Mary Cremin, Director of Void Gallery, gave a presentation on Void’s exhibition programme. Void hosts five exhibitions a year in their brand-new gallery space, and works primarily with mid-career artists who focus on socially and politically engaged practices. Jaki Irvine and Locky Morris have an upcoming exhibition in March, which will showcase their interdisciplinary practice fused with the digital. During the Q&A, panellists discussed the best way for artists to approach them, emphasising the need for artists to make sure their work fits with the gallery programme, and to submit to open calls, residencies, and other opportunities before approaching gallerists for exhibitions.

International Opportunities

The third panel focused on international opportunities with insights from London-based Irish artist Elizabeth Magill, Stephen Snoddy, Director of The New Art Gallery in Walsall, and Nora Hickey M’Sichili, Director of the Centre Culturel Irlandais (CCI) in Paris. Elizabeth spoke in a reflective way about her practice, which combines painting and screen-printing. A sense of visual disruption or environmental threat permeates the landscapes she depicts. Elizabeth moved from Northern Ireland to London in the early 80s. Her first big break came when she was selected for The British Art Show in 1990. However, she stressed that the nature of interest in artists constantly shifts; breakthroughs come and go but are mostly out of one’s control.

Stephen Snoddy is a curator and artist from Northern Ireland who has been working in the UK since the late 80s with various art organisations and is currently Director of the New Art Gallery in Walsall. Stephen reflected on leaving Belfast at the height of The Troubles, and how this distance let him appreciate the powerful work being made by Northern Irish artists. He curated Rita Donagh’s retrospective at Cornerhouse in 1995, which coincided with the announcement of a ceasefire. As Director of Southampton Art Gallery, he organised a solo exhibition by Chris Ofili, which helped the artist win the Turner Prize in 1998. Stephen

was also responsible for building the collections, which required consideration of historical works and their interplay with contemporary acquisitions.

Nora Hickey M’Sichili discussed the visual arts programme at CCI Paris and its mission to present and support the work of Irish artists. Aideen Barry’s exhibition ‘Oblivion’ launched on 16 September as part of the centre’s 20th anniversary celebrations and was attended by over 1300 people. The touring exhibition, ‘Martin Parr’s Ireland’, opened at CCI on 11 November, and was complemented by a group show of four University of Ulster alumni, offering exposure for lesser-known artists during Paris Photo, which attracts hundreds of gallerists, collectors, and curators to the city. In 2023, CCI will present exhibitions by Niamh McCann, Colin Martin, Anita Groener, and Michael Hannah.

During the Q&A, panellists discussed strategies to increase international opportunities for Irish artists, including organising tours of Ireland and Northern Ireland for curators and directors working abroad; reinstating the Northern Irish pavilion at the Venice Biennale; and touring more Irish exhibitions internationally. Nora suggested that applying for residencies or funding is a good way for your work to be seen by panels – she has previously invited unsuccessful residency applicants to take part in group exhibitions. As the only artist on the panel, Elizabeth shifted the focus back to art making, stating that if you’re happy with your work, you shouldn’t be fussy about where you show – just get the work out there, and things usually come from that. Sometimes you only need one person to take an interest in the work to give it momentum.

Artists Speak

At Get Together 2022, there were three iterations of the ever-popular Artists Speak, with presentations from diverse groupings of VAI members. Nasrin Golden is an Iranian artist living in Ireland since 2012. Using various media (including photography, painting, and moving image) and drawing on tropes of self-portraiture and surrealism, the artist explores femininity, repressed sexuality, motherhood, and women’s bodies and identities within a patriarchal society. Nasrin’s solo exhibition, ‘Camouflage’, ran at D-Light Studio, Dublin, from 24 to 27 November 2022. Stephen Doyle was born the year after homosexuality was decriminalised in Ireland, which is significant in terms of the artist’s queer identity. Stephen’s practice has been enriched by spending time with LGBT+ activists in Russia and China. His work Dylan is ainm dom… (2018) is the first piece to openly discuss transgender identity within the national collection. Ayelet Lalor, presented documentation of various works depicting archetypal goddess figures. Religious and pagan influences resonate in her work, along with a sense of storytelling and humour. Ayelet works across different scales and materials, and has previously presented an ‘edible art exhibition’ at the Doorway Gallery in which visitors were invited to eat the sculptures.

Tunde Toth has been a practicing artist and researcher for the past nine years. Her work is socially engaged and focuses on themes of collectivity, solidarity, and participation. She utilises art as a tool to invite social change. Daire O’Shea is a sculptor, lecturer, writer, and motorcycle enthusiast moonlighting as a UX designer. He graduated from LSAD in 2016 with a sculpture degree and is interested in digital art form the 1990s and early 2000s, meme culture, and connections between text and image. Rouzbeh Rashidi is an Iranian filmmaker who moved to Dublin in 2004. He founded the Experimental Film Society (EFS) in Tehran in 2000, which became a film production company in 2017, and recently released a book for its 20th anniversary. Rashidi likens his films to the work of David Lynch due to the pervasive atmosphere of dread. Street and spectacle artist, Caoimhe Dunn, became engaged with street theatre as a teenager. Her recent work includes Queen Maeve’s Cattle Raid parade and Biddy’s Festival in 2019, and Samhain Lantern Procession, as well as Spraoi in 2022.

Samir Mahmood’s artistic practice focuses on the tensions between growing up in Pakistan, and his new life in Ireland. As a queer migrant artist, he explores an existence where in one country you are criminalised, and in the other, you are free. Recent mixed-media works focus on queering notions of masculinity, often incorporating imagery from the Sufi and miniature painting traditions. Kerry-based artist, Ber Earley, seeks to find beauty and magic within the mundane aspects of ordinary life. This was especially pressing during lockdown, when Ber created a series of paintings highlighting the importance of human contact, friendship, laughter, connection, and togetherness. Catherine Callanan creates figurative sculptures using a broad range of media, including plaster casts and textile elements. The artist is very curious about the human psyche and what keeps us going through adversity, and these themes deeply inform her art practice. Gillian Fitzpatrick is heavily influenced by space exploration. Projects include recreating the lunar landing on a sandy surface in a gallery context, organising an event at A4 Sounds in Dublin to mark the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, and crafting a tiny artwork to fit inside a 1cm cube – one of 100 artefacts sent by the Moon Gallery Foundation to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2021.

Inspiration

Artist Rosie McGurran’s talk, ‘One Woman and an Island’, took place virtually on the first day of Get Together 2022. McGurran was inspired by the beauty of Connemara when she visited Roundstone in 1989, where she eventually moved. She helped start an annual week-long summer residency on nearby Inishlacken. Her work draws heavily on the local landscapes and seascapes, the ‘casualties of winter’, and the ‘otherness’ of life.

Mark Francis’s presentation, ‘Echo Vision’, chronicled key aspects of his artistic career and a recent series of paintings which focuses on capturing sound as an image. The artist described how his techniques are rooted in his skills as a printmaker, such as painting horizontally but displaying vertically. Music is a constant in his studio and greatly influences what he creates. Francis was joined by Stephen Snoddy in a Q&A session, during which they discussed the influence of music on artistic practice, and the influence of other painters on their early work.

Samir Mahmood, Agonism / Antagonism, 2022, image transfer on panels, acrylic paint, crinoline tubing; photograph by Sinéad Barrett, courtesy the artist and Sample-Studios.

The World Was All Before Them

Emma Campbell: Can you discuss your curatorial theme and aspirations for TULCA Festival 2022?

Clare Gormley: The final lines of John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, recount Adam and Eve’s journey out of Eden and leaves them on the precipice of a new world. I’d been struck by the terror, but also the potential offered in imagining what lies ahead. Popular conventions imagine the future in the binary terms, dystopia vs utopia. However, this is a problematic framework, centred on saving us via technological, masculinist mastery, because technology’s sense of connection to world events offers mere performance of politics.

EC: Many of the presented artworks are tactile, as if seeking to explore beyond mediated screen existence.

CG: I devised the call-out to be evocative of human centred practices. Some engaged civics, dance, or other connections, borne out of a need for continued reinvestment in those things. From a curatorial standpoint, having been physically denied exhibitions, I wanted something human and warm. Evocations of technological and human agency as well as climate change became linchpins of the festival.

EC: Were there artists included that you hadn’t encountered before?

CG: Judith Dean is unlike anything I’ve seen; her work was a revelation. There are vortexes that encompass different cultural and historical reference points that are hard to pinpoint yet are portals to somewhere – bizarre but connected. Thinking particularly in ecological and environmental terms, universal deep time was another way to unlock potentiality. Judith’s works do that by col-

Emily Speed, Flatland, 2021, mixed media installation comprising two film works, set and costumes, commissioned by Tate Liverpool, installation view, TULCA Gallery; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy the artist and TULCA Festival.

EMMA CAMPBELL INTERVIEWS CLARE GORMLEY ABOUT HER CURATORIAL VISION FOR TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS 2022.

lapsing abstract pictorial space. The work of Dutch artist Anouk Kruithof, which was installed in Colombian Hall, comprises eight, four-hour edits of 8,800 films, representing diverse cultures of dance gathered from social media. It’s immersive and mimics the addictive qualities of scrolling; time fades away, as bodies move together.

EC: Do you think any artists involved in TULCA 2022 would be happy to have tins of soup thrown at their work?

CG: The action has resonance for the work in TULCA. It’s been interesting, in terms of an urgent rethinking of how we live, and art’s role in social change. People want justification for art’s potential as a vehicle to ask important questions. Artists provoke us, and art can be an activist tool for engagement. The act of throwing the soup on canonised masterpieces poses some hard questions. In 200 years, we won’t be talking about the paintings; we’ll be talking about the ecological destruction of the world. Artists are citizens of our world and offer subtle prompts for contemplation. Encounters with art can create space for dialogue. The artist-run spaces in Belfast are some of the only places in the city where conversations on the environment, abortion, or bodily autonomy are permissible.

EC: Which of the works exhibited this year would you describe as the most provocative?

CG: Tabitha Soren’s interaction of oily bodies and

the cold hard surface of the screens asks if on-screen interactions enable or prevent political agency. It recognises that we’re constantly consumed with decontextualization. The surface of Tabitha’s iPad highlights the psychological impact of the bombardment of images that we are rendered incapable of acting upon. Anouk Kruithof’s Contagious Speech is one of the pandemic-related works. Anouk explores English as it morphs through non-native English speakers. During the pandemic she was researching how our speech and our breaths have changed from continuous Zoom interactions.

EC: Because of the scale of laptop and phone screens, have you chosen work that plays with scale?

CG: Tabitha has done so much research around our engagement with screens. Researchers noted that our stress levels are increased through close looking but decreased with distance. Looking closely at a phone, versus looking at the horizon from cliffs towards a bigger vista, physiologically does something to our bodies. The proportions of the main venue, TULCA Gallery, allowed a large-scale sculptural presence, thus reorienting the body around objects bigger than us. Universal Tongue (2022), an immersive video with dance and colour, is taken from a screen-sized engagement and blown right up. Another artist, Caroline Jane Harris, does incredibly intricate, beautiful, hand-cut stills. This includes screenshots of volcanic eruptions, from which she hand-cuts tiny pixels, and intricate stilled moments

of a video crafted by hand. These works play with scale but also create moments, encouraging viewers to stay with things like digital engagement, that would normally be fleeting. These works also oscillate between time periods, from the contemporary consumption of images to the deep time of a volcanic eruption.

EC: What is next, Clare?

CG: I plan to refocus after TULCA. I have some core exhibitions coming up around Northern Irish books but Hannah Starkey’s project in the Ulster Museum will be the big one.

Clare Gormley is a curator and researcher based in Belfast and founder of the Northern Irish Art Research Group. She is Head of Programmes and Partnerships at Belfast Photo Festival and was Assistant Curator at The MAC in Belfast.

Emma Campbell is completing her practice-based PhD at Ulster University, addressing photography as an activist tool for abortion rights. Emma is a member of the Turner Prize-winning Array Collective and has exhibited in international solo and group shows. Emma is co-convenor of Alliance for Choice and core campaigner since 2011. emmacampbell.co.uk

Anouk Kruithof, Universal Tongue, 2022, video loop with sound, 4hrs duration, edited by Ieva Maslinskaitė, sound by Karoliina Pärnänen, installation view, Columban Hall; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, image courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.

Berte & harmey, Nul Punt Wolk: Points of Departure, Attempts at Orientation, 2020, 2021, 2022, installation view, wooden dowels, 3D print, block mounted riso prints, installation view, TULCA Gallery; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, image courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed, i am not done yet, 2022, xerox paper prints and wall painted text, installation view, Galway Arts Centre; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, image courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.

Thomas Pool: How does your work responded to the ideological, administrative, and social implications of citizenship, outlined in the EVA Platform Commission brief?

Amna Walayat: This theme is an extension of my previous work, based on my personal experiences of living as a dual citizen of Pakistan and Ireland, in which my own position as a migrant activist and artist is constantly evolving. Like many other displaced people – and as a migrant, mother, and Muslim woman – I try to find ways to accommodate the dual ideological poles that have existed for centuries. These dualities are constricted by nationalism, culture, and religion, and are often in conflict with one another. Uprooting from one soil and re-rooting in another offers a sense of something left behind: loss and grief on one hand, and stigma, otherness, estrangement, loneliness, adaptation, integration, survival, and a profound sense of being what Edward Said described as ‘spiritually orphaned’.

Cliodhna Timoney: In recent years I have been researching and creating work that explores subjects like enclosures, edges, and wildness. I have simultaneously contextualised these ideas using specific sites, such as backroads, crossroads, and farmyards in the Northwest of Ireland. What interested me in the Platform Commission brief was not only the opportunity to continue this line of research, but to build a body of new work which considers the relationship between boundaries, access, and connection in response to citizenship.

The work aims to highlight moments where gatherings of people challenged the defined limitations of landscape through acts of journeying, dance, and music. Through the Platform Commission, I will map culturally significant dancefloors that existed on the

Sarah Durcan, The Invisibles, 2022, production still; photograph by Louis Haugh, courtesy of the artist.

island of Ireland, particularly in rural and peripheral areas, and will outline the power of the dancefloor as a shelter for kinship, a space for resistance, and a site for re-imagining new forms of existence.

Frank Sweeney: My project proposes to examine the legacy of Irish and British state censorship of The Troubles. The work attempts to address the absence left in state archives by censorship of the Northern Ireland conflict and political movements during this era. In Ireland, censorship under Section 31 was extended far beyond its stated aims, preventing journalists from carrying out interviews with various community and activist groups during the time period.

In response to the themes of EVA 2023, I was particularly interested in views of citizenship and democracy popularised by Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book, Public Opinion (Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1922). Ministers responsible for censorship refer to views “appropriate for citizens to hold” and to matters which “would tend to confuse citizens”, reflecting paternalistic and authoritarian ideas developed in Lippman’s work, most notably what is referred to as the necessary “manufacture of consent” in democratic societies.

Phillip McCrilly: Broadly speaking, I’m interested in the transgressive and interdisciplinary possibilities of food, hospitality, and education. My research is centred around collective acts of land and property reclamation,

often considering cruising and foraging as likeminded deviant practices, and exploring the potential for queer desire within a rural Irish context. My work navigates between fixed research, stories of individual biography, and collective memory. The work is grounded and informed by growing up in the North in an area known as the Murder Triangle.

Sarah Durcan: My film project, The Invisibles (2022), takes a ‘spectro-feminist’ approach to the story of Ella Young (1876-1956), a lesser-known Irish writer and revolutionary activist. Young was both a member of Cumann na mBan and a theosophist who believed in the agency of trees, mountains, and fairies – the original invisible entities. Disillusioned after the formation of the Irish Free State, Young emigrated to California in 1925. There, she had a ‘second act’, forging her own spiritual citizenship as a ‘druidess’ and independent lesbian woman who became part of the liberated West Coast artistic scene. The Invisibles speculates on Young’s identity, and an ‘otherworld’ of subjects excluded from the nascent Irish nation state and the heteronormative orthodoxy enshrined in the Irish constitution. The film deploys the aesthetic register of spectral visibility/ invisibility to express the intertwined struggles of Irish women suffragists and nationalists for equality and national identity. These women maximised their lowly semi-invisible status as women to engage in subversive activities and inventive forms of protest.

Sharon Phelan: Citizenship is conditioned by constantly evolving protocols. These protocols are (re) articulated based on historically conceptualised modes of collective belonging and being-together. What constitutes this sense of community is the exchange of speech, action, sound, and agency. At the same time, to cite political theorist Jodi Dean, we live in an era of ‘communicative capitalism’, where language has been co-opted for capitalist modes of production, and speech has become distinct from the individual. In my work, I’m responding to, or following, the ‘prosody of citizenship’ – a concept proposed by poet Lisa Robertson as “the historical and bodily movement of language amongst subjects.”

TP: What research methods are you using to develop the commission and what artistic or theoretical sources are you drawing on?

AW: My work is informed by Michael Foucault’s ideas on power and Edward Said’s views on orientalism that I studied during my MA in UCC; my final dissertation was based on these ideas. My work seeks to devise a survey of power and control relationships between various cultures, genders, races, economies, and nations. Citizenship is a highly charged term in its own right. I try to convey these complex ideas in my painting through simple storytelling using symbols and iconography. Currently, I am working in the Indo-Persian miniature style and reading a lot of books on the Indo-Persian

Amna Walayat, the artists’ studio view, 2022; photograph by Muhammad Issa, courtesy of the artist.

Cliodhna Timoney, EVA Research Image, 2022; photograph courtesy of the artist.

Many have eyes but cannot see? Mural on Blucher Street, Derry, 1985, about censorship based on a poster design, Information Libre, from the May 1968 Paris Uprising; photograph © Peter Moloney Collection, courtesy Frank Sweeney.

Phillip McCrilly, Fort of the Burial Place 2022, 35mm photograph; courtesy of the artist.

painting tradition, contemporary miniature paintings, Celtic motifs, medieval art, and the designs and illustrations of Harry Clark. I get inspiration from these eastern and western sources to create new symbols. I have also purchased new and expensive organic materials, mostly imported, to experiment with techniques and to make my own colours and materials.

CT: This work will primarily draw influence from The Showband Era and how the central cultural motifs of this era, such as the star and magic, shaped collective imagining. Throughout 2022, I made several research visits to sites of disused dance halls and ballrooms in the Northwest, as well as to archives like The National Folklore Collection at UCD, The Donegal County Archives, and The Derry City and Strabane Archives. By undertaking this kind of research, I had the opportunity to view photographs, audio recordings, written documents, and material culture which relates to dance, music, and architecture.

FS: I will be carrying out several interviews with people censored during The Troubles era. The Oral History Centre at Mary Immaculate College Limerick will be archiving the full unedited recordings and making them available for public access to coincide with the 40th EVA International later this year. A core text in the development of this work has been Betty Purcell’s memoir, Inside RTÉ (New Island Books, 2014). I will be discussing censorship with Betty and several people who worked for state broadcasters in Ireland and Britain during this period.

PMC: There’s a disparate list of sources I’ll be drawing from within my research, including: the tradition of road bowling, the early productions of Ulster Television at Havelock House, the remains of a garrison fort on the Tyrone-Armagh border, the ‘room’ installations of William McKeown, and an Anglo-French gentry sauce, as well as a history of alternative and queer social spaces in the North. I’m working across informal and formal archives in my research, as well as out-sourcing some elements to local Limerick-based expertise in the development of the commission.

SD: I’m drawing on Young’s writings, her beliefs in theosophy, the occult and Celtic mythology. Young was involved in the staging of tableaux vivants, a theatre practice developed by the activist women of Inghinid- he na hÉireann, and wrote several collections of Celtic myths. This led me to a collaboration with Sue Mythen, a movement director, and two actors to devise a contemporary tableau vivant for camera. Young and her associates were well aware of the power of images and myths to inspire and create identity, focusing on strong female characters, a practice that continues in activism and silent protests today. We also devised a warmup sequence based on eurythmy – Rudolf Steiner’s movement practice that aims to connect the body with the spiritual world. Eurythmy is one of several esoteric dance movements originating amid the bohemian circles and societies that Young aligned herself with.

SP: There is a gendered and marginal aspect to my research, guided by filmmaker and feminist thinker, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of ‘listening to intervals’. For Trinh, rhythm opens a dynamic to expand on “[r] elationships between one word, one sentence, one idea and another; between one’s voice and other women’s voices; in short, between oneself and the other.” Language, of course, is never neutral, and since capital has entered both civus and domus, sociologist Saskia Sassen’s writings on predatory formations help give shape, as amorphous as it is, to the artificial entities that circulate in much the same way. This has led me to questions of personhood, listening, and speech in relation to corporate power, and how we give bodily form to citizenship today.

TP: How do you envisage the manifestation of your work in the context of the 40th EVA International

programme?

AW: This project is a huge commitment for me and a very important development in my career. Most of my paintings are performative self-portraits that are conceived for an indoor gallery setting, along with some sculptural elements. Some of my paintings will be single pieces and others will form part of a series. Instead of presenting paintings in a traditional way, options have been discussed with the EVA team to experiment with the exhibition space in a more unconventional manner and I am producing work accordingly. So, I’m excited to see how it unfolds.

CT: By using the framework of a dancefloor and the archetypal forms and ideas found within nightclubs –such as the star, magic, and glamour – I plan to create sculptural forms using materials such as mirrors, ceramics, and textiles. Alongside this, I am developing a video piece that charts a sense of journey and envisions new ways of togetherness and gatherings through soundscapes and imagery.

FS: The project aims to make an intervention in the canonical archive by recreating a television programme that never existed under state censorship. The resulting film will be screened in some form at EVA, and I hope to organise some related public events and discussions between people involved in the research stages of the project.

PMC: I purposefully kept my original proposal extremely open with a number of possible outcomes to the commission. At the moment, I imagine the work will be performative and event-based, oscillating between active and dormant stages over the run of the biennial. I’m hoping to successfully embed the project within Limerick itself and to allow it to exist without me in the centre.

SD: I’ll be working with the EVA production team to show The Invisibles as part of the 40th EVA International programme. Foregrounding the sound mix and spectral quality of the work is going to be key to the installation.

SP: I’ve been engaging in field recording, particularly by exploring the relationship between two forms of recording: words and sounds. Language, as a recording medium, isn’t as fixed as institutions would have us believe. Similarly, I haven’t wanted to impose a predetermined form on the recorded material. I tend to begin a new piece of work with a gathering of intensities on the page. These often develop into text scores, which

I later attempt to shake off the page, either through performance or installation. Working with EVA, I’m excited to set out in some unanticipated direction, finding ways for the work to co-exist with the wider programme.

Amna Walayat is a Pakistani born visual artist based in Cork. @amna.walayat

Cliodhna Timoney is a visual artist from Donegal currently based in Dublin. She holds a BA in Visual Arts Practice from IADT, and an MFA in Fine Art Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art. cliodhnatimoney.com

Frank Sweeney is an artist with a researchbased practice, using found material to approach questions of collective memory, experience and identity through film and sound. franksweeney.art

Phillip McCrilly is a Belfast-based artist and chef. He is a former co-director of Catalyst Arts, and a co-founder of the artist-run café, FRUIT SHOP. @phillipmccrilly

Sarah Durcan is an artist and writer based in Dublin. @durcansarah

Sharon Phelan is an artist whose work spans performance, installation, writing, and composition, with specific attention to sound, voice, resonance, and the poetics of place. soundsweep.info

Sharon Phelan, texture reprojection (research image), 2022; image courtesy of the artist.

The Man Who Sees Through Shadows

ON THE OCCASION of photographic artist Mike Bunn’s 80th birthday, the Office of Public Works is presenting a large-scale retrospective of his work, titled ‘The Man Who Sees Through Shadows’, in Farmleigh Gallery in Dublin’s Phoenix Park (18 November 2022 – 19 March 2023).

The exhibition presents over 130 high-quality prints from the artist’s diverse practice, which spans more than five decades. Beginning with a series of photographs that capture the atmosphere of Dublin in the early 1970s, when the artist first arrived in the city, the presentation goes on to highlight examples of Bunn’s pioneering fashion campaigns that he undertook from his studio in Temple Bar’s Crown Alley, which he set up with his late wife, the iconic stylist and boutique owner, Betty Wall.

These photographs chart his long and productive working relationship with many of Ireland’s then up-and-coming fashion designers, including John Rocha, Michael Mortell, Louise Kennedy, Philip Treacy, and Lainey Keogh. Also included in the exhibition are some of Bunn’s environmental and landscape photographs, which featured in several important publications, as well as his intimate portraits for The Writers, published in 1980 by the O’Brien Press. Conceived as part of the Sense of Ireland Festival in London that year, the book included (amongst 44 individual authors and poets) portraits of Brendan Kennelly, Frank Ormsby, John Montague, Neil Jordan, Mary Lavin, and William Trevor.

In the summer of 1996, Bunn was chosen to represent Ireland at The Round Tower, Copenhagen, when the city was the European Capital of Culture. The show featured images from his ‘Acid House Techno’ portfolio, examples of which feature in the Farmleigh exhibition. Also presented is a selection of powerful portraits of indigenous communities, taken in the year 2000 as part of an assignment for The Shubinak Trust, that took him to the Hindu Kush Mountains on the Paki-

stan-Afghan border, with the omnipresent Tirich Mir peak looming overhead.

In 2012, Bunn’s ‘Talking Heads’ exhibition of largescale, black and white photographic portraits of writers, poets and artists, was held in Solstice Art Centre in Navan, while in 2013, he conducted a fashion shoot on Skellig Michael for Juno Magazine, as the first photographer to be allowed to do so. This was followed in 2014 by ‘Volto Angelo’ – an exhibition of large prints in The Octagon Room of the Irish Georgian Society’s headquarters on Dublin’s South William Street.

Throughout his working life, Bunn has been interested in the landscape of Ireland and is particularly concerned with the fate of Irish bogs, especially those close to his home in County Sligo. The Farmleigh exhibition features several recent photographs of these magical and fragile environments, as well as his imagined constructs relating to the works of W. B. Yeats and the poet’s interaction with the region.

‘Mike Bunn: The Man Who Sees Through Shadows’ presents an extraordinarily varied selection of images that reflect with great sensitivity key cultural developments occurring in Ireland over the past 50 years. The exhibition is accompanied by a programme of talks and workshops that highlight the importance of Bunn’s vision as a classical photographer in capturing Ireland’s cultural, social, and environmental history. Forthcoming events can be booked through eventbrite.ie:

• Saturday 14 January 2023, 3pm – Exhibition Talk / Anthony Hobbs, former Head of Department of Fine Art Media, NCAD

• Saturday 11 February 2023, 3pm – Mike Bunn / Portrait workshop

• Saturday 11 March 2023, 3pm – Mike Bunn / ‘Plein Air’ workshop

‘Mike Bunn: The Man Who Sees Through Shadows’ continues at Farmleigh Gallery until 19 March 2023.

Mike Bunn, Angus and Enda, Punks, 1984; photograph courtesy of the artist.

Mike Bunn, John Rocha’s 1st Collection 1984; photograph courtesy of the artist.

Mike Bunn, Empress, 2002, designed by Lainey Keogh; photograph courtesy of the artist.

Up in the Sky with the Swallows & Swifts

ARTIST AND VAI member, Gillian Deeny, was born in Belfast in 1936. She studied painting at the National College of Art in Kildare Street in the 1950s, under the tutelage of Maurice MacGonigal and Seán Keating. In 1958, she undertook postgraduate studies in stained glass at the Centre d’Art Sacre, St. Germain, Paris. There, she worked with French glassmaker, decorative artist, illustrator, and engraver, Jacques Le Chevallier (1896-1987) in his atelier.

Professor Le Chevallier set craft projects for her each week, including drawing from life. One of the models at the studio was an elderly French gentleman, Antonio Nardone, who often wore a black felt hat, striped shirt, and waistcoat, and who, in his early twenties, had been the model for the male figure in Rodin’s famous marble sculpture, The Kiss (1882). Gillian still has seven pencil sketches of Nardone, including a detailed portrait, which was recently exhibited as part of her solo exhibition, ‘Quest’, at Pigyard Art Gallery in Wexford.

In 1983, Gillian moved to St Ives, a place made famous by ‘the exotics’ from mainland Europe who settled in Cornwall after WWII, when the region became a centre for modern and abstract developments in British art, known as the St Ives School and led by Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. She was living in a two-storey cottage in Rosslare in Wexford at the time and travelled by ferry in her very small car to visit artist friends in Cornwall. There, she later rented a townhouse in St Ives, owned by Barbara Hepworth, which is situated opposite her famous sculpture garden with views of Porthmeor Beach. Gillian fondly remembers this time in her life as being enriched through friendships with a diverse group of painters, sculptors, poets, and applied craft workers.

Upon her return to Ireland, Gillian undertook various ambitious stained-glass projects, including a commission for Galway Cathedral in 1999. She designed and installed four windows in the eastern wall of the cathedral’s nave, depicting iconic scenes from the life of Jesus, as narrated in the Gospels. Gillian has since developed numerous vibrant stained-glass works for

churches, cathedrals, and private collections, both in Ireland and overseas. This includes producing a stainedglass depiction of Virgin and Child in the Lady Chapel of the Church of the Good Shepherd, in Llanrwst, Conwy, and winning an international competition to design the windows for the Church of St. Frances of Rome in New York.

When she was in her 70s, Gillian lived for several years in Vence, a town near Nice in the French Riviera, which is associated with some of the world’s greatest artists, including Picasso, Matisse, Magnelli, and Léger. Gillian remarked that many of the artists ran up bills in local restaurants, offering artworks in exchange –many of which are still on display in businesses and gardens around the town. Gillian bought a small, sixteenth-century terraced house, located in one of the tiny hill villages, known as villages perchés, on the rocky hillsides above the Mediterranean Sea. She describes the house as being situated “up in the sky with the swallows and swifts with views of olive groves in the distance.” She attended mass every Sunday in The Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, designed by and housing several original works by Henri Matisse.

Matisse lived in Vence in his older years, in a house called La Colombe / The Dove, where he worked on his cut-outs, after his young nurse, Monique Bourgeois, joined the town’s Dominican convent in 1943. Bourgeois told Matisse about the Dominicans’ plan to build a new chapel and asked if he would help to design it. Work began in 1947, when Matisse was 77, and took four years to complete. Matisse’s design for the chapel included three sets of stained-glass windows (in yellow, green, and blue) which flood the white interior with colour; three murals (fabricated in tiles by local craftsmen); the 14 stations of the cross, on the back wall of the chapel; and the priests’ vestments, using traditional ecclesiastical colors. Maquettes for the vestments are now housed in the Pompidou Center in Paris, while copies of the garments are also housed in the Vatican’s museum of modern religious art in Rome. Matisse even designed the bronze crucifix on the altar, the bronze

candle holders, the tabernacle, and the doors of the confessionals, which are carved in wood. In 1949, Marc Chagall bought a house in Vence close to the Matisse Chapel, and in 1962, Chagall decorated one of the chapels of the Notre Dame de la Nativité cathedral with a colourful mosaic.

During the intervening years, while living in Wicklow and then Wexford, Gillian continued to paint, exhibiting her work in solo and group exhibitions in venues such as Dyehouse Gallery, Wexford Arts Centre, the Royal Hibernian Academy, and Courthouse Gallery in Tinahely. Many of her smaller panels are housed in private glass collections in Ireland, Italy, and America, as well as public collections in Ireland and abroad.

The Pigyard Gallery in Wexford town recently presented a solo exhibition by Gillian, which ran from 14 October to 6 November 2022. The exhibition was titled ‘Quest’ and was delivered in partnership with Wexford County Council and the Wex-Art festival of contemporary art, to coincide with Wexford Festival Opera 2022. The exhibition presented more than 30 works from the artist’s personal collection that have never been shown before. Across these new and recent paintings, pastoral scenes are drawn from the landscapes of West Kerry, the Burren, the Wicklow Mountains, the South of France, and her home in Wexford. As an artist, Gillian searches for meaning and beauty in the everyday, which includes detailed examinations of the Irish landscape and the natural world, where she finds quiet moments that resonate across different strands of poetry, philosophy, ecology, and her travels to many beautiful places, that continue to enrich her artistic practice.

Gillian Deeny, Horseman Passing, c. 2014, oil on canvas; image courtesy the artist and Pigyard Gallery. Gillian Deeny, Harvest Girl of the Vines Provence, c. 2015, oil on board, 44 x 46 cm; image courtesy the artist and Pigyard Gallery.

Oonagh Latchford

THE SMALL BUT very punchy exhibition of paintings that Oonagh Latchford put together for the 2022 Wexford Opera Festival revealed an artist who has a real connection to her medium and her content –an impression strengthened by the modesty and understatement of its delivery.

The exhibition at Studio 4 in Wexford’s Creative Hub was titled ‘SPF 50’ and presented a series of canvases, painted since the Covid-19 lockdowns, that fall into two overarching but closely connected categories. The first group, often painted in sepia tones, refers very loosely to family photographs, snapshots really, with all the intimacy but also the almost haphazard arrangement of people and forms that are a feature of such photographs. This is joined by images of more recent experiences, connected to the first by theme but painted in sizzling hot tones against brilliantly coloured grounds.

The two groups have much in common; they tend to record summer days by the sea and an almost desperate desire, in the more contemporary ones, to hold onto those apparently carefree moments when sunshine, sand, and water blur the boundaries between generations. That desire is all the more acute, when juxtaposed beside the family memories, which are evermore precious as the detail disappears and time fades the colours.

Was childhood ever really as good as this, they seem to ask? Did the sun always shine or is this a trick of our minds? And what about the blurring of the sunburned bodies in the water now? As the title of the show reminds us, we now need protection from the sun in ways that our parents never expected, just as our memories need the artist’s protection to preserve them for us. Latchford’s strategy is to surround each figure group with an aura or halo that separates it from her generally monochrome backgrounds, stripped of narrative detail, so that it is only the sketchy figures and time

itself that are presented.

By contrast, the contemporary figures are clearly outlined, if blurred and unrecognisable, but the forces of water (represented by sparkling blue or aquamarine paint) and heat that forces sun bubbles on each figure or onto our vision, remind us inexorably of the threat of climate change and global warming. Should we really be enjoying this or should we be rushing to firefight? These images are full of allure, but they also remind us of the threat that Dylan Thomas outlined in his poem, Fern Hill (1945), when he imagined dying as he “sang in my chains like the sea.”

Photography is not only a vehicle for providing source material for Latchford; it also has a fundamentally important aesthetic dimension. She has been influenced for many years by Japanese Bokeh photography, which employs the kind of out-offocus background and blurring of form that you get when shooting a subject using a fast lens with a wide aperture. In Latchford’s work this allows her to further separate her subject from its surroundings, making them timeless but, as in baroque painting, forcing them into the viewer’s space, multiplying the drama. One thinks of Caravaggio’s theatrical, spotlight effects, achieved here through a painted camera lens.

Latchford’s climate crisis concerns are reinforced by the data visualisation graphics of heat effects on the environment, climate stripes as they have been called, in the work of the climatologist, Professor Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading. What this adds up to is a body of work that is unmistakably modern, but which carries that same burden of history that made painting so important in the first place.

Catherine Marshall is an art historian, freelance curator, and member of Na Cailleacha. She is co-editor of Irish Art 1920–2020: Perspectives on change (Royal Irish Academy, 2022).

40 years of artists working in the city

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