28 minute read
Columns
Plein Air
The Signature of All Things
CORNELIUS BROWNE DISCUSSES THE ORIGINS OF ARTISTIC ANONYMITY.
Cornelius Browne painting in a field, 2022; photograph by Paula Corcoran, courtesy of the artist.
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 shoemaker of peasant stock with no formal education, wrote De Signatura Rerum in 1621, as part of an astonishing body of work. In these pages,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Kip Alizadeh, abstract mark-making based on siyah mashq calligraphy 2022, India ink and qalam pen on white paper; image courtesy of the artist.
Art & Access
Through Care, Towards Access
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
Curatorial
Curating in a Negative Spectrum
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
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
Venus Patel, Eggshells 2022, experimental short film; image courtesy the artist and Pallas Projects/ Studios.
Seminar
We Need to Talk About Painting
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 is a Dublin-based painter who is currently studying for an MFA at NCAD.
@karen.ebbs
The Kerr Shoe Collection
EVE PARNELL CONSIDERS SHOES HOUSED IN NIVAL THAT WERE HANDMADE IN IRELAND IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
Kerr Shoe Collection; image courtesy of NIVAL.
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.
Elida Maiques, Tagged 2022, performance workshop; photograph by Eoghan Carroll, courtesy the artist and Vault Studios Belfast.
