The Visual Artists' News Sheet – January February 2025
Scheme 2025
Fingal County Council invites applications from artists for up to €5,000 to support 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, film, drama, literature, and dance.
Closing date for receipt of applications: Friday 21st February 2025 at 4.00pm For further information and to apply please
To be eligible to apply, applicants must have been born, have studied, or currently reside in the Fingal administrative area. This funding is for projects or initiatives which will take place between 1st May and 31st December 2025.
The Visual Artists’ News Sheet
January – February 2025
On The Cover
First Pages
5. News. The latest developments in the arts sector.
6. Roundup. Exhibitions and events from the past two months.
Columns Adam Fung, The Gathering, 2024, oil on copper panel; image courtesy of the artist and Sarah Walker Gallery.
8. Our Allotted Time. Cornelius Browne reports on his oil painting master class in Twin Towns Community Garden. The Joy of Everyday. Helena Tobin considers the work of KCAT Studio artist Eileen Mulrooney.
9. Make Play a Habit! Aoibheann Greenan offers advice for cultivating more playfulness in your creative practice. What Do Street Lamps Dream Of? Monika Crowley discusses a site-specific sculpture commissioned by EV+A in 2004.
10. Notes on Being Human. Neva Elliott chronicles her return to art practice which includes an emphasis on making as healing. Archiving Plurality: A Collaborative Process. Alessia Cargnelli discusses a recent research project for NIVAL.
11. Feed the Soil. Karla Sánchez uses soil as an analogy for art world ecologies.
Swimming a Long Way Together. Vanessa Daws discusses her durational art project inspired by Mercedes Gleitze.
Career Development
12. Libraries of Rest. Aoife Donnellan speaks with Ciara Barker about current concerns in her practice.
Project Profile
13. Art and the City. Niamh Darling reports on a recent project for Dublin Fringe Festival 2024.
14. Mammary Mountain. Tara Baoth Mooney discusses her immersive virtual reality artwork which premiered in Venice.
Exhibition Profile
15. Periodical Review 14. Miguel Amado discusses his curatorial contribution to the latest showcase at Pallas Projects/Studios.
16. Skin / Deep. Day Magee reviews the current exhibition at PMI.
17. A Woman’s Place. Colin Darke considers the work of Jo Spence currently being presented in Belfast.
18. Blue of Distance. Yvonne Scott responds to a recent group exhibition at Sarah Walker Gallery.
Critique
19. Clodagh Emoe and Donal Lally, ALTAR, Goldenbridge Cemetery.
20. Farm Walks, Counties Leitrim and Fermanagh
21. ALTAR at Goldenbridge Cemetery
22. TEK to Tech at National Sculpture Factory
23. Psyche II at National Sculpture Factory
24. Red Sky at Night in Belfast
Residency
26. Into the Furnace. James L. Hayes outlines his residency at Sloss Metal Arts in Birmingham, Alabama.
Festival / Biennial
27. Nurture Gaia. Brian Curtin discusses his role as one of the curators of the Bangkok Art Biennale 2024.
28. The Salvage Agency. EL Putnam reviews TULCA Festival.
VAI Event
30. Get Together 2024. Thomas Pool reports on Get Together. 32. Poetic Structure. Joanne Laws interviews Joan Jonas.
Member Profile
34. The Rhythm of Life. Ella de Búrca interviews Elizabeth Cope about the evolution of her painting practice.
36. Best Laid Plans. Mandy O’Neill reflects on her doctoral research and exhibition at the Irish Architectural Archive.
37. Hardcore Fencing. Seán Kissane outlines the practice of Dublin-based artist Luke van Gelderen.
Last Pages
38. Public Art Roundup. Site-specific works beyond the gallery.
39. VAI Lifelong Learning. Helpdesks, cafés, and webinars.
The Visual Artists’ News Sheet:
Editor: Joanne Laws
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News/Opportunities: Thomas Pool, Mary
McGrath
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RDS Visual Art Awards 2024
Winners of the annual RDS Visual Art Awards were announced on 22 November 2024 at the RHA Gallery, Dublin, for the launch of the nine-week exhibition that celebrates ten emerging Irish artists. The ceremony at the gallery was hosted by the Chairperson of the RDS Foundation Board, Dr Andrew Power. There were two live performances by artists Mary Madeleine McCarroll – who hosted a live drawing session of writings and symbols that were erased and redrawn on blackboards, accompanied by a Junkanoo drum soundscape – and Derry artist Cahal O’Connell as his drag persona Miss Mary Jane performed a cover of Nickelback’s Rockstar. Both artists are exhibiting as part of the annual exhibition.
RDS Visual Art Awards 2024 [Cont.]
A judging panel of five visual art professionals reviewed the shortlisted candidates before selecting the final six winning artists. The 2024 show is curated by acclaimed artist Colin Martin, who is also the Head of the RHA School. The full expert judging panel is chaired by Mary McCarthy (Chair of the 2024 VAA panel and Director, Crawford Gallery Cork), and members also include Eithne Jordan (RHA Nominated Judge), Janice Hough (IMMA Nominated Judge), Gary Coyle (National Gallery of Ireland Nominated Judge) and Irish artist Colin Martin (Professional Artist & 2024 RDS VAA’s Exhibition Curator).
The awards winners are:
• RDS Taylor Art Award: Sorcha Browning
• R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award: Ava Lowry
• RDS Members’ Art Fund Award: Keara Simonsen
• RDS Mason Hayes & Curran LLP Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Award: Fionn Timmins
• RHA Graduate Studio Award: Mary Madeleine McCarroll
• RDS Graphic Studio Dublin Emerging Visiting Artist Award: Sorcha Browning
AIB Portrait Prize 2024
Amanda Dunsmore has been announced as the winner of the AIB Portrait Prize. Her filmed video portrait, titled Lydia (2022) and depicting Dr Lydia Foy, was revealed as the winning portrait at the ceremony in November. Arann McCormack and Emily Mc Gardle were highly commended for their works, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, and The Pox, respectively.
As stated by the artist: “In 1993, Dr Lydia Foy applied to Ireland’s Office of the Registrar General for a new birth certificate to reflect her gender. She was refused. Dr Foy undertook an arduous 22-year legal battle with the Irish State. Ireland’s Gender Recognition Act was passed on July 15th, 2015 and Lydia became the first person to be legally recognised by this Act. Lydia is also in the Guinness World Records for growing the tallest foxglove, 3.29 metres,
THE LATEST FROM THE ARTS SECTOR
This year’s awards were announced by Chairperson of the judging panel, Mary McCarthy, Director of Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, and presented by the RDS President, John Dardis. The quality of this year’s applications was outstanding, and the ten artists included in this exhibition went through a rigorous twostage selection and judging process. They are a real tribute to the professionalism and talent of the emerging artists coming into the professional visual arts sector. This year, the RDS Visual Art Awards partnered with the RHA Gallery for the 2024 exhibition, which runs at the gallery until 18 January 2025.
[Cont. below]
and her portrait was filmed in her garden.”
Amanda Dunsmore works in art processes that explore representations of societal transformation, examining place, people and moments of political significance. Dunsmore’s contextual portraits evolve through long periods of research, and her work is presented as a series of extensive socio-political and historical projects, through video, photography, drawing, audio and sculptural installation. Central to Dunsmore’s art practice is an exploration of the potential and long-term implications of socio-political art-making and the legacy of visual parity in portraiture. Dunsmore has exhibited extensively in Ireland and shown internationally since 1992. She lives in County Clare and is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Limerick School of Art & Design, TUS.
The Gallery’s annual AIB Portrait Prize exhibition features the shortlist of works chosen from hundreds of entries. This competition, showcasing contemporary portraiture, is open to artists from across the island of Ireland, and Irish artists living abroad. The winner of the competition receives a cash prize of €15,000 and will be commissioned to create a work for the National Portrait Collection, for which they will be awarded a further €5,000. Two additional awards of €1,500 are given to highly commended works.
Ireland at Venice 2026
The Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sports and Media, Catherine Martin T.D. has announced the selection of artist Isabel Nolan, with Georgina Jackson and The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art as the curator, to represent Ireland at the 61st Venice Art Biennale in 2026.
The Venice Biennale is one of the most important international platforms for contemporary art, attracting over half a million visitors, including global curators, gallerists, art critics, and artists. The selection of the team to represent Ireland was made following an open, competitive process, with international jury members.
Minister Martin, said: “I would like to congratulate Isabel Nolan, Georgina Jackson and The Douglas Hyde Gallery on being selected to represent Ireland at the
2026 Venice Art Biennale. Isabel Nolan is recognised to be at the forefront of Irish visual arts practice. Participation at the Venice Art Biennale increases awareness of Ireland’s strong visual arts sector; it is also an important moment in an artist’s career. My Department, through Culture Ireland, commissions Ireland at Venice in partnership with the Arts Council.”
Artist Isabel Nolan’s exhibitions are rooted in big subjects: cosmology and deep history; religion and mythology; mortality and love. Working across sculpture, textiles, paintings, drawings, photography and writing, Nolan responds to the fundamental question of how humans bring the world into meaning. Her work has a remarkable capacity to speak to audiences, looking for ways to like, or even love, the complex world we’ve made. In 2027, this work will return to Ireland on a national tour, supported by the Arts Council, in a variety of venues across the island.
The selected artist, Isabel Nolan said: “To represent Ireland in any sphere of cultural activity is a great privilege. To have my work in congregation with so many other artists is a rare opportunity; as is the occasion to reach such large audiences there, and at home with the national tour.
Venice is an extraordinary city and to have the great fortune to realise this ambitious project with curator Georgina Jackson of The Douglas Hyde and producer Cian O’Brien is very exciting. Art has a strange and special capacity to make and test powerful kinds of community with shared knowledge and beauty, however temporary. The Venice Biennial is a stage like no other.”
Curator Georgina Jackson said: “Artist Isabel Nolan is a leading light of contemporary Irish visual art. The Venice Biennale is an incredible platform to spotlight both her work and the vibrancy of Irish contemporary visual art, and connect to far reaching audiences. Showing Isabel’s work in Venice is a powerful proposition; motifs that recur in her work include arches, fallen chandeliers, surging waves and dying suns –imagery which will resonate dramatically in the Arsenale. I am honoured and excited to work with Isabel, producer Cian O’Brien, the team at The Douglas Hyde, Culture Ireland and The Arts Council to deliver Ire-
land at Venice 2026, and build on the legacy of successful previous pavilions.”
TBG+S/HIAP Residency 2025
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios and Helsinki International Artist Programme are delighted to announce Cliodhna Timoney (IE) and Yuijie Zhou (CHN/FI) as the recipients of TBG+S/HIAP International Residency Exchange 2025.
TBG+S/HIAP International Residency Exchange has been active for 19 years and gives an Irish or Ireland-based artist the opportunity to spend three months at HIAP. The selected artist has access to production facilities, visiting curators and an international network of artists. In return, TBG+S hosts a Finnish or Finland-based artist to live and work in Dublin for two months, kindly funded by the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland.
Cliodhna Timoney is a visual artist working across sculpture, imagery, and sound to trace the edges, in-betweens, accumulations, and linkages within space as a means of reflecting upon our relationships – with one another, the nonhuman, and place. Rhythm of space has been a constant concern in her work; here, she aims to reveal rhythm’s potential to connect, to ignite, and, fundamentally, to destabilise fixed states and absolutes.
Yujie Zhou is a Chinese visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland. They navigate performativity and a decoded notion of language through photography, textiles, video, and publishing. Based on the juxtaposition between their nationalist upbringing and their current life in Finland, their practice interrogates dominant historical narratives and power structures while reframing collective individuality.
Sorcha Browning, Eden 2024, installation view, The RHA; photograph by Leon Farrell, courtesy of the artist and the RDS.
Dublin
Belfast
Goethe-Institut Irland
Curated by Ben Livne Weitzman, ‘The Glenkeen Variations: With Or Without You’ featured work by four international artists who participated in the Glenkeen Garden Residencies in West Cork. Filippa Pettersson (Sweden) and Kristin Reiman (Estonia) imagined a post-human future where termites and cockroaches process plastics for sustenance, while Carolin Liebl and Nikolas Schmid-Pfähler (Germany) presented their research on the biodegradability of plastics.
goethe.de/ireland
Kevin Kavanagh
The group exhibition ‘Magic and Loss’ was presented at Kevin Kavanagh from 21 November to 21 December 2024. The exhibition took its title from a 1992 album by Lou Reed, consisting of gritty, downbeat but emotionally enriching songs, which was shaped by the illness and death of two people close to him. In living, Reed suggests, beauty and bleakness are intertwined. The exhibition was dedicated to all those beings we have loved and lost, as we live our lives.
kevinkavanagh.ie
Molesworth Gallery
A solo exhibition by Vera Klute, titled ‘Petals & Pulp’, ran at Molesworth Gallery from 5 to 23 December 2024. Klute’s latest body of work includes a series of boldly coloured and closely cropped images of woodlands and plants, where the sinuous, coiling branches and the densely clustered foliage recall her earlier sculptures of intertwining, disembodied limbs. The interdependence of all life contained within and constituting the Earth’s biosphere – abundant and unencumbered by our efforts to control it – remains central to Klute’s work.
molesworthgallery.com
Hugh Lane Gallery
A significant exhibition by Brian Maguire opened at Hugh Lane Gallery on 3 October 2024. Spanning two decades of work, ‘La Grande Illusion’ draws on seven pioneering and interconnected bodies of work, appraising the artist’s human rights activism and his efforts to document the shape-shifting nature of war with its far-reaching impact on the poor and our environment. Intimate and uncompromising, Maguire’s paintings demand social justice and are an act of solidarity with families and communities. The exhibition continues until 23 March.
hughlane.ie
MART Gallery
‘Winter Hues: Visual Artists Members Artwork Showcase’ was presented at MART from 13 November to 22 December 2024, showcasing the work of MART’s studio-based and online members. ‘Winter Hues’ featured artworks by Adeline Gaudefroy, Adrian Fitz-Simon, Anna Olachova, Art_E-Rina, Brady Izquierdo Rodríguez, Dr. Niki Collier, Duc Van Pham, Erica Duryea, Gavan Duffy, Gillian Murphy, Jordan Holms, Louise Newman, Mary Mar- tin, Maura Culbert, Scarr Ó Scóir, The Ljilja, and William KWAKU AMØ. mart.ie
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios
Fergus Feehily’s exhibition at TBG+S is situated in deep winter, taking place on both sides of the solstice, continuing into brighter days. This changing context draws on ideas of illumination, making associations with places as far-reaching as the megalithic site of Newgrange and the neon streets of Shinjuku, Tokyo – locations of personal significance for Feehily, bridging time and memory through the exhibition. The title, ‘Fortune House’, conjures visions of a site where luck, prosperity, or glimpses into the future, might be found. The exhibition continues until 23 February.
templebargallery.com
ArtisAnn Gallery
Saffron Monks-Smith’s exhibition, ‘While Others Sleep’, was nfluenced by night walking, the artworks are an immediate response to the heightened sensitivity that we experience when night draws in and shadows are cast. Originally specialising in Fine Art Printmaking, Saffron graduated in 2018 from Ulster University, Belfast. She then furthered her studies, obtaining a Master’s degree in Fine Art, specialising in Painting. On display from 6 November to 14 December 2024.
artisann.org
Belfast School of Art
From 13 to 22 November 2024, The Belfast School of Art celebrated its 175th anniversary with a special series of events, activities, and lectures on the theme of Celebrating Past, Present and Future. There was also an exhibition of objects and memories from the School and those who have passed through it. It is the oldest provider of design education on the island of Ireland as well as being one of the oldest creative arts schools in the UK.
ulster.ac.uk
The MAC
Continuing at The MAC until 30 March, the group exhibition, ‘I see his blood upon the rose’, spans all three galleries and traces the history of the flower in art, its evolution from botanical illustrations to the opulent still-life paintings of the seventeenth century, their adoption as symbols of political influence, revolution, and human control over nature. Floral motifs were used for the advancement of women’s suffrage, Ireland’s Easter Rising and in opposition to the Vietnam War. The exhibition includes works by contemporary artists for whom the subject has remained an enduring interest. themaclive.com
Belfast Exposed
‘Jo Spence: A Woman’s Place?’, was an exhibition spotlighting the ground-breaking phototherapy work of the celebrated British photographer and feminist Jo Spence (1934–1992), providing an intimate and powerful look at Spence’s exploration of the roles and experiences of women within society. Jo Spence was not just a photographer but a cultural critic and activist who used her medium as a tool for emotional and political self-exploration. On display from 17 October to 21 December 2024.
belfastexposed.or
Pollen Studio and Gallery
On 5 December 2024, sculpture and lensbased artist, Aimée Magee, presented ‘White Witch’ a solo show of snow dusted experimental works exploring the kind heartedness found in folklore of local witches and the seasonal magic of the Cailleach, the ancient Celtic bringer of winter, transformation and balance. The exhibition was part of Elevate & Connect project supported by Arts Council Northern Ireland and Belfast City Council.
pollenstudiobelfast.com
University of Atypical
The group exhibition ‘Pathways’, on display from 7 November to 20 December 2024, was an opportunity for University of Atypical to showcase the work of some of their 20 DDASF awardees and their Digital Innovation Awardee. This exhibition showcases the work of DDASF awardees Barry Mulholland, Emma Whitehead, Julie McGowan, Lauren Martin, Lisa Brown, Martin Della Vecchia and Norma Beggs; and Digital Innovations Awardee, Peter Fleming. It includes ceramics, painting, textiles, drawings, photography, digital art and sculpture. universityofatypical.org
Kristin Reiman and Filippa Pettersson, The Royal Museum of Termitology and Plastic-Plastic, 2022-24, ceramics and mixed media; image courtesy of the artists and the Goethe-Institut.
Victor Sloan, Police, Belfast, 1994, silver gelatin print, toners, dyes, inks, bleach, gouache; image courtesy of the artist and Millennium Court.
Regional & International
Backwater Artists Group
Backwater Artists Group’s Winter Salon fundraiser ran from 25 October to 20 December 2024. This annual group show ensures they can continue to support artists by delivering a programme of developmental supports. Exhibiting artists included Joseph Heffernan, Éadaoin Glynn, Conor O’Brien, Inge Van Doorslaer, Siobhán Collins, Ray Murphy, Michaela McCann, Mary O’Leary, Sinéad Ní Chionaola, Gillian Cussen, Kate O’Kelly, Mary Galvin, Sarah Long, Seán Hanrahan, ÉIlis Ní Fhaoláin, Amna Walayat, and others. backwaterartists.ie
Grilse Gallery
Katherine Boucher Beug’s solo exhibition ‘People’ was on display from 16 November to 21 December 2024. Beug has been working and teaching in West Cork since 1971, when she moved from Princetown, New Jersey. Known for her draughtsmanship, the artist draws every day, consistently experimenting through writing, collage and painting. She often exhibits her journals, valuing ‘the raw’ at least as much as ‘the cooked’. The exhibition included the launch of her latest book, People, which explores the creative process through her portraits. grilse.ie
Luan Gallery
Continuing until 2 February, ‘Let The Mirror Express The Room: A Westmeath Artists Awards Exhibition’ is a group show at Luan Gallery. It features almost 50 works by 32 Westmeath visual artists, who were selected by guest curator, Benjamin Stafford. The Westmeath Artists Awards is a collaboration between Luan Gallery and Westmeath Arts Office, aiming to celebrate, showcase, and support the practices and careers of the county’s professional visual artists, with funding support from the Arts Council of Ireland. athloneartsandtourism.ie
CCA Derry~Lononderry
Michael Hanna’s long-term project Crossing the Park was on display from 5 October to 21 December 2024. In Crossing the Park, Hanna takes himself as the subject in a project that sees the artist attempt to change his deep-set allegiance from Everton Football Club to their arch rivals, Liverpool. This process, which has taken place across the past three years, highlights the strong negative social pressures against such a change, as historically Northern Irish football fans choose an English team to support for life when they’re young.
ccadld.org
Highlanes Gallery
John Graham’s exhibition, ‘Familiar Things’, accounts for the familiar in different ways. The exhibition of new works is joined by examples of older ones, so that continuity, difference and future developments can be encountered and anticipated in this fuller context. John understands his practice as an ongoing activity, a way of living that includes the making of discrete objects for display. His latest artist’s book, Titles, Etcetera, will be launched on 18 January in the gallery, where the exhibition continues until 25 January.
highlanes.ie
Millennium Court
‘Belonging’ highlights the influential work of Victor Sloan, one of Ireland’s most celebrated visual artists, known for his poignant explorations of identity and conflict during the Troubles. This exhibition captures the intensity of the 1980s and 1990s – a period marked by profound social and political upheaval. Sloan’s innovative techniques, including his distinctive use of dyes, inks, and paint on negatives and prints, create powerful images that blend documentary and conceptual perspectives. The exhibition continues until 18 January. millenniumcourt.co.uk
Claremorris Gallery
On display from 7 to 21 December 2024, ‘Converging Contours’ brought together a dynamic collection of works that explore the intersections of form, style, and perspective in contemporary Irish art. This group exhibition featured the work of 16 critically acclaimed artists: Aidan Crotty, Ann Quinn, Budi Gugi, Gary Robinson, Kate Murphy, Lorna Watkins, Mags Duffy, Manar Al Shouha, Maurice Quillinan, Michael Wann, Mollie Douthit, Natasha Conway, Nuala Clarke, Peter Burns, Robert Ryan, and Sian Costello. claremorrisgallery.ie
Lavit Gallery
Continuing until 17 January, the Winter Exhibition is a seasonal showcase of the best in Irish art, craft and design, which includes paintings, prints, sculpture, ceramics, jewellery, textiles and much more, with prices to suit every budget. Audiences are invited to support local artists and makers during the festive season, as well as Lavit Gallery, a not-for-profit arts organisation and registered charity. Each year, the exhibition features work by over 50 artists and makers, including regular contributors and new additions.
lavitgallery.com
Regional Cultural Centre
The exhibition ‘between now and there*’ by Sue Morris was on display at the Regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny from 9 November to 21 December 2024. An immersive installation exploring ideas of home, belonging and the erroneous nature of memory, ‘between now and there*’ took as its emblematic subject an archival collection of family photographs and slides. These, along with polaroids – taken on the artist’s final visit to the family home, prior to its sale following her mother’s death –form the basis of this work.
regionalculturalcentre.com
Esker Arts Centre
‘Saibhreas: Works from Offaly County Council Municipal Collection’ ran from 15 November to 20 December 2024 in the Croghan Gallery at Esker Arts Centre. Offaly County Council has been collecting art since the early 2000s and the municipal collection now comprises over 500 artworks by local, national, and international artists across a broad range of disciplines including painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, print and mixed-media works. This was the first time the collection was displayed in a purpose-built visual art gallery.
eskerarts.ie
Dlr Lexicon
On display concurrently, Mary Burke’s ‘Moments of Domesticity’ and Róisín White’s ‘Safe Harbour’, continue at the Dlr Lexicon until 19 January. Burke’s exhibition marks the culmination of her artist’s residency at the Dún Laoghaire Baths Artist Studios, with ‘Moments of Domesticity’ an attempt to capture slices of people’s lives at this moment in time. ‘Safe Harbour’ is an exhibition of works in progress by White that explores our relationship with the sea as a place of leisure and play and the sea’s power, strength and unpredictable nature. dlrcoco.ie
Waterford Gallery of Art
‘GROUND (two-unfold)’ is the first iteration of Susan Connolly’s exhibition, ‘GROUND (100+one)’, originally commissioned by the F.E. McWilliam Gallery. ‘GROUND (100+one)’ saw Connolly consider what one hundred plus one years of abstraction on the island of Ireland could mean for Irish painting today. Connolly made 100 paintings as a homage to Mainie Jellett’s painting, Decoration (1923), and as a way to tease out questions that have intrigued her own abstract painting practice. The exhibition continues until 5 April. waterfordgalleryofart.com
Louise Neiland, blue, 2024, oil on linen; image courtesy of the artist and Lavit Gallery.
John Graham, ‘Familiar Things’, installation view; image courtesy of the artist and Highlanes Gallery.
Work in Focus: KCAT Artists
Our Allotted Time
CORNELIUS BROWNE REPORTS ON HIS OIL PAINTING MASTER CLASS FOR THE FRANCES BROWNE LITERARY FESTIVAL 2024.
DAZZLED BY MORNING sun, I lug my easel and paints through the gate of Twin Towns Community Garden in Ballybofey, County Donegal. I have been brought here by the Blind Poetess of Ulster. Frances Browne was born nearby in January 1816, at the dawning of the coldest recorded year in Western Europe, remembered meteorologically as the ‘Year Without a Summer’. Browne was destined never to see a summer, an attack of smallpox, when she was 18 months old, stealing her sight.
A blind working-class woman, lacking formal education, from geographically isolated Donegal, rising to shine in London literary circles, would seem unlikely today. Browne’s achievement, authoring poems, novels, short stories, essays, and hundreds of articles, against the prevailing gendered expectations of her day, touches on miracle. Following her death, a nightfall of obscurity descended over Browne, erasing her from the canon of Irish literature. Painter and poet, Celine McGlynn, is now ushering in a second dawn, in the shape of a literary festival bearing the forgotten poet’s name. Which ushers me into this October garden, where it appears summer has been persuaded to lengthen its stay.
Tickets for my oil painting masterclass have sold out, and in the Men’s Shed – filled entirely with women painters – I am greeted by a warmth absent from the sun. My suggestion that we paint outdoors is met with surprise. A group within the group have already set up painting stations in the comfort of this robust log cabin, at their usual tables for regular art classes here, and only one (a familiar face from my Glebe House & Gallery plein air workshops) has previously painted outside. The idea of working from nature, aiming to complete paintings within the hours we have together, is unfamiliar territory.
On phones and shelves, I am shown paintings created carefully across weeks, mostly from photographs. Enthusiasm grows in the shed, propelling all but three (who opt to work from windows overlooking vegetation) into the gardens, some even sending out for coats. Through downpour
and shine, the afternoon slips by, and we return to the shed, dripping rain, into a garden of astonishment. Many artists have two or three paintings, works of such vibrancy and outright beauty that the painter in me reels. Thankfully, this exhilaration is shared: Never knew I could paint so freely! Can’t believe I painted this! What a day!
In the middle of the day, surrounded by these painters in action, my thoughts wander to artist Sarah Cecilia Harrison. Walking between easels, in haphazard patterns over these ticking hours, gazing into designs of blossom and leaf, the tender work of community gardeners spreading tendrils to our little community of artists, it dawns on me that the seeds Harrison helped sow, more than a century ago, have grown into this garden. A renowned portrait painter, Harrison’s second life as suffragist and social activist saw her become the first female councillor for Dublin Corporation in 1912, where she campaigned vigorously for the rights of the city’s tenement dwellers.
As a driving force within the Vacant Land Cultivation Society, established in Dublin three years prior to Harrison’s election success, the artist fought for the poor to have access to land in the form of allotments. Unemployed workers would cultivate unemployed land, for their mutual benefit. The allotment movement grew entwined with Ireland’s co-operative movement, which in turn supported a new women’s movement, the Society of United Irishwomen. From this soil, grew community gardens, countrywide communal responses to urban allotments. Harrison may or may not have encountered the writings of Frances Browne, still they certainly shared a spade. Browne’s industrious pen loyally championed the working class, the rights of tenants, children, and the urban poor. Night will fall. Most of us will be forgotten within a few generations. Yet how we spend our allotted time on Earth may help bring light and hope to days that we won’t be here to see.
Cornelius Browne is an artist based in County Donegal.
The Joy of Everyday
TOBIN CONSIDERS THE
EILEEN MULROONEY’S WORK evokes a sense of joy – not simply of excitement or exuberance but of an authentic pleasure in the ‘everydayness’ of life. Working mainly from photographs, Eileen’s landscapes and portraits depict a keen observation while also communicating to the viewer her emotional resonance with these places and people. What could be seen as mundane images of friends in a kitchen, swans by the river, parked cars, or people walking their dogs, become vibrant tableaux, brimming with aliveness and movement, as if we are experiencing frames of an unfolding narrative. This is Eileen’s gift to us – the ability to invite us into her world and bring it to life, in such a way that it feels like we belong. Her relationship to the people and places she paints and draws translates to the viewer, making us feel that we also know them, even if we do not. Her work makes us care.
Eileen Mulrooney’s passion for art began at the Presentation College in Carrick-onSuir in County Tipperary, before she went on to study at KCAT, where she has been a studio member since 2005. During my first studio visit with Eileen, I was completely struck by the volume of work she produces, and her technical prowess across a range of mediums including pencil, pastel, and watercolour. I can vividly recall two of Eileen’s works as if they are right in front of me: People Climbing Slievenamon (2019), ink and pen on paper; and Camphill Carrick (2023), water-based oil on canvas. These works are completely different but have the clear hallmarks of Eileen’s unique style.
In People Climbing Slievenamon, Eileen presents us with a wonderful composition looking down on the landscape of South Tipperary, near her hometown of Carrickon-Suir – a region I am also familiar with.
To me, the scene is instantly recognisable, though Eileen uses the most economical marks and brushstrokes to convey the landscape below. A group of six populate
the left-hand side of the drawing with their backs to us; it is clear they are descending the mountain. Eileen’s fluid and intuitive mark-making fills the figures with kinetic energy, producing an uncanny sense that they are mid-movement. We can almost hear them chatting, and feel the slight chill, as other figures ascend and descend in the distance.
In contrast, people are absent from Camphill Carrick, although their presence is implied. Painted thickly with water-based oil paint, this piece hums with the bright colours of summer. An impasto tree trunk dominates the right-hand side of the painting with its canopy of green sheltering the table and chairs below. One chair is leaning against the table – maybe it rained earlier and was placed like this to dry off ? Yellow bunting hangs on the tree – was there a party? Or perhaps a celebration is about to happen? Celebration is an appropriate word because that’s what all of Eileen’s work feels like – a celebration of friends, people, animals, and places – a celebration of life, in its everydayness.
Eileen has exhibited widely in Ireland and internationally, including at the Kilkenny Design Centre; the Freight Gallery in Fremantle, Western Australia; Gallery Prabbeli in Wiltz, Luxembourg; Crawford Art Gallery in Cork; Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre; and the Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar. Her work featured in Living Colour (2011) – a documentary about KCAT Studio artists by Wild Fire Productions – and has been reproduced in several publications, including The Engagement Project KCAT 2014-2020, Perceptions 2016: The Art of Citizenship, and Art and Inclusion: The Story of KCAT
HELENA
WORK OF KCAT STUDIO ARTIST EILEEN MULROONEY AND RELATIONSHIPS WITH HER SUBJECTS.
Helena Tobin is Artistic Director at South Tipperary Arts Centre. southtippartscentre.ie
Twin Towns Community Garden during the Frances Browne Literary Festival 2024; photograph by Cornelius Browne.
Eileen Mulrooney, People Climbing Slievenamon 2019, ink and pen on paper, 38 x 57 cm; image courtesy of the artist.
Wellbeing Make Play a Habit!
AOIBHEANN GREENAN OFFERS ADVICE FOR CULTIVATING MORE PLAYFULNESS AND PLEASURE IN YOUR CREATIVE PRACTICE.
IF YOU’RE FEELING creatively blocked, there’s a high chance that what’s missing from your artistic practice is play. Sure, you could argue that all art making is a form of play, but what sets play apart from more targeted creative production is the intention behind it. Are you creating out of urgency, driven by deadlines, or purely for the joy of exploration?
The art world tends to strip play from the creative process by steering artists towards a results-driven mindset. We’re pressured to articulate our ideas before they fully form, whether for funding applications or pitches to potential partners. Top-down thinking is a skewed approach to creativity. True artistic innovation, like all imaginative play, thrives on bottom-up processes, where ideas take shape organically as you work. In a system geared towards outcome-focused work, an intentional mindset shift is required. Think of play as an essential habit for artists. Play isn’t just a break from ‘real’ work; it’s an integral part of the creative process that can spark new insights and ultimately lead to a more compelling practice. Here are some ways you can cultivate more playfulness in your work.
Habit 1: Curate your Space
Play, by its very nature, draws us out of our everyday state of consciousness. Picture a tennis court, a stage, or a magic circle –each of these settings invites distinct conditions for play and exploration that shift us into new states of consciousness. This concept can be applied to your studio space, even if it’s just a desk. Transform it into a playground for your imagination by decluttering and curating it with only the most potent and inspiring images, materials, and objects. The goal is to be able to glance idly around your space and spark spontaneous, lateral connections in your mind. By priming your imagination in this way, you create the ideal conditions for play to begin!
Habit 2: Creative Warm-ups
Just as musicians practice scales before a performance, and dancers warm up with stretches, visual artists also benefit from preparatory exercises. Expecting to dive straight into your best work without first loosening up is unrealistic. If you have the luxury of a full studio day, starting with creative warm-ups is essential. Depending on your practice, this might look like blind contour drawings, notebook collages, a digital animation, or any creative exercise of your choosing. The key is to keep it lowstakes, enjoyable and judgment-free. Try not to allow perfectionism to creep into this process. If you’re familiar with The Artist’s Way, you know about ‘The Morning Pages’ – a practice of unfiltered writing that serves to clear mental clutter. Creative warm-ups function similarly, clearing mental blocks and preparing you for deeper cre-
ative work. Don’t underestimate the power of this simple habit. Studies have shown that activities involving manual dexterity help reduce stress and stimulate brain regions linked to problem-solving and creativity. So, engaging in creative warm-ups can easily snowball into a full day of productive flow!
Habit 3: Creative Constraints
Every game operates with a set of rules that, rather than limiting freedom, create a framework that channels the energy and facilitates flow and innovation. The same principle applies to your art practice: too many choices can lead to decision paralysis, but self-imposed constraints can sharpen your focus. Let’s say you’re stuck on a work in progress; can you playfully challenge yourself to using a maximum of two specific tools, materials, or colours? Another effective constraint is to work in series, exploring slight variations in each piece. This approach engenders more fluidity by taking the pressure off the outcome of a singular work. Whatever the constraint, limitations can actually push through inertia by forcing you to use your ingenuity and consider new solutions. So, get creative about inventing new rules!
Habit 4: Incorporate Chance
Another great tool, if you find yourself stuck, are techniques that inject chance into your process. Surrealist-inspired games like William S. Burroughs’s Cut-Up Technique, involve physically cutting and rearranging text to generate new meanings. The same approach can be applied to images. Similarly, Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards provide cryptic prompts to break through creative blocks. Marina Abramović’s instruction cards work in a similar vein. A resource I often recommend to visual artists is The Choreographer’s Handbook by Jonathan Burrows. This book brims with methods for remixing and reconfiguring your material. Sometimes, I’ll open it to a random page and see what synchronicities unfold from there. All these strategies introduce randomness and disrupt conventional thinking, allowing spontaneous connections to surface that lead to surprising breakthroughs.
The goal of these playful habits is to enable you to release control and reconnect with what feels alive and pleasurable in your practice – a clear indicator of where the treasure lies. When you trust your intuition and lean into what genuinely excites you, instead of contorting yourself into rigid mental frameworks, you transform your practice into a playground of infinite discovery.
Aoibheann Greenan is an Irish artist and founder of Rodeo Oracle. rodeooracle.com
Irish Art History
What Do Street Lamps Dream Of?
MONIKA CROWLEY DISCUSSES A SITE-SPECIFIC SCULPTURE ORIGINALLY COMMISSIONED BY EV+A IN LIMERICK IN 2004.
THERE’S A STREETLAMP on the grounds of IMMA that dreams of night revellers and banter. “A sentimental entity on a patch of green grass. If the world doesn’t revolve around it at least it wobbles in its direction occasionally. A working mind spread across the fields of the social, the ordinary and the in-between.”1
Whilst researching a case study for a presentation on site-specific / site-responsive artwork for my MFA at NCAD, I wondered about the ephemeral nature of artworks that were removed from their original contexts, and whether they could still connect with their audience and purpose. EVA International is cognisant of similar issues, since their strategic approach favours “art’s role in the dynamics of the present, as opposed to the permanent, the monumental, the everlasting... [which] has resulted in EVA’s history being almost invisible and without material evidence.”2
To capture the history of contemporary art in Limerick, EVA International have built ‘NEVER LOOK BACK’, an online archive that maps EVA’s history across 160+ sites, spaces and venues. It was here, navigating the dedicated website, that I stumbled upon the sculpture, Slattery’s Lamp – Sediments of an Ordinary Mind
Commissioned by EVA in 2004, Slattery’s Lamp was initially situated at 50 Lord Edward Street in Limerick, gathering information through sensors from inside Slattery’s Bar, measuring and collecting data on light, audio, door-opening/closure, heat, and humidity. This information was passed through MAX MSP, programmed with the help of Nick Rothwell and Dave Guy, where a small, generative AI engine worked and reworked the data and sent one signal out that regulated a dimmer for the lamp. Initially, the locals in Limerick’s oldest family-run pub were somewhat bemused at what was happening, but soon embraced the lamp as a lifeform of sorts, living in their midst. A few weeks after installation, when the artist returned for a pint, someone at the bar called him over saying, “you are the fella that made that lamp... I passed it this morning... it was really, really happy.”3
Slattery’s Lamp – Sediments of an Ordinary Mind was created by Dr Michael Kliën, artist, educator, and a leading voice in contemporary choreography. The original impetus for the work came about in the mid-90s from observing broken lampposts in the streets of London. Kliën imagined that their apparent brokenness was only our contextual reading. How would we know if these lampposts had gained life and were communicating? As such, perceiving Slattery’s Lamp is an exercise in trust: “One must trust that there is life in this work, that it is not broken, and despite not being able to follow a linear logic or rational communication, you have to trust that there is
a logic at play... because there is, but there is no external ‘proof’. The lamp won’t talk, it won’t communicate ‘human’, it’s a ‘lamp’ after all.”4 A rudimentary precursor of AI, the lamp was equipped with the capabilities to gain knowledge, to build meaning, and to express itself in a limited manner. Gregory Bateson’s definition of ‘mind’ resonated with Kliën, who was struck that the concept would bind him, the lamp, and Slattery’s into a sort of emerging mind.
Kliën had long been fascinated with the study of system theory and the basis of life. But it was in 2003, when he became the Artistic Director of Daghdha Dance Company in Limerick, that he started this project in collaboration with EVA (then known as EV+A). The streetlamp would gather information in Slattery’s bar and use its light to communicate its findings. The artwork was an ambition to create a local ‘cradle of relations’ that binds an inanimate object into an animate social loop, making the choreography part of a community. Kliën reminisces that there were plans to create a lamp for every city or to create a whole highway with sections of lights communicating with each other.5
Three years after its initial installation, it had to move from its position close to Slattery’s, since the land it was standing on was being developed – as is often the story these days. Its new home for the next 20 years would be the grounds of IMMA. Several years ago, there was talk of moving the lamp into storage; perhaps it was the pandemic that saved it, or the growing interest in AI. Either way, it stands there still. Without sensors any longer, its recorded data now transferred to an Ardino chip, it reworks its memories in an endless loop, looking across Kilmainham’s gardens towards Limerick, dreaming of what’s happening in Slattery’s bar.
Thanks to Dr Sarah Durcan, MFA Fine Art Programme Leader, NCAD; Ruth Hallinan, Assistant Manager, NIVAL; and the patience and generosity of Dr Michael Kliën, artist and Professor of the Practice of Dance at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.
Monika Crowley is an Irish artist whose practice explores the trauma of change. Her work is a meditation on the quotidian, reframing the everyday into meaningful gestures and rituals. monikacrowley.com
1 Mike Fitzpatrick and Paul O’Reilly (Eds.), EV+A 2004: Imagine Limerick (Limerick: Eblana Editions, 2004).
2 See: neverlookback.eva.ie
3 Excerpt from the author’s interview with Dr Michael Kliën.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
Memento Mori Archives
Notes on Being Human
NEVA ELLIOTT CHRONICLES HER RETURN TO ART PRACTICE WHICH INCLUDES AN EMPHASIS ON MAKING AS HEALING.
WHEN I RETURNED to my practice in 2021, after a break of over a decade, I did not immediately assume the title of ‘artist’ again. Instead, I embarked on feeling out each step towards it.
The first step – leaving my job – was not a clean break from the ‘working’ world. Committing to my practice entirely meant saying no to freelance work. As anyone who has relied on freelancing will know, this decision was especially difficult. To my elation, I eventually navigated it by realising that while other people could be found for various projects, I am all my work has – to paraphrase Maeve Brennan’s words of advice to her fellow writer, Tillie Olsen.
The second step was visibly re-establishing myself as a working artist by consistently finishing and showing new work – thereby announcing my return. Heading into 2024, I defined the next phase as ‘de-institutionalising’ my practice. For me, this meant that rather than focusing on deadlines or outcomes, creating should be a non-definitive proposition, a site for exploration, with ‘doing’ rather than ‘presenting’ being central.
To support this, I planned what I called my ‘Year of Making’. This had two key elements: my residency as the 2024 Irish Artist-in-Residence at Artlink in Fort Dunree, County Donegal; and an exhibition as part of Pallas Projects/Studios’ Artist-Initiated Projects series.
The PP/S opportunity – to challenge and test practice in the public realm –aligned with my plan. The resulting exhibition, ‘Notes on Being Human’, was designed to act as a parenthesis for this time of making and as support, motivation, and manifestation. It involved rephrasing the question “What shall I show?” to slice through the fabric of making happening at that moment. The residency was transformative, helping me shift toward a focus on making, through extended time in an environment away from my everyday life, but also through an enforced disconnecting in a
studio without electricity and internet.
My working mode continued to be based on and in my life, processing recollections and psychological states into action; however, I stepped away from the heroization of finalised, exhibited ‘works’, focusing instead on the act of ‘working’ – resulting in pieces as by-products of generative activity rather than conceived as finished objects.
Come September, after eight months of making, the ‘workings’ I presented as part of ‘Notes on Being Human’ acted as a kind of interim report on my current practice. Rather than being presented as static, the viewer encountered the works as they unfolded, their ultimate realisation in form and import still to be determined. To signal this, I labelled several pieces as ‘ongoing’, not to imply incompletion, but to highlight the importance of the process itself, distinct from the more traditional ‘in progress’ wording.
In tandem with this focus on practice, ‘Notes on Being Human’ brought together the acts of making that were part of my post-bereavement experience. Turning emotional labour into physical labour, I engaged in a dialogue between personal psychology and sculpture through acts of making. In this way, the primary audience for the work was myself, allowing space and time for healing through creation. The emerging pieces spanned sculpture, ceramics, textiles, photography, text, and performative gestures.
Regular studio time, breaking from other work and distractions, and a focus on making rather than showing have transformed my practice, allowing me to drop into a more intuitive space, expand my materials and methods, and work confidently. The next phase is to ask what my practice needs in 2025.
Neva Elliott is an artist and writer based in Dublin. nevaelliott.com
Archiving Plurality: A Collaborative Process
ALESSIA CARGNELLI DISCUSSES A RECENT RESEARCH PROJECT AND PUBLICATION COMMISSIONED BY NIVAL AT NCAD.
IN JANUARY 2023, I began an exciting post-doctorate in one of my favourite places to conduct art-related research: the National Irish Visual Arts Library. Based in NCAD, NIVAL is accessible to anybody, free of charge, and is sustained through voluntary contributions from artists, designers, arts organisations, and arts professionals. One of the organisation’s key characteristics is its ‘democratic approach’ which informs their collections and access.
This democratic approach is reflected in their acquisitions policies: when archiving new materials, there is no judgement on artistic ‘quality’, proficiency, or reputation of artists and designers; everyone is equally valued. Nonetheless, these efforts do not always ensure equity, and despite the policies in place, NIVAL recognises a lack of representation in certain aspects of their collection, particularly around artists and designers coming from diverse ethnic, cultural, gender backgrounds and nationalities.
It is from this key acknowledgement that my research began. Coming from a feminist-informed and collective-led practice, I was conscious of the importance (and difficulties) in challenging the traditional hierarchies between the researcher and subject of the research. Recognising that diversity projects can sometimes be perceived as tokenistic, I decided to embed a participatory-led methodology in the research. To tackle inequality of representation, it is imperative to give agency to the subjects of the research, providing them with the tools to directly shape the project.
This methodology also creates the conditions in which the commissioning institution can learn from the people they have excluded. I involved more than 30 artists and designers who self-identify as coming from diverse ethnic, cultural, gender backgrounds and nationalities, and who are living across the island of Ireland. Participants were selected through a publicly advertised open call and paid for their time.
Starting from the key question, “How to practise the right to belong?”, a series of focus groups explored three macro themes: site, language, and collections. A subsequent printed publication presented a research report on the data collected during these gatherings, along with a set of co-authored short-term and long-term propositions for more accessible and inclusive collections. Through participant quotes, the report captures the array of contributions – at times contradictory and uncomfortable – around feelings of belonging, while exploring how personal identities intersect with the social constructs of race, ethnicity, gender, and how this in turn relates to creative practice and its relationship with institutions.
Reflecting on her experience as research participant, Limerick-based artist Karen Rodrigues Enokibara said: “I was a little apprehensive at first as some of the subjects
weren’t the kind I was used to discussing so profoundly, however conversations flowed and in the end I was able to meet people who were in a similar conundrum as myself and returned home full of hope!” Ultimately, the focus groups acted as a catalyst for making space and giving voice to the ‘missing people’, as Rosi Braidotti described them – individuals “whose knowledge never made it into the official cartographies.”
While the research recommendations may seem specific to NIVAL, these discussion points are extremely useful for all researchers working in libraries, archives, and the creative sectors. The publication aims to instigate future projects, research, and perhaps better practices across the arts and beyond.
As part of the publication, I commissioned essays by teresa cisneros, Sara Damaris Muthi, Bojana Janković, and Sophie Mak-Schram – arts professionals with interests in EDI scholarship, decolonial practices, and direct experiences of migration, within and beyond the island of Ireland. The variety and richness of their approaches add additional depth to the study, further expanding this critical conversation at individual, collective, and institutional levels.1
Alessia Cargnelli is a visual artist and researcher based in Belfast. alessiacargnelli.com
1 Archiving Plurality: A Collaborative Process was supported by the Arts Council’s Capacity Building Scheme and NCAD, through the Edward Murphy Bequest and the Art Research Development Office. It can be purchased in printed form, or freely downloaded, by contacting nivalinfo@staff.ncad.ie
Archiving Plurality: A Collaborative Process (Dublin: NCAD, 2024); photograph by Eslam Abd El Salam, courtesy of the author and NIVAL.
Ecologies Feed the Soil
KARLA SÁNCHEZ
FROM BLACKBIRD CULTUR-LAB IN WEXFORD USES SOIL AS AN ANALOGY FOR ART WORLD ECOLOGIES.
“FEED THE SOIL, and the soil feeds everything else” is a key saying of regenerative agriculture, and a useful analogy for many other ways of living, including arts and culture. We live within a civilisation that prioritises sequential analysis and hyper-focus on dividing the world into controllable units – a useful intellectual framework that has produced material goods unimaginable to previous generations. However, once this becomes the sole focus, at the expense of all other realms of knowledge and wisdom, it begins to threaten our very material foundations for existence.
It is high time we start respecting and appreciating the many aspects that give value to life, not only the things that can be measured and quantified. We need to embrace approaches, methods and processes that consider the complexity and interconnectivity of our lives, and start formulating actions that are best for our own contexts. If I have learnt anything, working with the land, it is that context is key; nothing works everywhere, for everyone, or all the time.
Soil is teaming with life; bacteria, fungi, earthworms, and many other microorganisms, live, multiply and die, providing everything we need to survive on this planet. Without them, we have no hope, yet we keep destroying the conditions they need to thrive. Within a healthy ecosystem, every single organism has something to contribute. Various types of symbiotic relationships are key to long-term survival. For instance, many species of trees are helped to combat attacks from pests by extensive networks of mycorrhyzal fungi under the forest bed. And almost all vegetable roots interact with small bacteria which they ‘farm’, extracting nutrients in exchange for different types of sugars.
Observing and working with natural processes has forced me to re-think artistic and cultural systems and structures. I believe the current art world to be an unbalanced ecosystem. An obsession with tangible products and quantifying outcomes shapes
how our cultural institutions conceive of and deliver all sorts of programmes. Some of this is fantastic, but the impact on the overall mental, economic, or spiritual health of individuals makes one wonder whether there are different, more grounded and holistic ways of integrating the arts into the everyday lives of communities.
Rather than struggling from project to project, from year to year, what would happen if we were to generate conditions that supported artists at all levels from the medium to long term? What would it take for us to understand how everything we do and use (including materials) impacts our own growth and health, and that of all other beings within and around us?
I have found it useful to apply ideas from the theoretical framework of regenerative agriculture, to the way I think and work, both as a farmer and within the arts. I believe this may offer alternatives for individual creators, as well as for institutions, to assess, restore and regenerate their own beliefs, aspirations and practice. Why are we doing what we are doing? What are the values revealed by our actions? Are we rebuilding, restoring and bringing more vigorous life to our environments? How can we create circularity within the art world? At the farm, we try to actively practice our ethos. We have made lots of mistakes; yet, we continue to work, hoping to re-generate ourselves and everything we manage. The choice is, as always, before us.
Karla Sánchez runs (along with Oisín O’Connell) Blackbird Cultur-Lab, a creative cultural laboratory based within a working farm that is transitioning towards regenerative agriculture practices. Blackbird Cultur-Lab aims to provide an environment for farmers, artists, academics, and practitioners from various disciplines to experiment and work beyond traditional boundaries.
blackbirdcultur-lab.com
Art Practice
Swimming a Long Way Together
VANESSA DAWS DISCUSSES HER DURATIONAL ART PROJECT INSPIRED BY PIONEERING SWIMMER MERCEDES GLEITZE.
ON 15 JULY 2024 at 4:10am, I set out swimming from Samphire Hoe in Dover. 17 hours and 35 minutes later, I ran up a dark beach in torrential rain at Le Petit Blanc Nez in France. I jumped up and down with my arms in the air. I had finally swum across the English Channel.
It had been a long journey. Five years earlier, curator Rosie Hermon and I were putting together a proposal for the Arts Council of Ireland Open Call Award 2021, with the project that would become ‘Swimming a Long Way Together’. The English Channel was the starting point for our collaboration.
Rosie and I met in 2017. Rosie came to visit me in my project studio in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. We found that we shared common interests in the geographical and imaginative spaces of the English Channel. At the time, I was training to swim across the Channel. My first attempt in 2019 was not successful. After 12 hours of swimming, my boat pilot asked me to stop because I was being pushed into the Calais shipping lanes. Our Open Call proposal, however, was successful! And so, we started our ‘Swimming a Long Way Together’ adventure.
Swimming sits at the core of my artistic identity, as an enquiry into place, as a performance, and as a generative process which spills over into many more traditional artistic mediums – from drawing, painting, and sculpture to filmmaking, photography, and participatory practice. I begin by swimming in the particular body of water I’m exploring. I talk to swimmers and people passing by. I’m interested in the history, heritage, and personal stories of swimming there. This way, the water and its community lead my art projects; they kind of go with the flow.
‘Swimming a Long Way Together’ is a durational art project inspired by the pioneering twentieth-century swimmer, Mercedes Gleitze – the first British woman to swim across the English Channel in 1927. The project is a celebration of swimming
and swimming communities. Over the past few years, we have created large-scale art events and exhibitions involving hundreds of people in Dublin, Cork, Donaghadee, Galway, Dover and Brighton. Each location was chosen because of its significance to Mercedes’s story. The project was launched in 2021 with a music and swim performance in the River Liffey, followed by a ‘Swimposium’ event the next day. I first heard about Mercedes when I read her daughter Doloranda Pember’s book, In the Wake of Mercedes Gleitze. Mercedes travelled the world with her groundbreaking swims in the 1920s and ‘30s, when large crowds came to cheer her on. Mercedes loved music; there was always a gramophone or people singing from the support boats, to keep her spirits up, as she swam for hours on end. Music was also a vital part of ‘Swimming a Long Way Together’. I commissioned musician Ruth Clinton to write a song, As easy stop the sea, which was interwoven throughout the project and performed at every event.
We documented our events through film, photographs, songs, poems, and texts written for the project. These were included in a publication, designed by Peter Maybury, and a film by filmmaker Barry Lynch. My recent successful Channel swim couldn’t have been timed better – this was luck, as you never know exactly when you will get the call to swim. This swim became central to my exhibition at The LAB Gallery (19 September – 22 November 2024). I drew a continual horizon line circling the space with the creatures and markers I encountered on my swim. This exhibition felt like a full circle moment for ‘Swimming a Long Way Together’, marking the return of the project to Dublin, of mine and Rosie’s first meeting in the studio, and our initial thoughts and dreams about the English Channel.
Vanessa Daws is a long-distance swimmer and visual artist based in Dublin. vanessadaws.com
‘PAPAS’ event at Blackbird Cultur-Lab, July 2024, delivered in collaboration with CocinaStudio; photograph by Oisín O’Connell, courtesy of the author.
Vanessa Daws, Swimming a Long Way Together 47-Hour Swim and Poolside Performance, Sea Lanes, Brighton, 2023; photograph by Phoebe Wingrove, courtesy of the artist.
Libraries of Rest
AOIFE DONNELLAN SPEAKS WITH CIARA BARKER ABOUT THE CONCEPTUAL AND MATERIAL CONCERNS IN HER PRACTICE.
Aoife Donnellan: What drew you to installation originally, and how did that develop into your current practice?
Ciara Barker: I studied print at Limerick School of Art and Design, but I originally didn’t want to have to choose a discipline. I chose print because it felt encouraging, and I was interested in learning the processes. I spent my second year making prints on paper, which was definitely the worst year of my artwork in college because I was trying to confine myself to the visual and trying to get better at things that aren’t my strengths. I remember a lecturer saying “If something isn’t your thing, you don’t have to force yourself to get better at that; you could look at something different”, which was very helpful.
After that, I became interested in questioning and distorting the visual. I focused more on abstract forms and textures, and I got really into the way materials interact with light. I had a strong desire to make things big and spatial; I really wanted people to experience the work beyond looking at it, so I gradually shifted off the page. In my installation practice now, I’m concerned with thoughts, intentions and materials rather than forms. The form happens when I physically engage with the materials and the constraints of the space, rather than starting with a fully formed visual idea.
AD: Your work is concerned with embodied knowledge, in particular. This is often
architectural, with elements of care. What role do uncertainty and discovery play in your process?
CB: I often think of relationality in the making of the work. I want to create in relation to something, whether it’s a space or a dialogue with someone. For my work at The Feminist Supermarket, People Who (…) Have No Dreams (2021), it was about the experiences of being in a body, as well as the othering and dividing of people based on their bodies. In the work, you encounter one of two videos, then you venture around it and enter through a door. In this space, you can become preoccupied with your own body because of the reflective material which distorts it. When someone else starts to interact with the piece, the lighting changes, and you realise that you aren’t in a private space. In that way, the work is spatial and temporal; it considers the timeline of participation and the different moments that may or may not happen. Some of the experience is contingent on another person walking into the other side of the installation and changing it. Some people won’t get to see that, which I find exciting, that variety of experience.
AD: You were Artist-in-Residence at Ormston House from 2019 to 2023. Did that security or feeling of authorship in a space change your practice?
CB: Absolutely. It had a huge impact. The
piece for the Feminist Supermarket was the first time I’d gotten to make work over a longer period of time. Because of lockdown, I ended up with almost a whole extra year to develop it, and having the support of Ormston House was amazing. The work benefited so much from that, and properly articulated what I had intended because I had the resources and time.
AD: We’ve spoken previously about the physical considerations of buying, transporting, housing, and hanging materials. How do these limitations impact your practice?
CB: They have definitely guided the materials I choose. At the beginning of my practice, I didn’t have a car, so I needed to be able to carry artworks. That’s why mylar blankets, which often feature in my works, are so perfect. They’re small and light but can occupy quite a lot of gallery space. When I started using different kinds of materials, I was a student so, money-wise, this was challenging. I really wanted to work with glass or big mirrors, but that was very impractical, so instead I used cellophane or mirror film. These substitutions ended up being really fruitful for my practice for different reasons. Through necessity, I found alternative materials that were actually more exciting.
AD: Your latest exhibition ‘Libraries of Rest’, at transmediale studio in Berlin last
September was an immersive installation that explored the radical potential of resting. What developments did you see in your practice during the creation of this exhibition?
CB: I think that the course I completed in User Experience Design in 2022 had an impact in terms of my approach. I knew more about designing with people’s needs in mind. I was also interested in co-creation in design and the ways one can invite people into the creative process. I wanted to make space and time for people to draw on their own expertise, their own lived experience, to solve problems that impact them. Through that, I wanted to expand the interactive nature of my work to make it fully participatory. An important development was also the prioritisation of compassion in my practice. I wanted to lean into and respect the role compassion plays. For me, dreaming and imagination feel like ways to combat current structural oppression, inequality and other things that are hurting us all. Being able to imagine and dream and create is a way through that. I want to invite people into a place of hope.
Aoife Donnellan is a researcher, art writer, and curator from Limerick, based between London and Berlin. @aoife_donnellan_ Ciara Barker is a multidisciplinary artist based between Galway and Cork. ciarabarker.com
Ciara Barker 'Libraries of Rest', installation view, transmediale studio, Berlin, September 2024; photograph by Katie O'Neill, courtesy of the artist and transmediale festival.
Ciara Barker, People who (…) have no dreams 2020-21, installation view, Ormston House, October 2021; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of the artist and Ormston House.
Art and the City
NIAMH DARLING REPORTS ON A PROJECT FOR DUBLIN FRINGE FESTIVAL 2024.
ON SEEING THE call out for the Art and the City programme on the Creative Futures Academy website, I was most intrigued by the image.1 Captioned “No Man’s Land by Fergal McCarthy (2011),” the photograph showed a man in a suit standing behind a tent on a miniature island in the middle of the Liffey. The work is a sign of the times, both intentionally and unintentionally. McCarthy’s suit references the nearby International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) and Ulster Bank, a gesture to the culprits of the 2008 economic crash. Meanwhile, the tent, flanked by palm trees, evokes an uncanny sense of tropical escapism, seemingly oblivious to the, then, approaching homelessness crisis. I presumed this surreal image was photoshopped. In today’s context, the idea that an artist would get permission to construct a large installation in the middle of the river seemed completely outside the realm of possibility.
The image was not photoshopped, but this question surrounding the boundaries of possibility remained central to Art and the City – a once off programme, curated and led by Michelle Browne (artist and lecturer in Sculpture and Expanded Practice at NCAD) with support from Samantha Cade (theatre director and PhD Candidate at UCD School of English, Drama and Film). The programme brought together ten participants to delve into the Dublin Fringe Festival (DFF) archive, focusing on temporary, site-specific works over the past 30 years of the festival. The aim was to examine art’s durational relationship to the city, and to develop an audio-based walking tour, exploring these dynamics.
Like McCarthy’s No Man’s Land, the DFF archive exposes how much the city has changed in a relatively short period of time. Most obvious were the downswing of events held in unconventional public spaces, and the disappearance of cultural venues, reflecting the gradual erosion and regulation of the public realm. Róise Goan, Director of DFF from 2009 to 2013, spoke to us candidly of the shift from limited funding in the immediate aftermath of the economic crash, to restricted access to space as developers closed in on the city. In light of such challenges, it amazed me that DFF and other art festivals and organisations survived at all.
Resilience is too often lauded under neoliberalism. It must be recognised for what it is: a survival mechanism that forces adaptation to broken systems, rather than the systems themselves being held to account. As we raked through the archival material, the group kept returning to the same question: How do we maintain contact and connection in a city that is increasingly being cordoned off by private developers?
Fortunately, we engaged with practices that went some way towards answering this question. Strikingly, the most compelling practices did not adapt to the regulation and privatisation of the public realm, but
instead pushed against such developments, reclaiming both physical space and a stake in the city. For example, artist Bill Harris’s work hinges on the idea of sound as an arc that ripples out to fill space and connect people, thereby countering the diminishment of third spaces and social contact.
Equally concerned with accessing neglected spaces, artist Evan Kelly took the group on a walking tour of vacant and derelict buildings across Dublin. Many of these had been sites for his film screening project, Rupture Cinema (2022) – a self-described ‘liberated cinema’ that harnesses the collective experience to perform an occupation of sorts. According to Evan, Rupture functions by “piercing the ideological membrane.” This reflects Jacques Rancière’s sentiment that “The rupture is not defeating the enemy […] it’s ceasing to live in the world the enemy has created for you”.2 As the name suggests, the project calls for resistance rather than resilience, defying the enclosure of space by staging guerrilla screenings of radical films in the urban environment to bring people together.
While there has been a tangible sense of dissatisfaction about the state of Dublin in recent years, it was refreshing to be brought into close proximity with people who felt similarly about the city and shared a common desire for change. My fellow participants were Oswaldo Alvarez, Anthony Cullen, Stephen Doody, Mel Galley, Alicky Hess, Clara McSweeney, Tree McCaul, Luxmi Shanmugananthaee, and Mizuho Yamaki. Coming from a range of backgrounds, including urban planning, architecture, art, curating, and acting, we each brought a unique viewpoint to the programme. After every session, as I looked out the window on the bus home, my view of the city and the realm of possibility expanded.
This sense of possibility both complicated and broadened the group’s understanding of space, which, in turn, affected our approach to our site-specific response at the end of the programme. We developed two walking tours following different routes: the east route linked urban palimpsests, marking the absence of art spaces that once existed there; while the west tour drew on physical characteristics of urban green spaces to evoke distant or imaginary sites.3 One tour reflected lost places and the other declared new ones. Neither tour would have worked following a different path, and yet they both clung onto expanded notions of space, beyond the current state of the space itself.
This summed up a newfound understanding of the city, fed by the archives, artists, and projects we engaged with on the programme, as well as the idea that space is shaped by association, memory, and, perhaps most significantly, ideology. Ultimately, we came to recognise that we have far more control over the fabric of the city than we initially thought.
Niamh Darling is the current Provost’s Fellow in Curating at the Douglas Hyde Gallery. thedouglashyde.ie
1 Art and the City was initiated by Michelle Browne in collaboration with Dublin Fringe Festival and UCD School of English Drama and Film and was funded by Creative Futures Academy Public Engagement Project Fund 2024.
2 Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Devisualize’, in Umut Korkut et al. (Eds.), The Aesthetics of Global Protest Visual Culture and Communication (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020).
3 The walking tours were presented as part of Dublin Fringe Festival 2024 under the title Fringe Was Here
Fergal McCarthy, No Man's Land, 2011, performance; image courtesy of the artist.
Fringe Was Here: Art in the City Walking Tour (West), September 2024; photograph by Simon Lazewski courtesy of the author.
Mammary Mountain
TARA BAOTH MOONEY DISCUSSES HER IMMERSIVE VIRTUAL REALITY ARTWORK WHICH PREMIERED AT THE VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL.
MAMMARY MOUNTAIN (2024) is a culmination of the experience of the expedition of breast cancer treatment. It holds the testimonies of seven women and one man at its core and is placed in an ‘other world’, created by a team of artists and participants to make sense of the realm one is cast into, while undergoing treatment and its aftereffects. The interactive artwork is a collaboration between myself, artist and researcher Camille Baker, digital media artist and creative technologist Maf’j Alvarez, and seven survivors of breast cancer. Mammary Mountain is manifested as an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) animation.
Throughout the piece, these testimonials convey the messiness, the surprise, and the disintegration of self, while witnessing the body undergo radical change. They collectively expose the difficulty of living well, during and after breast cancer treatment, and highlight the individuality of personal trauma. Just as a cancer tumour is created within the sinews and fleshy mass of our bodies, so too each tumour is our own, thriving within the body’s ecosystem.
We have made the piece as a counter-narrative to the military language of ‘battle’, and the overly branded, pink ribbon culture that dominates the discourse around breast cancer. In her memoir, The Undying (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), Anne Boyer exposes some of this language, which is reserved for those recounting a hero’s journey – of ‘survivors’ circumscribing the kinds of emotions women with breast cancer can express.
My impulse as an artist, while going through the experience, was to enter into the viscerality denied to us by current medical systems. Being anaesthetised meant that I was in darkness. Although the body and psyche registered what was happening, my conscious self was left nursing a black, swollen, right breast, bandaged and trussed up. I wondered what violence had taken
place.
So, I drew. I drew topographies of the body as stagnant, landless land. When anxious, the scar sears itself through my body like a red-hot lance. Lance is an old Germanic term for land or territory – fitting for the body I am now, which feels separate. Both land and body fall into a category of the unfamiliar and estranged.
I drew tumours as creatures with voracious appetites. I drew endless broken things, to understand who I was becoming in the brokenness. I recorded the 273 steps that I travelled each day, along the same path, to be placed and subsequently burned deeply between three ‘target points’, tattooed upon my breastbone and underarms. I wrote about the instruments used to discover the little bárnach beast – the same methods employed to monitor the heartbeat of a foetus during pregnancy. My embryo was a dark and mutant thing.
There are days when my right breast tingles with my mother’s laugh – her memory, a painful and joyous reminder of my ancestry. At some point during the early 60s, my mother found herself in a doctor’s surgery in Limerick, assisting in the radical surgery of her mother’s lumpectomy. As her carer, my mother was asked to hold a steel bowl under her mother’s bosom – numbed by a local anaesthetic – that captured fluids, blood and eventually the hacked-out tumour. My grandmother never spoke of that again.
Women were often placed in the role of bearing silent witness around care and trauma – roles which were rarely vocalised. My mother never recovered from that experience. The severing of breasts from their hinterland, the silence around the wounding and disfiguration, could almost be normalised within current surgical procedures. In some ways, I feel lucky that I was not subjected to watching my own lumpectomy, which happened under the veil of anaes-
thetic, but I also question the violence of the act and how the body and soul fiercely compensate.
Within the dialogue of Mammary Mountain, grief presents itself quietly and anonymously. One of the participants makes a connection between breasts and sex and realises that they had not thought about this until long after their treatment had finished. It is only now that they can visit scenes of that loss. Another makes a comparison between the loss of the breast and the ‘scooping out of an ice cream’. Do we need to find metaphors that lessen the horror of gouging out left-over tissue and flesh after a tumour has been extricated? Where does the sense of self, concentrated in that mass of tissue, muscle nerves and flesh, fall? The aftermath of the experience left many of the participants in a state of free-fall, as they were released from the
system back into some form of abnormal normality, in which their former selves exist only in memory as ghosts.
Mammary Mountain premiered at the Venice International Film Festival 2024, and was screened at the Digital Cultures Festival in Poland, BFI London Film Festival, Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, Art + VR Festival in the Czech Republic, and the Filmgate Festival in Miami, Florida, where it was awarded the Best in Festival prize. It was presented as an interactive VR installation in Colemans shop in Carrick-on-Shannon, and will be shown as part of a small, curated exhibition at the ^ space in Manorhamilton from 17 to 19 January 2025.
Tara Baoth Mooney is an interdisciplinary artist based in Leitrim. tarabaoth.wordpress.com
MIGUEL AMADO DISCUSSES HIS CURATORIAL CONTRIBUTION TO THE LATEST SHOWCASE AT PALLAS PROJECTS/STUDIOS.
‘PERIODICAL REVIEW’ IS an annual exhibition organised by Pallas Projects/Studios that considers current trends in art made around Ireland. For each iteration, two representatives of Pallas Projects/Studios, Gavin Murphy and Mark Cullen, invite two peers to partake in the curation. For the 14th edition, I joined the Pallas Projects/ Studios team and the other invited curator, Valeria Ceregini. Each one of us selected five works and/or proposed five artists that we had encountered in exhibitions presented across the country in the past year or so.
The premise of ‘Periodical Review’ is simultaneously exciting and daunting. It carries the virtues of experimentation and cooperation, made possible by the dialogue and knowledge invested in, and through, the curators. Each one of us is in charge of reflecting not only on the art being produced in Ireland, but also on the conditions that determine that. Our choices are generous and connected to our lived experience in a broader context of precarity and institutional complexity.
On the other hand, ‘Periodical Review’ has a totalising, objective ambition: to capture the art currently emanating from Ireland – a sort of ‘best of’. This, on its own, is a task doomed to fail, given the framework in which each of the curators must navigate: the smaller scale of the gallery hosting the display, and a preference for works already seen, rather than an opportunity to showcase newly commissioned works, are elements that inevitably influence the shape of the exhibition. In addition, the curators all necessarily have partial access to the exhibitions that occur in Ireland, and thus their approaches can only be fragmentary and subjective.
I decided to focus on art I’d seen in the city and county where I operate, Cork. I figured that this geographical approach
would challenge the bias towards key artistic hubs – in this case, Dublin – that initiatives attempting to define the ‘best of’ traditionally have. Centring my decisions in a locale with which I am deeply familiar was, to me, the only meaningful and responsible mode of action. All the artists I proposed are based, or have exhibited, in Cork city and county: Sarah Long had a solo show at St. Luke’s Crypt; Samir Mahmood and Pádraig Spillane exhibited in group shows at The Glucksman and Lavit Gallery, respectively; and Riki Matsuda and Amna Walayat participated in Cork Midsummer Festival and EVA International in Limerick City, respectively.
The second factor I took into consideration was ethical: How to reconcile my role as director of Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh with that of co-curator for ‘Periodical Review’? Of course, the art I’ve shown at the venue I run is the art I believe deserves to be part of any ‘best of’. But I couldn’t merely duplicate my gatekeeping role, and thus I prioritised artists who had not exhibited at Sirius Arts Centre, with the exception of Walayat, who had a solo show in late 2023. My aim was to genuinely open up my selection to the many relevant and pertinent practices emerging in Cork and Cobh, and concurrently renew or establish new relationships with artists with whom I may work in the future. For example, following our interaction for ‘Periodical Review 14’, Mahmood has a solo show scheduled at Sirius for 2025.
The final line of enquiry I followed aligned with my overall interest in practices and themes related to identity politics, particularly my commitment to artists who are underrepresented, due to their class status or origin, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or level of ability. In general, I deliberately engage with the historical ‘others’ of the art world and I took a similar path with ‘Periodical Review 14’, attempting to be inclusive. Interestingly, in the end, not all the artists I proposed for the exhibition explore questions of representation, which makes their art something more than a ‘translation’ of their selfhood. This enriched my selection with perspectives that turned out to be wider than I anticipated.
‘Periodical Review’ ‘lives’ from and for its eclecticism. A strict, unique curatorial viewpoint would be undesirable, and likely simply unviable, for such an exhibition, prioritising as it does matters of multiplicity, even exuberance – of images, materials, techniques and subject matter. My participation in ‘Periodical Review 14’, manifest in the works that I selected, is just one more input into this state of things, but I sincerely hope that I added to both this and all the cumulative editions of the exhibition so far.
Miguel Amado is Director of Sirius Art Centre in Cobh. siriusartscentre.ie
Top: Pádraig Spillane, Appearances 2024, collages on Hahnemühle Photo Rag® Matt Baryta 308 gsm paper with steel, aluminium and acrylic; photograph by Roland Paschhoff, courtesy of the artist and Pallas Projects/Studios. Bottom: Riki Matsuda, The Way the Wind Blows, Flag I 2024, inkjet print on knitted polyester; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of the artist and Pallas Projects/Studios.
Skin / Deep
DAY MAGEE REFLECTS ON THE CURATORIAL THEMES OF THE CURRENT EXHIBITION AT PHOTO MUSEUM IRELAND.
IN A PHOTOGRAPH, light may leak – but can the image bleed?
Curated by Darren Campion, ‘Skin / Deep: Perspectives on the Body’ intermingles subaltern bodies that live on the edge of the social frame: the queer, the migrant, the maternal, the sick. It is of course the edge that gives a thing its shape – that sets the stage for its composition – its constituent elements, performers, whose collective dance dramatises life. Here at Photo Museum Ireland until 9 February, these edges are curved inward, converging upon a new centre.
Bookending the first floor are works from Vera Ryklova’s ongoing series, ‘Triptychs’ – a pale, brightly lit room with nine untitled self-portraits meeting the eyeline in a reverse camera obscura – and Brian Teeling’s installation, Wet Dreams (2015-17), a dimly lit space, punctuated by vivid reds, images obscured by drawn curtains. The former reveals Ryklova in underwear, posed combatively to meet the lens’s gaze against a door – will she escape through it, or has she already arrived safely and locked it behind her? Each triptych is photographed simultaneously from multiple angles, mapping the dimensions of the moment, the body casting itself in temporal relief. Multiple pasts are now present. The latter yields the detritus of a bedroom, the mess framing unseen sexual encounters, clothes cast from bodies to make a nest in which to rest, in which to love. A photograph of discarded underwear is printed on carpet across the floor. Somewhere between a darkroom and domestic living space, the installation posits sex as the site where bodily images might chemically develop in communion.
Elsewhere, Phelim Hoey’s La Machine (2018-ongoing) poses a question through the placement of objects; casts of his body, made in the wake of Multiple Sclerosis, are arranged into absurd assemblages. The question is not specific, but conveys generalised doubt, embodied in the face of medical mystery and the certainty of illness. In diagnosis, mortality is newly understood, metabolised, its knowledge lived and recognised through the body. In Shia Conlon’s Sites of Dreaming (2021), we see images of trans bodies, resolved within themselves through one another in embrace – a community necessitated and rendered by care. Once celllike, the body interlinks with others in novel configurations. One may be born again in a new body, if not part of it.
In Between the Gates (2018-19), Pauline Rowan details a body’s beginning. Interspersed with the bloom cycle of flowers, we see the artist’s daughter newly navigating the world through a garden. There is not simply the intimacy of mother and child, but the intimacy of new consciousness meeting the world unfettered, before the body becomes socialised – mediated and imbued with personhood. Jane Cummins’s Marrow (2017) extends this potential through long exposures, producing images in which we literally see the body through place. Body and landscape, time and space, constituting one another, not as gendered equivalents but as mutual constituents of being. By the time we come to Nazli Yildirim’s Anonymous (2021), the body has grown and extruded itself through the land as flora and fauna, populating and characterising itself in myriad signs of life. The textures of tree bark become skin, its folds the flesh, its limbs our own. A species’ body, as mediated through evolution, is time morphologised, calcified. An animate record and shape of time survived. In Pradeep Mahadeshwar’s film, Skin to Skin Talks (2023), we encounter a body stylising itself in vivid, dreamlike imagery, earnestly narrating itself in the spo-
ken word. A body narratively othered via sexual racism, seeking to change how this othering might be told –that is, lived. Mahadeshwar dances blindfolded before the Ballycorus smelting tower, describing the liberal and tolerant Ireland he’d once dreamt of – dreams, themselves, being bodily processes. Pádraig Spillane’s works signal the show’s resolution. Through collage, countlessly reproduced male bodies are further fragmented, eating one another. It is not simply the image that is fractured, nor the body as historically distinguished from the mind, but mind itself, as a somatic property, that is splintered in novel, speculative modes of reproduction.
Campion’s curation, at once tender and challenging, draws upon American literary critic, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s queerness of ‘strange relation’. A world’s edge may curve, slope, deviate, where maps merely end. The artists he has gathered here venture to the edges, excavating their bodies from which they yield yet more world, and it is a beautiful one. Their frames are not borders, but bridges. In either direction, they do not end at their skin – the image lives.
Day Magee is an artist, performer, and writer based in Dublin. @daymagee
Top: Shia Conlon, Self in Bandages 2021, from the series ‘Sites of Dreaming’; image courtesy of the artist and Photo Museum Ireland. Bottom: Pradeep Mahadeshwar, Skin to Skin Talks 2023, 16mm film transferred to digital; film still courtesy of the artist and Photo Museum Ireland.
A Woman’s Place
COLIN DARKE CONSIDERS THE WORK OF JO SPENCE CURRENTLY BEING PRESENTED IN BELFAST.
‘A WOMAN’S PLACE’ at Belfast Exposed (17 October – 21 December 2024) includes a number of works by British artist and activist, Jo Spence (1934-1992), made throughout the 1980s, in collaboration with several photographers. They are selected from the Hyman Collection by Belfast Exposed curator José Luís Neves and shown in collaboration with the Centre for British Photography. The curator has selected from multiple series, forming his own sets.
All works consider Spence’s chosen themes of politics, despair, dark humour, gender, sex and death, with the majority of pieces on show placed under the gallery’s heading of ‘Photo Therapy’. This curatorial decision echoes Spence’s use of performance and portraiture to articulate traumatic experiences, and her view that “photography … could be called one of the healing arts.”
The exhibition, however, begins with two photographs from her 1982 series ‘Remodelling Photo History’, debunking archetypical female labour roles, placing them in the context of class struggle. In the first, Self as image, Spence wears a somewhat disturbing smiling mask and a cheap blonde wig and holds a bottle of washing-up liquid. Her wedding ring sits on her rubber-gloved finger.
Behind her, a poster displays the legend “Capitalism Works: Could You Wish For Anything More?” – a photomontage from 1977 by John A. Walker, dominated by the promotional image for Clint Eastwood’s film, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). In the second, Realisation, she wears worker’s overalls and google-eye glasses. She laughs hysterically as she reads Freud’s writing on female hysteria.
In one grouping, two images of subservience – firstly, Spence with a maid mask and napkin [Service (1989)] and secondly, presenting food to her father with a heart-breaking look of inferiority [Daddy’s Good Little Girl, c. 1943 (1985-86)] – sandwich a group of four housewife portraits. She prepares her scarf turban, washes her hands, but takes a smoke break with a smile, and laughs again as she reads – this time, rather than Freud, at the contents of Housewife magazine [Double Shift/ Double Crossed/ Double Bind (1984)].
Only When I Got to Fifty Did I Realise I was Cinderella (1984) exemplifies the therapeutic role of Spence’s work. Nine self-portraits, each enacting a role, are framed by handwritten observations and questions, like notes from a counselling session. This therapeutic function of her work resulted from her confrontation with breast cancer and challenging the social determination of self. The negativity of despair is thus juxtaposed with the positivity of defiance, all in the context of male-dominated art history. In one selection of three, Spence’s fear is manifest. Firstly, in The Gaze (1986), she faces us, dressed in a white gown, like a Jacques-Louis David portrait, with a look of
childlike vulnerability. Secondly, in Untitled from a session on Powerlessness (1986), she stands naked, facing away from us, holding a framed print of her 1982 diptych, Deindustrialisation. This image-within-an-image includes a back view of her lying in an empty, Claude Lorrain-like landscape and a self-portrait that echoes her standing pose. Thirdly, in Write or be Written Off (1988) she poses like Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ (c. 1480), laid out on her imagined deathbed, a nametag tied to her toe.
Nearby, in a group show at The MAC, ‘I see his blood upon the rose’ (8 November 2024 – 30 March 2025), we find Spence on her actual deathbed, dying in hospital from leukaemia in 1992. She is accompanied by her friend and collaborator, Rosy Martin. As well as her eyes, her camera lens breaks the fourth wall to capture images of the audience.
The eight images from the ‘Libido Uprising (Part 1)’ series from 1989 make up a narrative of self-discovery, Spence’s memory of puberty. From left to right, realisation to curiosity, followed by images of joy as she smears her body, face and hair with her menstrual blood.
The three photographs from the 1989 series, ‘Narratives of Dis-ease’ are perhaps the most poignant in the show. Made in collaboration with her doctor, her nakedness and distress reflect her changing relationship with her body following her mastectomy. Her gaze is no longer towards us, indicating a shift away from her air of defiance, having surrendered her body to medical surveillance. At centre, she looks down, crying and hugging her teddy bears. In the third, her head is out of frame and the word “MONSTER” is written across her chest.
The work, with its therapeutic role for Spence, is a collection which explores for the artist a panoply of emotional responses to her breast cancer. For her, it was a process of understanding and survival. For its audience, it stands as an important and unique self-portrait.
Darke is an artist based in Belfast.
Colin
Top: Jo Spence, Only when I got to fifty did I realise I was Cinderella (09) 1984, artist-laminated exhibition panel; image courtesy of Belfast Exposed and The Hyman Collection. Bottom: ‘Jo Spence: A Woman's Place?’, installation view; photograph courtesy of Belfast Exposed.
Blue of Distance
YVONNE SCOTT RESPONDS TO A RECENT GROUP EXHIBITION AT SARAH WALKER GALLERY.
“BLUE THE COLOUR that represents the spirit, the sky, the water, the immaterial and the remote, so that however tactile and close up it is, it is always about distance and disembodiment.” – Rebecca Solnit1
The exhibition, ‘Blue of Distance’ at Sarah Walker Gallery (20 September – 4 November 2024), comprises the work of four artists: Dorota Borrowa, Julie Forgues, Julian Forest, and Adam Fung. They met in 2023 on the summer solstice Arctic Circle residency on board the ship Antigua. While they have maintained their independent vision and media (painting, drawing, photography), and each is based in a different part of the planet, found there was nonetheless overlapping and common ground in their respective interests in the interconnected fields of environment, landscape, and nature.
The title, ‘Blue of Distance’, draws on a recurrent phrase in the book by Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. She explores its multiple meanings, explaining, for example, how distant landscapes have been represented by artists since the fifteenth century, with depth of field indicated by the blue blurring of the horizon. This feature emulates the way we observe the vastness of a panorama through the medium of air, whose transparency suggests a kind of invisible nothingness. But we know that in reality it is a tangible, material zone, through which we peer towards the distant horizon, a region that is consequently perceived –both in the eye and in art – as a blueish haze.
Later in the text, Solnit explores the work of Yves Klein, a French modernist painter from Nice who specialised in seemingly abstract images comprising a particular, dense tone of ultramarine blue which suggested the ‘void’ of the depths of sky. Klein’s celebrated performance art photograph, Leap into the Void (1960), is described by Solnit as his “leaping towards the sky,” a description that imaginatively suggests an endless falling into the blue depths above, however unlikely in reality.2 Endless or otherwise, distance we know infers time. This sense of distance and presence at the same time – that might seem initially like mutual opposites –suggests something of the complex visual explorations of the Arctic experience by the four artists in this show.
The residency aboard the Antigua was designed to accommodate the exchange of ideas between participant artists and scientists as it journeyed from Longyearbyen in Norway through icy oceans of the Svalbard archipelago, well within the Arctic Circle. The Arctic is a geographic rather than political region; that is, it is not subject to a single defined state boundary. The Arctic Circle is delineated by several definitions that are similar if not identical: on one hand, a fixed location on the globe (at c. 66° N); and on the other, to characterisations of extreme cold and consequent challenges to organic growth. Climate change is however wreaking a devastating impact on the Arctic area, which, when defined by its climatic conditions, is subject to increasing shrinkage as the polar icecap recedes.
The conditions that have rendered the area as an extreme wilderness, that is an environment fundamentally inhospitable for human habitation, are at once desolate and beautiful. Described by the artist Christiane Ritter, almost a century ago, in her extraordinary and strangely absorbing memoir, A Woman in the Polar Night (1938), it was alluded to in a recent discussion with the artist Dorota Borowa, who was drawn to its sincerity and authenticity as well as its uncompromising description of survival in the region. The book conveys with unflinching detail the artist-writer’s year living with her husband and his friend in a tiny hut in Svalbard/ Spitzbergen in the 1930s. Ritter, who left the comforts of Austria for the duration, commented on how the experience shed light on what was ultimately
important in life.
While this compelling text strips away the superfluous niceties of comfortable living to the bare essentials of survival in a minimalist landscape, it also describes a kind of cleansing that reveals a luminous clarity of vision. The artists in ‘Blue of Distance’ have commented also on the effect of the landscape they encountered: the stark purity of the snow, with all of its tones that blanketed and concealed, creating a kind of blank canvas for the imagination; the clarity of the air that intensified the senses from the touch of a breeze to the spirituality of profound silence. Julie Forgues comments how in such ‘silence’ one can ‘hear’ nature: wind, rocks, birds, whales, water.
There were notable contradictions too, such as how such a pristine environment could also reveal, as Julian Forrest’s work demonstrates, the residues of previous activities evident in abandoned fragments: industrial, invasive, scarring. He observes also how time takes on a new dimension in that environment, and while its passing was evident, it somehow seemed to stand still. The artists in the show have variously commented through their work, on the Arctic environment as elemental, dynamic, transitory, unstable, and visceral. Forgues, at the same time, explores the idea of ‘Nordicity’ through her photographic images questioning the meanings of space, place, and the ‘in-between’.
The Arctic has attracted curiosity for centuries, but where travellers were once occasional and infrequent, a growing interest among artists and others is evident today assisted by opportunities that facilitate access to the most remote and unstable environments. Understandably, there is a desire to see an exceptional wilderness landscape before it disappears forever. Disquiet at the consequence of climate change emerges in the artworks. Julie Forgues and Adam Fung have each been to the Arctic before and have observed unnerving transformations over time.
Forgues reproduces photographs taken on previous visits to the region in the past, but with increasingly leached exposures, like faded ghosts of dissolving memories – drawing ideas from French-Canadian geographer, Louis-Edmond Hamelin. Fung’s haunting, immersive, digital exhibit Fathom (2024) was central to an exhibition at the Arlington Museum of Art earlier in 2024. ‘One Point Five Degrees’ draws its name from a report on the threats from climate change caused by a rise in global temperature of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
Some of Fung’s digital images and seascape paintings include a flickering candle, which in turn has a long history as a symbol in art. Among the early Flemish painters exploring the representation of landscape, commonly as a background to popular religious themes, such as the Annunciation to the Virgin (that she would give birth to Christ). This was typically portrayed by Northern European artists of the time in a contemporaneous, domestic interior, and included a household candle whose flame was shown snuffed out at the moment of miraculous conception.
A couple of centuries later, memento mori images, most commonly by Dutch artists, also featured a candle, but this time as a symbol of the transitory nature of life. In the past, candles held a dual function, both as a vital source of light and as a means to measure time. Consequently, a candle is an apt symbol within the show to reference the ecological challenges of climate change, while to ‘burn the candle at both ends’ is suggestive of the kinds of excesses that led to cultural shifts inferred in Forrest’s imagery. To summarise, the candle symbolises, therefore, both the protracted processes of transition over time, as well as its momentous tipping points – religious, existential, social, or ecological.
Borowa explores the condition of water in its range, from liquid to solid (ice) forms, as she encountered it during her Arctic foray. Water provided a means of travel in a dramatic and inhospitable terrain – as a supporting and fluctuating body for the ship, or as a meandering stream finding a route of least resistance as it succumbed to the undulating motion of the vessel. In its solid form as ice, its potential ranges significantly. At a local and intimate level, it bonds slices of stone which separate like a puzzle if the ice melts. In its larger scale as an iceberg, it can support a community of seals or pulverise a ship. At a global level, of course, the dissolution of a polar icecap threatens to overwhelm on an unimaginable scale. Borowa’s drawings range from the controlled accidents where glacial melt, rocked by the Arctic waters, leaves blue traces of delicate ripples and eddies on otherwise pristine paper. In exploring the potential of water, from the trickle to the tsunami, Borowa’s explosive wall drawing infers something of its surging power.
Blue can suggest presence as well as distance; near or far, glacier ice appears blue, due to the effect of the transmission and scattering of white light. However, the expansive Arctic landscape is inferred also by the four perceptive artists in the show as an incomparable and fragile terra incognita, a wilderness of vast and hazy horizons to be envisaged before they fade from view.
Dr Yvonne Scott is a fellow emeritus at Trinity College Dublin.
tcd.ie
1 Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2017) p159.
2 Solnit, p175.
Adam Fung, The Gathering, 2024, oil on copper panel; image courtesy of the artist and Sarah Walker Gallery.
The Visual Artists’ News Sheet
Critique
Edition 77: January – February 2025
Clodagh Emoe and Donal Lally, ALTAR site-responsive intervention, Goldenbridge Cemetery, Inchicore, Dublin, September 2024; photograph by Kate-Bowe O'Brien, courtesy of the artists and Common Ground.
Critique
Farm Walks
Creative Ireland Shared Island Programme Counties Leitrim and Fermanagh
March to October 2024
IN THE MIDDLE of June, I stood in a bog in Leitrim, silently and blissfully, with a group of 45 people. For two minutes, no one spoke or shuffled. We just listened to the chorus of an Irish midsummer. For those who know me, this will seem like par for the course. In my creative work, I often find myself in intentional listening situations with groups of sonic enthusiasts. However, the group I stood with was not made up of seasoned sound-fanciers but rather a different contingent, familiar with the practice of deep listening in nature: farmers.
We had been brought together through an innovative Farm Walks project, co-created by Leitrim Arts Office, Leitrim Sustainable Agriculture Group, Ulster Wildlife Farmers’ Group, and The Dock, and funded through the Creative Ireland Shared Island Programme. The project hosted six farm walks in Fermanagh and Leitrim. Each walk featured a talk by an invited artist whose work resonated with that farm, its creative potential, heritage, or other special characteristics.
The partners invited me to join Farm Walks as a Creative Producer/Curator. My role was multifaceted and spanned activities, from sourcing local produce for the meals we enjoyed together, and facilitating site visits between the guest artist and host farmers, to all of the minute logistics that accompany event production. Below is a brief overview of each walk along with some of my favourite memories.
March 2024 – Spa Cottage Organic Farm, Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim
Host Farmers: Yvonne Browne & Michael McManus
Guest Artist: Anna Macleod
Both organic and nature-friendly, Spa Cottage Farm has a sulphur well that is historically renowned for its healing properties. We explored the Spa Well, its historic links to medicinal healing and its current role in farm enterprise diversification. Anna gave a presentation on her recent works that refer to water conservation, wells and heritage farming practices. She spoke of using materials from the land in her work and passed around wool that she had dyed with lichen and other natural sources.
The Farm Walks project launched with a welcome lunch at The Dock Arts Centre before we moved out to the farm. The first person to arrive was my neighbour Padraig Gilbride. 80 years of age, Padraig came dressed in his standard farmer attire of heavy-duty reflective yellow jacket, jeans, once blue and now adorned in every shade of daub, and a good solid pair of fresh-offthe-farm wellies. It was Padraig’s first time through the doors of The Dock. I was surprised to see him. He hadn’t filled in an online booking form, wasn’t a member of any of the partner groups, and was not on my booked-out guest list. As an event producer, I should have turned him away. But how could I? I welcomed Padraig and invited him to check out the exhibition while he waited, which he happily did. By the end of the project, Padraig was the only guest to attend all six farm walks.
April 2024 – Leitrim Village, Leitrim
Host Farmers: Frank Whitney and John Flynn
Guest Artist: Christine Mackey
These two farms border the River Shannon and are steeped in history and heritage with the twelfth-century Portsham Castle, an ancient orchard, the old main road from Carrick to Manorhamilton, and a unique ancient spring well on the banks of the river. Christine presented and discussed two soil prints she had made, based on soil samples collected from each farm, using an analogue scientific process called Chromatography. Christine spoke of her work on art, seeds and ecology and exhibited photos she had taken of heritage Irish apple varieties.
As both farms are on the shores of the Shannon, we began the day with a boat trip to view the fields from the water. As the boat paused beside by his farm, my favourite moment came as we listened to John reading a short piece, he had written specifically for the day, about his spring well that bubbles up on the riverbank.
May 2024 – Boa Island, Fermanagh
Host Farmer: Patrick McGurn
Guest Artist: Anna McGurn
Located on the northern shores of Lough Erne, this farm is managed for its species-rich wet grasslands, hayfields and rich variety of wildflowers. Breeding waders, including curlews, are frequent visitors to the farm. The farmer and the invited artist for this walk are brother and sister. Anna demonstrated how clay from the farm is used to produce ceramics and led us in a short workshop where we could try making ceramics ourselves.
Patrick walked us through his land while identifying grasses and plants we passed. Anna had invited the participants to pick a flower along the walk that we would use in the ceramic workshop. My favourite moment was seeing a line of people stretched across a field all carrying a single flower.
June 2024 – Ballinaglera, County Leitrim
Host Farmers: Carol and Gavin Durkin
Guest Artist: Deirdre O’Mahony
This is a biodiverse-rich cattle and sheep farm with wildflower meadows and an apiary. It is a hub for social farming and highlights the farm’s potential for community building and wellbeing.
The aforementioned listening moment took place on this farm. Deirdre read quotes to us along the walk. After speaking about rustling hedgerows and vanishing birds, Deirdre invited us to just listen. For me, standing silently with 45 people in a bog was quite a moving experience. This day also had one of my favourite culinary moments. Carol, the farmer, produces her own honey. One of the food producers I regularly used during the project, Leitrim Hill Creamery, make their own Goat’s Milk Ice Cream. Ahead of the walk, Carol had brought jars of her honey to the creamery and after lunch everyone was treated to ice cream, served in a handmade cone.
September 2024 – Marlbank, Marble Arch, County Fermanagh
Host Farmer: Aidan McGovern
Guest Artists: Edwina Guckian, Tara Boath Mooney and Gerry Bohan (All members of the Leitrim Hawthorn Collective)
Located in the Killykeeghan Nature Reserve, this liminal space hosts the meeting of heather upland heath, rush grasslands, peatlands and areas of calcareous limestone. Swally holes on the land lead to the Marble Arch Caves located below. Sheep are kept traditionally amongst clusters of hawthorn trees on this mountainside farm. Edwina spoke about her work that bridges land use, farming, traditional crafts and communities. Gerry Bohan, a farmer himself, read a short story from his book, The Clainings Tree. Tara Boath Mooney brewed hawthorn tea that we drank as she revealed the mythology, history and healing properties of the hawthorn. Later, she brought out her mobile apothecary and let us sample various hawthorn tinctures.
I visited this farm three times: once with the partners for a planning visit; again, with the artists for a site visit; and finally, for the Farm Walk itself. Each time, I left feeling like I’d been charged with positive vibes. The views are spectacular, and a magic feeling emanates from having the marble arch caves in the ground below and being surrounded by the ancient hawthorns.
October 2024 – Boho, County Fermanagh
Host Farmer: Trevor Irwin
Guest Artist: Maria McKinney
Guest Chef: Phillip McCrilly
This walk focused on hedgerows, their history, heritage, and management, and their importance for supporting biodiversity and providing shelter and wildlife corridors. It included a demonstration by Neil Foulkes on coppicing and hedge laying. Maria McKinney spoke about her work which centres on contemporary farming practices and agriculture, primarily focusing on cattle breeding. She dazzled the farmers with
photos of sculptures made using artificial insemination straws. Philip McCrilly prepared lunch for us that highlighted local produce.
I spent most of the day helping Phillip in the kitchen. He had put together an adventurous menu and part of me wondered if our guests would shy away from dishes more suited to a Michelin star restaurant than a community hall in Boho. Just before lunch, Philip gave a presentation that touched on his own work with art and food and introduced the menu. He obviously charmed the crowd, as each guest tried nearly every dish, most coming back for seconds or thirds. People enjoying locally produced, hearty food together tends to always be a favourite moment for me.
After the last walk, a friend who had attended was wondering if I knew the name of someone whom he’d met on the day. Trying to narrow down who he might be referring to, I asked: “Were they a farmer or an artist?” “To be honest,” he said, “you couldn’t really tell the difference.” This kept revealing itself to me through the project –just how much artists and farmers have in common. This made the pairing of artists and farmers feel like a natural and easy process.
I came away from the project feeling how fortunate we are in Ireland that so much of the land is in the hands of people whose experience comes through generations of knowledge and who feel themselves to be guarding it for the future. This project gives me hope that by creatively working together, we can ultimately tackle issues of food sovereignty, biodiversity and appropriate land use.
Natalia Beylis is a sound artist and creative producer based in County Leitrim. nataliabeylis.com
Padraig Gilbride and Tara Boath Mooney at Aidan McGovern's Farm, Marlbank, Marble Arch, County Fermanagh, 2024; photograph by Brian Farrell, courtesy of Leitrim County Council and The Dock.
Clodagh Emoe and Donal Lally, ALTAR
Site-Responsive Intervention
Goldenbridge Cemetery, Inchicore, Dublin 12 – 29 September 2024
GOLDENBRIDGE CEMETERY IS a living archive. Spread across two acres, it speaks directly to political and social landscapes from the early-nineteenth century onward, communicating the histories of the communities it continues to serve. Nestled between the Camac and the Grand Canal, Goldenbridge was the first Catholic graveyard built following emancipation. Opened in 1828 by Daniel O’Connell, this walled Victorian garden cemetery inadvertently became a time capsule, when new burials were stopped, leading to it being closed to the public. To ensure its long-term sustainability, the cemetery needed to be revived as a space for the local community. As such burials, resumed in 2017, and since 2019, it has also been home to arts development organisation, Common Ground, which occupies the old caretaker’s lodge.
This new chapter has seen reengagement with the community through a series of projects facilitated by Common Ground. The latest of these projects is ALTAR, a site-responsive intervention for Goldenbridge, developed in collaboration between artist Clodagh Emoe and architect Donal Lally, that seeks to highlight its multifaceted history. This is achieved through an installation within the cemetery, a series of public events, and a publication, which each draw together collaborators with a wealth of diverse knowledge.
The installation sees a wooden box, representing both altar and casket, installed within the original mortuary chapel, a neoclassical Roman temple from 1835. For the events, the casket is opened and from it an 18-metre-long piece of fabric is unravelled to cover the platform in front of the chapel, extending down the steps and resting in front of a birch tree – rumoured to have been planted by O’Connell himself. The ecological wool is dyed an array of different colours using ingredients, such as ivy, weld, and rhubarb root, all of which grow onsite. Similarly, the wooden casket was made from yew and birch – native trees also found within the walls of the garden cemetery. The fabric provides a temporary space for visitors to sit and listen to the readings, also offering a visual and physical connection between the architecture and its surrounding environment. The birch tree has grown, like the city around Goldenbridge, and its canopy stretches ever closer to the mortuary chapel.
The public events, which took place on Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons, included experts across a broad range of disciplines, from music and horticulture to architecture and folklore, which richly intertwined with the history of the site. The process of inviting contributors to a cemetery, where the land of the living meets the dead, brought spatial and temporal considerations to the fore, enhanced through key decisions made by Emoe and Lally. For example, the chapel was originally built with no windows, but they were subsequently added, before later being covered over with wood. For ALTAR, the wooden covers were removed, providing another annotation in the space’s architectural history.
In addition, there is no electricity with-
in Goldenbridge Cemetery, and Emoe and Lally declined the option to bring any in. As a result, there are no lights during the events, aside from a few torches to aid readers, and instead the city hums away, glowing beyond its walls. Since the cemetery normally closes at 3pm daily, the evening events provided a rare opportunity to experience the cemetery at night, with the darkness providing a glimpse into burial practices of past generations. On a stormy Thursday evening, it’s hard not to think of mourners at Mass Rocks in the dead of night – or countless others worldwide –with no cover and no light.
Visiting the cemetery on a day between events is an altogether different experience. The crowds have dissipated, and the fabric has been removed – a burial shroud returned to its container, lying in state until the next event. The intimacy of the empty space allows your curiosity about the box to be indulged in a way that would have been inappropriate during an event. You find yourself pacing the cemetery, observing the gravestones and memorials in a pensive manner, akin to walking around an art gallery.
The grave of James Whelan from 1820 has been disturbed and broken by the growing Birch tree, along with that of Michael Keogh of Spitalfields. We remember people like Patrick Hoey of Braithwaite Street –who buried his beloved son, also Patrick, on 22 July 1836, aged just 15 years old – and Eugene Lynch, an eight-year-old boy killed during the Easter Rising. These personal stories are wrapped up in the history of the state, with two former Taoisigh, W.T. and Liam Cosgrave, also being buried at Goldenbridge Cemetery, while mass burials took place here during the Great Famine (1845-49) and during the cholera epidemic of 1867.1
The ultimate success of ALTAR is in highlighting the personal and communal histories that are contained within graveyards. Like the seasons that bronze and remove the birch tree of its leaves, before returning them again in spring, Goldenbridge’s history will continue to evolve, blending fact and folklore in rich and compelling ways.
Aidan Kelly Murphy is a writer based in Dublin. aidankellymurphy.com
1 While Cosgrave never officially held the office of Taoiseach, he is widely considered Ireland’s first Taoiseach, due to having been the Free State’s first head of government.
All images: Clodagh Emoe and Donal Lally, ALTAR site-responsive intervention, Goldenbridge Cemetery, Inchicore, Dublin, September 2024; photographs by Kate-Bowe O'Brien, courtesy of the artists and Common Ground.
Critique
Helle Helsner, TEK to Tech
Ancient Bronze Casting Workshop
National Sculpture Factory
17 – 18 August 2024
MORE CLAY IS needed for the mix. I fetch a bag. People have been generous with the horse manure. Its fibres need something more to hold on to. Helle has been speaking about the Danish sky horse that brings the sun on its journey through the day, as we have been gathered around the bench using nothing but our hands to combine the materials. It is warm in the factory, and it smells like a stable. It is busy, but not frenzied. There is a softness to the work, like kneading dough. I squat at intervals and crush up bits of an old furnace with a lump hammer. I add this to the mix. It will provide strength to the furnace and the moulds the mix will form.
Our conversations are circular. Research, process and experience are equally valued and voiced, beginning with Helle and moving between us workshop participants. We work while we speak. Helle speaks about slow process. She shared her experience of using a pug mill to make the mix, to speed up the process. It didn’t work very well; the mix needed hands. The mix won’t tolerate rushing or force. It’s the first time everyone has made this mix, and it’s fairly good.
Now the mix is made, the group gathers to make two furnaces. Some roll the mix into thick long sausages, others twist the sausages into place, then others smooth the surface and fill the cracks. It is like making large
pinch pots. They are about as wide as an ash bucket and half the height. Someone decorates the mouth of one furnace with a double spiral. We set the furnaces aside to air and contract, to prepare them for the heat of the pour.
We spend some time with the wax, moulding and shaping. Helle encourages people to use their hands, to become familiar with the feel of the material. With a piece of wax smaller than a plum, I make a horse; it morphs into a head, then a disc. I’m not sure what I’m making. I watch the others. They have made a cat, and a seal, and a little man in a boat. We are working small; the smallness requires sensitivity.
Up in the mezz, we gather and drink hot tea. Dobz bought some biscuits. We nibble and dunk and draw out some of the earlier conversations. We speak about ourselves through speaking about our work. Many of us work rurally, or in a workshop environment. I pocket a bourbon cream.
Back on the floor, our thumbs work the mix to coat the waxes. I have decided to try a ‘burnout’ of the bourbon cream. And so, I smush the mix over its crumby surface. I want to immortalise the biscuit. As we leave the moulds for the evening, they look like a collection of finds from an archaeological dig.
The next day I am in leathers and a visor, sweating
and filthy, and bellowing for Ireland. There are the two pit furnaces we made the day before, a burnout fire for the moulds, and Helle has lit the gas furnace.
When the time comes to pour, a silence settles and we watch, as someone ever so gently empties the crucible into the moulds. My bourbon cream is poured last from a batch; the consistency of the bronze is like honey. The bronze sinks in the moulds, and for a few minutes they look like small orange suns. The smell of warm stable and burning charcoal is strong, as we all pause amidst production mode. Helle nestles the mugsized crucible back in the furnace and we continue to work until all the moulds are poured.
We crack the moulds open together, tapping gently on their hard, cakey shells. We watch each other and delight in the successes, even if they are not our own. The bourbon cream was missing some of its letters, so I opted to place it in the pile to be melted in another one of Helle pours.
Róisín Foley is a curator, writer and permaculturalist based in West Cork. Helle Helsner’s twoday TEK to Tech workshop formed part of ‘Materials Laboratories: Metal Fest’ at the National Sculpture Factory. nationalsculpturefactory.com
Both Images: TEK to Tech, Ancient Bronze Casting Workshop with Helle Helsner, August 2024; photographs courtesy of the artists and National Sculpture Factory.
James L. Hayes, PSYCHE II
Material Laboratories: Metal Fest
National Sculpture Factory
5 October 2024
THE NIGHT OF Psyche II, James L. Hayes’s collaborative performance, was one of the wettest nights of the year. Despite the orange weather warning for rain, the event – which centred on an outdoor live iron casting in the yard of the National Sculpture Factory – proceeded. The result was an epic battle with the elements: a battle to get the huge iron furnace up to a temperature of 1500 degrees in driving rain; a battle to keep the moulds for the pour sufficiently hot; and a battle to prevent the molten iron from exploding in showers of sparks, when in contact with water. There was something undeniably operatic about the spectacle as helmeted and leather-clad bodies laboured in clouds of steam or crouched beside the furnace to catch the boiling iron in their ladles.
This was a decidedly durational event, and over the course of the evening, the liquid iron became a wilful actor and agent at the heart of the performance. The molten metal can reach temperatures of between 2350 and 2700 degrees centigrade, and therefore the live casting required watchful attention and precisely coordinated movements. Hayes’s Pschye II required four participants to move in careful synchronicity to pour the electric-orange liquid into a massive sand mould on the floor. This would gradually harden into a huge, dark ring of metal, to be raised into the aperture of the NSF’s massive loading bay doors. As clouds of steam and smoke filled the factory vault, the sense of ritual intensified.
Michał Staszczak’s European Sunrise – A Tribute to Griff (2024) involved a mandala-like structure, raised on a lever mounted pole, a shape that invoked the commemorative, reverential elements of holy architectures. When Staszczak poured a volume of molten iron into the vessel, the structure was hoisted aloft and set alight against the night sky.
Psyche II took place as part of ‘Metal Fest’ (1 – 5 October 2024) – the third iteration of NSF’s Material Laboratory Programme, focusing on material research and medium-specific practices. The festival brought together leading artists and educators from across Europe and the US, who focus not simply on casting technologies and their histories, but on new modes of materiality. Hayes, for example, an artist and lecturer in MTU Crawford College of Art and Design, has been involved in metal casting since the 1990s. He spent seven years with AB Fine Art Foundry in London, working on multi-million-pound projects for artists such as Rachel Whiteread, Anish Kapoor, and Barry Flanagan, amongst others. These projects were predominantly realised in bronze, a famously costly material with an imposing classical pedigree. Cast iron, however, is infinitely more democratic, both as material and as a process. Iron is a ubiquitous and commonplace material – it is in our blood, it is under the ground, it is a key substance in the formation of tools for everything from farming to war. Iron is a marker of time, as in the Iron Age. It is also ejected from the debris of dying stars.
Psyche II has a conceptual grounding in the recent NASA explorations of 16 Psyche, a 140-mile-wide iron and nickel aster-
oid, floating in our solar orbit between Mars and Jupiter. No spacecraft has ever visited an object like 16 Psyche, which is thought to be the exposed core of a demolished planet. The mission, NASA scientists argue, offers a way to explore our own planet, as the composition of 16 Psyche is thought to be similar to that of Earth’s deep interior, the metal core which acts as heat engine, driving the movement of tectonic plates.
Despite this connection to cutting-edge astronomical research, the performance of Psyche II hinged on the undeniably alchemical drama of cast iron pouring – the transmutation of a base material to a molten golden liquid. Crucially, the etymology of the word alchemy can be traced back to the Egyptian kēme or ‘black earth’, forging a link, then, between the earliest experiments in material transformation and iron as a prima materia.1 The names given to the eras in human history – stone, bronze, iron, and now silicon – chart the ways in which our understanding of matter has transformed culture.
A project as hazardous and exhaustingly labour intensive as this requires meitheal Curated by NSF Programmes Manager, Dobz O’Brien, the event was facilitated and managed by a team of leading cast iron artists and educators. Running the furnace were Eden Jolly and Stephen Murray, with assistance from artists Fionn Timmins, Agnieszka Zioło and Murrough O’Donovan. Beyond the undeniably spectacular nature of the live casting experience, what Psyche II demonstrated was the ways in which a curiosity about the capacities of material can open onto much broader and more far-reaching questions, and therefore can expand our way of thinking. As a society we are largely unaware of the trail followed by common materials as they go from the earth into our hands. This event offered a greater appreciation of the basis of the material world, demonstrating both the beauty and the hard graft behind the manipulation of physical matter.
Sarah Kelleher is a writer and curator based in Cork, and a lecturer in Art History and Theory at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design.
@sarahkell77
1 Douglas Harper, ‘Alchemy’, Online Etymology Dictionary, etymonline.com
All images: James L. Hayes and collaborators, PSYCHE II live iron casting, Metal Fest, 5 October 2024; photographs by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of the artist and National Sculpture Factory.
‘Red Sky at Night’
Curated and Produced by Household Multiple Locations in Belfast 1 – 3 November 2024
DEVELOPED THROUGH A new international public art commissioning programme, ‘Red Sky at Night’ took place in six unique locations around Belfast during the first weekend of November. The six new commissions were curated and delivered by Household – a collectively-led organisation supporting the production of high-quality art that connects people and place – and funded by Belfast City Council, the British Council, and the Mondriaan Fund, as part of the Belfast 2024 celebrations. The night-time festival saw artists from Palestine, Greece, Poland, Thailand, and Belfast create temporary installations, responding to the city and its sites in Riddel’s Warehouse, the Palm House, Carlisle Memorial Church, Bank of Ireland, 2 Royal Avenue, and the Waterworks Park.
In the Palm House, Bangkok-based artist Kanich Khajohnsri’s installation, POSSESSION, explores customs and rituals in Thailand and Northern Ireland around burial, death, and cyclical notions of renewal, transformation, and the land. Responding to the circular plan of the iron and glass construction, Khajohnsri has suspended a series of infrared photographs of hands and burial sites on translucent fabric in a ‘henge’ formation. Bird-like hooting and warbling sounds ring out among the exotic plants, emanating from speakers connected to open source theremins (coiled around branch and stone constructions) and triggered by approaching visitors. Revealing the invisible through infrared photography and theremins, both sensors of forces below the threshold of human perception, chimes with the notion of phi – namely, the ghosts or spirits in Thai folklore, said to be found in certain trees.
The current limbo-state of the iconic Bank of Ireland building (pending renovation into a new tourist attraction) is the inspiration for Polish artist Zuza Golińska’s intervention, Lament. The work is a oneoff performance by members of St Anne’s Cathedral choir, led by choirmaster Jack Wilson, of a reimagined version of the 1993 Cranberries song, Linger, extended to 30 minutes. In an introduction to the work, Golińska invited visitors to consider how one can sing a love song to a building, and the context of the building’s present ‘lingering’ condition. Bathed in green light, the singers performed the new rendition in movements of sustained and overlayed tones, call and response, and punctuated by repeating phrases from the original song. Meanwhile, the porous nature of the building amplified the sounds generated from within and without.
Polish artistic duo, Irmina Rusicka and Kasper Lecnim, employ humour in their practice, and their Common Point Exercises focuses on sites of play around the city. Situated in the polychromatic vestibule of 2 Royal Avenue is one of their sculptural forms: a balance beam for children to play on. In the work, two steel beams (one straight, the other bent) are connected by a narrower and more challenging beam. The lines owe their shape to the map of the interface between the Shankill Road and the Falls Road, and the piece is flanked by rolls of drawings made by primary school children in both areas. Further metal constructions, seemingly abstract (all black vertical wavy lines and anthropomorphic eyes) are in fact based on bar chart data showing Troubles-related deaths before and after the Good Friday Agreement, thus continuing a playful approach to serious topics.
In creating her sound and textile-based response, The Sound We Longed For, in Riddel’s Warehouse, Palestinian artist Dina Mimi engaged with people who had experience of incarceration, focusing on how this impacts sensory experiences. A large reproduction in negative of a small relic-like portrait of a family member, worn close to the body in prison, forms a visual backdrop to her sonic piece that blends snippets of song, wind, the tapping of metal on metal, and children’s voices. In an accompanying performance, Mimi takes attendees on a kind of guided meditation, reflect-
ing on everyday sounds. In the context of the ongoing atrocities in the artist’s own country, one considers the sounds we take for granted, which are denied by war: “The sounds of plates and cutlery […] children in the distance, playing on a swing […] the sound of someone calling you by your name.”
A sliver of light over the entrance to Carlisle Memorial Church, vertically bisecting the smoke of a fog machine, creates a portal into the vast space, occupied by Greek artist Leandros Ntolas’s Benign Land. Inside, more smoke billows, illuminated periodically by a revolving spotlight. A huge projection screen before the former altar shows a fictive nocturnal world of shimmering plants, lit from within by a hovering, at times blinding, light, accompanied by a wavering, scraping soundtrack of muffled vocals. A single Xbox controller on a black plinth allows users to navigate eerie, dreamlike scenes – photogrammetric recreations of sites like the Giant’s Ring dolmen, standing stones, dry docks, and indeed, the church itself, filled with swathes of tall swaying grass.
Finally, Belfast-based artist Aisling O’Beirn contin-
ues her research into light pollution with Suggestions for Stargazing, a series of neon, visual, and textual provocations and exhortations, which are dotted about the Waterworks Park. Over the course of a night-time tour, O’Beirn asks us to consider insidious issues like light trespass, sky glow, and garish street lighting, as well as the general effects of light pollution on humans, the habitats of nocturnal animals, pollinators and migrating birds, and what we can do via communal activism to fight for the right to the night sky. It is thrilling to be in the unlit park at night – and indeed, in all of the venues, not normally accessible during the hours of darkness.
Catching all six of these responses, which evolved over an intensive two-week group residency, makes for a rewarding weekend, during which themes of heightened perception, hidden presences, other worlds, and a certain degree of mischief, resonate with the time of year, with Samhain, and the thinning of the veil.
Jonathan Brennan is an artist based in Belfast. jonathanbrennanart.com
Irmina Rusicka and Kasper Lecnim, Common Point Exercises 2024, ‘Red Sky at Night’, installation view, 2 Royal Avenue, Belfast; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artists and Household.
‘Red Sky at Night’, installation views Top: Kanich Khajohnsri, POSSESSION 2024, the Palm House; Bottom Left: Dina Mimi, The Sound We Longed For, 2024, Riddel’s Warehouse; Bottom Right: Zuza Golińska, Lament, 2024, performance by St Anne’s Cathedral choir, Bank of Ireland; all photographs by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artists and Household.
Into the Furnace
JAMES L. HAYES OUTLINES
HIS SUMMER RESIDENCY AT SLOSS METAL ARTS IN BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA.
FROM FAMILY HOLIDAYS in the UK as a child, travelling along the M4 in South Wales, looking across to the vast steelworks in Port Talbot and seeing their spectacular blast furnaces billowing out smoke and steam, I have always been fascinated by steel-making industries. Over the years, industrial archaeology and processes have also been strongly referenced in my sculptural practice.
I was delighted to recently be offered a place on the Sloss Metal Arts Visiting Artists programme (slossmetalarts.com). Now a national historic landmark in Birmingham, Alabama, USA, Sloss Furnaces had, at its peak, two enormous blast furnaces that produced 300 tons of iron a day. After closing in the 1980s, it was subsequentially converted into a living museum to preserve its industrial heritage. Later, the Sloss Metal Arts (SMA) programme, an educational and artistic initiative, was developed.
Birmingham was a focal point of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and has a stirring Civil Rights Institute and walking trail that charts the seminal protest marches in 1963 – taking in noted landmarks like the 16th Street Baptist church and Kelly Ingram Park, where peaceful protesters faced brutal police repression in the fight for racial equality.
The SMA programme offers eight-week residencies to three visiting artists annually. It provides great accommodation in partnership with The 600 Apartments complex in downtown Birmingham, a former high-rise that has been converted into luxury apartments. Its vast lobby provides a superb, designated exhibition space for the sculptures created by the SMA artists-in-residence. The residency also provides a cash stipend and support across its various interconnected stakeholders and crafts people in the locality, many of them SMA alumni.
The SMA residency programme is open to emerging and established artists; however, it is essential that applicants possess strong knowledge and experience of metal casting and related mould-making technologies. Applicants are required to submit a realistic proposal for their residency upon application.
The residency itself is incredible for artists, offering 24-hour access to the extremely well-equipped foundry, studios and castings shed. The Sloss National Historic Landmark has an archive that contains the history and records of the former workings of the site and of iron production in Birmingham. There is a working historian onsite, who is always willing to explain its history and its vast, creaking, ochre structures.
Local artists often stop by Sloss to meet the incoming visiting artists and to assist with large iron pours. They also help visiting artists to integrate into the wider, vibrant Birmingham art community, bringing them to sites of interest, showing them their studios, local galleries and Birmingham’s bustling microbrewing industry.
My project was a complex one, requiring intensive input. I got great assistance and support from four artists-in-residence as well as from the incredibly talented foundry manager, Ian Skinner. As everyone in the iron community is aware, iron casting cannot be done alone – this was no different at SMA. It was essential to become part of the crew, assist and be assisted, share your knowledge and let them share theirs with you. For me, this spirit of cooperation embodied the essence of Sloss. I feel extremely fortunate to have been at ground zero for this unique experience with such a vital and inclusive community. The programme has a dynamic director, Virginia Elliott, who perfectly steers the pro-
gramme, while jumping in on iron pours and directing bespoke classes, national projects and events.
The conclusion of the residency involves a solo exhibition at The 600 Apartments complex, that allowed me to show and speak about the body of work I completed during the residency, and present it to the Birmingham community.
A slight word of warning: this residency is not for the faint hearted! The heat and humidity in summer in Alabama, twinned with working in a busy, hot and dusty foundry is challenging for both the body and mind. However, it was the most incredible experience. Only at Sloss is it possible to make such large-scale, precise iron castings, with such specialised facilities and support. I was able to make a unique body of work that would just not have been possible at a commercial foundry in Ireland or the UK.
The next SMA residency open call will be advertised in the new year (slossmetalarts.com). In addition, ‘Skimming the Surface: National Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art & Practices (NCCIAP)’ will take place from 2 to 5 April 2025 at Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark (nccciap.com).
James L. Hayes is an artist based in Cork who lectures in sculpture at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design. jameslhayes.ie
BRIAN CURTIN DISCUSSES HIS ROLE AS ONE OF THE CURATORS OF THE BANGKOK ART BIENNALE 2024 WHICH INCLUDES THE WORK OF FOUR IRISH ARTISTS.
THE FOURTH BANGKOK Art Biennale (BAB) opened to the public on 24 October 2024 amidst a glitzy week of events, launches, and after-parties. It will run for nearly four months, closing on 25 February. This edition of BAB presents over 70 artists from around the world and is staged across 11 venues. These include the conventional Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), ancient temples, and a new development, titled One Bangkok – a residential and commercial district in the centre of the city. The digital facade of an enormous shopping centre was also put to use for artists’ films.
Ambitious, if not dizzying, in its scope and ambition, BAB speaks to many currencies. These include the artists themselves, the curatorial theme, countless numbers of public and private funders, accelerated interest in (and platforms for) contemporary art within Southeast Asia in recent years, and, ultimately, questions of ‘soft power,’ internationalism, city-branding, and the very function of global biennials across these critical interests.
My own involvement was indicative of the tensions these currencies can generate. As someone who more typically writes about art (and has reviewed past iterations for other publications), I was hesitant to accept an invitation to co-curate this year’s biennale. To do so might be to feel co-opted and therefore complicit in trying to resolve these tensions, rather than critically expose them in writing.
Since opening, the PR for BAB regularly trumpets the thousands who’ve visited, while the opening festivities were awash with an ‘international’ crowd. The biennale has also received widespread attention in the global art press. Titled Nurture Gaia after the Gaia Hypothesis – a theory that the natural world is interrelated as a self-sustaining system – the curatorial theme emphasised the terrible damage us humans are doing. This is a fashionable lament, and because of the multiple interests at stake, it is easy to question the effective politics of such a proposition.
But the diversity that informed or underlined the organisation of BAB was notably evident in the fact of a wide variety of art and the sharp turns in curatorial practice between, say, the integration of art with antiquities in the National Museum and the goddess-heavy presentations at the National Gallery. To wonder about the biennial format as an ideal form, one must think of something succinct, timeless, somewhat didactic and clean, and less provocatively changeable and inclusive.
The latter is a productive means to think through the various group exhibitions and the theme itself. How else might we make connections between Kira O’Reilly’s Menopausal Gym (2021), a durational performance in which the artist puts herself through gruelling, outdoor exercises, and a nearby installation of mannequins, by a local artist, dressed in recycled plastic
garb? O’Reilly’s physical contortions, with the aid of a skeletal copper structure and a variety of straps and objects, were highly expressive. Expressiveness was reinforced in view of the staid neoclassical environment of the National Gallery and because the artist sweated profusely in Bangkok’s tropical heat. Here the theme of the biennale became tangible and, perhaps oddly, was upbeat: material change, struggle, and pain in dialogue with rigour and control. The nearby commentary on eco-fashion certainly had its place but seemed benignly instructive due to being haunted by a sense of telling us what we already know.
Susan Collins and George Bolster are two artists I worked with directly, juxtaposing their engagements with landscape at the BACC. One of Collins’ projects, titled LAND (2017), comprised three large prints, digitally derived from a continuous filming of the West Bank over many months. Against Bolster’s panoramic tapestry, The Impermanence of Protection: Big Bend National Park (2023), which depicts the rural border of the US and Mexico, both stage the awe-inspiring qualities of nature, while hinting at the pernicious impact of humans. Collins’s use of pixilation spoke to the presence of surveillance, while Bolster included a video that narrates Trump’s rescinding of environmental protections. However, Bolster is proving more popular with audiences because the scale and haptic quality are seemingly delightful, offering an upbeat edge to the sinister implications. The works of both artists were surprisingly ‘activated’ in this respect, when a loud bleed from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (1785) could be heard from the entrance, as Amanda Coogan momentarily led a signing performance with a hearing-impaired community.
O’Reilly, Bolster, and Coogan are Irish, as is Aideen Barry who was also included –an unprecedented representation for BAB. Bolster is based in New York and O’Reilly in Finland; yet funding for their participation came from Ireland. While Barry’s dark, gothic, installation, Oblivion (2021), partly addresses Ireland’s colonial history, the work of the other three artists does not directly relate to the Irish context. Each artwork was woven into a fabric of differences that affirmed a need to make connections: between human bodies and landscapes; emotion, language, and understanding; and across the literal and affective – a binary that afflicts critical discussion of contemporary art. This insight is not to distract from very real conflicts of interest or contradictory values, but, rather, to recognise that BAB – and the biennial model more broadly –is inherently flawed. How else might we confront the messy realities of our current world and imagine different futures?
Brian Curtin is an Irish-born art critic based in Bangkok since 2000. brianacurtin.com
Aideen Barry, The Song of the Bleeding Tree, 2023; image courtesy the artist and the author.
Amanda Coogan, Freude! Freude!, 2023-24, living installation, dimensions variable; photograph by Arina Matvee, courtesy of the artist and Bangkok Art Biennale.
Kira O’Reilly, Menopausal Gym 2021, performance and installation, restaged at National Gallery, Thailand, October 2024; image courtesy of the artist and the author.
THIS YEAR’S TULCA Festival, curated by Michele Horrigan and titled The Salvage Agency, meets us in our current moment of global instability and uncertainty, mistrust and disillusion, extreme automation and military acceleration, when it can feel nearly impossible to claim any sense of agency. However, the festival assembles a selection of artists who collectively demonstrate a sense of purpose by salvaging the multiplicity of entangled crises and digging into the thickness of time.
The Salvage Agency
EL PUTNAM REVIEWS TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS.
A Salvage Agency
The festival title can be read in multiple ways, attesting to the nuance of its meaning. At first, The Salvage Agency sounds like some kind of service that rummages through scrap, in order to determine what can be kept, reused, or restored. One imagines the Baudelairean figure of the ragpicker, tasked with creating order from the hoarded debris of the industrial age.1 In a way, that is what each of the exhibiting artists is trying to do, as they take and make use of linguistic, cultural, or material fragments.
For example, Seanie Barron’s wood carvings present haptic and tacit knowledge of the materials he collects and transforms. Exhibited in the Printworks Gallery and installed among the displays at Freeney’s Fishing Tackle Shop, Barron’s carvings demonstrate a salvaging of spirit, which conjures surrealist visions from wood. Also at the Printworks, Áine Phillips’s sculptural installation and video work, The Secret (2013), depicts a road adjacent to the IKEA superstore in Dublin. Broken bits of furniture, packaging, and other rubbish are strewn along this secluded thoroughfare. There is nothing, it seems, to be salvaged within this detritus; it conceptually underscores both the empty promise of consumerism and the brevity of our material lives.
Seanie Barron, wood carvings, installation view, Printworks Gallery, November 2024; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.
However, the act of salvaging is not just about recovering physical materials, but a salvaging of humanity, within this milieu. In the University Gallery, Guatemalan artist and poet Regina José Galindo’s video work, Tierra (2013), presents the artist standing nude in a green field, as an earthmoving excavator digs the land around her. She maintains her posture of stillness, as she is eventually left on a small island of earth, in the midst of a decimated landscape. Sometimes, when overwhelmed by external forces – understood, in this instance, as patriarchal and colonial regimes – what is salvaged comes from within our bodies, as one is grounded to the Earth.
Léann Herlihy’s performance-based bus tour, Beyond Survival School Bus (2022), similarly engages interconnections between the body and the landscape. In contrast to Galindo, Herlihy is playful in their evaluation of the power of human relations with nature, delivering a script informed by queer ecology, feminist and abolitionist theory. However, both artists challenge notions of apocalypse as a future event; rather, they suggest, such moments have previously happened and are currently occurring, requiring urgent systematic and structural change.
The Agency of Salvage
While the festival title alludes to the agency that arises from acts of salvage, the capacity to recover is becoming less feasible amid the extractive practices of late capitalism. Bogland, for example, is a repository of time – both an ancient landscape and an organic, living archive. The industrial strip-mining of bogs for the mass cultivation of fuel during the twentieth century has left stretches of exhausted wasteland in the Irish midlands. In the Printworks Gallery, Catriona Leahy’s Bog Syntax: The (Dis) Order of Things* presents fragmented digital images of bogland, laid out as specimens in an irregular grid. There is a breaking down of visual forms, evocative of peat harvesting – whereby the earth is conceived in terms of its capacity to be exploited – to create a pixelated visual landscape. While salvage within a state of ruin may seem futile, anthropologist Anna Tsing states: “Our first step is to bring back curiousity.”2 Artistic interventions within the festival prompt the curiosity that is necessary to instigate liveliness. In Leahy’s Bog Thing*: Assembly* for Symbiocene, a 3D scan of an eviscerated landscape becomes an ampitheatre that actively invites such speculations.
To Salvage Agency
Much like bogland, myths are tales that are carried through time, with the salvaging of these narratives opening new imaginary possibilities. David Beattie’s Remnants (2024) presents a 3D-scan of the Grange Stone Circle, a Bronze Age site in Limerick. The audio track, an AI-generated mythological narrative, is glitched and disrupted, and further manipulated through interactions with the screen. A subtle twist of the 3D object enables the voice to become more distinct, only to be swallowed by noise. The viewer assumes a god-like position, controlling the simulation and its broken algorithmic recounting of oral history across technological epochs.
In Michelle Doyle and Cóilín O’Connell’s Irish language short film, Super Gairdín (2022), screened at Palás Cinema,
a middle-aged man inadvertently awakens a vengeful cailleach (divine hag) who has taken the form of a large rock within a garden centre. Mythology in this film does not function as a means of trying to capture a lost history, but the absurd scenario shows the cailleach encountering the limits of a past that cannot be translated into the present. These linguistic limitations do not hinder the capacity of the story to emerge, but resonate with Irish philosopher Richard Kearney’s reflections on mythology as a “catalyst of disruption and difference, a joker in the pack inviting us to free variations of meaning” in order to “challenge and transform the status quo.”3
Most striking about this year’s festival is Horrigan’s assemblage of artists, whose interrogations of landscape, nature, and folklore, as well as colonial and industrial histories, offer a range of aesthetic encounters. Moreover, this iteration of TULCA can also be understood as the ‘salvaging of
agency’ in recovering, through artistic provocations and improvisations, our capacity to imagine and actively build alternative futures. The act of producing art itself, then, becomes a means of reclaiming agency, as we learn to exist through and with the wreckage that accumulates.
EL Putnam is an artist-philosopher based in Westmeath.
1 See for example Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises (Les Paradis Artificiels, 1860), trans. Stacy Diamond (New York: Citadel Press, 1996).
2 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021) p 6.
3 Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997) p 98.
Áine Phillips, The Secret, 2013, sculpture and video, installation view, Printworks Gallery; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.
Regina José Galindo, Tierra, 2013, HD video; still courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.
Catriona Leahy, Bog Thing*: Assembly* for Symbiocene 2024, 3D animation; image courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.
VAI Get Together 2024
THOMAS POOL REPORTS ON THE NATIONAL NETWORKING DAY FOR VISUAL ARTISTS RECENTLY HELD AT IMMA.
ON 19 NOVEMBER 2024, VAI’s Get Together returned to its pre-pandemic glory as approximately 500 artists, members, and participants from across Ireland, Europe and North America convened in the recently refurbished North Wing of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). As in previous editions, the heart of the networking event was the bustling VAI Café in the Great Hall – a trade fair of sorts, hosting many diverse organisations relevant to the professional careers of artists. The ever-popular Speed Curating took place in the Johnston Room, along with Specialist Clinics in associated rooms, offering artists one-to-one appointments with individual curators.
The IMMA Chapel served as the main auditorium for the conference, with a diversity of presenters and panellists, as well as the much-anticipated keynote from American artist, Joan Jonas. The first panel of the day, The Mother City, was facilitated by visual artist Rachel Fallon, researcher and writer Sara O’Rourke, visual artist, educator and arts worker Nicola Sheehan, and interdisciplinary artist Rachel Doolin. The Mother City (2022) was a practice-based performance project, created for Cork Midsummer Festival 2022 and curated by Pluck Projects. Collectively, the artistic research explored matricentric feminism and the potential of mothering as an activist strategy for reimagining community after the pandemic. Three eight-hour performances took place in Cork’s Red Abbey Square, featuring a purpose-built mobile glasshouse, taking the form of conversations about care, and inviting contributions from local residents. The glasshouse became a hub for conversations, sewing, and communal activities, welcoming diverse participants across gender and age, while emphasising collective action. Ultimately, The Mother City demonstrated the transformative power of ephemeral, participatory art in fostering dialogue across the
All images: VAI Get Together, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 19 November 2024; photographs by Marc O’Sullivan, courtesy of Visual Artists Ireland.
themes of advice and support, loss and hope, and protest and repair.
The first of two Artists Speak sessions began with Ralf Sander, who discussed the evolution of his practice from carving figures from single pieces of wood to focusing on the blending of time and space. Also discussed was his 2022 public art piece memorialising the scientist John Tyndall, and his 2008 work, World Saving Machine, which used solar panels to power an ice and snow machine. Mags Geaney discussed her deeply personal ‘Rapture’ series, featuring works that reflected on her mother’s stroke and memories tied to clothing that merged performance and painting. She also discussed her recent exhibition, ‘Making Faces’ at Lavit Gallery, which used magazine-style titles to interrogate women’s representation. Nina McGowan discussed the influence of sci-fi and its inherent escapism in her work, including her Star Wars-inspired sculptural installation, Tie Fighter, at the Hugh Lane Gallery in 2005, and her drone film that skewers notions of privacy in the digital age by spying on the Google and Facebook Dublin offices. A freediver world champion, McGowan also discussed diving and sleeping as the last refuges from capitalism. Venus Patel, a transfemme artist who blends reality and fantasy to address queerness, rage, and societal norms, discussed her work, Eggshells (2022), a short film made in response to a transphobic hate crime she experienced. She also discussed her mockumentary, Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse (2023), about a radical trans street prophet, which incorporates conservative religious language into queer culture. Upcoming projects will explore AI and digital identity through a sci-fi musical lens.
At noon, the second panel, Damaging Effects of Social Media and Doomscrolling, discussed internet culture with an emphasis on the aetheticisation of doomscrolling and understimulation as a counter response, referencing key thinkers including Walter Benjamin and Mark Fisher. Coined and popularised during the Covid-19 pandemic, ‘doomscrolling’ refers to the activity of spending excessive amounts of time on the internet, reading negative news stories or social media content. Presenting in-person were Moreno Hebling, a writer and artist working between Venice and Bologna, whose research focuses primarily on the relationship between digital culture and avantgarde art; and Matilde Pernarcic, a student of multimedia arts and fashion at IUAV in Venice, with a particular interest in video games and ‘brainrot’ material. Joining remotely were Valentina Tanni, an art historian, curator and lecturer at Digital Art at Politecnico University, Milan, whose research centres on the relationship between art, technology, and internet culture; and visual artist Francesca Vanoli, whose research focuses on the side effects of ecosystems in which any content can be immediately exchanged, shared, stolen and modified. The focus of their discussion was the internet trends of ‘brain rot’ (referring to the deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state due to the overconsumption of trivial or unchallenging online content) and ‘corecore’ (an editing technique that collages media clips from disparate sources to disorient the viewer) with an interrogation of their Dadaist qualities, representing the emptiness and absurdity of late-stage capitalism.
Attendees reconvened in the chapel after lunch for a fantastic conversation between VAN Editor Joanne Laws and Joan Jonas (see pp 32-33 for the abbreviated interview transcript). The third panel of the day, The Porous School of Collections, focused on the programming of museum collections beyond exhibition formats. Rooted in contemporary discussions on restitution of objects, accessibility and inclusion of access to objects, and the social as much as pedagogical role of art, this panel brought together examples of projects in Northern European art museums. Speakers included: Jeanne van Heeswijk, an artist who facilitates the creation of dynamic and diversified public spaces to ‘radicalise the local’; Kurdish art organiser, journalist and activist Serda Demir, and artist and activist Iliada Charalambous, who co-organise the Ware Tegenmacht (True Counterpower) assemblies at the Van Abbemuseum (NL);
Lisa Heinis, head of Education and Interpretation at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (NL) and lecturer on the Master Education in Arts at Piet Zwart Institute; and Sophie Mak-Schram, Lecturer in Pedagogies of Art at the University of Leeds, who co-convenes Gentle Gestures, a porous research group about alternative (arts) pedagogies. Discussions focused on the democratic artistic takeover of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the accessibility of twentieth-century Welsh school objects, now housed in a museum as art; and Kurdish resistance through dance, workshops, and integrating storytelling into exhibitions to enable dynamic audience engagement. Also discussed was a banner symbolising collective resistance, created by 26 activist organisations, which has become a mobile artwork, shared between museums and used during protest demonstrations.
The second round of Artists Speak talks kicked off with Peter Crann, who began his artistic career at age nine, drawing papal insignia for a homework assignment. Initially critical of religion, he was later inspired by a Spanish priest to paint Stations of the Cross in churches. Returning to Ireland, he embraced live art and music collaborations, with his current project, Cranky Island, illustrating rare Irish songs via mechanical art. Based in Cork, Orla O’Byrne’s current PhD research focuses on artists and archives, including her discoveries of glass slides in Crawford Art Gallery’s archives, which inspired a series of charcoal drawings. She also spoke about her residency in a historic marble quarry in Italy used by Michelangelo. Tom Climent discussed the trajectory of his painting practice from abstract expressionism, evolving toward geometric abstractions exploring light and form, as well as his return to simplicity and foundational elements in art. Baryalai Khoshal, a photographer from Afghanistan who came to Ireland after the Taliban takeover in 2021, highlights his homeland’s diversity and resilience through storytelling and portraiture. His projects ‘Echoes of Home’ and ‘Citizens of Dublin – Portrait
of a City’ document Afghan and other refugees’ sense of belonging, home, and integration, while celebrating community and identity.
The exciting, day-long conference concluded with the panel, Curating in the Landscape, which explored art in natural landscapes to foster belonging through outdoor exhibitions, sculpture trails and land art. Such projects blur the boundaries between art and science, encouraging environmental awareness and responsibility through engagement with nature. Speakers included: Researcher Dr Jo Lewis, former director of Green-Door Ireland, the festival of rural architecture and living; Dr Matthew Jebb, a botanist and the Director of the National Botanic Gardens; Alannah Robins, founder and director of Interface Artist-in-Residence programme in Connemara; and Yvette Monahan, an Irish photographer, artist and curator whose practice explores how landscapes can hold concepts such as history, memory, mythology, transcendence, and trauma. Discussions centred on woodland schools and bringing the landscape into the classroom; a salmon hatchery repurposed as an artist space; the devastating impacts of Sitka pine on Ireland’s woodlands; natural mythology in art; and the National Botanic Gardens as an outdoor classroom that fuses art, science, and human experience.
Get Together concluded with a prize draw for a luxury two-night stay in Liss Ard Estate. Overall, the day was filled with vibrant presentations and discussions, interactive art in the form of Exquisite Corpse, breakout sessions courtesy of the Café Chats, and a host of partner organisations and curators, who were onsite to speak with our members. A really enjoyable day was had by all, and we can’t wait to host Get Together 2025.
Thomas Pool is the Content and Production Editor for the VAN and miniVAN digital companion magazine. visualartists.ie
Joanne Laws: Perhaps I could ask you, first of all, about growing up in New York in the 1930s and 40s. I imagine it was a completely different city to the one we know now?
Poetic Structure
JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS JOAN JONAS AS PART OF VAI GET TOGETHER 2024.
Joan Jonas: Yes, it was a much more beautiful city. It didn’t have all those terrible glass buildings. I loved New York growing up there. We lived on the Upper East Side near the East River. I remember hearing the tugboats on the river at night, which I loved. I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art as a child, and I remember liking it.
JL: You previously described the existence of a hole in the city, any city, be it New York, London, Berlin, where happenings and movements can occur under the radar.
JJ: Yeah, I called them holes in the cities. I lived in New York, but Berlin was where I got that idea because I had a residency in Berlin in the early 80s. And Berlin was full of holes, including bullet marks on the walls. Performances and events took place in these situations because they were interesting outdoors places. There was a group of young artists called Bureau Berlin, who looked for interesting locations. And I did that in New York, too. Everybody did.
JL: Can you share with us some of your memories of New York’s downtown art scene at this time, potentially in relation to space, which is such a massive consideration for all artists?
JJ: Well, in the 60s and early 70s, it was very inexpensive to live in New York and produce work. Now it’s become impossible, probably, for young artists, which is too bad. But then you could go out in the street to make work. For one piece, I took my friend Pat Steir, who was a painter, and we brought my props of tubes, cones, and hoops onto the streets of Wall Street at night, and nobody questioned us.
All images: Joan Jonas in conversation with Joanne Laws, VAI Get Together, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 19 November 2024; photographs by Marc O’Sullivan, courtesy of Visual Artists Ireland.
Now, you couldn’t do that without getting permission; there’s not the same feeling of freedom. But for me, it was access to a certain kind of culture in New York that was important. And going to the Philharmonic – I mean, classical music and the opera – with my mother, and then later on, contemporary music, in the early 70s; people like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and many others. One went to hear live music all the time. The audience was a group of artists of all sorts; composers, visual artists, and we all went to each other’s work. The composer La Monte Young had a huge effect on me.
JL: I believe one of your first performances involved you looking into a mirror and laughing. Can I ask about mirrors as props in your work?
JJ: I began to be interested in and inspired by mirrors by reading [Jorge Luis] Borges. His book, Labyrinths (1962) was translated around that time, and was given to me. I immediately loved the stories. I took all the references to mirrors out of that book, copied them out, memorised them, and then I did a performance in a mirror costume. Mirrors interested me because they distorted the space; they reflected everything else. Borges called them mysterious and threatening – he believed in the infinite multiplication of space. In the early performances, there are about 17 people carrying large, heavy mirrors. They reflected the audience, and the audience saw themselves. I just did ten of the mirror performances at MoMA, and I went to see them all. Sometimes, when you see your own work years later, it’s amazing to think you actually had the energy to go through that!
JL: Your first film was a black and white, soundless, 16 mm film from 1968 called Wind. Maybe you could share with us the appeal and also the limitations of 16mm for you as an artist?
JJ: Long before I came here in the 80s, I was interested in film. But I didn’t go to school to study film. When I went to college, I was studying sculpture, working in clay from the figure. They didn’t have a film course then. I began to I study film by just going to films. There was the Anthology Film Archives in my neighbourhood in SoHo – Jonas Mekas gave a tremendous amount to us by having these archives – so, I went to see all of those. I made two 16mm films: Wind (1968) and Songdelay (1973), but I always had to work with filmmakers because the film camera is so elaborate and complicated. Wind was based on an indoor piece that we took outdoors. It’s called Wind because it was the coldest day of the year, and the wind was blowing. And from then on, the wind became one of my collaborators. So, when I’m in Canada in the summer, and whenever the wind blows, I rush out with my costumes and whatever, and my dog comes with me.
JL: In 1970, you travelled to Japan with your friend, the artist Richard Serra, and that’s where you bought a Sony Portapak, a battery-operated videotape analogue recording system that could be carried and operated by one person. I’m guessing this gave a whole new dimension and level of autonomy to your filmmaking? JJ: I loved it, and so did everybody who worked with video. Filmmakers hated it because of the quality of the video. It was black and white and very grainy and indistinct. It wasn’t like film, but we all loved it. I think the most important thing about the Portapak was that an artist could sit in their studio with the camera and look at what they were doing on the monitor or in the projection. That was radical and revolutionary. It really was, for artists to be able to see themselves as they worked. And that’s what my early work is all based on.
JL: In the mid-70s, wearing a doll like mask, you performed as Organic Honey, whom you described as an “electronic, erotic seductress.” In Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy from 1972, your own fragmented image appeared onscreen. In hindsight, how do you situate your alter ego, Organic Honey within your then evolving practice?
JJ: Because it was my first video piece, it was one of the most important works. I began to insert vertical rolls into one of the video works. That’s an autonomous video work, but I put it in the performance. I’m not a theorist, so I wasn’t reading theory; it just was in the technology at that time, and in the places where some of us were going. It was also the time of the women’s movement, so Organic Honey was based on the idea of questioning what is female imagery. I dressed up in costumes that I found in flea markets, and masks. I was influenced by Noh theatre, and I still look at texts from Noh plays, because they’re an ongoing inspiration for me.
JL: We should mention that you lived in Dublin in 1994, when you were preparing for your first retrospective in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. While you were here, it seems you were quite engaged with the Irish literary scene?
JJ: Well, let me just say something about Ireland. For a long time now, I’ve been interested in Irish mythology and content. It’s because I’m part Irish – I’m sorry to mention it! There are hundreds of thousands of us scattered all over the place. My [family] name is Huguenot, and my grandmother’s name is in the Huguenot Cemetery [in Dublin]. It doesn’t mean anything, but for me it was a connection. And I was always drawn to Irish themes and Irish literature. James Joyce, of course, was a huge influence. The fact that he had mythology in his stories; that really influenced me to include mythology in my work. Rudi Fuchs [then director of the Stedelijk Museum] introduced me to the work of Seamus Heaney, so I based a piece on his poem, Sweeney Astray. I came here to work on that, and I went to the Aran Islands and photographed all those beautiful stone walls.
JL: I’m curious about your relationship to art criticism over the years. Your work was so pioneering that I expect critics really struggled to find the terminology to write about it. Is that something you particularly cared about as an artist?
JJ: Well, I’ll just say first, I felt bad they didn’t write about me more! And that’s true; they didn’t know how to write about what I did. Jonas Mekas was the first person, a filmmaker, who understood what I was trying to do. He saw my early video performances, the Organic Honey ones, and he wrote about it in the newspaper. For me, that was important because everybody would say, “I can’t figure out what you do.” They didn’t know how to approach it. I didn’t have a dialogue, so I didn’t talk to them because I’m not a theorist.
JL: Across your multi-dimensional performance and installations, there’s been an impulse to revisit and revise, and more specifically to restage and reanimate some of your earlier works. I’m curious to know how have you been able to construct and maintain this dialogue between past and present works?
JJ: I mean, it’s not a new method. But the Organic Honey group of videos – I don’t redo those ever. There are certain pieces that I don’t touch. A very concrete example is a recent series about the ocean, based on a book called Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness, who is a wonderful Icelandic writer. Of course, I had to put my work in the present, but he wrote that book in the 60s. The first thing you think of is that glaciers are melting now. So, I had to take that into consideration. The piece became about ecological impact, and I included footage from Disturbances (1972), which was filmed in a swimming pool, with young women (myself included) swimming around naked or in white nightgowns. I wanted to indicate that everything is melting and that we’re all going to be living underwater. Water is a big issue.
JL: How did you feel when MoMA mounted your retrospective earlier this year, ‘Good night. Good morning’? Was it a self-reflective, nostalgic, triumphant moment?
JJ: Not at all nostalgic – please – I don’t want any nos-
talgia! No, I was very happy about it. I’d done retrospectives in the Tate and in Munich and Portugal, but it was very different to do it in my hometown. The curators came to my loft every week for two years, just doing their own research. They were able to put more material into it, making it richer. Because of the way my work is constructed, you can’t see these installations unless they’re set up. So, for me, it was very important that people finally saw my work as it should be, at last in New York, where I come from.
JL: I wanted to ask what advice you would give to younger artists – or indeed, artists of any career stage – about how to just keep going, throughout the many challenges we all face in life.
JJ: Well, one thing I would say is you have to love what you do, because you may never be recognised. I hate to say that, but you really have to love it. And even if you are recognised, you have to continue to love what you do, because it’s hard work to keep going and to go through the bad periods; there are ups and downs, for sure. But I think the main reason for doing what you do is because you are drawn to it and you can’t resist it, you know.
Audience Question: Can you talk about the crossover between drawing and performative drawing and the film work?
JJ: Well, drawing was part of my practice from the very beginning. It’s the one thing I brought from studying sculpture and art history. For me, drawing is a process; I’m always learning how to draw and practicing how to draw. And so, I make drawings consciously for each of my works that have to do with the content, with the technology, like drawing for video and so on. Drawing is part of my basic language. I have thousands of drawings that I’ve kept, that have been hidden away, and they just show up in performances. But I also make autonomous drawings. I get obsessed with certain subjects, like dogs.
Audience Question: You work so much with words and stories, but you also work with performance, drawing, and the body. Can you talk to us about this tension?
JJ: Words are only important to me when I use them, but I don’t think they’re at all necessary. It just seems to flow, you know, from one form to another. Poetry has been huge. When I say poetry, I mean how poems are structured. Someone said a poem is a telegram; a shorter way of saying something very complicated and beautiful, maybe. I see it more as a flow than a tension between those two. I started out with no words in my early work, and then they gradually seeped in.
JL: I want to thank you sincerely for being here to speak with us in such an honest and inspiring way about your work.
JJ: Thank you for having me. I’m very happy to be here and thank you. I love being in Ireland.
Joanne Laws is Editor of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet. visualartistsireland.com
Joan Jonas is a pioneer of performance and video art who was a central figure in New York’s performance art movement of the 1960s. Joan has performed and exhibited extensively throughout the world. Her retrospective, ‘Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning’, was presented at MoMA from 17 March to 6 July 2024. moma.org
Ella de Búrca: Could you open up on your early influences and what led you towards painting?
The Rhythm of Life
ELLA DE BÚRCA INTERVIEWS ELIZABETH COPE ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF HER PAINTING PRACTICE.
Elizabeth Cope: As children, my father used to take us around to all the different monuments. We had some of our family buried in Killín Cormac in County Kildare. I remember seeing Ogham stones in the graveyard (that were later stolen) and you’d have to translate them into Latin. These kinds of things were inspiring to me. When I was nine, my sister Phil came home from Paris with a box of oil paints; it was the smell of those oil paints that seduced me into being a painter. She also gave me a slim version of the Bible in pictures, and I remember distinctly seeing a picture of Rembrandt’s Christ on the Cross (1631). My aunt was also a big inspiration; she used to play Chopin to me.
EdB: Does music play a role in your paintings?
EC: Music is more important than painting for me, because it’s the rhythm of life. I love the human voice. I find singing so inspiring. I’ve sung in my local choir, in Saint James’ choir in Dublin, and at the Cork Choral Festival. I like all kinds of music, but I have to say, I always go back to the old favourites – opera and ballet. I saw Rudolf Nureyev dancing with Margot Fonteyn when I was 19. He was 36 and she was 53. I went to the Wexford Opera Festival this year and I loved Donizetti’s Le Convenienze Ed Inconvenienze Teatrali (1827). The quality of singing was excellent throughout. I think the GPO should be turned into the National Opera House.
EdB: Do you have thematic currents in your painting practice or subjects you like to focus on?
EC: I don’t do themes. Life throws its themes at you. I paint every
Elizabeth Cope, ‘The Palpable Bump on the Bridge of the Nose’, installation view, VISUAL, September 2022; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and VISUAL.
subject under the sun, so themes are everything. Even the most abstract thing, like the corner of a table, can become a very beautiful image to me. The shape and the physiology are of equal importance. People, animals, plants, minerals – they’re all an excuse for me to put down paint. The subject is the paint itself. Everything is difficult and everything is easy. I don’t believe in the word ‘only’ and I don’t believe in the word ‘can’t’. It’s all possible.
EdB: What is the role of drawing in your work?
EC: Drawing is the bones of painting. Drawing is essential. Without drawing, you’re nothing. Take children, for example. I’m not saying every child can draw perfectly, but until around nine years old, children have this freedom, an intuition to draw, and then what happens? They push it away. They think “this drawing thing is childish.”
I learned one really good lesson, when I went to London aged 19. I worked for a Ms Holland in an advertising agency, and she painted in her spare time. She had the most beautiful handwriting I’ve ever seen. She used her left hand. When she was younger, she used to write with her right hand, but during the war, her hand would get so tired that she trained herself to use her left hand, and she ended up using it for the rest of her life. What I say to you or anybody who wants to draw: use the opposite hand because there’s no vanity in it. You get used to the same old story with the one hand you use.
It’s better to write or to make marks of what you see, than what you think you see. We all have an idea of the
shape of something in our heads, which then means we’re not observing the subject. We have to observe. It’s hand-eye coordination. People want perfection –but perfection doesn’t exist. You draw while people are moving. I love people talking to me when I’m painting them. Animals moving, children playing – that’s really important. You try to capture it as quickly as you can.
EdB: Can you talk further about the act of live drawing?
EC: On my first day at the Sir John Cass School of Art in London, there was a woman modelling – she was in her mid-70s, I imagine. There she sat, naked, surrounded exclusively by men, except for me. I spoke to her during the break, and it transpired that she was a model for Welsh painter, Augustus John (1878-1961). I mean, what a great link back to the past. If you want to be good at life drawing, you have to sit yourself, to understand how difficult it is. I’ve been at drawing classes where a lot of people have no sensitivity to the model. The model is in charge when you are drawing and painting. For a start, you have to make sure they’re comfortable. Not everyone makes a good model but the people you least expect will be good models.
EdB: I found this quote on your website: “The act of painting is like doing a post-mortem.” Could you expand on this?
EC: First of all, in making a work, the subconscious has to be there and at the same time, you have to get the painting to work, like a surgeon repairing a broken leg. You have to fix things. It’s like having a dual personal-
ity. You work on two levels: the conscious level and the subconscious level.
We’re all artists, in one shape or another. The most important thing about all art forms in my opinion, is humour and fun. Why are you doing it? The Irish author Brian Keenan was incarcerated in Beirut for four and a half years after being kidnapped by Islamic Jihad. Another prisoner, John McCarthy, said it was Brian’s wit that kept them going. He was great to be able to have that concentrated, humorous way of looking at the world. One day, as Keenan sat in his container, he was asked by his captors “What would you like?” to which he replied: “Oh, a grand piano.”
Ella de Búrca is an artist and Assistant Lecturer at NCAD. elladeburca.com
Elizabeth Cope is an artist based in Kilkenny. A major solo exhibition of her work, ‘The Palpable Bump on the Bridge of the Nose’, was presented at VISUAL (23 September 2022 – 8 Jan 2023), while ‘Elisabeth Cope – From the Eye to the Heart’ was shown at Maison Depoivre Art Gallery in Ontario, Canada (31 August – 29 September 2024).
elizabethcope.com
Elizabeth Cope, Top Left: Nude with Paraphernalia and Donkey and Hens, 2006, oil on canvas; Bottom Left: ‘The Palpable Bump on the Bridge of the Nose’, installation view, VISUAL, September 2022; Right: John King with Blue Spotted Cardigan 1992, oil on canvas; all photographs by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and VISUAL.
Best Laid Plans
MANDY O’NEILL REFLECTS ON HER DOCTORAL RESEARCH AND RECENT EXHIBITION AT THE IRISH ARCHITECTURAL ARCHIVE.
IN 2005, SHORTLY after I completed a BA in Photography at Dublin Institute of Technology, the Irish economy went into freefall and the value of property went from boom to bust. This socioeconomic reality had a significant influence on my practice for that first decade after college education. During this time, I worked with community groups, schools and institutions, reflecting on the impact that ideological decisions can have on lived experience. In ways, this phase of my practice focused on how decisions made at the top played out for those less privileged. Focusing on educational contexts, this work attempted to visualise what this might look like through the still image.
During this time, I primarily worked with children and young people, through a series of artist residencies in schools. The schools were classified under DEIS (Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools), which aims to address disadvantage in education. This trajectory felt particularly important to me, having returned to college myself as a mature student. On one level, the work I made in these schools focused on photographic portraiture – images of people contextualised by the topographic details of their surroundings. On a deeper level, this work gave a voice to those who might otherwise have remained unseen, their circumstances and challenges unheard. In 2019, I had a solo exhibition at Photo Museum Ireland, drawn from a decade of projects with schools. For this show, I employed painted interventions on the gallery walls, in an attempt to animate the work in new ways. This moment, I would argue, marked a shift and turn towards the sculptural possibilities that photography might present.
In 2020 I embarked on a practice-based PhD at Dublin City University. My doctoral research was instigated by spatial transformations I witnessed in the area of Cabra in Dublin 7, alongside changes happening in my own practice. As my research began, the outcomes of new planning initiatives were beginning to materialise in Cabra, in the form of two large-scale housing developments, representing the largest building projects in the area since the mid-twentieth century. I was drawn to the built materials of the area, their sculptural and fluid elasticity, their capacity to evolve quickly, or be shaped and refashioned by strong urban sunlight. I began to engage creatively with new materials, combining photographs with timber, paint, tape and metal. While researching the Cabra narrative, I also looked at the wider history of Irish housing, prompting me to reflect, too, on my own personal and complex experiences of growing up in a social housing context.
My exhibition, ‘Best Laid Plans’, ran at the Irish Architectural Archive (IAA) from 18 September to 29 November 2024, and was the final outcome of my PhD project. Populating two floors of the IAA – a first for the institution – the site-specific
installation included photography, printed matter, sound and video. The sound piece responded to the histories of Irish housing, with my own personal history an important aspect of the work. Reflecting scenes witnessed throughout my PhD research period, I constructed the exhibition, borrowing from the methods, approaches and building processes I had seen so often, throughout my mass observation of Cabra building sites. Large-scale timber structures were created with modular systems of support. It was within these makeshift structures that much of the photographic materials for the show were integrated and displayed.
As an interdisciplinary project, my research encompassed photography, sculpture, geography, architecture, cartography, planning, history, design and theories of material engagement. This multi-stranded approach attracted a wide and varied audience and instigated valuable dialogue across many disciplines and thematic concerns. In this sense, the exhibition was highly successful in prompting debate about housing-led development and art practice, while also allowing me to explore and deepen my practice through material engagement. My plan is to further develop my work in this vein, with a particular interest in site-specific endeavours and interventions. ‘Best Laid Plans’ was supported by the Irish Architectural Archive, while my practice-based PhD was supported by Dublin City University and the Irish Research Council. The exhibition will be reimagined in new ways for a solo show at Ballina Arts Centre in 2025.
Mandy O’Neill is a visual artist based in Dublin.
@Photomando7
Both Images: Mandy O’Neill, ‘Best Laid Plans’, installation view, Irish Architectural Archive, September 2024; photograph by Ros Kavanagh,courtesy of the artist and Irish Architectural Archive.
Hardcore Fencing
SEÁN KISSANE OUTLINES THE PRACTICE OF DUBLIN-BASED ARTIST LUKE
VAN GELDEREN.
LUKE VAN GELDEREN’S work addresses how online and virtual spaces shape and often distort identity, focusing especially on performative masculinity and the commodification of personal experience. Through a fusion of sculpture, photography, digital media, and video collage, he critically explores identity as an evolving, often conflicted construct in a world driven by content consumption. His practice positions the internet as both a mirror and a stage; an environment where self-expression and vulnerability are routinely transformed into performative displays, reshaping personal identity into consumable media.
Drawing on his queer identity, van Gelderen questions how online culture affects traditional and queer masculinities, revealing how digital spaces reshape ideals of aggression, vulnerability, and identity within a highly commodified, algorithmic landscape. Utilising his experiences from adolescence onwards, van Gelderen captures the internet’s evolution from a platform of community to one of hyper-commodification, creating a complex critique of the internet’s impact on self-perception and the construction of identity.
In his early work, and during his time as a Fine Art student at IADT, van Gelderen began shaping his exploration of digital images and memory, questioning the possibility of a ‘true’ self in the networked age. Using the archive of his internet browsing history as source material, he examined the ways in which technology shapes our perceptions of identity and authenticity. Key works included Self-Portrait as a Loop (2020), My Activity (2019), and https://chatroullete.com (2018-19),
the latter underscoring how people may project onto an online persona, often with intense and sometimes disturbing reactions.
Among his recent works, HARDCORE FENCING (2023) is a video-collage that functions as a form of digital self-portrait. Drawing from his browsing history, van Gelderen constructs a portrait by remixing social media content from platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. The artist’s willingness to expose his private browsing history – incorporating content like violent pornography – invites viewers into his vulnerable space, blurring the line between private and public. However, he also ‘performs authenticity’, the confessional nature of his disclosure recalling the ways in which viewers are enticed and manipulated by evermore extreme displays of emotion online. ‘Hardcore fencing’ in van Gelderen’s practice could be seen as a metaphor for the way he navigates the digital landscape – a relentless, high-stakes environment where vulnerability and aggression intermingle. Much like a duel, his work engages in a constant back-and-forth with online culture, revealing the complexities of masculinity, self-image, and Butlerian performativity.1
His practice aligns with artists like Jon Rafman, Cory Arcangel, and Ryan Trecartin, known for their explorations of the surreal, hyper-connected world of the internet. Rafman’s blend of anonymity and narrative, along with Trecartin’s chaotic style, resonates with van Gelderen’s work and situates him in the movement of post-internet art, engaging with the materials and aesthetics of the online world. Reflecting a generation-
al experience, his practice embodies a critique of the shifting role of the internet from a community-building space to a hyper-commercialised, commodified one. His work resonates with the sense of disillusionment that many millennials and Gen Z individuals feel toward an online world that once promised connection and freedom but has evolved into a landscape of surveillance and algorithmic manipulation.
HARDCORE FENCING has been shown to critical acclaim internationally, including in ‘FAKE BODY’, a two-person exhibition with Lana May Fleming at Platform Arts in Belfast (13 – 27 May 2023); ‘this is perfect, perfect, perfect’ at Transmediale in Berlin (31 January – 14 April 2024); and ‘Uncanny Valley’ at Palazzo Bronzo in Genoa (3 – 15 October 2024). It was first screened in Dublin as part of the artist’s solo exhibition, ‘ROMEO SAVE ME’, at Pallas Projects/Studios (3 – 19 October 2024), and subsequently at Digital Arts Zurich, Switzerland (2 – 10 November 2024) and Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, Germany (12 – 17 November 2024). Van Gelderen’s work will also be presented at IMMA in the group exhibition, ‘Staying with the Trouble’, in 2025.
Seán Kissane is the Curator of Exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. imma.ie
1 See for example Judith
Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Luke van Gelderen, HARDCORE FENCING 2023, HD Video, Still, appropriated footage [15:01 mins]; image courtesy of the artist.
The Mourning Band
Visual Artist: Kathryn Maguire
Artwork Title: The Mourning Band
Commissioning Curator: Vaari Claffey
Date Sited: 2023
Commission Type: Private Commission
Project Partners: Bennett Construction, Justice for Magdalenes, Irish Social Housing, Property II SARL, JFA Architects.
The Mourning Band (2023) is a black brick intervention in a 124-unit residential scheme for the private rental sector, located at the rear of the old Bonnington Hotel in Whitehall, Dublin 9, formerly High Park.
The work consists of a wide band of hand-made black brick embedded in black mortar surrounding a pillar, at the front-facing side of the building. The work represents a ‘mourning band’ such as those worn around a sleeve or hat as a mark of respect for someone who has died. The work is visible upon entry to the development.
Accompanying the work is a plaque with a short text, composed in collaboration with Justice for Magdalenes (JFM). The plaque sits near a pair of Cypress trees which would have been present on the site while the Magdalene Laundry was in operation. The design reflects the brickwork intervention on the new building and is planted with black and purple plants, to signify mourning.
The plaque reads: In memory of all the girls and women who were confined in the former Magdalene Laundry on this site (1831-1991), and to the children born to some of those women. In 1993, 155 Magdalene women were exhumed from this location to facilitate the sale of the land. 154 women were cremated, and their ashes were interred at Glasnevin Cemetery.
Respects can be paid to them at their grave located at LN140-MN146. The artwork adjacent to this plaque, a brick intervention by artist Kathryn Maguire titled ‘The Mourning Band’, acts as a mark of honour to all the women who lived, laboured, and died on this site.
Under Darkening Skies
Visual Artist: Alex Pentek
Artwork Title: Hive Mind
Commissioning Body: Park Developments Dublin LTD, Northwest Logistics Park, Ballycooleen, Dublin
Date Sited: 22 January 2024
Budget: €120,000 + VAT
Commission Type: Private Commission
Project Partners: Caroline Cowley (Fingal County Council Public Art Coordinator), Aisling Prior (Consultant and Curator), Park Developments, Dublin LTD
Alex Pentek’s Hive Mind (2024) is a 6.5 metre-tall, abstract, site-specific sculpture for North West Logistics Park in Dublin. A honeycomb sphere in gold anodized stainless steel rests securely on a tensegral frame that combines compressed shafts and tensioned rods to maintain its rigid structure. On an architectural scale in gold mirrored steel, the sculpture interprets the kaleidoscopic view of a bee, looking skywards through a compound eye. The symbiotic relationship that bees have with their natural environment carries an important message; Hive Mind reflects these ideas, as well as the growing necessity for us all to work together for a more sustainable future.
Kathryn Maguire, The Mourning Band 2023; photograph by Mark Stedman, courtesy of the artist.
Both images: Alex Pentek, Hive Mind 2024, laser-cut, folded gold mirror finish and bead-blasted stainless steel, height 6.5 metres, Northwest Logistics Park, Ballycooleen, Dublin; photograph by Park Developments (Dublin) Ltd.; image, courtesy of the artist and Fingal County Council.
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