Visual Artists' News Sheet – 2018 March April

Issue 2: March – April 2018

The Visual Artists' News Sheet

Inside This Issue INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN MAGUIRE RESPONSE TO A REQUEST: CONCLUDING REMARKS MORAN-BEEN NOON'S RESIDENCY IN NIGERIA ARTIST PROFILE: KIAN BENSON BAILES

Contents On The Cover Brian Maguire, Aleppo 2, 2017, acrylic on linen, 200 x 160 cm; image courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery.

First Pages 6. Roundup. Exhibitions and events from the past two months.

8.

News. The latest developments in the arts sector.

Columns 10. Opinion. Making Cultural Connections. Beatrice Kelly.

Opinion. With or Without a Tunnel. Natalie Giorgadze.

11.

Northern Ireland. Home is Where the Art is. Rob Hilken.

Regional Focus: County Limerick 12.

13.

14.

Self-Imposed Parameters. Seán Guinan, Visual Artist.

Big City? Gerry Davis, Visual Artist.

Negotiating the Function of Art. Michele Horrigan and Sean Lynch, Askeaton Contemporary Arts.

Celebrating Artists. Úna McCarthy, Limerick City Gallery of Art. Making Culture Happen. Sheila Deegan, Limerick Arts Office.

How is it Made?

15.

16.

Solidity and Comfort. Hazel Shaw discusses Stephanie Deady’s recent exhibition, ‘Primed Vision’.

Spatial Assemblage. Kian Benson Bailes outlines his sculptural and digital methods and practice.

Editorial WELCOME to the March – April 2018 issue of

the Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

Timely concerns surrounding global migration and the hardening of national borders are broadly discussed in this issue, offering insights into how artists are responding to such geopolitical uncertainties. In an interview for VAN, Brian Maguire discusses the role of art amidst global warfare and humanitarian crisis – recurrent themes in the artist’s practice that underpin his exhibition, ‘War Changes its Address: The Aleppo Paintings’, currently showing at IMMA. Moran Been-noon discusses her residency in Lagos, Nigeria, where she developed new work in response to global migration and the refugee crisis, as part of the Iwaya Community Arts Festival (ICAF) 2017. Reporting from his recent residency in the Tindouf Refugee Camps, Algeria, and Tifariti, Western Sahara, Bryan Gerard Duffy outlines the plight of the Western Sahrawi people, following decades of armed conflict.

Chris Clarke discusses the exhibition, ‘OUTPOSTS: Global borders and national boundaries’, currently showing at the Glucksman, Cork.

With an emphasis on photography and moving image works, ‘OUTPOSTS’ presents work by artists exploring perceptions of national identity amidst disputed territorial borders, including those in Ireland, Mexico and the Middle East.

Artist Publishing 18.

Measuring Change – Changing Measurements. Michaële Cutaya reports on the Create Networking Day.

Career Development 20.

22.

Painting as Solidarity. Joanne Laws interviews Brian Maguire about his ‘Aleppo Paintings’.

The Courage to Waste Time. Thomas Brezing reflects on the trajectory of his arts practice to date.

The Visual Artists' News Sheet:

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

Visual Artists Ireland:

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

Residency 24.

26.

What Lies Beneath the Sand? Bryan Gerard Duffy reports from his residency in Western Sahara and Algeria.

Portraits in Motion. Moran Been-noon discusses her residency in Lagos, Nigeria.

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

Organisation Profile 27.

28.

30.

In other feature articles for this issue, Hazel Shaw discusses a new series of paintings by Stephanie Deady, shown recently at the Kevin Kavanagh, Kian Benson Bailes discuss his sculptural practice, and Thomas Brezing reflects on the trajectory of his arts practice to date. Mark St John Ellis outlines the evolution of the nag gallery, Dublin, while Chris Hayes discusses ‘Periodical Review’ – a long-running curatorial project by Pallas Projects/Studios. Michaële Cutaya reports on the Create Networking Day 2017 and Rebecca O’Dwyer reflects on her one-year publishing project, Response to a Request.

Leaving Little Trace, But Whispers… Rebecca O’Dwyer discusses Response to a Request.

Conference 19.

In the context of an increasingly fragmented Europe, definitions of culture are in danger of becoming instrumentalised according to nationalist or political agendas. Speaking at the launch of the Frankfurt Book Fair last October, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel dubiously pledged to “foster cultural diversity” in opposition to rising populism and nationalism across Europe. In columns for this issue, Natalie Giorgadze, Communications and Community Director of Culture Action Europe, discusses Irish priorities for culture, as articulated during the organisation’s recent think-tank in Dublin. Beatrice Kelly, Head of Policy and Research at the Heritage Council, outlines the Irish programme for the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018, while VAI NI Manager, Rob Hilken, assesses the impact of recent funding cuts on arts organisations in Northern Ireland.

Journey to the East. Mark St John Ellis reflects on the evolution of the Nag Gallery, Dublin.

Archival Gesture. Chris Hayes discusses Pallas Projects/ Studios' Periodical Review.

Border Crossings. Chris Clarke provides an overview of ‘Outposts’ at the Glucksman Gallery.

Last Pages 32.

Public Art Roundup. Art outside of the gallery.

34. Opportunities. Grants, awards, exhibitions calls and commissions.

35.

VAI Professional Development. Upcoming workshops, seminars and

peer reviews.

Republic of Ireland Office

Northern Ireland Office

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

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

Principle Funders

Project Funders

Corporate Sponsors

Project Partners

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

Cover Image: Tom Climent, Berg, 2017, oil, plaster & sand on canvas.

‘Latitudes’ at Dunamaise Arts Centre.

‘Sustainable Futures’ at Sirius Arts Centre.

‘Fragmented Realities’ and ‘A Sense of Place’ at Ards Arts Centre.

‘Push & Pull’, Ashford Gallery, RHA. ‘Black & White’ at Butler Gallery.

International Memberships

6

Roundup

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS FROM THE PAST TWO MONTHS

Dublin

Belfast

GREEN ON RED

‘Future’ was a group exhibition on show at the Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, from 15 Dec 2017 to 3 Feb 2018. The exhibition featured new work from both gallery-represented and invited artists. The 11 artists on show were: Kirstin Arndt, Alan Butler, John Cronin, Damien Flood, Benjamin Houlihan, Mark Joyce, Arno Kramer, Fergus Martin, Niamh McCann, Caroline McCarthy and Nigel Rolfe.

HILLSBORO FINE ART

Followng her retrospective exhibition ‘93% Stardust’ at IMMA, which ended in October 2017, Vivienne Dick returned to Dublin to exhibit her work at Hillsboro Fine Art from 18 Jan until 17 Feb. ‘New York Film Stills’ consisted of a series of prints of stills from some her most iconic No Wave-era Super 8 films, including She Had Her Gun Already (1978) and Trixie (Liberty’s Beauty) (1980).

Gerard Byrne presented his new video installation, In Our Time, at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin from 2 Dec to 20 Jan. The film depicts the daily activities of a non-descript radio station. According to the press release, the film, originally commissioned for the Skulptur Projekte Münster, uses the “study of radio as a model of time”.

In Our Time is a film of no fixed duration and instead plays in sync with the time of day, during the gallery’s opening hours. The modular structure of radio programming also echoes the serial qualities of Minimalism.

THE LAB

From 18 Jan until 4 Mar, The LAB Gallery, Dublin, is exhibiting ‘Transit Gateway: A Deep Mapping of Dublin Port’ by Silvia Loeffler. The series of nine maps on display in the exhibition document the transitional changes in the shape of Dublin Port, from its medieval shoreline, to its present day configuration. The works were commissioned by Dublin Port Company as part of their ‘Port Perspectives’ art commissioning series, which also included projects by Sheelagh Broderick and Cliona Harmey.

kerlingallery.com

RHA

Grayson Perry’s exhibition of tapestries, ‘The Vanity of Small Differences’, runs at the RHA until 19 Mar. The tapestries explore the English class system, underpinned by notions of aesthetic taste and class mobility, as articulated through the life of Perry’s fictional character, Tim Rakewell, from “humble birth to famous death”. The iconography of works are based on people, places and objects that Perry came into contact with whilst travelling through Sutherland, Tunbridge Wells and the Cotswolds. rhagallery.ie

The group exhibition ‘Unfamiliar Familiarities’ ran at Gallery 2 in the Belfast Exposed Gallery from 12 Jan to 24 Feb. The exhibition was a response to Peter Michell’s series ‘A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission’, which ran concurrently in Gallery 1. The photographs on display were taken by participants of Belfast Exposed Stage 3 photography courses and featured work by Brian Stafford, Chris Boyd, Diane McNeill and Jade Best, amongst others.

hillsborofineart.com

greenonredgallery.com

KERLIN

BELFAST EXPOSED

‘The Breath from Fertile Grounds’ was the first Irish solo exhibition by Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga, which ran from 8 Dec until 10 Feb at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. The exhibition presented new work, made after a research visit to Dublin. Conceived as a “space of remains and revitalisation”, the installation comprised disparate industrial and natural materials, exploring tensions between the organic and the man-made in a time of “transformation and crisis”.

templebargallery.com

Gerard Byrne, In Our Time (detail), 2017, video, unfixed duration. Image courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery

Dublin-based visual artist Bea Daly presented a series of works in the Green Room of the Black Box, Belfast, from 4 to 28 Jan. Some of the work shown was created during her recent residency in Inis Oirr, Aran Islands. Other works were taken from a longer process originally inspired by the Wiliam Hope Hodgson book, The House at the Borderland. These thematically distinct works intersected within the exhibition, to explore concepts of figurative and non-figurative existence.

belfastexposed.org

CATALYST ARTS

‘Now Another Procedure Is To Run’ is showing at Catalyst Arts, Belfast, until 15 Mar. It brings together works that employ analogue videotape, live transmission and televisual images, acting as a critique of the self-indulgent desires of contemporary society. Featuring works from The Blue Mountain (Allan Hughes and Mark Jackson), Gail Pickering and Jawbone Jawbone (Nikki Katrina Carroll and Matthew Young). Through live broadcasts and storytelling, new narrative spaces and platforms are created addressing the subjectivity of popular visual formats.

dublincityartsoffice.ie

TBG+S

BLACK BOX

blackboxbelfast.com

FRAMEWERK

‘Modern ART’, a multimedia exhibition by Ruth Bate (AKA Tom Greenhalgh) ran at Framewerk, Belfast, from 27 Jan until 3 Feb. The exhibition consisted of a selection of paintings, drawings, graphic work and music made by Bate over the past decade. Despite the fact that the works on display tackled different subject matter across a range of media, the overarching theme of the exhibition focused on the absurd and surreal aspects of human nature.

catalystarts.org.uk

THE MAC

For the first time in nearly 20 years, collaborative art duo Gilbert and George are presenting a significant exhibition in Northern Ireland.

‘SCAPEGOATING PICTURES for Belfast’ kickstarts the MAC’s 2018 programme and will run until the 22 Apr. Marking the duo’s 50th anniversary (since meeting at St Martin’s School of Art in 1967) ‘SCAPEGOATING PICTURES’ holds a mirror up to society. According to the press release, the work describes “the volatile, tense, accelerated and mysterious reality of our increasingly technological, multi-faith and multi-cultural world”.

framewerkbelfast.com

QSS

Following the exhibitions ‘Unafraid Red’, ‘Unafraid Yellow’ and ‘Unafraid Blue’, the fourth and final iteration in the series, ‘White’, ran from 2 to 22 Feb in Queen Street Studios. Curated by Colin Drake and featuring the diverse work of 23 QSS studio artists, the exhibition series was assembled using colour as an overarching curatorial theme. While the first three shows reference primary colours as “emotional dialogue”, ‘White’ alludes to the gallery wall on which artworks hang, suggesting “an appropriation of the nothingness surrounding them”.

themaclive.com

queenstreetstudios.net

Vivienne Dick, Monitor (She Had Her Gun All Ready, 1978) (detail); image courtesy of Hilsboro Fine Art

Ruth Bate, Self-Portrait, 2014-17, acrylic on canvas; image courtesy of the artist

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Roundup

Eleanor McCaughey, Portrait, 2017, oil on canvas, carpet fringe, 40 x 40cm

Ciarán Murphy, Arrivals, 2017, watercolor, gouache and oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm; image courtesy the artist and Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam

Chris Leach, Petrus Plancius, Amsterdam Silverpoint on prepared paper, 18 x 14 cm; image courtesy of the artist

CUSTOM HOUSE STUDIOS AND GALLERY

THE DOCK

7

Regional & International

126

‘BLOW-INS II’ is an exhibition of selected works by MFA students from the Western Carolina University School of Art and Design. 126 Artist-Run Gallery, Galway, has been working closely with the faculty in order to provide international residency and exhibition opportunities for members. In return, selected 126 members will have the chance to exhibit works in America. The exhibition, currently showing until 25 Mar, presents the work of the students across a diverse range of styles and media.

‘Silence, exile and cunning..’ was a solo show by Chris Leach, running from 26 Jan to 18 Feb in the Custom House Gallery and Studios, Westport, County Mayo. The exhibition presented new silverpoint drawings, depicting various spaces, environments and moments in time.

Leach acknowledges both the historicity and labour-intensive nature of his drawing techniques, which date back hundreds of years. According to the press release, the artist explores notions of “scale and proximity” to question the “value relationships inherent within the drawings”.

126.ie

HYDE BRIDGE GALLERY

Gavin McCrea presented ‘Innermost Limits’, a Graduate Award exhibition of new work at Hyde Bridge Gallery, Sligo, from 24 Jan to 13 Feb. McCrea’s practice and his use of materials reference the construction of surfboards and the translucency of the sea itself. From gestural mark-making and paint drips, to the use of screen printing techniques and transparent surfaces, McCrea aims to give viewers insights into his fixation with the process of painting as well as the vast expanse of the ocean.

customhousestudios.ie

LIMERICK CITY GALLERY OF ART

‘Repair’ is a solo exhibition by Bernadette Cotter, running from 25 Jan until 25 Mar at Limerick City Gallery of Art. The exhibition combines installation, performance and drawing to variously explore the existential themes of life and death, religion and ritual, pain and sorrow. Three distinct bodies of work by Cotter are currently on show – Repair (2017), Edge of Absence (2014) and Still Life (2008) – incorporating a variety of materials, such as piano strings, thread and broken glass.

yeatssociety.com

ROCHESTER ARTS CENTRE

‘Intimate Expansive’ is a solo show of Irish born artist Eamon O’Kane which runs from Jan 18 – May 27, focusing particularly on architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s influence in the Upper Midwest.

Rochester Arts Centre, Minesota, US, present a new series of drawings, paintings and animations by O’Kane, including three paintings of Rochester Wright homes. His works in this exhibition approach the relationship between clean, sleek Modernist architecture and the rural, natural environments that these buildings can be found in. rochesterartcenter.org

‘Like Me’ brings together the works of Alice Hanratty, Kian Benson Bailes and Eleanor McCaughey in The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon. The exhibition (10 Feb – 31 Mar) refers to art-historical decoration elements, such as classical portraiture and painting, as well as the more contemporary processes of image assemblage and digital deconstucion. It is the third in a succession of exhibitions incorporating artists at varying stages of their careers.

gallery.limerick.ie

TACTIC

TACTIC Gallery, Cork, presented ‘The Paradise of The Heart’ from 27 Jan until 8 Feb, featuring work by Cork-based artists Peter Nash and Tomas Penc. For this exhibition, the artists developed visual responses to the allegorical text, Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart, by seventeenth-century Czech scholar, John Amos Comenius. An immersive installation was created in the context of an uninhabited domestic setting, presenting new works alongside reiterations of existing works. sample-studios.com

GRIMM GALLERY, AMSTERDAM

Irish artist Ciarán Murphy's recent exhibition, 'Plainsight' at the Grimm Gallery (13 Jan – 24 Feb), marked a decade of collaboration between the artist and the gallery. Murphy’s paintings depict “an unsettling array of things: sticks, rocks, Martian landscapes, insects, interiors, hands, letters, blank screens, architectural features and geometric shapes”. These objects were presented in “varying states of flux: things float, or seem in the midst of changing form, while other things seem barely there, are entirely absent, or in various states of becoming."

thedock.ie

LONDON MITHRAEUM BLOOMBERG SPACE

Running from 8 Nov – 3 Jun, Dublin-based artist Isabel Nolan presents ‘Another View from Nowhen’, featuring two of her works, The Barely Perceptible Vibration of Everything and Blind to the Rays of the Returning Sun, both taking inspiration from the location of the gallery space.

The Barely Perceptible Vibration of Everything, a vibrant tapestry based on geographic and archaeological representations of the Walbrook river, once lying on the space which Bloomberg currently occupies, accompanies the large, angular, painted-steel sculpture, Blind to the Rays of the Returning Sun.

grimmgallery.com

MERMAID ARTS CENTRE

Wicklow-based artist Emma Finucane presented her solo show in the Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray from 1 Dec 2017 to 27 Jan 2018. The works featured in this exhibition were a direct response to the uncoverings of a 2014 reasearch project carried out in UCD School of Nursing and Midwifery by Finucane, Dr Maria Healy, (previous Head of Midwifery at UCD) and Teresa McCreery of the National Maternity Hospital.

Finucane’s work often incorprates research and education, while also including collaborative and cooperative practices.

londonmithraeum.com

VISUAL

Saidhbhín Gibson’s solo exhibition, ‘Loping Towards Darkness’, ran from 16 September to 21 January at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow. Gibson’s visual art practice broadly questions the “ceaseless cleansing and compartmentalisation of the outdoors”. She utilises a meta-language of materials and haptic approaches to construct “hinterland hybrids” of sculptural objects and images. Through the use of assemblage, drawing and photography, the artist creates macro and micro narratives, aimed at articulating human-centric approaches to the natural environment. visualcarlow.ie

mermaidartscentre.ie

WEXFORD ARTS CENTRE

Katie Watchhorn’s exhibition ‘A Calf Remembered’ ran at Wexford Arts Centre from 27 Jan to 24 Feb. Watchorn was the winner of the Wexford County Council and Arts Council Emerging Visual Artist Award 2016. Having been raised on a rural dairy farm in County Carlow, her work focuses on materials derived directly from the farmyard, as well as the creameries and livestock. The work is itended as a dialogue probing ideas of permenancy and decay in the agriculture industry. wexfordartscentre.ie

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News

THE LATEST FROM THE ARTS SECTOR

General News

WORKSPACE SCHEME FUNDING

The Arts Council of Ireland have awarded funding totaling €221,000 to 19 studios and workspaces under the Visual Artists’ Workspace Scheme. The scheme offers grants of up to €40,000 towards maintaining facilities for visual artists around Ireland and is administered

by Visual Artists Ireland on behalf of the Arts Council. According to Claire Doyle, Head of Visual Arts at the Arts Council, the scheme is one of the “most critical infrastructural necessities for artists in Ireland” with the work produced in these spaces being enjoyed in art galleries throughout Ireland.

The funding allocated under this leg of the scheme will support the facilities for 676 artists. The awards were allocated to studios and workspaces in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway, Mayo, Louth and Wicklow, including: the Cork Artists’ Collective; Pallas Projects/Studios; A4 Sounds; MART; Custom House Studio; Ormond Studios; Galway Print Studio; and Creative Spark Print Studio.

NEW CREATIVE IRELAND DIRECTOR

Tania Banotti has replaced John Concannon as the director of Creative Ireland, the government initiative to place “creativity at the centre of public policy”. Banotti, who will take up her new role as part of Creative Ireland in June, has worked as Chief Executive for the advertising trade body the Institute for Advertising Practitioners in Ireland (API) for the past five years. She has been credited with reinvigorating the body during her time in charge. As well as working for API, she has also held and number of roles within the arts, including working as Chief Executive for Theatre Forum Ireland.

Banotti was one of the founders of the National Campaign for the Arts and is a former Chief Executive of Screen Producers Ireland.

VAI News

FREE MOVEMENT POST-BREXIT

VAI RESIDENCY AWARD WINNER

38TH EVA INTERNATIONAL

EARLY VAI GET TOGETHER

The continuation of free movement for people going to and from the UK has been a hotly contested issue since the beginning of Brexit.

Its cessation is predicted to have several detrimental effects for UK and EU citizens traveling between the UK and Europe, including hard border checks, delays in travel and impacts on tourism. The arts and other creative industries have also expressed concern by joining the campaign #FreeMoveCreate, which seeks to protect the free movement of artists, musicians and workers in other creative sectors post-Brexit.

The creative sector is one of the fastest growing sectors in the UK and is currently worth £92bn.

The pressure to address the issues of freedom of movement by the creative sector has now been acknowledged in a report, published in January,

by House of Commons’ Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee. The report, titled The potential impact of Brexit on the creative, industries, tourism and the digital single market, states that: “The Government should seek to retain free movement of people during any transitional period after the UK formally ceases to be a member of the EU in March 2019” and acknowledges that creative industries require a travel system that supports the “spontaneity” of the field. This news will come as a positive sign for many artists across the EU. However, much work still remains for the UK government to negotiate terms with the EU that will guarantee these rights.

The 38th EVA International will open to the public on Saturday 14 April across various venues in Limerick, with a preview and opening party on 13 April. This iteration of EVA is curated by Inti Guerrero and has no title, breaking with a tradition of the biennial dating back to 1990. This decision aims to replace the ‘monolithic’ biennial model with a more complex ecology of exhibitions, while also emphasising the word ‘international’ that is central to EVA’s identity. For more information on the EVA programme, vist eva.ie.

Visual Artists Ireland and The Tyrone Guthrie Centre are delighted to announce that Evgeniya Martirosyan has been awarded the 2018 VAI Residency Award. The VAI Residency Award is open to all members of Visual Artists Ireland.

The award provides a one-week residency/retreat at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan and will provide Martirosyan with accommodation and a studio facility for the duration of her stay. Applications for the 2018 Residency were of a very high standard and VAI would like to extend our thanks to all of our members for applying.

Evgeniya Martirosyan is an artist based in Cork. Her first solo exhibition ‘Between Something and Nothing’ opened on 8 February 2018

by TACTIC at the Crypt, St Luke’s Former Church, Cork. Her current work stems from her interest in philosophy and science. It represents intuitive responses to concepts of time, matter, chaos, and transformation. Martirosyan completed a BA Honours Degree in Fine Art in 2016 at CIT Crawford College of Art and Design.

She is currently engaged in the Artist-in-Studio Scheme with Cork Arts Support Team. This scheme is associated with National Sculpture Factory and is designed to support emerging artists. For further information, visit the artist's website: evgeniya-martirosyanartist.com

This year Get Together will take place at the earlier date of 21 May 2018. The day provides the opportunity for artists to get together so they can meet curators, ask for advice from experts and discuss professional visual art practice. VAI have invited a wide range of artists, curators, critics, speakers and representatives from arts organisations and galleries from all over the country. The event will run from 10am until 4pm at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Tickets will cost €25 for VAI members and €50 for non-members.

For more information, contact the VAI office at info@visualartists.ie.

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Columns

Opinion

Opinion

Making Cultural Connections

With or Without a Tunnel

Beatrice Kelly

Natalie Giorgadze

BEATRICE KELLY OUTLINES THE IRISH PROGRAMME FOR THE EUROPEAN YEAR OF CULTURAL HERITAGE 2018, COORDINATED BY THE HERITAGE COUNCIL.

FOLLOWING A RECENT THINK TANK WITH VAI IN DUBLIN, CULTURE ACTION EUROPE’S NATALIE GIORGADZE CONSIDERS WAYS TO BRIDGE THE IRISH AND EUROPEAN CULTURAL SECTORS.

ACCORDING TO a Eurobarometer report, com-

IT’S NO SECRET that the European Union

missioned by the European Commission, Irish people have a stronger sense of pride in their local heritage sites and are more likely to engage in a traditional activities, such as Irish music or dance, compared with their EU counterparts.1 This research collated more than 28,000 interviews to assess the attitudes of European citizens towards cultural heritage. The findings were shared at the launch of Ireland’s programme for the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018 (EYCH 2018) in January.

In addition, the EU survey also suggests that Irish people are more likely than other Europeans to understand the positive impact that living close to heritage sites can have on their quality of life. However, while Ireland has a stronger sense of its distinctive local heritage and traditions, Irish people are also slightly less likely to attend classical music events or to visit an art gallery or museum. Time is identified as the main barrier to participation in cultural heritage activities: this is true in Ireland and across Europe, while lack of interest and access to relevant information were also cited as important barriers in the Irish context.2 Hoping to address some of these issues, the European Year of Cultural Heritage in Ireland is being coordinated by the Heritage Council – the statutory body charged with promoting, educating and encouraging enjoyment in Ireland’s national heritage. The Heritage Council is working closely with cultural institutions, heritage organisations, local authorities, community groups and individuals to implement and promote a year-long programme of heritage-related public events and activities. The programme is focused on engaging with communities across Ireland and aims to encourage people to learn more about our wealth of monuments, historical and archaeological sites, museum collections, our customs, sports, music, dance, folklore, crafts and skills, and natural heritage, including wildlife habitats and biodiversity.

People and communities are the custodians of our heritage in all its richness and therefore are at the heart of this year’s Irish programme, reflected in the theme ‘Make a Connection’.

This theme aims to deepen the connection between people and heritage and to build a legacy of increased public engagement. To achieve this objective, the Heritage Council is inviting organisations and individuals to take action and respond to the theme. Cultural institutions and heritage site managers are invited to make connections with communities, including disadvantaged communities, retired people and school children. Local authorities are invited to work with their communities to develop projects with European links. Heritage sites are invited to tell their stories in innovative ways to stimulate public interest and engagement. Heritage organisations – governmental, non-governmental and voluntary – are invited to make or renew connections with each other, and to work

on common policy initiatives. And finally, the general public is invited to participate in heritage activities, learn more about our heritage and make new connections with it.

The Heritage Council has developed a number of initiatives to support the implementation of the EYCH programme, including an events calendar available on its dedicated website.3 The calendar will be updated with events and activities – from workshops, exhibitions and lectures, to film screenings and digital projects – throughout the year and offers the easiest way to find out what’s on. The Heritage Council is encouraging organisations and groups across the country to submit events for consideration as an EYCH initiative. Successful submissions will be granted the EYCH label and added to the events calendar. Such activities are likely to include: information, education or awareness-raising campaigns; cultural events and festivals including film festivals; conferences, exhibitions, performances, media and launch events; research activities, studies and surveys; digital projects, workshops, visits and exchanges.

Heritage Week, which runs from 18 to 27 August 2018, will be one of the year’s highlights, with a plethora of public events happening across Ireland and Europe, through the European Heritage Days. The theme this year is ‘Sharing Stories’. In addition, ‘Le Chéile san Eoraip’, a special initiative coordinated by the Heritage Council, will see local authority heritage officers work with community groups to research heritage links – including literary, historical, craft, architectural and linguistic connections – between their community and that of another European country.

Heritage is our cultural identity. It comprises values and traditions that we have inherited from previous generations, live with today, and will hopefully pass on to future generations. It belongs to all of us and we should all engage with it and contribute to its protection, enhancement and promotion. The legacy of the EYCH is important and the Heritage Council envisages that the benefits of the programme will extend beyond this year. Heritage is something we can all enjoy, and it also plays an important role in supporting social cohesion, both within national borders and across Europe. We hope that 2018 will lay the foundations for a more empowered heritage sector and more engaged audiences.

Beatrice Kelly is Head of Policy and Research at the Heritage Council.

Notes 1 Special Eurobarometer Report 466: Cultural Heritage, commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture and co-ordinated by the Directorate-General for Communication. European Union (2017).

2 europa.eu/cultural-heritage/toolkits/special-eurobarometer-europeans-and-cultural-heritage 3 eych2018.ie

might sometimes feel like a distant, illusory place, with incomprehensible language and long corridors of bureaucracy. As cultural operators, we are often faced with the question: does the European cultural sector exist? Do we – separated in space, sectorial silos and modus operandi – have anything in common? Why should we bother to engage in European policy debates and how can we make our voices heard?

Culture Action Europe (CAE) is a European network of cultural organisations and individuals dedicated to promoting culture as a necessary condition for sustainable development, both at a local and European scale. CAE is a cross-sectoral, membership-based organisation.

As the major cultural network in Europe, we are the political voice of over 80,000 cultural practitioners and activists across the continent. Our current members come from 28 European countries. Over 40% of our members are networks (transnational and national) in themselves. As an inclusive network, CAE membership is open to everybody – from foundations and universities, to smaller cultural organisations, community groups and individuals.

Acting as a liaison (and often as a translator) between the EU institutions and the cultural sector, CAE advocates, co-creates and provides knowledge. We offer our members opportunities, space and the tools to shape CAE advocacy work.

We directly collaborate in developing joint campaigns, thus influencing cultural policy-making at European level. Representing voices from very diverse artistic and cultural domains, we aim to promote exchange and grass-roots engagement in order to advocate the needs of the cultural sector.

We also aim to develop a mutually beneficial dialogue between the European cultural and political realms, in order to encourage the democratic development of the European Union.

While culture and cultural policy in Europe have traditionally been within the boundaries of the EU members states, the actual cultural life as it is practiced has always had strong transnational, European and global dimensions. Numerous local and international actors play an irreplaceable role in the preservation of cultural traditions and the creation of innovative cultural practices. Our rich European culture is created and sustained by vast and complex networks of institutions, associations, NGOs, representative bodies, groups and individuals. Culture Action Europe reflects this rich tapestry of the European cultural landscape.

In late January, we visited Dublin to attend an event organised by Visual Artists Ireland.

This was the first attempt by VAI to introduce the Irish cultural sector to CAE’s European policy debates. The event proved highly successful, with a diverse range of Irish cultural sector representatives, VAI members and freelance artists in attendance. The day generated lively debates, informed discussions and practical proposals that we gratefully took back with us to Brussels.

Participatory methodologies used during our discussions in Dublin reaffirmed the fact that the core issues affecting the cultural sectors of different regions can be very similar, regardless of location. Our Irish colleagues highlighted the following issues as being timely and important: shifting definitions of culture (and the potential instrumentalisation of culture by political agendas); strategies for measuring the impact and value of culture in society; fair work and fair remuneration for artists; challenges related to maintaining organisational structures (such as funding and capacity); and a need to link culture with other sectors. Heated debates on sustainable development and financial sustainability ensued. These discussions reflected concerns also being raised by the CAE community in other European countries. Shared problems bring people together, encouraging exchange and group problem-solving. This is the power of networks like CAE; we pose common questions and crowdsource the solutions.

The specific difference we noticed in these Irish discussions was an emphasis on culture within rural areas. As many participants of the working groups mentioned, a lot is being said and done about the importance of the arts and culture in creating cohesive societies in urban contexts. However, perspectives and stories from rural areas are missing and, as noted by some participants, it’s high time we started researching and investing in these areas more.

Interestingly, the terms “Galápagos syndrome” and “island mentality” were also mentioned in relation to Ireland’s position as an island at the edge of Europe and as an obstacle to transnational artistic mobility. While thinking about the three core principles that should guide the future EU Agenda for Culture, one participant joked: “We [the cultural sector in Ireland] need the three T’s – Transparency, Transferability and a Tunnel!” Indeed, artists have always travelled across Europe. First from court-to-court and now from festival-to-festival, gallery-to-gallery and theatre-to-theatre. In this way, artists help to shape and disseminate cultural ideas that constitute the basis of Europe.

Securing the ability of the cultural sector to continue to operate transnationally is crucial. However, as stated by one participant, “it is not about natural borders and barriers, it is about the mode of transportation we use!” Whether by hopping on a boat or travelling via dirigible balloon, it is important to remain connected transnationally, because your voice matters. By joining networks like the Culture Action Europe community, you can continue to ensure that culture is at the centre of public debate and decision-making.

Natalie Giorgadze is Communications and Community Director at Culture Action Europe.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Northern Ireland

Home is Where the Art is Rob Hilken AMIDST RECENT FUNDING CUTS, ROB HILKEN ASSESSES THE CURRENT OUTLOOK FOR THE ARTS AND CULTURE IN NORTHERN IRELAND.

AS I SIT HERE contemplating what the new

year will bring for the arts sector in Northern Ireland, further budget cuts have forced the Arts Matter NI campaign to declare a ‘state of emergency’, kickstarting another wave of lobbying to ensure the survival of the sector. Funding reductions of around 8% have dramatically impacted the already stretched budgets of galleries, studios and support organisations in Northern Ireland, prompting news headlines such as “death by a thousand cuts”, reminding us how fragile our arts ecosystem is.

There’s widespread frustration that the continued absence of a government at Stormont leaves us without a minister to champion a sector that employs 5500 people and whose output reaches and enriches the lives of 91% of the population. One potential champion, current Arts Council of Northern Ireland chair, John Edmund, recently opted out of that role, declaring (at an Arts and Business Awards event in late January) that: “the current funding model for the arts has created a high level of dependency and, frankly, has not been a sustainable one for some time”. Board Members of the Arts Council have since distanced themselves from this comment, while former Stormont Finance Minister and Sinn Fein MLA, Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, responded: “I am disturbed at Mr Edmund’s recent statements branding arts groups as having a dependency culture”, he said. “Nothing, in my experience, could be further from the truth.

Arts organisations are dynamic, innovative, and net contributors to the economy, despite often operating on a shoestring.”

When the 2016 restructuring of government departments at Stormont placed culture and the arts within the remit of the newly-formed Department for Communities, the sector saw an opportunity to measure the impacts of culture and the arts on local communities. Sceptics warned that our budget would now have to compete with heavy spending on social housing, urban regeneration and employment services, as well as the traditional stablemates of sport and language. Without a minister to steer this diverse portfolio, budget constraints are now compromising the capacity to deliver and measure the benefits of the arts.

Despite the cuts, artists and arts professionals throughout Northern Ireland continue to innovate and to find ways of bringing about change. Regional borough and district councils are embarking on arts strategies that fit within their own community plans. Mid Ulster District Council began their five-year strategic plan in January 2017, quickly followed by Derry City and Strabane District Council, who began a phase of active consultation with the sector in March. Ards and North Down Borough Council have begun to examine their development strategy, while Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council have been working with Thrive (formerly Audiences NI) on their own plans.

In the absence of ministerial guidance from Stormont, we must look, in part, to these arts and culture strategies being developed at a local level. It is critical that all arts stakeholders (including individual artists) know what is being decided and how it will impact on infrastructure and services in their area. With the Arts Council of Northern Ireland budget being stretched to breaking point, it is vital that we urge our local councillors and officials, as well as ministers, to make a firm commitment to supporting culture and the arts and securing long-term investment for the sector.

One positive outcome of the local arts strategy being developed in Derry City and Strabane is the coming together of the sector during the consultation phase. Artists and arts professionals have volunteered their time to contribute to the process and by doing so have strengthened their relationships with each other and with regional arts officers. There is a willingness to establish a Visual Arts Forum in Derry, similar to the one in Belfast that has established a collective voice within the city.

Towards the end of 2017 there was a lot of effort being poured into the joint Belfast/Derry bid for the European Capital of Culture 2023 (ECOC 23). The proposal revolved around notions of ‘home’ and what this means to citizens.

Artists responded enthusiastically to the open call (around 150 proposals were submitted), demonstrating a commitment to projects focusing on community participation in ambitious public events.

Unfortunately, Brexit resulted in the bid’s collapse, along with competing bids from Dundee, Nottingham, Leeds and Milton Keynes. However, the process did open up strong lines of communication between the regions, securing a solid commitment from local government that investing in culture is a positive thing. Despite this disappointment, an active team is still working on a proposal to develop certain aspects of the project, so the spirit of the bid is very much alive. They are determined to capitalise on the groundswell of support from the arts community and the huge contributions made by the public during the consultation phase, along with the renewed ambition of local government officials to enhance the international profile of the region.

It is not without irony that whilst the arts sector creaks under the strain of budget cuts from within the Department for Communities, a citizen-driven, council-led project revolving around notions of ‘home’ gives us the best opportunity to champion the impact of the arts in Northern Ireland.

Rob Hilken is the Visual Artists Ireland Northern Ireland Manager.

Regional Focus County Limerick

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Big City?

Gerry Davis Painter and winner of the Hennessy Portrait Prize 2016

Self-Imposed Parameters Seán Guinan Artist and Director of Wickham Street Studios

I HAVE BEEN LIVING in Limerick since 2003,

when I moved from Athlone to attend Limerick School of Art and Design. Since its inception in 2009, I have based my painting practice in Wickham Street Studios, and I am also the studio’s director. In the couple of years after Wickham Street Studios opened, Limerick’s art scene really began to take off, with several artist-run galleries and studios being set up in the city, including Occupy Space, which was established by Wickham Street members. A lot of my peers from art college remained in Limerick after graduation, so it felt like a natural progression and a good place to establish my practice.

Wickham Street Studios is very active at the moment and there’s a good buzz around the place. This provides a sense of pace and offers a source of feedback. I tend to do my best work at night when the studio is quieter. Economically, Limerick is a good city to live in, and studios are relatively affordable, however, it has become increasingly difficult for artists in recent years.

Spiralling rents and living costs mean that many artists are having to seek out additional sources of income and there are now fewer workspaces available around the city, or galleries in which to exhibit.

My practice has undergone a number of changes in recent years, and I am in the early stages of another transformation. Although still very intuitive, my painting process now requires more conscious choices. Shifts in perspective, colour gradients and symmetry, together with a flat use of paint, are among the characteristics that distinguish my current body of painting from previous work. The process is more protracted now, beginning with a drawing on wood,

followed by a slower application of oil paint throughout. Parameters are more pronounced, many of them self-imposed – something I find oddly liberating, even necessary. These parameters include scale, support, orientation, paint-handling and the use of recurrent motifs.

Landscape is taken as a point of departure from which to implement a more representational approach, whilst making room for abstract, painterly games. There is a loose-knit, otherworldly narrative at play, with a variety of ambiguous elements merging to form surreal, dream like scenes. A line drawing is laid down without much deliberation and becomes a platform for the rest of the painting to evolve. Colour is initially dictated by instinct, but it becomes more challenging to resolve as the painting edges closer to completion.

Over the past few years, my more gestural work has involved a multi-layered approach. It often used to take months, or even years, to resolve a finished piece. Layers of oil paint were applied thickly and took months to dry, making this methodology inconvenient in many respects. I find that my current approach is more practical. The paint is applied thinly, often in one layer, so it doesn’t require a lot of drying time. In addition, the small scale of the work makes it easier to prepare, transport and store. Furthermore, the reduced scale allows me the option of having a larger number of paintings in my visual field at any one time, which is more conducive to identifying relationships and patterns as they emerge. My studio space used to be quite chaotic, with paintings strewn everywhere, but I have since built a partition to create a storage area, meaning my working space is now more minimal and less cluttered. I feel this has positively impacted my work. Sometimes what one might perceive as practical restrictions upon the work, can turn out to be a blessing in disguise. At the moment, I am satisfied with my current methodologies and I am increasingly curious to see how my practice develops over the coming years.

seanguinan.com

Seán Guinan, Untitled (detail), 2017, oil on wood, 15 x 21 cm; image courtesy the artist

Gerry Davis, Studio Space 2 (Speaking Out), 2015, oil on canvas, 46 x 76 cm

IT’S NOW CLOSE TO nine years since I graduat-

ed from the Limerick School of Art and Design.

If you could talk to 24-year-old me and tell him about the path my career as a painter was about to take, I would be both delighted and dismayed, depending on what was being considered. Dismayed perhaps with the failure (as of yet) to realise the unreasonable dreams: New York City opening nights, breaking records at Sothebys, invitations to biennales, effortless success and endless, hangover-free parties. But on the other hand, I would be proud of things that actually did happen: sticking with priorities, continuing to make work and – in this way – achieving a story that I would be happy to accept, both then and now.

One of the things that would probably surprise 24-year-old me – and one of the things that helped me continue making work – was the fact that I’m still in the city I graduated from.

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t think it’s necessary to move to an ‘art capital’ to make it as an artist these days. Often this can actually be detrimental, with the cost of living in large cities, the necessity of part-time work, and smaller or more expensive studios, all being obvious drawbacks. However, I don’t think that working in complete isolation from the art world would have been good for me either. It’s good to know what’s going on and the social aspect of an art scene can be important. In these ways, Limerick ended up being perfect. It had affordable studio space and a well-informed art community who function as the perfect microcosm for things going on internationally.

When I graduated in 2009, the economic recession was in full swing, which made it difficult to make an income from selling work. But as is often the case, economic downturns can sometimes be beneficial to the arts. The ‘Creative Limerick’ initiative, which allowed artists to occupy empty shop units, led to a proliferation of artist-run galleries and studios around the city, such as Occupy Space, Ormston House, Faber

Studios and Raggle Taggle. As a result, many students continued living in Limerick after they graduated and this strengthened the art scene for years to come, despite many of these new spaces dwindling as the economy improved.

In my case, I was lucky enough to become a member of Wickham Street Studios just as it began in April 2009. This was a good setup.

I was able to continue working alongside my peers as I had done in college and it allowed me to forge connections with new graduates as the years went on. The studio’s group shows, and its connection to Occupy Space (which was also started by Wickham Street members), meant we all gained valuable experience exhibiting work, meeting curators and hosting studio visits.

In 2015, the significance of my time in Wickham Street became more apparent, leading to my ‘Studio Space’ series of paintings, which depict the various nooks and crannies of the Wickham Street building and the variety of studio spaces within it. They were snapshots of a place that is always in transition and the subject matter felt endless. Around this time, I was also lucky enough to win the Hennessy Portrait Prize 2016, which helped my career even further.

I felt that I had achieved something significant by making those paintings, and the temptation to continue with the series was strong. But after two years and two solo shows in Pallas Projects/ Studios, Dublin, and in Source Arts Centre, Thurles, my practice is going in new directions again and I’m reminding myself of the excitement that comes from a fresh start. As I move on to new projects, Wickham Street Studios and Limerick continue to provide the ideal environment from which to progress, whatever new forms the work might take.

gerrydavis.net

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Regional Focus

Negotiating the Function of Art

Celebrating Artists

Sean Lynch and Michele Horrigan

Úna McCarthy

Co-Curators at Askeaton Contemporary Arts

Director, Limerick City Gallery of Art

ASKEATON CONTEMPORARY ARTS was es-

tablished in 2006 in a small town in west Limerick. We are an artist-led initiative and organise residencies and exhibitions that often take the daily life of the town and region as a thematic.

We do not have a permanent exhibition space – any project made here has to find ways to exist in the public realm. We have facilitated artists from around the world to realise projects in places such as a hair salon, petrol station and seventeenth century Hellfire Club, amongst many others. Over the years, this impetus has developed into the production of publications and the use of established platforms to expose artists to an international audience.

A large part of our interests are the social constructs artists can inhabit and influence. In Limerick in recent years, these constructs have primarily been focused on ideas of regeneration and ‘City of Culture’ initiatives. From our perspective, it is useful to discover or keep alive paradigms outside of the generic branding of the creative industries – places and people are inevitably more complicated than marketing campaigns might suggest.

Sean Keating, the famous painter of Free State Ireland, is a good example. Despite being awarded the Freedom of Limerick in 1948, he went on to describe the region as a “medieval dung heap” on RTÉ television in 1971. Keating’s impressions were formed over a prolonged period (he didn’t leave to settle in Dublin until he was 33 years old), and were very much in conflict with his portrayal as the great social painter, grounded in ventures such as the Ardnacrushna Hydroelectric Scheme. In 2017, we published Liz Ryan’s book Under Starry Skies that touched on an almost-unknown school of vernacular painting in Limerick. The main protagonist, Bobby Duhig, had one exhibition in his life, inside the foyer of the O’Connell Street’s Ulster Bank. While Keating painted the utopianism of the dam upstream on the River Shannon, Duhig and his friends made paintings of violent battles between soldiers and displaced fishermen a few miles away.

Last July in Askeaton, Tina O’Connell and Neal White further questioned Keating’s identity,

digitally remaking his now-destroyed 1939 mural for the World Fair in New York and installing it underneath the stage of Askeaton’s Community Hall. This gesture suggested that Keating might be a subconscious entity, hiding in wait in the shadows, to be encountered as we collectively negotiate what art can do in this region.

In our 2018 programme, we will collaborate with Lismore Castle Arts in Waterford. We both share interests in how the wider Munster region’s environment and culture is perceived.

We have introduced established international artists, such as Olivia Plender from Stockholm, Stuart Whipps from Birmingham and the Centre for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles, to further this enquiry. Following much exploring over the last two years, the group exhibition, ‘The Expanded Field’, will be presented at Lismore in July.

Our summer residency programme, ‘Welcome to the Neighbourhood’, runs from 16 – 28 July, with five artists living and working in Askeaton accompanied by public tours, screenings, talks and more. In addition, Limerick artist Carl Doran is in residence at Askeaton’s ruined twelfth-century castle, working with OPW staff who have been actively conserving the site over the last decade.

In 2018, we have an additional emphasis on publication. An expended resource book generated through Filip Van Dingenen’s Algae Summit – a pan-European symposium on the subject of seaweed, held last summer on Coney Island’s Shannon Estuary – will soon be launched. Columbian curator Catalina Lozano is a frequent visitor here, and her new book, The Cure, features modern accounts of shamanic healing, ghosts and stolen rhino horns. Deirdre O’Mahony takes on the role of a private investigator in her forthcoming artist’s book, which tracks down a painting she sold to the now defunct Shannon Development Agency, a quango whose policies dreamed of industrialising the Shannon into the Irish version of the Rhine-Ruhr valley.

askeatonarts.com

Neal White and Tina O’Connell, Study for a Pavilion: Askeaton, 2017, ongoing

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Bernadette Cotter, Edge of Absence, 2018, performance; image courtesy of Limerick City Gallery of Art

LIMERICK CITY GALLERY OF ART (LCGA) is

Limerick’s premier visual arts space and is recognised as one of the most significant galleries in Ireland. It has a distinguished track record of serving the region through a programme of national and international exhibitions and is at the forefront of supporting visual artists at all stages of their careers. Occupying a site adjacent to The People’s Park in the Georgian Quarter of the city, LCGA was unveiled in its current guise in 1985 when the City Library and Museum moved out of the then designated Carnegie Building. In a bold decision, Limerick City Council (LCC) dedicated the entire building to the presentation of contemporary visual art and their Permanent Collection. LCGA is also a key partner to the critically acclaimed EVA International, which takes place every two years.

LCGA is funded by LCC and the Arts Council and aims to provide an innovative exhibition programme, which offers regional, national and international artists the opportunity to experiment, develop and exhibit their work. The gallery also aims to acquire, conserve and exhibit the Permanent Collection for the purposes of education and public enjoyment, thus enabling participation and stimulating cultural experiences for local communities and visitors. These objectives are further supported through free access to exhibitions and events, as well as the exploration of new audiences and artistic approaches.

LCGA also develops partnerships with other organisations to achieve common goals. We are proud of our close connections with other cultural institutions and programmers in Limerick, including Limerick School of Art and Design, University of Limerick, the Irish Chamber Orchestra and Dance Limerick. Nationally, LCGA also works closely with Bealtaine – an annual festival celebrating art and older people.

The 2018 programme opened on 25 January with ‘Repair’, a survey exhibition of work by Bernadette Cotter. Cotter’s formidable and fearless practice is rooted in her use of materials. The

eponymous new piece was made specifically for LCGA. A roundtable discussion of Cotter’s work will take place on Thursday 22 March with Alice Maher, Dr Austin McQuinn and the artist to coincide with the launch of a catalogue, including essays by McQuinn and the writer Sara Baume.

Running concurrently is the exhibition ‘Known Unknowns’, curated by the 2015 – 17 Shinnors Scholar, Simon Corcoran, as part of his research MA in Curatorial Studies. The exhibition reflects on 80 years of the Permanent Collection, with new response-based works by Damien Flood, Nuala O’Sullivan and Daniel Greaney. The exhibition merges the old and new, the known and the unknown, to forge new relationships and narratives which connect the artists’ distinct practices to the collection. EVA International will also play a central role in our 2018 programme. The biennial exhibition, curated by Inti Guerrero, will run from 14 April to 8 July and will include 56 Irish and international visual artists. During the summer, an exhibition of new work by Gabhann Dunne will deal with ownership of the environment in Ireland. Rather than using a polemical tone, Dunne highlights our disconnect from the environment in understated ways, leaving no doubt about the situation we find ourselves in during the first half of this century.

LCGA is delighted to include Maud Cotter, one of the leading artists of her generation, in our autumn programme. LCGA has worked closely with Cotter to develop a substantial body of new work that will have its first manifestation at LCGA, before travelling to The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon and Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane in 2019. An exhibition by the Dutchborn and Dublin-based artist, Anita Groener, will also open in the autumn. ‘Citizen’ is a multimedia exhibition of drawings, video and silhouette installations exploring collective alienation amidst the current global refugee crisis. gallery.limerick.ie

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Regional Focus

Supporting Arts & Culture Sheila Deegan Arts and Culture Officer at Limerick City and County Council

County Limerick Youth Theatre

THE LIMERICK ARTS OFFICE was established

in 1988 and has been supporting and promoting arts and culture in Limerick for 30 years and is now at a key point in its cultural history and development. Since Limerick’s time as Ireland’s first City of Culture in 2014, it has been renamed as the Limerick Culture and Arts Office (LCAO). We currently provide a wide range of arts and cultural opportunities through strategic supports for individual practitioners, cultural organisations, communities and groups organising and engaging in arts activities aligned to local, national and international strategies.

A new role for LCAO is the delivery of five civic festivals and events across departments in Limerick City and County Council (LCC).

Support for youth arts practice includes the delivery of Artist in Schools programmes, support for various festivals (such as Fresh Film Festival) and individual bursaries for young people to attend important professional development opportunities. This brings a strong educational dynamic that allows younger audiences to participate in and learn through the arts. Opportunities and supports to individual artists are provided in the form of residencies, travel bursaries, artists’ studios and accommodation. We are extremely proud of the artists' apartments in John’s Square, Limerick, which form part of the city’s living cultural quarter.

The Limerick Cultural Strategy (2016 – 2030) was adopted by LCC in 2016. The strategy aims to develop Limerick’s artistic capabilities by attracting and retaining cultural practitioners to live and work in Limerick. Importantly, we work to develop resources necessary for staging largescale performances, festivals and productions and to grow and support innovative and creative collectives. A number of open call grant schemes for financial support have been developed to deliver these objectives and are currently open for applications. The Limerick Cultural Strategy also strives to place culture and the arts at the heart of the economic and social regeneration in Limerick. An example of this is the development of Troy Studios, as a significant media hub for television and film production in Limerick.

Aligning to the Creative Ireland plan to “enable creativity in every community”, the Limerick Culture and Creativity Plan was published in 2017. This plan supported 18 projects in the city and county through the Creative Ireland funding, including ‘Walking Limerick – Luimneach ag Siúl’, free walking tours as part of Limerick’s Cruinniú na Cásca event on Easter Monday. At a European level, we are partnering with Walk the Plank to deliver the ‘European School of Spectacle’, which is funded by Creative Europe. This project is part of a wider initiative that brought together local and international creative practitioners, trained in outdoor arts, for night-time events in Limerick over eight days. Last November the trainees showcased their new knowledge and skills by putting together a ‘scratch’ performance, titled Glean Áine Alight, on the grounds of the Herbertstown GAA Club, with the community of Hospital – a small town in east County Limerick. Over 400 people from the locality attended and were transfixed by the aerial performances, fire drawings and children’s parade.

The Autonomy Project is a collaboration between multiple partners designed by LCAO, LCC and artist Lisa McLoughlin and funded through the Arts Council’s Invitation to Collaboration scheme. The project aims to promote engagement with the arts, focusing on a global resurgence in youth activism and providing a platform for the young people of Limerick to explore a wide range of issues through art and culture, including identity, gender and social justice. Phase one of The Autonomy Project will be delivered as part of Limerick Fringe 2018, and an international symposium will take place in the University of Limerick in April 2018.

Public support for culture is widely evident across Limerick city and county, as are the economic, social and cultural benefits. The projects discussed here manifest, in some way or another, the underlying ethos of LCAO’s work, which is to foster imagination, innovation, creativity and integration, allowing citizens and visitors to experience the uniqueness and beauty of Limerick. limerick.ie

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

How is it Made?

Solidity and Comfort HAZEL SHAW DISCUSSES WORK SHOWN BY STEPHANIE DEADY IN HER RECENT SOLO EXHIBITION, ‘PRIMED VISION’, AT KEVIN KAVANAGH GALLERY.

PAINT IS A VERSATILE medium allowing for detailed re-

finement, while also permitting gestural articulation and the abstraction of forms. Oil paint, in particular, evokes a slow, considered and controlled process of observation and representation and carries with it a sense of longevity. Limerick-born artist Stephanie Deady uses oil paints on wooden boards to consider the various environments she has experienced and inhabited. Her first solo exhibition, ‘Primed Vision’ at Kevin Kavanagh gallery (11 January – 10 February), displayed an accomplished selection of interior scenes painted over extended periods of time. Choosing wooden boards as her surface, Deady has control over the exact speculations of her images, finding wood easier to cut to size and better for accurate drawing. Her medium is almost architectural in this sense, reflecting her thematic interest and curiosity in forms and surfaces. Taking this structural approach to painting, Deady examines the details of landscapes and buildings with clean, austere brushstrokes and studious intent. This precision is fragmented by the occasional gestural stroke or an object out of place within the composition; the artist delighting in the articulation of space through the medium of paint.

Deady’s painting is informed by her astute, observational manner and meditative reflection on the spaces she occupies.

Her works exist in series, often returning to depict the same room or landscape multiple times. As the artist reflects on her process and the works she has created, she often finds more to be done or another view to be articulated upon her return to the scene. As the current recipient of the prestigious Tony O’Malley Residency award, Deady now works from a spacious home and studio in Callan, County Kilkenny. The residency has been awarded by Jane O’Malley, in conjunction with the RHA, every year since 2011, with the aim of offering painters the privilege of seclusion and space to develop their practice. With a focus on space, steadiness and calm running through Deady’s paintings, the O’Malley residency seems a fitting phase in the artist’s career. Having graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design in 2014, she worked in various studios across Dublin before taking up this current residency. The ways in which we inhabit space preoccupies her painting, as does the role of architecture in shaping our environment and experiences. The results are slightly off-kilter rooms or landscapes only sparsely populated by objects and, occasionally, a fragmented human figure.

The artist depicts interior scenes that feel both ordinary and safe yet curious enough to be worthy of an attentive viewer. Be it a friend’s kitchen in Aughrim, an exhibition space at MART studios, or the alcoves of an undisclosed location, each image Deady creates comes from a real place inhabited, observed or remembered. ‘Primed Vision’ – a four-part series depicting the artist’s studio space in Dublin – began during her time there in 2015, but she returned to this series in 2017, creating two final works using photographs and memory. The title of the series suggests an ideal vantage point; a view carefully calculated by the artist and communicated to the viewer.

It also draws attention to the medium of paint and its surfaces, a quiet reminder of the picture plane as manipulated by the artist. Despite minute detail and careful brushstrokes, throughout the series we experience destabilising shifts in perspective, distortions so subtle you could almost miss them.

Stephanie Deady, installation view, ‘Primed Vision’ at Kevin Kavanagh, February 2018; image courtesy the artist and Kevin Kavanagh

These subtle abstractions seem calculated to disrupt a notion of realism, continually bringing the image back to its surface. Avoiding the sentimentality that risks jeopardising the viewer’s own connection to a work, Deady employs a cool colour palette and reserved manner of painting. Showing a flair for restraint, a certain stillness permeates her steady brushstrokes. These images are refined, simple and to the point. Yet their fascination is that they do not feel cold or distant, an attachment is there. These are paintings of a studio as it has been experienced, lived in and felt.

Neglecting a deeply personal narrative, Deady invites the viewer to create their own, and to become as absorbed in the space as she once was. Through continued reiterations of the same spaces, her paintings infer a sense of time passing by, as objects and people move through their environments.

Deady’s ‘Second Thoughts’ series, exhibited as part of a group exhibition at MART studios in 2015, comprised small rectangular boards depicting an array of landscapes and empty rooms, their alcoves and cornices being particularly prominent. Taking fragments of environments she has encountered, Deady creates an aesthetic trail that carries the viewer across each piece. When displayed in sequence, a line runs horizontally across images, using abstracted forms to create a sense of movement through space. Unlike ‘Primed Vision’, these images seem to work at a quicker pace, evocative of a journey rather than a fixed abode.

Deady is interested in the evolution of a space as we inhabit it. The interiors she paints have histories of human presence and they have also been subject to dilapidation.

A blank wall in a studio or house is given patchy layers – indicating that it has been painted over again and again in the same colour – while there are spaces where paint has chipped away. This is the kind of detail Deady picks up on, these subtle suggestions of time passing and the various iterations of work that have come and gone. In her ‘Aughrim House’ series (2015 – 16), a worktop in the kitchen of a friend’s home is studied in minute detail over the course of seven paintings. Although the kitchen is typically a site of warmth and home comforts, Deady’s observations play with the boundaries of familiarity, fragmenting and reconstructing the Formica cupboards and dirty dishes in each of her representations.

Highly conscious of the simple acts of looking and representation, Deady takes a methodical yet experimental approach to the scene. Her painting is inherently connected to the ways in which we familiarise ourselves with a space over time. Each time we enter, new details emerge and different foci become apparent. These images are self-consciously fabricated and carefully constructed with this in mind. A human form appears momentarily throughout this series, abstracted and fragmented, as an almost ghostly presence. The figure is never wholly present in Deady’s paintings, yet the images evolve in ways that allude to continuous human interaction with these environments. The architecture of the studio or the home provides a sense of constancy, a stillness and longevity juxtaposed by fleeting human presence.

Deady is slow to offer explanation for her work, or to enter into theoretical dialogue with critics. Although admitting that she listens to philosophy and music in order to enter a state of calm while working, her paintings are deliberately not referential to external sources. Her work is about the simple act of quiet observation, absorbing a space and its aesthetic qualities. For Deady, these paintings seem to fetishise the act of looking, finding enjoyment in their calculated representations of familiar spaces. For the viewer, these spaces are initially unfamiliar, yet they at once ignite curiosity and a feeling of calm. Through a shared fascination in observation – looking in on a habitat and examining its details – these paintings are somewhat reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s lonely subjects. Yet Deady’s interiors and landscapes have their own charm. The predominant feeling of the work is an invitation to join in the artist’s quiet and calm delight in the act of looking. Amidst the transience of objects and human life as it shifts and disappears, architecture and environment have a stabilising presence. Their solidity is a comfort.

Hazel Shaw is a contemporary art critic and creative writer based in Dublin.

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

How is it Made?

Kian Benson Bailes, Clobber Verses, 2017, mixed media installation; Connacht Tribune Print Works, TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2017; image courtesy the artist

Spatial Assemblage KIAN BENSON BAILES DISCUSSES HIS SCULPTURAL AND DIGITAL FABRICATION METHODS.

I BECAME INTERESTED in identity politics in second year of my Visual Arts Practice

degree at IADT Dún Laoghaire. Terms like ‘appropriation’ had begun to penetrate the pop culture sphere, which caused me to evaluate the work I was making in terms of my own cultural perspective. My practice has become an extension of the types of socio-political commentary that have become increasingly prevalent throughout the internet via social media and the public sphere. The internet is a particularly pertinent platform because it offers itself as a vehicle for research, while also providing its own kind of spatial interventions.

Historical art movements such as Arte Povera encapsulated ideologies regarding art and the everyday, defined by Italian art historian, Germano Celant, in terms of people against systems. The system he speaks of falls in line with many concerns regarding present and future assimilation and commodification of queer bodies. When Celant states (with regards to art production) that “each of his gestures has to be absolutely consistent with his behaviour in the past and has to foreshadow his future”, he highlights a tendency towards defining intangible ideas, people and gestures relative to historical contexts – a concern widely shared by queer theorists.1 Such concepts resonate with my own interest in making and are particularly relevant to postmodern notions of the everyday, whereby computers and digital spaces have become primary models of communicating and recording, generating vast archives of personal data – uploaded to clouds and easily accessible from anywhere that has an internet connection.

For me, the repositioning of these historical narratives inside a queer framework has become interesting, based on a capacity to subvert and to create new narratives. Where queer theory practices see understandings of the term as relative to history, it is constantly being defined and redefined as that narrative progresses. The type of assemblage techniques that underpin my two-dimensional research and digital collages, echo the same process interests found within my sculptural assemblages. Compounding the two approaches has expanded my ideas about image deconstruction and reconstruction.

Judy Chicago’s installation, The Dinner Party (1979), is a pointed reference for my work, based on how the piece wrote a new historical narrative by placing a certain value on kitsch over the aesthetic object. Documenting the process of making a physical sculpture and deconstructing it through collage techniques; reconstructing and printing this form as another physical object – this amounts to an aesthetic investigation of how

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Kian Benson Bailes, Untitled, 2018, digital collage; image courtesy the artist

we read images and objects. It also questions whether the documentation of process embodies the transience of queer culture more apparently than a finished artwork.

New sculptural works (including An Urban Phenomenon and Clobber Verses) developed for TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2017: ‘They Call Us the Screamers’ allowed me to engage in the types of community politics that ran concurrent with the contextualisation of the exhibition. Across my practice, building sculptural installations has always been typified by methodologies that feel queer, through the use of found materials and readymade objects. Incorporating large-scale prints into my sculptural installations for the first time allowed an engagement with pictorial space that felt authentic to my background in painting. The installations for TULCA’s Connacht Tribune Print Works venue were built from a range of materials including plastic, wood, plaster, papier-mâché and cardboard. These material associations allowed me to erect spaces that fostered associations with historical art movements (such as Minimalism and Pop Art), as well as capitalist motifs that intersect with queer theory, engaging the viewer’s relational co-presence with objects in space.

Exhibition production has become an important extension of my studio practice. If artworks already exist, or are made for a specific purpose or setting, they are often repurposed or recycled afterwards. Exhibition-making exists as a platform for my ideas to be realised in a space outside of the studio. Whether a success or failure, this process allows making to be tangential and revaluated once art objects return to the studio. This treatment of materials is in direct conversation with the ‘precious culture’ surrounding artworks – and indeed the preciousness and perceived hierarchies of art materials themselves – and is only further compounded by my own interest in the ephemeral vernacular of queer culture.

How is it Made?

Kian Benson Bailes, No fats / no femmes, 2017, digital collage; image courtesy the artist

I am currently interested in expanding my use of digital collage – a process that, for me, denotes a fundamental compositional principle, but also the origins of symbols, motifs and visual representation. Moving the rhetoric into a digital sphere only furthers this conversation about how images are consumed, based on contemporary audiences’ participation in internet culture. When Hito Steyerl suggested that the ‘poor image’ mocks the promises of digital technology, it reminds us of our expectations regarding systems and the kinds of representation we readily and intimately consume.2 Digital art seems to be more expedient, because it addresses a viewer’s concerns more directly, but the medium interests me because it proposes many of the same concerns as sculpture. The dimensional concerns of the medium are investigated through my use of AutoCAD softwares, where virtual spatial interventions are possible and scale is implied through screens and projections (as opposed to physical objects), which requires a different set of demands from viewers in this regard. Building images using software like Photoshop, interests me because of the self-documenting processes that the software undertakes on its own. Using the preset software moulds and templates available is like having access to a digital ready-made, which comes with its own set of rules and limitations specific to the medium.

I am interested in notions of sculpture as architecture or public artwork, based on expectations of audience participation, as proposed by Swiss artist and architect, Max Bill. Bill questioned whether, at a time when “sculpture had become closely identified with the object, with something seen rather than experienced as a presence, a sculpture could still constitute a monument”.3 In this way, the work becomes more performative and has direct concerns with the body politic

– habitually a very queer space. Arguably, successful queer art practices have become even more engaging when interpreted through the lens of socially-engaged critical frameworks, like Relational Aesthetics. Addressing the audience is a more practical concern that has emerged in a recent body of work, currently showing as a part of ‘Like Me’ with Eleanor McCaughey and Alice Hanratty in The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, until 31 March. This work is entirely framed by digital processes and plays with expectations regarding the origins of these processes. Images built inside a resolution usually encountered on a screen have been enlarged to the scale of a billboard. Similarly, images encountered amid fleeting online conditions are materialised in a more formal and traditional sizing in the exhibition context.

Kian Benson Bailes is an artist based in Sligo.

Notes 1 Germano Celant, ‘Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerrilla War’, Flash Art International No 5, 1967.

2 Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux Journal #10, November 2009.

3 Andrew Causey, Sculpture since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press: 1998).

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Artist Publishing

Leaving Little Trace, But Whispers…

REBECCA O’DWYER DISCUSSES HER ONE-YEAR PUBLISHING PROJECT, RESPONSE TO A REQUEST. RESPONSE TO A REQUEST 1 was an online publication I

started in July 2016, and which came to an end, for the most part, in June 2017. Over the course of its brief run, I somehow managed to convince the following people to write for it: Kathy Tynan, Kevin Breathnach, Niamh McCooey, Nathan O’Donnell, Lizzie Lloyd, Adrian Duncan, Joanna Walsh, Ian Maleney, Susan Connolly, Jonathan Mayhew, Darragh McCausland, Emma Dwyer, Sam Keogh, Sue Rainsford, Michael Naghten Shanks, Suzanne Walsh, Ingrid Lyons, Sabina McMahon, Eimear Walshe, Dennis McNulty, Fergus Feehily and Niamh O’Malley. However, as I prepared for the belated closing event that took place on the 2 of February at the Douglas Hyde Gallery – presenting three final responses from the artist Isabel Nolan, writer Mike McCormack and poet Ste-

a line in it that struck me: “why mightn’t there be, somehow, a new science for each object?”2 On waking, my somewhat reductive dreaming brain then converted this question into the idea of Response, which I hoped would create a space for new kinds of writing about art, with each edition responding to an individual image. Invariably, at this point I also returned to T. J. Clark’s seminal A Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006), in which Clark returns and returns again to two paintings by Nicholas Poussin: “Maybe,” he muses, “we deeply want to believe that images happen, essentially or sufficiently, all at once… Maybe the actual business of repeated gawping strikes us as embarrassing at least when set out in sentences”. These, then, were my main coordinates. Response to a Request would be simply a place for looking at, and thinking about, images.

Stephen Sexton speaking at the Response to a Request closing event in on 2 February in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; image courtesy of Rebecca O'Dwyer

phen Sexton – I was faced with the task of articulating why I started Response to a Request at all. What, exactly, was its aim?

I’m not sure there really was any distinct aim with the project, but let’s assume that Response to a Request was set up to address a modest need or even a perceived lack within Irish art writing. Was it successful in this aim? One way of traditionally gauging success is, of course, through a growing or at least stable readership; and, more typically now, through a sustained and visible currency on social media. But the problem is that Response to a Request vanished just as quickly as it appeared. The website is dead and the texts are not available to read anymore. Granted, I knew this would be the case when I first conceived the idea, but this material dearth makes its assessment – as success, or indeed failure – much less clear-cut. On a personal level, there’s also something distinctly self-sabotaging about editing a publication that leaves little trace but whispers.

Thinking back, I realise now that Response to a Request was, rather unfashionably, the result of a dream. At the time, I was reading Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980), and there was

Having a very clear idea of the website in my mind – a simple page split down the middle; image to one side, text to the other, with the image remaining visible at all times as you read – I put out a request for a website designer on Twitter in May 2016. With the help of Fallow Media’s Ian Maleney (who not only built the site, but later contributed a beautiful essay on Agnes Martin’s Friendship) it came together very quickly. Admittedly as much an economic as aesthetic decision, I decided at this point that Response to a Request would only run for a limited time, one year; that there would be no archive; and that, as a result, I would commission through invitation, rather than open call. Happily, from working in Ireland, looking at art and reading a lot of art writing, I had acquired a collection of likely unrequited ‘crushes’ – I borrow the usage from Brian Dillon’s 2017 book, Essayism3 – and now, it seemed, was the time to make the move. I drafted an odd blurb and sent invitations out, a lot of them to people I barely knew, hoping, again unfashionably, to get to know them better. To my surprise, the vast majority accepted the invitation, and the first response, from Kathy Tynan, went

online in August 2016. Every two weeks, a new writer would then respond to an image of their choice; this included a painting by Peter Doig (Lizzie Lloyd), a photograph by Josef Koudelka (Suzanne Walsh), and another photo from the scene of Gianni Versace’s murder (Sam Keogh). Enfolded into the project, in contrast with most online reading, was the idea of urgency: once the text disappeared, it would not come back.

Given its somewhat feverish beginnings, I did not apply for arts council funding. It was also unlikely that I would be able to generate advertising revenue from a website that essentially deleted itself every fortnight. Both of these factors meant that Response to a Request was entirely self-funded, and, even more problematically, that I was unable to pay any of its contributors. I thought this was a dreadful concession to make, to be honest, and still do; but I justified this bad situation by giving each text a considerable amount of attention (likely too much, considering I was also writing a PhD at the time) – most went through at least three rounds of edits – and by doing my best to ensure that each would receive enough traction via social media, mail-outs, and so forth. This doesn’t completely allay the fact of their unpaid labour, not by a long shot, but at the same time I think this situation is preferable to writing something for peanuts only for it not to be edited at all. I do hope Response to a Request’s contributors agree.

Back to the question of its aim: I think, at its most basic, the idea behind Response was to foster a kind of community.

And I mean this, first and foremost, in a very selfish way: being a fan of these artists and writers meant I wanted to engineer some means of working with them. Having a lot of faith in these people, I was pretty certain I wouldn’t be the only one who would be interested in reading what they wrote. Simply put, I think artists develop singular attachments to images, and I wanted these teased out and committed to paper so that I could read them; those that listened, rapt, to Isabel Nolan at the recent closing event, will surely share in this sense. While always looking to art, though, I was also coming across a lot of new Irish writers in journals like Gorse, Paper Visual Art Journal, The Dublin Review, Fallow Media, The Tangerine and elsewhere, and was excited by what they were doing too. I wanted to see how all of these artists and writers approached the task of writing about images; as a person who had only ever written about art, I also wanted to learn from them. And even though Response to a Request is now definitely concluded, my small hope is that it will be a catalyst for other collaborative projects in the future. If the closing event at the Douglas Hyde Gallery demonstrated anything, it is that there is an appetite for even more conversations between art and writing.

There are just as many ways of writing about images as there are images. To borrow something of Sexton’s response from the closing event, indeed it seems entire worlds can spill out from them, “undamaged, undented, and whole”.4

Rebecca O’ Dwyer is an Irish art writer based in Berlin.

Notes 1 I was reading a lot by the Swiss author Robert Walser at the time, and so I borrowed the project’s title from one of his short stories.

2 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage Books, 2000) p. 8.

3 Brian Dillon, Essayism (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017) p. 40.

4 Stephen Sexton, Donut Plains (2018), the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2 February 2018.

The Visual Artists' News Sheet

Critique Edition 36: March – April 2018

Tom Climent, Berg (detail), 2017, oil, plaster and sand on canvas, 153 x 122 cm; image courtesy the artist and Dunamaise Arts Centre

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Tom Climent ‘Latitudes’ Dunamaise Arts Centre 19 January – 28 February 2018

'Sustainable Futures’ Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh 8 February – 1 April 2018 Featuring: Méadhbh O’Connor, Fiona Kelly, David Thomas Smith and Sarah Lincoln

TOM CLIMENT’S exhibition, ‘Latitudes’, at

Dunamaise Arts Centre, Portlaoise, was described in the gallery text as “investigating the boundaries between abstraction and representation”. Climent presented twelve roughly similar landscapes featuring a central mound, peak or outcrop on a slightly higher-than-centre horizon line. While these compositions fall within the recognisable tradition of landscape painting, the artist’s synthetic colour palette, along with occasional architectural additions, serve to unsettle the familiarity that the genre normally fosters. Perhaps Climent’s expansion of this disciplinary boundary is less focused on stylistic approaches and more concerned with how the viewer rationalises personal expectations of painting. It helps that they are beautifully executed and bridge real and imaginary worlds. Climent’s disorderly arrangements of planes, vertices and edges are softened by his hand-drawn outlines, textured surfaces and luxuriant use of colour.

The pictorial format employed in Adamant (2017), brings to mind a ringfort formation.

Being so familiar and numerous within the Irish landscape, ringforts are almost invisible, appearing merely as hilltops that seem oddly different from the land around them. Adamant depicts a primitive dome-shaped dwelling or similar structure. Its irregular form is painted in vivid planes of deep red, vermillion, pink and, occasionally, lime green. The sky is an expanse of opaque cerulean blue. The surrounding hill is mossy and sage-coloured, as sunlight filters down onto the foreground, suggesting the rising dawn. Energy radiates from the strange hybrid psychedelic structure, yet it seems perfectly conceivable that it might have grown from the remains of an early medieval ringfort. Climent describes his painterly approach as “largely intuitive”, with painting triggering the discovery of “unintended connections and relationships.”

Caprock (2017) resembles a burial mound located in a flat upland position, rather than on a hilltop. Climent presents a slightly flattened isometric view, allowing the front elevations and foreground to be shaded from ambient light, illustrated through blocks of violet, purple, maroon and brown. The vertices and points of intersection are more cleanly defined, while the flat areas are

more textured, revealing layers of underpainting and plaster. Over these coarse areas, patches of luminous colour brighten the scene, despite a dull sky. In this way, Climent manages to avoid the risk of over-boiling his intense colour range or overreaching the narrative between his key influences of archaeology and science fiction.

The rock formation depicted in a larger work, Berg (2017) slides at glacial pace from the horizon as it’s bulk casts a deep shadow on the hillside. Conversely, in Mountain Mind (2017), liquid matter spills from a huge opening in the mound, flooding the ground around it. The relationship between the subject and this sense of continuing motion serves to widen the narrative possibilities beyond the picture plane. This interaction also reveals the technical and conceptual struggles between being faithful to intuition (without over indulging) and producing good painting.

Two works, Alfuen and Gimle, presented sideby-side in the gallery, more explicitly disclose how personally compelling the making of this work might be. Both paintings comprise sharply pointed mountain peaks whose apexes are hewn with the same distorted harlequin edifice. The downward slopes that fall away from the peaks gradually soften into a more natural appearance. The viewpoint is paradoxical, only possible by being elevated in flight. There is a sense that these mountain peaks stem from innate memory or knowledge – in the way that ringforts are involuntarily etched onto the collective Irish consciousness. Sometimes a sense of familiarity has no identifiable origin, while ideas are unbound by pure representation or abstraction. These intangible qualities permeate the materiality of Climent’s painting. His compositions are neither wholly real, nor completely fictional and most importantly, they offer no easy resolutions. His work remains open, generous and evolving, demonstrating great investment of skill and vision. By neat coincidence, the arts centre’s namesake, the Rock of Dunamaise, stands less than five miles away, surrounded by the seven hills of Stradbally, so I imagine that local audiences actually felt very at home looking at this work.

Carissa Farrell is a writer and curator based in Dublin.

Tom Climent, Corona, 2017, oil, plaster & sand on canvas, 244 x 153 cm; image courtesy the artist and Dunamaise Arts Centre

‘Sustainable Futures’, installation view, West Gallery; Méadhbh O’Connor Biosystem, 2018, and Fiona Kelly, The Distillation of Detritus, 2015 – 17; image courtesy of Sirius Arts Centre

‘SUSTAINABLE FUTURES’ is an ambitious ex-

hibition currently showing at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, County Cork. The show acts as a focal point for a multifaceted collaborative project bringing contemporary art practice into dialogue with scientific research on sustainability, through a series of talks and events involving artists, the scientific community and local youth groups.

Upon entering the East Gallery, the first thing we encounter is David Thomas Smith’s largescale aerial photographs of the Chrysler factory and Silicon Valley, taken between 2009 and 2010.

These are Google Map composites, developed using a meticulous process that works against the low quality of the source material. Smith has photographed tiny sections of the Google Map images, reconstructing them like a jigsaw, so that the images stay sharp as the scale is increased. With a background in documentary photography, the artist shows us detail that wouldn’t normally be visible. The photographs deal with the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ – referring to the geological age of mankind who, in one hundred years, have affected the natural world more drastically than natural processes have in 1,000 years.

Continuing the theme of protracted and accelerated time, are new works by Sarah Lincoln including Skin Contact (2017), a series of eight wall-mounted pottery plates. Some of the surfaces incorporate spiral patterns, which makes them look like fossils or archaeological remnants. Despite having the appearance of relics from the past, these objects are spray-painted in futuristic silvers and golds, causing them to oscillate between the past and the future. Interestingly, these forms are actually cast from the plates used to spin pottery and therefore point towards the origins of craft, as well as to the ground from which future clay will emerge.

Upon entering the West Gallery, we are met by the vibrant pinks and vivid greens, which punctuate the earthy tones of Méadhbh O’Connor’s Biosystem (2018) – a sculptural installation of hanging globes comprising preserved and living moss and various air plants. The installation references the Gaia hypothesis, initiated by British environmentalist, James Lovelock, in 1965.

Lovelock’s theory posits that the earth is one

large superorganism capable of regulating itself and that human beings are connected to everything else within this living system. O’Connor’s installation suitably demonstrates this hypothesis, given that the art objects are actually living organisms and will only survive the duration of the exhibition if they are cared for.

O’Connor’s hanging globes lead the eye down towards Fiona Kelly’s The Distillation of Detritus (2015 – 17), a pile of reconstituted blocks, sitting atop a wooden platform. Kelly has reappropriated waste from demolition sites in order to create a perfectly formed stack communicating ideas of both destruction and waste, but also renewal and life, based on the cosmological premise that all matter comes from and returns to dust. On the adjacent wall is the word Dustsceawung written in limestone dust. This Old English word denotes the transience of all things and the contemplation of what has been lost, literally meaning a ‘consideration of the dust’. It offers a poignant final reflection on the exhibition and a subtle warning of the precariousness of our own position if we do not find ways to live more sustainably.

‘Sustainable Futures’ is an extremely promising curatorial debut from Claire Ryan, who ambitiously suggests that art can act as a conduit for raising awareness about environmental concerns.

This proposition is all the more convincing given the visual seductiveness of the exhibition, with its paired back formalism, drawing the viewer in to face the most pressing issues of our time, in a way that cleverly manages not to overwhelm.

Ryan demonstrates a heightened sensitivity both to her subject and to the practices of the four artists involved. Brought together through a shared interest in environmental themes, the artworks resonate with each other as separate but integrated elements of the whole, embodying the overriding message of the exhibition – that we are intimately connected to all living things and can affect the future of the natural environment, for better or for worse.

Kirstie North is an art historian and independent curator who lectures at University College Cork.

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Institute for Conflict Research ‘A Sense of Place’ Mairead McCormack ‘Fragmented Realities’ Ards Arts Centre, Newtownards, 1 – 24 February 2018

A SERIES OF black and white digital photo-

graphs by Belfast-based artist, Mariusz Smiejek, was presented in the Georgian Gallery in Ards Arts Centre. The small-scale photographs depicted women within the natural and domestic landscapes of the Ards Peninsula. Strong tonal contrasts played a part in some of these images, whereas others had a softer tonal range. The depth of field also varied; sometimes Smiejek concentrated solely on the subject, while at other times the background was also depicted in detail. The artist explained: “I focus on the person rather than their surroundings, capturing the person rather than things”. That said, the objects surrounding the women also seemed to have life resonance. Most of the photographs intimately narrated the women’s facial expressions but a few also conveyed their physicality, stance and their attitudes towards the camera, with some seeming more self-conscious than others. Yet my favourite photographs captured a sense of energy, such as wind tugging at women’s hair. Somehow, this elemental force brought a youthfulness and honesty to the women’s smiles. Smiejek stated that “it takes time to become part of the person’s life… I like to spend as many hours or days as possible”, suggesting that, ideally, projects need to be quite durational.

Also presented within the gallery was a series of small digital colour photographs taken by these women, as part of the ‘Back to the Future’ programme organised by the Institute for Conflict Research, Belfast. Jane McComb, an artist and resident of Ards Peninsula, worked with the group over two days. Initially, the group explored the writings of Irish poet, Louis MacNeice (1907 – 1963). MacNeice was born in Belfast, educated at Merton College, Oxford, and taught for a time at Bedford College, London – the UK’s first higher education college for women.

He is buried alongside his mother in Christ Church, Carrowdore, on the Ards Peninsula.

The women used McComb’s camera to capture a range of scenes including sea-washed rocks, a soaring black-headed gull, quiet country lanes, a derelict school in Portaferry, smiling people, and a number of graveyards with awkwardly titling headstones. Snippets of MacNeice’s poetry were placed next to these colourful photographs.

A physical distinction was made between Smiejek’s work and the women’s own visual exploration of their landscape. For instance, Nuala McKnight was depicted by Smiejek in front of her elaborate doll’s house. However, the photograph she took (of a knitted teddy bear, sitting on a stonewall in Portaferry) seemed rather disconnected, in terms of placement within the gallery, as did her selected quote: “I cannot deny my past to which myself is wed, the woven figure cannot undo its thread”. Similarly, Mary Mageean was depicted in Smiejek’s documentation hugging her grandchild, yet her own photograph documents Strangford Lough, thematically supported by her chosen MacNeice quote: “Round the corner was always the sea. Our childhood”. The two bodies of work – Smiejek’s portraits and the women’s own photographs – were further distinguished through the creation of two separate catalogues and the use of different titles: ‘Women of the Peninsula’ and ‘A Sense of Place’ respectively. In my view, the two bodies of photography enhanced each other, as the viewer gradually gleaned a sense of the women. Nevertheless, it required time to connect the disparate elements of portraiture, text and photographic self-reflection.

Mairead McCormack’s concurrent exhibition, ‘Fragmented Realities’, was showing in the Sunburst Gallery. McCormack is a textile artist who juxtaposes artefacts from the past within a collage format. In the gallery, eight small-scale works were pinned to two facing walls, comprising four paper collage works and four textile pieces incorporating print and embroidery on linen. The textile works were meticulously hand embroidered but had raw, fraying edges, creating a sense of incompleteness. The works had the quality of pages from a sketchbook – imperfect, but with suggestions of interconnectedness lurking beneath their flimsy façades.

McCormack stated that, as an artist, she aims to revive and sustain the labour-intensive processes of the textile tradition. With ‘Fragmented Realities’, she attempted to explore the effects of modern society on shifting notions of craft and the handmade.

Kathryn Nelson is an artist based in County Tyrone.

Mariusz Smiejek, Abigail Dunn, Cloughey, 2017; photograph © Mariusz Smiejek

Niall de Buitléar ‘Push and Pull’ RHA Ashford Gallery, Dublin 19 January – 11 February 2018

Niall de Buitléar, Push and Pull, 2016, acrylic on canvas boards, 20 cm diameter; image courtesy the artist

IN A TED TALK entitled ‘How architecture

helped music evolve’, the musician David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) suggested that the relationship between architecture and music is directly formative. Byrne argued that the spatial and architectural features of a venue specifically influence the sonic and acoustic characters of the music performed there. In other words, American punk band, Black Flag, are to the small hardcore club what AC/DC are to the open-air area. If we imagine visual art to be engaged in a similarly formative relationship with its venues of display, it is interesting to consider whether Niall de Buitléar’s exhibition, ‘Push and Pull’, is specifically informed by the spatial particulars of its host venue, the RHA Ashford Gallery. According to the press release, Byrne’s attempts to “create [musical] compositions that were multi-layered and non-hierarchal” influenced de Buitléar’s work. Comprising 14 paintings and a small sculpture, the exhibition celebrates, with a calm but persistent rigour, the formative logic of interior worlds and the differences that emerge through formal repetition.

Moving from painting to painting, the eye instinctively traces grey and white dancing lines, synced like spinning vinyl to the tune of the circle. Over tar-black lacquered canvas boards, spools of lines seem drawn to various axes of convergence. At times these spools appear like illustrative X-rays of some physical mechanism, yet their stillness is undermined by a persistent sense of fragile flux. The formal logic of mark-making is inseparable from the human hand that intuitively executes it and these wonderful spooling forms, though measured, seem to bloat and burst into the unoccupied territories of the black canvas void. At its most abstract, the work suggests inorganic permanence. There is a sense that these geometric abstractions are to remain repeatable and eternal. But a quiet dichotomy keeps reverberating, and somehow the charming variations that emerge seem at odds with any real sense of historicity.

In his 1966 essay, Entropy and the New Monuments, Robert Smithson pointed to artworks that he felt might cause us to forego linear conceptions of the future.1 In the works cited,

perishable materials often took precedence over those that might invoke a sense of canonical permanence. As a result, these ‘new monuments’ demonstrated for Smithson the material principles of entropy, and like his own Spiral Jetty (1970), they were built against time. In a diagrammatic sense, de Buitléar’s handling of materials echoes the “backward looking futures” of Smithson’s new monuments. The consistencies of de Buitléar’s marks staccato with interruptions in the paint’s distribution. In instances where the paint is drawn too thin, the unforgiving black void peers through, placing this humble and measured chiaroscuro into a state of dynamic and entropic precariousness.

Moving away from the flatness of the canvas, we are confronted with a sculptural iteration of these recurring pictorial forms – a small, geometric sculpture, 3D-printed in incremental layers of white acrylic. It isn’t long before the imagination adds scale and dimension. With ease we can conceive this sculpture as an architectural model for some much larger intervention in the landscape, something like Will Insley’s utopian architectural project ONECITY – one of the new monuments cited by Smithson in 1966.

With Insley’s structure in mind, subterranean and hidden expansions of these forms suddenly seem conceivable beneath plinths and behind walls. It’s as if the sculpture generates a renewed viewing of the paintings: with some new-found topographical character, they seem to map seismic trenches scarred deep into the surface of encounter. This sequence of engagement seems to be imposed through a practical necessity though, rather than direct artistic intention. The exhibition’s cohesive thrust, overall, remains formally lateral, rather than sequential. Understated but monumentally resolute, ‘Push and Pull’ ensures – much like the spooling marks contently dancing the circle – that the emphasis returns, over and over again, to the form.

Philip Kavanagh is an artist and writer based in Dublin.

Notes 1 Robert Smithson, ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’, Artforum, June 1966.

Critique Jane O’Malley ‘Black & White’ Butler Gallery, Kilkenny 13 January – 25 February 2018

DOES A ‘FEMININE AESTHETIC’ exist? It’s a

divisive hypothesis (and a possibly unanswerable question) that came to mind upon viewing Jane O’Malley’s exhibition, ‘Black & White’, at the Butler Gallery. The fifty pieces shown included several etchings and aquatint prints, as well as sketches in an array of media, including chalk, Conté crayon, pastel, oil, pen and ink. As the title implies, this body of work is monochromatic, although a couple of pieces display slight intrusions of yellow. O’Malley’s ease with her wide range of media is immediately apparent. Lines are loose, fluid and used sparingly but effectively. There is a pleasing juxtaposition of sparse details – a simple outline suffices to suggest a jug, a straw, a bowl of cherries – with repetition used to add substance and pattern, as in the fields and flora of her Chinese brush drawings. O’Malley also has numerous techniques in her repertoire; these include uninterrupted fine line, scratching and removing marks. In At Michael Joe’s with Bob Quinn the Dog, 1984, she achieves an extraordinary luminosity in her rendering of the pots, bottles and jugs, through a combination of such techniques.

Landscape provides the subject matter for some of the works, which presents something of a conundrum. The lack of colour makes it difficult to identify aspects we tend to associate with landscapes – the season, the time of day, the weather – although, in Isla Graciosa, 1996, O’Malley effectively manages to create the impression of wind and movement through the use of angular lines. However, it is hard to perceive what these pieces are ‘about’. Is this due to a failure on the part of the artist, or a result of the viewer’s preconceived notions? A further disappointment in these pieces is the cartoonish rendering of sheep, an instance where O’Malley’s sureness of line seems to falter. On the other hand, her more narrative works demonstrate a confident, even cavalier, treatment of perspective. Only someone who has honed their drawing technique over many years can break the rules as joyfully as she does.

A number of pieces tenderly feature her late husband (the artist Tony O’Malley) as subject: at work, rest, or engaged in household chores.

Others depict domestic interiors, rendered very simply, often with doors or windows opening onto a lush world of vegetation, with birds being a regular feature. The contrast between the pared-back interiors and the detailed exteriors is intriguing and poses questions about the artist’s perception of her world. Does she feel herself to be constrained within a sparse domestic environment, compelled to look out onto a richer, more substantive world? Or is this what it is to be female? O’Malley’s work is not thematically or theoretically challenging. The subject matter is domestic, comprising depictions of her husband, home and environment. For the most part, the artist evades the viewer, visible in only one self-portrait, as she draws the image she sees in the mirror. But even here she presents herself at a remove from the viewer, choosing to be described just as “self ”.

‘Black & White’ is not presented as a body of finished work, but as a series of drawings taken from O’Malley’s sketchbooks and notebooks over nearly forty years. It is therefore not reasonable to ask of them what they were never intended to provide. These pieces ably demonstrate the importance of drawing and of drawing regularly as part of art practice. They offer a comprehensive checklist of media and technique, without a dependence on colour. But by being placed on public view, they are contextualised as artworks.

In this context, I wonder what they are telling us about women and art. Is it still possible, desirable or acceptable to talk about a ‘feminine aesthetic’? O’Malley’s work is not about these issues and therefore cannot address them. But provoking them – well, that’s another matter.

Mary Catherine Nolan is a Dublin-based artist with a background in linguistics.

Jane O’Malley, Summer Evening Seal Cottage - 9th June ’74, 1974, pen and ink on paper, 20 x 28 cm; © Jane O'Malley, photograph by Ignatius O'Neill, courtesy Butler Gallery

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Conference

Measuring Change – Changing Measurements MICHAËLE CUTAYA REPORTS ON THE CREATE NETWORKING DAY FOR THE COLLABORATIVE ARTS, WHICH TOOK PLACE ON 1 DECEMBER 2017.

FOR ITS 2017 ITERATION, the Create Networking Day

for Collaborative Arts took place at the recently opened O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance at NUI Galway. Sinead O’Reilly, Head of Local Arts and Arts Participation at the Arts Council, was tasked with delivering the opening remarks. She set out two themes which resonated throughout the presentations on the day, the first being the changing demographics in Irish society. O’Reilly quoted some numbers from the Central Statistics Office – for instance that 18% of the population speak neither English nor Irish at home – as a way to highlight the extent to which Irish society is changing and what it means for the arts, in terms of participation and representation of ethnic minorities. She also raised the necessarily complex question of measuring the transformative role of the arts, pointing out the Arts Council’s commitment, in its new strategy, to “looking at the impact of its investment in the arts”. She added that one of the first principles to emerge was the uncoupling of measurement and advocacy, and that the collection of information about the impact of a project did not have to be a constraint on projects – a timely development that I welcome.

Selina Thompson’s keynote presentation, ‘Sand’, opened with the statement: “my Create residency in Ireland was a disaster; there, I said it”. What followed was a moving, funny, insightful and lucid presentation, the likes of which are rather rare. Working through the difficulties she encountered (including sickness, logistics and misjudgment, amongst other things), in which she failed to deliver, Thompson also shared what she learned about her own practice from participating in the residency. We might fleetingly wonder how in such a scenario, we could measure impact. Thompson presented her work as being centred on her identity as a black woman, identifying two strands. The first of these is a socially-engaged practice in which she operates from the position of a community insider – in the Portrane residency she could only position herself as an outsider and found it difficult.

The second strand she identified was her work as a researcher and her participation in conferences across the world, bringing her into contact with vastly different contexts in which to address her identity as a black woman – the fluidity of which she likened to ‘shifting sands’. She gave examples of different situations where her own position shifted each time. In Texas, for instance, she could address issues of race to an exclusively white audience because she had a British accent. In the subsequent conversation, Blessing Moyo, a human right activist from Zimbabwe, asked Thompson how she became an artist, to which Thompson replied that she could become an artist because two generations of women before her did the work that she, Moyo, was doing now in Ireland.

Thompson added that she was constantly asking herself what she could do to pass on her privilege, which was one reason why she requests to have a woman of colour as interlocutor in conversations such as this one.

There was plenty of content and food for thought in the following panel discussion, ‘Questions of Collecting; Refocusing Representation of Ethnic Minority Cultures in National Archives’, chaired by Ann Lyons. Artist Seamus Nolan talked about his current research within national collections to identify artworks that represent travelling communities, whether circus performers, ‘tinkers’ or ‘gypsies’. Nolan noticed rather romantic notions of ‘nomads’ in the nineteenth century,

Selina Thompson speaking at the Create Networking Day for the Collaborative Arts; photograph by Louise Manifold

who became a more sinister presence in the twentieth century. Two representatives of the Galway Traveller Movement talked about their endeavour to celebrate traveller culture and to change the perception of travellers as “failed settled people”. Dr Eve Olney, an ethnographer and academic, discussed research she conducted with Nolan about representation and public memory, and how national identity gets constructed through national collections. They are working on a project for a travellers’ archive and facing questions about display as well as content. It was a fascinating presentation that could have done with some streamlining of the slide content, which was more distracting than instructive.

This was followed by a presentation from artist and filmmaker Jijo Sebastian, titled ‘Art and Politics in Collaborative Filmmaking’. Sebastian discussed the work he has been doing with a group of friends and amateur filmmakers making films based on the lives of the Indian community in Ireland. He went through the collaborative process of developing content with a skeleton crew, drawing parallels with the practices of filmmakers like Pedro Costa and Béla Tarr. He showed a series of trailers of the movies he made, which surprisingly juxtapose the aesthetics of a Hollywood thriller – rapid editing, snappy one-liners – with everyday life in suburban estates featuring amateur actors. Sebastian explained that although the content is developed collaboratively with the crew and the actors, he controls the final form. But, beyond the technical feat, the sleekness of this format feels problematic for me. If Indian amateur filmmakers produce films that look like they were made in Hollywood, it raises questions about the diversity of expression.

‘Scaling Up, Large Events from Intimate Tales’ a presentation by Chris Baldwin, artistic director of Galway 2020 opened the afternoon sessions. He spoke eloquently about his process while working in Poland from 2012 to 2016, as curator of interdisciplinary performance for Wroclaw European Capital of Culture 2016. Responding to the question of what it means to be European, he spoke about the development of The Flow Quartet. This project delved into the complex and traumatic history of the city whose pre-WWII name and identity was pretty much erased until the 1990s.

Breslau, as it was called then, was a German city with a majority of Protestants and an important Jewish community, which contrasts with the majority Catholic polish population of modern Wroclaw. The whole region endured an ethnic re-engineering with massive displacement of populations followed by a phase of ‘forgetting’ orchestrated by the soviet authorities. The project called upon this memory and aimed

to open creative reflections on the themes of diaspora, migrations and contemporary European identities. It is difficult to form an idea about such an ambitious project through a few minutes of footage, however its emphasis on large-scale spectacle conveyed little of the fascinating contextual research Baldwin articulated.

Afterwards, the audience split up into the four break-out sessions on offer: Diversity and Language; Hard Landings and Creative Intersections; Transformational Practice; and The Politics of Place. These sessions were cut a little short they ran late, but following a well-trodden ritual, mediators from each session later relayed feedback to the reassembled audience. After a flamboyant introduction by Charlotte McIvor, lecturer in Drama and Theatre studies at NUI Galway – which gave lie to the notion that biographical introductions are a rather bland exercise – the day ended with a presentation by American artist Rick Lowe, focusing on two community-based projects: ‘Project Row Houses’ in Houston, and ‘Victoria Square Project’, Athens, which was part of Documenta 14. Lowe talked about his projects as ‘social sculptures’ – to take a term coined by Joseph Beuys – thus harnessing an ambition to transform the structures of society.

Disturbingly however, the two projects’ impact was measured as per the number of individuals’ success stories, not through any transformation of the underlying conditions that had caused the need for social transformation in the first place.

This aspect was all the more striking in contrast to Thompson’s keen attention and careful consideration of her position as an individual within a community.

The Create Networking Day offered many opportunities to ponder upon the potentials and pitfalls of collaborative arts through a range of diverse and exciting practices. As O’Reilly pointed out in her opening remarks, the transformations achieved within the arts are complex, while causalities are often difficult to establish. The day invited us to consider how the Arts Council’s aforementioned strategy to separate measurement from advocacy might apply to actual practices, and how the dominant influence of metrics and statistics might be avoided. Of course, it was also a great occasion to meet and talk, with discussions extending into the evening during the launch of the A5 Art Fair at the Galway Arts Centre.

Michaële Cutaya is a writer based in County Galway and Co-editor of Circa Art Magazine.

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Career Development

Brian Maguire, Police Graduation (Juarez), 2014, acrylic on linen, 300 x 400 cm; image courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery

Painting as Solidarity JOANNE LAWS SPEAKS TO BRIAN MAGUIRE ABOUT HIS CURRENT EXHIBITION, ‘WAR CHANGES ITS ADDRESS: THE ALEPPO PAINTINGS’.

Joanne Laws: ‘The Aleppo Paintings’ depict the crumbling buildings of the war-torn Syrian city. Can you describe your motivation for this work?

Brian Maguire: I was very interested in the Syrian Civil War. I was reading texts by Patrick Cockburn, which made me think about how the Irish Civil Rights Movement was militarised and sectarianised. It became about Catholics and Protestants and was taken over by the military, yet it began as a civil rights movement, just as the rebellion in Syria began as a peaceful movement and very quickly became militarised by armed gangs. It also became sectarianised, meaning that people of different faiths could only live within certain areas.

With these paintings, I’m not making any statement about who did what to whom, because I don’t know. This series evolved from a painting I did for the Kerlin show in 2016, of a destroyed apartment block in Aleppo. The motivation was to finish the argument.

JL: At such a large scale, the paintings feel very immersive – was that your intention?

BM: Yes, that’s necessary. The Paris painting studio I’ve used since 2010 is big enough to make work of this scale. You collect the information and you come back. What is the information? Well first of all, your memory – I always think that memory is the best editor. I took hundreds of photographs that were slowly whittled down to just a few, to be blown up and printed. This system seems to work for me.

JL: In contrast to your previous series – which focused on the refugee crisis – these scenes are bereft of people. Why is that?

BM: It’s because the place is bereft of people. There’s a war there, with not just two sides – more like 22 sides. People are

being bombed out of their homes, so that’s why the refugees are coming across the Mediterranean Sea. When I finished the 2016 series, I realised that if I wanted to do more, I had to go there and immerse myself in the place, if only for a short period of time. I painted the bodies of three Mexicans who had been shot by criminal traffickers while attempting to cross into the US. What was interesting about that painting is that when people looked at it, they said it reminded them of the image of the Syrian child washed up on the beach, but the painting had actually been made six months earlier.

JL: With the title of this show, ‘War Changes Its Address’, are you implying that the narratives of global warfare are very much transferable?

BM: I have years of experience in civil war conflict – I was involved in the one in Northern Ireland, with the Tamils in Sri Lanka, in Brazil I observed an undeclared civil war between rich and poor and Mexico was similar. In these circumstances, I don’t feel free. Really what I wanted to show was the effects of war – full stop. I was horrified by that piece with the ceramic poppies to commemorate WWI, because it excluded the German and Austrian dead. That artwork was still fighting the war, suggesting that only our dead counted.

I fail to understand WWI in nationalist terms; for me, it was working class men on both sides. If you look at these paintings, you wouldn’t know who did the attack or who placed the explosives into each building. This is purposeful because I just wanted to stand back, in the same way that I can stand back from WWI and just see it as an unmitigated disaster. In 20 years time, if I’m still alive, I guarantee you I’ll be reading about some other city, bombed to a fucking tinder box.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Career Development

Brian Maguire, Aleppo 3, 2017, acrylic on linen, 210 x 170 cm; image courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery

JL: It’s horrifying to observe responses from certain western countries, who profit from the sale of arms to these regions yet are the first countries to close their borders to refugees.

Does this kind of geopolitics influence your research?

BM: There are two major arms fairs in Paris and London each year. My attention was drawn to them because the Irish Quakers who demonstrate outside these fairs often sleep in my Paris studio while they’re visiting. They brought me back the arms catalogues and one in particular struck me – a topof-the-range personnel carrier. The text was terribly revealing, stating that this personnel carrier could carry nine “units”.

We’d call them people – maybe soldiers – but the production people who are selling this machine describe them as “units”.

Now, if they can do that with their own, what chance do civilians have? This is the language of war and the people who sell into war. There are no victims because there are no people in this world, just cash. So that was very illuminating for me.

JL: Is it true that in Mexico, you saw rifles similar to those used in the north in the 1970s?

BM: Oh yes that’s true, but it was more than that – it was the whole military infrastructure. The first night I drove over the border, I stayed in the Ramada Hotel in Juarez. The NGO I was working with advised me that this was the safest place, because there were no cops staying there. The cartels have since taken over that hotel. The first thing I saw was an open-backed truck full of soldiers. There were also black Land Rover pickups, with police in black uniforms in the back, and machine guns mounted above the cabins. In Belfast, in the 1970s, that’s how the British Army arrived, and when the RUC fired on the Shankill or Falls Road, it was from those kinds of vehicles. I said: “I know this kind of place – I’ve been here before!” So it was familiar – I almost felt safe!

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Brian Maguire, Apartments Aleppo, 2016, acrylic on linen, 290 x 270 cm; image courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery

JL: For me, Police Graduation ( Juarez) (2014) remains one of the most important Irish paintings of the twenty-first century. Where did the image come from?

BM: I got the image while doing a residency in a newsroom in Juarez. I asked the editor if I could go through his archives and I found photographs documenting the graduation ceremony of the protective police. I recovered the image from my own archive years later, around the time that 43 students were disappeared and killed in Mexico. It’s incredible, because they were just trainee teachers demonstrating about the law being changed. I saw many demonstrations while I was in Mexico – they are normally very banal and cheerful, like fucking carnivals. But it became very violent for them that day, and I knew this painting explained why. It’s unbelievable that a fascist salute would be used by cops.

JL: Did the strong social conscience that underpins your practice come from your work in prisons?

BM: I was always involved in communist ideology as a young person. I got teaching in prisons on behalf of NCAD, so ended up mostly dealing with incarcerated working-class men, sometimes women. For me, Ireland was very simple – if you were from a particular place, the chances were high that you’d end up in jail, but if you were from another area, chances were, you’d go to university. These were the major institutions of the state; one for the lower classes and one for the middle classes. I began to see society in this way, based on what I learned from the Marxists, in terms of class structure. I didn’t go to prisons in Damascus and I wouldn’t say I’ve completed my research until I have.

JL: You have previously described painting as a “gesture of solidarity” or as “an act of revenge” for some form of injustice. Can you explain this?

BM: Remember we talked about memory being an editor?

Well, for a long time, the feelings that returned to me were feelings of anger, so this became the source of the work. I get very fucking angry when I see something like this. How did those people manage to get here? Why did they kill this girl?

It’s a separate question as to who the anger is for, but that’s what I meant when I said that most art comes from a spirit of revenge; sometimes love, but mostly revenge.

JL: Perhaps you’re not just documenting the aftermath of war, but recording atrocities in the public memory?

BM: There is an archival and forensic nature to this work.

Justice failed the Jews in Europe and every text I’ve read emphasises that their story be told in the future. And who does the telling? Artists. When asked why Ireland had so many writers, Becket said: “when you are in the last ditch, there’s nothing left to do but sing.” The only thing left is to ensure that the story is told. I see myself as a storyteller, as a contemporary history painter. The logic of the work rests in the telling of these stories.

Brian Maguire lives and works in Dublin and Paris.

His exhibition, ‘War Changes its Address: The Aleppo Paintings’, continues at IMMA until 6 May. Accompanying seminars will take place on 1 March and 27 April. exploring the role of photojournalism and activism in regions of conflict. imma.ie

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Career Development

Courage to Waste Time DUBLIN-BASED ARTIST THOMAS BREZING REFLECTS ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF HIS ARTS PRACTICE TO DATE.

Thomas Brezing, Every Artist Needs A Vehicle, 2015, mixed media; image courtesy the artist

Thomas Brezing, Out Too Far, 2017; photograph by Lucy Brezing

ONE OF THE REASONS I left Germany 25 years ago was be-

cause I couldn’t stand the ‘time is money’ attitude. In my view, time is much more valuable than money; it’s our greatest gift.

They say the Germans admire the Irish because they have the courage to waste time. When I moved to Ireland in the early 1990s, I began this most pleasant business of wasting time. I would write, draw, read, go for long walks, meet people, stare at the clouds and enjoy my life for the first time. I spent a few unhappy years in a metalwork apprenticeship and working as a journeyman before I met someone who was preparing a portfolio for art college. Until then, I didn’t even know that art could be pursued as a career path. I decided to do a oneyear art course in Thomastown. At the interview, I was told I could have a place on one condition: I had to give up sleeping in the woods, because winter was coming, and it would be difficult for me to work without a roof over my head. In Ireland, I found that there was room for failure and mistakes because people here are more forgiving. Without mistakes, there can be no art. Although I enjoyed this newfound freedom in Ireland, I also wanted to see more of the world. I travelled to the astonishingly beautiful Nepal, where I spent three months traipsing around the Himalayas before travelling around Europe, living in Berlin and Cork and going back and forth to Germany for work whenever the money ran out.

All this prepared me for becoming a full-time artist.

As I didn’t take the usual trajectory to an arts career via art college, everything took longer for me. After I moved to Balbriggan in 1997, I started experimenting intensively with different materials. I would make batiks and oil paintings and merge them with found materials, such as rusty shopping trollies and driftwood collected from beaches. I was trying to find my groove in a rather obstinate way, and the whole thing was a raw mess. Around this time, a studio group called Renegade Art Studios was formed in Balbriggan by members of the former Sunlight Studios. We had several group shows together around Ireland and one in Ghent, Belgium. Four years later, I had my first solo show, ‘The Art of Falling Apart’, in the Basement Gallery in Dundalk. The show assembled

many autobiographical impulses that I had to work out of my system, such as seeing my much-loved grand-aunt dead when I was about five years old. To be confronted with death at such a young age leaves a lasting impression. The way I dealt with it as a boy was by drawing a picture of the undertakers carrying the coffin and putting it into the hearse. This picture was held up at her funeral in the church by the priest. I remember sinking into the pew feeling mortified, with the eyes of the congregation on me. At the same time, there was this feeling of satisfaction, over which I felt much internal guilt.

Over the years, my art has become less autobiographical, but I still draw on personal experiences, situating them within wider contexts, as nothing exists in isolation. For my solo exhibition at the RHA’s Ashford Gallery in 2005, curated by Mark St. John Ellis, the work I showed was a little more refined. The show comprised oil paintings and a sound piece and was titled ‘Remember When We Were Older’ – a question once asked by my daughter, Maya, who was five at the time. Maya’s voice also featured in the sound piece. I now have three teenage daughters and all of them have influenced my work in some way over the years, as has my wife Emma, whom I met in Cork in 1994, while she was studying at the Crawford College of Art. As the economic recession hit, I was preparing for an exhibition at Drogheda’s Highlanes Gallery. This work was very much informed by environmental concerns, exploring how the accelerated pace of life and the scale of human ambition is affecting the natural world. Encountering the photographic work of American artist Chris Jordan was a crucial moment.

Jordan examines marine pollution through the lens of dying albatross chicks, who swallow the plastic detritus coming from our oceans. I felt as though by making art, I was just adding to this obscene wastage and that I was part of the problem, not the solution. This realisation prompted me to reintroduce the use of found objects into my work, making my practice more sustainable by using existing materials. This led me to collect things that people tend to discard. Instead of using machines to make art, I use a needle and thread. If

I had a warehouse, I would probably keep everything that I find. I am fascinated by what society produces and consumes and I don’t want anything to be thrown away. We are constantly being bombarded with adverts telling us we should consume more, but I can’t help wondering where this will lead. My parents grew up amidst the ruins of post-war Germany. Food and resources were sparse, so society functioned at lower levels of consumption and everything was made use of. This ‘waste not, want not’ mentality is deeply ingrained in my psyche and filters from my life into my art.

These inquiries culminated in a new body of work I exhibited as part of a two-person show (with German artist Klaus Effern) across two venues in Finland in 2016. They also formed the basis of my most recent project, ‘Out Too Far (Wishing Too Many Things)’, for which I received an Arts Council Bursary Award last year. The project involved a largescale installation consisting of hundreds of burst GAA balls, a film, sculptural bricolage and techno-fossils – man-made fossils for a modern era. The work was fabricated during two studio residencies at Creative Spark, Dundalk, and in the Loughshinny Boathouse Studio, run by the Fingal Arts Office. This installation has since been exhibited at 126 Artist-Run Gallery and NUIG during the Galway Arts Festival 2017, Engage in Longford, Basement Gallery in Dundalk, and at the Fingal Arts Office’s Boathouse Studio launch in Loughshinny. In April, it will be shown at the Custom House Gallery & Studios, Westport. This project involved many collaborators, including filmmaker Liam McGrath, artists David Newton and Jozef Voda, composer Dave McCune, photographer and curator Davey Moor, designer Feena McCarthy and writer Peter O’Neill.

Last year, along with artists Gary Robinson and David Newton, I established an artists’ group called Flotsam. In collaboration with Westport Men’s Shed, we made an ephemeral street installation out of waste material, during Westport Arts Festival. The three of us frequently send each other random things in the post – books, boots, roof slates, or pieces of footpath. David Newton and I sporadically meet in a remote location in County Meath that we call ‘Criminal Crossroads’ – a grass-covered traffic island, featuring three Neolithic rocks.

We use one of these rocks as a table and site of exchange. In September, I will present new paintings in a solo exhibition at the Molesworth Gallery, Dublin. For me, the playful, slow and demanding process of painting creates an intuitive blend of abstraction and representation. I try to paint with an attitude of humility. It’s like welcoming a stranger, becoming a child again, or looking for something that I most likely will not find. In the fast-paced digital age, painting offers both sanctuary and solace.

Thomas Brezing is an artist who lives and works in North County Dublin.

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Residency

Bryan Gerard Duffy and Mohamed Sulaiman, Disappeared, 2010; featuring Western Sahrawi activist Najla Mohamed, Boujdour Refugee Camp, Tindouf, Algeria (Artifariti 2010); photograph by Bryan Gerard Duffy

What Lies Beneath the Sand?

REPORTING ON HIS RECENT RESIDENCY IN WESTERN SAHARA AND ALGERIA, BRYAN GERARD DUFFY QUESTIONS THE ROLE OF ART IN THE ‘FREE ZONE’.

HAVING RECEIVED an Arts Council of Ireland Trav-

el and Training Award, I returned to Western Sahara in November 2017, seven years after my first residency with Artifariti – an annual arts festival (now in its eleventh year) initiated by the Association of Friends of the Sahrawi People, a solidarity group based in Seville, Spain. The organisation’s primary objective is to highlight the human rights violations of the Western Sahrawi people, through the medium of art. The event brings international and Sahrawi artists and activists together to develop work in the Tindouf Refugee Camps (Algeria) and in Tifariti (Western Sahara).

Anyone can apply via the Artifariti website.

My initial encounter with Artifariti came in 2009, after the organisation presented at the ‘NCAD Art with Africa’ seminar and exhibition in Dublin. As a result of this event, a group of artists, including Brian Maguire and Augustine O’Donoghue, travelled to Sahara. From there, Augustine and I joined fellow Irish artist Neil Rudden in Western Sahara in 2010. We worked alongside Sahrawi translator and calligraphy artist, Mohamed Sulaiman, on issues pertaining to the “Disappeared” (kidnapped) people in the Western Sahara area. Unfortunately, that was our last venture to Sahara until last year.

Western Sahara is a country located in northern Africa. The only former Spanish colony on the continent, Western Sahara was invaded by Morocco and Mauritania after the withdrawal of Spain in 1975. The Moroccan forces bombarded the civilian population, forcing them to take refuge in neighbouring Algeria.

They have resided in Algeria’s Tindouf Refugee Camps

ever since, making it the second oldest refugee camp in the world. Otherwise known as ‘The Devil’s Garden’, the Tindouf Refugee Camps house approximately 170,000 Western Sahrawi people. By taking exile in these camps, they are prohibited from claiming asylum anywhere else in the world.

The Moroccan Western Sahara Wall now cuts off those Sahrawi’s that remained in Western Sahara from their families in the Algerian camps. Known as the ‘Wall of Shame’ by Western Sahara residents and leaders, the wall extends over 2500 km in length and divides Western Sahara (the ‘Occupied Territory’) from Tifariti (the ‘Free Zone’). It is the second largest security barrier in the world and is protected by over 100,000 Moroccan forces and over five million landmines. Mauritania withdrew in the 1970s. Under the guidance of the UN, a ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario Front (Western Sahara) was brokered in 1991, with the promise of a referendum the following year. There still has not been any referendum. Since then, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Frontline have all reported increasing human right abuses by the Moroccan forces upon the Sahrawi people in the Occupied Territories. During my most recent trip to Artifariti, I wanted to explore the reasons why Western Sahara has become the forgotten land and effectively the ‘last colony’ of the world.

Reaching temperatures of over 40 degrees Celsius, the conditions are not kind to those exiled at the Tindouf Refugee Camps. The traditionally nomadic Sahrawi people are completely dependent on foreign aid.

We met a man on the final day of our 2017 trip, whose

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Residency

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Top Left: NGO Landmine Action, The Free Zone, Western Sahara. Two NGO staff members detecting landmines and cluster bombs (Artifariti 2017); photograph by Bryan Gerard Duffy Bottom Left: Interview with Mustafi Fadil, Western Sahara Minister for Culture, Boujdour Refugee Camp, Tindouf, Algeria (Artifariti 2017); photograph by Bryan Gerard Duffy Right: Local Sahrawi woman delivering a goat, Boujdour Refugee Camp, Tindouf, Algeria, (Artifariti 2017); photograph by Bryan Gerard Duffy

ambitious aim is to overcome this dependency by planting his own vegetables in the sand. Miraculously, he now feeds his family and supplies the local shops. One must ask if this is a symbol of human resilience, or a sign of resignation in claiming his land back.

FILMMAKING: IN TWO PARTS

Travelling with me on my recent trip to the Western Sahara was filmmaker Emmet Sheerin, who I previously collaborated with on the award-winning short documentary Sumud, Everyday Resistance (2016). We were saddened by what we perceived as a lack of global awareness about the exploitation of Sahrawi’s natural resources, particularly the illegal exploration of oil in the Occupied Territory by Irish energy company San Leon. This issue offered a starting point for our time with the Western Sahrawi people.

As part of the Artifariti residency, Emmet and I lived with a local Sahrawi family in their home. We spent a lot of time interviewing and chatting with local people who have witnessed, or experienced firsthand, modes of exploitation by Moroccan forces. Some people had travelled across the harsh and unforgiving terrain of the Occupied Territories into the Free Zone, miraculously bypassing the minefields surrounding the Wall of Shame. We met a young Western Sahrawi woman who spoke determinately about living and working as a journalist in the Occupied Territory. She talked about being detained in Moroccan prisons and the forms of torture they were subject to. Corey El Noruego, our wonderful translator, explained how she spoke passionately about their fight of resistance and how they used mobile phones to document abuses. She said that Sahrawi women are seen as the symbol of the Sahrawi resistance, largely because their tradition-

al melhfa garments are so colourful and visually distinctive.

As a result, they can be easily picked out and discriminated against, during peaceful protests in the Occupied Territory.

The younger people showed us their bodily scars and declared that they had no fear about going to war, if necessary. The Western Sahara Minister for Culture highlighted the importance of art in their fight for independence. He spoke briefly about Ireland one hundred years ago, and the ways in which art and culture were embraced to galvinise a sense of national identity during the Irish struggle for independence. The Western Sahara Ambassador to Seville discussed European relations and the process of challenging the EU’s treaties with Morocco. He favoured a political solution over taking arms.

They all spoke about the responsibility of the international community, and the important role of the media.

As we discussed what might be the future of Western Sahara, we found ourselves spending more time with young people and school children. I responded to this by creating a short video, In Two Parts, that was shown as part of an exchange project between the children of Brackloon National School in Westport (Ireland) and Boujdour National School within the Tindouf Refugee Camps (Algeria). Those participating in the workshops made drawings of their lives in their respective countries, offering them as gifts to the children in the other school. Many of the children’s drawings seem to feature a lot of sport, weather, hearts and flags, while others focused on our conversations about the 13,000-year-old cave drawings in the Free Zone. The drawings were folded and presented as origami paper boats stuck in the sand. My video also features the children singing and playing their own traditional music, as well as sending greetings and messages of thanks to each other via computers. Involved in these ac-

tivities were Emmet Sheerin, Annette Jordan, the teachers and students of Boujdour National School and Brackloon National School, Cory El Noruego and Olga Blázquez.

In the end, we were left with a number of questions, including: what will become of Western Sahara and its children? What is the responsibility of the international community? Do the media and the arts still have a role to play, and if so, what form might this take? Are the refugee camps simply pacifying the fight of the Sahrawi people? Mindful of the pitfalls of ‘cultural appropriation’, or even ‘misery tourism’, we must decide what to do with our knowledge and experiences of Sahara. It was essential for us to continuously ask why we were there.

Earlier in the trip, Emmet and I encountered a woman with her sleeves rolled up delivering a baby goat, aided by her 12-year-old daughter. The woman cleaned the slime from the animal’s face and kissed its mouth. It survived, lay on the ground and within minutes was walking around like Bambi.

The goat is one of the few examples of independence and self-sustainability for the Sahrawi people. With her hands dripping with excrement, and her feet submerged in sand next to a few protruding animal bones, the woman announced that she was going inside to cook dinner for her children. Is western intervention needed to allow for the birth of the Western Sahrawi nation, free from colonialism? Or do we continue to bury our heads in the sand, alongside the animal bones, oil, phosphates and landmines? Such questions will be interrogated further in our Western Sahara documentary, What Lies Beneath the Sand?, which will be realised later this year.

Bryan Gerard Duffy is an artist and filmmaker based in Westport.

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Residency

Portraits in Motion MORAN BEEN-NOON DISCUSSES HER EXPERIENCES OF WORKING IN LAGOS, NIGERIA, WHILST ON RESIDENCY WITH THE 2017 IWAYA COMMUNITY ARTS FESTIVAL. “HOW ARE YOU FINDING Lagos?” During a month-long residency in Nigeria, I was asked this question often, and always gave the same answer: “it’s intense”. An overload of sound, imagery, traffic, stifling weather and social issues meant my experience was anything but dull; it was full-on, with endless energy and rhythm to be found in the city’s non-stop daily life. Iwaya is a neighbourhood in the Yaba district of Lagos, Nigeria. The Iwaya Community Arts Festival (ICAF) was established in 2016 by Aderemi Adegbite, a local artist whose vocation is to introduce art to his community.

The festival is run by Adegbite and a team of artists who select the work, with support from the local community. In 2017 Adegbite initiated a residency for artists to create work for the festival. Last November I travelled to Lagos – and the 30 degrees/80 percent humidity equatorial conditions – to spend a month living with a family in Iwaya, where I developed and presented new work as part of ICAF 2017.

Top and bottom: Moran Been-noon, Visa Application Appendix 11/c, 2017; video projection in Iwaya streets during ICAF 2017; photogaph by Aline Motta, courtesy the artist

The 2017 festival focused on global migration and the refugee crisis. Five international artists were selected for the residency, but due to unforeseen circumstances, only three of us spent the month in Iwaya. I was joined by Dutch artist, Anja Seijben, and Brazilian artist, Aline Motta. We each stayed with different families and worked on our projects throughout the month. The biggest logistical issue became clear immediately. Electricity was only available for between five and ten hours each day, mostly during the night, and was otherwise dependent on whether a generator was connected to a fuelled power converter. As a digital artist producing video installations, this was a problem, but one that I imagined local creatives dealt with regularly, so I was determined to figure something out.

Over the last few years, my primary interest has been exploring political identities – particularly the idea of belonging to a place and how that influences an individual – by undertaking casual practices, like walking and talking. I make videos that combine footage and sounds from a given location, which I install in neck-bending ways, either projected at unusual angles, or onto unorthodox supports, making it difficult for the viewer to differentiate between the moving image and the static surface. In my residency application, I proposed creating video installations as a way of engaging with Iwaya’s neighbourhoods and communities, developing ‘portraits’ of locals to offer different perspectives on Nigerian culture, within the global story of migration. A week in Lagos helped refine this

idea into a subverted commentary on migration, showing my subjects’ thoughts about their homeland, how they spend their time, and their aspirations for the future.

I specifically searched for individuals aged between 20 and 30 years old, who were unmarried, as this demographic has a tougher time applying for tourist visas to travel to the West.

During the time that I spent with Tola, Yomex, and Samuel, we visited locations in Iwaya that they find meaningful and we discussed the significance of their Yoruba names. These three individuals see their future paths very much as being local ones.

One of the men, Yomex (Abayomi), works on the island of Ago in his family business, a bar and ice packing factory. He also collaborates with NGOs who help fund community development projects. Ago is a small, mostly residential area on the far side of the river from Iwaya, originally settled by a community from the Republic of Benin. No motor vehicles can access the island and the poverty there is palpable. It was important for me not to let the injustice of their economic conditions taint the footage of the portrait, as this was not Yomex’s story. We discussed his name, meaning “miracle child” in Yoruba, which empowers him in times of difficulty and gives him strength.

We joked about the X in his nickname acting as a ‘superhero suffix’, and he said it’s funny, but it works. When he took me to see the bridge and clubhouses he built with NGO help, I thought he might be right. We also visited a quiet spot at the far end of Ago, beyond the original settler homes, football pitch and kids playing in the water.

Most of the conversation with Yomex, as with the others, remained off camera and it helped me to understand the story that needed to be told. The three individuals featured in the films all want to travel out of Lagos, but do not want to permanently migrate, so I entitled the project Visa Application Appendix 11/c, as this highlighted a different side to the story that immigration officers do not look at. A travel visa application must demonstrate a stable, well-paying job, large amounts of money in the bank and give details of dependants.

Otherwise, it is a waste of time applying, as the applicants are automatically looked at as potential illegal migrants. Tola (Omotolani) said this frustration is not really something people talk about. As a fashion designer, she would love to visit or undertake an internship in Paris or Milan, but according to her, there is no point trying.

In my original residency proposal, I outlined my plan to project my films in shops, restaurants or abandoned buildings. From afar, Lagos gave an impression of a networked city, particularly regarding mobile communication, so I brought a few old smartphones to use as video devices, thinking that they could be placed on countertops, coffee tables or even on seats. The phones would be able to run non-stop, connected to portable chargers. After ten days of conversations, on and off camera, I retreated to my temporary home, editing footage at night time when the power was on. I created three portraits of the individuals and their life paths, with a fourth video acting as a trailer, blending the three stories into one piece.

During the day I visited shops, restaurants and market stalls, “implanting” the mobile devices among the displayed merchandise, or in between the dishes being served. The sporadic and unreliable power supply ruled out installing projectors in spaces, so this was replaced by street projections using a mini projector. After dark, I wandered the streets with a hand-held projector, casting images onto walls, large objects and even a puddle on one occasion. The trailer was projected in the Iwaya market square.

“So... how was Lagos?” The answer to that question has not changed very much: “it was intense”. It was an exciting opportunity that taught me a lot about community engagement.

The hand-held projections became a type of performance piece, which allowed me to strike up conversations with numerous Iwaya youths who followed the three stories across various dissemination formats. They understood the work and were delighted when they recognised a location in the film or a pop culture reference hidden in a title. But the residency was not solely a positive experience. The backdrop of poverty in the region and its impact on the community was obvious.

Unreliable supplies of electricity and water, and bridges that cannot survive the weather conditions, are the norm where I lived for a month. Every day had little challenges, like dealing with men and children cat calling or touching my arms and legs as I walked around the neighbourhood. The casual style of the organisation meant I had very little support during the residency, which posed many practical problems that were even more pronounced for me as a digital artist. But despite these setbacks, the moments of hope and conversation during the production and festival made the trip invaluable, inspiring new understandings of political identity within my practice, from unexpected angles.

Dr Moran Been-noon is an independent curator and artist based in Dublin. mobespaces.wordpress.com

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Organisation Profile

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Journey to the East MARK ST JOHN ELLIS REFLECTS ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE NAG GALLERY, DUBLIN AND ITS FUTURE RELOCATION TO CENTRAL PORTUGAL. FROM 2012 TO 2017, I founded and managed nag Gallery,

where failure, process and change were an integral part of my journey towards a curatorial identity and philosophy. I decided early on that I was never going to compete with Dublin’s other commercial galleries, so I chose to use the gallery as a platform for learning. In my previous role as curator of the RHA’s Ashford Gallery (2000 to 2009), I worked with emerging artists, coordinated the AIB Emerging Artists Award and curated exhibitions for the Cross Gallery. When I was invited to review the NCAD degree show for RTÉ’s radio programme, Arena, I was introduced to the filmmaker Lauralee Guiney, who went on to exhibit in nag on two occasions thus continuing my work in supporting emerging artists. Establishing nag also gave me the opportunity to reconnect with some of the more established artists I had previously worked with, including Kieran Moore, Margaret O’Brien and Brian Fay. Twenty years ago, my main focus was within the music industry, recording as Elijah’s Mantle. When my royalties were in decline, I later took on the role as technician at the Douglas Hyde Gallery and was consequently introduced to contemporary art. Stephen Brandes, Brendan Earley and I installed the work of many Irish and international artists, including Peter Doig and Felix Gonzalez Torres. During this time the Douglas Hyde was under the directorship of John Hutchinson, who had a profound influence on my way of thinking as a curator. Some of the lessons I learned during this period remained with me and have since informed the development of nag, including the decision to limit the number of artists, in keeping with the gallery’s minimalist aesthetic. What particularly made an impression on me was the presentation of objects by unknown people or artisans in Gallery Two at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, which contrasted dramatically with the work by well-known and established artists shown in Gallery One. When I decided that 2017 would be the last year of nag in Dublin, the final programme was designed to be uncompromising. John Hutchinson also retired from the Douglas Hyde Gallery last year, which gave us the opportunity to form some exhibitions together and for me to bring some of my past experience full-circle.

THE JAPANESE SHIBUI PHILOSOPHY

As a curator, I have become more interested in reductionism, as well as the philosophy of Japanese aesthetic and its influences on life and art. I realised I was not going to make a living by showing interesting artists in nag alone, so I created the arts consultancy, nag Offsite, to present contemporary art in domestic, commercial and functioning public spaces. nag Offsite and nag Gallery are very much influenced by nonwhite cube spaces, such as the Axel Vervoordt Foundation in Antwerp and Galerie Tschudi in Switzerland. There then followed the opportunity to install nag artists in unusual environments such as: Chapter One restaurant in Dublin; a nineteenth-century private residence in Wicklow; and a tea room in Kyoto, Japan. Suddenly the disciplines of curation and interior design were becoming entangled, which I was comfortable with. This abstraction of the functional object into a work of art is naturally underpinned by an Eastern philosophical way of thinking. In the tokonoma – an alcove area of a Japanese tea room – an object is placed so that it can be studied and contemplated with the same levels of discipline as might occur in a conventional white cube gallery space. The purpose of each space is to elevate the object in our thinking, and thus transcend to that place we call art. During the late 1950s and 60s, Western artists were influenced by Eastern and Zen Buddhist philosophies, which ultimately produced the Minimalism movement. Minimalist architecture is unapologetic in taking its influence from traditional Japanese interiors and philosophies of space. Like Minimalism, the Japanese philosophy of Shibui – dating back to the

Edo period (1603 – 1868) – conjures a modest aesthetic and lifestyle. The elements of Shibui are simplicity, modesty, silence, naturalness, everydayness and imperfection. It is a reaction to anything ostentatious.

The commonalities shared by nag artists is their obsession for detail, their labour-intensive processes and the ritual of repetition. These attributes can be found in: the layering and weaving of paintings by Kohei Nakata; the precise mark-making and painterly layers of Gareth Jenkins’s abstract images; Ian Charlesworth’s labouring with a candle to trail carbon across a gesso surface above his head; Jane Proctor’s ink lines on Japanese paper, which create surfaces of seemingly woven fabric; the natural materials with spiritual symbolism, sourced

by Pertiwi, to create delicate sculptural environments; Margaret O’Brien’s use of science and philosophy to build sculptural installations that engage all the senses; and finally, Masashi Suzuki’s chawan (bowls used in the Japanese tea ceremony) that ground nag’s aesthetic philosophy.

JOURNEY EAST

For the past eighteen months, I have been researching options for relocating nag eastwards to the continent, in a project that would include my family. Having established that the gallery is not commercially sustainable, it needs to be situated in an environment with a visiting audience where the overheads are lower, so I can continue to curate and exhibit artists’ work. The Alentejo area of central Portugal is approximately one and a half hours drive from Faro airport and a similar distance from Lisbon airport. The area has cultural institutions that link with Lisbon. The primary industry of the country is tourism, but what is on the increase – as described in the Financial Times – is cultural tourism. The weather, lifestyle and low cost of living is attractive to visitors, including those interested in art and culture, who want to stay in environments sympathetic to their tastes. I have discussed with the Portuguese architect João Maria Trindade, a project to purchase rural dwellings that can be converted into three

Top: Installation view, nag Gallery, May 2016; L-R: Gareth Jenkins (paintings) and Rory Tangney (sculpture); photograph by Mark St John Ellis Bottom: Installation view, ‘Japanese Objects Series 2’, nag Gallery, April 2017; L-R: Jizu Bosatsu (from John Hutchinson Collection), Roseanne Lynch (digital print), bowl and stem bowl (from Mark St John Ellis Collection); photograph by Mark St John Ellis

distinct spaces. The renovated buildings would function as the gallery, the family home and a separate holiday rental space.

The environment would combine art, design and tourism, therefore appealing beyond a simple Airbnb experience and offering the nag Gallery a potential target audience coming from the rest of Europe. As the business model diversifies, a reliance on the gallery’s commercial viability is reduced. My curatorial role, international programme and ongoing work with nag artists, will hopefully be viewed as an asset by other arts institutions in the region and beyond, thus attracting larger audiences.

Mark St John Ellis is a music producer and founder of the record label De Nova Da Capo, as well as Curator and Creative Director of nag Gallery and nag Offsite. nagallery.ie

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Organisation Profile

Installation view, Periodical Review #7, 2017, selected by Gavin Murphy, Mark Cullen, Rachael Gilbourne & Kate Strain; image courtesy Pallas Projects/Studios

Archival Gesture CHRIS HAYES DISCUSSES THE EVOLUTION OF ‘PERIODICAL REVIEW’ – A LONGRUNNING CURATORIAL PROJECT BY PALLAS PROJECTS/STUDIOS.

TO WRITE ABOUT the Periodical Review – an annual ex-

hibition, now in its seventh iteration – is to repeat and confront the curatorial project’s own questions and provocations.

Hosted, organised and partially curated by the not-for-profit artist-run space, Pallas Projects/Studios in Dublin, Periodical Review aims to enliven the practice of contemporary exhibition-making by reimaging the gallery space as a magazine.

The exhibition title, in itself, echoes this publishing endeavour, suggesting something occurring at regular intervals. Periodical Review offers a unique opportunity to look back on the preceding year in Irish art, by showcasing artworks that have previously been exhibited nationally. Holding an annual survey of contemporary art is certainly a provocative proposition. A list of selected artworks immediately queries what isn’t present, what has been left out and by what authority?

The format has remained largely intact from the beginning. Working alongside Pallas Projects’ directors, Mark Cullen and Gavin Murphy, invited artists, writers or curators put together a selection of significant artworks exhibited on the island of Ireland during the previous 12 months. This review format calls to mind the Turner Prize – an annual survey of timely and significant moments or practices in contemporary art, within the geographical boundary of the UK. There are key distinctions, of course. At a basic level, the Turner Prize is framed around an individual award, while Periodical Review is a ‘review-styled’ group exhibition. More significant is the fundamental question of institutional weight. The Turner Prize was originally founded by a group of collectors in association with the Tate. Today, it is a monumental event, receiving major corporate sponsorship, celebrity endorsement and widespread coverage in the mainstream media. In contrast, Periodical Review is a grassroots and artist-led ini-

tiative, but they share an archival ambition, to remember to reflect on what came before. In an art world captivated by the next up-and-coming artist, commercial gallery trends, or ever-expanding auction records, the desire to reflect upon what mattered and why, during a given timeframe, is both critically challenging and wildly nourishing.

Periodical Review began on 19 September in 2011. From the outset, the core idea of reimaging the gallery space as a magazine was present, with subsequent exhibitions rarely deviating from this original format. Explaining how the process works, Gavin Murphy stated: “We have an initial meeting with selectors early in the year to discuss the parameters and structure, and again around September for the editorial meeting.

Generally, each selector suggests approximately seven possible artists who are discussed and decided upon. Often there are instances where an artist is proposed by more than one selector.”

In terms of the rationale for what gets selected, and the motivations and limitations surrounding an end-of-year review, Murphy added: “the space provided [in magazines] is always too brief to allow for anything meaningful; you might get one image per writer, so they always fall short. That fed into the structure of Periodical Review – multiple selectors choosing a number of artists or projects, writing a short accompanying text, but also showing the actual work. That’s partly why it’s described as ‘not a group exhibition per se’.

Selectors talk about works as much as showing them, with the works intended to act as ‘texts’ as much as artworks. In that sense, documentation or publications have been included alongside artworks in the exhibition, as opposed to being auxiliary elements.”

Periodical Review #1 and PR#2 took place in the Pallas gallery space, while an offsite project was developed at John

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Organisation Profile

Top and Bottom: Install view, Periodical Review #5 (2015) selected by Anne Kelly, Daniel Jewesbury, Gavin Murphy & Mark Cullen. L-R (top) works by Kevin Lindsay, Liam Crichton. L-R (bottom) works by Rachael Campbell-Palmer, Eilis McDonald, Lucy McKenna, Eva Roth; images by Louis Haugh, courtesy Pallas Projects/Studios and NCAD Gallery

Fallon’s bar for PR#3. It wasn’t until PR#4 that the exhibition expanded beyond Dublin, initially taking place in Pallas, before being reshaped for a second iteration in Ormston House, Limerick. For the fifth edition in 2015, the exhibition expanded across multiple spaces, occupying both Pallas and the NCAD gallery. The funding behind the project has had a similarly varied history, receiving support from the Arts Council and Dublin City Council at times, as well as self-funding, crowdfunding and an auction, with proceeds from the sale of artworks helping to support both Pallas and the artists involved.

It was during the sixth iteration in 2016 that Periodical Review truly began to flex the weight of its ambition. Coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of Pallas Projects/Studios, the PR#6 survey extended beyond the usual 12 months to encompass the previous 20 years. Pallas co-directors Mark Cullen and Gavin Murphy weren’t as directly involved with the selection as they had been previously. Instead, Brian Duggan, Sarah Glennie, Jenny Haughton and Declan Long took the lead. Explaining the reasoning behind this, Gavin Murphy said: “In that instance we decided that our input would be to invite four selectors who we thought had made important contributions within different fields of the Irish visual arts over the previous 20-year-period, concurring with the timespan of Pallas.” Discussing the line-up for PR#6, Aidan Dunne wrote that the selection “encompasses a broad range of projects and history with some ingenuity”.1 Both PR#6 and PR#7 were covered in Frieze magazine, suggesting that the project’s dynamism continues to draw considerable critical attention.

Periodical Review is clearly growing each year, in terms of venues, critical reach and reception. PR#7 expanded to in-

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Dennis McNulty, A cloud of soft equations, 2014. Series of performances staged in the former Pathology Department of UCD, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin, in association with the Irish Architecture Foundation. Part of Periodical Review #3 (2013) selected by Michele Horrigan, Matt Packer, Mark Cullen & Gavin Murphy; image courtesy Dennis McNulty

clude the Kevin Kavanagh gallery and was selected by the collaborative duo RGKSKSRG (Rachel Gilbourne and Kate Strain) – the first occasion that a curatorial collective has contributed to Periodical Review. This recent history lends momentum to the project, while also highlighting a demand for upcoming iterations to continue to expand upon and evolve the format.

Periodical Review is difficult to separate from the history of Pallas itself, or from some of their other major projects to date. Founded in 1996, Pallas Projects/Studios is like so many other independent artist-led spaces across Ireland – perpetually shaped by ‘crisis’ and perceived gaps in the cultural infrastructure. A recent project from Pallas is their major publication, Artist-Run Europe: Practice/Projects/Spaces, which looks at the conditions, organisational models, and role of artist-led practice within contemporary art and society. Murphy articulates a recent history of artist-led practice in Dublin, beginning with a wave of activity in the late 60s, a recognition of the need for greater infrastructure in the 80s, followed by a surge in activity in the 90s and 2000s, by artists who chose to remain in the country, due to improving economic conditions. Periodical Review is deeply embedded in the trajectory of artistic practice and in the fluctuating infrastructure of recent decades. Just as independent projects and artist-led activity filled in the infrastructural gaps, Periodical Review established something of a rival critical platform, as a counter to other institutional frameworks. By reflecting upon the Irish arts ecosystem, Periodical Review, like Artist-Run Europe, probes the legacy and the archival contributions of Irish art practice.

During the seven years to date of Periodical Review, the selectors and artists involved have offered vibrant insights

into contemporary practice, both emerging and established.

Looking back over previous exhibitions, many of the names will be familiar, as these artists have since developed their practice substantially over the years. The exhibitions where artworks were originally shown, also provide another archive of contemporary Irish practice, bringing numerous galleries, curators and periods into this conversation. Establishing this expansive network is a noble legacy, but it is also daring and audacious due to the necessity of its partisanship. Crucially, Murphy explains, “Periodical Review was never intended to be a ‘best of ’ yearly honour roll, or some kind of resolution of things, but a collaborative dialogue, an active discussion of where things stand now”. Faced with the enormity of 12 months of activity across the entire island, each selection committee is forced to make choices based on the practical limitations of the gallery. In doing so, each iteration of Periodical Review has a charged and dynamic energy that continues to elaborate upon its growing legacy.

Chris Hayes is an art critic based in London and Assistant Editor at CIRCA Art Magazine.

Notes 1 Aidan Dunne ‘Building a Pallas: 20 years of modern art in Ireland’, Irish Times, 13 December 2016.

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Organisation Profile

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Willie Doherty, Border Incident and Katharina Cibulka, ist heute morgen; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of Glucksman Gallery

Border Crossings CHRIS CLARKE PROVIDES AN OVERVIEW OF ‘OUTPOSTS’ AT THE GLUCKSMAN, CORK.

IN 2017 AND 2018, borders have been very much in the news, with emerging geo-

graphic barriers being discussed as political realities by a globally interconnected world.

‘OUTPOSTS: Global borders and national boundaries’ considers these ideas in an exhibition that features work by Irish and international artists who creatively explore the dividing lines that distinguish territories. From Mexico to the Middle East, Ireland and the European Union, the works challenge our perceptions of national identity while addressing the conflicts that often arise over these disputed boundaries. Artists are often the beneficiaries of international travel and exchange, while exploring what it means to live in a divided world. ‘OUTPOSTS’ presents contemporary artworks that focus on the spaces and sites, landmarks and lines that crisscross and shape territories.

Given the international scrutiny now placed on wall-building between Mexico and the USA and current concerns about reinstating hard borders within the island of Ireland in the wake of Brexit, ‘OUTPOSTS’ is a timely investigation into the personal and political mapping of place.

The establishment of national boundaries are often the product of past conflicts or political disputes. This also leads to their contestation by certain parts of the population who might see such definitions as arbitrary or unrepresentative. South Tyrol, an Alpine region of Italy that was formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, maintains a vocal separatist movement who see themselves as historically and culturally distinct.

Katharina Cibulka’s sculptural intervention re-purposes wooden roofing shingles from South Tyrol to create a fence-like barrier that cuts across the gallery floors. In transporting these objects into a new, foreign context, Cibulka also points to the ways in which culturally specific materials can be re-made and manipulated. Hrair Sarkissian’s photographic series Front Line depicts a similarly contested region: the self-proclaimed independent Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, situated between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The war-torn region is represented through strangely quiet, unpopulated images of sedate landscapes, bullet-ridden buildings and rusting machinery, as if captured in the aftermath of a battle. Dragana Jurisic’s extensive photographic project YU: The Lost Country documents the artist’s return to her native Yugoslavia, a nation since dismantled and reshaped into different enclaves of overlapping ethnic and cultural affinities.

The series resembles a diary of her journey: children playing in the streets of Split, animals from Belgrade Zoo, crumbling buildings in Kosovo, and the open pages of her

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

Organisation Profile

Top: Dara McGrath, Liskova German-Polish Border, 2009, C-print, 75 x 100cm; image courtesy of the artist

Dragana Jurisic, YU: The Lost Country, 2011-13, C-print photograph; courtesy of the artist

Bottom: Teresa Margolles, Espejos de la barra del club RUV (Mirrors from the counter of the club RUV), and 'Pista de baile'; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy Glucksman Gallery

travel reading. Retracing the 1937 travels of the Anglo-Irish writer Rebecca West, Jurisic re-examines the conflicting emotions and memories of the country that was.

This shifting of national borders is not only caused by conflict: it can be the consequence of deliberate national and international policies. In Larissa Sansour’s film Land Confiscation Order 06/24/T, the artist reveals how Israeli occupying forces have systematically seized territory in Palestine, using discriminatory legal rulings to redraw historic borders. Dara McGrath’s photographs show sites along national boundaries of the European Union, with glimpses of street signs and roadways acknowledging a gradual and almost invisible erasure of ‘hard’ borders. In Bouchra Khalili’s film The Seaman, a Filipino narrator recounts the isolation he suffers during long months at sea and his relationship to his home. Filmed in the port of Hamburg – one of the first harbours to automate their terminals’ container storages – the site appears emptied of human life and presence, with only the ghostly choreography of cranes carrying thousand of containers, day and night.

The remaking of landscapes as extraterritorial freeports and ‘special economic zones’ finds an absurd yet poetic corollary in Jun Yang’s Phantom Island. This film follows the artist’s installation of a bright green, artificial island in the waters off Taiwan, alluding to his own homeland’s status as a disputed nation as well as to the Chinese government’s current creation of such islands in the contested waters of the South China Sea. NO MAN’S LAND

The border between Mexico and the USA is the site and subject of international scrutiny, as elected politicians demand increased security and the re-negotiation of trade agreements.

In Javier Téllez’s film One Flew Over the Void (Bala Perdida), the border is the site of festive celebrations, culminating in a ‘human cannonball’ – shown displaying his passport – being fired into the United States. Brian Maguire’s paintings depict women who have disappeared or been murdered in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez. The portraits hang alongside stark texts that describe the circumstances surrounding their deaths. Having met with the relatives of the victims and working from family photographs, Maguire painted two copies of these portraits: one for exhibition and one for the families to keep in their homes. The femicide and violence prevalent in the region is also explored in Teresa Margolles’ works. She considers the situation in Ciadud Juárez through photographs of transgender sex workers who are seen standing proudly amidst the ruins of demolished nightclubs. There is intense pressure on this community to leave the city, as the State seeks to regenerate the downtown area without care for those who work and live there. Margolles’s images speak to their vulnerability, lack of protection and endangered lives, but she also asserts their individual presence and reminds us of the personal narratives contained within the devastation of the border city. Alongside these photographs hangs a mirror that belonged to one of the flattened nightclubs. In the looking glass, Margolles invites viewers to see themselves and perhaps reflect on how, in our globalised world, we too are implicated in the larger processes that affect border communities such as migration, the international drug trade and human trafficking.

Britain’s vote to leave the European Union is redrawing the map once again, and ‘OUTPOSTS’ features a display of posters that were created by artists, illustrators and designers to support the unsuccessful Remain campaign of 2016. In

the wake of Brexit, there is once again a focus on the border within the island of Ireland. The exhibition opens with Willie Doherty’s Border Incident, a 1994 photograph of a burnt-out car framed against a landscape of green Irish fields. It is an unsettling image, the aftermath of a violent event, whether a road accident or terrorist attack. The picture was taken on the outskirts of Derry, Northern Ireland, where the artist lives and works. Balancing this specific border image within the wider context of Irish history, Doherty’s photographic series ‘Loose Ends’ closes the show. These diptychs bring together sites from Donegal and Dublin that were formative in the constitution of the Irish republic. The images have both lush beauty and piercing detail, reminding us of the ways in which the land both resists and retains the man-made markings of border lines.

‘OUTPOSTS: Global borders and national boundaries’ is curated by Chris Clarke and Fiona Kearney in association with Professor Nuala Finnegan, Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University College Cork. The exhibition continues at the Glucksman until 11 March 2018. The Glucksman’s Spring exhibition, ‘Double Take: Collections and Context’, will open to the public on 3 April 2018, with a formal launch on 22 April, and features work by Martin Healy, Fiona Kelly, Suzanne Mooney, Brian O’Doherty, Garrett Phelan and Sonia Shiel, amongst others.

Chris Clarke is a writer and critic and Senior Curator at the Glucksman, Cork.

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Public Art Roundup

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

ART OUTSIDE OF THE GALLERY

Drop

John J. Hearne

Artist: Eimear Murphy Title of work: Drop Site: Sculpture Garden, Dublin Port Company Commissioning body: Dublin Port Company Date sited: 20 September 2017 Commission type: Private Project Partners: Dublin Port Company, Roadstone Concrete, DBFL

Artist: Elizabeth O'Kane Title of work: John J. Hearne, Architect of the Irish Constitution 1937 Site: Cathedral Square, Waterford City Commissioning body: Waterford Treasures Museum Date advertised: April 2017 Date sited: July 2017 Budget: €15,000 Commission type: Public Project partners: CAST Foundry, Stephen Burke, D15 Stone Studios

Description: Drop is a sculpture by artist Eimear Murphy, which is permanently installed in the ‘sculpture garden’ of Dublin Port Company, located on Alexandra Road, Dublin 1. Made of concrete, the sculpture presents a visual paradox to the viewer: it appears to be sinking into the ground under it’s own weight, whilst also seeming to emerge from the earth, traveling upwards. With the piece, Murphy aims to question architectural perspective by pitting two-dimensional lines against a sculptural surface. Both soft and hard edges interplay with one another to create varied and surprising viewpoints. The sculpture’s abstract form aims to evoke visual touchstones from industrial – and specifically – maritime environments. Drop is imagined for a redeveloping Dublin Port, which has a long history of utilitarian concrete. As such, the artwork is set beside its equivocal material, but it is also set apart through Murphy’s artmaking process.

Description: John J. Hearne (1893 – 1969), was the architect of the 1937 Irish Constitution, the first Irish Ambassador to the United States, from 1950 – 1960, and Irish High Commissioner to Canada, from 1939 – 1949. Born in Waterford City, Hearne was a barrister and a diplomat. As American ambassador, he famously started the tradition of presenting shamrock to the American President on St Patrick's Day. To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the drafting of the Irish constitution, sculptor Elizabeth O’Kane was commissioned by Waterford Treasures Museum to create a bronze portrait bust sculpture of Hearne. The sculpture was unveiled to the public in July 2017 by Minister for Justice and Equality, Charles Flanagan, TD. The sculpture was modeled from clay by O’Kane from a selection of reference photographs of Hearne during his life and career, and cast in bronze at CAST Foundry, Dublin. It is hoped a bronze replica will be installed in the Irish Embassy in Washington DC later this year.

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Opportunities

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2018

GRANTS, AWARDS, OPEN CALLS, COMMISSIONS

Open Calls

188TH RHA ANNUAL EXHIBITION

Applications are now open for Ireland’s oldest and largest open submission exhibition, the 188th RHA Annual Exhibition. Open to all artists working in paint, drawing, print, sculpture, photography and architecture, the RHA Annual attracts a large public and critical audience.

Hand in of work takes place on 6 and 7 April.

Up to three pieces can be submitted per person and each piece costs €15 to submit.

RHA will take 35% commission on work sold during the 2018 exhibition. Last year they took 40% in order to raise funds for their bank repayment due in June 2018 which is €350,000, they raised €100,000. To this they can add funds raised from other sources of €150,000, however RHA still need to secure the final €100,000. So for this year in the 188th Annual RHA are seeking 35% commission from all of the participating artists in the exhibition, including RHA members and invited artists to raise the final tranche.

Deadline 25 March 2018 Web rhagallery.ie/visit/annual-exhibition

Residencies

SIGNAL ARTS CENTRE EXHIBITIONS 2019

Signal Arts Centre, Bray, Co. Wicklow, is now accepting submissions for exhibitions to be held in 2018. To submit an application, please include the following information: a submission proposal, including a title, covering what you would hope to exhibit if you are successful; and a minimum of six images in digital format clearly marked with your name and title of picture. All images should be suitable for print reproduction (300 dpi) jpeg format, not exceeding 5MB in size.

The proposed sizes and the medium of the works should also be included where possible. Applications should also include an artists CV (art related only) and an artist statement (for PR purposes). Please note that there is an exhibition fee of €250 to be paid by the artist when selected.

Deadline 30 March 2018, 5pm Email exhibitions@signalartscentre.ie Web signalartscentre.ie/submissions.html

EYES WALK DIGITAL FESTIVAL, GREECE

Applications are open for 3D, video installation and site specific performing art projects as well as virtual reality and augmented reality games for Eyes Walk Digital Festival 2018, Syros Island, Greece. Artists are encouraged to consider the following options with regards to the locations and venue possibilities that the city of Ermoupolis offers: video art installations at key locations that define the character of the city (maximum duration five minutes), site-specific installations/ performing art and dance exhibitions in public space (maximum duration ten minutes), augmented reality projects through smart phone apps, interaction between image and sound, interactive (motion-detection) animation.

The team of the Eye’s Walk Digital festival will be responsible for the curatorial work and the production. Accommodation and travel costs to and from the location of the festival, which is held in Syros Island, are partially covered.

Deadline 15 April 2018

PHOTOIRELAND FESTIVAL 2018

Deadline (Round 1) 26 March 2018

Deadline 1 April 2018, Midnight

Deadline (Round 2) 25 June 2018

Email pif.submissions@gmail.com

Email support@create-ireland.ie

Web festival.photoireland.org/2018

Twice yearly, the Arts Council offers grants to enable artists and communities of place and/ or interest to work together on projects. The Scheme is managed by Create. Create is a scheme is open to artists from any of the following disciplines: architecture, circus, street art and spectacle, dance, film, literature (Irish and English language), music, opera, theatre, visual arts and traditional arts. The projects can take place in a diverse range of social and community contexts, e.g. arts and health; arts and cultural diversity; arts and older people; as well as with any communities of interest.

The aim of the scheme is to encourage meaningful collaboration between communities of place and/or interest, and artists. It is essential that consultation takes place between the artist and the community group, so that both parties are involved in deciding on the nature of the project realisation.

Telephone 01 473 6600 Web create-ireland.ie

The call for proposals for the PhotoIreland Festival 2018 Open Programme is now open.

If you have an exhibition or an event during, or running into, the month of May relating to photography and contemporary visual culture happening anywhere in Ireland, then join the festival celebrations. PhotoIreland welcomes submissions from national and international, individuals and organisations. The events could be exhibitions, installations, performances, films, shorts, videos, talks, workshops.

All participants will be featured in the festival catalogue and website, promoted through the festival’s social media and will also receive festival catalogues to distribute during the event.

There is a contribution fee of €125 towards the marketing materials. You must have secured a venue for your event or exhibition before you submit. For full information and how to enter your event visit the website below.

An Táin Arts Centre’s summer residency programme is open to recent graduates and artists at the start of their career looking to establish a collaborative practice. The aim of the residency is to assist artists to research and develop new work and give them the time and space to develop their practice in a community setting.

During the three-month residency, artists are provided with studio space, administrative support, a living stipend of €1500, materials budget of €500, and the opportunity to use the main gallery for the month of September.

Applications are now being accepted for the July – September 2018 residency. Supported by Louth County Council and the Arts Council of Ireland.

Deadline 10 March 2018, 4pm Web antain.ie/visual-artist-in-residence

Email info@eyeswalk.gr Web eyeswalk.gr/index.php/en/e-news/624-2018open-call

ARTIST IN THE COMMUNITY SCHEME

AN TÁIN EMERGING VISUAL ARTIST RESIDENCY AWARD

MAC INTERNATIONAL 2018

MAC International is the largest arts prize in Ireland, offering artists from around the world an opportunity to exhibit at the MAC, with a prize of £20,000 awarded to the artist deemed to have made an outstanding contribution to the exhibition. MAC International will run from 9 November 2018 – 31 March 2019.

Subject to the availability of funding, the MAC will cover the cost of transport of works excluding crating. If an artist is required to be on site to install a work MAC will cover flights, accommodation and per diem. The MAC will cover all installation and equipment requirements necessary for the presentation of work but will not cover the cost of production. Artists selected for the exhibition who wish to attend the launch will have one night’s accommodation covered. Please note there is a submission fee of £20 to apply.

Deadline 27 April 2018 Web themaclive.com/mac-international-2018.

Funding

FINGAL ARTISTS’ SUPPORT SCHEME 2018

Fingal County Council has announced the Artists’ Support Scheme 2018. This strand of funding which has been increased by 50% this year, allows professional artists to avail of up to €4,000 of an award towards travel and professional development opportunities, a residency, or towards the development of work.

The objective of the Artists’ Support Scheme is to support individual professional artists from Fingal to develop their artistic practice. The award is open to practicing artists at all stages in their professional careers working in music, visual art, drama, literature and dance. To be eligible to apply, applicants must have been born, have studied, or currently reside in the Fingal administrative area. The funding is for projects or initiatives which will take place between 1 June – 31 December 2018. For more information and application forms please visit website below.

Deadline 23 March 2018, 4pm Email denise.reddy@fingal.ie Telephone 01 890 5733 Web fingalarts.ie

professional development Spring 2018

Northern Ireland

Republic of Ireland Dublin City

Leitrim

Derry & Strabane

Ards & North Down

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR MATURE ARTISTS

ARTIST'S SHOW AND TELL

NEW SPACES

WORKING WITH DIGITAL IMAGES

In association with the Bealtaine Festival & the RHA Morning practical presentations & afternoon panel discussion Date/Time: 15 May. 10:30 – 16:30.

Location: Royal Hibernian Academy Places/Cost: 50+. €5 refreshment.

Fingal CREATIVE PROPOSALS WORKSHOP

with Annette Moloney In association with Fingal Arts Date/Time: 8 Mar. 10:30 – 16:30.

Location: Malahide Castle Visitors Centre.

Places/Cost: 20+. €15/FREE (Fingal Artists).

Kerry ART & ECOLOGY SEMINAR

In association with Siamsa Tire, Tralee Date/Time: 3 Mar. 10:30 – 16:30.

Location: Visual Artists Ireland.

Places/ Cost: 10 – 12. €80/40 (VAI members).

Laois

In partnership with The Dock and Creative Frame Date/Time: 16 Mar. 10:00 – 12:30.

Location: The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon.

Places/Cost: TBC.

Sligo CREATING AND CURATING SPACES

In association with Sligo Arts Service Date/Time: TBC. Location: Sligo.

Places/Cost: TBC.

Other events in planning for Spring/ Summer 2018 in Dublin and regionally: Marketing & Social Media for Visual Artists Artist One-to-One Clinics – Legal, Financial & Career Advice Child Protection Awareness Training Writing About Your Work Creative Proposals Developing Opportunities for your Work Peer Critique – Mixed Media with the RHA Sustaining Your Practice Documenting Your Work Working with Digital Images Health & Safety for Visual Artists & Studio Groups

In association with Dunamaise Arts Centre & Laois Arts Office Date/Time: 10 Mar. 10:00 – 16:30.

Location: Dunamaise Arts Centre.

Places/Cost: 20 – 30. €30/15 (VAI members).

Development Partners

BRASS TAX - LOOKING AFTER YOUR FINANCIAL HEALTH

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

Date/Time: 12 Mar. 18:00 – 21:00.

Location: Sync Space, Bangor.

Places/Cost: TBC. Ards & North Down Residents/VAI members £5. Visitors/Nonmembers £10.

CREATING AND CURATING SPACES (THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX)

Date/Time: 23 & 30 Apr. 18:00 – 21:00.

Location: Ards Art Centre.

Places/Cost: TBC. Ards & North Down Residents Residents/VAI members £5.

Visitors/Non-members £10.

In partnership with Dance Resource Base and TheatreNI Date/Time: 22 Mar. 10:00 – 14:00.

Location: Waterloo Place, Derry.

Cost: FREE (RSVP requested for catering).

VISUAL ARTISTS HELPDESK/ PROJECT CLINIC

Belfast

Causeway Coast & Glens

VISUAL ARTISTS HELPDESK/ PROJECT CLINIC

CREATING AND CURATING SPACES (THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX)

Date/Time: 14 Mar, 11 Apr. 12:00 – 17:00.

Location: Visual Artists Ireland NI. Places/Cost: 6. £5/FREE (VAI members).

PRESENTING YOURSELF SUCCESSFULLY

Date/Time: 21 April. 9:30 – 17:00.

Location: Belfast Exposed Gallery.

Places/Cost: TBC.

ART & ARCHITECTURE SEMINAR

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

In 2018 we will be looking for emerging curators to join a new programme designed to bring contemporary art to unconventional spaces across Northern Ireland. This programme will support curators in creating four exhibitions over the course of the year, with mentoring and training by leading arts professionals. This programme will be delivered in partnership with Derry and Strabane District Council and is supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Challenge Fund.

Date/Time: 16 May. 11:00 – 16:00.

Location: North Down Museum.

Places/Cost: 6. £5/FREE (VAI members).

Date/Time: 28 Mar. 13:00 – 16:30.

Location: Flowerfield Arts Centre Places/Cost: Places TBC. Causeway Coast & Glens/VAI members £5. Visitors/Nonmembers £10.

Fees VAI members receive preferential discount of 50% on fees for all VAI, training and professional development events. Fees range from €5 – €40 for VAI members.

Tell us about your training needs!

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

VAI Show & Tell Events VAI will schedule Show & Tell events during 2018 and invites interested artists, groups, venues or partners to get in touch if interested in hosting a Show & Tell. E: monica@visualartists.ie

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