Visual Artists' News Sheet - 2019 March April

Issue 2: March – April 2019

The Visual Artists' News Sheet

Inside This Issue INTERVIEW WITH GRACE WEIR INTERVIEW WITH NICK MILLER ESSAY – LIGHT ART IN IRELAND PROFILE – DRAWING DE-CENTRED

Contents On The Cover Sarah Diviney I, X, 2018, live performance at MART Gallery, Dublin (10 January 2019); photograph by Seamus Travers, courtesy of MART Gallery.

First Pages 6.

8.

Roundup. Exhibitions and events from the past two months.

News. The latest developments in the arts sector.

Columns

10.

11.

Screening. The Memory-Image. Sarah Durcan.

Reading Group. booksvscigarettes. Sara Greavu.

Northern Ireland. Universal Credit. Rob Hilken.

Skills. The Materiality of Austerity. James L. Hayes.

Regional Focus: Cork City 12.

13.

14.

15.

MA: Art & Process. Ciara Rodgers, Visual Artist.

National Sculpture Factory. Valerie Byrne, Director.

Inscriptions of an Immense Theatre. Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Visual Artist.

Hybrid Citizen. Darn Thorn, Visual Artist.

Backwater Artists Group. Brian Mac Domhnaill, Studio Coordinator and Research Assistant.

Cork Artists Collective and The Guesthouse. Catherine Harty, CAC Member and Guesthouse Curator.

The Glucksman. Chris Clarke, Senior Curator.

Crawford Art Gallery. Dyane Hanrahan, Marketing and Communications Manager.

Profile 16.

Seeing the Light. Renata Pekowska discusses the theme of light across several recent exhibitions.

Artist Publishing 18.

This I Can Carry. Annabel König discusses her recent publications, based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Career Development 20.

22.

24.

The Truth of the Encounter. Joanne Laws interviews Nick Miller about his painting practice and current exhibition in London.

Peripheral Visions. Hazel McCrann discusses her art practice and career to date.

Paradise Is Too Far. Andrea Neill interviews Martina Coyle about her art practice and upcoming exhibition.

Introduction WELCOME to the March – April 2019 issue of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

March at Áras Inis Gluaire Gallery, Belmullet, County Mayo.

In columns for this issue, Sarah Durcan outlines her ongoing research project, ‘The Memory-Image’, as well as a related screening event at the Irish Film Institute in January. Sara Greavu discusses the evolution of CCA Derry’s dedicated reading group, booksvscigarettes, which aims to bring concentration and care to a range of texts, through the attentive act of communal reading.

The Skills Column for this issue comes from James L. Hayes, who discusses experimental casting processes, technologies and materials, as well as the most recent iteration of his ongoing ‘Iron-R’ project. Reflecting on the many uncertainties currently facing artists in Northern Ireland, VAI NI Manager Rob Hilken outlines the challenges of the new social security payment, Universal Credit.

Recent Sligo IT graduate, Hazel McCrann, discusses her art practice and her recent show, ‘Peripheral Visions’, which ran at the Hyde Bridge Gallery, Sligo, as part of her Graduate Solo Exhibition Award. Melissa O’Faherty and Kiera O’Toole explain the evolution of the Irish contemporary drawing collective, Drawing de-Centred, while Tobi Maier discusses his recent curatorial residency at The Glucksman and his stay in Carraig-na-gcat, County Cork. In her extended essay, entitled ‘Seeing the Light’, Renata Pekowska reflects on several recent exhibitions across Ireland dedicated to the medium of light. In the Artist Publishing section, Annabel König discusses two of her recent publications, which use Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ as a point of departure.

This issue features several interviews with artists whose exhibitions are currently showing nationally or internationally. Joanne Laws interviews Nick Miller about the evolution of his painting practice and his exhibition, ‘Rootless’ – currently showing at Art Space Gallery in London – while Chris Hayes speaks to Grace Weir about her current exhibition, ‘Time Tries All Things’, at The Institute of Physics, London. Both exhibitions run until the 29 March, Brexit day, after which time the shipping of artworks to and from the UK is likely to become more complicated. In addition, Andrea Neill interviews Martina Coyle about her upcoming exhibition, ‘Paradise Is Too Far’, which will open on 30

The Regional Focus for this issue comes from Cork city, with profiles from: The Glucksman; Crawford Art Gallery; Backwater Artists Group; National Sculpture Factory; and Cork Artists Collective and The Guesthouse. Recent CIT graduate, Ciara Rodgers, outlines her research, as part of the MA Art & Process (MA:AP), and Cork-based artists Ailbhe Ní Bhrian and Darn Thorn discuss their recent work.

The Visual Artists' News Sheet:

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

Visual Artists Ireland:

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

Residency 26.

Walking in a Circle. Tobi Maier discusses his curatorial residency at The Glucksman and his stay at Carraig-na-Gcat, County Cork.

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

How is it Made?

28.

30.

Time Tries All Things. Chris Hayes interviews Grace Weir about her current exhibition at The Institute of Physics, London.

Drawing de-Centred. Melissa O’Faherty and Kiera O’Toole discuss their Irish contemporary drawing collective.

Last Pages 32.

34.

35.

Public Art Roundup. Art outside of the gallery.

Opportunities. Grants, awards, open calls and commissions.

VAI Professional Development. Upcoming workshops, seminars and peer reviews.

Critique Supplement i. ii. iii. iv.

Cover Image: Alan Butler, Surprise Party Breath, 2015.

Liam Crichton with Autumns at Void Gallery, Derry.

‘Surveillé·e·s’ at Solstice Arts Centre, Navan.

‘Lectus’ at MART Gallery, Dublin.

Shane Keeling at Wexford Arts Centre.

Gerry Davis at Galway Arts Centre.

As ever, we have reviews of recent exhibitions, details of the upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public art roundups, news from the sector and current opportunities.

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

International Memberships

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Roundup

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS FROM THE PAST TWO MONTHS

Dublin

Belfast

A4 SOUNDS

From 18 to 22 Jan, Fingal County Council and Block T Studios presented a new exhibition of work by 2017 Fingal Graduate Award-winner Róisín McGannon. ‘How it Stands, Provisionally’ mediated on the “unreliable and uncertain position of being in the body”. Using photography and performative video, McGannon undertakes a series of bodily investigations in order to provide a “framed glance into an embodied existence explicitly aware of its nuanced fragility”.

McGannon is a member of A4 Sounds.

THE LAB

Currently at The LAB Gallery is a solo exhibition by Galway-based Scottish artist, Marielle MacLeman. During a Dublin City Council residency, MacLeman researched the “histories of enterprise, labour and land use in Dublin’s Liberties”. ‘In Course of Rearrangement’ features new work responding to the “interrelationship of inner-city built and natural environments”, using materials, such as cut-grass and dyed Irish wool, echoing The Liberties former weaving industry. The exhibition continues until 10 Mar and will tour to Galway Arts Centre.

a4sounds.org

LIBRARY PROJECT

‘Some Concrete Possibilities’ (10 to 30 Jan) was a group exhibition curated by 2019 Black Church Print Studio Emerging Curator Award-winner Siobhán Mooney. The exhibition looked at the role of chance processes in influencing the development and creation of artworks. This idea was explored through Gareth Joyce’s torn-paper digital collages; Lee Welch’s paintings based on tarot card readings; a series of light pieces

by Helen MacMahon; and a large-scale drawing, ceramics and sound-producing sculpture by Cara Farnan.

‘Process 1000/1’ was an exhibition presenting new work researched and created by artists who were awarded the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural IMMA 1000 residencies in 2018. The exhibition featured new photographs

by Dragana Jurisic exploring the institutional context of IMMA’s old Royal Hospital setting; a video and sound installation by Jenny Brady, titled Second Person; and Neil Carroll’s monumental expanded paintings, which fenced in different parts of the gallery space. The exhibition ran from 24 Jan to 24 Feb in IMMA’s Project Space. imma.ie

‘The Body Politic’ is an exhibition addressing the “different struggles against status, laws and narratives perscribed on our individual and collective bodies”, featuring work from Chloe Cooper, Rachel Fallon, Núria Güell, Jesse Jones, Eimear Walshe and Emma Wolf-Haugh. The exhibition takes its title from the medieval metaphor that analogises a nation to one autonomous being, made up from the people within a nation state.

Each artist provides a contemporary response to this idea, using video, photography, textiles and other methods. Continues until 14 Mar.

thelab.ie

RUA RED

‘Finnegans Woke’ is a new exhibition created by the collaborative art duo kernnardphillips (Peter Kernard and Cat Phillips). According to the press release, the exhibition is a “call for civic engagement” via community-led work, serving as a “platform to counter mainstream [media] coverage”. The exhibition urges viewers to learn from the past, referencing the cyclicity of history found in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. It is the fourth collaboration between Rua Red and the London-based arts organisation a/political. ‘Finnegans Woke’ continues at Rua Red until 30 Mar.

blackchurchprint.ie

IMMA

CATALYST ARTS

A solo exhibition by Irish artist, Robert Armstrong, titled ‘Squeegee Paintings’, is currently showing at the Kevin Kavanagh gallery, Dublin, untill 9 March. The exhibition title references Armstrong’s tools and material approaches – which sees him “delight in the dripping, slipping, scraping, melding, oozing, brushing and drying of oil paint on a heavily gessoed linen ground”. Using a squeegee, the artist “ravages” the painted surface, producing “paintscapes” that retain the history of their own making, akin to a poised depiction of a world in flux. kevinkavanaghgallery.ie

‘The Body Politic’, installation view, Catalyst Arts, Late Night Art (7 February); photograph courtesy of Catalyst Arts

For their first exhibition of the new year, Belfast Exposed have curated a new group exhibition of photographic works borrowed from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Collection. Curated by Belfast Exposed Director, Deidre Robb, the exhibition aims to showcase the variety of different approaches to contemporary photography in Northern Ireland. 20 artists are featured in the exhibition, including: Paul Seawright, Susan MacWilliam, Peter Richards, Fergus Jordan, Mairead McClean and Angela Haliday. The exhibition continues until 16 Mar.

catalystarts.org.uk

BLACK BOX

From 3 Jan to 3 Feb, The Black Box presented the exhibition ‘Dreamed of Places’ by Alana Barton in their Green Room café space. The exhibition displayed a series of paintings by Barton that feature both figurative and abstract elements. According to the press release, the paintings take their inspiration from “cults, alternative cultures and consciousness; sourc[ed] from old photographic material, primarily based on young people integrated with organic forms”. Barton is the winner of Vision Express’s 2019 Northern Ireland Young Artist of the Year Award.

belfastexposed.org

GOLDEN THREAD GALLERY

The Golden Thread Gallery’s annual ‘Dissolving Histories’ exhibition took place from 8 Dec 2018 to 22 Jan 2019. Titled ‘New Narratives’, the exhibition followed on from the ‘Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art’ series, which was conceived as a way of exploring “the unreliable nature of history”. ‘New Narratives’ featured work by Pauline Rowan, Jan McCullough, Helena Hamilton and Gail Mahon, spanning photography, video, sculpture and installation. ‘New Narratives’ was co-curated with Professor Paul Seawright (Ulster University) and Golden Thread Gallery.

blackboxbelfast.com

ruared.ie

KEVIN KAVANAGH

BELFAST EXPOSED

PS2

‘The Question of Feeling At Home’ ran at PS², from 7 to 23 Feb. Curated by Moran Been-noon, the exhibition featured work by David O’Regan, Sarah Smith, Matthew Calderwood and Cecilia Bullo. It offered various perspectives on the role of the home in contemporary life, particularly with regard to temporary living situations, more fluid definitions of family and representations of the domestic. The exhibition aimed to be relevant to those living with intellectual disabilities, for whom views of home-living raises questions of independence, support and community. pssquared.org

Neil Carroll, Icefall, Part 1 & 2, 2019; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of IMMA

goldenthreadgallery.co.uk

ST JOSEPH’S CHURCH

‘Vibrant Matter’ was an exhibition that explored alternative, “anthropocentric ways of navigating the ‘worlds’ in and around us”. The artists featuring in the exhibition – Jasmin Märker and Jan Uprichard – used video, bio-art and sculptural works to question our relationship to extisence in relation to ‘non-human’ things, and how ‘non-humans’ experience cities and urban enivironments. The exhibition was organised by Household Belfast, in collaboration with Sailortown Regeneration Group, as part of the 2019 NI Science Festival programme. householdbelfast.co.uk

Marielle MacLeman, ‘In Course of Rearrangement’ installation view, The LAB Gallery, Dublin

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Sinead O’Donnell, Crossing Permissions, performance, 1 February, Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown; photograph by Monique Kelly; courtesy of the artist

Roundup

7

Mary A. Kelly, Snow Falling (detail), 2018, oil, bitumen on canvas, 150 × 150cm; courtesy of the artist and Highlanes Gallery

Taus Makhacheva, Tightrope, Dagestan, 2015, currently showing in ‘The Keeper; To have and to hold’ at The Model, Sligo; image courtesy The Model

THE DOCK

DUNMAISE ARTS CENTRE

Regional & International

CCI, PARIS

Elaine Hoey’s solo exhibition, ‘Surface Tension’ ran at Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, from 25 Jan to 22 Feb. In the exhibition, Hoey explored the current refugee crisis in Europe through the use of virtual reality installations and video. The works commented on the rise of right-wing, populist ideologies, whilst also impressing the need for values such as “empathy, justice and solidarity” in helping those caught in the crossfires of far-away conflicts. ‘Surface Tension’ was curated by Norah Hickey M’Sichili and was Hoey’s second solo exhibition.

Anita Groener’s latest exhibition, ‘The Past is a Foreign Country’, asks funadmental questions of what it is to be a human today. Creating large-scale installations composed of fragile materials, such as birch trees and bird nests, Groener prods at the fragility of life that has been exposed by the recent refugee crisis. ‘The Past is a Foreign Country’ continues at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, until 9 Mar before touring to The LAB, Dublin, and Uilinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, later in the year.

centreculturelirlandais.com

HIGHLANES

Currently on show at Highlanes Gallery, Dorgheda, is a new touring exhibition of paintings by mid-career artist Mary A. Kelly. Kelly, who is typically known for her lens-based works in photography and video, has created a series of paintings for this new show, titled ‘Chair’. The works investigate the social functions and significances of chairs in different environments, as a “construct aside” and a “witness to life”.

‘Chair’ continues at Highlanes until 13 Apr before toruing to other venues around Ireland in 2019.

thedock.ie

NERVE CENTRE

‘Troubles Art’ presents a number of works taken from the National Museums NI art collection responding to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The exhibition provides varying artistic insights into the causes, impact and complexity of the Troubles, dealing with themes of violence and division, and their impact on society. The exhibition is part of ‘Making the Future’, a cultural heritage project that aims to use objects, collections and archives to ask challenging questions about the past. ‘Troubles Art’ continues until 28 Apr.

highlanes.ie

SECESSION, VIENNA

An exhibition by Irish artist Gerard Byrne, titled ‘Upon all the living and the dead’, will continue at Secession, Vienna, Austria, until 31 March.

The exhibition features several of Byrne’s most recent moving image works, which extend the artist’s exploration of the complex relationship between images and time. Alternative display formats reflect on the “changing technical and cultural realities underlying his work and its presentation”, while dialogue is activated in relation to the “proto-cinematic moment” and the “evasive temporality” of individual artworks. secession.at

nervecentre.org

SIRIUS ARTS CENTRE

For the last installment of events comissioned as part of their ‘One Here Now: the Brian O’Doherty / Patrick Ireland Project’, two new exhibitions are showing at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, until 27 Apr. ‘A Silent Space in the Turning World’ by Mary-Ruth Walsh uses painting, collage and blueprints to reflect on O’Doherty’s engagements with space, place and arcitecture.

‘House Call’ is an exhibition of rare works made

by O’Doherty (and his alter egos Patrick Ireland and Sigmund Bode) that have been sourced from private collections around Ireland. siriusartscentre.ie

‘Plate, Paper, Print’ (11 Jan to 17 Feb) was a group exhibition that celebrated the craft of contemporary printmaking in Ireland. The exhibition featured works made by ten members from Ireland’s oldest print workshop, Graphic Studio Dublin, which was founded in 1960.

Each artist presented their work as small groupings within the larger exhibition space.

The works displayed highlighted the various techniques commonly used in fine art printmaking, including etching, lithography, photo etching and screen printing.

F.E. MCWILLIAM

Locky Morris is presenting a solo exhibition of his work at F.E. McWilliam Gallery, Bandbrigde until 18 May. ‘Once a day every day all day long’ focuses on recent work made by Morris since 2010, highlighting shifts in the artist’s practice from political to more personal themes.

As mentioned in the press release, this shift “references changes in [Morris’s] personal circumstances and also the transformed landscape of post-conflict Northern Ireland”. The exhibition was curated by Feargal O’Malley (Ulster University) and Dr Riann Coulter.

dunamaise.ie

MILLENNIUM COURT ARTS CENTRE

‘Crossing Permissions’ is a new solo exhibition by performance artist Sinéad O’Donnell, which opened at Millennium Court on 1 Feb with a live performance by the artist. The exhibition also featured camera-based performances, using videos and photographs, as well as drawings and sculptures, which were developed over the past year

by O’Donnell while visiting Tokyo, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, San Paulo, Fukushima, Bangkok and Portadown. The works used performance as a way of responding to the ideas of “feminine place” and “landscape” in these different locations.

visitarmagh.com

THE MODEL

‘The Keeper: to have and to hold’ (9 Feb to 14 Apr) is a major exhibition currently on display at the Model, Sligo, which considers the significance of collections and how they can communicate the concerns of past cultures. The exhibition features artworks by over 70 Irish and international artists, spanning more than 100 years of history. Taking the form of an “exhibition within an exhibition”, ‘The Keeper’ features work from the Graeve Collection and Niland Collection, along with a display of contemporary works, which each explore expressions of different historical narratives.

millenniumcourt.org

UILLINN: WEST CORK ARTS CENTRE

‘Elemental’ (12 Jan to 2 March) was an exhibition curated by Cleo Fagan (Superprojects), which lets young children explore contemporary art through touch and movement. Featuring works by artists Caoimhe Kilfeather and Karl Burke, the exhibition utilises interactive and tactile sculptures and installations, that experiment with scale, texture, space and light. During the final week of the exhibition, a number of newly commissioned artworks were displayed in the gallery, which were created in collaboration with local primary school children and artist Siobhán McGibbon. westcorkartscentre.com

themodel.ie

VISUAL

A retrospective of artworks by Stephen McKenna is currently showing at VISUAL, Carlow.

The works featuring in ‘A Painters Life: Stephen McKenna (1939-2017)’ were originally decided upon by the artist shortly before his passing in 2017. In addition, the artist’s legacy is being acknowledged in a group exhibition of six artists influenced by McKenna, namely: Isabel Nolan, Stephen Loughman, Mairead O’hEocha, Eithne Jordan, Adam Bohanna and William McKeown (1968–2011). The exhibition continues until 19 May. visualcarlow.ie

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News

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

THE LATEST FROM THE ARTS SECTOR

General News

VAI News

WORKSPACE SCHEME

NEW ART STUDIO CLOSURE

NEW PROJECT CURATOR AT SOLSTICE

BASIC SPACE ARTIST RESIDENCY

NI YOUNG ARTIST OF THE YEAR

FIRE STATION BURSARY AWARDS

A total of 14 studios and workspaces have been awarded funding for 2019 through the Arts Council of Ireland’s Visual Artists Workspace Scheme. Totaling €230,000, the grants will support the upkeep and running of various studios and workspaces for 551 individual visual artists working in Ireland.

The studios and workspaces awarded grants this year are: A4 Sounds (Dublin), Artspace Studios Ltd (Galway), Backwater Artists Group (Cork), Cork Artists’ Collective Ltd (Cork), Custom House Studios Ltd (Westport), Engage Art Studios (Galway), GOMA Gallery of Modern Art (Waterford), MART (Dublin), Ormond Studios (Dublin), Over The Line Studios (Cork), Pallas Projects/Studios (Dublin), Sample-Studios (Cork) and Spacecraft (Limerick).

In January, Basic Space announced that Rosie O’Reilly will be the recipient of their latest artist residency, beginning in March 2019. The residency will take place at ONONO project space in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, with support from Basic Space. As part of the residency, O’Reilly will receive a large studio space and accommodation for the duration of her stay.

Rosie O’Reilly is an artist and maker who works across audio, sculpture and drawing to create site-specific and responsive work. Her practice is concerned with the separation of nature created by rational-constructivist viewpoints. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions including: TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2018; ‘Guest Appearance’, Trinity College Dublin; and ‘ROSC: Fiction of the Contemporary’, Irish Museum of Modern Art. CULTURE IRELAND FUNDING

The Minister for Culture, Heritage and Gaeltacht Affairs, Josepha Madigan TD, has announced €2.13 million of Culture Ireland funding for the international promotion of Irish arts in 2019. A total of €1.16 million will enable 168 Irish artists and arts organisations to present projects, covering architecture, circus, dance, film, literature, music, opera, theatre and the visual arts in 41 different countries. A total of €153,400 of this funding was awarded to visual arts projects. A total €975,000 of funding has also been allocated for the promotion of Irish literature, music and film through resource organisations and Ireland’s flagship cultural international centres – Centre Cutlurel Irlandais, Paris, and Irish Art Centre, New York.

Some of the visual arts projects supported through this funding include: Alice Maher and Aideen Barry at the American Museum, Washington DC; Mariechen Danz at the 16th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; Richard Gorman at Chigasaki City Museum of Art, Japan; Mark Clare at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland, California; Nick Miller at Art Space Gallery, London; Alan Butler at Volta, New York; and Presentation by Gibbons and Nicholas of work by Elva Mulchrone, Anita Groener, Suzy O’Mullane and Sean Molloy at Art on Paper, New York.

It was announced on the 14 January that New Art Studio would be closing the doors to their Mary’s Abbey premises in central Dublin. The studio group had been in operation since 1983.

Over the past 35 years, they have provided studio facilities to over 80 visual artists working in Dublin. The building contained 11 studios, as well as a project exhibition space.

The news of the closure came via a social media statement by co-director Mary Burke.

Burke noted that the closure of New Art Studios reflects an increasingly deteriorating studio infrastructure for artists working within the city, stating that: “The disappearance of such groups has reduced the supply of quality studio space to a critically low level, especially in central Dublin.

This will ultimately undermine the entire cultural infrastructure throughout the country.”

In 2018, young artists aged between 25 and 30 based in Northern Ireland were invited to apply for the Vision Express Northern Ireland Young Artist of the Year Award. In January, it was announced that painter Alana Burton was the winner of the 2018 prize. Burton, who is based in Vault Artist Studios in Belfast, received a cash prize of £1,000 at the awards ceremony, which took place at The Braid Arts Centre, Ballymena.

Speaking of the prize, Burton stated that it was a “wonderful honour” and that she was “delighted to have been chosen”. The runner up for the prize was Jasmine Märker, who will be staging a solo exhibition at The Braid Arts Centre later this year. Märker is also based at Vault Artist Studios. An exhibition, featuring all 13 of the shortlisted finalists, ran at Braid Arts Centre until 9 Feb.

ACNI RECOGNISES COMMUNITY ARTISTS

Three artists from Northern Ireland have recently been awarded £5,000 National Lottery Funding by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) for new the development of new community arts projects. These career development awards, which were created under ACNI’s existing Support for the Individual Artist Programme (SIAP), are presented in memory of Mike Moloney and Anne O’Donoghue, who passed away in 2013 and 2014 respectively. Both were well-respected figures within the arts community in Northern Ireland. Mike Moloney was the co-founder of the Belfast Community Circus School, while Anne O’Donoghue was Director of Play Resource Warehouse and a champion of community arts practice.

The recipients of the awards are aerialist Hannah Anderson and photographer Mervyn Smith. Hannah Anderson will use her Mike Moloney Award to travel to Guadalajara, Mexico, for a six-month mentoring residency. Mervyn Smith will use the Anne O’Donoghue Award to develop his skills working with people in the mental health sector using photography. Specifically, he will use the award for study visits and mentoring whilst engaging with people with complex mental health conditions, bringing this experience back to his role as Community Engagement Manager with Belfast Exposed.

It has recently been announced that Linda Shevlin will take on the role of Project Curator for Solstice Arts Centre in Navan for 2019. As part of this role, Shevlin will be responsible for Solstice’s visual arts programme and will curate a series of exhibitions during the winter season.

Linda Shevlin has extensive experience as a curator, facilitator and manager. Her most recent role was as invited curator for TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2018 in Galway. Shevlin’s other notable achievements include curating the Hennessy Art Fund in 2017. She has been awarded the Arts Council of Ireland’s Visual Arts Curatorial Residency Award for three consecutive years (2013 – 2017). She has also worked with various significant artists, including Vivienne Dick, Kathy Prendergast, Duncan Campbell and Martin Parr.

Fire Station Artists’ Studios have announced the recipients of their 2019 Sculpture and Digital Media Bursary Awards. Alan Magee, Helen Hughes and Neil Carroll have been awarded Sculpture Bursaries, while artistic duo Ella Bertilsson and Ulla Juske, and multidisciplinary artist Michelle Doyle have been awarded Digital Media Bursaries. Each awardee will benefit from free access to Fire Station’s facilities for a three-month period, as well as curational support and a stipend.

Fire Station have also announced their International Curator Residencies for the year. The curators, who will each stay at Fire Station for one-week research period, are: Vanina Saracino (Italy/Germany), Hana Ostan Ozbolt (Slovenia), Canan Batur (UK/Turkey), Lucy A. Sames (UK), Amy Powell (USA), Alfredo Aracil (Spain), Sabine Schmid (Germany) and Patrice Sharkey (Australia).

TBG+S PROJECT STUDIO AWARDEES

Five artists have been awarded studios at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios for a one-year period. Project Studios are awarded to artists at an early point in their career. This year, the Project Studios have been awarded to: Jenny Brady, Chloe Brenan, Paul Hallahan, Celina Muldoon and Martina O’Brien. Each artist was awarded their studio by a selection panel, following an open-call application process, which took place in October 2018. The selection panel for this year’s award consisted of Catriona Leahy (TBG+S Studio and Board Member), Sibyl Montague (TBG+S Studio and Board Member) and Nicola Wright (Exhibitions Curator, Studio Voltaire, London).

Jenny Brady works with film to explore ideas around translation, communication and the limitations of language. Chloe Brennan’s practice deals with how methods of structure, order and meaning are constructed from reality. Paul Hallahan works with painting, video and installation, focusing on intuitive and primitive ways of engaging with art. Celina Muldoon is a performance artist, specialising in site and context-responsive works, which investigate socio-political structures and the body. Martina O’Brien’s works focus on the links between people, nature and technology.

GET TOGETHER 2019

VAI are excited to announce that their sixth annual Get Together will take place on Friday 14 June 2019 at the DIT Grangegorman Campus in Dublin. VAI’s annual Get Together invites both local and international art professionals to learn from each other and make new connections.

The theme of this year’s Get Together will be: “We are all Individuals… Or are we? Maintaining Creativity & Identifying Opportunities”.

Through a series of panel discussions and talks experts from the arts sector will unpick the different ways in which artists express themselves through their work and their different identities.

As usual, the day will feature the Visual Artist Café, which features information points from various important cultural and arts organisations in Ireland. A crowd-favourite, Speed Curating will also return this year, allowing artists to make new connections with curators based around the world. Clinics will also take place, so that attendees can receive specialist advice on their careers.

Early Bird tickets will be available to members for €25 euros from the start of March until mid-May. Tickets will be €30 after this date.

Non-member tickets are €50. For more information on Get Together, feel free to contact our office by emailing info@visualartists.ie. An announcement of the full Get Together 2019 programme will be made in the coming weeks.

NEW VAI RESOURCE CENTRE IN LIMERICK

Visual Artists Ireland are happy to announce that we have launched a new VAI Resource Centre in Limerick, based in Ormston House.

The Resource Centre, which was officially launched on the 11 February, will serve VAI members in the Limerick, Clare and Tipperary area. This new collaboration with Ormston House will act as an important outpost for VAI in the south west of the country and will host a number of different workshops and events in the coming months, through VAI’s Lifelong Learning programme. These events will include a career review workshop with Linda Shevlin on 12 March; a workshop on costing and pricing work with Patricia Clyne-Kelly on 8 April; and a workshop on creativity with Miriam Logan on 13 May. Ormston House will now receive copies of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet, as well as other VAI-related information.

DCC/VAI ART WRITING AWARD WINNER

VAI, in partnership with Dublin City Council’s The LAB Gallery, are pleased to announce Lily Cahill as the winner of the 2019 DCC/ VAI Critical Writing Award. Cahill’s winning text – a review of Michelle Doyle’s exhibition ‘Obedient City’ at A4 Sounds – will be published in the May/June 2019 issue of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet. She will also be invited to contribute to subsequent issues of VAN and will develop a writing commission in response to The LAB Gallery’s 2019 programme.

The panel of judges this year comprised: Sheena Barrett (Assistant Arts Officer, Dublin City Council and Curator, The LAB Gallery), Joanne Laws (VAN Features Editor), Chris Steenson (VAN Production Editor) and Chris Clarke (Critic and Senior Curator at The Glucksman).

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Columns

Screening

Reading Group

The Memory-Image

booksvscigarettes

SARAH DURCAN OUTLINES HER RECENT SCREENING PROGRAMME, CURATED IN COLLABORATION WITH AEMI.

SARA GREAVU DISCUSSES THE EVOLUTION OF CCA DERRY~LONDONDERRY’S DEDICATED READING GROUP.

‘THE MEMORY-IMAGE: Intermedial Aesthet-

ics in Artists’ Moving Image’ is my ongoing research project which consists of a book-inprogress and related events. A screening event, held at the Irish Film Institute (IFI) on 29 January 2019, was developed in collaboration with Alice Butler and Daniel Fitzpatrick of aemi (artists’ experimental moving image platform).

The four films presented can be understood as ‘memory-images’, triggering the retrieval and construction of memory.

The rise of ‘memory studies’ and the preoccupation with memory in contemporary art is linked to both the unprecedented technological capacity to store data and the aftermath of the ‘grand narratives’ of history. While the moving image has always been associated with the conceptualisation of memory, this study shows how the remediation of film and analogue video through the affordances of digital technology has produced new models of memory within artists’ moving image. The term ‘memory-image’ is drawn from Henri Bergson’s metaphysics of memory and time, as well as Gilles Deleuze’s extension of these ideas to a cinema of the ‘time-image’. For Bergson, the memory-image temporarily actualises the movement of thought, as it attempts to recall virtual or pure memory.

The screening began with All the World’s Memory/Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), directed by Alain Resnais, whose signature tracking shots are described by Deleuze as ‘circuits of memory’. Made after Nuit et Brouillard/Night and Fog (1955) – Resnais’s landmark reflection on Nazi concentration camps and the systemised administration of the Holocaust – Toute la mémoire du monde brings an undercurrent of scepticism to what is ostensibly a documentary on the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. In contrast to the narrator’s utopian tone, Resnais presents the library as a shadowy place in which books are imprisoned, with the film apparatus being implicated in the surveillance and management of the collection. In this sense, the film anticipates an anxiety around the ‘totalising rationale’ of the archive and the role of technology in data repositories. The moving image is both part of such technologised storage systems and, as an archetypal medium of memory, it also modulates the ways in which we remember and forget.

In a change to the scheduled programme, the second film screened was Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer’s Why Are You Angry?

(2017), which takes its title from a painting by Paul Gaughin. Riskily reactivating a memory of Gaughin’s colonialist gaze, the film restages the painter’s compositions of Tahitian women and children, made while residing in Tahiti in the 1890’s. Unfolding in languorous tableaux and observational interludes, the film calls attention to the curious temporalities of the moving image in which past and present can co-exist and overlap.

A different temporal vector is established in Lucy Raven’s The Deccan Trap (2015), which

creates a memory of image production reaching back from 3D digital studios in Chennai, India, to ancient bas-relief carvings in the volcanic Deccan region of Western India. Raven’s film is made in a deliberately slowed form of photographic animation that emphasises the moving image as a composite, articulating connections across time and space between the contemporary globalised economy of film-production, early methods of celluloid animation and the Deccan sculptural friezes.

The final film in the programme, Mark Leckey’s Dream English Kid, 1964-1999 AD (2015), presents a journey into the past via a montage of images, sound, found footage and CGI sequences spanning the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s. The image of a mesh from fishnet tights transitioning to a raster grid of RGB pixels and networks of pylons and motorways recurs throughout the film, underlining the fact that Leckey’s memories are constituted from a matrix of technical media. In a Proustian update, the past is retrieved through the aesthetic qualities of different media formats and the digital foregrounding of analogue sounds.

Leckey navigates a path through the archive by combining personal and collective memory of techno-scientific events. Referencing the launch of a communications satellite, lunar eclipses, nuclear test footage and culminating in the hysteria over the millennium Y2K bug, the film captures the experience of living through technological change. The clunky syntax of the title, Dream English Kid, lifted from a YouTube cartoon, is a double-edged nod to both the homogenisation of culture as it passes through the internet and an acknowledgement that the past is always slightly out of registration, subject to the reconstructions of memory.

We were very fortunate to have Leckey attend the screening and participate in a discussion afterwards. As he described it, the film emerged from a late-night internet trawl when he came across an audio recording of a Joy Division gig that he’d been at and realised it might contain a trace of his own presence. He also mentioned the Bruno Bettelheim story of a boy who thought he was a machine connected to electricity, in relation to his interest in how technology infiltrates our minds, and as a childhood play on his name – the ‘leckey meter’, short for electricity meter.

This screening and talk would not have been possible without the kind support of the artists, Les Films du Jeudi, Peter Maybury, Dean Kavanagh, aemi, Arts Council Film, IFI, LUX, NCAD and Clíodhna Shaffrey of Temple Bar Gallery + Studios.

Sarah Durcan is an artist, lecturer and programme leader of the MFA Fine Art at NCAD.

“Spaces of learning are not only places to acquire the skills of research and production; they are places where you learn how to co-create knowledge, in community. You are not in a space of learning in order to outperform your peers; you are in a space of learning to discover and share the pleasures of rigor and generosity. You are in a space of learning to be in proximity to the energy, gifts, and challenges of others.” 1 The intermittent reading group, booksvscigarettes, originated in the Centre for Contemporary Art in Derry in 2016. The group takes its name from George Orwell’s essay, ‘Books v. Cigarettes’, which assessed the cost and the value of reading, measuring it against other pursuits. The name plays with the distinction between everyday pleasures and cultural products, collapsing them into each other, even as they sit opposed.

Bookvscigarettes is one small element of CCA’s public programme, which seeks to find and explore a set of shared interests and concerns by connecting local communities, artists and the discourses of contemporary art. We are interested in programmes that acknowledge the specific political, cultural, historical and educational context of our location but, from there, speak outwards – relating lived experiences to other spaces and systemic ideas.

The texts read by bookvscigarettes so far have ranged from Laboria Cuboniks’ Xenofeminist Manifesto and Christina Kiaer’s Imagine No Possessions, to a selection of readings from k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher.2 Sometime our choice of reading is linked to an event or exhibition in the gallery; at other times it draws on a longer-term thematic arc or is responsive to broader national and international cultural and political conversations.

We have recently partnered with other groups – including Outburst Queer Arts and the University of Atypical, a disabled-led arts group – to read works of shared interest and relevance.

Group sizes vary from five to 20 participants, with some people attending consistently and others joining based on a specific interest in the selected text. Our method is straightforward and, we hope, generous. Participants don’t need to have read the text in advance; we take it in turns to read a paragraph or passage (with the possibility to opt out if you prefer) and we check in at the end of each section. We pause to discuss if there are parts that are unclear or if anyone disputes an assertion. People elaborate or share a reference or experience. Sometimes we need to google a word or a concept. At times, everyone is happy to advance to the next section without discussion, to see where the argument is going.

The tone is conversational, and we take care to host participants (with tea, coffee and food), to contribute to an overall sense of conviviality.

This unhurried and sociable approach delimits the length of texts we can tackle – generally one or two chapters or a mid-length essay are about right. But it allows us to pay attention to

each other, so that all voices are included, and everyone’s contribution is valued. From a personal perspective, there is something in the act of reading together that brings extra concentration and attention to a text. It requires a recalibration to change the pace from rushing and skimming, to taking care with the form and meaning of the words. Collective reading and discussion seem to produce an intellect that is greater than the sum of its parts. Participants have talked about the way it combats the sense of isolation we can feel when our knowledge communities or allies are physically dispersed; only connected through our online lives.

From an institutional perspective, bookvscigarettes suits our context. Derry does not have an art college or a well-developed arts infrastructure. An informal or self-organised educational platform can have a light touch. It can be responsive as well as challenging. Initiatives like this feel like a small part of building an arts ecology, a slow process of seeding ideas and methods and creating networks. This format of ‘learning in public’ is one way of producing a programme with a set of concerns and interests but without a dogmatic agenda. It cedes the power of authority and expertise in return for collaboration, exploration and social connection. It aligns with a model of the art centre as a space of encounter, offering opportunities to engage with ideas/discourses/people/artworks/texts. The model is not a new one – reading groups happen all over – but we feel we have found a formula that works for us. Communities are built in spaces of learning… through a thousand tiny acts.

Sara Greavu works with artists and others to make exhibitions, projects and texts.

She is based in Derry.

Notes 1 Susan Jahoda and Caroline Woolard, Making and Being: A guide to embodiment, collaboration, and circulation in the visual arts, (Hauser and Wirth: 2019).

2 A partial list of texts read by booksvscigarettes: • Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, (Verso Books, 2018).

• Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016) – excerpt.

• Lesli Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues, (Firebrand Books, 1993) – with Outburst Arts • Alison Kafer, ‘A Time for Disability Studies and a Future for Crips’, Feminist, Queer, Crip, (Indiana University Press 2013) • Jordy Rosenberg, ‘The Daddy Dialectic’, Los Angeles Review of Books, March 2018 – with Outburst Arts • Andrea Long Chu, ‘On Liking Women’, n+1, Issue 30, Winter 2018 – with Outburst Arts • Ellen Samuels, ‘Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 37 (3), 2017 – with University of Atypical • Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, (Indiana University Press, 1965) – excerpt.

• Mark Fisher, ‘How to kill a zombie: strategising the end of neoliberalism’ and ‘Acid Communism (Unfinished introduction)’ from k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004– 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018)

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Columns

Northern Ireland

Skills

Universal Credit

The Materiality of Austerity

ROB HILKEN OUTLINES THE CHALLENGES OF THE UNIVERSAL CREDIT SYSTEM FOR ARTISTS IN NORTHERN IRELAND.

JAMES L. HAYES DISCUSSES EXPERIMENTAL CASTING PROCESSES, TECHNOLOGIES AND MATERIALS.

ARTISTS IN NORTHERN Ireland are being challenged by a range of uncertainties. Brexit is casting a looming shadow, but with so many unknowns about the nature of any withdrawal agreement, it is very hard to put plans in place that will mitigate against potentially negative impacts.

But even before Brexit comes into effect, there is another issue that is already having a significant impact on the livelihoods of artists in Northern Ireland – that of the United Kingdom’s new benefits scheme, called Universal Credit.

Universal Credit is the new ‘simplified’ benefits system that combines Jobseekers Allowance, Housing Benefit, Working Tax Credit, Employment and Support Allowance, Child Tax Credit and Income Support into one single payment.

Universal Credit was initially announced by the Conservative government in 2010 and has slowly been rolled out across the UK since 2013, reaching Northern Ireland in late 2017. If you make a new application for benefits today, you will go straight into the Universal Credit system, while anyone on existing benefits schemes are currently being migrated to Universal Credit. If you are still receiving benefits under one of the old schemes, any significant change in your circumstances may trigger your automatic migration to the new system. This includes changes to your employment status, address or family details.

However, the switch to Universal Credit is not just a change to a more ‘streamlined’ system.

It also changes how benefits are calculated. Depending on your individual circumstances, the amount of benefits you will receive may change quite dramatically compared to the old system.

You can use an online calculator to work out how much you may receive (entitledto.co.uk). As you earn more from your employment or self-employment, the amount you receive will reduce.

Universal Credit and the various benefit schemes it aims to replace are designed to support people with no or low income. Many artists fall into these categories, often relying on parttime jobs to supplement income from their artistic practice. There are three aspects of Universal Credit that will significantly affect artists: The Minimum Income Floor; proving that you are ‘gainfully self-employed’; and managing monthly fluctuations in your income and expenditure.

Most artists are self-employed and in order to qualify for Universal Credit, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) must determine whether you are ‘gainfully self-employed’. They define this as having “self-employment in a trade, profession or vocation [that] should be your main occupation. It must also be organised, developed, regular and carried out in expectation of profit”.

To do this we recommend that you have a business plan that demonstrates your strategic priorities and financial projections for the coming year. If you are also employed, they will decide if self-employment is your main occupation, based on the number of hours worked and the income you generate from it. If they decide you are not gainfully self-employed as an artist, your ‘work

coach’ will expect you to commit to looking for a job, or you must decide not to claim any benefits.

The second aspect of Universal Credit that artists will find challenging to manage is the Minimum Income Floor (MIF). The Minimum Income Floor is a figure based on the number of hours you are available to work per week (usually 35) multiplied by the National Living Wage (currently £7.83 and rising to £8.21 in April for those over 25). Universal Credit assumes that everyone will earn this amount each month. If your self-employment income is less than that, your benefits are calculated from that figure instead of your earnings. Your work coach may ask you to make efforts to increase your monthly income to meet the Minimum Income Floor.

If you have been registered as self-employed for less than a year, then you may be entitled to a ‘start-up period’ of a year to develop your business, where the MIF does not apply.

Universal Credit comes with more onerous reporting requirements and you must submit details of your income (profit) every month.

Whereas the old systems averaged your income and expenditure out over the whole year, the new system calculates your benefits on a monthly basis.

This system works if you have a regular monthly income and should help people avoid cases where they might be asked to repay money due to mid-year changes to their work circumstances. The challenge for artists is that this does not allow for monthly or seasonal fluctuations in your income. If you do not generate any income for several months (while your are producing a new body of work for example), you may be asked to look for new work, and may be subject to sanctions if you do not meet this responsibility. Conversely, if you generate a larger amount of sales in a short period (due to an exhibition or commission for example) you may be refused benefits for that period and subsequent months, due to generating a higher income.

As mentioned above, every person wishing to claim Universal Credit will have a ‘work coach’ assigned to them and you must attend an interview with them for your application to be approved. Many people find this interview intimidating, but when you consider the additional complexities of the needs of a self-employed artist in relation to the benefits system, it can become a daunting prospect indeed. The interview is important, as is your relationship with your work coach, because the sanctions they can impose (cuts to your benefits) can be severe and can last for up to three years.

There are independent welfare advisors who can help you prepare for your interview and application. You can contact an organisation such as Advice NI (adviceni.net) or Citizens Advice (citizensadvice.org.uk) for help.

Rob Hilken is Northern Ireland Manager of Visual Artists Ireland.

‘THE MATERIALITY OF Austerity’ was the title of a paper I previously delivered at the Paradox Fine Art European Forum Biennial Conference, hosted by University of Granada, Spain. The paper explored the often overlooked medium of cast iron in contemporary practice and its democratic use in arts education, as a cost-effective material for making art during times of austerity.

I examined the cast iron movement in America since the 1950s, focusing on the development of the medium and its use among artistic communities, including the university sector.

Today – like many contemporary artists and art students alike – I continue to search for efficient and cost-effective means to make new work. I also spend a lot of time looking at the availability of exciting new creative processes, techniques or interesting materials, which I endeavor to utilise or transcribe into my sculptural work and teaching practice.

‘Medium-specificity’ is a term that has recently begun to occupy the psyches of many contemporary artists. We have also observed a resurgence in a ‘well-crafted’ sculptural aesthetic, based on core materiality and traditional processes, such as the casting of cement, concrete, silicone rubbers, plaster, iron, bronze and, more recently, new acrylic-based fibreglasses, like Jesmonite and other non-toxic resins. At CIT Crawford College of Art & Design (CCAD) – where I work as a sculpture lecturer – we have pretty much eliminated the use of polyester and polyurethane resins and other odorous fibreglass systems, in an effort to minimise the use of toxic solvents and additives in our workshops and communal studios.

About 10 years at CCAD, I began introducing Jesmonite systems as production and casting materials, but also as reinforcements for casting mother molds (as opposed to using conventional fibreglass or making heavy plaster reinforcements). Jesmonite products have a plaster-like quality and a white/cream finish, and they certainly do improve the working environment of the studios. Tools and vessels can be easily cleaned using water, as opposed to the more toxic resins used in traditional fibreglass processes, which require the use of multiple consumables, mixing bowls, brushes and so on.

Jesse Jones’s film installation, ‘Tremble, Tremble’, presented for 52nd Venice Biennale in 2017, featured two large-scale Jesmonite casts, showing the versatility of this material in capturing the fragility of ‘bone’ or ‘fossil’, whilst also referencing a sense of modern materiality. Other newer technologies – such as 3D printing, rapid prototyping, laser-cutting and CNC milling – are also becoming established practices for contemporary sculptors.

During the third iteration of my IRON-R project in the National Sculpture Factory (NSF) in July 2018, we noticed that approximately 40% of the work brought in by artists to be experimentally cast was 3D-printed or laser-cut. This was a new and interesting development for us,

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as we tried to adapt some of our more traditional sand-casting methods to accommodate these new materials and products.

Cork-based Czech artist, Tomas Penc, brought an array of 3D-printed objects. Penc had sourced a low temperature plastic that could be used in his 3D printer. He gently heated it to 50 degrees Celsius with a heat gun, not by burning away this material (as it would be very toxic and damaging to the underlying sand mold), but by simply softening and shrinking it, so it could be easily removed from the mold, thus providing the cavities to be filled accurately with molten iron. Similarly, the collaborative experimental printmaking duo, Hehir & Noonan (Catherine Hehir & Noelle Noonan), brought an array of intricate laser-cut objects and flexible plywood patterns that could be pressed into the sand, removed and then cast in iron.

Our main project focused on the work of invited US-based artist and educator, Tamsie Ringler, who was researching river systems.

Working with Cork artist, Lynn-Marie Dennehy, we constructed a virtual 3D render of Cork’s River Lee and its adjoining tributaries. Several months prior to the event, we sent the digital model to Ringler’s studio at the University of Minnesota, where she was able to break down the 3D model into scaled sections in order to form a replica. This replica was then CNC milled into soft foam sections, which would be reconstructed like a jigsaw, to be molded and cast at the IRON-R18 casting event.

The resulting sand mold (measuring four by two metres) was cast open-face as a durational performance event at the NSF, lasting nine hours.

This performance showed the riverbed mold gently being filled up with molten iron, while laminating itself to the cooler iron that went before it. The dramatic event and innovative method of production challenged the conventions of these former materials processes, whose industrial histories are well-known, yet sadly are less seen or accessed by contemporary artists.

Arguably, in the digital age, important processes and practices of the past may be overlooked in favor of the new. One of the main objectives of the IRON-R project is to support artists in identifying ways to combine traditional and emerging processes, thus forming unique methods and languages relating to the production of contemporary art.

James L. Hayes in a visual artist based in Cork, who lectures in Sculpture at CIT Crawford College of Art & Design. He is the founding director of the IRON-R Project (2012, 2014 & 2018). jameslhayes.ie

Regional Focus Cork City

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

National Sculpture Factory Valerie Byrne Director

MA: Art & Process Ciara Rodgers Visual Artist

AFTER COMPLETING A BA in Fine Art, and a

period of both collaborative and independent practice, I planned to undertake a studio-based Master’s in Fine Art with the aim of intensively developing my practice and identifying a place within the wider art world. I applied for the MA: Art & Process (MA:AP), as I could complete the course in one calendar year over three semesters and because it offered a bright studio space in the city centre, including workshop facilities.

The MA:AP studios sit in a commanding white-coloured, period building that dates back to the early 1800s. It is located by the Nano Nagle bridge on Grand Parade overlooking the River Lee and the former site of the FÁS building on Sullivans Quay. This brutalist building housed CCAD students and various art organisations, including Sample-Studios and TACTIC Gallery, until late 2017. From my studio window, I watched as the building released its last exhale in 2018 – a devastating blow to the artistic community at the time.

I began MA:AP in January 2018 with an intensive investigation of my existing art practice.

From the beginning, there was an emphasis on group discussions and site-specific readings at off-campus locations, such as the City Gaol and atop the Elysian Tower. Studio tutors supported the MA:AP cohort, as we deconstructed our individual practices and self-consciously defined new systems of material and theoretical enquiry.

Engaging with the demolition of the FÁS building across the river, as well as the river itself (which can rise quite high against the foundation of the Grand Parade), I read books such as J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. My theoretical research involved the strange, impermanent

nature of our built environment. Intensive material production blended with my psychological exploration of the ‘modern ruin’, producing scaled-down dyed plaster maquettes, influenced by precast Bréton Brut concrete elements.

I produced a contextual research paper, titled ‘Otherworld’s in the Postmodern Urban: The Architectures of Noémie Goudal and Tatiana Trouvé’, which helped formulate and defend a context for my practice and engage with its theoretical, historical and artistic situation.

I developed uncanny built vistas and narratives through an ongoing polaroid fieldwork series and large-scale charcoal drawing installations in the studio. I also undertook a self-directed placement module with Cork Centre for Architectural Education, which further intensified my exploration of the built environment. Trips to EVA International and Glasgow International also sparked valuable discussions with my peers.

Our end of year exhibition, ‘Memories of a Nervous System’, ran from 30 November to 14 December 2018, and included work by Francesca Castellano, Johanna Connor, Raphael Llewllyn, Sinéad Lucey, Anne Martin Walsh, Lar O’Toole, Mirte Slob, Breda Stacey Clare Scott and myself. During the exhibition run, we engaged with the public through peer-led film screenings, symposiums and interactive workshops, involving invited guest speakers and specific groups, such as The Lantern Project and the Irish Armed Forces. As noted in Sinéad Lucey’s catalogue text, the exhibition’s title acknowledges the role of the artist in contemporary society as a defender of subjectivity against an ever more dominant system of knowledge received as data.

A nervous system that is both macro and molecular, refers to society and the living body, as well as to the intermediary collective system of the MA:AP group.

This intense year of study culminated in a viva presentation and a realisation of a more structured and well-defined artistic practice for me, which I now see as a linear process, rather than having a prescribed end-point. cit.ie

Ciara Rodgers, Pyl On, 2018, installation view, ‘Memories of a Nervous System’, plaster and fabric dye, 13 × 15 × 17 cm

The National Sculpture Factory, Cork; photography by Jedrzej Niezgoda, © National Sculpture Factory

THE NATIONAL SCULPTURE Factory (NSF), Cork City, is an arts organisation that provides studio and production facilities within a supportive and enabling environment for the realisation of a broad range of artistic projects. Established in 1989 by four local artists, the NSF has since developed an international reputation of programming and producing site-specific artworks and collaborating on a diverse range of interdisciplinary events and projects. We actively support artists and their practice through our sculpture workshop, residencies, lecture programmes, professional development workshops and the commissioning of new public artworks.

On the Factory Floor, we presently have a range of artists working in a wide variety of materials, including stained glass, porcelain, bronze, steel and mixed media. Working alongside these artists are a number of recent graduates, taking part in our Annual Graduate Residency Awards.

These awards are designed to create time and space for young artists to professionalise their practice straight out of college, in our supportive and productive environment. Each year, we give four residency awards to students from three art colleges: CIT Crawford College of Art & Design; Limerick School of Art & Design and Waterford Institute of Technology.

Successful graduates are offered free studio rental from between three to six months, as well as materials stipends, technical and administrative support, curatorial and peer support and free access to a number of our lectures and professional development workshops. The 2018 awardees were: Sue Dolan and Catherine Callanan (CIT Crawford College of Art & Design); Jesse Hallaway (Limerick School of Art & Design); and Joseph Fogarty (Waterford Institute of Technology). The NSF is working on expanding our residency opportunities in the near future.

We will launch our 2019 programme in early spring with the unveiling of Carom, an exciting new architectural intervention designed by Clancy Moore Architects. This considered and newly-created reading room will create a quiet, reflective space within the busy workshop. It is a tangible response to the existing architecture of

the NSF – in particular Tom De Paor’s Mezzanine – and will add a new dimension to our engagement with the physical space of the Factory.

In April and May, the NSF will engage with the ambitious ‘Art Architecture Activism (AAA)’ project, co-produced by Eve Olney and Kate O’Shea as part of the Arts Council’s ‘Making Great Art Work’. AAA is a collaborative scheme of five multidisciplinary projects, involving a range of artists, designers and Direct Provision service users, that will be developed over a year and then exhibited in Cork city for two weeks in autumn 2019. The AAA project strives to breach the discourses of art, architecture and activism by moving artistic social practice beyond ‘rehearsals of the social’, into concrete practical outcomes.

This summer, NSF will continue its mutually rewarding collaboration with the Cork Midsummer Festival. For this year’s festival, we will produce a newly-commissioned artwork via a public open-call, in partnership with Cork Opera House. Last year the NSF presented and supported three extraordinary projects: Isolde Donohoe’s Rolling Hills performance piece that evolved over the full ten days of the festival; In Clouds, a multi-disciplinary, immersive musical by composer and sound designer Peter Power (who is presently undertaking an experimental residency at the NSF); and Mark Storor and Stephen King’s interventionist theatrical installation, called I Can Colour Between The Lines But I Choose Not Too. Following the very successful presentation of Alan Butler’s dual-screen video installation, On Exactitude in Science, on the Factory floor during last year’s Cork Film Festival, we are already working on this year’s collaboration, with details to be announced soon. This relationship is now in its ninth year and has become an incredible vehicle for the NSF to insert Irish and international artists working in moving image right into the heart of the oldest running film festival in Europe.

nationalsculpturefactory.com

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Regional Focus

Inscriptions of an Immense Theatre

Hybrid Citizen

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain Visual Artist

Darn Thorn Visual Artist

MY NEW FILM, Inscriptions of an Immense The-

atre, which was recently shown at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, opens in the interior of British Museum. The choice of location was a follow-on from my previous film, Reports to an Academy (2015). Here I took certain archetypal sites of collective cultural identity – the Natural History Museum in Dublin and the traditional drystone walls of the West of Ireland – and used film and computer-generated imagery to transform them into stage sets of a kind. I was looking to play with the constructs that underpin our relationship to certain familiar sites.

When that film was completed, I started to look to further cultural fortresses. As the first national public museum in the world, the British museum seemed a good place to start. There is much reference within the museum to its telling of “the story of human culture” – a claim which reveals many presumptions. But as I spent time in the museum, the use of the word ‘story’ struck me as increasingly significant. Looking at the site through the lens of fiction became something I wanted to do, to navigate the troubled seam between the certainty and the fiction contained in such a space.

I start making films in the same way I make collages: by putting one thing next to another and seeing what happens. I am interested in the imaginative leap that happens when locations, images or texts are simply placed in contact and how a logic can be revealed or broken by the simple fact of proximity. Playing with these connections – poking at existing ones or trying to surprise new ones into existence – defines how I approach any new piece of work. In the context of the British Museum – which embodies a regime of visibility with such political, historical and cultural consequence – this relational approach was never going to lead me into simple territory. In the end, issues of environmental destruction, human displacement and the history of objects converged.

The ideas and structure of the film stemmed from a single small display cabinet that I stumbled upon during an early exploratory trip. This was a relatively sparse display of early Assyrian artifacts, which included a small stone monkey

(with a particularly compelling gaze) and two partially cracked and fully inscribed clay forms, supposedly recounting the glorious past of the earliest Assyrian empire. A photograph I took of this display became an unexpected touchstone for the work, providing visual cues to think through relationships between the museum, contemporary displacement and the ways in which cultural history is variously inscribed, broken and reconstituted. It led me to the final trio of locations in the film: the earliest collection in the museum; a contemporary accommodation centre for asylum seekers; and a working limestone quarry. The display also prompted the presence of a small capuchin monkey in the film, surveying his man-made surroundings with a strange, fatalistic calm.

The work is accompanied by a voice-over composed from collaged fragments of the earliest published text on museums – Inscriptions or Titles of the Immense Theatre, a treatise by Samuel Quichheberg dating from 1565, which also gave the film its title. The voiceover is stripped of specific contextual reference. Overlaid across the three disparate locations, it prompts questions around the ultimate implications of the museum’s imperial agenda.

Technically, this film was my most challenging production to date. It was made possible through Arts Council funding, which facilitated me to work with a lot of great people including Kris Kelly, Stephen O’Connell, Susan Stenger, Eileen Walsh and Feargal Ward. These relationships are precious and also underpinned the work I made for Sirius Arts Centre’s ‘One Here Now’ programme – Miranda Driscoll’s beautifully varied series of commissions responding to Brian O’Doherty’s wall painting at Sirius. This commission influenced my thinking in ways I couldn’t have predicted, drawing me into the polyverse that is Brian O’Doherty’s work and bringing me into contact with some incredible new pieces – works like Liz Roche’s I / thou or Peter Borderick’s One Hear Now, that make you look and listen differently and believe that commissions and collaborations really can result in little moments of magic. ailbhenibhriain.com

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Inscriptions of an Immense Theatre, 2019, video still, single channel film, 33:09 mins; courtesy the artist & domobaal gallery, London

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Darn Thorn, Aggiornamento #2, and Aggiornamento #1, both 2016, installation view at EVA International 2016; photograph by Deirdre Power, courtesy of the artist

My lens-based installation works consider utopian ideologies and cultural identity. Typically using wallpaper and large-scale advertising banners, my images fill the gallery wall and dwarf the viewer. I have a critical interest in how cultural history is formed and how the narrative of the state can differ depending on the experiences of individuals or groups within society. I explore themes of self-identification within larger cultural constructs and how abstract concepts, such as the utopian idea of progress, impact on the individual.

‘Aggiornamento’ – a current series that considers utopian post-war architecture as realised in Ireland during the 1960s – was exhibited at: EVA International in Limerick (2018); ‘2116’ at The Glucksman Gallery, Cork (2016); and Broad Art Museum, Michigan, USA (2017).

The series focuses on the radical re-conception of ‘ecclesial space’, as witnessed in the churches commissioned during the period and its correlation to dynamic public infrastructure projects realised by the Office of Public Works. Meaning ‘to bring up to date’, the title reflects the modernist desire to reform society via a new type of architecture. This desire was manifested in the demolition of inner-city tenements and the vogue for building housing estates on urban fringes (e.g. Ballymun in Dublin and Southhill in Limerick etc.).

‘Aggiornamento’ was also a term used by the Vatican in the lead up to the ecclesial reforms of the 1960s. The series comprises a collage of digitally-scanned black and white film negatives that I shot at various locations around Ireland.

Digitally composited and re-coloured, they relocate buildings – such as Our Lady of Divine Grace (Raheny, Dublin, 1962) – into odd pastoral landscapes, whose colouration references Science Fiction tropes. Conjuring both the idealised landscape postcards of John Hinde and the eerie mysticism of filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, these works have an unsettling presence.

For me, the radical impulse for change evidenced during this period tells us something of a society responding to the tragedy of WWII. Printed as large commercially fabricated vinyl banners, these works are a kind of dysfunc-

tional advertising – one that leaves the viewer impressed by its aesthetic, but perturbed by its oddness. ‘Aggiornamento’ responds to the complex changes in Irish society from the 1960s to the present, where conservatism has given way to a kind of (neo-liberal) globalism. It considers how a society that initially embraced modernism in architecture and the ‘new and improved’ Catholicism of the Vatican II, has eventually come to abandon both doctrines.

A recurrent issue in my work is the question of how to engage the genre of landscape in contemporary art. I trained at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia, and my work responds to questions posited by post-colonial criticism, namely the problematic relationship between representations of the landscape and colonial or nationalistic narratives.

During an MA at Monash University, Australia, I furthered this exploration by focusing on the problematic relationship between photography, the landscape genre and the representation of societal trauma. Migrating to Australia at the age of 12 and returning to Ireland at 18, I felt like a ‘hybrid citizen’ – both cultural insider and outsider. I have explored these themes most recently in my 2015 solo exhibition ‘Arcadia in Grey’ at Sirius Art Centre, Cobh; and in ‘Acadian in Particular’, a work I made while on residency at Struts Gallery in New Brunswick, Canada, in 2016.

My work engages with the idea of an opposition between intuition and scientific rationalism, as conceived by the Romanticism movement. I employ motifs of ‘the sublime’, repurposed as a vehicle to highlight the disjuncture between the inner-world of lived experience and abstract ideological or cultural narratives present in society. Accordingly, my artworks are visually seductive but gnomic, featuring dramatic imagery (epic landscapes, monolithic architecture) that impress the viewer but usually lack narrative context. The de-contextualised presence of such imagery delays the viewer’s ability to easily interpret the work, encouraging a more direct and sensory engagement. darnthorn.com

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Regional Focus

Backwater Artists Group

Cork Artists Collective and The Guesthouse

Brian Mac Domhnaill Studio Coordinator and Research Assistant

Catherine Harty CAC Member and Guesthouse Curator

BACKWATER ARTISTS GROUP is an artist-led organisation based on Wandesford Quay in the centre of Cork City, where they share a premises with Cork Printmakers and The Lavit Gallery. Under the stewardship of Studio Director Elaine Coakley, Backwater provide high-quality, affordable, individual purpose-built studios, with much needed security of tenure for artists.

The genesis of the studio group began in 1989 when a few artists met in a house on Back Watercourse Road. The group first rented a space at Watercourse Road Industrial Estate in 1990 but moved a year later to 12 Pine Street and 3 Devonshire Street, increasing their capacity to 30 artists. The artists then focused on securing a permanent home, so representations were made to Cork Corporation to acquire a building. In 1995, the City Manager of Cork agreed to assist in the purchase of a premises that would house both Backwater and Cork Printmakers, provided that the Arts Council and the Department of Arts, Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht funded the necessary renovations. A premises was finally identified and in 1997 Minister Michael D. Higgins announced the success of an application for CDIS funds. With additional funds from the Arts Council, everything was in place and by 1999. The tenacity and determination of the core Backwater members involved in this feat of persuasion cannot be understated.

With many arts organisations in Cork City now struggling to hold on to temporary spaces, the security of tenure achieved by Backwater and neighbours Cork Printmakers is something to celebrate. The 99-year lease of the complex from Cork City Council is under the management of Wandesford Quay CLG, which includes representatives from Backwater, Cork Printmakers and Cork City Council. Given the security of this arrangement it is possible and worthwhile to carry out ongoing maintenance and make more substantial improvements, such as the replacement of all the windows and doors (which is due to be completed in February 2019, courtesy of a capital grant part-funded by the Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural an Gaeltacht Affairs and Cork City Council). The Arts Council of Ireland and Cork City Council

currently fund the group.

Backwater has 28 studios in total, comprising of six sculpture bays and 22 painting/mixed media studios, which facilitate 38 artists, ten of whom share their studios. Of the 28 studios, 24 studios are leased with various tenancy lengths (four, eight, 12 and 20 years). The 20-year leases held by founding members are now being phased out, which has resulted in these valued members looking for studio space elsewhere.

There is one year-round short-term project studio (three to six months) and three nine-month spaces allocated for the CIT Crawford College of Art & Design Post Graduate Award and the Ciarán Langford Memorial Bursary Award (six months); these then become short-term project spaces when the bursaries finish.

Backwater only considers submissions from professional practising artists in need of working studio space. Artists must also commit time to the activities of the group and use the studio space. Along with having a heated, well-lit studio space, members have access to other shared facilities which include: a computer room, a small library, woodwork facilities and a new darkroom facility initiated, built and administrated by studio member Darn Thorn. Six associate members now have access to the darkroom, including one Backwater Darkroom Bursary recipient.

Launched in 2018, the Studio 12 exhibition/ project space gives members the opportunity to present new work and also functions as a venue for hosting talks, events and workshops. Members are also encouraged to curate or collaborate with non-members in the space.

The organisation is currently developing a Home Studio Artists Network, which will offer benefits such as an online profile, use of shared facilities and access to tailored workshops and events. In 2020, Backwater Artists Group will celebrate its 30-year anniversary. To mark this special milestone, the organisation will be strengthening and building relationships locally, nationally and internationally and adopting a collaborative approach to developing a year-long programme of events and projects. backwaterartists.ie

Analogue photography demonstration at Backwater’s new darkroom facility; image courtesy of Backwater Artsits Group

Billy Foley’s studio at The Cork Artists Collective; photograph by Colette Lewis

THE CORK ARTISTS Collective (CAC) was

founded in the early ‘80s by a group of graduates from Crawford College of Art & Design. At a time when young people were leaving the country in droves – driven out by a combination of a deep economic recession and a stiflingly conservative social climate (for example, the Eighth amendment was inserted into the constitution by a majority of 66.9% in 1983) – these graduate artists decided to stay, in an attempt to sustain a creative community.

Originally, the collective occupied a three bedroom semi-detached house in the suburbs.

In 1985 they moved into Library House, situated on the grounds of St Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork city centre. The Library House building is unique. Located inside high walls, beside the cathedral and graveyard, it feels like a space out of time, offering artists a place removed from the typically fast-paced, always on time contemporary world.

The building provides nine individual private studios with 24-hour access. Artists in the CAC are engaged across the full spectrum of contemporary art practices – from painting (Billy Foley and Morgan Keaveney), sound art (Mick O’Shea), installation and sculpture (Angela Fulcher and Evgeniya Martirosyan), to video, performance, installation and research (Catherine Harty, Colette Lewis, Collette Nolan, Marilyn Lennon and Brian Mac Domhnaill).

Our newest artist, Evgeniya Martirosyan, joined the CAC at the beginning of January 2019. She has taken over the basement studio, formerly occupied by Paul Hegarty, whose experiments in sound and noise would periodically rumble up through the floors of the building!

Evgeniya is currently working towards a solo show at Triskel Christchurch later in the year.

Also currently inhabiting Library House is ‘The Institute of Dwelling’ – a collaboration between CAC artists Colette Lewis and Marilyn Lennon, and Elinor Rivers. This social art practice works with “the concept of dwelling under the characterisations of a place of residence, considering and being, which invites an exploration of dwelling through the hands-on experience of working with materials and inhabiting spaces”.

The Library House Studios has so far managed to surf the depths and peaks of the economic cycle. The current boom in speculative building that is transforming the city centre (with new office blocks, hotels and high-end student accommodation) has resulted in the closure of a number of other studio complexes.

The FÁS building, formerly occupied by Sample-Studios, has recently been demolished and in its place, a large mound of rubble remains.

In 2005, Cork held the title European City of Culture. Members of the CAC saw an opportunity to fight for a legacy that would continue after the spectacle was over. With the backing of Cork City Council, a building was sourced which would become The Guesthouse. Located at 10 Chapel Street in the Shandon area of the city centre, The Guesthouse provides flexible short-term workspaces, including live-in and desk space residencies for individual artists and groups, with an exhibition/performance space and 24-hour access to facilities.

The Guesthouse is managed by a group of artists, some of whom are also members of the CAC. We run an ongoing programme of free public events, residencies and activities. The residency element provides the main structure for the organisation, with all the other elements arranged to compliment it. This residency is open to both national and international artists and has been a way of forging links with artists worldwide. Events and activities are initiated both by board members and outside practitioners. The social aspect of the project is very important, with the kitchen and dining area providing a relaxed and inviting space for discussion and debate.

The CAC is currently thinking through ways of negotiating recent developments, which are having an impact on the city’s artistic community. Artists’ requirement for spaces to work as part of a creative community are being increasingly marginalised by the logic of a system which puts the desire for profit over the needs of people. thecollective.ie theguesthouse.ie

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Regional Focus

The Glucksman

Crawford Art Gallery

Chris Clarke Senior Curator

Dyane Hanrahan Marketing and Communications Manager

THE GLUCKSMAN WILL turn 15 in 2019 and, during this time, it has showcased a range of Irish and international artists, developed a broad education and outreach programme and established unique institutional partnerships with colleagues and departments within University College Cork. The Glucksman – and its iconic architecture – bridges city and campus, reflecting both a strong educational ethos and an ongoing engagement with the wider public.

This has produced exhibitions on themes such as mathematical data, food, stagecraft and the marketplace, as well as programmes of lunchtime talks, collaborations with schools and community groups, workshops, performances, and much more. In the past two years, The Glucksman has launched initiatives such as: the Nicholas Fox Weber Curatorial Residency programme (Glasgow-based curator Lesley Young will take up the third residency in June 2019); The Classroom Museum (which brings contemporary art to rural schools); programmes with children living in Direct Provision Centres; and exhibition partnerships with museums in Italy and Croatia.

In April 2019, the Glucksman will host a major exhibition of Irish architectural practices from the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.

‘Close Encounter: Meetings with remarkable buildings’ is curated by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara (Grafton Architects), featuring installations from sixteen invited architects investigating and interpreting historic buildings. Based around the notion of ‘generosity’, ‘Close Encounter’ features projects by firms and architects, such as A2, Boyd Cody, DePaor, Heneghan Peng, Mary Laheen/Aoibheann Ní Mhearáin and TAKA. Also opening in April is ‘The Parted Veil: Commemoration in Photographic Practices’, an exhibition and publication of work by contemporary Irish artists and writers. Including work by artists David Creedon, Roseanne Lynch, Tom Molloy, Vukašin Nedeljković, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Miriam O’Connor, Amelia Stein and others, ‘The Parted Veil’ considers ideas of memory and celebration, intimacy and reflection.

This exhibition finds a counterpart in a concurrent exhibition in the Glucksman’s Sisk Gallery,

The Glucksman, Cork; image courtesy of The Glucksman

entitled ‘Beckett and the Wake: Photography by John Minihan’. University College Cork Special Collections has recently acquired the archive of this acclaimed Irish artist, whose photographs of Samuel Beckett have become iconic images of twentieth-century culture.

In the spring, The Glucksman will curate a project for the Bealtaine Festival that sees poet and writer Gerry Murphy and artist Collette Nolan working with the Ballyphehane/Togher community. Through a series of workshops and discussions, the artists will work with participants to develop a new film responding to Bealtaine’s themes of hospitality, hosting and welcome. A public film screening will take place at The Glucksman in May 2019, before touring cultural venues around the country.

As part of Cork Midsummer Festival (14 to 23 June), The Glucksman will work with artist Richard Proffitt on an immersive and ephemeral off-site installation entitled ‘May the moon rise and the sun set’. Transforming the interior spaces of the UCC Music Department premises, the installation will incorporate painting, sculpture, sound, video and other artefacts to referece makeshift shamanic shrines, dilapidated places of worship, and sub-cultural interests in folk ritual and the hippie communes of the 1960s and 70s.

University College Cork will host this year’s Electronic Literature Organisation conference and, as part of this, The Glucksman will present a week-long exhibition in July entitled ‘Peripheries: Electronic literature and new media art’ looking at the confluence of digital culture and written text. From August to November, a major exhibition will look at how all life on earth carries out its biological processes in sync with the 24-hour patterns of the earth. ‘Circadian Rhythms’ will feature works by Irish and international artists who will reflect on time, the cadence of working life, sleeping patterns, as well as the disruptive impact of modern technologies.

The exhibition will be mirrored by the seasonal changes visible through the gallery windows, as summer gradually eases towards the close of another year. glucksman.org

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‘The Naked Truth’ (13 July – 28 October 2018), installation view at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; image courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery

CRAWFORD ART GALLERY is located in the

heart of Cork, where the main shopping district stretches like an elaborate runway towards the gallery’s entrance. Built in 1724 as the city’s customs house, the gallery is thriving with over 230,000 visitors annually. With 12 exhibition spaces over three floors, a dedicated screening room, a 100seat lecture theatre and an award-winning café, there is much to offer the diverse audiences who visit this national cultural institution.

Over the centuries, the gallery has undergone many architectural changes, but none as impactful as the Project Ireland 2040 Plan, committing €22 million from 2018 to 2027. This investment is expected to support the transformation of the Crawford Art Gallery to further meet the expectations of local, national and international visitors. This announcement in 2017, together with the appointment of a new Gallery Director Mary McCarthy, heralds a new and dynamic era for this much-loved Cork institution.

The gallery is home to a nationally significant collection, featuring works from the 18th century to the present. It is also home to the famous Antonio Canova’s ‘Canova Casts’, gifted to the gallery two centuries ago. Well-known and loved works by 20th century Irish artists – such as Seán Keating, Harry Clarke, Mainie Jellet, John Lavery and Jack B. Yeats – feature in the gallery’s historic collection, while the modern collection features the work of contemporary Irish artists, including Eilis O’Connell, Gerard Byrne, Dorothy Cross, Maud Cotter and Hughie O’Donoghue. The gallery hosts numerous temporary exhibitions by local, national and international artists, showcasing both visual art and film. As well as being a vibrant receiving and commissioning venue, the gallery has a very active ‘Learn & Explore’ department, which engages in education outreach and community programmes, promoting imagination and creativity across all communities.

As well as scoping out the future transformation of the gallery, 2019 is shaping up to be a very exciting year. Currently showing in the Sculpture Galleries is ‘Recasting Canova’, which celebrates the bicentenary of the ‘Canova Casts’, the prestigious gift that forms the basis of the

Crawford Collection. The galleries underwent a reconfiguration for the representation of these works, to directly link Crawford Art Gallery to a European sculptural tradition. Initiated by the Irish Museum of Modern Art and curated by Seán Kissane, Mary Swanzy’s upcoming exhibition, ‘Voyages’ (15 March – 3 June), will display over 70 works. UK-based Irish artist, Andrew Kearney, will present his environment-responsive light and sound installation, ‘Mechanism’ from 15 March to 26 May. During the summer months, Crawford Art Gallery will present a major survey exhibition, titled ‘Seen not Heard’, which will display a selection of work examining historical and contemporary representations of children, from Irish artists and national collections. In May, ‘The Gibson Bequest 1919 – 2019: Selecting, Collecting and Philanthropy’ will feature works from the Crawford Collection, examining the legacy of Joseph Stafford Gibson, who effectively established the Crawford Art Gallery’s collection of Irish and European artworks in the early-twentieth century. In June, a new artist-directed programme aims to support artists to pursue their current research interests and connect with audiences by responding to the gallery’s site, collection and location.

Later this year, Crawford will be exhibiting Marianne Keating’s multimedia installation (21 June – 22 September), which will focus on the movement of Irish indentured labourers and emigrants to Barbados and Jamaica during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, and their resulting legacies in the contemporary Caribbean. This new initiative proposes to interrogate historical narratives and invites artist responses.

The year ends with a significant exhibition by Irish artist Daphne Wright. Initiated by Crawford Art Gallery, ‘Of course’ (15 November 2019 – 17 February 2020) will present a large body of work expanding on Wright’s existing multi-media practice, including stitched work, wood relief carvings and clay objects, to explore themes of immutability, impermanence and failure. crawfordartgallery.ie

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Profile

Helena Hamilton, Untitled (With), edition of 21, installation view, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan; photograph by Davey Moor, courtesy of Solstice Arts Centre

Seeing the Light RENATA PEKOWSKA DISCUSSES THE THEME OF LIGHT ACROSS SEVERAL RECENT EXHIBITIONS.

IN LATE 2018, three exhibitions dedicated to the medium of light opened in venues across Ireland. Through a diverse range of curatorial inquiries, each exhibition showcased the medium’s fascinating potential for producing arresting visual encounters and triggering an enhanced awareness of the act of seeing. The interest in light as an agent in artworks is centuries-old, but gained momentum during the Baroque period, when it was used to great effect in Bernini’s dramatic interactions of sculpture and architecture or George de la Tour’s candle-lit chiaroscuro scenes. But it was not until the advent of electric illumination when it became possible for artists to treat light as a medium in its own right. Early electric light installations were experiments with incorporated light sources, creating moving shadow patterns and auroras of colour. Some well-known international examples include Thomas Wilfred’s ‘Lumia’ series – which infused dark spaces with the elements of form, colour, time and motion – and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s luminary device, Light Space Modulator (1922). Similarly, Eileen Gray’s minimal sculpture, Tube Light (1927) attests to early light art produced by Irish artists. In the 1960s, the transition in fine arts practices from object to environment freed the light object from restrictions of physicality and scale. Light gained physical presence and materiality, signalling its further potential as both a sculptural

medium, and as a material capable of transforming traditional art spaces into walk-in staged spectacles.

The group exhibition, ‘Lux: Light Art in Ireland’, at Solstice Arts Centre, Navan (10 November – 21 December 2018) showed light as a central protagonist and axis of artistic practice. Solstice Director, Belinda Quirke, believed an exhibition of Irish light art was necessary and timely, given the range of contemporary practitioners who are actively experimenting with the medium. On entering the gallery, the show commenced with Kevin Killen’s white and red neon work, Certain Moment, quietly casting a glow on the high wall of the foyer.

In the hallway upstairs, a set of carefully drafted drawings was reminiscent of Renaissance technical studies of light and perspective, while a suspended circle of radiometers served as a reminder of natural light as an ever-present source of energy. Walking further into the space, viewers encountered an installation of moving auroras, created by the mechanical rotation of painted discs and a glass bowl, evoking the sense of wonder of early light experiments, such as ‘colour organs’ constructed by inventors since the sixteenth century. These works, created by Helen MacMahon, reflect the artist’s interest in light as a rich and accessible medium, because of its direct impact on all viewers, regardless of their conceptual interests. Elsewhere, Lorraine Neeson’s small but striking work played with the unsettling effect of flickering neon signs. The work manifested the idea of changing messages by making the first letter in the word “THERE” flash on and off.

The second space at Solstice introduced larger installations, two of which foregrounded interactions between sound and light: Lorraine Neeson’s poetic work, Where do we go now but nowhere, used sound recordings of inhaling and exhaling to affect the electrical current flowing through a light bulb, causing it to dim and light up; while Helena Hamilton’s edition Untitled (With) explored the sonic qualities of fluorescent tubes, encouraging viewers to move through the installation and explore it from different angles. Hamilton’s piece

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Profile

Top: Brigitte Kowanz, Immersion II; photograph by by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of The Glucksman, Cork

Niamh Barry, Gesture II, 2018, bronze, LED strips; image courtesy of the National Museum of Ireland

Bottom: Margaret O’Brien, THIS ISN’T IT, installation view, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan; photograph by Davey Moor, courtesy of Solstice Arts Centre

also incorporated a camera to detect light changes in the gallery space, which in turn changes the soundscape around the sculpture. Placing two large light and sound installations in the same space can create an engaging dialogue by forcing the viewer to identify the sounds and assign them to the pieces, but it also runs the risk of obscuring or diminishing the impact of the individual works. Also presented in the space was another piece by Killen – one of three on show, forming a dispersed triptych, encountered in sequence while walking through the building. For this work, glowing lines were suspended against a curved black Perspex mount, trapping them inside its reflective surface. Certain Moment is a visual interpretation of the movement of a dancing human figure. Killen is a master of sublime curved lines, which he conceives by combining a slick technological aesthetic with the beauty of the handmade.

Margaret O’Brien’s installation, THIS ISN’T IT, was a complex site of random patterns of light, sound and other sensorial stimuli. O’Brien is interested in light as a manifestation of electricity and its volatility and erratic impulses. Her other work also explores the effects of light on the body, like the afterimage it burns on a retina, which she sees as part of her sculptural work. Here, she investigates electricity’s manifestations to create an anxiety-inducing, stifling environment.

Lorraine Neeson’s projection, titled Trap, was a thing of deceptive simplicity, revealing the potential for drama, even within small-scale light interventions. The manipulated slides were projected onto one side of a raised square and were further activated by the shadows of visitors who walked through the installation. It was a very effective piece and the sense of mystery did not disperse, even after realising the mechanism of the structure.

In his 1820 poem, Lamia, John Keats discussed how Newton destroyed the “poetry of the rainbow” by reducing it to a prism. However, in my view, light works, both natural and man-made, do not lose their poetry when solved. Currently

showing at The Glucksman, Cork, is the group exhibition, ‘Prism: The Art and Science of Light’, which takes the scientific observation of light in art as its point of departure. The exhibition was developed in collaboration with UCC Tyndall Institute’s Irish Photonic Integration Centre and features work by respected Irish and international artists. Many works

by Irish artists – including Diana Copperwhite, Mark Joyce and Alan Butler – use traditional media, such as painting and drawing, to depict the vibrant hues of diffracted light.

American artist Polly Apfelbaum’s rainbow wheels are scattered on the wall, complemented by small-scale light objects

by English artist David Batchelor, adding brightly-coloured illuminations to the surfaces of the gallery.

A large chandelier-shaped installation of coloured test tubes, created by Emer O’Boyle, is suspended from the ceiling. Light and its diffraction are present in the back-story, rather than directly in the form, of this newly commissioned work. The piece is dedicated to British-born American astrophysicist, Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin, whose ground-breaking PhD thesis on stellar atmospheres was dismissed due to her gender. Payne used colours of diffracted radiation to determine spectral classes of the stars. O’Boyle’s piece thus also becomes a commentary on gender bias occurring in the sciences and other disciplines. Another work telling a light-related story is Grace Weir’s film installation, A reflection on light, which focuses on Mainie Jellett’s painting, Let There Be Light (1942) – currently hanging in the School of Physics in Trinity College Dublin – and the notes of Jellet’s grandfather, a TCD scientist who researched polarised light.

More light objects and installations installed upstairs include some of Jenny Holzer’s classic LED messages, an angular wall piece by James Clar and Brigitte Kowanz’s hypnotic illuminated infinity mirrors. Leaving the space, it is almost possible to miss a piece by Dennis McNulty – the only light installation by an Irish artist – an intimately-scaled work comprising a single letter LED display, which is placed in

a narrow gap between the wall and an added layer of construction material, surrounded by the glow of reflection. The letters slowly spell their message and appear like an otherworldly unreachable elevator button, requiring concentration, patience and physical proximity to decipher its meaning.

A solo exhibition by Niamh Barry, entitled ‘Light on Earth’, runs for the duration of 2019 at the National Museum of Ireland’s Decorative Arts & History at Collins Barracks. Barry creates large-scale lighting pieces – using mostly bronze, stainless steel and LED strip-lighting – as high-end commissions for private clients. Varying in scale from small to large, her angular and oblong sculptural installations and designs are on display in the main entrance hall and in a small space in the upper-floor galleries. Sculptures are presented alongside models and sketches, providing glimpses into the creative processes that underpin her works. Barry’s inspiration comes from observing natural forms from different vantage points, such as: fluid lines of rivers; winter light filtering through tree branches; cloud formations; human movement; and fire as a primordial source of heat and light. The work is executed to a very high standard and serves as a good example of how certain light pieces can be seen as both sculptural objects and functional lighting designs. Clearly, incorporating light into an artwork can sometimes result in transgressing the line between the fine art, craft and design disciplines.

Hopefully all three exhibitions will create more interest and appreciation for light art practice in Ireland. Such momentum may even result in an even larger or more ambitious show in the future, in a venue spacious enough to incorporate a multitude of experimental environments, thus further showcasing light as material and conceptual element with its own unique story.

Renata Pekowska is an artist and researcher based in Dublin.

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Artist Publishing

This I Can Carry ANNABEL KÖNIG DISCUSSES HER RECENT PUBLICATIONS, WHICH USE MASLOW’S ‘HIERARCHY OF NEEDS’ AS A POINT OF DEPARTURE.

Annabel König, Room 206 - the wedding photo, Hotel Proteas, Athens, photograph from the series ‘This I can Carry’, 2017; image courtesy the artist

IN 2018 I applied for an Artlinks bursary through County

Carlow Arts Office, to publish two publications entitled Food – Newfoundland and This I can Carry. These books were the result of two residencies I had undertaken Newfoundland and Athens in 2017. I knew that I needed to get the work off my website and into a solid format, so that people would take the time to look at and contemplate the subjects, in a more reflective manner than is often possible when something is on a computer screen.

As an artist, I work on several projects at once. My works all relate to each other, but they often have different starting points or use of media. I am a founding member of the ‘9 Stones Artists’ group, formed in 2004 by professional artists who live and work in the foothills of the Blackstairs Mountains in South County Carlow. Living rurally, I often find that conversations within my community can shine a different light on my own thoughts and perceptions.

My two publications are based on Abraham Maslow’s psychological theory: ‘Hierarchy of Needs’. Maslow believed that we can all reach our full potential, known as self-actualistion, once we have satisfied a number of basic needs such as food, shelter, safety and a sense of belonging. As can often be the case, I came upon Maslow’s theory in a round about way. Ideas I had been thinking about were put into words as I listened to a TED Radio Hour programme on Maslow. His thinking around ‘safety needs’ gave me a departure point for This I can Carry, while my second publication, Food – Newfoundland, investigates Maslow’s ‘biological and physiological need’ for food, which we all possess.

This I can Carry looks at the refugee crisis through the personal objects that refugees manage to carry with them when traveling to a safe location. In March 2017, I contacted the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR Ireland, to ask if they could help me make some contacts in Greece. After some persistent communications – in which I strengthened my ideas and gave information about previous work – I was given the contact details for a UNHCR worker in Athens. From there I developed other contacts and in May of that year, I flew to Athens. I met amazing people and although my time there was short, every minute was filled. My time was spent either meeting people or writing down my thoughts and impressions and reflecting on my experiences. In truth, it was a bit of a whirlwind.

Annabel König, View from the Sanctuary of Poseidon, photograph from the series ‘This I can Carry’, 2017; image courtesy the artist

In Athens, I made contact with the Nostos organisation for social integration. In Greek, nostos means ‘a longing for home’. Together with my Nostos contact, we set out an agenda for the week and I was put in touch with various refugee centres around the city. These centres included tourist hotels housing refugees, centres specifically built for unaccompanied minors, and apartments where several refugee families share a space. At each location – with the help of aid workers and interpreters (who translated from English to Greek to Arabic and back again) – I found people who were willing to take part in the project. I asked basic questions about their personal belongings – the remaining belongings they had managed to hold onto until they arrived in Greece. I listened to their stories and I took photographs as I saw them. I didn’t bring any specialist equipment, just a camera, a tripod and a white sheet, on which I placed their objects to be photographed.

I wanted to keep it simple. Many of the people I spoke to had already suffered enough intrusion into their lives.

Maslow’s theory of ‘needs’ has five levels, but not all levels necessarily follow in order. For example, sometimes you can’t obtain food or sleep until you find a place of shelter. I don’t believe we fully understand, from our privileged western perspective, just how difficult life can be for others. You don’t have to be a refugee to find yourself in trouble but listening to other peoples’ stories, or imagining yourself in their situation, can often be a huge eye-opener.

Immediately upon my return to Ireland, I started work on images for World Refugee Day for the UNHCR. I contacted all the major galleries in Ireland, both north and south, and asked them if they would display a poster for World Refugee Day, in a public space. They all agreed, for which I am very grateful. The posters were also shown in the Netherlands and the US. Food – Newfoundland is a project that I have been carrying around with me for quite a few years. I have a strong interest in farming, environmental issues and food sustainability and Food – Newfoundland reflects on these issues. In the 1800s, many people emigrated from counties Waterford, Wexford and Carlow to Newfoundland and I was curious to find out if their Irish traditions and farming methods were still in use.

Again, through persistence, careful planning and the establishing of contacts, I flew to Newfoundland in September

2017. Within my structured schedule there was also fluidity.

I let the project lead me, allowing my original plan to diversify, as I received suggestions about people I should talk to or places I should visit.

My budget for the publications didn’t allow me to hire a designer, so I did most of the design work myself. It was a steep learning curve, as I had to teach myself how to layout a book using Adobe InDesign. Luckily, I was able to get help from friends, who are more proficient with InDesign and they helped me through the head-banging moments. Visually, I wanted to keep the layout quite simple, so the images and words did not have to compete with each other. To get the work printed, I approached four different companies for quotes, three in the Republic and one in Northern Ireland.

In the end, I went with GPS, located in Belfast, as they were the only company with whom I had a meaningful communication. Even though the quote was roughly on par with the other companies, it was their genuine interest in producing a high-quality product that finally swung it for me. The most terrifying point was pressing the ‘send’ button, to confirm that I was happy to proceed to print.

As part of my aim to ‘get the work out’, I have sent copies of the publications to a wide range of institutions, curators, artists, interested organisations, and of course to those who helped me realise my ideas by participating in the project. I am currently working with my local community on the third ‘need’ in Maslow’s hierarchy – that of ‘Love and Belongingness’. The project, entitled ‘Memory Map’, is being funded both by Creative Ireland and Create (through the Artist in the Community scheme). I aim to complete this project by the end of May.

Annabel König is a visual artist based in County Carlow. annabelkonigvisualartist.com

‘The Book Project’, an exhibition by the 9 Stones Artists group, is currently showing at VISUAL Carlow untill 19 May. 9stones.wordpress.com

The Visual Artists' News Sheet

Critique Edition 42: March – April 2019

Alan Butler, Surprise Party Breath, 2015, Contents of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Amazon.com Wish-list, installation view, ‘Surveillé·e·s’, Solstice Arts Centre; photograph by Paul Gaffney, courtesy Solstice Arts Centre

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Liam Crichton with Autumns ‘Stereo Object’ Void, Derry 12 – 26 January 2019 ALONG THE GRAND Promenade of Derry’s City

Walls stands an empty plinth, which became an empty plinth long before it was fashionable to be so. It is what remains of the monument to Governor George Walker, hero to Unionism, which for its atavistic sins was ‘blew up’ by the IRA in 1973. It’s said that hundreds of Bogsiders collected the far-flung debris as souvenirs of the war on triumphalist art. Where are all the bits of Governor Walker now?

An installation by artist Liam Crichton and musician Autumns (AKA Christian Donaghey), titled Stereo Object, enacts a symbolic séance on his remains, with particular interest in a kind of psycho-kinetic interpretation of sound within the built environment. Void’s main gallery is visually sparse, and all the more so for its great scale, with only a cathode-ray television sitting in the corner, permanently stuck in static. A handful of polaroid photographs are dotted here and there above eye-level, as if they don’t want to be seen: one is an unclothed male chest and right arm, with a black cross painted across the bicep; in another, a car is parked outside a boutique in the curvy international style. In this city, focusing attention on a car, parked inexplicably outside a building, is no innocent gesture.

A wall text reading “NO WORDS” is set against a grey colour field, uneven and ragged at the edges, as though hastily rolled on just before you turned your gaze in its direction. This being Derry, these words are resonant with Willie Doherty’s early photographic works that were overlaid with text. Doherty employs the printed word to symbolically alienate images of demarcated territories, effecting a banality that is instructive in this case. If we were to take the press release at its word – that Crichton “[invokes] a presence of absence, or equally, the absence as presence” – then not only would these no-words-that-are-words or the no-statue-thatis-a-statue be anodyne, but our role as viewers would also be redundant. Falling somewhere between aphorism and cliché, it makes me think about Doherty’s film, At The End Of The Day (1994), and its acrid recitation of generic political apophthegms: “At the end of the day there’s no going back – There’s no going back to the past –There’s no future in the past”. Cliché can become a rich critical seam: it is a temporal artefact whose movement through time gives depth; it is a meme foregrounding originality; in this context, the banality of “NO WORDS” seems to radiate off the wall, texturising the soundscape.

A cluster of guitar amplifiers, with dimensions modelled on the Walker Memorial Plinth, is installed out of sight in a smaller antechamber, flooding the gallery with a sonic composition made by Autumns and Crichton. The music is constructed from field recordings taken around the memorial, which are sonically destroyed – thankfully not by a 100lb bomb, this time – and musically reconstructed with electronics, synths and percussion.

It is difficult not to hear the clamour of an Apprentice Boys’ parade in the percussive patterns woven throughout the piece, and impossible not to discern the crackling of gunshots.

The notes of sectarianism mingle with everyday highlights: a distant car alarm; wind crackling through a microphone; disembodied voices from the yellow-jacketed tour guides of Derry’s troubles-tourism economy.

I often observe, and share, the conceit of seeing art as a critical destination: the terminus where subjects are disgorged, naked and other-

Liam Crichton with Autumns, Stereo Object, installation view, Void, Derry; image courtesy of Void

wise honest, ‘Telling truth to power!’, etcetera.

This is why it’s tempting to see Stereo Object as such a destination, that the artist and institution have revealed quod erat demonstrandum, the cultural problem that rained upon the Bogside in smithereens. I know I’m supposed to hear these references to gunshots and marching bands and experience something remedial, but these sounds enter a space permeated with banality, and they are changed by it.

The repetitious banalities of troubles-art are somehow elevated, perhaps illustrating how a ‘millennial’ generation of artists relate to the conflict. Where Doherty’s oeuvre exhibits immediacy – a despairing and lugubrious vision of a culture hollowing out – Stereo Object is the performance of the hollow that remains. It is a performance of our culture’s estrangement from the gravity of violence; the way shootings and bombings feel so distant, even if they happen right up the street. It’s why my Great Auntie Molly grabbed an empty pram and set about gathering as many pieces of Governor Walker, as could be manageably wheeled home.

Liam Crichton, Found image, laser print, installation view, ‘Stereo Object’, Void, Derry; image courtesy of Void

Kevin Burns is an artist and writer based in Derry.

Liam Crichton with Autumns, Stereo Object, installation view, Void, Derry; image courtesy of Void

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

‘Surveillé·e·s’ Solstice Art Centre, Navan 12 January – 1 March 2019 THE EXPOSÉ OF Cambridge Analytica last year

showed us how we are complicit in our own surveillance. It’s no longer just footage from omniscient CCTV that tracks us; self-authored social media data is also capable of being harvested, hacked or stolen. And thanks to unscrupulous but canny work of electioneers, the world now has Trump and Brexit to deal with. As the wordplay in the title suggests, the current exhibition at Solstice surveys surveillance-related art from multiple perspectives.

The show originates from Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris – Ireland’s cultural outpost in Europe – and is curated by centre director and Belfast native Nora Hickey M’Sichili, who began the project at her family home, on discovering it was used as an ‘intelligence centre’ during WWII. It is The Troubles however, that provides the historical backbone to this show.

Two large photographs by Willie Doherty from 1985 observe Derry with dry, ominous words as overlaid text, describing yet subverting the banal urban landscape. 20 years later, Donovan Wylie photographed the dismantling of army watch towers on the border, documenting landscapes once littered with the infrastructure of looking and listening. These stark images introduce the object but not the subject of surveillance – something which proves more elusive than should be expected across the entire show.

The banality of surveillance is evident in Colin Martin’s large photorealist painting of a canteen area at Facebook’s Dublin offices.

Based on a snapshot taken on an open day, Martin’s intense detailing misdirects, as it discloses no secrets or dark revelations regarding the company’s guarded internal operations.

The futility of revenge against our technological overlords is more apparent with Martin’s accompanying small painting of a child’s head, wired with EEG electrodes.

This belied banality is a common thread. John Gerrard’s 24-hour simulation of a Google data farm may show some random industrial buildings, but they are made sinister by imagining what is inside. Roseanne Lynch’s photograph of an actual Google data farm off the M50 in Dublin may be static and analogue, but it is just as portentous. Conversely, Karl Burke’s Martian-like landscapes are digitally fabricated from computer virus code that was originally used,

‘Lectus’ MART Gallery, Dublin 10 January – 14 February 2019 amongst other things, to disrupt Iranian enrichment centrifuges in 2010. The ones and zeros have been repurposed to map a virtual geography. Oddly, the prevention of nuclear annihilation has created barren post-apocalyptic landscapes; sublime contradictions abound in these human-free works.

Alan Butler’s pizza-covered drone forms part of a mock-advertisement-cum-expo stand, promoting cryptography for children. It’s a mega-mix, where pop eats itself with extra pepperoni, flanked by an Amazon Books wish-list of a bomber from Boston. Digital traces are mocked here but are then manipulated back into a critical assemblage. The adjacent woven carpet by Jim Ricks reappropriates the Afghanistan tradition, begun during the Russian occupation, which incorporated military vehicles in carpet designs – upgraded now to deadly decorative drones.

With the human subject largely absent from the exhibition, Teresa Dillon’s cardboard CCTV cameras focus on a UV anti-bird gel as another incursion into urban life. But there are figures in Ian Wieczorek’s paintings and in Benjamin Gaulon’s hacked and not-so-closed CCTV footage, which shows how unaware we are of the open wireless networks watching us and how they can so easily be harnessed. Declan Clarke also provides some humans to surveil, in his 35-minute classic spy film drama.

Here the gaze is gendered male, with the artist stalking a female researcher through galleries and streets.

As a corollary, the female gaze fights back through artificial intelligence in Caroline Campbell’s research piece, in which an AI programme is taught to see the ‘wrong’ stuff – in this case, to ignore the faces of activists in the footage of protests at Shannon Airport. This resistance is complimented in Nina McGowan’s adjacent sculptural assemblage, which offers a conceptual route away from surveillance. A large ornamental pinecone stands in for a pineal gland, illuminated by an array of large surgical theatre lights.

The pineal is being interrogated as the site of the soul, now a giant mechanical flower in bloom, as a spiritual form of resistance to the presence of all-pervading surveillance.

Alan Phelan is an artist based in Dublin.

‘Surveillé·e·s’, installation view, Solstice Arts Centre; photograph by Paul Gaffney, courtesy Solstice Arts Centre

Éanna Heavey, I’m Sorry I was Not Here, 2018 installation view at MART Gallery, Dublin; photograph by Seamus Travers, courtesy of MART Gallery

THIS IS THE third year of MART’s Exhibition

Award, in partnership with CIT Crawford College of Art & Design (CCAD) and Fire Station Artists’ Studios (FSAS). Curated

by Deirdre Morrissey, ‘Lectus’ platforms the work of Èanna Heavey, Sarah Diviney (both CCAD graduates) and IADT graduate Emma McKeagney.

On that day in January when winter finally decided to bite, the 12-foot red doors of the Fire Station Gallery gaped open. In its jaws, a yellow bathtub, half full of cloudy murk, sits almost fallow but for a motionless floral dress, stained with an indistinct darkness. This is the sculptural residue of Diviney’s performance, I,X,. A monitor shows Diviney entering an indistinct white space, wearing the aforementioned garb, and slowly immersing herself into the bath. Her knotted pink fingers pensively clutch a bar of soap, her lightly freckled face is stoic, and at the pace of a prayer, she scrubs the blackness permeating the lower half of her dress. A vulnerable intimacy laps gently with the bathwater that surrounds her before she rises up, twisting her dress into a weighty pouch. The water bellows, then drains from her with the intensity of impending labour – she is pregnant with defiance, the painful contractions of history palpable, as she repeats the motion. In this looping action, she is at once both embryonic and the birthing mother. As the object, her body, is powerful, she is autonomous; yet the shadowy stain remains, insolent in its clarity.

McKeagney’s sculptural series embodies notions of new materialism, conversing with geology and the primal impetus of finding a single ergonomically shaped rock on Killiney beach.

A satisfying photographic triptych of hands clutching the kidney-shaped stone anchors her central sculpture. From an open birch ply box, three steel rods blossom white polymorph cradles. The central sprout elevates the naked ‘origin’ rock above the two ceramic homages to its left and right – one glossy black, the other a muted metallic gold. A further three ceramic iterations sees the artist interrogate the original granite form in speckled spritely yellow, turquoise and gentle pink glazes, each caressed to the wall in the foamy white polymorph like poisonous mushrooms to a tree. In rusts, mossy greens and sepia tones, McKeagney’s ‘Continues’

series comprises of square glass frames displaying pigments derived from coloured pebbles, also sourced from Killiney shores. Each offering resembles a map-like formation, playing with the elemental origins of her materials. The entire series has a warm tactility that only an artist who has developed a keen intimacy with her materials could achieve. It elevates the natural object, with each support mechanism feeling like an extension of the artist’s hand, asking us to reconsider all objects in the world around us.

A small boy with a lone white balloon on a string stands watching as it dances in the breeze.

The shadow of a young girl spills into the frame.

Cut to darkness, as a terrifying clown appears from the shadows, asking us to play a game which serves as mode of narration for Heavey’s disturbing video assemblage, I’m Sorry I was Not Here (2018). Drenched in the sickly secondhand Americana of 1980s McDonalds and Coca Cola commercials, the soundscape contorts from advertising jingles (like “Can’t beat the real thing”) to the Angelus bells. A warped Catholic sex education video from the same era, shows a pious woman discussing slippery vaginas and using her fingers to illustrate sexual intercourse. Cut to a snowy woodland scene, then a philosophical sky. Heavney dexterously sutures religious and capitalist psychosexual preoccupations, creating a cacophonous savage that feverously claws at its own historic repression, spilling fresh and bloody truths.

‘Lectus’ is an ambidextrous provocation, bearing both the hands of the artists it frames, and the hands of the state. Whether clutching a rock, a bar of soap or simulating sexual intercourse, these hands bear witness to a palpable residue, symptomatic of twentieth-century Ireland. Collectively these works ignite complex anthropocentric tensions, exorcising historic grievances as a form of cultural reflection, whilst elevating geological matter itself as a transcendental agent of change.

Brendan Fox is a writer, curator and visual artist based in Dublin and Rome.

Critique

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Shane Keeling ‘BAD-MAN Oh Man’ Wexford Arts Centre 14 January – 16 February 2019 WEXFORD-BORN EMERGING artist, Shane Keeling, recently graduated from the National College of Art & Design with an honours degree in Glass & Ceramics. As recipient of NCAD’s 2018 Ceramic Residency, Keeling has developed a new body of mixed-media works which aims to generate dialogue on mental health, suicide and the stigma surrounding these conversations. Curated by Lisa Byrne, Keeling’s solo exhibition at Wexford Arts Centre is not just about the art – the artworks presented are certainly not unremarkable, but perhaps more importantly, they provide a vehicle to explore the artist’s very timely concerns.

Through the material processes of making, breaking, mending and remaking ceramic pots, Keeling seeks to initiate dialogue on the fragility of the human condition. Where many topical issues strive to be gender-neutral, Keeling has boldly chosen to represent a distinctly masculine thematic inquiry. The artist wants people to question why there are such negative connotations around mental health, particularly for men.

This body of work is the fulfilment of his efforts to question why men seem to have labels of ‘dishonour’ attributed to them, with suggestions that they are “not man enough”, or that they should “man up”, whenever their mental health might become vulnerable.

Combining elements of ceramics, sculpture and painting, ‘BAD-MAN Oh Man’ features a series of wall-mounted mixed-media works, as well as several sculptural assemblages, presented on low plinths. A number of individual clay vessels and found objects also hang grimly from the ceiling, on thick black nooses. These images of isolation are contrasted with the mass confusion found in the central mixed-media sculpture, titled Man Oh Man. Here, the jagged pieces of broken ceramic pots have been combined to form a tall curving structure, calling to mind the shape of a question mark. Infused with barbed wire (that warns viewers not to get too close), this manifestation of ‘brokenness’ suggests internal conflict and perpetual suffering.

Using the sgraffito technique, Keeling has etched into the surfaces of many of the artworks. Derived from the Italian word, graffiare (meaning ‘to scratch’), sgraffito is a decorative

Gerry Davis ‘Procession’ Galway Arts Centre 11 January – 8 February 2019 method which involves scratching through a surface to reveal a lower layer of a contrasting colour. In Keeling’s ceramic pieces, the surface has been scraped away to reveal Pop Art-style text and illustrations, calling to mind Grayson Perry’s ceramic vessels, such as The Existential Void (2012). These designs add an element of lightness and humour to the work – a satirical voice that highlights the futility of cutting off emotional contact with other people. Keeling’s use of the technique can also be interpreted as a metaphor for looking beyond a person’s happy façade, to see the sadness that often lingers just below the surface.

The British potter, Edmund de Waal, feels that ceramics are unlike any other artform. As humans, we know ceramics intimately; we handle them every day in our domestic lives, and they form the centre of our rituals. They are a constant and often ignored presence in our day-to-day existence. When you hold a piece of pottery in your hands, the story of its making begins to unfold. One thinks of the fact that few pots emerge from the kiln in perfect condition.

Even if they seem flawless, there is no way of telling how they hold up to wear and tear – their strength is yet to be tested. Many seemingly flawed pots, with their uneven glazing, blisters and mending, have completeness and added value. A broken tea cup may no longer hold liquid, but could have a different purpose, such as holding coins or bits of jewellery.

The process of harnessing the four primitive elements of the universe – fire, air, water and earth – and transforming them into something else, is both awe inspiring and magical. Keeling’s skill in ceramics is a reminder of the dramatic and transformative properties of clay. Through his use of broken and mended pots, he offers a small glimmer of hope of this same transformative power within all of us. Being broken is no badge of shame; rather it is instead a shining example of human capacity to endure, develop and change.

Susan Edwards is a writer based in County Wexford and PhD candidate at NCAD.

Left: Shane Keelin, Hang-Tuf, ceramic & rope, variable dimensions Right: Shane Keeling, Badest Man (Background) and Brick Swayer; all photographs courtesy of the artist and Wexford Arts Centre

Gerry Davis, ‘Procession’, installation view, Galway Arts Centre; photograph by Tom Flanagan, courtesy of the artist and Galway Arts Centre

‘PROCESSION’ IS A powerfully evocative exhi-

bition by Limerick-based painter, Gerry Davis, which generates extensive narratives. In this respect, the work demonstrates how aesthetic experience transcends language. The exhibition comprises a new body of realist paintings that address timeless and contemporary issues pertaining to the function of art. Each painting poses questions about the nature of looking, as well as the interconnected roles of the artist, the viewer and the wider public.

In some of the paintings, there is an atmosphere of solitude and depravation. For example, Studio Space 4 details a dated studio, which appears to be lacking in central heating, as evidenced by an electric heater. Some works contain depictions of other paintings within them, prompting us to look (and look again) at hidden details – like rat poison in the corner of a studio, or an easel standing precariously on two legs. Nevertheless, a degree of optimism does permeate this work; fire features as a recurring motif, harking to the primitive. At the most fundamental level, there is mark-making and pictorial space that continues to burn bright in the digital age.

Observation is another key theme that recurs throughout the exhibition. Generally, we do not know what Davis’s figures are looking at, but such propositions open avenues for critical discussion. For example, Observers shows three people on a low wooden platform staring at something in the sky.

Similarly, the titular painting, Procession – in which many tiny figures climb a huge observation deck – shows how looking can be a social and communal act, with the hordes of people queuing indicating that there is something worth looking at. In Pulling Weeds we find a man thinning out the dead and useless parts of nature; the scene is both emotionally and philosophically charged, suggesting that the man is trying to get to the root of things, by deciphering what may or may not be important to him.

Most of the paintings present things out of their usual context: a solitary easel is depicted in the wilderness; an artist appears out of focus in the wild. A cross-section of plein air paintings and indoor studios appear to speak to the dialogical relationship between culture and nature, of which art is born. True to its title, a religiosity

is present across the exhibition, creating charged atmospheres of uncertainty. Artist’s Talk shows the artist presenting in a Chapel, reflecting historical debates about the artist as ‘saviour’. This is juxtaposed with the stark isolation conveyed in a number of other pieces that clearly document the artist alone at work, in less than ideal circumstances. Such scenes are not new for Davis, whose previous body of work portrays empty artists’ workspaces. ‘Procession’ extends beyond the studio to encompass the extended communities that make up the art world, pointing to the idea that an artwork is ultimately completed by an audience.

Some paintings are more personal than others. Still Life with Radio and Dole Letter is a beautifully rendered and haunting image which describes the personal cost and desolation of being a practising artist. EVA Baby depicts a baby in a pram, neglected in a dark and lonely place – a reference perhaps, to the many submissions an artist makes, in the hope of recognition. A sense of fear and apprehension accompanies each proposal, as an artwork breaks ties with its creator, to be judged in the world at large.

Despite this, there is the feeling that a life of art is worth pursuing; regardless of self-doubt and personal sacrifices, the artist expresses a compulsion to remain on this journey. It is refreshing to find that Davis’ paintings are skilfully crafted and work well together as a coherent series. The artist makes a case for painting, based on what he expresses and also how he expresses it. Although this body of work is about being an artist, the beauty of it is that it is not self-obsessed – it is not personal confession parading as art. The exhibition speaks not just of its creator, but universally to all artists, all viewers and all people who wonder.

Colleen Fitzpatrick is an artist and writer based in Westport, County Mayo. She holds a PhD from NUIG in the Philosophy of Art and Culture.

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Career Development

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Janet Mullarney sitting for Nick Miller in his studio in 2017; photograph courtesy of the artist

The Truth of the Encounter JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS NICK MILLER ABOUT HIS PAINTING PRACTICE AND HIS CURRENT EXHIBITION IN LONDON.

Joanne Laws: The term ‘Encounter Painting’ is commonly associated with your work. I guess this relates to things happening in your daily life and how you respond to them?

Nick Miller: Not really, it’s more formal than that. Back in 1988, still in my late-twenties, I had a kind of eureka moment about what art could be for me while on a residency in Dublin Zoo. I began to draw from life again, facing the otherness of animals in captivity. It became about meeting and holding contained energy through the act of drawing. It coincided with my reading of Martin Buber’s extraordinary book, I and Thou 1. This helped frame my interest in trying to hold the life that I encountered in the material form of art. Since then, my practice slowly evolved to be one of setting up the conditions necessary (in the studio or outside) to encounter things – a person, landscape, or object – in a practice environment where there is also the best possibility of making a painting.

JL: I remember a kind of eastern influence manifesting in your work in the mid-90s.

Was that through your engagement with Tai Chi? NM: Yes. It followed on directly from starting to define that sense of ‘practice’ but was a parallel learning system. In the ‘90s, I was lucky enough to study in America with a friend of Alan Watts, Chungliang Al Huang.2 An aspect of his teaching was very visual, using calligraphy as embodied physical movement. It gave me a way into that world of integrating eastern thought into a very western rooted art practice. You may remember from my teaching in the life room back then, that I used to get people to do physical movements and breath work, to try and wake up. Painting from life is a most literal ‘mind-body’ activity – absorbing information from outside, processing internally and releasing into the material of paint. Taoist thought offers a non-linear, spherical kind of approach, where the result is almost a fortunate ‘left over’ from your commitment to practice.

JL: In your engagement with the archetypes of painting – landscape, portraiture and still life – are you are grappling with the medium to make this territory your own?

NM: Yes, I suppose I am. We all look to enter art and hopefully find something authentic. A lot of the time – and I know, because I’ve taught in art college – education tends to iron out ‘wrongness’, so that artists can perform in a professional ‘art world’. I never got ironed out, so I used my ‘wrongness’ to make work. I could just say that I’m an old fashioned ‘life’ painter and leave it at that, but that wouldn’t be entirely true. In some ways, I’m not so interested in art. I’m interested – from necessity in the ‘art of living’ – with the problems of being a painter. Contradicting myself, I actually do have an enduring love for all those genres in the history of Western art. It is finding affirmation in the works of very different artists, in paintings that for me are portals across time

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

– repositories of contained energy – that completely absorb and charge me.

JL: Your sitters are often fellow artists and friends, like Alice Maher or Janet Mullarney, then some of whom have since sadly passed away – including Barrie Cooke, Anthony Cronin Seán McSweeney and John McGahern. When that happens, do you find that their portraits almost take on an archival function? Is this work about posterity?

NM: Not really, or not at first. I started by painting my family and friends – no one with a public life. Portraiture is my first love, and I continually return to it as the root of all my work.

The most exciting encounter is of one human to another and in my own personal trajectory, I like to hold something of the people I’ve met. As I became rooted in Ireland and the relatively accessible artistic community here, paying respect to those artists, writers or anybody who ends up sitting for me, is something I like to do. In truth, I feel most real when painting – that is the best of me – connecting to them. As people die, as we all do, I suppose the paintings can become a historical record, but I can’t have that as a goal – it gets in the way. I am not an archivist.

JL: Where ‘Vessels: Nature Morte’ reflects the utter collapse of meaning that happens when someone dies, your most recent series, ‘Rootless’, seems to transcend individual loss to focus more on the collective and the political. Can you discuss the evolution of this new work?

NM: My last still life series, ‘Vessels: Nature Morte’, had a deeply personal energetic core from a long collaborative project in North West Hospice, and the parallel passing of my own parents. For me they were the opposite to the “collapse of meaning”. They were about holding the last moments of life and meaning before it left. After that work, I was somewhat lost in the studio, wanting dialogue, but unable to find the people or conversations I needed to have. Like many of us, I was trying to process this crazy world that we’re all having to live with – the political mayhem that we seem to be

Career Development generating on the planet, the climatic mayhem, the migratory suffering – all this stuff we are facing. In a fairly intense period in 2017-2018, I began processing that lack of dialogue in my own way, in the large-scale canvases that became the ‘Rootless’ paintings. They took on a life of their own, asserting the urgency of nature. I was exploring disorder and the possibilities of integration in more complex compositions, some of which I showed at the Oliver Sears Gallery in Dublin last year, but are currently being shown more completely at Art Space Gallery in London.

JL: I also remember your ‘Truckscapes’ with great affection.

At what point did you decide to include the ‘viewing device’ of the doorway within those compositions?

NM: The first couple of years in the mobile studio, I couldn’t find a way to paint. I was really high, enjoying the mad freedom of being in the landscape, meeting the rural world in which I was living, but there was a dissatisfaction in me – they just looked like ‘pictures’ that did not need to exist. I had been scraping off paint, correcting things and it was starting to dot around the truck doorframe. And then in 2001, while working on a painting of a Whitethorn tree in a neighbour’s field, I radically re-worked the painting to include the truck interior and the paint-spattered doorway looking out onto the tree, like a standing portrait.3 My experience became defined by the protection of the truck as a studio, of culture with a relatively narrow doorway to the infinite world of complexity outside – as a tortoise in my shell. I realised these were not landscapes, but ‘Truckscapes’. I began to adjust my practice of making them in the context of the truck view, and that’s how they became something real for me, as paintings of land, trees or whatever.

JL: Many people recognise your muted and organic colour palette as being particular to your work. Does it come from living in the west of Ireland?

NM: Basically yes… It is muted in an adjustive way, starting with a very broad palette (contrary to any advice I would ever

Nick Miller, Three vessels: Interior, 2018, oil on linen, 214 × 183 cm; courtesy of the artist

give anyone). You’re trying to coalesce something into being, but the colour comes from nature. It is something to do with the light here. My studio is a warehouse with dirty, natural, overhead light. I’m trying to hold life – not commemorate it but hold it in the present – through a kind of alchemy.

Through training, I work at an intense and surprisingly fast pace that suits my temperament. I’ve learned to relate it to focus in sport.

JL: Do you drink Lucozade Sport while painting?!

NM: I’m trying to reduce sugar intake! Having taken up tennis as a first ever sport at 48 after a life of indolence, now it is taking over. After 10 years playing, I have competed for Connacht at Inter-Provincials, and at that level I am mostly losing with determined style. The concentration needed is similar to painting – a sustained attention, but on a yellow ball. Now I’m also swimming every morning in the sea – mainlining nature through cold water. I’ve become an addict. My partner Noreen describes it as my daily electric shock treatment, which is not far from the truth. It resets mind and body, until I return to my normal zombie-like self by the end of the day, catching up on Netflix or Brexit. My show in London ends on 29 March. Since I was born there and, after 34 years finally becoming an Irish citizen, it seems morbidly symbolic to me that my show is ending on Brexit day.

Nick Miller is an artist based in County Sligo. His exhibition, ‘Rootless’, continues at Art Space Gallery, London, until 29 March. nickmiller.ie artspacegallery.co.uk

Notes 1 Martin Buber, I and Thou, first published in German in 1923.

2 See: Alan Watts and Chungliang Al Huang, Tao: The Watercourse Way (Pantheon: 1975).

3 Whitethorn, truck view (2000-01), oil on linen. Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Nick Miller, Last Sitting, portrait of Barrie Cooke, 2013, oil on linen, 61 × 56 cm; courtesy of the artist

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22

Career Development

Hazel McCrann, Squeeze, 2018, acrylic, glue and gel on board, 200 × 180cm; image courtesy the artist

Peripheral Visions HAZEL MCCRANN DISCUSSES HER ARTISTIC PRACTICE AND CAREER TO DATE.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Hazel McCrann, Rising Form, 2018, acrylic and glue on board, 200 × 180cm; image courtesy the artist

HAVING SPENT MOST of my adult life living and working in urban environments, I finally returned to the west of Ireland six years ago with my husband and two children.

Originally from Strokestown, County Roscommon, I now live in Cliffoney in County Sligo. I really appreciate being able to live in this unique part of the world, situated between the Dartry Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean. Studying Psychology in the National University of Ireland Galway, led to a career working in the then burgeoning online industry of the noughties. For many years, I worked in Dublin and abroad, designing online user experiences, while at the same time attending Fine Art courses in the National College of Art and Design. Although I enjoyed the work, I always hoped that someday I would be able to devote more time to my art.

I found that I missed the open spaces and slower pace of life that can be found in the west of Ireland. When my husband was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2010 – and had to undergo two years of intensive treatment – we decided that the time was right to escape the city for good. Every cloud has a silver lining, as they say, and moving back west allowed us as a family time to recover from the trauma of recent years. I discovered a part-time BA in Art and Design run by the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology and decided to enrol. Having the opportunity to return to college to study art was a dream come true and something I never thought I’d get the chance to do. The learning environment on the Castlebar campus was really special and I graduated in 2016.

After taking a year out, I decided to return to college full-time and enrolled in the fourth year of the Fine Art course at Sligo Institute of Technology. The course was intense but very rewarding, and I graduated in 2018 with an honours level degree.

Upon completion of my degree, I participated in a Creative Showcase held on the Sligo IT campus, which exhibited the work of all graduating students within the fields of Art, Design and Architecture. As a result, six of my paintings were acquired as part of Sligo IT’s Graduate Exhibition Purchase Award and are now held in its permanent collection. I was also delighted to receive the Graduate Solo Exhibition Award, granted by the Hyde Bridge Gallery, Sligo, in collaboration with Sligo IT. My solo exhibition, titled ‘Peripheral Visions’, ran at the Hyde Bridge Gallery from January to February this year.

I’m lucky enough to have my own studio at home, which never seems large enough for the number of paintings that I am working on at any given time. While I do miss the company of the college environment, having my own space has made the transition from college to practicing artist much easier, making it possible to work intensively on a new body of work for ‘Peripheral Visions’. The process by which I make the work has evolved over the years, but my main concerns have remained the same. I view my paintings as a dramatic embodiment of thoughts and emotions, acted out through the process of painting. The paintings attempt to capture the elusive, or that which lies on

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Career Development

the periphery of our vision. My job as a painter is one of attentive and reactive decision-making – a place where you can either stick to the rules or break them. A painting for me is a chunk of captured time. All the dramas and messy complexities of life are played out in the guise of painterly moves, unpredictable events, decisions and reactions. Through the painting process, glimpses of what lies on the fringes of awareness are offered. I sometimes think that paintings have the ability to bring into focus that which is seen, but hardly noticed.

A sense of discovery has always been inherent in my work. Several paintings are worked on at once, making them part of an interactive series, influencing each other as they are being made. Mostly painted on board, they vary from small intimate paintings, to larger more immersive pieces. I lay the paintings out flat, either on the ground or across tables, while I work on them. The paint is laid on in thin layers – some transparent, some opaque – giving the paintings a veneer or glaze-like quality. As the layers build up over time, colours and forms appear and disappear. As well as brushes, I also use various tools and scrapers to manipulate the paint. Rather than shying away from the synthetic qualities and colours that acrylic paint allows, I have embraced them.

The colours I mix do not reflect the colours I end up with, as they are embedded in the materials I use. I combine paint with paint mediums, such as glues and gels, which are poured, pulled, pushed and scraped. Working in this physical way creates a space for unpredictable events to occur, creating a back and forth dialogue within the work.

Trusting my instinct, I allow my materials and processes to guide the direction of the work, allowing for a more visceral and intense form of painting, where the residue and mess of all these decisions and actions amalgamate to become the finished pieces. Unlike more traditional methods of painting, where the work is sometimes more planned, my emphasis is on how the unstable process of painting itself can become a mode of discovery. However, this apparent lack of control can be measured in some ways; the more paintings I make, the more I can begin to predict possible outcomes.

There are many painters who have influenced me over the years, most recently Serge Charchoune, Ed Moses and Alexis Harding. Charchoune has a mysterious quality to his paintings that I find fascinating, while I greatly admire the instinctive materiality and process-driven approaches of Moses and Harding. Although most artists study the practices of others, I find that the making process seems to guide me towards other painters who are following a similar path.

Working in the studio has now become an integral part of my life. Recent work outside the studio has involved sharing this passion for painting with others, especially the older community. I run courses and workshops at the New Ballagh Centre in Rossinver, County Leitrim. The centre aims to promote the mental and physical health of older people and I find these classes very rewarding, as they allow me an opportunity to share my vision as an artist and give something back to the community. Although I currently have no concrete plans for future shows, being awarded the solo show in the Hyde Bridge Gallery has given me the confidence to pursue exhibition opportunities elsewhere. Further study may well be on the cards, but for the moment, giving myself the time and space to develop as a painter feels like the right thing to do.

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Hazel McCrann, Scheele Secret, 2018, acrylic and gel on board, 400 × 340cm; image courtesy the artist

Hazel McCrann is an emerging artist based in County Sligo.

Hazel McCrann, Blue Splurge, 2018, acrylic and glue on board, 650 × 450mm; image courtesy the artist

Room 1 of ‘Peripheral Visions’ solo show in Hyde Bridge Gallery, Sligo. L –R: Carmine Scape (2018), Florescent Blush (2018), Crevice (2018), Melt (2018), The Drip (2018); courtesy of the artist

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Career Development

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Martina Coyle, Paradise Is Too Far (2), 2019; photograph by Martina Coyle and Mella Travers, courtesy of the artist

Paradise Is Too Far ANDREA NEILL INTERVIEWS MARTINA COYLE ABOUT HER ART PRACTICE AND HER NEXT EXHIBITION IN COUNTY MAYO.

Andrea Neill: Your upcoming solo exhibition ‘Paradise Is Too Far’ will open at Áras Inis Gluaire Gallery, Belmullet. Is this a parody of Dante’s Paradise or Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost?

Martina Coyle: The exhibition title came from overhearing my son telling his friend, while playing a video game, that “paradise is too far”. This sparked off my imagining on how it would feel to pursue paradise and then realise it was out of reach. At the time, I was developing new work for my major project, as part of my MA in Art and Research Collaboration at IADT. I chose to include ‘paradise’ in the project title, as it is a very emotive, personal and experiential term. I feel the title contains both idealism and realness, while leaving space for the viewer to conjure up what it could possibly entail.

AN: How did your ideas for the work evolve?

MC: The initial impulse to research and develop this work came about after I saw an internet image of a tree covered with ‘anti-bird spikes’. We may or may not be familiar with the presence of anti-bird spikes in urban landscapes, and for the most part, they go unnoticed and are deemed acceptable. Though, a spike on a tree is not. Last summer I was involved in a project that succeeded in protecting a Little Tern bird colony that was nesting on Portrane beach in County Dublin. An area of the beach was partitioned off and protected, mostly by Birdwatch Ireland, in order to safeguard the nesting site from kestrels, dogs and the general public. It was intriguing how, in each situation, people intervened.

AN: Is this exhibition a kind of analogy for ‘the inhospitable’? Are we hostile towards the nesting instinct?

MC: No, that is not really what the exhibition is about. I am presenting observations and expressions around these ideas but feel it’s important to suspend judgement and allow for personal interpretation. The work seeks to generate a dialogue around anthropocentrism, our relationship to our environment and the other species that also inhabit it. When I lived in

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Career Development

Sligo and Marseille, migrating birds would inhabit both locations. It was interesting to observe the effect of their presence and how people responded. For example, when swallows arrive and build their nests in the apex of my current home, some neighbours welcome them as a sign of spring, while others attach strips of plastic to their own homes to deter them. Although the research refers to attempts to control wildlife, the work aspires to create imaginary links with a universal instinct to seek shelter.

AN: Your practice displays a sublime grasp of materiality. What materials are you navigating with this new body of work?

MC: Materials with the potential to hold light have always attracted me – be it seaweed, glass, silicone, mirror, water, cotton or even monofilament fishing line. I am currently exploring the transformative qualities of reflected light and have created a series of photographs utilising imagery reflected in broken hand-held mirrors. I’ve also been experimenting with hawthorn and blackthorn, which are common in Irish hedgerows. These shrubs provide birds with food, nesting sites and protection against predators, and are also used by farmers as boundary markers to control the movement of farm animals. Other materials include recycled reflective plastic. I am sensitive to the nature of materials and their impact on the environment.

AN: Declan Long used the Seamus Heaney phrase “earthed lightning” to describe your sculptural work, in light (2000), shown at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. He drew attention to its ambiguous, sensuous luminosity, calling it a “freeze-frame of natural motion” and a “mid-air waterfall”.

What were the latent concepts informing this work?

MC: In light was created when I lived in Sligo; the trees were collected in a forest close to my studio at the time. Scores of branches – mainly ash, sycamore, willow, beech and hawthorn – were pared down to form one pure line, then painted, tipped with mirror and tightly bound with radiant synthetic fibres. I was attracted to the idea of transforming the material, creating an ambiguity between the transparent artificial skin and the natural body below. The reforming of in light in different locations was central to the overall concept. In light was later exhibited in The Model, Sligo, and then in the Regional Hospital in Roscommon. It’s only with hindsight that I can see reoccurring conceptual and material concerns in my work, right from my earliest days after graduating from NCAD’s glass department.

AN: Your piece, The Silver (2006) – commissioned by Mayo County Council and filmed on the Atlantic coast of County Mayo – has a hypnotic feel to it. One 47-minute video shows the sun setting over the sea and Inishkea Islands, creating a reflective filter with which to experience the other three videos. How did this work unfold?

MC: As I was based in Paris at the time, I devised this commission as a residential project, living and working in Blacksod Bay for three months to carry out research before making the artwork. I created an event whereby people on the mainland travelled by boat to Inishkea South, the island where they originated. This was filmed from the mainland, the island, the boat and finally, as they made their way home. The locals are incredibly tuned in to the tides. I noticed during the residency that the only time I saw people congregate was for mass and funerals, so I decided to organise a mass on the island’s pier. We had a huge turnout for the event. The conditions were perfect for the journey, and the community had wanted a mass on the island for many years.

The light was amazing that day and we got great shots on both journeys. Immediately afterwards, everybody jumped up to return to the mainland, because the tide was turning. As this is a Gaeltacht area, I decided to develop a soundtrack of locals naming places, rocks, fields, animals and so on from the 1912 census, in Irish. The work was later shown in a converted car showroom in the village, where the community gathered for the exhibition. The Silver will be shown later this year in Árais Inis Gluaire. I am looking forward to returning to Mayo.

AN: Will you pursue these conceptual inquiries, tied to the communal loss of memory and the universal instinct to seek shelter, in future work?

MC: I imagine our vulnerability, inter-relationships and how we navigate the world will always have relevance to my practice. The world is in such a state of flux; it strikes me that this is a pivotal moment, particularly in relation to the environment. This is something I care deeply about, and I will continue to add my voice to this conversation.

Andrea Neill is an artist and writer who is currently working on a series of podcasts.

Martina Coyle is a multidisciplinary artist working predominantly in the field of sculpture. ‘Paradise Is Too Far’ runs at Áras Inis Gluaire Gallery from 30 March to 1 May 2019.

Top: Martina Coyle, in light (detail), 2000, monofilament fishing line, branch, paint; photograph courtesy of Martina Coyle Bottom: Martina Coyle, Paradise Is Too Far (1), 2019; photograph by Martina Coyle and Mella Travers, courtesy of the artist

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Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Residency

Walking in a Circle TOBI MAIER DISCUSSES HIS RECENT CURATORIAL RESIDENCY AT THE GLUCKSMAN AND HIS STAY AT CARRAIG-NA-GCAT, COUNTY CORK. IN BERLIN IN early December 2018, I boarded an Aer Lin-

Documentation of hike to the Drombeg Stone Circle on Sunday 16 December 2018; all images courtesy of Tobi Maier

gus plane bound for Dublin. I had recently moved from São Paulo to Germany and the invitation to Ireland – to undertake a curatorial residency at The Glucksman, Cork – was a homecoming of sorts, as I had started my undergraduate studies in Belfast in 2001. Accompanied by curator and friend Jonathan Carroll, I visited Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane and the Francis Bacon Studio, as well as exhibitions by Wolfgang Tillmans (IMMA), Liam Gillick (Kerlin Gallery) and Gillick’s collaboration with NCAD students at the Goethe-Institut.

After a day in Dublin, we took off for Belfast. We headed to Phil Hession and Paddy Bloomer’s studios (in the back alley of former stable-yard, Lawrence Street Workshops), we had encounters with filmmaker Nicky Keogh and graphic designer Duncan Ross, and we saw this year’s edition of the MAC International. We enjoyed the Ulster Museum, but more so its adjacent Botanic Gardens. There were plants there, enclosed within a 200-year-old greenhouse, that I recognised from Brazil’s Atlantic Forests coastline – a beautiful climate-controlled tropical island, indeed.

However, the majority of my time in Ireland was spent down south in County Cork. My curatorial residency at The Glucksman was named after Nicholas Fox Weber – Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation – honouring Weber’s investment in the gallery programmes at University College Cork. In the UCC Special Collections library, I spent some time reading up on the history of megalithic stone circles on the Cork-Kerry axis and analysing eighteenth-century maps that cannot be copied nor photographed. Among the several day-trips I undertook from Cork, was a memorable visit to Sirius Art Centre in Cobh, where we studied Brian O’Doherty’s restored nine-part, floor-to-ceiling mural, One, Here, Now – originally painted more than 20 years ago.

Following my invitation to the curatorial residency at UCC, arrangements were also made for a short stay at Carraig-na-gcat – the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation’s artist-in-residence programme near Glandore, West Cork (carraig-na-gcat.org). At the time, I was penning a review of the exhibition ‘Bauhaus Imaginista’ at SESC Pompeia, São Paulo (25 October 2018 – 6 January 2019), so it was a joy to encounter publications on the Albers’ work in the study at Carraig-na-gcat, with its much-cherished fireplace. I arrived in West Cork with my friend, Brussels-based architect Lars Fischer. I had invited Lars with the aim of organising a circular hike together, carrying a ring towards the Drombeg Stone Circle.

The motivation for the event stemmed from a ring that I had been presented with earlier that year by common room and Sleeperhold Publications, as part of their ongoing collaboration.1 The announcement stated: “We have a proposition for you – we have a gift for you. We would like to present you with a ring. But as gift-giving goes, it includes an implicit idea of reciprocal engagement.” And furthermore: “By attributing a similar object to multiple authors, each iteration of the ring further complicates the idea of authorship and simultaneously strengthens the network of connections between the various participants. These social connections are essential to the project.”

The invitation to the hike we planned in West Cork, outlined the ring’s provenance and complex backstory as follows: “This ring is a limited edition reduction of a steel ring designed by common room for 019 (Ghent) which was a distortion of a circular steel ring designed by common room for Dexter Sinister at Stella Municipal Cinema (Athens) – later moved on to Radio Athènes – which was an adapted re-production of a circular steel ring designed by common room for Casco (Utrecht) based on a reinterpretation of a circular steel ring by ifau & Jesko Fezer for the Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building (New York) following a reproduction of a steel ring by common room produced for ‘Dexter Sinister Presents

Common Room (Circular)’ (New York) which was a re-consideration of the original steel ring designed by Aldo van Eyck for the architect’s apartment in Amsterdam (1948).”

My invitation for Lars to join me in Ireland was thus not to produce another artist’s ring.2 We already had one in hand.

Instead, we conceived a circular hike to pay tribute to these “social connections”, adding yet another layer to the story with the walk, evoking the history and spirits of the ring.

Our potential audience had been invited to join us at Carraig-na-gcat on the morning of Sunday 16 December 2018.

The day before the event, we embarked on a test run, only to get soaking wet. Luckily, just after 9am the stormy and rainy December weather cleared, and the gods presented us with rays of sun and clear skies. A few people endeavoured to join us: locals with a dog, a handful of art professionals from Cork and their kids.

Lars gave an introduction, describing the 2009 circular walk that he had previously arranged around New York’s Lower East Side, with various stops at circles of the Seward Park Extension, the housing projects on Essex Street, as well as the circled seating arrangement outside Abrons Art Centre on Grand Street opposite the common room offices.3 For our walk, we carried the Sleeperhold and common room edition ring, departing from Carraig-na-gcat, and heading towards the Drombeg Stone Circle – a ring composed of 17 stones with a nine-meter diameter. Located three miles from the residency, this stone circle is more than 3,000 years old and dates from the Bronze Age. At the circular entrance gate to the stone circle, we stopped and addressed our fellow travellers: Drombeg has been described as a place of worship, a centre for learning and a site of medicine and healing. Like many circles surveyed to date, it is characterised by a “recumbent slab”, or in some instances, a “flat surfaced block-like boulder” which “stands in the western semicircle of the monument”.4 We placed our steel ring in the centre of the stone ring. We circled around it, dragging our boots through the slushy rain-soaked grass, as glimmering sunrays reflected in the puddles. The event took place just days before the winter solstice, when the sun famously sets through the v-shaped nudge in the adjacent hills, beaming straight through the centre of the Drombeg Stone Circle.

Our walk was like the human ring featured in the Henri Matisse’s painting, Dance (1910). It was a procession that formed a ring – not simply a means of getting from A to B, but as a way of arriving ceremonially with symbolic importance. As a circular hike supposes, our walk returned us to the point of origin – Carraig-na-gcat.

Tobi Maier is a curator and writer based in Berlin.

He previously organised the exhibition space SOLO SHOWS in São Paulo (2015–2018), and worked as associate curator for the 30th edition of the Bienal de São Paulo (2012).

Notes 1 Sleeperhold is a publication platform. It will produce 10 outputs. After #10, it will cease to exist. Every edition is an experiment in approach / collaboration / distribution / media. There is no recurring theme, format or audience. Common room is a collaborative platform based in New York City and Brussels. It is an architectural practice with a publishing imprint and an exhibition space. Common room comprises: architects Lars Fischer, Maria Ibañez and Todd Rouhe; Rachel Himmelfarb; architectural researcher Kim Förster; and graphic designer Geoff Han. 2 For example: Richard Long’s A Circle in Ireland (1975) produced in County Clare, as a follow up to his Circle in the Andes (1972).

3 See also: common circular 2, published in 2009 on the occasion of ‘common room presents dexter sinister (circular)’. common-room.net 4 Falny, E. M., ‘A recumbent-stone circle at Drombeg Co. Cork’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, Series 2, Vol. LXIV, No. 199, January –June 1959, p3.

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How is it Made?

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Grace Weir, Time Tries All Things, 2019, video still featuring David Berman; © Grace Weir, courtesy the artist and Institute of Physics

FIGHT WITH CUDGELS (c.1820–23) is a painting by Francisco Goya that depicts two

Time Tries all Things CHRIS HAYES TALKS TO GRACE WEIR ABOUT HER CURRENT EXHIBITION AT THE INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS, LONDON.

men duelling, and with each step, slowing sinking further into the mud below them.

Their supposed opposition is a misreading; their struggle is not between two distinct forces, but a situation which they create together and for each other. “With every move they make,” wrote French philosopher Michel Serres, “they are gradually burying themselves together.” The image appealed to Serres as a metaphor for a relationship between two things, in this instance, that of people and the threat of climate catastrophe, which he discusses in his book, The Natural Contract (1995).

“So, it’s this point that I like very much,” Grace Weir says about Serres and Goya, “how he says that the differences are moot. As we’re dealing with ideas of our potential distinctions, this image throws the relationship between these things.” We’re discussing Weir’s solo exhibition at the vast new gallery in the Institute of Physics in London. Her filmic installation, Time Tries All Things, is characteristic of much of Weir’s work –reflecting on complex scientific and philosophical ideas about time, and emerging out of collaborations with notable figures, on this occasion, Professor David Berman of Queen Mary University of London and Professor Fay Dowker of Imperial College London.

For Weir, Serres’s analysis of the Goya painting suggests not just a model of ethics – people and their environment entangled, dependent – but a useful understanding of knowledge. She states: “you can’t have a concept of history without a concept of time.”

Any means of understanding the world has multiple starting points; just as the struggle of the two men brings them together, any disciplines, ways of working or communicating are inescapable from each other.

But don’t describe this as ‘art meeting science’. Weir tells me: “I should say, I hate ugly hybrids. I’m very, very critical of sci-art, or whatever they call it.” She goes on to explain that she is “a little bit tired of the art and science conversation”. It’s a cultural conversation she’s been actively involved in for over 20 years. After completing an MA in New Media in the late ‘90s, an interest in concepts of time naturally emerged out of her work in film. This relationship between time and moving image has been central to the work of countless artists, from Warhol and beyond. It seems that Weir’s important contribution here is to go much, much deeper.

“I’ve been following a particular train of thought for ages – and it was really about wanting to understand time better. In the late ‘90s, new media and film were thought of differently than we think of them now. I wanted to understand the nature of time because I was working in film. And that’s what led me to want to meet a physicist, to want to understand relativity. It took about 18 months of talking to the physicist before I understood it. And really, coming to understand that had a transformative impact – it changed me. I always say it’s not something you can recover from, and I don’t want to either.”

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Grace Weir, Time Tries All Things, 2019, video still featuring David Berman; © Grace Weir, courtesy the artist and Institute of Physics

How is it Made?

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Grace Weir, Time Tries All Things, 2019, video still featuring Fay Dowker; © Grace Weir, courtesy the artist and Institute of Physics

And this pivotal moment has reverberated through her practice ever since. One of the most significant manifestations was her retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, titled ‘3 Different Nights, recurring’ (7 November 2015 – 28 March 2016), which comprised some 30 works, including three major film commissions.

This new commission at the Institute of Physics continues and elaborates upon many of her central concerns. Densely packed with elaborate scientific and philosophical ideas – such as space-time illusions and quantum mechanics – the video’s focus is resolutely personal and material, centring on a number of individuals who are drawing and carving from stone.

There’s a connection to the physicality of the drawing and stone carving depicted on-screen, and how Weir is directly involved with the camera work and the editing.

“Editing is about time,” Weir explains. “How it’s cut up, how the film is paced. You’re controlling when shots are coming, when they’re not. Things don’t need to be sequential, they can loop back into each other. They don’t have to follow a beginning, middle and end. These are all choices.” Cleary, time, control, authorship and the fundamental basis for these scientific concepts is reflected by what happens, how it happens and how it’s shown – it’s as layered and elaborate as these ideas are complex.

Time Tries All Things comprises two films, presented as a dual-screen installation.

As explained by Weir, one film is more linear, while the other one is cut up, with each film having “a completely different sense of time.” This dual format is reflective of the physicists she’s collaborated with and how differently they conceive of these ideas. The artist is telling this story through scripts, camera work, voiceover and a heavily involved installation process. And while Weir mentions how important it is to have a budget to collaborate – to bring in people with different skills and to finalise the piece in different ways – she’s clear about her role and responsibilities as the editor. During our conversation, it becomes apparent how important the process of making the work is. Just as she took control during the extensive editing process, Weir also worked for several days on the installation, taking a hands-on approach to everything necessary for this show to come together.

But for Weir, to place too much emphasis on the outcome is to miss the whole picture. “As I’ve become more familiar with the field of science, when I hear the word ‘science’ now, it’s a bit like I would hear the word ‘art’ – this could mean everything, from opera to concrete poetry. So, if someone’s going to talk about art, and they mean all of this and more, I’m a bit perplexed; what are you talking about? And specifically, what are you talking about? Even within the field of physics, there’s applied physics, theoretical physics. And they’re all very, very different. Different in their approaches and in their outcomes.”

“I find it very difficult. The more I’ve engaged scientists the more, actually, I find it difficult to make a statement on it because… I suppose, fundamentally, I don’t know what we can really obtain here. I’m sceptical of it, this pitting one generality against another. Having said that, of course I don’t think all things are equal and all things are the same. There are, of course, strong divergences in the field. I don’t go out to engage with scientists. That thought never comes to me. When I’m talking with David [Berman], it’s not like I’m there with my artist hat on and they’re there as scientists. We’re people, sitting in a space discussing something. It’s not about the outcome – there may even be no outcome. It’s the desire to be in that space with somebody, when you’re both engaged with the topic, that drives me to collaborate. I very much like that space – before things are art, or before things are science.”

Chris Hayes is an Irish writer based in London and the founder of The Emotional Art Magazine.

Grace Weir is an artist and filmmaker based in County Leitrim. ‘Time Tries All Things’ continues at Institute of Physics, London, until 29 March 2019. graceweir.com

Grace Weir, Time Tries All Things, 2019, installation view, Institute of Physics; photograph by Thomas Skovsende, courtesy Institute of Physics

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How is it Made?

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

Felicity Clear, DdC Farm site; site curation/photography Melissa O’Faherty, courtesy of DdC

Drawing de-Centered

Diverse-nomadic-open-provoke-interim-decenterd-trail-liminalsift-provisional-testing-scratch.

DRAWING DE-CENTRED is an artist collective and online platform for

MELISSA O’FAHERTY AND KIERA O’TOOLE DISCUSS THE IRISH CONTEMPORARY DRAWING COLLECTIVE, DRAWING DE-CENTRED.

exploring contemporary drawing practice and research. In 2016, six professional Irish artists, whose practice is rooted in drawing, first met at a peer critique event, organised by Visual Artists Ireland and chaired by Arno Kramer. Kramer is a visual artist, curator and founder of Drawing Centre Diepenheim in The Netherlands, who champions contemporary drawing in all its diversity. One of the many outcomes of this serendipitous encounter was the establishment of a drawing-focused platform, titled ‘Drawing de-Centred’ (DdC). The title of the collective originated from the geographical diversity of the group, which extends to the north, south and west of Ireland.

The collective is brought together by a shared understanding of contemporary drawing, characterised by openness, embodiment and present-ness.

We also have an interest in advocating drawing practice in Ireland. Our aim as a collective is to share knowledge and resources and to encourage a collaborative and public approach to drawing, with a particular focus on flexibility, liminality and impermanence. In practice, the group meet online via video conferencing technology and in person, whenever project decisions are made. DdC member Felicity Clear states that the collective “allows for testing and trying out, entering a collective space where the total responsibility for the work is somewhat relinquished and an open conversation can take place. It can be nimble, flexible, playful and economic.” Our diverse drawing practices range from traditional pencil on paper, to three-dimensional drawing in the expanded field, using neon lights or found, natural and manmade materials. The collective share a keen interest in encouraging critical thinking around drawing, questioning what drawing is, but also what drawing can be.

Our inaugural project, titled ‘Drawing as Interruption’, developed the idea of how drawing might act as a form of disruption. Individual artists

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

How is it Made?

Top: Felicity Clear, Untitled (detail), 2018, pencil on paper; image courtesy of DdC

Melissa O’Faherty, Thoughts on Interruption, 2019, found materials charcoal, burnt sticks & ink on paper, 120 × 160 cm; couresy of DdC

Bottom: DdC at Model Studios Sligo, Artists: Rachael Agnew, Kiera O’Toole, Felicity Clear; image courtesy of DdC

responded to this proposition through site-specific drawings in rural, urban, public or private spaces. This methodology served as a testing ground for creating dialogue between drawings and in relation to site. Our initial iteration was curated by Kiera O’Toole and Felicity Clear and installed in O’Toole’s studio in The Model, Sligo. The second iteration was curated by Felicity Clear, Melissa O’Faherty and MaryRuth Walsh in the Independent Studios, Temple Bar, Dublin. This exhibition ran for one week in a temporarily vacant artist studio. For this iteration, some of the artists developed new work and installed these alongside existing works to form fresh configurations, allowing for new visual dialogues.

DdC gathered momentum from the positive response we received from peers, the public and the many curators who visited this exhibition.

In keeping with the notion of ‘de-centering’, the collective’s third iteration, curated by Melissa, was installed on the grounds of a historical farm and buildings in County Wicklow. Melissa made new drawings and videos in response to the other artist’s work insitu. Melissa states: “I enjoy the notion of de-Centered, in that the work is non-reliant on gallery spaces. In this way, there can be more freedom over the placement of work which, in turn, can activate interesting outcomes”.

Similarly, Kiera O’Toole’s practice and research engages in the phenomenology of site-specific drawing. Kiera states “I’m interested in drawing’s capacity to bring forth the essence of a phenomena, while making connections that arise between the aesthetic experience and the surrounding environment and/or society”. However, Kiera could not visit the site, so Melissa and Kiera decided to simultaneously draw their lived experiences by recording elements of their perceptual experiences. Given that Melissa was located on the farm and Kiera

was in Sligo, both artists agreed to a timeframe to start and finish the drawings. By taking a phenomenological approach, drawing becomes a device for perceiving and understanding the world as it appears. As described by DdC member, Mary-Ruth Walsh, drawing can be used as a “thinking tool”, which variously considers: “drawing to communicate, drawing as a physical act, drawing as writing, drawing to familiarise yourself, drawing’s relationship to material, performative drawing, contemplative drawing encounters and drawing that re-frames a space”.

In 2019, Kevin Killen will host the next iteration in Belfast, followed by Mary-Ruth Walsh in Wexford and Rachael Agnew in Wicklow. Like Kiera, Rachael explores a philosophical underpinning of phenomenology in relation to site-specific drawing. Racheal’s practice and research explores “the fundamental ontology of interstitial space”, referring to “in-between, empty, transitional, transient or non-places that are assumed and unquestioned”. The concept of space is also explored in Kevin Killen’s walking journeys. Kevin notes that although he known as a sculptural artist, drawing is an integral part of his practice. Kevin studies people’s physical space and the journeys that they make, noting: “I use traditional drawing tools to translate journeys into maps [and] recreate using neon. Initially, my drawings were part of the process to create the finished neon, but now I see them as works in their own right”. Space, place and the everyday is also explored in Mary-Ruth Walsh’s practice. Walsh focuses on architectural spaces and how they affect the way we move and behave, stating: “I make imagined, yet impossible proposals, realised through drawing [so that] we see the commonplace anew” (maryruthwalsh.org).

Our themed project, ‘Drawing as Interruption’, is provid-

ing us the time and space to discover each other’s practice in deep and meaningful ways. Furthermore, it is providing the opportunity to reflect on various approaches regarding contemporary drawing practice, relying on the inner-workings of the group to further develop rich modes of collaboration.

We envision DdC as an evolving and flexible collective and going forward, we intend to continue exhibiting both inside and outside the gallery space. We hope to work with curators and drawing practitioners for future projects in Ireland and abroad.

For additional information on current projects and future exhibitions, visit drawingdecentred.com Melissa O’Faherty is a visual artist based in Stylebawn Farm Studios, County Wicklow. melissaofaherty.com

Kiera O’Toole visual artist, researcher and educator based in County Sligo. kieraotooleartist.com

The other DdC members are: visual artist and researcher Rachael Agnew, who lives and works in Dublin (rachaelagnew.com); artist and educator, Felicity Clear (felicityclear.com); Belfast-based visual artist, Kevin Killen (kevinkillen.com); and Mary-Ruth Walsh, a visual artist, curator and writer based in New Ross, County Wexford (maryruthwalsh.com).

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Public Art Roundup

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

ART OUTSIDE OF THE GALLERY

Remembering Our Father’s Words

Quiet Listening

Artist: Nicola Anthony Title of work: Remembering our Father’s Words Site: Shoah Foundation, California, USA Commissioning Body: Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation and confidential private donor Date advertised: October 2017 Date sited: November 2018 Commission type: Public sculpture Project Partners: USC, Shoah Foundation, The Goldrich Foundation

Artist: Orla de Brí Title of work: Quiet Listening Site: Belvelly Castle, Belvelly, Co. Cork Commission Type: Direct Private Commission by the owners of Belvelly Castle. Planning permission was granted as the public can see the sculpture.

Date Sited: December 2018

Description: Remembering our Father’s Words is a permanent sculpture commissioned by The Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles. The artwork features the life story of Jona Goldrich, a holocaust survivor who escaped from Poland during World War II. Jona’s testimony has been memorialised in a metal sculpture by Dublin-based artist Nicola Anthony.

The testimony takes a form similar to that of a memory – the viewer can delve in at any point and sometimes one part of the story might obscure another. Reading a person’s story as a physical sculpture is akin to getting to know a person: it takes time to understand and unravel the complexities; you have to absorb it, gaze at it and look from different angles.

The Shoah Foundation was founded by Steven Spielberg and works to develop empathy, understanding and respect in contemporary society. Through creating platforms for the testimony of genocide survivors, they hope to help overcome prejudice, intolerance and hatred.

Description: Quiet Listening is a bronze sculpture created by Irish artist Orla de Brí, that sits atop the roof of Belvelly Castle in Co. Cork. The artist aimed to create a sculpture that reflects on stories from a different time, as well as the feelings of ancestry that people sense when entering historically rich buildings like castles. De Brí did this by sculpting a human figure contemplating a gold tree.

The tree acts as a symbol of the past and present, with roots planted firmly in the past and branches reaching for new beginnings. Locked in captivation, the human figure acts as a visual connection of mankind with nature, present and past. The three-metre figure and the five-metre tree are both bronze. The tree is leafed in 24 carat gold and the figure is painted a deep green colour. These are the colours traditionally used by architects throughout history for roof domes of cathedrals and castles.

In total, the sculptures took one-year to complete.

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

A Sense of Place

Artist: Geraldine O’Reilly Title of series: ‘A Sense of Place’ Commissioning Body: St Joseph’s National School, Rathwire, Co Westmeath Date Advertised: February 2017 Date sited: October 2018 Budget: €15,000 Commission type: Series of eight woodblock prints (73 cm × 74 cm each).

Description: ‘A Sense of Place’ is a series of eight large-scale woodblock prints created by artist Geraldine O’Reilly and commissioned by St Joseph’s National School in Rathwire, Co. Westmeath.

The artworks explore the history, folklore, archaeology and architecture surrounding the locality of the school. For the commission, the school principal wanted the works to include an educational remit, asking the artist to undertake a series of workshops with the school’s sixth class pupils before working on the commission proper.

O’Reilly undertook considerable research, which helped to inform the images for the eight woodblocks. The school also received copies of this research, which they plan to use as the foundation for other art projects. A selection of the children’s artwork was also framed and hung in the school to accompany the commission, which was officially launched on 6 March 2019.

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Opportunities

Visual Artists' News Sheet | March – April 2019

GRANTS, AWARDS, OPEN CALLS, COMMISSIONS

Open Calls

Commissions

Residencies

ALPINE FELLOWSHIP VISUAL ARTS PRIZE

ST MOCHTA’S NATIONAL SCHOOL

CREATE RESIDENCIES

NEO:RESIDENCY 2019, BOLTON, UK

Deadline Monday 18 March, 5pm

Deadline Monday 25 March, 12 noon

The Alpine Fellowship Foundation is accepting applications for its Visual Arts Prize competition for 2019, open to all visual artists aged 18 and above. The prize is awarded for the best visual arts project that responds to the concept of ‘identity’ – the theme of the 2019 Alpine Fellowship Annual Symposium.

The winner and two runners up are invited to attend the Alpine Fellowship Annual Symposium in Fjällnäs, Sweden. Winner receives £2,000 and a further £1,000 towards shipping and installing the winning piece.

All visual media is permitted including, but not limited to, painting, sculpture, digital art and installation. There is a limit of one entry per person. Entries should include appropriate images or video and details of the work, including a short description of how the work is related to the theme of ‘identity.’

The competition is open to all nationalities.

The Alpine Fellowship is a group of writers, thinkers and artists who are passionate about learning and communicating with a view to better understanding themselves and others.

For more information on the prize and to apply, visit the Alpine Fellowship website.

St Mochta’s National School, Clonsilla, Dublin 15 intend to commission a public art work under the Per Cent for Art Scheme, funded by the Department of Education and Science.

The school is looking to commission an art piece that is reflective of the spirit, diversity and energy of their school. The budget for commission is €50,000. This is a two-stage open commission and will be managed by St Mochta’s Per Cent for Art Scheme Group. The opportunity is open to all professional artists. The selection panel will include the principal, two teachers, a representative of the Board of Management/ Parents’ Association, an independent artist and the current build architect.

During Stage 1, artists will be required to submit: a description of the proposed concept; an outline of proposed materials and scale; and a high-level budget breakdown. A CV and examples of previous work are also required.

Three artists will be invited to proceed to Stage 2 and will receive a payment of €300 to further develop their proposals for this stage. For more information on the commission and to receive a full brief, email info@stmochtas.ie.

Create have announced two residency opportunities in partnership with Fire Station Artists’ Studios and Carlow Arts Festival respectively. The Arts Council of Ireland’s Artist in the Community Scheme funds both residencies.

Both residencies are aimed at collaborative artists from ethnic minority backgrounds that are based in the Republic of Ireland. Applicants may only apply for one of these opportunities.

The Fire Station Artists’ Studios residency is a four-week residency award, based at Dublin’s Fire Station Artists’ Studios (FSAS). The residency will run during the month of June, incorporating International Refugee week (17 to 23 June 2019) offering opportunities for discussion and development of work.

The Carlow Arts Festival residency will begin in May, and run until June, to incorporate the Carlow Arts Festival period, which takes place from 4 to 9 June 2019. The residency aims to develop the applicant’s socially-engaged practice.

For more information on each of the residencies and to apply, visit Create’s website.

Neo:studios, Bolton, UK, invites new BA and MA graduate artists that have graduated between 2018 – 2019 to apply for its 2019 Artist Residency Programme. One artist will be selected to work in neo:studios and University of Bolton for a period of 12 weeks, followed by the opportunity of a solo exhibition. The resident artist will receive ongoing support from assigned directors and volunteers of neo:studios and from a group of artists and curators that will best suit the new graduate throughout the residency period and the conception and delivery of the outcome.

The selected artist will receive: up to £1000 for materials, including £500 vouchers from GreatArt sponsorship; a £500 artist’s fee, provided by University of Bolton; free accommodation (provided by University of Bolton); a £600 subsistence for living expenses (provided by University of Bolton); travel expenses for two return journeys to and from Bolton (within the UK); marketing of related events and exhibition, including catalogue, posters and preview refreshments. For more information on the residency and to apply, email neo:studios.

Deadline Monday 1 April

Deadline Friday 5 April, 12 noon

Web create-ireland.ie

Web neoartists.co.uk

Web alpinefellowship.com/apply

Web info@stmochtas.ie

Email info@create-ireland.ie

Email neoresidency@neoartists.co.uk

PARALLEL PHOTOGRAPHIC PLATFORM 2019

SCOIL BHEINÍN NAOFA BUACHAILLÍ

WEXFORD COUNTY COUNCIL RESIDENCES

EUCIDA DIGITAL ARTS RESIDENCY

Parallel Photographic Platform has opened their third cycle call for new artists and curators. Through this call, 30 emerging artists and six emerging curators working with Photography will be selected to participate in the Parrallel Platform’s third cycle exhibition programme, taking place September 2019 –November 2020.

The selected creatives will be taking part in an innovative process, from idea to exhibition, integrating a wide network of artists, curators and other art professionals.

Applications from artists who have never exhibited at museums/galleries/festivals and curators who have never curated an exhibition at museums/galleries/festivals are more than welcome. The call is open internationally.

There’s no compulsory theme, all work is appreciated. The selection will take into account gender balance and overall diversity. For more information on the call and to apply, visit the PhotoIreland website.

Under the Per Cent for Art Scheme Scoil Bheinín Naofa Buachaillí wishes to commission new visual artwork influenced by the history, context and aspirations of the students, teachers, parents and community of Duleek and the surrounding region. The commission is for a collaborative art programme to be explored, developed and completed in conjunction with the Per Cent for Art Committee.The budget for the commission is €22,000.

Artists must register interest in the project by emailing duleekpercentforart@gmail.com or writing to Emma Keane, Art Commission Co-ordinator, Scoil Bheinín Naofa Buachaillí, Duleek, Co. Meath. Expressions of interest must be received before 4 pm on 23 March 2019, providing your name, address, telephone number and email address. When registering, please indicate if you require a project site visit.

A maximum of five artists will be invited to submit a Stage 2 proposal. Each shortlisted artist will receive a fee of €500 to develop their proposal further.

Deadline Saturday 4 May

Wexford County Council has two upcoming residency opportunities: The Tyrone Guthrie Centre Bursary Scheme 2019; and the Leitrim Sculpture Centre Artists Residency Award.

The Tyrone Guthrie Centre Bursary Scheme 2019 enables two artists, practicing in any art form, to spend two weeks at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, County Monaghan. Each bursary covers all board and lodging expenses for a two-week period, plus the use of a studio (if necessary) and a stipend of €300 towards expenses.

The Leitrim Sculpture Centre Artists Residency Award offers a residency to a contemporary visual artist for a period of six weeks, running from 5 August to 15 September 2019.

The award supports artists wishing to explore new directions in their practice through experimental approaches to different materials, processes, ideas and/or techniques. The residency is non-outcome driven, however, artists may be invited to give a short presentation on their practice to a local audience and submit a report at the end of the residency period.

For more information on each residency and for application forms, visit the Wexford County Council website. The residencies are only open to artists based in County Wexford.

The EUCIDA Artist-in-Residence programme provides artists with an opportunity to bring their practice to a new, productive, supportive and dynamic environment located within one of the three partner venues in Dublin, France or Latvia. This is an opportunity for digital artists, based in Ireland, Latvia or France to collaborate trans-nationally in new media, digital arts, or arts and technology, and to further explore their work in a supportive environment. The selected artist from Ireland will travel to either France or Latvia, the host county will be decided based on the applications received and the work proposed.

This residency will run simultaneously with residencies in partner venues. Each artist will be supported in terms of collaboration of practice between the three artists via online conversations/webcam technology. Consequently, a good level of English will be required. The residency offers flights, accommodation, a stipend and an artist fee. The selected artist will be provided with a studio/space (needs dependent) and access to the partner venue’s equipment and facilities.For more information see on how to apply, visit the EUCIDA website.

Deadline Friday 26 April, 5pm

Web photoireland.org

Deadline Wednesday 1 May

Deadline Monday 15 April

Web eucida.eu

Email info@photoireland.org

Email duleekpercentforart@gmail.com

Web wexfordcoco.ie

Email eucidaproject@gmail.com

lifelong learning Spring 2019

Republic of Ireland

Northern Ireland

Dublin City

Causeway Coast & Glens

Belfast

WRITING ABOUT YOUR WORK

VISUAL ARTISTS HELPDESK/ PROJECT CLINIC

LEGALITIES AND LOGISTICS

with Brenda Tobin Date/Time: 14 Mar. 10:30 – 16:00.

Location: Visual Artists Ireland.

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

COMMUNICATING YOUR PRACTICE

with Conall Cary Date/Time: 21 Mar. 10:00 – 16:30.

Location: Visual Artists Ireland.

Places/Cost: 12. €100 / €50 (VAI members).

HOW TO APPLY FOR FUNDING

with Maeve Mulrennan Date/Time: 25 Apr. 10:30 – 16:30.

Location: Visual Artists Ireland.

Places/Cost: 12. €100 / €50 (VAI members).

Limerick CAREER REVIEW WORKSHOP*

with Linda Shevlin Date/Time: 12 Mar. 10:30 – 16:30.

Location: Ormston House.

Places/Cost: 14. €100 / €20 (VAI members in Limerick, Clare & Tipperary) / €50**.

COSTING AND PRICING YOUR WORK

with Patricia Clyne-Kelly Date/Time: 8 Apr. 10:30 – 16:30.

Location: Ormston House.

Places/Cost: 12. €100 / €20 (VAI members in Limerick, Clare & Tipperary) / €50**.

BEING CREATIVE: TOOLS IN HOW TO MAINTAIN CREATIVITY AND OVERCOME BLOCKS

with Miriam Logan Date/Time: 13 May. 10:00 – 16:30.

Location: Ormston House.

Places/Cost: 12. €120 / €30 (VAI members in Limerick, Clare & Tipperary) / €60**.

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

Lifelong Learning Partners

PAINTING – GROUP MENTORING

with Joy Gerrard Date/Time: 16 Apr. 11:00 – 16:30.

Location: Visual Artists Ireland.

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

Wexford HOW TO APPLY FOR FUNDING*

with Neva Elliott Date/Time: 4 March. 14:00 – 17:00.

Location: Wexford County Council.

Places/Cost: 15. €100 / €50 (VAI members) / €20 (Wexford artists).

MANAGING YOUR ACCOUNTS

with Gaby Smyth Date/Time: 1 April. 10:30 – 13:30.

Location: Wexford County Council.

Places/Cost: 15. €100 / €50 (VAI members) / €20 (Wexford artists).

FINANCIAL ADVICE CLINIC – ONE ON ONE*

with Gaby Smyth Date/Time: 1 April. 13:45 – 14:00 / 14:00 – 14:15 / 14:15 – 14:30.

Location: Wexford County Council.

Places/Cost: 3. FREE for Wexford artists.

VISUAL ARITSTS CAFÉ

Date/Time: 29 April. 10:30 – 16:00.

Location: Gorey School of Arts.

Places/Cost: 30. FREE / €10 (Non-members not based in Wexford).

with Joanne Laws Date/Time: 30 Mar. 11:00 – 16:00.

Location: Flowerfield Arts Centre.

Places/Cost: 20. £20/£10 (VAI members).

ASSESSING THE LANDSCAPE OF OPPORTUNITIES

with Catherine Hemelryk Date/Time: 27 April. 13:00–16:00.

Location: Roe Vallery Arts Centre, Limavady.

Places/Cost: 20. £20/£10 (VAI members).

Derry City & Strabane VISUAL ARTISTS CAFE: INTRODUCING THE NORTH WEST

Date/Time: 30 Apr. 10:30 – 16:00.

Location: Flowerfield Arts Centre.

Places/Cost: Unlimited. £10/FREE (VAI members).

Ards & North Down ARTIST CONTRACTS: PROTECTING YOURSELF BY BEING PREPARED

Date/Time: 19 Mar. 18:00 – 21:00.

Location: North Down Museum.

Places/Cost: 20. £10/£5 (VAI members).

BEING CREATIVE: TOOLS IN HOW TO MAINTAIN CREATIVITY AND OVERCOME BLOCKS

with Miriam Logan Date/Time: 4 Apr. 10:00 – 16:00.

Location: Boom! Studios, Bangor.

Places/Cost: 20. £40/£20 (VAI members).

Date/Time: 13 Mar, 17 Apr, 15 May. 11:00 – 17:00.

Location: VAI Belfast Office.

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

PRICING YOUR WORK

with Louise Gorman Date/Time: 7 May. 13:00 – 17:00.

Location: VAI Belfast Office.

Places/Cost: 15. £20/£10 (VAI members).

FINANCES & TAX FOR SELFEMPLOYED ARTISTS

with Louise Gorman Date/Time: 8 May. 13:00 – 17:00.

Location: VAI Belfast Office.

Places/Cost: 15. £20/£10 (VAI members).

PEER CRITIQUE: APPROACHES TO SOCIALLY-ENGAGED PRACTICE

with Sara Greavu Date/Time: 25 May. 12:00 – 17:00.

Location: Belfast (Venue TBC).

Places/Cost: 6. £20/£10 (VAI members).

OPPORTUNITIES WITHIN PUBLIC PROGRAMMES

with Sara Greavu Date/Time: 4 May. 13:00 – 17:00.

Location: Belfast (Venue TBC).

Places/Cost: 20. £20/£10 (VAI members).

PEER CRITIQUE: PAINTING

with Ronnie Hughes Date/Time: 7 Aug. 12:00 – 17:00.

Location: Belfast (Venue TBC).

Places/Cost: 6. £20/£10 (VAI members).

*Sold out but waiting list available ** All other VAI members

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

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

Tell us about your training needs!

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

VAI Show & Tell Events VAI will schedule Show & Tell events during 2019 and invites interested artists, groups, venues or partners to get in touch if interested in hosting a Show & Tell. E: info@visualartists.ie

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