Columns

Plein Air

Guerrilla Painting

CORNELIUS BROWNE CONSIDERS CONNECTIONS BETWEEN UNDERGROUND FILMMAKING AND PLEIN AIR PAINTING.

Cornelius Browne, Looking at Snowy Mountains (detail), 2022, oil on canvas; photograph by Paula Corcoran, courtesy of the artist.

TWENTY YEARS AGO this spring, I was part of a skeleton crew in Leitrim, shooting Ireland’s first indigenous horror movie. Dead Meat (2004) was also the first film completed under the Irish Film Board’s Micro-budget initiative, which provided funds for projects budgeted at €100,000. In the credits, my name appears under Production Designer. However, we had so few hands and so little money, that roles were, by necessity, fluid. Over that Easter weekend, we shot some of our most exhilarating scenes in a cottage belonging to novelist John McGahern. I was introduced to McGahern on Good Friday, wearing a weighty crucifix around my neck, brandishing a fake axe, and doused in fake blood. To stretch our budget, we frequently filmed en plein air. I cherish memories of freewheeling days and nights scouting locations.

Our next film planned as a company was Chiaroscuro, a psychological horror I had written about disintegrating relationships within an artists’ colony, which I was also slated to direct. To attract funding, I created an elaborate storyboard, comprising hundreds of drawings. This was the first artwork I had produced since graduating from NCAD twelve years earlier. Despite positive feedback, Chiaroscuro languished in development purgatory, but it reignited my passion for drawing.

My original intention had been to make Chiaroscuro as a Dogme 95 film. Lars von Trier’s avant-garde manifesto proposed a new way of producing films with extremely low budgets, adhering to strict rules that he provocatively termed the ‘vow of chastity’. Dogme films had to be shot on location, using hand-held cameras without any special lighting, with direct sound recording, and no music, optical work, or filters. The manifesto attacked illusory cinema and promoted a naturalistic alternative.

During my early childhood we had no television set, and I was 19 before setting foot in a cinema. In between, we had a black and white telly, our aerial erratically

picking up signal, meaning the picture was often snowy. Graveyard slot screenings of old or disreputable films turned me into a teenage insomniac. My inclination was towards guerrilla filmmaking, the ultralow budget underground work of directors operating on the margins. One night in deepest winter, I caught the only film written and directed by Barbara Loden. Wanda (1970) was shot by a crew of four people for $100,000 on grainy 16 mm film, usually reserved for documentary work. That freezing night, I experienced a snowfall of feelings about working-class art. I recollect Loden’s ideas on mainstream filmmaking: “I hate slick pictures, they’re too perfect to be believable. I don’t mean just the look. I mean in the rhythm, in the cutting, the music – everything. The slicker the technique is, the slicker the content becomes, until everything turns to Formica, including the people.”

Ten years ago, I returned to painting. Not one of my pictures has been slick. As a painter, I have taken a ‘vow of chastity’: all paintings are created entirely outdoors in a single session, with no preliminary drawing, underpainting or photographic reference, no retouching in the studio afterwards, and no varnishing. I have vowed to paint in the open across every season, at all times of day and night, continuing to work through whatever the weather throws my way, which is unpredictable on the Donegal coast. Painting a picture like Looking at Snowy Mountains, my fingers numb with cold, I have no idea that two strangers in a boat are about to drift into view. When I call out to them to please stay where they are for a few minutes, and look towards the snow, I recall that a long time ago, I had hoped to direct a film.

Cornelius Browne is a Donegal-based artist. His current solo exhibition, ‘All Nature Has A Feeling’, continues at the RCC, Letterkenny, until 25 March.

regionalculturalcentre.com

Ultimology

Turning Towards a Rupture

FIONA HALLINAN DISCUSSES THE DEMOLITION OF IRELAND’S SECOND LARGEST CATHOLIC CHURCH.

“To demolish is to obliterate, to eradicate, to erase, to destroy. Informally, the verb is used to describe an overwhelming defeat. It is the end.” – Ellen Rowley, Making Dust (2023)

IT COULD BE a catharsis to watch a building come down. Indeed, many demolitions have been presented as spectacle; as opportunities for gathering and celebrations in themselves. Watching a church come down could represent a purge – a way of starting over from a failed plan. ‘Emotional residue’ is a term in social psychology that describes how buildings and objects contain real, tangible traces of events in the lives of their inhabitants that can be sensed by other people over time.1

There is an ongoing international movement to ‘de-monumentalise’ due to the reckoning with colonialism and imperialism, documented by Nicholas Mirzoeff in ‘All Monuments Must Fall’.2 Buildings, however, are not monuments. They are functional spaces that provide shelter, but which extract large amounts of natural resources in their construction. To knock a building down and build a new one is often an economic decision; but in a climate crisis, can we afford to make decisions based on the arbitrary index of financial cost? Perhaps we should pay attention to the traces left in buildings, in materials.

Finglas West’s Church of the Annunciation, by architect David Keane, was a landmark building in the area – the tallest thing around except for the mountains. Designed to hold gatherings of over 3000 people, it opened in 1967 as part of a series of giant churches built around Ireland for a decidedly Catholic society. The 1961 Census records 94.9% of the country’s population identified as Catholic; however, as this percentage continues to decrease, there are fewer reasons to justify exclusive use of a building on this scale.

‘We Turn Towards an Ending and Pay Attention’ is a project currently showing

at VISUAL Carlow until 14 May. It will also be presented at the Irish Architectural Archive later this year (14 September – 20 October). The project includes a film, Making Dust (2023), that maps the research and writing of architectural historian Ellen Rowley on to the process of dismantling the church, and a table made from fragments of the demolition. At a symposium in May, the table will be activated with a meal, gathering different perspectives on the project. Rowley notes that a swathe of buildings, including the large-scale churches of Catholic Ireland, will be threatened with demolition. Built within the last 50 years or so, they don’t seem old enough to be considered of historic virtue.

Over the blue hoardings that concealed the demolition site, we asked passers-by what they thought about this building coming down. There was no major dissatisfaction about its dismantling; I noticed instead a distinct ambivalence. This project was not an act of protest or memorialising, but a way to mark a moment we describe as a ‘rupture’. It considers issues of land ownership, the agency of materials, sustainability, the built environment, and the legacy of the Catholic church’s power in Ireland; it asks what do we value, where do we gather, what should we keep and, in the context of a climate crisis, what should we discard?

Fiona Hallinan is an artist and researcher based between Brussels and Cork, and co-founder with Kate Strain of The Department of Ultimology. departmentofultimology.com

1 Krishna Savani et al., ‘Beliefs About Emotional Residue: The Idea That Emotions Leave a Trace in the Physical Environment’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 101, No. 4, 2011, pp. 684-701 (krishnasavani.com) 2 allmonumentsmustfall.com

Fiona Hallinan, Making Dust, 2023, film still; photograph by Faolán Carey, courtesy of the artist.

Art & Access

Intrinsic Models of Accessibility

IARLAITH NI FHEORAIS OUTLINES A FORTHCOMING ACCESS TOOLKIT FOR CURATORS AND PRODUCERS.

MANY ARTS ORGANISATIONS and curators are eager to create more accessible spaces for art workers, audiences and artists, but struggle to find the right advice. Numerous artists have self-organised in response to inaccessible environments, creating toolkits and resources to help fellow artists advocate for themselves. Recent examples include: Access Docs for Artists, an online resource to “help disabled artists communicate their access needs with galleries, art organisations and other employers”, developed by Leah Clements, Alice Hattrick, and Lizzy Rose in 2019 (accessdocsforartists.com); and Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice, an accessibility guide commissioned by Recess, New York, and written by Carolyn Lazard in 2019, which is “geared toward small-scale arts non-profits and the potentially expansive publics these organisations serve” (promiseandpractice.art).This has resulted in a long-awaited increase in artists sharing their access needs. Unfortunately, many curators and art organisations are still unprepared for supporting these requests.

With this in mind, I applied for Arts Council England funding to produce an access toolkit for curators and producers in late 2021. The aim of the toolkit is to provide key information on how to work, make and display accessibly in the visual arts, from fundraising and budget planning to working with artists. As a disabled curator myself, I also wanted to create a resource for disabled art workers to use to advocate for their own access needs.

I began by interviewing four disabled and/or chronically ill artists, alongside four curators and producers who either work in disabled-led art organisations, have disabilities themselves, or produce particularly accessible programmes. The artists have diverse practices with varying access needs, and all predominantly work in the UK and Ireland. For interviewees to speak openly about their experiences, their contributions have been anonymised. I asked artists about their experiences of working with institutions, curators and producers, what their access needs are, how they’ve been met in the past, and crucially, what their practice would look like if all their access needs were met. Curators and producers were asked questions on planning, policy, funding, current access provision, management, and their own access needs.

Firstly, all of the curators and producers I spoke with called for an intrinsic model of accessibility – one which centres access from the very first planning conversations, thus taking account of access needs of art workers, artists and audiences at every stage. This is opposed to the most common model, which often considers access an add-on at the end of a project. Key to making the intrinsic model work is gathering the access needs of the team, having

those early conversations with artists and colleagues, and building that into a plan. This could include people needing flexible working patterns, support workers, assistive devices or technologies, easy-to-read documents, flagging flare-ups, caring obligations, upcoming surgeries, or more time to complete tasks. A valuable way of collecting this information is an access rider – a simple document allowing artists or freelancers to share their relevant access needs, which could be requested as part of a contract.

Once access needs are assessed, their provision can be included when fundraising. It is recommended that 10% to 20% of a project budget should be ringfenced for access, therefore ensuring that if access costs arise, there is a budget in place. Many awards allow access costs to be requested above the award amount, where needed. It can be more difficult to account for access in regular organisational funding but this percentage guide is a useful metric when building access into an organisation longterm. Many artist respondents highlighted the need for access budgets to support their own access needs in the production period, and not just the display of their work. Artists also state that flexible approaches to production schedules, project outcomes, and ways of communicating are vital.

In terms of display, most interviewees advocated for a creative and intersectional approach to access. There are many ways to make an artwork accessible, but those tools should be considered alongside creative ones, as part of a holistic approach. You can’t be accessible to everyone all of the time, and there is no such thing as ‘fully accessible’. Access is a conversation and a process that will look different in every project. An intersectional approach can make working and witnessing art accessible for everyone. This may include: flexible working supports for parents or trans people undergoing care; quiet spaces for older people or those who are breastfeeding; paying people to attend meetings; or sliding-scale ticket prices for disabled people, students, pensioners, unemployed people, and those on low incomes. And everyone appreciates comfortable seating, no matter who they are.

As we consider the impact of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Toolkit, it is essential that organisations provide the supports necessary to include disabled art workers, artists and audiences, beyond our own commitment to disability justice. Later this year, I will publish a free online toolkit, intended as a practical guide, outlining ways we can create more accessible practices, organisations, and ways of working across the sector.

Iarlaith Ni Fheorais is a curator and writer based between Ireland and the UK.

Angelica

The Fabric of Nostalgia

BELFAST-BASED ARTIST, ANUSHIYA SUNDARALINGAM, REFLECTS ON HER MULTIDISCIPLINARY PRACTICE.

MY FIRST MEMORY of making art is sitting outside my classroom in the warm, open air, drawing banana and coconut trees. Growing up in Sri Lanka, I watched the making of many traditional, handmade creations for everyday cultural and religious life including crafts, textiles, and weaving. I saw patterns, colours and textures used everywhere, in all aspects of life, from births and weddings to funerals. Patterns were even made while sweeping the sandy floor of our house.

Since graduating with a degree in Fine and Applied Arts from Ulster University, I have been working as a full-time artist and arts facilitator in Belfast. While I initially trained as a printmaker, my practice has since become more diverse, working in both two and three dimensions, creating installations, paintings, prints, and mixed-media works. As a multidisciplinary artist and collector, I like to incorporate different materials and textures in my work, and frequently use less traditional materials such as thread, encaustic, flax, metal, and bamboo. Experimentation and exploration of ideas, subjects, materials and effects drive my practice and continually challenge and motivate me.

My current work reflects on challenges of identity and the nature of belonging. I am concerned with how our relationship with natural and cultural environments shape our sense of self and place, particularly if one’s surroundings change through displacement, whether by choice or not. When I left Sri Lanka in 1989, I left behind my roots, culture, identity and tradition. Over the years, my work has evolved, and I have been influenced through many different aspects of living in Northern Ireland; however, the sights and sounds of my childhood regularly influence and inspire my work, enabling me to reconnect with some of the things I have lost.

My next solo exhibition runs from 9

March to 6 April at Island Arts Centre, Lisburn, and is entitled ‘Rip it Up and Start Again’. It is kindly supported by a grant from Lisburn & Castlereagh City Council. This exhibition takes the sari, a traditional item of Sri Lankan clothing, and reworks metres of cloth to tell a new story of the generations of women who wore this fabric. Collected saris from the Sri Lankan diaspora, many passed down in families, have been ripped and reworked to create new works. Fabrics that come from everyday settings to special occasion wear have been imbued with meaning, perhaps sadness, joy, sentimentality and nostalgia. This exhibition speaks of Sri Lankan communities throughout the world yet reflects on a very basic human sense of identity, and what that means.

Depending on my practice, I can work from my home studio, at Belfast Print Workshop, or at Queen Street Studios, where I am a member. Sharing creative practice is important to me, and I have facilitated many short and long-term projects for all ages and abilities. I enjoy giving something back. I come from a society where art is not valued as a profession, and although my family has always been supportive, I have had to fight to be respected as an artist. I have recently been awarded the 2022 Artist’s Career Enhancement Scheme from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for a project with the Ulster Museum, titled ‘தப்பிஓடு TappiOdu (Flee)’.

Anushiya Sundaralingam is a multidisciplinary artist based in Belfast. anushiyaartist.co.uk

The Angelica Network amplifies the voices of women and non-binary artists of minority cultural and ethnic backgrounds. angelica.network/home

Anushiya Sundaralingam, Untitled, 2022, monotype on Japanese paper, 25 x 10 x 25 cm; photograph © and courtesy of the artist.

Curatorial

Unruly Forms of Care

CECELIA GRAHAM AND GRACE JACKSON DISCUSS THEIR CURATORIAL RESIDENCY AT PS² IN BELFAST.

Mark Buckeridge, 'Handycam Gifts', installation view, 2022; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of PS².

“Terms like serious and rigorous tend to be code words [...] for disciplinary correctness; they signal a form of training and learning that confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of fancy.”

– Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011)

WHEN WE STARTED collaborating, we were approaching the end of our curatorial master’s programme, both exhausted, disappointed, and heartbroken. We had hoped for a discursive programme that encouraged conversations about dismantling patriarchal and hierarchical structures within the institution. Instead, we felt that the university perpetuated those institutional structures, requiring a rigid professionalism that treats artists as tools to uphold curatorial discourse and power.

Care was, and still is, at the centre of discussions about the future of institutions and curation. How can we care for one another when the institutional structures are, themselves, hostile? How can we build something new from these structures? The answers to these questions came not from our formal education, but from the nourishing conversations we had in the park, or over a pint in the pub. These chats built the foundation of our approach, which estranges itself from professionalism, slickness, and rigidity within curation.

It is freeing to be directly responsive to the artists we work with, and we encourage artists to explore their own interests. For this reason, there is no logic or linearity to our work. Sometimes common themes emerge between projects; however, this is not always the case. One thing that does run through many of our collaborations is a desire to experiment or create collectively. In 2022, our first two projects as Curators-in-Residence at PS² – ‘Handycam Gifts’ by Mark Buckeridge and ‘Queer na nÓg’ with Bog Cottage – upheld the importance of collaboration and collective labour.

At the time of writing, Tara McGinn’s ‘A Change in the Cells’ currently occupies the gallery space at PS2, reimagining the static

exhibition structure as something that can accommodate both rest and slow working. We are looking forward to a threeday collective video workshop with Lillian Ross-Millard and a site-specific installation with Christopher Steenson and a project with Nollaig Molloy. Each project has taken a different form, and accommodating this flexibility ensures that we are putting the artist at the centre. Our goal is simple: we intend to collaborate with each artist and celebrate their individual interests.

Throughout this residency, we have been keen to dismantle hyper-productive and linear ways of working, giving artists the opportunity to return to thoughts that feel incomplete, or create work that has the potential to shift and grow based on their changing interests. The ‘flights of fancy’ that Jack Halberstam refers to are important to experimental art practice, and as curators we seek to accommodate the changes that come up through our collaborations.

Friendship is important too, and we count all our collaborators as friends. Through a welcoming and responsive approach, we hope to foster a different type of artist-curator relationship that prioritises camaraderie and vulnerability with ample space for failure. We wish to create a comfortable and safe space for artists to follow the life of an idea, rather than imposing hierarchical or bureaucratic procedures that equate curatorship with control.

The team at PS2 have shown us true generosity, advocating for our experimental practice, and showing flexibility and understanding when sudden change occurs – a rarity within art institutions. We have learned to navigate deadlines in a way that leaves room for our malleable approach, even though this often goes against the standards imposed by funding bodies. For the first time in a long time, we feel excited about curatorial practice and what we can accomplish with it.

Cecelia Graham & Grace Jackson are a curatorial duo who value kind-hearted and vulnerable approaches to artistic-curatorial relationships.

ceceliagraham.cargo.site gracejackson.ca

Project

To Huddle

SAIDHBHÍN GIBSON OUTLINES AN INFORMAL ART DISCUSSION GROUP SHE HAS BEEN CONVENING SINCE 2017.

I WAS LIVING between Carlow and Kilkenny around 2014. At the time, I felt there was limited opportunity in the immediate area to engage in discourse around contemporary art. I wanted to develop an event which had the potential to bring people together to have critical conversations and to share knowledge. I also wanted to create an inclusive event for a community to interact, socialise and be visible to one another. I imagined a group of us, huddled over hot cups of tea. I think the fact that I was renting a very cold apartment influenced this Dickensian image.

I began getting a sense of the demand for such a bespoke event. I considered who it was for, what the objective was, and where it would take place. After completing my MFA, I had more time to put the idea into motion. The first H U D D L E took place at Arthouse in Stradbally in January 2017.

With each ‘huddle’, a prescribed piece of text is emailed beforehand. The chosen writing might be influenced by an exhibition in the host venue, or it might be a seminal text that will spur interesting dialogue. For the first event, I chose a text from Failure (2010, The MIT Press) – a book edited by Lisa Le Feuvre, as part of the anthology series, ‘Documents of Contemporary Art’. Jörg Heiss’s interview with Swiss artist duo, Fischli/Weiss, prompted discussions around notions of failure, permission to fail, and art that uses failure as its core concept.

H U D D L E No. 11 took place in the main gallery at VISUAL Carlow, where we deliberated the late Brian O’Doherty’s essay, ‘Notes on the Gallery Space’. O’Doherty’s book, Inside the White Cube – first published in 1976 as a series of three articles in Artforum – asserted many salient observations about the influence of white cube spaces on art, artists, and the reconstituted audience.

In 2019, I had work in the exhibition, ‘A

Vague Anxiety’ at IMMA, and convened a huddle in one of the studios. We unpacked Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) by Jane Bennett, whose writing resonates with aspects of my visual art practice. We discussed the chapter ‘Vitality and Self-interest’, arguing the proposal that if all matter was to be viewed by humans as having its own tendencies, this could be of political and ecological benefit to the environment.

The first outdoor huddle took place during the pandemic in 2021 under Covid guidelines. Donnelly’s Hollow in The Curragh, County Kildare, was the perfect setting, since a sloped depression in an otherwise flat plane acts as a natural amphitheatre. We looked at Virginia Woolf’s essay, ‘On Being Ill’, which first appeared in The Criterion in 1926. Nearly a century after the piece was published, Woolf could have been writing about “the great experience” of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Huddles are nomadic and ephemeral. The emphasis is on the time we are together, face-to-face, responding to the prescribed text, and any periphery topics that arise along the way. Electronic communication and screen time is kept to minimum. To date, 21 huddles have taken place in numerous venues across Ireland, including Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny Arts Office, National Design & Craft Gallery, and Riverbank Arts Centre. My thanks to Laois, Kildare and Kilkenny County Council Arts offices, and to the huddlers who attend these events.

Saidhbhín Gibson is a visual artist currently based in County Kildare.

H U D D L E sign, 2022, still in use after five years; photograph by Saidhbhín Gibson.

Memento Mori

An Art to Grief

DAY MAGEE REFLECTS ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LOSING THEIR FATHER AND THE PROFOUND ART OF HUMAN GRIEF.

FOUR ANNUAL UNITS of temporal measurement; four terms under the bodily condition of grief. Grief is a map of itself that loads in anything but ‘real-time’. All previous conceptions of self crystallise and shatter. This is the cost of love. You were rare in ways that grow evermore apparent as I live on. You were good in ways I still come to terms with; I will likely never be as good. Not that I have to be anything but what I am, I’m sure you’d say. But you deserve to be relived – re-enacted – through me. I am, after all, impossible without you. I live the continuation of the information that lived through you. Whether there is a heaven or not, only that which we enact upon the world – the gyroscopic balance of our deeds and motivations – is what sustains it, and what it sustains. To that end, I won’t let you die any more than you have to.

Childhood is the belief in adulthood itself. The child scries the face of its elder for surety, not realising that it is another child staring back, bigger on the outside. The secret to adulthood is that there is no secret – yet it’s one that must somehow still be kept. I see now why you were a bus driver – you got people to where they needed to go. Bus driving was but one emergent form of your doing so, in the same way that art is mine. You understood this in your final moments, foreseeing my grief process, telling me to ignore the nurses and document whatever I wanted. Pictured are our two bodies: yours unable to breathe lying down, nor able to hold itself up; mine improvising with itself and a pillow to prop you up, breathing for you rhythmically, unknowingly performing the image then captured by your sister. Even now I am documenting. I often say I do what I do out of fear as

much as out of love – for ultimately, ours is the creative material of life itself.

Bodies are the holy sites through which life takes its pilgrimage. Your faith was both what dealt our mutual wound, and what continues to heal it. We are forced to reconcile with where our parents’ beliefs end and ours begin. Bodies are belief systems; systems that are believing. Self-fulfilled prophecies, distinct from our own; phenomenological algorithms simulating themselves, until their every probability in space and time has been enacted.

I look for you everywhere. The most meaningful way to do so, I have found, is to deign to look at the world through your eyes. This is how we keep people alive –even those still living – to try to see life from their perspective. In order to see, we must live as they do, according to the self-mythographies they inhabit. We must conceive of the indignations they overcome as they, like us, try to communicate to others the terms on which they might be loved. It is not just how we sustain them, but also ourselves in self-compassion, as we grow from self to self.

We love not only towards a future, but towards a past. We are them now, and they are now us. We are the material. We are the crest of their lives’ incline, just as they were to those before them, in radial waves of living information, emanating outward in every temporal direction.

Day Magee is a performance-centred multimedia artist based in Dublin. daymagee.com

How to Create a Fallstreak

NEVA ELLIOTT DISCUSSES HER CURRENT SOLO EXHIBITION AT LINENHALL ARTS CENTRE.

THE ETYMOLOGY OF bereavement is to “deprive or rob of.” At root, it is something enacted upon us. So too is bereavement’s progeny, grief, arriving not just for the person who is gone but also for ourselves. After my husband Colin died from cancer at 40, I entered a period of grieving, both for him and my lost self.

In my time and culture, without the black parramatta silk or bombazine dress of the Victorians, or Jewish observation timelines, I found I lacked a defined process of mourning. So, I went back to work a week after the funeral and carried on until, after further unexpected and traumatic deaths close to me, I was no longer road worthy. I left my job and returned to my practice. Within death, a part of me was reborn.

This return to making was markedly different from my previous practice. Then, my gaze turned outwards to contemporary society; now, I looked inwards to my own experience. Through my work, I bore witness to my grief in what had become a chaotic, uncontrollable world. Living as material, I began working from a place of transparent vulnerability.

What emerged was a lyrical conceptualism blurring art and life, externalising emotion, responding to relationships and the situation I found myself in, and forming presence that manifested absence. This is a lived archaeology of loss involving people, objects, place and story. Physically, it formalised across photography, text, object, video, sound, and documentation of performative action, such as Sending messages to the sea (2021-22), inspired by lighthouse keepers’ wives, signalling to their husbands from the shore, where I used semaphore flags, the language of the sea, to communicate: “I am here my love, where are you?” to

the vast expanse of ocean and sky.

Making acted as a tether to the departed – a way to hold them close – so much so, that I found it difficult to finish pieces. Only when the Linenhall Arts Centre invited me to show with them in January did I finalise the body of work and realise that this was not a letting go. My solo exhibition, ‘How to create a fallstreak’, continues in the gallery until 4 March. The fallstreak of the title is a meteorological term for holes that can appear in cloud formations, referencing the proverbial gap in the clouds I was attempting to create.

While writing the exhibition wall panels, I found myself repeatedly returning to re-work these ‘tombstones’. While demonstratively focused on my own experience, I was also attempting to expand autobiography, to go beyond personal memoir and speak to others about shared human experience. I wanted to create honest, open narratives beside my pieces to enable conversation rather than hide behind distancing art-speak.

My practice has become a memorial, a transitional object, a communication and a salve. As I embodied loss, so did my work. To fill a void of absence, to find a way back to myself, to heal and come to a new understanding of my loss, I made art. This allowed me to access a space of mourning and, with it, a restoration of self.

Neva Elliott is a contemporary artist based in Dublin. After ten years as CEO of Crash Ensemble, Elliott returned to her art practice in 2021. Last year she was made an Irish Hospice Foundation signature artist. nevaelliott.com

Neva Elliot, Sending messages to the sea: I am here my love, where are you? 2021-22, documentation of performance, archival pigment print; image © and courtesy of the artist.