Issue 3: May – June 2018
The Visual Artists' News Sheet
Inside This Issue INTERVIEW WITH EVA CURATOR INTI GUERRERO THE LEGACY OF BRIAN O'DOHERTY BERLIN'S TRANSMEDIALE FESTIVAL 2018 ALICE MAHER'S 'VOX MATERIA'
Contents On The Cover Sanja Iveković, Lady Rosa of Luxembourg, 2001, gilded polyester, wood, inkjet print; installation view at the 38th EVA International; photograph by Deirdre Power, courtesy the artist and EVA.
First Pages 6. Roundup. Exhibitions and events from the past two months. 8. News. The latest developments in the arts sector. Columns 10. Opinion. A Unified Voice. Jeanie Scott. Northern Ireland. Curating Beyond the Gallery. Rob Hilken. Regional Focus: County Longford 12. 13. 14.
The Future Shape of Longford. Sam McGarry, Curthú Arts Festival. Space to Create. Rosie O'Hara, Engage Longford. Material Conversations. Gary Robinson, Visual Artist. Creative Wanderings. Amanda Jane Graham, Visual Artist. Sexual Revolution Studies. Eimear Walshe, Visual Artist.
Residency 15.
Glass Threads. Róisín de Buitléar reports from her residency at the National Museum of Ireland.
Festival 16.
Dismantling the Monolith. Mary Conlon interviews Inti Guerrero, curator of the 38th EVA International.
How is it Made? 18. 19. 20.
Awkward Objects. Lily Cahill reflects on Hannah Fitz’s practice. Dual Façades. Francesca Biondi interviews Ashley B. Holmes. Corporeal Matters. Tina Kinsella interviews Alice Maher about her touring exhibition, ‘Vox Materia’.
Editorial WELCOME TO the May – June 2018 issue of the
Visual Artists’ News Sheet.
This issue has a timely focus on several important exhibitions currently showing in galleries nationwide. On 13 April, the 38th edition of Ireland’s contemporary art biennial, EVA International, opened in various venues across Limerick city. EVA will run untill 8 July with several off-site projects also taking place in IMMA. Mary Conlon interviews EVA 2018 curator, Inti Guerrero, for this issue, offering insights into Guerrero’s curatorial research and exhibition-making strategies. Meanwhile, a number of exhibitions and projects are currently taking place across Ireland to celebrate the diverse career of Irish conceptual artist and critic, Brian O’Doherty, who marks his ninetieth birthday this year. Brenda Moore-McCann’s extended essay outlines some of these events, while reflecting on O’Doherty’s vast artistic legacy. Alice Maher’s solo exhibition, ‘Vox Materia’, is currently showing at The Source Arts Centre, Thurles, and will subsequently be presented at Crawford Art Gallery from 7 September to 24 November. Tina Kinsella interviews Maher about her new bronze sculptures and wood relief prints. In other features for this issue, Lily Cahill reflects on the sculptural practice of Hannah Fitz, an Irish visual artist currently based between Dublin and Frankfurt. Fitz’s solo exhibition, ‘Knock Knock’, is showing in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios until 30 June. In addition,
Face Value. Pádraig Spillane on Berlin’s Transmediale Festival 2018. The Digital Museum. Logan Sisley reports on the ‘Networked Curator’ at the Getty Center, LA. Living Archives. Anne Mullee reports from the Art and Heritage seminar in Kildare.
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: Monica Flynn Website Listings: Shelly McDonnell, Siobhan Mooney, Christopher Steenson Bookkeeping: Dina Mulchrone
Archaic Language. Brenda Moore-McCann outlines nationwide projects and exhibitions celebrating the work of Brian O’Doherty.
The Shape of Thought. Joanne Laws interviews Alison Pilkington about her current body of work. Making Waves. Recent graduate Gavin McCrea discusses his practice.
Public Art 31.
Seafaring: Traces of a Transient Community. Sheelagh Broderick discusses her ‘Port Walks’ commission.
Last Pages 32. Public Art Roundup. Art outside of the gallery. 34. Opportunities. Grants, awards, exhibitions calls and commissions. 35. VAI Professional Development. Upcoming workshops, seminars and peer reviews.
As ever, we have details of the upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public art roundup, critique section, news from the sector and current opportunities.
Visual Artists Ireland:
Board of Directors: Mary Kelly (Chair), Michael Fitzpatrick, Richard Forrest, Paul Moore, Mary-Ruth Walsh, Dónall Curtin, Michael Corrigan, Cliodhna Ní Anluain
Career Development 28. 30.
A number of conference reports feature in this issue: Logan Sisley reports on the ‘Networked Curator’ event at the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Anne Mullee discusses the Art and Heritage seminar that took place in Kildare in February; and Pádraig Spillane reports from Berlin’s Transmediale Festival 2018.
Features Editor: Joanne Laws Production Editor/Design: Christopher Steenson News/Opportunities: Shelly McDonnell, Siobhan Mooney
Legacy 26.
Columns for this issue touch on some of the themes underpinning the upcoming VAI Get Together 2018 (which will take place in IMMA on Monday 21 May), particularly the panel discussion, ‘Curating Ireland – New Ways of Working’. VAI NI Manager Rob Hilken outlines ‘New Spaces’, an upcoming exhibition and curatorial mentoring programme taking place in non-traditional venues across the Derry City and Strabane region. Jeanie Scott – the outgoing Director of a-n The Artists Information Company – discusses some of the issues currently facing visual artists in the UK.
The Visual Artists' News Sheet:
Conference 22. 24. 25.
Joanne Laws interviews Alison Pilkington about her touring exhibition, ‘How We Roam’, currently showing at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon until 2 June, before being presented at the RHA Ashford Gallery in autumn 2018.
Republic of Ireland Office
Northern Ireland Office
Visual Artists Ireland Windmill View House 4 Oliver Bond Street Merchants Quay, Dublin 8 T: +353 (0)1 672 9488 E: info@visualartists.ie W: visualaritsts.ie
Visual Artists Ireland 109 Royal Avenue Belfast BT1 1FF T: +44 (0)28 958 70361 E: info@visualartists-ni.org W: visualartists-ni.org
Principle Funders
Project Funders
Corporate Sponsors
Project Partners
Critique Supplement i. ii. iii. iii. iv. iv.
Cover Image: Shane Berkery, Robes (detail), 2017, oil on canvas. ‘Like Me’ at The Dock. ‘Contemporary Paintings’ at the Molesworth Gallery. ‘Angles: Perspectives from the Margins’ at GOMA. ‘Land Marks’ at the RHA Ashford Gallery. ‘Metamurmuration’ and ‘Paintings (Uillinn Series)’ at Uillinn: WAC
International Memberships
6
Roundup
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS FROM THE PAST TWO MONTHS
Dublin
Belfast
ALEXANDRIA COLLEGE
The ‘Hermione Exhibition’ returned to Alexandria College, Dublin, for its twenty-fourth year from 3 to 16 Mar. Originally created to enhance college students’ “experience, appreciation and understanding of the visual arts”, this year’s event had a slight change, being co-curated by Aisling Prior and the school’s art teacher Patricia Cowley. Featured in the exhibition were Alan Phelan, Eithne Jordan, Diana Copperwhite, Fiona Finnegan, Alice Maher, Damien Flood and Hughie O’Donoghue, amongst many others.
DOUGLAS HYDE
‘Seasons End: More Than Suitcases’ by Tamara Henderson runs in Gallery 1 at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, until 5 May. Made in collaboration with Aude Levère and Jake Tilbury, the exhibition brings together 50 figures from Henderson's previous exhibitions. The theme of travel is central to the exhibition, with figures clad in materials collected during Henderson’s visits to Athens, Turkey and beyond, who themselves carry passport-like identity booklets. Henderson will give an artist's talk at 3pm on Saturday 5 May in the Robert Emmet Lecture Theatre.
alexandriacollege.eu
KERLIN
Sam Keogh’s sci-fi themed installation, Kapton Cadaverine, ran at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, from 27 Jan to 10 Mar. For the work, the gallery space was transformed into the crumbling interior of a futuristic spacecraft. Covered in grime and shrouded in webs of melted plastic stuck together with ‘Kapton tape’, the spaceship had the impression of being abandoned and exposed to the elements for some time. The installation was activated by a performance by Keogh, who appeared as an astronaut, awaking from a cryopod in the depths of the space.
Bassam Al Sabah’s solo exhibition ‘Illusions Dyed by Sunset’ runs at the LAB, Dublin, until the 3 Jun. Featuring sculptures, paintings and video works, the exhibition tackles themes of revolution, war and exile, with the works presented considering the impact of Arabic-dubbed Japanese anime TV shows on popular culture in the Middle East. Included in the show is a CGI film that features a digital recreation of the artists’ former home in Iraq – a place that his family cannot return to – exploring nostalgia for lost futures.
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Photography Department at the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University, Belfast Exposed presented ‘Beyond View’, a retrospective exhibition featuring work from 26 photographers who have worked or studied at the department through its BA, MFA or PhD programmes. Featured in the exhibition were photographers: David Copeland, Maria Przybylska and Robert Ellis, amongst many others. The exhibition ran from 9 Mar until 21 Apr.
douglashydegallery.com
KILMAINHAM GAOL
From 13 to 26 Apr, Kilmainham Gaol hosted The Trial, a new installation created in collaboration between artist Sinead McCann, UCD historians Catherine Cox and Fiachra Byrne, participants and staff of The Bridge Project, a ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ specialist and a video production company. The Trial consisted of multiple screens and speakers, installed at various locations across the Old Courthouse, which were used to explore the theme of healthcare in Irish prisons.
kerlingallery.com
THE LAB
BELFAST EXPOSED
Coinciding with the Oonagh Young Gallery’s tenth birthday celebrations, Barbara Knezevic exhibited her new three-channel video work, Lithophone, from 15 Mar to 18 Apr in the gallery. In the work, a strangely shaped Carrara marble sculpture is recorded while being subjected to a series of “sonic and observational procedures”. The piece acts as an interrogation of the “material estrangement of art objects and our relationship to them”, through the use of digital media.
dublincityartsoffice.ie
'Beyond View' at Belfast Exposed, installation view; image courtesy of Belfast Exposed
oonaghyoung.com
Catalyst Arts presented their Graduate Award exhibition ‘Sweatin’’ by Helouise O’Reilly from 30 Mar to 7 Apr. The exhibition displayed O’Reilly’s work investigating how people interpret numbers and their significance for peoples' identities. These ideas are explored through the context of a working-class bingo hall in the city centre of Belfast. O’Reily spent extensive periods of time in this location, listening, observing and playing bingo in order to understand the issues surrounding numerical associations, superstitions and the notion of luck. catalystarts.org.uk
belfastexposed.org
GOLDEN THREAD
‘There and not there’, ran at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, from 1 Mar to 21 Apr. Curated by Sarah McAvera, the exhibition presented artwork by Victoria Dean and Sharon Murphy. The theme of “absence” connected both artists’ work. Murphy’s photographs reflect her background in theatre, with the landscapes she captures having the feeling of a stage set, whilst other works feature children as a “ethereal presence”. Dean’s photographs also present landscapes, with a focus on “alien structures” that feel out of place within their surrounding environment.
kilmainhamgaolmuseum.ie
OONAGH YOUNG GALLERY
CATALYST ARTS
goldenthreadgallery.co.uk
POLLEN STUDIO
Pollen Studios presented ‘The Melody of Dust’, an exhibition by two emerging artists, John Macormak and Jasmin Marker, from 5 to 21 April. Both artists are Fine Art graduates of the University of Ulster. Macormac’s multi-disciplinary practice embraces performance, installation and drawing, while Marker engages a variety of biocultures to explore scientific and anthropological concepts. The exhibition explored notions of “organic forms, traces and movement” and included a workshop by Infinity Farm on how to develop sustainable practices. pollenstudiobelfast.com
Ben Weir, 'The Public Pulpit' at Imagine Festival, Belfast (pictured: Ian McHugh); photograph by Christopher Steenson
IMAGINE FESTIVAL
The Imagine Festival of “ideas and politics” returned to Belfast for its fourth year between 12 and 18 Mar 2018, with events taking place across the city. Consisting of screenings, talks, music, workshops and exhibitions, the festival aims to promote unique ways of imagining the future of the city. This year, the festival included Ben Weir’s performance art event, ‘The Public Pulpit’, the sound installation Other Registers – The Sound and Silence of Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro, and the exhibition, ‘In Their Footsteps’, with contributions from the Bloody Sunday Trust and the Pat Finucane Centre. imaginebelfast.com
SONORITIES FESTIVAL
Sonorities Festival is an experimental music and sound art festival that ran in Belfast from 17 to 22 April. Comprising performances, installations, screenings, workshops and club nights, the festival gathered together artists from over 40 countries to showcase their work. The festival programme included the exhibitions ‘Same Place’ by Umbrella collective at Sonic Arts Research Centre, ‘Scare the Deer/Shishi-odoshi’ by Callum Scott at Framewerk and Iris Garrelfs’s participatory project 'Listening Wall' at QSS Gallery. sonorities.org.uk
Fiona Finnegan, Robe, oil on wood, 50 x 40 cm; image courtesy of the artist and Alexandria College
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Martina O'Brien, Sites for Watching, 2017, three-channel HD video, audio, 3 minutes 5 seconds, looped; image courtesy of the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny
Roundup
7
Dennis McNulty, 'TTOPOLOGY', installation view at Visual, Carlow
Danny Osbourne and Frieda Meaney, 'Landmarks and Lifeforms', installation view at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda; photograph by Eugene Langan
BUTLER GALLERY
COURTHOUSE ARTS CENTRE
Regional & International
ANITA CHAN LAI-LING GALLERY
‘Sceílín in Paint’ was a solo show featuring the works of Wexford-based artist Oonagh Latchford, as a part of the Hong Kong & Macau Irish Festival. The show ran from 19 Mar until 24 Mar with support from Culture Ireland. It consisted of small-scale paintings which the artist describes as “short stories in paint”. Latchford’s practice is concerned with how strong light, such as sunlight and artificial lighting, can distort shapes and colours, creating a new narrative. Figurative elements are a constant within Latchford’s paintings Recent work sees the placement of solitary figures within abstracted landscapes. hkfringeclub.com
HIGHLANES
‘Landmarks and Lifeforms’ was an exhibition by west Cork-based artists Danny Osborne and Frieda Meaney, which ran at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, from 3 Feb to 14 Apr. Meaney’s work is interested in ideas drawn from biology and the ecosystem. Her video installation for the exhibition consisted of footage of endangered species held at a Tenerife aquarium and a soundtrack consisting of a chorus of birds from a South American jungle. Osborne’s work draws from his fascination with lava, using the substance as a material to create sculptures.
The Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, presented ‘At Some Distance in the Direction Indicated’, a multi-media exhibition by Kildare artist Martina O’Brien. The works within the exhibition explored advancements in climate change research, while also examining ideas surrounding the visibility and invisibility of climate data infrastructures. The exhibition ran from 10 Mar – 29 Apr and included a video instillation spotlighting the meteorological instruments and computational forecasts that predict Ireland’s weather, with live CCTV footage from one of Ireland’s weather monitoring stations. butlergallery.com
HUNT MUSEUM
The exhibition ‘The Segment and Apple Drawings’ by Savills Art Prize winner Samuel Walsh ran at the Hunt Museum, Limerick, from the 3 Feb to 10 April. Walsh’s ‘Segment’ drawings are taken from larger drawings, which themselves were taken from thumbnail-sized sketches. His ‘Apple’ sketches are derived from his practice of using apples in drawing classes to demonstrate sketching techniques to students. Despite not being apparent upon first glance, the work transports themes of “upbringing, culture, experience and relationships” into the fold of his work.
highlanes.ie
LEITRIM DESIGN HOUSE
‘The Lake’ was an exhibition by Brian Farrell that ran at Leitrim Design House from 8 Feb to 4 Apr. Having worked as a freelance photojournalist for many years, with his work regularly featuring in both national and international newspapers, this exhibition saw Farrell focus on his surroundings in the Northwest where he lives, featuring images related to life in the region. The exhibition was made in collaboration with journalist and Irish Times contributor Merese McDonagh. leitrimdesignhouse.ie
Painter, photographer and television documentary director Joe Farrell presented his exhibition ‘Joe Farrell: Painting, Photography, Documentary’ from 11 Feb – 23 Mar in The Courthouse Arts Centre, Tinahely, County Wicklow. The show draws on places, events and encounters experienced throughout his 20 years of traveling and 40 years of image-making. The works included, such as Everything is Broken, aimed to bring together the dual strands of documentation and abstraction that have equal status within his work.
‘Willow and Clay’ was a craft exhibition that ran at Signal Arts Centre, Bray, Wicklow. The exhibition featured the work of Andrea Paul and Aoife Patterson. Paul works with clay and found objects – both natural and man-made items that the artist refers to as her "treasures" – to create exquisite bowls and other objects. Patterson’s work revolves around the practice of traditional wicker weaving to create unique, one-of-a-kind wicker baskets. The exhibition ran from 20 Mar to 1 Apr. signalartscentre.iev
‘EX-VOTO the body + the institution’ was a group exhibition that addressed the colonisation of the human body and treatment of the body by State, corporate, medical and pharmaceutical institutions. The relationship between institutions and the individual, the role of power and the impact of capitalism were investigated, while framing the artist as witness. The exhibition, which ran from 19 Jan – 10 Mar, featured works by Lucy Beech, Jenna Bliss, Cecilia Bullo, Judy Foley, Sinead Gleeson and Rajinder Singh. galwayartscentre.ie
courthousearts.ie
LACE
MART curators Matthew Nevin and Ciara Scanlan presented the exhibition ‘Activating Pangea: Acts to Objects’ at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) from 15 Mar to 29 Apr. The exhibition is the final of three collaborative exhibitions between MART and LACE, which have sought to promote the work of Irish contemporary visual artists. Featured in the ‘Acts and Objects’ exhibition were: Áine Phillips, Amanda Coogan, Helen MacMahon, Margaret O’Brien, Katherine Nolan, Eleanor Lawler and Laura O’Connor.
huntmuseum.com
SIGNAL ARTS CENTRE
GALWAY ARTS CENTRE
LINENHALL ARTS CENTRE
Erin Hagan’s exhibition, ‘Another Light’, ran at the Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar, Mayo, from 29 Mar to 28 Apr. Hagan graduated from Belfast School of Art in 2014 with an MA in Fine Art. Since then, she has exhibited widely around Ireland and has been co-director and chair at Platform Arts, Belfast. Hagan’s work seeks to embody a sense of mystery, through the processes of change and spontaneity within her practice. By being curious about the possibilities of the materials she uses, she lets these materials guide the final artistic outcomes.
welcometolace.org
STUDIO 12
The Cork-based Backwater Artists Group played host to a new installation by Darn Thorn from 23 Mar to 6 Apr in their new exhibition space, Studio 12. Titled ‘Towards the Omega’, the installation created a shrine of sorts to the utopian ideas of the modernist French paleontologist and philosopher Pierre Theilhard de Chardin. The work explored de Chardin’s ideas by responding humorously to his esoteric concepts, incorporating computer-controlled LED lighting and a 3D rendering of the paleoanthropological hoax, Piltdown Man, etched into a glass block. blackwaterartists.ie
thelinenhall.com
VISUAL
‘TTOPOLOGY’ is an exhibition of new and retrospective works by Denis McNulty that runs at VISUAL, Carlow, until 20 May. The works on display considers the “technologies and systems that have been developed, cast aside or revised in order to advance our human potential.” Two events associated with the exhibition will take place on the 19 May: a discussion on the relationship between art and technology with the artist and theorist Bernard Geoghegan, and a sound performance by McNulty, in collaboration with musician David Donohoe. visualcarlow.ie
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News
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
THE LATEST FROM THE ARTS SECTOR
VAI News
General News
ACNI FUNDING CUTS
The Northern Irish arts sector was met with severe news at the beginning of April. With the announcement of ACNI Annual Funding, came the news that two of Belfast’s flagship artist-led galleries and studio providers, PS2 (Paragon Studios and Project Space) and QSS Gallery and Studios, have had their funding cut completely. QSS is Belfast’s longest-running and largest studio group, providing space to 38 artists and regularly holding exhibitions in its gallery. PS2 provides seven studio spaces and has been invaluable in providing opportunities to early-career artists and curators. Additionally, two North Belfast community arts organisations – New Lodge Arts and Arts for All – have also had their funding cut. Both organisations have been vital in providing artsbased provision to the area. Speaking of the cuts, New Lodge Arts stated that whilst they were fortunate to have additional sources of funding to deliver their wider programme of events, the cuts would have a direct effect on their Art Academy classes, which has been funded by ACNI for many years, giving arts provision to 200 young people each week. Responding to the situation, Arts Matter NI’s Conor Shields stated that the ACNI’s decision was a “much anticipated and dreaded one” before offering his sincerest sympathies to those organisations who lost their funding. Visual Artists Ireland believe that the removal of funding for these arts organisations will have detrimental consequences to the artists they support. We are committed to working in partnership with all artist-led organisations, to enable them continue to carry out their essential role within the visual arts ecosystem.
IRELAND AT VENICE 2019
The Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Josepha Madigan, recently announced that artist Eva Rothschild and curator Mary Cremin, have been selected to represent Ireland at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, following a competitive open-call process. Attracting over half a million visitors, the Venice Biennale is one of the most important global platforms for contemporary art. As stated by the Madigan, Rothchild will “engage with international audiences, curators and gallerists and increase international opportunities and awareness of our strong visual arts sector”. Commissioner/Curator for Ireland at Venice 2019, Mary Cremin, is Director of Void Gallery, Derry, which will support the delivery of the exhibition. Cremin commented that Rothschild is a “significant artist of international and national importance” and that she is “very excited and honoured to be working with her on the Irish Pavilion” which she believes will be “one of Ireland’s most exciting and visually dynamic pavilions, highlighting the strength and diversity of Irish artistic practice and building on the existing reputation of Irish artists internationally.” Responding to the announcement, Rothchild said she is “delighted and honoured to have been chosen to represent Ireland at Venice 2019” and looks forward to “working closely with Mary Cremin and the team at Void to develop the pavilion”. Rothschild is planning a pavilion that will “build on current dialogues around notions of precarity, environmental change and ongoing political instability”, creating an immersive sculptural environment that will invite audiences to reflect on our role as global citizens and agents of change. Ireland at Venice is a partnership initiative of Culture Ireland and the Arts Council.
TULCA 2018 CURATOR ANNOUNCED
HEAD OF ACCESS & ENGAGEMENT AT VOID
ARTS & DISABILITY FORUM REBRANDING
ROME PRIZE WINNER
Linda Shevlin will curate the sixteenth edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, titled ‘Syntonic State’. Shevlin is an independent curator currently based in Co. Roscommon. She has previously curated, facilitated and managed both large and small-scale visual arts projects, including the 53rd Venice Biennale, where she was project manager for Gareth Kennedy and Sarah Browne. In 2017, she was the invited curator for the Hennessey Art Fund. Alongside Festival Director Tara Byrne, Shevlin also co-curated the Bealtaine Festival 2017, working with artists such as Vivienne Dick, Kathy Prendergast, Kevin Gaffney, Pauline Cummins and Frances Mezzetti. The deadline for the TULCA 2018 open call is Thursday 31 May. See tulcafestival. com for more information.
The Arts & Disability Forum has announced a new rebrand of the organisation. They will now be called the University of Atypical, with their gallery space now being called the Atypical Gallery. This is the first major rebrand of the organisation since it began in 1993. The University of Atypical is a Northern Ireland-based disabled-led arts charity that takes an empowerment-based approach to disabled and deaf people’s involvement in the arts. Their activities include the Bounce Arts Festival and gallery space, which showcases the work of deaf and disabled visual artists. Visit their website for more information: universityofatypical.org
Derry-based gallery Void announced their new Head of Access Engagement, Maeve Butler, at the beginning of April. Butler has previously worked as Gallery Development Manager at Photo London, Assistant Curator of the Touring Department at the Hayward Gallery and Exhibition Manager at the Royal Academy of Art, London, where she developed various exhibitions including Anselm Kiefer’s ‘From Paris’ and ‘A Taste of Impressionism and Mexico: A Revolution in Art’. Speaking of her new role at Void, Butler stated that she was “delighted to be joining the team at Void” and was looking forward to “working with local communities to create a culturally inclusive Access and Engagement programme”.
Irish artist, Helen O’Leary, has been named as winner of the 2018-2019 Rome Prize in the visual arts category by the American Academy in Rome. Supporting innovative and cross-disciplinary work in the arts and humanities, the prestigious and highly competitive Rome Prize has been awarded annually by the academy for over a century. During her year-long fellowship at the academy in Rome, O’Leary will receive a stipend, workspace, accommodation and board. She plans to create a series of three-dimensional, collapsible paintings, which she envisions as “large constructions that can fold into themselves and out again.”
CURATOR OF RDS VISUAL ARTS AWARDS
The Royal Dublin Society (RDS) have announced Amanda Coogan as curator for the RDS Visual Arts Awards 2018. The RDS Visual Art Awards is a curated exhibition of Ireland’s best visual art graduates, taking place each October. It offers a platform for graduating artists as they transition from student into early professional career, offering a prize fund totalling €30,000. Amanda Coogan is an internationally recognised and critically acclaimed artist working across live art, performance, photography and video. She has previously exhibited her work at Irish Museum of Modern Art; The MAC, Belfast; Venice Biennale; and PS1, New York. Curators are currently visiting art colleges across Ireland to select candidates for the awards. Candidates will work with a professional artist/ curator, with the opportunity to win a share of the €30,000 prize fund. The judging panel will select winners of the €10,000 RDS Taylor Art Award, the €5,000 R.C. Lewis-Crosby Award and in 2018 a new cash award of €2,500. There is also the opportunity to win a three-month residency at Centre Culturel Irlandais (CCI) in Paris, which will be selected by the CCI Director. Each exhibiting artist recieves a €500 stipend to assist with and exhibition-related epxenses. New to this year’s prize is a chance for nominees to be selected for the RHA Graduate Studio Award, which gives the winner access to a studio in the Royal Hiberian Academy for one year, including a cash stipend of €2,500. ARTIST-INITIATED PROJECTS AT PALLAS
In March Pallas Projects/Studios announced their new Artist-Initiated Projects programme, which will run until November 2018. The open-submission, annual gallery programme comprises 12 two-week exhibitions intended to be highly accessible to artists. It is supported through funding from the Arts Council of Ireland. In particular, Artist-Initiated Projects seeks to support emerging, early-career and recently graduated artists by providing them with a platform to “produce and exhibit challenging work across all art forms”. The projects funded through the programme will be supplemented with artists’ talks, texts, workshops, performances, or gallery visits by students from colleges and local schools. The artists announced to take part in the programme are: David Lunny, Austin Hearne, Roisin Lewis, Salvatore of Lucan, Emma McKeagney, Miguel Martin & Jennifer Mehigan, Robert Dunne, Marc Guinan, Sibyl Montague, Ella Bertilsson and Ulla Juske, Ann Ensor and Louisa Casas and Ann Maria Healy. BASIC SPACE ARTIST RESIDENCY 2018
Basic Space recently announced Vukasin Nedeljkovic as recipient of the Basic Space Artist Residency 2018. Nedeljkovic created the Asylum Archive – an archive of asylum and direct provision in Ireland – over ten years ago, while she was living in Direct Provision Centres. According to Nedeljkovic, establishing the Asylum Archive and documenting her environment via photography and film helped her to “overcome confinement and incarceration.” Nedeljkovic intends to continue documenting Direct Provision Centres in Dublin’s inner-city, as part of the Basic Space Artist Residency.
VAI GET TOGETHER 2018
Registration is now open for Visual Artists Ireland’s Get Together 2018, which will take place on Monday 21 May at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMA). The annual Get Together invites arts professionals to learn from one another through the open exchange of ideas. Get Together 2018 will feature a series of panel discussions: ‘Curating Ireland – New Ways of Working’ will focus on creating opportunities for artists outside of traditional institutional settings and will feature contributions from Daniel Birmingham, Jenny Haughton, Mary Cremin and Matt Packer. ‘Residencies: Time Space and New Environments’ will explore how artists can apply for and get the most out of residencies, with insights from Amanda Rice, Ingibjörg Gunnlaugsdóttir, Janice Hough and Mark Clare. A third panel, ‘Photography: Ireland’s Eyes’, will look at unique Irish voices in photography through a discussion between Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger, Clare Gallagher, Fiona Kearney, John Duncan and Tanya Kiang. The day will also feature artist talks from Pádraig Spillane, Evgeniya Martirosyan and Susanne Wawra, among many others. As usual, the day will feature Speed Curating, with some notable new additions, including: Livia Paldí (Project Arts Centre), Sean Kissane (IMMA) and Úna McCarthy (Limerick City Gallery). Clinics will offer specialist advice from arts professionals, including Sheena Barrett (The LAB), Emma Dwyer (EVA) and Áine Phillips. General admission tickets are priced at €25 for VAI members/€50 for non-members. For more information on Get Together 2018, visit visualartists.ie.
SUKI TEA ART PRIZE 2018 WINNER
Visual Artists Ireland and Suki Tea are delighted to announce Ursula Burke as the winner of this year’s Suki Tea Art Prize. As winner of the prize, Ursula will have a two-month, fully-funded, artist residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, including flights, accommodation, studio space, a monthly stipend, and superb networking opportunities. The prize aims to provide artists with an opportunity to respond to a new environment and develop new work. Ursula Burke is a Belfast-based artist who works within the discipline of sculpture, as well as using a variety of other media. Much of her practice deals with issues of representation and identity within contemporary Ireland, north and south of the border. Burke has previously exhibited at the MAC, Belfast, and the Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh. EXPANDED ARTS DIRECTORY
With the launch of the new and improved Visual Artists Ireland website, there have been a number of improvements and updates. One of these is the newly expanded Arts Directory. This directory has been fully updated to include a comprehensive list of all the public, commercial and artist-led galleries operating in Ireland. It also includes a list of artist studios, colleges, resource centres and Local Authority Offices. The list of art suppliers and organisations also provides information on subscribers to the VAI discount scheme.
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Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Columns
Opinion
Northern Ireland
A Unified Voice
Curating Outside the Gallery
Jeanie Scott
Rob Hilken
AMIDST THE UNCERTAINTIES OF BREXIT, JEANIE SCOTT DISCUSSES THE CURRENT CHALLENGES FACING UK ARTISTS, WHILE OUTLINING THE ADVOCACY WORK OF A-N.
THE UPCOMING PROJECT, ‘NEW SPACES’, AIMS TO OFFER CURATORIAL MENTORSHIP, WHILE ACTIVATING NONTRADITIONAL VENUES.
OVER THE BEST PART of four decades, a-n The
THE ‘NEW SPACES’ exhibition programme,
Artists Information Company has grown from a 500-copies-per-month newsletter, to a print and online magazine, into a professional membership organisation for visual artists. Fundamentally, a-n continues to deliver the mission set by its founders – to stimulate and support contemporary visual arts practice and to affirm the value of artists in society. However, with the methods of delivery changing over the years, clarity about a-n’s work and role hasn’t always been achieved, beyond the artists who have used its services. Since joining as the company’s CEO in 2014, clarifying a-n’s offer (around advocacy, professional support, research and news) and its role within the sector (as a membership and support body) has required some focused changes and restructuring. In my view, a-n has emerged from this process a much stronger, impactful organisation. In four years, we’ve grown our membership from 18,500 to 22,500 members. We’ve increased expenditure on our programmes, artist employment and professional development from £290,000 in 2015, to £400,000 in 2018. And with 80% of our income now self-generated, we’ve been able to increase our artists bursaries annually – in five years we’ve distributed over £570,000 to members in bursaries for R&D, professional development and travel. With the size of a-n’s membership, and its reach across the country, it has been difficult for a-n to be ‘present’ for members anywhere other than online. A new office hub in Manchester, along with offices in Newcastle and London, a newly increased staff team and artist advisors across the UK, mean we now have the capacity to be much more visible on the ground. We introduced a-n Assembly events last year, which resemble mini VAI Get Togethers. Through these peripatetic events, we commission artists to curate and shape each programme, so the events are tailored to the types of experiences artists want to have. They’ve proved popular and productive, generating a best-practice survival guide for artist parents, the ‘Artist-Led Hot 100’ guide to artist-led activity, as well as many talks, debates, communal meals and workshops. What has been particularly rewarding about Assembly is seeing a-n play a supportive, facilitative role, giving artists the forum to share their expertise, opinions and to find solutions themselves. We’ll be building on this momentum with a new advocacy programme later this year. The current economic and political climate has created different and persistent challenges for organisations like a-n in supporting members. We’ve found taking an open and collaborative approach has allowed us to forge new, effective partnerships. Working with VAI on our Paying Artists Campaign is a good example. Following a lengthy sector consultation on artist payments, we published our Exhibition Payment Guide in 2016. Leaning on VAI’s ex-
perience, we were able to confidently launch this guide with the support and endorsement of all four arts councils in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This was the first time that visual art representatives from our key cultural funders came together in this way, and it’s paved the way for other sectoral partners to work together on fair payment across the UK, through a-n’s Paying Artists Working Group. Over the last four to five years, the challenges facing artists have increased too. It’s not just about negotiating and sustaining livelihoods in the face of ever-reducing opportunities and rising living costs; artists also face difficulties in trying to find the mental space to make sense of significant shifts in society, politics and national identity, and having their concerns heard and understood. Art can be at its strongest in response to change, but post-referendum, our research has revealed that artists are daunted and overwhelmed by current events. The needs of individual artists were largely drowned out by the broader needs of the sector and its cultural institutions. Working with the Incorporated Society of Musicians, a-n launched the #FreeMoveCreate Campaign in 2016, to raise awareness of the needs of self-employed artists, especially focusing on the need for freedom of movement post-Brexit. We’ve lobbied government and briefed the House of Lords and cross-party groups, to ensure issues relevant to artists are heard at the highest levels. It’s important a-n also ensure our artists continue to be engaged and networked across Europe post-Brexit. And, as the UK National Committee for the International Artists Association, we’ll work hard to strengthen those important European partnerships and networks for them. Looking forward, the ultimate goal for organisations like a-n should be to make themselves redundant. When the value and role of artists are affirmed in society and when artists are fairly paid and self-sufficient, we will have achieved our aims. In the meantime, the peer support networks that organisations like a-n and VAI facilitate are more important than ever before – providing a sense of belonging to a like-minded community (no matter how distributed it may be) with opportunities to share and learn from others’ experiences, practice and perspectives. Regardless of what the future brings, the visual arts sector needs to work together and present a collective united voice through its representative organisations.
Jeanie Scott is CEO of a-n The Artists Information Company. a-n.co.uk
which offers mentoring for emerging curators, will take place in the Derry City and Strabane region in the second half of this year. The project will be delivered by VAI in collaboration with Derry City & Strabane District Council (DC&SDC), partner venues and local galleries – CCA Derry~Londonderry, Nerve Visual and Void Gallery – with the support of our principal funder, Arts Council Northern Ireland, National Lottery Challenge Fund. During the consultation and discussion phase for the new DC&SDC arts strategy, a key theme to emerge was the lack of opportunities for artists – especially local emerging artists – to exhibit their work in the region. There are no artist-led galleries that can provide early-career artists with the space to exhibit. By their very nature, artist-led spaces grow organically, are usually established by core groups of dedicated artists, and rely on a constant supply of new talent or graduates living and working in a region. Generally, this kind of artist-led infrastructure does not exist in the DC&SDC area. As such, this project seeks to take a different approach to building regional capacity for new exhibition spaces, by partnering with the private sector. These ‘new spaces’ will be opened within existing businesses, such as a local brewery, a hotel, a café or an office building. However, building capacity is not only about developing partnerships with potential venues, but is also about fostering the necessary skills to deliver exhibitions – both across potential venues and within the pool of potential regional curators and cultural producers. Therefore, four emerging curators were selected from an open call in early May and will each deliver four exhibitions in non-traditional spaces across Derry City and Strabane. The selected curators will have clear connections to the area and will be able to access mentoring and training provided by our project partners. There are no restrictions on the curators to select local artists for these exhibitions. We believe that the curators should focus on selecting the right work for specific locations, but it is a strategic goal of the project that the venues will ideally become spaces where local artists will be able to exhibit in the future. Of course, there will be numerous challenges to navigate during this multifaceted project. With 16 exhibitions taking place over a six-month period, the scale of the project is purposefully ambitious. The tight budget will require everyone involved to think creatively and push the boundaries of what is possible. The nature of the project means that we are starting with a low level of existing infrastructure. Things that other galleries take for granted – such as installation equipment, in-house technicians, and invigilators – don’t exist here, so the curators will have to take these factors into account when selecting work. This programme aims to demonstrate new ways of working outside of institutions and the selected curators will have to
embrace these logistical challenges at every stage of the process. One of the benefits of working outside of institutions is that there is the potential to reach wider audiences, often comprising people that would not normally visit local galleries. In March 2017, we ran a ‘New Spaces’ pilot exhibition at the Bullitt Hotel in Belfast, which was curated by Jane Morrow and featured a new body of ceramic sculpture by John Rainey. More than 8,000 people experienced this work during its four-week run, proving the potential of this model for reaching a larger and more diverse audience. As the budgets of our institutions and galleries continue to be stretched, particularly in light of recent and ongoing funding cuts, it is becoming increasingly important to collaborate with the private sector, in order to create opportunities for artists, gain access to new spaces and develop new audiences. The venues we are working with are not only providing space and resources to host the exhibitions but are also contributing towards the overall budget that will cover fees of the participating curators and artists. DC&SDC received match funding as part of a larger programme supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Challenge Fund – a funding strand designed to empower and support local authorities to invest in the arts in their regions. One of the overarching themes of this year’s VAI Get Together – taking place on Monday 21 May at Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) – is how we can create more opportunities for artists. A panel discussion, titled ‘Curating Ireland: New Ways of Working’, will explore how we can do this by working outside of traditional institutions. Mary Cremin, Director of Void Gallery, will chair the panel, which will ask how the sector can adapt to this kind of curatorial practice and how artists can become more proactive in that process. The discussion at IMMA will provide a useful starting point for ‘New Spaces’. The panel will look at exhibition-making from the perspectives of diverse stakeholders, including collaborators, partners, institutions, curators, artists, funders, local authorities and audiences. Understanding and meeting the expectations of all stakeholders is key to effectively demonstrating the broad impact projects like ‘New Spaces’ can have.
Rob Hilken is Visual Artists Ireland Northern Ireland Manager. visualartists-ni.org
Regional Focus County Longford
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Space to Create Rosie O'Hara Member of Engage Longford
The Future Shape of Longford Sam McGarry Public Relations Officer, Cruthú Arts Festival
CRUTHÚ ARTS FESTIVAL is a multidisciplinary,
annual arts festival that takes place in Longford at the end of July. The festival was established by a group of local artists who were inspired by the ‘pop-up’ galleries and installations that occurred during the Love Longford event in 2013. This small committee of artists initiated the first Cruthú Arts Festival in 2014, which has steadily grown in scale each year. During this time, Cruthú has gained a reputation for its ambitious programme, which has had impact in stimulating the regeneration of urban spaces in the area and in generating dialogue among local citizens about the value of public art. This year sees the festival celebrate its fifth year, running from 26 to 29 July. Cruthú Arts Festival is the only festival of its kind in Longford. It is our mission to promote the arts through positive public engagement, inspiring freedom of expression and awakening passion and curiosity for the arts. In realising these aims, our key methods include: the development of public art programmes that actively engage citizens; performance programmes that showcase new and unusual acts; and the organisation of mentorships, workshops and exhibitions that support young people and local emerging artists. Through actively including local communities from various ethnic and social backgrounds, we hope to continue to broaden our audience and foster creativity at a local level, whilst also showcasing local, national and international talent through a range of accessible and inclusive events. Another important aim of the festival is to add to the legacy of the Longford area. We aim to be cognisant of Longford’s past and present, as well as exploring the town’s possibilities for the future. As such, part of the festival’s vision has been to
address the poor socio-economic reputation that has blighted the town in recent years and to engender a greater sense of pride of place among local residents. Permanent public artworks have been commissioned each year for the festival, which have added to the vibrancy and visual character of the town. Our ‘pop-up’ galleries – which utilise vacant retail units throughout Longford to showcase the work of emerging and established artists – are also now integral to the festival programme. All of these events have been valuable in addressing issues of dereliction, regeneration and renewal in the town, while also bringing local residents in contact with artists and allowing them to directly experience their work. Talks and workshops in various disciplines are also organised and hosted each year. Theatre pieces by amateur and professional groups have experienced increased audience numbers, while spoken word events have allowed for participation from emerging and established writers and performers. Music also plays a key element in our programme, ranging from free performances in local bars and cafés, to ticketed events. The headline music act of each year’s festival performs in St Johns Church, creating a unique atmosphere and special audiovisual events that are now a renowned part of the festival. The inclusion and involvement of young people is an important part of our programming each year as well. We always strive to provide events run by and targeting young people, which, in previous years, has included live street art, workshops and music events that have been supported by local youth and community groups. We are very grateful to the businesses, individuals, groups, bodies and communities whose support has been key to the festival’s success. We look forward to our continued engagement with all who make the festival so diverse and inclusive. As the Cruthú Arts Festival moves forward, the organisers are committed to the ongoing development of our programme, our brand and our audience numbers to deliver a nationally recognised event on a par with many of the more well-established arts festivals. cruthuartsfestival.com
Street artist Kathrina Rupit, aka KINMX, at Cuthrú Arts Festival; photograph by Shelley Corcoran
John Byrne, Peep, 2016, installation view at Engage Longford; image courtesy of Engage Longford
LONGFORD IS CURRENTLY one of the few
remaining counties without a dedicated visual arts space and so it was with this in mind that Engage Longford was established. Launched on Culture Night 2013, Engage is an artist-led, voluntary initiative that aims to promote Longford as a hub for contemporary visual art. The fundamental objective of the collective is to procure permanent, dedicated visual arts infrastructure in Longford. We want to connect, support and build the capacity of artists to work in the area, by providing workspaces and exhibition opportunities for recent graduates, as well as emerging and established artists. Currently there are four members of the collective. Engage initially secured the temporary use of a former hardware and furniture shop on Main Street in Longford. The first floor of the building was refurbished as a gallery space and has since been used to present a dynamic programme of exhibitions and events involving local, national and international artists working across a diverse range of disciplines. The generous dimensions of the space have allowed great scope for exhibiting a broad range of work over the past four years, including installation, sculpture, film, painting and sound art. During this time, we hosted John Byrne’s Would You Die for Ireland, Peep and other artworks, along with Rita Duffy’s ‘Souvenir Shop’, as well as shows from Shane Cullen, Michael Keegan-Dolan and many other Irish artists at different stages of their careers. I approached John and Rita to show during Cruthú Arts Festival in 2016, and we received funding through the 1916 commemoration programme. Both artists were very accommodating, and it was one of our more high-profile events, as both shows were exhibited at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, that same year. As well as exhibitions, our programme has included live art demonstrations and music ‘in-the-round’ across four stages. We have also developed strong links with educational institutions in the area, hosting end of year shows,
educational events, school visits, artists’ talks, workshops and projects with transition year and QQI/FETAC level students. In this way, we feel we have engaged and expanded our local audiences by opening up a critical dialogue with the wider visual arts community. The building we have occupied at a nominal rent has been for sale for a few years. It has recently been purchased by Longford County Council, with a gallery space forming part of the blueprint for a proposed new Digital, Innovation and Creative Hub. Work on the project commenced earlier this year and, although currently without a gallery space, we have recently acquired new property from Longford County Council with the intention of developing artists’ studios in the town centre. This new space will provide opportunities for artists to work and develop their practice in Longford. Up to eight studios will facilitate a range of artists and will be a valuable asset to local arts infrastructure, adding to the growing creative vibrancy of Longford. We hope that this initiative will offer further possibilities for networking and collaborative projects with existing and new audiences, local schools, and community groups. Low-cost studio rental will be offered to those who best meet the criteria, ethos and values of Engage and Creative Ireland Longford, whilst bringing a broad range of art practices to the project. In tandem with the development of Engage, members also established the now annual Cruthú Arts Festival, which takes place in July each year. This multidisciplinary event utilises vacant shop units as temporary galleries during the festival, further developing the profile of the visual arts in the region. Engage is currently supported by Longford County Arts Office, Creative Ireland Longford, local business patrons and voluntary contributions.
facebook.com/engagelongford
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Regional Focus
Material Conversations
Creative Wanderings
Gary Robinson
Amanda Jane Graham
Visual Artist
Visual Artist
LIVING IN A RURAL TOWN comes with its
own challenges, but it can also afford you the space to develop, which I see as a very positive opportunity. In a way, I start from nothing and every single second counts. Being informed by what surrounds me establishes an argument for chance discoveries against a pre-determined structure. By using text, either found or personal, I attempt to make contemplative, conversational work. This is an expression of how I see language and materials. As the viewer reads these texts, this dialogue can become a barometer of daily life, inviting discursive contributions. I am examining this relationship between words and thoughts and the shifting meanings inherent in even the most familiar turns of phrase. It is a poetic language that is easily recognisable. The work is driven by materials usually sourced in or around Longford. My love of lists, doodles and incomplete thinking informs the direction of this quiet language. Essentially, I am celebrating the lack of uniqueness in ordinary objects and conversations – i.e. real stuff in real spaces. My experience as an artist so far is that you have to keep working, even when you may be unsure what to do. Everything counts and leads to something else, so you cannot sit waiting for inspiration. For me, making art everyday is the key. My work evolves in an unpredictable fashion. Harnessing this quotidian approach, I tend to work on several pieces simultaneously. Each begins with a random, haphazard gathering of ephemeral materials, such as receipts, handwritten notes, till rolls, wallpaper, my own musings, diary pages, overheard chats and typed details – all of which gives each piece a unique conversational tone while creating a document of sorts. There are no shortcuts and every mark leads onto the next. Work is built up slowly, lettering is handwritten, and paint is heavily applied, covered and scraped back, revealing past narratives. Collages are re-worked, found paper is added, examined and possibly removed. Everything is given a new life. I act instinctively when making – everything happens on the surface of the canvas. Taking this approach fosters a personal dialogue with the work, which has informed the development of
new installation works. By using found materials, I am attempting to harness quiet conversations or moments in time by absorbing and documenting these experiences. It’s an unknown private history, almost ghost-like. The work reflects the real world whilst magnifying the ‘spirit-shocking wonder’ of our everyday lives. This work is not about me, it’s about everybody, it’s about taking part, becoming involved in something that could happen within your own life experience. Working in isolation has never been an issue for me. I have always used my surroundings as my raw material. However, I have been fortunate to have ongoing collaborations with other artists, such as Thomas Brezing and Sean Cotter for Galway International Arts Festival (GIAF) 2017 and John Kingerlee from 2015 – 16. As a result of the GIAF exhibition, I was invited to exhibit in the Burren College of Art. In 2017, along with Thomas Brezing and Dave Newton, I founded Flostam Arts Collective, where we reuse old materials to create new, ephemeral works for studio settings or onsite, some of which have previously been exhibited at the Westport Arts Festival 2017. Upcoming exhibitions include the Claremorris Gallery along with artist Eamon Colman in June. Rosemarie Noone curates an extensive programme of exhibitions and it’s a great gallery space. I am also preparing to exhibit with artists Ger Sweeney and Hughie O’Donoghue at the Green Fuse Gallery, Westport, next August. Since 2006, I have been exhibiting regularly at The Origin Gallery, Dublin. Origin’s director, Noelle Campbell Sharp, has always been a great supporter and has boundless energy. Noelle is also founding director of the Cill Rialaig Artist Retreat in Ballinskelligs, County Kerry. Cill Rialaig is a unique place that is completely tailored to artists’ needs, offering workspaces and great experiences.
instagram.com/garyrobinsonfrenchhallstudio
Gary Robinson, Hollies List, 2016, gesso, acrylic, handwritten lists, decal, ink, pencil on paper; 41 x 35.5 cm; courtesy of the artist
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Amanda Jane Graham, hen (Self-Portrait) (detail), 2017, drawings and emulsion collaged onto panel, 120 x 100 cm; image courtesy of the artist
MY FAMILY HAS ALWAYS had a strong tradi-
tion of emigration and I too seem to have inherited traits of this roaming custom. I was born in Scotland to an Irish mother and Scottish father, which officially makes me an Irish-Scot, though my Irish accent gives no evidence of this. I grew up in Drogheda and spent time in Dublin before moving to north Longford, in the heart of the picturesque and remote Gowna Valley. In 2005, I started in Sligo Institute of Technology, directly followed by postgraduate study at NCAD. After graduating in 2011, I spent four very productive years as a studio holder at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre. Sometime after this, I started working with The Arts Hour, a radio programme broadcast on Shannonside FM and Northern Sound FM. In this role, I cover the artists and art events throughout the Cavan, Monaghan, Leitrim, Longford and Roscommon area. Working for The Arts Hour means I attend many art events happening in the area, which has eliminated the solitary feelings associated with having a rural arts practice. Through my own art practice and contributions to the radio show, I have become very aware of the outstanding work happening in art centres across the country, as well as their increasingly culturally-diverse audiences. These observations have led me to initiate a doctoral project at Maynooth University, researching the arts centre as a new social focal point within Irish towns. My work is both biographical and autobiographical. I document emotive and dramatic visions that are accurate recollections of private worlds, as well as actual events that are challenging, funny, intriguing and disturbing at the same time. My reflections have taken me to Butte, Montana, at the turn of the last century. My grandmother was born there in 1913 to Irish parents. From these narratives, I created the body of work, ‘A Tribute To The Irish Community Butte Montana 1916 – 1919’, which I exhibited in the RHA’s Ashford Gallery last year. The exhibition narrates stories told to me by my
grandmother about her life in Butte. It was a proud moment to see her described in the Irish Times as ‘a three-year-old revolutionary’ for her valiant efforts during the Easter Rising. In 2016, I had the incredible opportunity to expand my practice into live performance. The Pram that Helped the Rising was a theatre play, commissioned by Cavan curators-in-residence as part of the county’s centenary celebrations. The work is of regional interest because Butte came to prominence as a direct result of a Cavan man, Marcus Daly. The production was also recorded as a radio documentary that aired on Shannonside and Northern Sound FM. My practice has taken me on many emotional journeys. In 2012, I was devastated by my mother’s death, and this surfaced within my work as ‘Warrior’s One in Three’. The word ‘warrior’ stands in opposition to the term ‘victim’, which is too frequently used around people with cancer. The artwork deals with oncology and palliative care, but is insightful, tender and uplifting. I was honoured to receive the Cavan Arts/Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre’s Arts and Health Studio Residency Award in 2016. I was invited to the 18th International Psycho Oncology Conference in Dublin, where I had the truly wonderful experience of showing the exhibition and speaking about my work and residency at Uillinn. My current project takes me back to Scotland with an artwork titled hen. A Scottish term of endearment, hen is an emotive self-portrait, spanning from childhood to today. It is part of a new body of work, called ‘The Domestic Abuse Panorama’, exhibited this year in Transart, Cavan, where I was a recipient of The Bullock Lane Residency Award. Some of the titles directly reference Scottish humour, which has the ability to transform crisis into comedy. North Longford is ideal for its inter-county commutes and to grant creative wanderings from the Scottish Highlands to the American Rockies. amandajanegraham.com
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Regional Focus
Sexual Revolution Studies Eimear Walshe Artist, Writer and Research Fellow at the Van Abbemuseum
Eimear Walshe, Separatist Epistle, 2016, video still; image courtesy of the artist
I COME FROM a very rural part of Longford, on the edge of a small village called Clondra, where the Royal Canal meets the River Shannon. At 17, I moved to Dublin to study in NCAD. When I told my peers I was from Longford, I was asked more than once which part of Tipperary that was in. The question of how to represent the regional or ‘peripheral’ to an audience at the ‘centre’ is an enduring theme in my practice. During my time as a student, the Royal Canal route – from my home in Clondra to the River Liffey in Dublin city – was reopened after almost 50 years of being unnavigable. I decided to organise a residency for my peers on the canal at the village harbour in Clondra. Eleven artists and designers lived in a barge and exhibited across adapted spaces, the school, the pub, and the village hall. After graduating with a BA in Sculpture in 2014, I was supported by Longford Arts Office and Longford County Library and exhibited work at the Atrium Gallery, the Longford Arts Festival, and the artist-run space Engage. I also received the Longford Artist Bursary, which was important in supporting my sculptural practice in those early days. I wrote my MA thesis on gender separatism, and, based on this research, I was awarded a fellowship in the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, as part of their Deviant Practice programme. At the museum, I worked with the Mediation Department to develop a public reading group, present a paper and produce a pamphlet discussing these themes and how they might apply to the museum and to society in general. It’s been really affirming to work there, because the museum pays great attention to even its smallest research projects, allowing change to be effected across the museum’s entire infrastructure – from its curatorial processes, to its bathroom policy. I have since been awarded a second research fellowship to initiate a new project in the Van Abbe – the 'Department of Sexual Revolution Studies', an inter-institutional learning platform invested in critical enquiry into moments of sexual revolution in art, design and visual culture. In the first phase of the project, I will work with
students from the Design Academy Eindhoven on a project that responds to New Sexual Lifestyles (2003), a three-channel video work by Gerard Byrne, currently on display at the museum. With the students, we will look at the idea of sexual revolution as cycles of antagonism, transgression, inversion and repression, from which we can learn more about society. My sculptural practice provides another means to think through the problems in my research, often taking forms that are in some way diagrammatic. For example, in making a sculpture, I might approach questions concerning gender and domination, or speech and literacy, with forms that reference architectural partitions, grammatical separations, or computer interfaces. Generally, my sculptures have been quite large in scale. For example, my degree show was an 11-meter-long rendition of the green wiggly line that corrects ‘bad’ grammar in Microsoft Word. Where my sculptures previously took large, solid forms, lately I have begun to use lighter materials, drawing edges and boundaries of objects, inspired by the line-drawing vernacular of hand-poked tattoos, which is another medium I work in. Currently I’m making sculptures for an exhibition in Galway Arts Centre, curated by Basic Space and opening on 5 May. It’s a two-person exhibition with myself and Berlin-based artist, Emma Haugh. I previously worked with Emma on Having a Kiki: Queer desire and Public Space – an extended essay for an edition of Paper Visual Art Journal, which gave me the opportunity to begin writing in a form that combines theory with memoir. I will develop my writing practice over the next two years towards a collection of essays in 2019. I am currently supported in my research, writing and art practice by the Arts Council Artist Bursary. This year I will continue to work both in Ireland and abroad, because, while my work would be impossible without international support, it is always very rewarding to be able to return and present work at home. eimearwalshe.com
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Residency
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Glass Threads RÓISÍN DE BUITLÉAR REPORTS FROM HER ONGOING RESIDENCY AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF IRELAND. THIS YEAR I am the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Na-
tional Museum of Ireland – the first time the museum has offered an artist’s residency since it was established in 1877. I love the museum and have used it for many years as an archive and source of inspiration. The National Museum of Ireland collection extends to 4.5 million objects across four sites: Decorative Arts and History in Collins Barracks; Archaeology in Kildare Street; Natural History on Merrion Square; and the Museum of Country Life in Castlebar, County Mayo. I am resident at the Museum of Decorative Arts until January 2019. I intend using all four sites to explore the collection, develop ideas, experiment and produce new work. Since graduating from NCAD in 1982, I’ve worked as a practicing artist, with glass being my primary material. Glass has so many qualities unavailable in other materials; I use refraction, reflection, transparency, translucency, fragility and sound to transfer ideas, with Irish culture often being a thematic starting point for my work. I make small-scale sculptures and large-scale architectural installations for public and private spaces including: the National Botanic Gardens; Ballyroan Public Library; the Basilica of Knock (Mayo); and the sensory garden at Áras an Úachtarán – the President’s residence in the Phoenix Park. My recent work focuses on creating sound objects from glass, working with contemporary musicians who play percussive, stringed and wind pieces during public performances. Such pieces have formed part of national and international exhibitions, and will be presented this year at the National Museum. Sound is also a theme for interactive sculptures I am currently developing for Dublin City Council’s National Children’s Garden, opening this year to commemorate children who died during the 1916 Rising. The magic of seeing molten glass being blown for the first time at NCAD got me hooked on the material. Watching an older student gather a molten glob out of the furnace, blow it into a drinking glass on the end of a long pole and then seeing it accidently shatter into fragments, demonstrated the material’s extraordinary alchemy. I was one of the first people to graduate from NCAD in hot glass and the only woman of that generation who has continued working in this field in Ireland. Until the furnace was built in NCAD in 1980s, there were no women blowing glass in Ireland. Only commercial products and decorative, functional objects were being made using this process by four major crystal factories (in Waterford, Galway, Cavan and Tipperary). Free blowing (without molds) and hot sculpting were spearheaded by Scandinavian and Italian glass companies and further experimented with in American art colleges. I travelled as often as I could, hitchhiking across Britain and Europe, meeting other glassmakers and eventually getting work as a studio assistant. There I learnt from masters of the discipline and about the history of the craft. Glassblowing is a very physical activity that combines balance, rhythm and fluid body movements to control liquid fire. I understand how hard-earned these skills are and how much can be done with the material, given the right opportunities. It was this sentiment that spurred me into action when the Waterford Crystal factory went into receivership in 2009 and laid off 2,000 people – many of them skilled glassmakers like me. Centuries of tacit knowledge were being discounted as disposable and unworthy of investment. These workers had crafted the glittering crystal trophies and bowls, presented as symbols of Irish heritage at every political and celebratory occasion worldwide for decades. Even at the recent White House Shamrock Ceremony for St Patrick’s Day, a crystal bowl was a central feature. Angered by these developments, I approached three masters from the factory about working with me to create new pieces that would demonstrate their adaptable and exemplary skills. This four-year project started with a residency at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Seattle, and a subsequent ex-
Peter O’Toole plays Chanter 1, National Museum of Ireland, 9 March 2018; photograph by Phillip Lauterbach
hibition in 2013,‘CAUTION! Fragile’, which ran for a year and attracted over 60,000 visitors. This exhibition became the catalyst for discussions about the future of industrial glassmaking and was the first international cultural and advocacy project to be shown at the museum. Together with international glassmakers and funded by private investors in Seattle, we made pieces that were shipped back to Ireland to be cut and engraved in the private studios of the three masters, Greg Sullivan, Fred Curtis and Eamonn Hartley. I made other pieces in Waterford’s only private glassblowing studio, Irish Handmade Glass. It has been a long road to bring this significant exhibition to the National Museum of Ireland. Focusing on the themes of history, landscape and sound, the exhibition draws on Irish cultural identity, retelling personal narratives from Ireland’s most famous glass factory. There are over 50 pieces in the show, including oral history recordings with factory workers and original music of glass sounds. At the opening in March, it was surreal to recount the evolution of the exhibition and to have all three men stand beside me talking about their experiences. Greg Sullivan, engraver, mentioned his factory number, 5,421; there were 5,420 people employed in the factory when he joined. Sullivan trained under Eamonn Hartley (factory number 2,960), head of the engraving school. Greg listed the small workshops currently practicing in Waterford – a poignant commentary on the handful of men continuing this craft in his hometown. Fred Curtis, cutter, listed American presidents, royalty and film stars as some of the recipients of his work under the Waterford label. He recently had a private audience with Queen Elizabeth II and her dogs at Buckingham palace, while delivering a crystal and diamond studded brooch he had been commissioned to make for her. During the exhibition launch, Liam Ó Maonlaí and Peter O’Toole from The Hothouse Flowers played glass pieces taken from the exhibition. They pushed the material’s fragility, creating soulful rhythms. Sounds carried far into the ether, leaving an imprint on the audience, who experienced another facet of this material’s alchemy. I don’t know what resonance my residency will have on the museum or my practice; I am leaving myself open to experiences. For now, I am immersing myself in various collections, with highlights so far including: The musical instrument collection; the textile archive;
Róisín de Buitléar, Chanter 1 & 2, 16 x 70 x 23 cm; photograph by Phillip Lauterbach
and the Damascus Room – a series of painted panels dating from 1670s Syria, the only remaining interior panels of their kind since the ongoing Syrian civil war. I’m also giving public workshops, lectures and tours, and am working with local community and school groups in different museum locations. I invited a German engraver to bring eight glass engraving machines to my studio, so we could run a glass engraving class with the aim of teaching this illustrative technique. This was the first ever public engraving workshop to be held in Ireland that, ironically, wouldn’t have been possible without temporarily importing German machines. The exhibition, ‘CAUTION! Fragile’, led me to be offered a residency at the National Museum of Ireland, thus the ‘glass threads’ that brought me to the museum continue to interweave.
‘CAUTION! Fragile’ continues at the National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks, until January 2019. museum.ie
Róisín de Buitléar is an artist who creates glass sculptures and site-specific installations that draw on cultural heritage and the history of making. rdebuitlear.com
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Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Festival
Sam Keogh, Integrated Mystery House, 2018, performance and mixed media installation; performance at the 38th EVA International 2018; photograph by Deirdre Power; courtesy the artist and EVA International
Dismantling the Monolith MARY CONLON CATCHES UP WITH INTI GUERRERO, CURATOR OF THE 38TH EVA INTERNATIONAL, CURRENTLY SHOWING ACROSS MULTIPLE VENUES IN LIMERICK CITY.
Mary Conlon: In developing the 38th edition of EVA International, you have replaced the standard ‘monolithic’ biennial model with a more complex ecology of exhibitions. Can you explain this curatorial strategy? Inti Guerrero: It is a proposal that corresponds to the simultaneous multiplicity of perception that audiences today have developed, alongside the advent of social media. In other words, in a biennial imagined as an ecology, people can navigate back and forth through entirely distinct bodies of work and different constellations of meaning, and yet not feel the need to force a single, dominant meta-curatorial framework upon every single artwork in the show. This isn’t to praise eclecticism for the sake of baroqueness, or to fall into cultural relativism of meaning, but to allow more freedom to the experience of an exhibition of this nature. This strategy is also connected to the decision of not giving a title to the 38th EVA International. While researching EVA’s archive, I noticed that for EV+A in 1990, the curator (then called adjudicator), Saskia Bos, radically proposed giving a title to the exhibition for the very first time in its history. Bos’s show, titled ‘Climates of Thought’, told a story and proposed a concept – the ‘monolithic aspiration’, as she suggested in the exhibition catalogue. My intention of departing from this curatorial tradition of naming the exhibition, is primarily meant to emphasise the word ‘International’ in the biennial’s existing title. In our current state of nationalisms, hard borders, protectionism and a dismantling of the liberal belief in “never again”, the term ‘international’ suddenly carries an important weight. I believe this must be celebrated. Despite its modest scale and the fact that it does not operate from an ‘art capital’, EVA has been a forerunner in understanding the world through art within a transnational, transcultural and
international dialogue since its foundation. In my view, this is what we must still celebrate. MC: The thematic inquiry of the 38th EVA International is underpinned by Irish historical and art historical concerns. How did you balance national concerns with the international expectations of the biennial format? IG: This edition sees a significant increase in artists from Ireland, compared with recent editions of EVA. Most notably, along with active Irish artists of our time – such as Sam Keogh, whose newly commissioned sci-fi work is currently showing at Cleeve’s Condensed Milk Factory, and Isabel Nolan, who presents new versions of her chandeliers of colour – we have also incorporated specific pieces by art historical figures, including works from the 1920s and 1930s by Seán Keating, Mainie Jellett and Eileen Gray. It is these artists and their works that underpin the narratives on hope, idealism and, ultimately, the deception of the nationhood project. The biennial seeks to curatorially reframe these early twentieth century artists within the context of present-day discussions. While researching Jellett, for example, it was remarkable to find that within her fauvic and cubist experimentation abstracting the icon of Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus, she paradoxically dedicated work to reproduction and even abortion. The ideological field of debate surrounding pregnancy is also found in the work of international artists, like Sanja Iveković. Keating’s magnificent paintings depicting the construction of the Shannon Hydroelectric Scheme have a more prominent representation. The main constellation of works at Limerick City Gallery of Art and Cleeve’s Condensed Milk Factory features practices addressing the subjects of electricity, light, power and related metaphors. The construction of pow-
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Festival
Top: John Gerrard, Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada), 2014, simulation, dimensions variable; installation view at the 38th EVA International 2018
Isabel Nolan, It Was Hot, Dense And Smooth, 2018; The Light Poured Out Of You, 2017; and Partial Eclipse (Above), 2017–2018, mild steel, paint, fabric and dye; image courtesy the artist, Kerlin Gallery and EVA International
Bottom: Lee Bul, State of Reflection, 2016, crystal, glass and acrylic beads, mirrors, stainless steel, aluminium and black nickel rods, steel and bronze chains, stainless-steel, and aluminium armature; installation view at the 38th EVA International 2018; both photographs by Deirdre Power, courtesy the artists and EVA International
er plants in itself is perhaps the most immediate and readable thread amongst works like Inji Aflatoun’s surrealist paintings and Malala Andrialadideazana’s new commission, featuring enlarged banknote collages of illustrations of dams and other major civic engineering projects used by many countries as state propaganda. Similarly, Aflatoun (b.1924–d.1989) was one of several artists and writers sent by the Egyptian government to create art devoted to the construction of the Aswan Dam on the Nile – an icon of modernisation and Pan-Arab nationalism, inaugurated by Egyptian president Nasser and Russian statesman Khrushchev in 1964. The open call for artists received around 2,500 applicants and the inclusion of artists coming through this mechanism either enriched the existing subjects described above, or catalysed entirely new and different thematic threads. This was particularly the case with Ian Wieczorek, an artist based in County Mayo, to whom I am grateful for his insightful approach to the subject of emigration, which simply cannot be ignored by a biennial in Western Europe today. MC: The Shannon hydroelectric scheme was a bold undertaking for a newly formed Irish Free State, resulting in the largest engineering project in world at that time. How did your visits to the Ardnacrusha power plant in Clare and the archives at ESB Headquarters in Dublin become the curatorial inspiration for this year’s EVA? IG: It was actually during my first visit to Limerick more than 18 months ago, when I came across Keating’s social realist painting, Night Candles are Burnt Out (1928–9), at The Hunt Museum. This first drew my attention to a subject that quickly became an obsession with these dam histories! I was well aware that there have been exhibitions and extensive scholar-
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ship devoted to Keating’s work (especially by art historian Dr Éimear O’Connor) and that there have also been recent indepth documentaries and writings on Ardnacrusha. Therefore, I had to consider what a biennial could do differently, and how to propose connectivity across practices and artistic languages. One important element within the show is highlighting the ways in which people take the use of electricity for granted. It has become naturalised as part of our habitat, running our technologies and charging our electronic devices. Electricity also plays a key biopolitical role in the production of capital, continuously extending working hours and stretching our notion of time. Yet, there isn’t widespread awareness of the fact that there are many populations around the world that still do not have electricity at home, no public lighting, nor that there are major metropolises like Lagos and Beirut with daily power cuts resulting from systemic corruption. This specific subject is addressed in the photographic work of Nigerian artist, Uchechukwu James-Iroha. Similarly, in Viriya Chotpanyavisut’s work, the silhouette of a fisherman and his impoverished reality in the darkness, contrasts with the glittering light of Bangkok’s neo-liberal cosmopolitan skyline. My visit to the ESB HQ was instrumental in learning more about the complex narratives surrounding the construction of the hydroelectric dam and its aftermath. The ESB’s Rural Electrification Scheme was as important as the construction of the dam itself, because it concluded the construction of the national grid, completing the ‘electrification of the nation’. This was a revolutionary moment that placed Ireland ‘on track’ after decades of underdevelopment in non-metropolitan regions. A new film project by Adrian Duncan and Feargal Ward is grounded in these themes, exploring the
massive importation of Scandinavian trees used for the electricity poles by the Irish government in the 1930s and 1940s. MC: Following up on your earlier reference to the works of Mainie Jellet and Sanja Iveković, how has the upcoming referendum on the Eighth Amendment within the Irish constitution informed the biennial’s engagement with gender politics and the bureaucratic structures controlling the female body? IG: Decriminalisation and legalisation of abortion is a major subject in many parts of the world. Ireland’s blind exception amongst the legislative abortion reforms across Western Europe suggests that perhaps the modernisation of the state is a continuously ongoing and unfinished process. There are still many struggles for the betterment of democracy, with this being one of them. Feminism, from its first wave onwards, has been fundamental to the improvement of an unequal and unjust citizenry. The Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment is therefore an important cultural production to bring into discussions at the 38th EVA International. Mary Conlon is the founding director of Ormston House, Limerick. Inti Guerrero is currently the Estrellita B. Brodsky Adjunct Curator of Latin American Art at Tate. EVA International launched in 1977 as an artist-led exhibition in Limerick City. It has since grown to be Ireland’s biennial of contemporary art. The 38th EVA International continues across various venues in Limerick city until 8 July.
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Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
How is it Made?
Awkward Objects LILY CAHILL REFLECTS ON HANNAH FITZ’S SCULPTURAL PRACTICE.
Hannah Fitz, ‘Doggie Eyed Stare’, studio preview, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, February 2016; image courtesy of the artist, photograph by Kate Bowe O'Brien
HANNAH FITZ MAKES sad outsider art. A difficult thing to
do, considering the ‘insider’ contexts from which it emerges (NCAD, Basic Space and the Städelschule, Frankfurt), and in which it is placed (Butler Gallery, Kerlin Gallery, Galway Arts Centre and currently, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, to name a few). Fitz is a formally educated and immersed practitioner, yet her work is pathetic and desperate. Yes, it’s at the party, but maybe no one wants to talk to it. So it takes out an acoustic guitar, and everything gets infinitely worse... Fitz layers plaster, paper, resin and other basic composite materials on top of steel or wooden armatures, resulting in generally unvarnished, clumsy-looking everyday things – apples, lamps, roses, ashtrays, tables, jugs; once there was even a man (last year on the floor of Kerlin). These forms are not quite true to life in size or colour – weird yellows and washy pastels abound. These slightly-off sculptures sport an ‘unrelieved’ manner, both formally and philosophically. Uptight and nervous, it’s like they’re getting away with something. But not quite. Size, colour and palpable unease render these generic masses of the world, but not quite at home in it. Their overworked imperfectness means they obviously aren’t indebted to machines, but they don’t really seem to have been human-borne either. Perhaps they birthed themselves, like things in the air that wanted (so badly and to such a degree) that they manifested themselves. And now that they’re here, they’re working very, very hard at fitting in. A lot of art ‘exists’ as if the viewer isn’t there. It has a certain bravado; it doesn’t need you to fulfill or finish it. Fitz’s work definitely knows you’re there and, I hazard, would act differently, were you not. This is fundamental. Candelabra (2017), replete with its burning wick, only appears thus when we’re looking at it. It is being polite. Some – like Rose (2017), with its broken vase and spilling water, that featured in the group show, ‘The Way Things Go: An Homage’ at Butler Gallery last year – can’t keep it together as well as others. The viewer is absolutely vital to its form. It is only its feigned composure that’s holding it together at all. It is all pretension. When we look away, Candelabra may collapse back into millions of little squirming atoms, previously held together by sheer force
of will. Not only would it not look like a lamp, it would not look like anything in any way categorisable or purposeful that we could possibly recognise. And what is existence without recognition? It’s nothing, of course. The work knows this and ‘matters’ itself into mattering, materialising in recognisable forms so it can be addressed – so it can have existence. For our benefit, the works even indulge our presence within their structure – the peeled apple, the lit cigarette, even simulated fingerprints – signs of human engagement as if they’re already a welcomed part of our environment, a literal part of the furniture. If they ‘act’ expansive, they will be conceived as such. This over eagerness to become is essentially their undoing – their giveaway is our takeaway. They’re thinking too much. The unbearable nature of being makes the production break down, rendering representational objects incomplete, their external surfaces rough and unfinished – a process analogous to the overproduction of skin cells by psoriasis sufferers. They’re so stressed out, they develop a skin condition. How human, after all. The emotional state Fitz’s objects induce in the viewer is less tolerable still, akin to being stuck in a corner of someone else’s sofa, having to listen to a guy dressed as Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean play the Oscar song from Once. It’s just all so agonisingly pedestrian. The British actress, Elizabeth Hurley, apparently refers to non-famous people as ‘civilians’ and that’s what Fitz produces – inglorious lumps: the circling cigarette smoke (Table, 2017); the untieable bow (Still in Set, 2013); the awkward joke (Knock Knock, 2018) There is a structured humour operating, but it’s too laboured, too planned, too much like hard work to be funny. Is humanity playful at its core? Of course not – we’re doomed. The work is only making jokes out of desperation because that’s what it has learned to do, as a way to convey its deepest obsessions – to be seen, to be, in an operative and acceptable manner. ‘Joking’ is how we allow ourselves to be gross, rude, sexual. It’s permitted because, for that moment, it’s not really us, it’s us being funny, it’s only a joke – an externalised state removed from the individual, allowing one to exist temporarily outside of oneself, which is the goal here. Whatever these objects essentially are, they do not want to be.
Hannah Fitz, Table, 2017; image courtesy of the Kerlin Gallery
The effort. And for what? It is art that mirrors back at ourselves our humiliating attempts at being. It’s mortified and mortifying. And it learned it from us. So, who’s looking at who? The objects are trying to be at home in the world by mimicking it. These acts may be too forced, too much, too overbearing, but who are we to judge? Working away at replicating humanity’s environs, creating goals for themselves, in the face of the grand, infinite, nothingness that is behind and beyond and inside us… Fair play to them. Who is to deny them this purpose, when it is the only tool at our disposal? Without purpose we are perilously unhinged. One can either sink into a subterranean depression or construct one. We all need something to aim for, something we’re trying to be, in order to live. However, desperation is a threatening condition uncontained by standards. Thus, fabricated purpose can be a wildly creative and dangerous proposition – if you look hard enough into the abyss, you’re sure to find something. With no notion of self-worth, selfhood, or any individual idea of value to constrain them (perhaps this is why they replicate and operate most effectively in groups), what does the future hold for Fitz’s objects? Or, for us… They produced one Man, there will be more. Trouble is afoot should they adapt and adopt further existing external qualities in order to progress, to evolve as humanity does. They may crave greater acknowledgement, which can be attained by assimilating our working dreamscape of ‘possibility’ and its ensuing system of successes and failures, life and death, everything and nothing. Expanding matter that isn’t too sure where ‘it’ starts and ‘you’ finish. It might just annihilate you. Lily Cahill is co-editor of Critical Bastards Magazine based in Dublin. Hannah Fitz is a visual artist, currently based between Dublin and Frankfurt, Germany. She is a visiting student of Peter Fischli in Städelschule, Frankfurt. Fitz’s current solo exhibition, ‘Knock Knock’, continues at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios until 30 June.
The Visual Artists' News Sheet
Critique Edition 37: May – June 2018
Shane Berkery, Robes (detail), 2017, oil on canvas, 140 x 100cm; image courtesy the artist and Molesworth Gallery
Critique
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
‘Like Me’ The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon 10 February – 31 March 2018 Featuring: Alice Hanratty, Kian Benson Bailes and Eleanor McCaughey
‘LIKE ME’ IS A SHOW which demonstrates the
Kian Benson Bailes, Untitled 1, digitial print, 335 x 488 cm; image courtesy of the artist and The Dock; photo Anna Leask
continued relevance and vitality of painting and drawing. Amongst other things, the three artists explore relationships between two-dimensional artworks and architectural space, while art of the past acts as a source of joy and inspiration, rather than as a ‘dead hand’, stifling creativity. Alice Hanratty’s newly-commissioned work, Procession, is a frieze of head-and-shoulder profile portraits, based on Cinquecento paintings, such as Piero della Francesca’s The Duke and Duchess of Urbino (1467–72). The works, which form a continuous frieze around The Dock’s central hall, are also exhibited as individual works on paper in Gallery One. The transformation of the loosely painted, easel-size paintings into a large-scale architectural intervention changes the character of both the artworks and the architectural setting, allowing viewers to consider the previous functions of the former courthouse building that The Dock occupies, and the gentler flow of people that now circulates.
Alice Hanratty, Procession; image courtesy of the artist and The Dock; photograph by Anna Leask
Eleanor McCaughy, installation view; image courtesy of the artist and The Dock; photograph by Steven Maybury
Hanratty’s frieze is reminiscent of Benozzo Gozzoli’s Procession of the Magi in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence (1459 – 60); however, the figures we see depicted here don’t seem like nobles and kings, but everyday people. Also on display is Hanratty’s dexterous use of paint. The brushstrokes tread a delicate line: they describe the motif, while at the same time operating quite independently of it. The pencil line that carries the descriptive structure of the figures is succinct and right. There is a sense of control over the medium, allied with a sense of exhilaration in the painting process. The way the figures are quoted and reused within the frieze brings to mind the appropriated imagery of Pop Art. However, the figures here are not merely a prop to hang virtuoso painting onto. Freed from their role as participants within a narrative, we are asked to ponder their function: perhaps they are the artist’s much-loved companions or guides? Entering Gallery Two, one encounters a giant billboard-sized work by Kian Benson Bailes.
The work is angled against the wall, dazzling the viewer with its sheer scale before one can grapple with its dense imagery. The digitally-generated drawing is made up of hard-todefine architectural forms, natural elements and fragments, with the format and compositional structure resembling a landscape painting. In the foreground are monochrome forms, reminiscent of bleached coral reef. In the middle ground, a black and white photographic section depicts a forest, while the space at the top of the composition is scattered with heavy geometric clouds. This structure is fragmentary, shifting and elusive, creating spatial disorientation reminiscent of Pop Art’s collaged surfaces, which conflated the upbeat messages of advertising whilst questioning society’s acceptance of consumerism. Benson Bailes’s work refers to the idealised spaces of AutoCAD design, a seductive platform used to sell us everything from designer kitchens to housing estates, while referencing the immersive and addictive parallel world of video games. On the reverse of the huge billboard is a small video monitor, showing the looped digital video, Untitled 2, which consists of tilting and shifting montage-imagery. This small, screen-sized interface provides a counterpoint to the huge billboard, playing with the idea of scale. In this piece, and in two accompanying works on paper, architectural references allude to plans for ideal spaces, as fragmentary and partial figures appear and disappear. In the same space, Eleanor McCaughey’s paintings are shown in a partitioned area with brightly-coloured, patterned and fleece-covered walls. The installation calls to mind the full-on aesthetic of the Postmodern design collective, the Memphis Group, while evoking the visual language of MTV and early music videos. The effect is a powerful statement, highlighting a process of art historical appropriation that permeates the entire show, creating a rich visual experience. The paintings themselves play with conventions of portraiture and still life. They offer naturalistic renderings of constructions that the artist has made with detritus, molded together and often bathed in oozing masses of paint. They reference classical portrait busts but resemble traditional still life paintings, in their lighting and deadpan handling. Like Baroque fantasies, they play with the viewers’ expectations of portraiture and teasingly question our credulity in front of these seemingly flat images. The synthetic colours and materials used to make the original sculptures are entirely modern, while their abject nature as objects arguably occupies an intensely critical position in relation to contemporary visual culture. However, the framing of the paintings within their own joyfully kitsch mini-gallery mitigates against any such straightforward readings. As well as inviting us to think about how we represent ourselves, and how we view each other, McCaughey, like the other artists exhibiting in ‘Like Me’, demonstrates a commitment to giving the viewer a richly visual experience.
Andy Parsons is an artist based in Sligo. He is the founder of Floating World Artist Books.
Critique
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Shane Berkery ‘Contemporary Paintings’ The Molesworth Gallery, Dublin 1 – 24 February 2018
THE TITLE OF Shane Berkery’s latest exhibi-
tion imparts little more than an implied focus on recent work, spotlighting where he is in his developing career through paintings that reflect his influences and interests. Dublin-based with Irish-Japanese parentage, Berkery eschews an overtly conceptual approach to his practice, and so may also be commenting on what contemporary art can be. The 11 canvases fall into two broad groupings, one with images of young ‘contemporary’ subjects, the other drawing on black and white photos relating to his Japanese heritage. Dating from the 1950s and ‘60s, these are characterised by informal poses and the clothing of the era, including kimonos and other traditional attire. As such, the showing typifies a body of work concerned with the human figure, within which variations in style, content and scale lend a measure of unpredictability. Berkery transforms his source material through decisions made while painting about what to portray, modify or withhold. His signature approach uses non-naturalistic sepia tones, harmonious pastels and edgy pinks, yellows and blues. This distinctive repertoire unifies the work (despite its relative diversity) as does photo-real illusionism, variously mitigated by background-foreground interplays, painterly stripes, splotches, ellipses and lightly-stained, visible canvas weave. Figure in the Dark introduces the Japanese strand. While Berkery often deploys monochrome within oscillating colour relationships, this study, unusually, features only tones of ‘black’ with burnt sienna accents. It captures a life-size male, mid-motion and mid-expression, his unstable stance heightened by the tilting wall behind him. This divides the plain background into subtly differentiated sections, a foil for skilled depictions of facial features and lived-in fabrics. Blank eyes meet ours as the subject’s thoughts turn inward and smoke furls up from his cigarette into the blackness. While Berkery strives to evoke a sense of realness and presence, interpersonal engagement is intriguingly elusive. The flip-flop wearing duo in Robes stare out from features masked by passages of paint; in The Bath, we are excluded from a father’s loving focus on his sleeping infant, who is
submerged in sky-coloured water; and in Lunch in the Meadow, a youth glances out over our shoulder through cool, distracted eyes, immersed in his own closely-observed moment in time. Among the ‘contemporary’ grouping, psychology overtakes nostalgia in Pensive, Wish You Were Here and Lime Light, all featuring male subjects. Their female counterparts in Lady and the Cherry Blossoms and Think of You display less emotionally-charged, ‘airbrushed’ perfection, their beauty conflated with that of the surrounding flowers. In the former, flawless features emerge from a flattened, decorative surface with overtones of anime and traditional Japanese prints, while in the latter, the subject’s hair is adjusted as her thoughts roam elsewhere. The female in White Room wears rock boots and stands incongruously on a chair. Her head, leaning back, is framed by a hanging plant, its tendrils echoing the necklace that reaches down, like her hand, towards a gaping mini skirt. As an undisguised erotic image, the whiteness of the room could allude to purity or transcendence, while the wafting curtain recalls Venus nudes, revealed by a drawn-back drape. This work’s complex iconography reflects a contradictory culture that tends to view women as either sexualised or feminist. It is interesting, then, that the smaller Pensive, hung opposite, depicts a male withdrawing from view, his gaze shielded by his hand. Wearing only a trench coat, he is naked and exposed, the composition cropped just shy of his genitals. The watery-eyed subject in the neighbouring Wish You Were Here cuts a grungy figure holding a toxic-pink amorphous skull with writhing forms that leap from his grasp, while an empty speech bubble underscores unspoken desolation and anger. Despite Berkery’s reluctance to read paintings like texts, there are notes in ‘Contemporary Paintings’ relating to love, sex, death, loss and gender representation – all themes reflective of humanity. It will be interesting to see, as he builds his oeuvre, if this artist’s clear talent and eclectic approach will continue to evolve these different pathways or coalesce in a unified, singular style. Susan Campbell is a final-year PhD candidate at the University of Dublin, Trinity College.
Shane Berkery, Lunch in the Meadow, 2017, oil on canvas; image courtesy the artist and Molesworth Gallery
Anthony Mackey ‘Angles: Perspective from the Margins’ Gallery of Modern Art, Waterford 8 – 26 March 2018
Anthony Mackey, Conversations with Cuddo (Drawing) (detail), 2018, graphite on paper
THE FRENCH NOVELIST, Gustave Flaubert,
an exponent of literary realism, once stated that “the artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere, but never see him”1. Anthony Mackey’s first solo exhibition accomplished this with consummate skill. His site-specific installation for GOMA employed various mediums and artistic methods to explore social issues of the marginalised community in which he lives and works. The mixed media installation – comprising drawings, printmaking and video – was presented across two gallery spaces, with local people being an integral element. No titles, details, pricelist, or descriptions of the artworks were offered; a wall text stating the artist’s name and the exhibition title provided the only acknowledgment of Mackey in the entire gallery. The first room contained four framed pencil sketches of men, composed through dark, bold and loosely-formed marks. Written under each portrait was the sitter’s first name, as well as the date and time. Time is a measurement of value, as there is only so much of it available to us, thus Mackey established a sense of worth for his subjects. Occupying the full length and height of two large walls were mosaic-style wooden tiles, in varying hues of blue, red and yellow. Screen-printed onto the tiles were faces and local buildings, including a young girl, a Garda, an adolescent boy and a corner shop, portrayed with a blueprint quality. The surfaces of these tiles were partially peeled back, rendering the wood fibres visible and offering a derelict quality. In the second room, four videos were installed on the wall, with more tiles forming frames around them. Taking up headphones, one heard a thickly accented voice, while watching footage of an anonymous hand drawing lines on paper. As a face was being formed – based on the portraits presented in the first space – the viewer heard a voiceover relaying the subject’s story. Tales of addiction, disillusion, unemployment and crime unfolded, highlighting the myriad issues often facing marginalised communities. Yet within these stories, there was shrewd commentary on various issues, such as: the manipulation of cheap labour by employment schemes; manual skills being lost to automation; and the economic impact of un-
employment within communities. These seemed like the collected narratives of a culture that has developed various survival skills to exist within a system that does little to acknowledge social inequality; they offered forthright, sincere and occasionally humorous reflections on the subcultures that pulse through this nation. The jewels of this exhibition were two drawings made on roughly torn paper that were pinned to the wall, as if floating in mid-air. The first depicted a male’s face and upper torso, while the second was a full-length sketch of two men. With no glass or frame creating a barrier between the viewer and the artwork, Mackey’s exquisite draughtsmanship was highly evident. These drawings contained no textual information about the subject, yet the range of emotion was so superbly executed that one felt as if their very souls would pour forth from the paper and drip down around one’s feet. They represented the dual ‘perspectives’ present within Mackey’s work – those of the socially-excluded or disenfranchised, and that of the strength in community, developed through familiarity, camaraderie and shared hardship. There are similarities between Mackey’s drawings and the work of American photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975). Each artist captures people in their everyday environments, chronicling how government policies affect communities within a given period or nation. Like Evans, Mackey works in a sphere reticent with notions of realism and the spectator’s role. While Evans conveyed the character of communities by photographing architecture, billboards and shop displays, Mackey brings forth internal and emotional qualities through his skilful drawing. Using the poetic potential of plain fact, Mackey has created a body of work in which the artist’s role is deeply felt. Susan Edwards is a writer based in County Wexford with a graduate degree in contemporary art theory. Notes 1 Gustave Flaubert, ‘Letter to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie’, 18 March 1857, in Francis Steegmuller, trans. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830 – 1857, Vol. 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1981) p. 230.
Critique
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Dorothy Smith ‘Land Marks’ RHA Gallery, Dublin 15 March – 22 April 2018
I MOVED HOUSE recently and, in the process,
became acutely aware of our perceived ownership of spaces. As I emptied one house of our family’s possessions, our hold on it began to drain. And as we began to fill the new house, our presence began forcing out the previous occupants. Before I turned the key of our old house for the last time, I was left in a space emptied of our things but was also conscious that some of our memories and traces would remain. This often-indiscernible line that exists between physical structures and our relationship to them is explored by Dorothy Smith in her show, ‘Land Marks’, at the RHA’s Ashford Gallery. Smith displays 21 drawings, all from the same body of work, but displayed in the gallery as two distinct subgroups, according to scale and technique. Ten larger pieces take on more mechanical and architectural qualities, with the artist using repetitive but varying pencil lines. Eleven smaller square pieces – given the prefix ‘Other Landscapes’ – see the artist adopt a more freeform approach. Smith’s choice of pencil anchors the work to architectural drawing. Devoid of people, skies and other non-architectural elements; civil engineering and architecture are the only visual languages, with road signs and barriers assuming the roles of textual signifiers. In these pieces, Smith confidently includes only what she wants to, leaving large sections of the paper blank. The drawings occupy the middle-horizon, leaving the edges free for contemplation, as she isolates structures from their context. This sense of architectural drawing is most prominent in the block of social housing and terraced housing presented in Encounter and The Gardens respectively. In each drawing, trees are depicted as 2D objects, akin to an architectural elevation. The looser lines used help to inject a level of fiction into the work’s narratives. These pieces also help highlight the conflicts between private and public spaces, and how this impacts on the management of space – the block housing is depicted in the process of closure. In ‘Other Landscapes’, we are presented with a contrasting approach. Here, Smith retains the entire surroundings of her items of intrigue, thus maintaining a faithful link to their context. As a result – and despite the ongoing lack of fig-
David Quinn ‘Paintings (Uillinn Series)’ Joanna Kidney ‘Metamurmuration’ Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre 3 March – 10 April 2018
urative representation – we observe a more humanly presence through the depiction of objects like postboxes, a tent and a sports stadium. The irony of describing scenes like these as more humanly (when compared to the larger manmade landscapes) is palpable. At times these 11 smaller works seem to act as follies to the larger works, existing in the show as satellite objects, rather than as independent entities. And while the intimacy of the Ashford Gallery helps gel the various works together, a larger space would have allowed them to breathe more. In the days after visiting Smith’s work, I experienced a heightened awareness of the changes occurring within my urban locality. Looking at the new Mary’s Mansions development on Sean MacDermott Street Lower – and how this postwar social housing is now being partly demolished for refurbishment – I see echoes of two of Smith’s drawings: the aforementioned Encounter, as well as Capital – More is Easy, which features the new Capital Dock construction on the quays. In this artwork, Smith shows the building sprouting up, scaffolding and supports in place, with the injection of capital fuelling its growth. Where we live is a huge part of our fabric. In recent decades, an increasing number of us are occupying non-rural landscapes, with the most recent census indicating that nearly two-thirds of Irish people now live in urban areas. These spaces are in constant states of construction and deconstruction as they go through their life-cycles. Urban landmarks evoke a sense of identity and, at times, a sense of permanence that can be misplaced. With this exhibition, Smith draws on these often-unconscious observations of the spaces we inhabit, analytically investigating them for us to enjoy.
Aidan Kelly Murphy is a writer and photographer based in Dublin, and Arts Editor of The Thin Air.
Dorothy Smith, Encounter, 2017, pencil on paper, 102 x 65 cm; image courtesy of the artist
Joanna Kidney, Metamurmuration (detail), 2015–2018, felt and microfilament, dimensions variable; photograph by Tomasz Madajczak
DAVID QUINN’S SHOW at Uillinn consists
of two artworks, Uillinn Series One to Nineteen (2018) and Zero (2018). The former consists of 19 small abstract works on paper and wood, composed of gesso, oil-based pencil and oil bar. All are uniform in size and are hung at eyelevel on two opposing walls of the James O’Driscoll Gallery. Their location is not best served by the open plan setting, as sound from the reception area spills into the gallery. This highlights a common dilemma within contemporary publicly-funded art galleries: demands for public accessibility, interactivity and inclusiveness can often lead to the art itself seeming like an afterthought. Quinn makes work that is in dialogue with the history of modernist painting. The end of painting was announced with the birth of photography and the era of mass-produced images and commodities. Quinn’s work engages with this dialogue at the ‘end of the end of art’. It is preoccupied with the self-evident fact of its own materiality. Certain repeated elements and gestures unify the series – signs of brush strokes, the grid (a recurring painterly parameter) and mark-making (resembling stitching) that is scoured into the surface. Several works appear to have a top layer of gesso that has then been etched with various patterns. From a distance, colours have a rusty quality, but close up, pinks, oranges and yellows emerge. Slightly larger and in a horizontal format, Zero is a monochromatic acrylic painting on plywood, with small circles indented into the surface. It has a translucent quality and is suggestive of snowscapes. The painting alludes to various art historical monochromes, from Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), to Ad Reinhardt’s ‘black’ or ‘ultimate’ paintings of the 1960s, of which he claimed: “I’m merely making the last paintings which anyone can make.”1 The inclusion of depth in the dimensions listed in the gallery handout expresses ambiguity around the object’s classification – is it a painting or a sculpture? The self-reflexive aspect of Quinn’s work is shared by Joanna Kidney’s installation, Metamurmuration, an element that is explicitly signalled by the title. It is a murmuration meditating on a murmuration. A murmuration is a
swarm – most often the amazing natural spectacles associated with starlings – a flocking, if you like, revealing the pun that flocking also denotes a kind of wallpaper, originally designed to simulate velvet cutouts on tapestries and wall hangings. Kidney’s threaded felt pieces trail the wall from ceiling to floor just outside the James O’ Driscoll Gallery, where they have to compete with an information stand, light switches and fire safety signage. As I moved from the corridor into the open space of Gallery II, Metamurmuration produced a momentary feeling of wonder. Seen from a distance against the back wall of the gallery, the installation appeared like a very large and beautiful abstract painting. The installation announces time spent making; many hands were involved in the assemblage of over 100,000 felt pieces. I initially perceived the felt as black, given associations with black swarms of birds, but in the light-filled upper gallery I saw that the materials were various shades of ochre, green, grey, lilac and red. Up close, the pieces move. This is not apparent from a distance, so perhaps my breath, my presence, caused the slight movement. Like Quinn’s objects of vacillating status – paintings that must withstand disappearing into design – Kidney’s installation also has to fight for its status within the gallery, though it does benefit from being situated in a slightly quieter space, where it is easier to spend time with the work. Both artists are concerned with scale, evident in their attempts to create site-specific installations from the arrangement of smaller parts. In some instances, the work is overwhelmed by the quotidian goings-on of the gallery, however at other times, it manages to stand its ground as art.
Catherine Harty is a member of the Cork Artists Collective and a director of The Guesthouse Project. Notes 1 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism, (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004) p398.
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
How is it Made?
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Dual Façades FRANCESCA BIONDI INTERVIEWS ASHLEY B. HOLMES ABOUT HER CURRENT BODY OF WORK.
Francesca Biondi: For over a decade, you have created numerous mixed media pieces featuring historical American houses, many of which are showcased in your recent exhibition, ‘Shadowpattern’, at The Island Arts Centre (14 March – 14 April). Where does your fascination with these buildings come from? Ashley B. Holmes: I was born near Boston, USA, and moved to Northern Ireland in 1999. I was homesick, and I thought a lot about my hometown in New England – about its history and architecture. My grandfather and great uncle were not architects, but they built their own houses and added rooms when they had children. Between them, they built houses in Colonial, Federal, Greek Revival and Queen Anne architectural styles. I made paintings of these houses and other homes in the area. After a visit to the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh, I tried to imagine how early settlers to America built the first fragile houses, to protect themselves from the harsh winters, the wolves and the Native Americans. The settlers must have felt desperate for a sense of safety and control over their environment. FB: Your use of wallpaper-style patterns offers unique representations of houses, with interiors and exteriors visible at the same time. How did pattern become such an important feature of your work? AH: I began to juxtapose architecture with the patterns of fabrics and wallpapers from New England, dating from the 1700 – 1800s, in the hope of divining some understanding of the early American mentality. In my opinion, cultural beliefs and desires must express themselves through decoration and architecture. I often look at the repetition of decorative motifs and architectural features, and one thing that I observe is a desire for control over the surrounding environment. Thus, many of the houses that I paint exist in a surreal, patterned space, rather than a natural landscape. I researched the history of early American architecture and aesthetics, but gradually this subject has become more intuitive than academic, with the work now speaking of internal things, using houses and patterns as starting points. I paint what I need to understand or process – like grief – and, in this way, my paintings teach me how to live. FB: Your repetition of architectural and decorative features creates a sense of order and safety, yet there is an underlying sense of fragility or threat within your paintings. The houses have a surreal, dream-like quality, looking like they could vanish at any moment. AH: It is true that my houses are not safe; they float, fly, drown and dissolve. The house depicted in the background of The Only Child (2014) has no interior – it is ephemeral and based on memory, with twins standing in the foreground. One girl is bright and substantial, smiling out at the world, while the other girl is depicted as a line drawing, placing a protective hand on her sister’s shoulder. She sees the horselike figure emerging from the pattern, while her sister is unaware of the danger. The characters were inspired, in part, by the poems of Anna Akhmatova and a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, titled The Yellow Wallpaper, published in 1892. I also admire the narratives suggested in the figurative paintings of Scottish artist Peter Doig. Characters and narratives come to me through the process of painting. My method involves cutting up acrylic transfers and drawings on paper and using them to create collages on canvas. I pour a layer of clear acrylic over them and paint on the surface with oils. FB: Poems and fictional narratives inspire your works. Do you also draw inspiration from your own emotions, experiences and internal arguments? AH: Yes, the painting, Everything Was Grey (2018), came
Ashley Homles, Everything Was Gray, 2018, mixed media on panel, 35 x 28 x 4 cm; image courtesy the artist
into my mind’s eye as a completed vision of a dull, obscured, monochromatic house in a simple landscape surrounded by ocean and sky. I could picture all the tones of grey perfectly. I had recently had a death in the family and was feeling like all the colour had been taken away from my world. I began making what I intended to be a very somber painting, but somehow it ended up bright and optimistic. I usually under-paint with bright colours and then put muted colours on the top. I poured several layers of acrylic medium and painted over the top layer with oils and added some glitter – I love bling. The house in the painting features a long shadow from an unknown source. The light source seems impossible, but I think it is also somehow believable. FB: A mirror image of a house appears in this painting, as well as several of your other works. Does this compositional device have a particular meaning? AH: I think of the dual house as having two faces, in the same way that the Roman god Janus has two faces – a face for the past and a face for the future. I studied Jungian psychology, and from this perspective, a dual house seems like an accurate representation of the mind to me. I started making those dual houses, with one façade looking out to the world, and the other one looking inward, into the subconscious. FB: The Weight that Drowned Him (2018) also features a dual house, surrounded by layers of patterned acrylic sheets. Is this a new fabrication technique for you? AH: This image depicts a drowning Northern Irish house and it is about a friend of mine from there who committed suicide. I wanted to understand why he made that choice. There are different layers of patterns on the acrylic sheets; one of birds, one of flowers and cats, and another of a cat who has caught a bird. I was thinking about patterns and how they influence us. In society, one attempts to fit into patterns of social etiquette, which can put pressure on a person. I was also considering Shahzia Sikander’s drawings of patterned margins. The cats look innocent with the roses, and the birds fly freely, but the truth is, cats kill birds because it is in their nature. When I made this painting, I was also experimenting
Ashley Homles, The Only Child (detail), 2014, mixed media on canvas, 20 x 25 x 4 cm; image courtesy the artist
with theatrical devices, creating depth by mounting several layers in a box frame. FB: You seem to draw on personal histories and stories when you create works. Are these narratives open to multiple interpretations? AH: Yes, I hope that people will bring their own experiences and thoughts to the work. I paint about the questions I have, and the experiences I am trying to understand, thus the work aims to be enigmatic and open to interpretation. Francesca Biondi is an independent curator and art consultant based in Belfast. francescabiondi.com
Ashley B. Holmes is a visual artist working from a studio in QSS, Belfast. ashleybholmes.com
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Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
How is it Made?
Installation view, 'Vox Materia', The Source Arts Centre; photograph by Lee Welch
Corporeal Matters TINA KINSELLA INTERVIEWS ALICE MAHER ABOUT HER TOURING EXHIBITION, ‘VOX MATERIA’.
Tina Kinsella: Your artistic practice consistently circles around themes of otherness, becoming, change, transformation, metamorphosis and shapeshifting, which are investigated through material processes and the capacities of the artist’s body. In your current exhibition, ‘Vox Materia’, how do your chosen materials – and the processes you have subjected these materials to – relate to this interrogation of the body, through the actualisation of what we might call ‘alchemical processes’? Alice Maher: As with my exhibition ‘Familiar’ in the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1995, ‘Vox Materia’ creates a dialogue between 2D and 3D forms of expression. Two distinct elements are brought together in this exhibition: 23 small bronze sculptural objects and a series of wood relief prints which are tinted with watercolour. The hand-sized sculptural objects were first made in wax, then dipped into molten wax to give a sleek, glossy surface, before being cast in bronze. The wood reliefs were first cut directly from plywood, then printed onto paper and overlaid with a watercolour wash. For the wood reliefs, I was photographed moving and contorting my own body. From those embodied movements came a series of pencil drawings which I scaled-up and cut out in silhouette from plywood – the commonest and cheapest type of wood that retains all its own ‘mistakes’. The knots and whorls are a material part of the plywood itself, and thus become part of the finished work. The sculptural objects also register movement as a material and embodied gesture, being pressed and squeezed through my fist as wax to begin with, before being dipped, cast and patinated in the foundry. In this way, both the sculptures and the prints went through many, layered artistic and corporeal processes, which were subject to a number of material and alchemical changes. TK: In previous works – such as Necklace of Tongues (2001) and Cassandra’s Necklace (2012) – you have undertaken a persistent
investigation into the absent, missing, or lost female voice. The title, ‘Vox Materia’, suggests both the materiality of the voice and the voice materialised, or rendered into material. How does this work relate to your previous investigation of the female voice? AM: In ‘Vox Materia’, the silenced female voice is materialised to create embodied forms of the missing sound: an expression of the recalcitrant transmutation that might take place from the body of a woman. Laid out like a 3D alphabet, the voice is pressed out, spat out, shat out, pushed out, bled out. The bronze forms are a solid, material expression of the missing or absent voice that arose from that initial pictorial recording of my own body. TK: The processes you describe rely on your body as medium and material to begin with. Yet, your body is absent from the finished works. Do these works therefore suggest an alternative to figurative art (based on an impossibility to represent the body) whilst making the absent body somewhat present? AM: The female body is so often appropriated and highly coded in representative art, becoming a screen onto which certain ideals and tropes of ‘otherness’ can be projected. The female figure in representative art is frequently devoid of subjective states, emotional states, and the senses, as well as the material processes of the body itself. I have an ongoing interest in alternative ways of making figurative art that is not about ‘making pictures’ of the body or representing the surface of the body, but which is about a bodily approach that addresses the interconnectedness between the interior and the exterior of the body. This is not just about making the interior of the body external, but about placing doubt over and disturbing, that divide between interior and exterior by expressing the connection between the body and the senses. The body considered in this way is a hybrid figure that can change into vegetal, animal or mineral states. In the works for ‘Vox Materia’, the use of wood brings the bodily form closer to a human/vegetal hybrid.
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
How is it Made?
Top: Alice Maher, Vox Hybrida 7, 2018, wood relief, hand tinted; photograph by Matt Gidney
Alice Maher at Parrallel Editions, Limerick; photograph by Suzanne O'Reilly
Bottom: Alice Maher, Vox Materia 3 (detail), 2018, patinated bronze, unique, 10 x 8 x 4 cm approx (sizes variable), 23 pieces; photograph by Michael McLaughlin
TK: The initial inspiration for ‘Vox Materia’ seems to have come from a series of graphite rubbings you made of a twelfth-century mermaid that you found carved into a wall at Kilcooley Abbey in County Tipperary. The mermaid is heavily represented in art and in mythology – sources that you constantly drawn on in your own work. Being somewhere between human and non-human, human and animal, land and sea, the mermaid is a feminine figure referencing those ideas of otherness, strangeness, becoming and transformation that your work addresses. I was thinking of mermaid-like mythical figures, such as the Sirens who sing to find the lost daughter of Demeter, Persephone, and was also reminded of the Selkie, or seal-girl in Celtic mythology. Do these figures play some part in your engagement with the mermaid carving for ‘Vox Materia’? AM: Yes! But don’t forget about Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, who had her tongue cut out – a violent theme which also underpins my 2001 work, Necklace of Tongues. The Little Mermaid gives up her voice for legs and human form. So, for these hybrid others, there is always something that is given up or taken away to become fully human. The Selkie gives up her seal skin. She is flayed, like Marsyas. There is a price to be paid for otherness. I did not go looking for the mermaid in Kilcooley Abbey, which is an area that is entirely inland, away from the sea. The mermaid was always there, within a landscape to which I am entirely connected, a Norman landscape, very near where I was born. The face of the mermaid at Kilcooley Abbey is grimacing. She is more like a Sheela-na-gig than any popular representation of a mermaid. She is accompanied by two beautiful fish – a salmon and a carp – and has fish fins of her own, and a huge manacle encircles her tail. She is positioned beside
a doorway on the way into the church, like the Sheela-nagigs that were often positioned at threshold points and passageways. These threshold spaces also relate to the themes of hybridity, subjectivity and female identity that I have worked with over years, as well as speaking to the realities of bodily boundaries and female bodily autonomy, which relates to my work with the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment in the Irish constitution. TK: You seem to take a lot of time researching your work whilst you are making it. This care also seems to inform the ways in which you create the final installation. What particular research inquiries have you undertaken for this work and how has this influenced the final installation? AM: Reading always plays an important role in the development of my work. In my practice, there is ongoing movement between reading, research, sketching and notetaking. These processes are not separate, but work together to inform each other, and I would be back and forth with the curators, Pluck Projects, on all of these readings. For ‘Vox Materia’ I have consulted a wide variety of texts, from feminist and psychoanalytic texts – such as Audre Lorde’s ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’; Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’; Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch; Julia Kristeva’s ‘Within the Microcosm of the ‘Talking Cure’’; and Griselda Pollock’s After-affects/After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum – to works on literature and folklore by writers like Gregory Darwin, Sanja Bahun-Radunovic, V. G. Julie Rajan and Cary A. Shay. I have always been interested in how things are framed, seen and experienced and this informs my installations. In ‘Becoming’, a retrospective held at IMMA in 2012, each
room was given special care for its display and associative properties. The objects in ‘Vox Materia’ are displayed in a specially-made cabinet and lit from the inside. You cannot see the objects when you first enter the gallery space, rather, you need to approach the cabinet and peer down into it, as you would look into a pool. TK: What other projects are you working on at the moment? AM: I am working on an experimental short film with the artist Aideen Barry, titled The Sixth Skin. This work is inspired by a medieval tapestry called La Dame et L’Icorne and it will be shown at the Cork Film Festival in November 2018. I am also working on the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment. At this year’s EVA International – currently showing across various venues in Limerick city – there is an information hub presenting the archives of this campaign, as well as an exhibition of our handmade silk banners. We also paraded the banners through the streets of Limerick during the launch of the biennale on 13 April. Tina Kinsella is Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies (Art) at IADT Dún Laoghaire. Alice Maher is a visual artist who works across media and disciplines. ‘Vox Materia’ continues at The Source Arts Centre, Thurles, until 5 May and will subsequently be presented at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, from 7 September to 24 November. Both exhibitions are curated by Pluck Projects – a curatorial platform by Sarah Kelleher and Rachel Warriner.
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Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Conference
Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Chelsea Manning, A Becoming Resemblance (installation view); photograph Adam Berry, transmediale
Face Value PÁDRAIG SPILLANE REPORTS FROM BERLIN’S TRANSMEDIALE FESTIVAL 2018.
TRANSMEDIALE FESTIVAL 2018: ‘Face Value’ took place
from 31 January – 4 February at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Bearing name changes over its thirty years, transmediale continues to examine and advance understandings regarding how societies absorb technologies. This 31st edition employed the familiar blunt phrase ‘face value’ – the apparent or supposed worth of something – to position multifaceted assessments of relationships with technologies and the influence they have on current cultural and political trajectories. As stated on the festival’s website, transmediale 2018 aimed to “take stock of current affairs, to recognise things for what they are before saying how they could be different”.1 The resolve was to look past the surface of the contemporary moment; to look at the abundance of players, agents and processes working to be recognised within the ‘face value’ of things; to examine where competing gains or attributes are networked and used for further advantage. Key questions asked by the festival included: Why might we think of truth as sitting on the surface of accepted things? Is this a naive presumption? Is truth always readily available? What is happening in contemporaneous destabilising shifts in the media?2 On the marks of coins throughout history, what happens at face value is not so much about truth, but an indication of the power struggles that wish to run through bodies and minds. As queried by Jussi Parikka in his opening remarks for the ‘Biased Futures’ panel discussion, what ideologies and rationales have been and are being further incorporated into life infrastructures? What ‘big data’ provocations need to be tackled? How is our habitual technology structured and used for data mining and data modeling predictions? What are the motivations and the possible consequences? It is worth noting that at the time of writing, Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based
political consulting firm, is embroiled in an unfolding news story regarding the alleged harvesting of personal data from over 50 million Facebook users, with the aim of influencing the outcome of the 2016 American presidential election. The strands of the festival – which included an exhibition, conference and video programme, as well as an accompanying journal and online archive – cast illuminations on different and recurrent subjects across the four-day-event and beyond. Over the past few years, we have been made aware of such issues, almost on a daily basis, including: the collection and financialisation of personal data through online devices; the regeneration and engineering of populism; and the disclosed processes that have shared in creating this present moment of unease, distrust and antagonism. On the first full day, there was a sense of deflation within the festival’s spaces, weighed down by despondency to these times and perhaps our own unrestrained involvement with ‘friendly power’.3 What was unmistakable was a searching for modes of resistance. I may be a self-projectionist here (as that is why I went) but judging by subsequent media reviews of the festival, there was a collective desire to find ways to counter the mood and shifts of the past few years. The exhibition programme ‘Territories of Complicity’ took “the free port as the referential starting point to explore how covert systems, technological infrastructures, and zones of exception shape our economic, socio-political realities.”4 It was secluded within a rectangular space, baring uniform black floors and walls, akin to stage flooring. This was a temporary adaptation, with a central corridor giving tight spaces for the installation of artworks either side. The exhibition space itself took on a permutation of containment – a visualisation with various contentions.
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Conference
Top: Goo Goo Muck Analytics and Sergey Schmidt at the opening ralley of transmediale 2018: 'Face Value'; photograph by Adam Berry, transmediale
Zach Blas, Contra-Internet, 2014–2018; photograph by Luca Girardini, transmediale
Bottom: Françoise Vergès delivering her keynote 'Politics of Forgetfulness'; photograph by Adam Berry, transmediale
Zach Blas’s ongoing project, ‘Contra-Internet’ (2014–18), was shown as part of the exhibition, addressing the impacts the internet continues to stimulate. Within the installation – comprising various elements and a projection of his film, Jubilee 2033 (2017) – was a one-off book titled The End of the Internet (As We know It) by Nootropix, the film’s contra-sexual, prophetic main character. As stated in the opening pages: “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of the late internet; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations”. It is an interesting thought experiment that as we hear more of the human impact on the world, we can imagine the world gone, but not this system that brings us information. This suggests that the impact and connections of the dominion of the internet on our lives may feel more real or linked to us than our relationships with the physical world. It also shows that what controls the internet can influence perspectives on contemporary reality. The scope of Blas’s work is to set up other possibilities regarding the internet, outside of something closed and deterministic that we have today, which is removed from possible historical queer, feminist and other emancipatory modes of online culture. Focusing on the rare earth element, europium, Lisa Rave’s film, Europium (2014), confronted “the transformation of a raw material into a monetary value”. This metallic element is extracted from the Bismarck Sea in Papua New Guinea. The florescent properties of europium are harnessed to create luminous flat screens for mobile phones, computer monitors and other pervasive displays. Europium operates by interlinking various types of imagery through anthropology photographs, commercial mock-ups and consumer advertising, creating a timeline that spans the nineteenth-century col-
onisation of Papua New Guinea, to the present-day sale of technological devices. Rave’s sophisticated connections between historical power struggles, spiritism, currency, material hoarding and cultural taboos, seemed effortlessness. The film successfully highlights the power relations occurring in plain sight, with regard to the devices we hold in our hands, as well as the constant upgrading of our everyday infrastructures. These ideas link with various other aspects of the transmediale programme, most explicitly with the keynote delivered by Françoise Vergès, entitled the ‘Politics of Forgetfulness’. Vergès asserted that we are conditioned to forget, in order to maintain current and future narratives of control. She spoke about the concealment of past slavery and bonded labour, and how these were the building blocks of the modern capitalist age. Referencing ‘Black Geographies’5, Vergès asserted that in order to develop fresh theories and ways of resistance, we need new histories that will allow us to reconsider space-making and temporal ways of being with each other, outside of current economic and political systems. The ‘guest presentation’, ‘A Becoming Resemblance’ by Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Chelsea Manning, was salient for this year’s festival. It comprised two works, Probably Chelsea (2016) and Spurious Memories (2007) and was presented in a light-filled space. Probably Chelsea was created using Manning’s DNA material – collected through consensual cheek swab samples and hair clippings during her incarceration – that was posted to Dewey-Hagborg. Using this shared biological information, the artist generated conceivable portraits via genomic identity construction technologies and 3D printing. At first sight, the resulting installation was unsettling; thirty detached faces with open-eyed static gazes were suspended roughly at head-height. However, an initial unease gave way to
wonder through 360-degree examination of the works. These heads (with the possibility of further multitudes) subvert the potential biases within such seemingly dystopian DNA profiling technologies, by playing with the very parameters and template biases in such technologies. From such processes, moments of commonality can be achieved, using genetics to show a level of mutuality that should be reinforced in these times. During a panel discussion called ‘Calculating Life’, Dewey-Hagborg spoke of her collaboration with Manning. She emphasised the installation as having ‘molecular solidarity’, aspiring to what Manning calls a “coalition”6 across identity categories, aimed at countering the animosity that such categorisation frequently produces. A basic techno-hack produced a moment of possibility, a hopeful proposal that was warmly welcomed in this year’s edition, where the overriding feeling was the recognition of deficit and a teasing apart of why this may be the case. Pádraig Spillane is a Cork-based visual artist who works with photography, collage and assemblage. Notes 1 2018.transmediale.de/program/text/face-value 2 The surface is a site of play and illusion, not where truth and falsity exist, as described by Faisal Devji in his essay, ‘Life on the Surface’, for the festival publication, archived at transmediale.de/content/life-on-the-surface 3 Byung-Chul Han ‘Smart Power’, Psychopolitics (Croydon: Verso, 2017) p.13-15. 4 2018.transmediale.de/program/text/territories-of-complicity 5 ‘Black Geographies’ offer ways of reexamining black lives and experiences. It considers how human relations are structured through spatial organisation, identity categories, exclusion, disparities and their opposition. 6 See Chelsea Manning’s interview in PAPER Magazine: papermag.com/ we-are-at-the-very-beginning-of-a-new-epoch-chelsea-manning-on-thelux-1427637348.html
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Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Conference
The Digital Museum LOGAN SISLEY REPORTS ON ‘THE NETWORKED CURATOR’, A RECENT DIGITAL LITERACY EVENT AT THE GETTY CENTER, LOS ANGELES.
giving curators the language to talk to technical teams, rather than turning curators into software programmers. There was an emphasis throughout on using open-source software and making data (and images) open and accessible. Sharing data enables collaboration, as does the use of shared vocabularies and ontologies. Linked open data facilitates aggregator sites that draw from different collections, assisting researchers and expanding potential audiences across geographical boundaries. Examples include Europeana, which has also developed a vocabulary for use and reproduction rights (europeana.eu). Another useful resource for open-access scholarship is Humanities Commons (hcommons.org). RESEARCH AND PUBLISHING TOOLS
Participants of the Networked Curator event at the Getty Centre, Los Angeles. Back row (L – R): Tamera Muente, Logan Sisley, Rose Bouthillier, Gilbert Vicario, Victoria Lyall, Staci Steinberger, Sharon Leon. Front row (L – R): Fabian Wolf, Andrew Eschelbacher, Shanice Bailey, Victoria Gerard, Danisha Baker-Whitaker, Austen Barron Bailly, Haley Berkman, Christa Clarke, Sheila Brennan; photograph by Judith Pineiro
IN FEBRUARY I attended ‘The Networked Curator’, a digital
literacy workshop for curators organised by the Association of Art Museum Curators Foundation and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM). Held at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, the event was led by Sheila Brennan and Sharon Leon, with Matthew Lincoln, and covered a wide range of strategies and tools for using digital technology in art museums.1 Participants came from a range of North American and European museums of differing scales and with a diverse range of collections. We worked from the premise that digital platforms should be treated as integral to realising a museum’s mission. If a platform is “a medium through which information or content is published or exchanged”2 (as asserted by Nancy Proctor, Director of the MuseWeb Foundation), then a museum can be thought of as an analogue platform. Digital tools can be employed in support of this – to inspire, engage, communicate or educate – and so can be used either effectively or inappropriately. Chad Coerver, the chief content officer at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, argues that digital strategies should not be considered distinct from other institutional policies, as we now “move continuously between virtual and physical spaces”.3 The potential for engagement with different audiences (both on-site and remotely) generated discussion on how to balance specialist knowledge held by curators with the contributions publics can make. While these questions are not exclusively related to digital media, they do offer engagement tools that may challenge the traditional role of the curator. An insightful tour of the exhibition, ‘Outcasts: Prejudice and Persecution in the Medieval World’, by Kristen Collins and Bryan Keene from the Getty’s Department of Manuscripts, provided a timely example of how digital tools can be employed in exhibition-making. ‘Outcasts’ examines attitudes towards marginalised and powerless figures in Medieval manuscripts. The curators carefully considered how viewing illuminated manuscripts from centuries past might provide an opportunity to examine marginalisation and scapegoating within current political discourse. They used the Getty’s blog to share research and to test ideas during the exhibition’s development (blogs.getty.edu/iris). While this helped gain support for their approach, encouraging dialogue online can also open the door to comments espousing the very prejudice that the exhibition attempts to counter, posing additional challenges for curators working digitally.
ACCESSING COLLECTIONS DATA
Museums are developing increasingly sophisticated ways to access collections information. For example, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia attempts to convey its founder’s ideas about light, line, colour and space by presenting Barnes's collection in ‘ensembles’, according to formal principles. Others have experimented with interfaces based on colour, texture or geography. While these experiments are not without their glitches and limitations, they do demonstrate the potential for providing multiple entry points. Mitchell Whitelaw from the University of Canberra has argued for more generous, humanistic interfaces.4 Generosity is an appealing guiding principle for the work of public art institutions in general, not solely in the digital realm. The desire to rethink online collections stems, in part, from the fact that conventional search functions don’t necessarily equate to access. They provide one way of finding information, but if you don’t know how to search or what terms to use, the results can be limited. Just as biases are inherent in the structure of institutions, they are also present in information architectures, notably in the algorithms on which searches are based. Looking for images using text-based searches can be limited, as they are dependent on description. Reverse Image Searching uses images rather than words, which has proved useful when searching for fragments or unidentified images. A dedicated service is Tin Eye, which reassuringly does not save or index uploaded images (tineye.com). Data visualisation provides another way of making collections information more accessible. One project using data from the Metropolitan Museum of Art created a visual representation of the museum’s evolution, highlighting the impact of historical excavation and acquisition agreements between the museum and various governments and institutions. We experimented with Palladio, a data visualisation tool developed at Stanford University. As spreadsheet data came to life, overlaid on maps and animated as networks, it was easy to be seduced. Aside from this initial allure, such tools can aid interpretation and can also highlight errors and omissions within data. OPENNESS AND TRANSPARENCY
The project at the Met was facilitated by making the museum’s data accessible on GitHub, a website used by developers to host open-source software projects. While some simple practical tools were explored in the workshop, the focus was on
‘The Networked Curator’ was co-organised by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, which develops digital research tools. The free reference management software, Zotero, is useful for collaborative research, because online groups and shared libraries can be created (zotero.org). Tropy is used for processing archival research (tropy.org). It is designed to help manage the mass of images generated by researchers who photograph archive and library material with digital cameras. We explored several online publishing tools that don’t require specialist technical knowledge. Omeka.net is one of three platforms developed by the RRCHNM that enable publication of collections and exhibitions. StoryMapJS is used to create place-based stories, annotating maps which can be embedded into other webpages (storymap.knightlab.com). Potential applications include walking tours or mapping resources connected to an exhibition. TimelineJS is used to create timelines (timeline.knightlab.com). An article by Steven Lubar on the history of timelines in museums provided food for thought on their application. Lubar argues that while timelines provide a clear overview, they are not without limitations and biases, privileging deterministic narratives of progress. DIGITAL PROJECT PLANNING
The use of maps or timelines, analogue or digital, are among the many decisions curators must make in developing exhibitions – decisions that affect relationships between, artists, objects and audiences. These questions are fundamental in digital project planning. Questions should be asked about who the project is for and how it will be used. The value of paper prototyping of digital projects was highlighted. Testing designs with potential users on paper can save time and money and result in stronger projects. The life-cycle of a project should be determined from the outset and digital content should be published with a support plan. If something is intended to be available for a brief period – perhaps the duration of an exhibition – a preservation strategy should be considered, and an archive copy created. This leads to wider questions of sustainability and preservation, and the long-term viability of digital material. These challenges are of broader concern to artists, curators and conservators in relation to digital artworks and documentation of event-based or performance art. The Library of Congress Recommended Formats Statement can offer technical guidance. Proprietary software formats should be avoided; documents should be saved as plain text (or as PDFs to retain formatting) and images should be saved as TIFFs. The 3-2-1 Backup Rule was encouraged: keep three copies of any important file; on two different media types; with one copy stored off-site. Storage too presents challenges, as the mass of digital material continues to grow, and we were reminded that the ‘cloud’ is not an immaterial entity, but dependant on data centres with an enormous appetite for energy. Logan Sisley is Exhibitions Curator at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. Notes 1 Sheila Brennan is Director of Strategic Initiatives and Acting Director of Public Projects at the RRCHNM and Associate Research Professor, Department of History and Art History at George Mason University; Sharon Leon is Associate Professor, Department of History at Michigan State University; Matthew Lincoln is Data Research Specialist at the Getty Research Institute. 2 Nancy Proctor, ‘Digital: Museum as Platform, Curator as Champion, in the Age of Social Media,’ Curator: The Museum Journal, 53 (1), January 2010, p.35-43. 3 Chad Coerver, ‘On Digital Content Strategy,’ SFMOMA. 4 Mitchell Whitelaw, ‘Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections,’ Digital Humanities Quarterly, 9 (1), 2015. 5 Steven Lubar, ‘Timelines in Exhibitions’, Curator: The Museum Journal, 56 (2), April 2013, p.169-88.
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Conference
Living Archives ANNE MULLEE REPORTS ON THE ART AND HERITAGE SEMINAR THAT TOOK PLACE IN KILDARE IN FEBRUARY.
COLLABORATION BETWEEN ARTISTS and cultural agen-
cies can facilitate increased dialogue between artists and the custodians of sites they work with. Organised by the Irish Walled Towns Network and Hollie Kearns of the Heritage Council, the seminar, ‘Art and Heritage: Exploring ways to work together’, examined projects that engage both heritage sites and communities, illustrating what can be achieved when understandings of heritage are expanded beyond historical relics. The seminar focused on projects where artists explored the more intangible aspects of a living cultural heritage. Hosted at Kildare town’s Solas Bhride Centre and Hermitages on 22 February, the assembled artists and cultural workers first heard from Charles Duggan, Dublin City Council’s Heritage Officer. Duggan described ‘Landing Place’, a visual art project taking place in the now-derelict Pigeon House Hotel on Dublin’s South Wall in 2013. Positioned at the entrance to Dublin Port, the Pigeon House Precinct once acted as a gateway to the city, both literally and figuratively. Following five months of research, ‘Landing Place’ concluded with a weekend-long public event. The four participating artists – Sven Anderson, Aoife Desmond, Fiona McDonald and Emma Nik Thomas – used sound, film and research to draw on the history of the Pigeon House as a sentinel, while activating the site as a temporary studio space. The project was commissioned by Dublin City Council Heritage Office and curated by Commonage – a curatorial partnership between Hollie Kearns and Rosie Lynch. Artist Deirdre O’Mahony offered insights into her research on rural heritage. O’Mahony explained how this long-running inquiry has informed projects in Ireland and across Europe, often challenging idealised notions of the pastoral. After outlining several previous projects – including the transformation of a former post office into a cultural hub, now known as X-PO in Kilnaboy, County Clare – she described her forthcoming project, developed during a recent residency at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading (UK). The museum holds the Ladybird Books archive of original illustrations which informed O’Mahony’s new film, to be screened at the Galway Arts Festival in 2019. The five-minute breaks between speakers were maximised with ‘micro-presentations’ from several artists. We heard from Brian Cregan, whose recent exhibition at the Riverbank Arts Centre in Newbridge presented pinhole photographs, inspired by his upbringing near the Curragh. As an artist who works with communities to explore notions of the rural, Gareth Kennedy briefly described his ongoing public art commission, Tir Saile, in Belmullet, for which he sourced bog oak from a nearby blanket bog. He described his approach as engaging with ‘experimental material cultures’, whereby traditional processes invariably inform final works. The Headford Lace Project was founded in 2016 as part of the Galway 2020 bid and has since grown from a community project into a broader platform for lace-making and research. Artist Selma Makela and the organisation’s chairperson, Ester Kiely, discussed the history of Headford lace and Makela’s work with Headford Girls National School to create ‘Nesting Lark’ – a project which saw bird boxes containing lace samples installed along New Street in Headford, where many of the town’s lace-makers traditionally plied their craft. Makela explained how the history of Headford Lace and its revival underpins this collaboration, which she plans to continue with new works. Following the morning’s presentations, attendees participated in one of four workshops, variously exploring funding opportunities, the legal obligations of heritage sites and the
Gareth Kennedy, The Origins and Uses of Round Towers, 2015; commissioned by Fingal Arts Office, Portrane; photograph by Brian Cregan
process of working with artists. I opted for the latter session – titled ‘Finding the harmonic soul of a project from the beginning’ – in which Ian Doyle led a discussion about heritage policy and the Heritage Council’s ambition to draft robust recommendations, in line with those of ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) and the Australian Burra Charter. Both policies champion multifaceted interpretations of heritage sites, with consideration given to historical, political, spiritual and artistic contexts. The conversation also touched on the Council of Europe’s ‘Faro Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society’ (2005), with inclusion and human rights being key tenets of contemporary approaches to heritage. The afternoon sessions explored ‘the artist as interlocutor’, with creative projects acting as catalysts for the revision of intangible cultural heritage. Both Sheena Malone and Michael Fortune presented works based on Irish folklore, using very different methodologies. As a curator and artist facilitator, Malone examined familiar stories from her native Kildare. Material from the ‘Schools’ Collection’ archive (collected in Irish schools in the 1930s) informed Malone’s exhibition, ‘Seven for a Story’, in Stockholm in 2016. Fortune advocates for accessibility and sharing within his practice and uses film and documentary to create a growing archive of folklore, stories and pisógs, including a monthly radio show and a series of DVDs focusing on his work with diverse rural communities. Aileen Lambert explores the vernacular through what she calls ‘songs of place’, focusing on choral works and solo singing in a traditional style. Lambert described her recent work, ‘The Kilmuckridge Song Project’ in Wexford, where local people contributed to a collection of regional songs and recitations, and subsequently performed them. Like Fortune, with whom she often collaborates, Lambert is interested in chronicling informal knowledge and histories. Kilkenny-based artist, Alan Counihan, recounted the evolution of his practice on his return to Ireland, after years of living in America. Uniting his interests in landscape, stone and land art, he created the 'Townlands Project', which grew from his realisation that each field in the Irish landscape is known to local people. This long-term project saw the creation of the ‘Kilkenny Field Name Recording Project’ and a publication, Townlands: A Habitation. Counihan also dis-
cussed the difficulty of positioning his work across art and heritage disciplines and the challenges of securing funding for such projects. ‘Making Contemporary Art in a Medieval Town’ was the focus of Michele Horrigan’s talk about her curatorial role at Askeaton Contemporary Arts, which she founded in her hometown of Askeaton, County Limerick. With no gallery or artist space, ACA’s activities are situated in the public realm, as process-based works or site-specific installations around the town. Horrigan discussed ‘The Hellfire Club’ (2012), a project by artists Diana Copperwhite, Stephen Brandes, Tom Fitzgerald, Sean Lynch and Louise Manifold, exploring the history of the eighteenth-century Baccanalian ‘club’, active at Askeaton’s Desmond Castle (now owned by the OPW). Drawing on this disreputable institution, the artists made new work to imagine the aftermath of a debauch: Louise Manifold made a film in a local pub; Diana Copperwhite constructed a reflective steel structure, allowing the audience to see themselves as part of the club’s fabric; and Stephen Brandes developed an impishly mis-informative plaque, playing with the speculative nature of history. The seminar concluded with reflections from Professor Gerry Kearns, who prompted us to question heritage as ‘content’ for art, and to be mindful of seeing art used as a “pragmatic service to heritage industry”. This prompted lively discussions around the difficulty artists face in carving out space for self-reflection while working with such material, highlighting the risk of artists being instrumentalised to merely ‘interpret’ heritage. The Art and Heritage seminar offered valuable opportunities to learn about artistic approaches in heritage contexts, only a few of which are detailed here. The full proceedings are available via video documentation on the Heritage Council’s YouTube channel.
Anne Mullee is an art writer and curator of the Courthouse Gallery and Studios in Ennistymon, County Clare.
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Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Legacy
Brian O’Doherty, Burial of Patrick Ireland, 2008, Irish Museum of Modern Art; photograph © Fionn McCann Photography
Archaic Language BRENDA MOORE-MCCANN OUTLINES THE EXHIBITIONS AND PROJECTS TAKING PLACE NATIONWIDE TO CELEBRATE THE DIVERSE ARTISTIC CAREER OF BRIAN O’DOHERTY.
FEW WOULD DISAGREE that Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland is
one of the most distinguished and significant artists of his generation to come out of Ireland onto the international stage in the last fifty years. Born in Ballaghaderreen, County Roscommon, his influence is felt on both sides of the Atlantic since his (voluntary) exile to New York in 1957. His extraordinary career, which spans many disciplines and uses different heteronyms1, has been puzzling to some and inspirational to others. As a pioneering conceptual artist, he produced such seminal works as the first conceptual portrait, Portrait of Duchamp (1966), as well as a double issue of the ground-breaking experimental magazine, Aspen 5+6 (1967), often cited as the first exhibition of conceptual art to dispense with the gallery. O’Doherty’s highly-influential series of critical essays, ‘Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space’ – first published in Artforum in 1976 – have been widely translated, forming an essential part of every art college library for decades. These essays were pivotal to the late twentieth century’s institutional critique for their exposure of the heretofore hidden economic, sociological and ideological factors underlying the exhibition and spectatorship of modernist art. In November 1972, as an emigrant’s response to Bloody Sunday in Derry the previous January, O’Doherty changed his artist name to Patrick Ireland at the ‘Irish Exhibition of Living Art’ in Dublin. Declaring he would hold the name until the British military presence was removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens restored their human rights, this became, chronologically, the first work of performance art in Ireland. After thirty-six years and with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, an effigy of Patrick Ireland (bearing a mask of O’Doherty’s face) was ritualistically buried following a three-day wake, in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in 2008. The headstone reads: “Patrick Ireland 1972– 2008” with the words “ONE, HERE, NOW” beneath, transcribed into the archaic Celtic language of Ogham.
This Ogham language, which he learned as a schoolboy in Ireland, was introduced to the world of conceptual art by O’Doherty in 1967 in a unique formulation that juxtaposed conceptualism, serialism and language. Remarkably, the structure of Ogham coincided with a growing interest in serialism at the time among conceptual artists like O’Doherty, Mel Bochner and Sol Lewitt. In Ogham, vowels and consonants are reduced to lines at intervals above, below and across a horizontal or vertical, similar to the arrangement of sets of notes in serial music. This was O’Doherty’s Rosetta Stone, which, over six decades, has produced an extraordinary array of Ogham drawings, sculptures, wall paintings, easel paintings and plays called ‘Structural Plays’. The artist George Segal once referred to O’Doherty/Ireland’s work as “the greatest oeuvre of drawings by any post-war American artist.” In these works, his verbal culture was reduced to single words with ontological undertones – ONE, HERE, NOW or, even further, to the vowels alone. As Patrick Ireland, O’Doherty’s linear drawings based on the language of Ogham, were taken into three-dimensional space with his signature series of ‘Rope Drawing’ installations, of which there have been 127 to date. Using space, colour and line, the Rope Drawings deftly overcame many of the criticisms so cogently outlined in Inside the White Cube. Crossing yet another boundary within the arts, O’Doherty became a novelist, his first novel, The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P, winning the Sagittarius Prize in 1993 and his second, The Deposition of Father McGreevy, being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2000. This year will be a significant one for this polymath artist, critic, medical doctor, writer, teacher, arts administrator and filmmaker as he reaches his ninetieth year, with long-overdue celebrations of his distinguished career taking place across Ireland. Events began in April at the Sirius Art Centre in the port town of Cobh in Cork, when a series of recently-restored wall paintings, titled ‘One, Here,
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Legacy
Brian O’Doherty, Rotating Vowels v, 2014, etching, 92 x 73.5 cm; edition of 40; image courtesy the artist and Stoney Road Press
Now: The Ogham Cycle’, was unveiled. Painted by Patrick Ireland when he was artist-in-residence at Sirius in 1996, they were subsequently donated by the artist to the Irish State, a gift accepted by President Mary Robinson. The paintings have lain hidden behind wallpaper in the central luminous space at Sirius until an ambitious restoration project was initiated by Sirius Director, Miranda Driscoll. Originally commissioned by Peter Murray, then Director of the Crawford Gallery, the wall paintings address Irish historical experience through language (Ogham, Irish and English). It is the richest and largest Ogham wall painting of the artist’s lengthy career, and one of the few permanent works in existence (two others are in Italy). The launch of this important restoration work coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of Sirius itself, and is accompanied by a year-long programme of talks, specially-commissioned artworks, musical compositions, dance pieces and performances responding to the work.2 A highlight at the opening was a public conversation between Brian O’Doherty and Alanna Heiss, founder of the PS1 gallery in New York (now MoMA PS1), on Saturday 21 April at the Sirius Art Centre. The same evening One, Here, Now: A Sonic Theatre – featuring newly commissioned music by Ann Cleare, developed in response to The Ogham Cycle – was performed at Sirius. The Glucksman at University College Cork is also showing work by O’Doherty/ Ireland, as part of the exhibition, ‘Double Take: Collection and Context’, which opened the same weekend. In addition, the theatre company, Gare St Lazare Ireland, presented Here All Night at the Everyman Theatre on Monday 23 April, a production that includes texts, songs, music and poems appearing in Samuel Beckett’s work. Visual elements taken from O’Doherty’s installation, Hello, Sam Redux – which was
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Conservator Don Knox at work on the restoration of Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland’s One, Here, Now, Sirius Arts Centre; image by Miranda Driscoll, Sirius Arts Centre
originally exhibited in Dublin Contemporary at the National Gallery in 2011 – have been successfully incorporated into the work since 2016. Other events in Cork include a celebration of the artist’s film career with a three-month screening series, titled ‘There is no thing here but much else’, that continues until 27 May at Crawford Art Gallery. Included is O’Doherty’s film Hopper’s Silence (1981), which won the Grand Prix at the Montreal International Festival of Films on Art in 1982. Also showing is the film Inverted Pyramid for Cyclops, in which O’Doherty playfully critiques Patrick Ireland’s Rope Drawing #94 installation at the Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, in 1990. Sé Merry Doyle’s film, Lament for Patrick Ireland (2008), was also screened on 6 April following a talk, titled ‘Re-Introducing Patrick Ireland: Selves, Semantics, Site-Lines’, by Christina Kennedy, Head of Collections at IMMA. In tandem with the tenth anniversary of the Burial of Patrick Ireland (1972–2008) – the subject of Merry Doyle’s film – an exhibition curated by Christina Kennedy opened at IMMA on 26 April, entitled ‘Brian O’Doherty: Language and Space’. The exhibition, which continues until 16 September, was developed in partnership with Stoney Road Press, with whom O’Doherty has had a long collaboration. Prominent among the works on display are drawings and works on paper, from the Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1966/2012) to the Rotating Vowels (2017) series. It is the latest evocation of a career-long interest in language, and the Ogham vowels in particular. The most recent series of Doherty’s prints with Stoney Road Press are the Structural Plays (1967–70/2018), performative language plays that were unique to the conceptual period. Also on display is video documentation of the piece, Vowel
Grid (1970), performed in 1998 in An Grianán Fort, County Donegal. The aforementioned multimedia work, Aspen 5+6, put together by O’Doherty in 1967 as a “conceptual issue”, is also included in the show at IMMA. The New Yorker magazine once described O’Doherty as “one of New York’s most treasured artist/intellectuals”. It looks as if he is about to reclaimed by his own country in what is already proving to be a fittingly broad and exciting programme of events that will extend into 2019: ‘There is no thing here but much else’, continues at Crawford Art Gallery until 27 May; ‘Double Take: Collection and Context’ runs at the Glucksman until 8 July; ‘Brian O’Doherty: Language and Space’ is showing at IMMA until 16 September; ‘ONE HERE NOW: The Brian O’Doherty / Patrick Ireland Project’ will be on view at Sirius Arts Centre until April 2019.
Brenda Moore-McCann is the author of O’Doherty’s first monograph, Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Between Categories, published in 2009. She is currently editing a book of selected letters from O’Doherty from the 1970s to the present day, which will be published by Smith and Brown, London, in September 2018. Notes 1 A heteronym differs from a pseudonym by creating a living biography attached to the assumed name or creative persona. Sigmund Bode, Mary Josephson and William Maginn are other heteronyms of Brian O’Doherty, first revealed in 2002 in the photographic multiple portrait, Five Identities. 2 siriusartcentre.ie/one-here-now
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Career Development
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
View of Alison Pilkington's notebook sketches
The Shape of Thought JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS ALISON PILKINGTON ABOUT THE METHODS AND INFLUENCES UNDERPINNING HER CURRENT BODY OF WORK.
JL: Your paintings seem to combine abstract, diagrammatic and figurative approaches. Are you conscious of having a particular aesthetic in mind, when you embark on a painting? AP: My aesthetic approach or painting style has evolved a lot over the last ten years or so, particularly since embarking on a practice-based PhD at NCAD, which I started in 2009 and completed in 2015. During this time, I made quite a deliberate break from gestural abstract painting. I think I felt the need to free myself up from a particular style of painting. It is ironic that gestural abstract painting – which is considered such a free and intuitive way of handling paint – was becoming restrictive and stifling for me. By making these deliberate changes, I felt I could explore the medium of painting as an active research process that could have a range of possible outcomes. I wanted to concentrate more on personal narratives and to explore how I might express these narratives through the medium of painting. I also wanted to explore figurative possibilities within the work. This was when I started exploring collage and maquettes as creative prompters for paintings. The work of certain artists, who paved the way for more fluid approaches to painting, have been greatly influential for me in this respect. These include German artist, Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997), and more contemporary artists such as New York-based abstract painter, Charline Von Heyl, and American painter, Amy Sillman. JL: Can you briefly outline your PhD inquiry and how this research may have altered your approaches to painting? AP: As anyone who has undertaken a doctorate will tell you, PhD research is a durational and complex journey. For me, there was a lot of discovery about the ‘why’ more than the
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Alison Pilkington, Wanderer, 2017, oil on canvas
‘how’ of painting – a reflective process that included a rigorous exploration of the medium’s relevance or validity as a research method. There are other avenues related to the research that I would now like to explore further, such as framing the creative process as a radical space for artistic agency – something that relates to my new body of work. JL: Perhaps you could outline some of your research methods? AP: My work tends to start with sketches, drawings and watercolour studies. I keep notes, thoughts and ideas in my journals. I love the freedom of drawing in sketchbooks and journals, and I tend to have two or three on the go at any one time. I try to make connections between what I am thinking and writing about in my journals and the images that emerge in the notebooks. Ultimately, the paintings are an extension of this investigative process – an approach that helps me to retain a looseness within my paintings. Rather than making direct painterly copies of my maquettes and collages, I use them as references that can be transformed through the process of painting. JL: Can you outline some of your art historical influences? AP: References to painting from different periods of art history frequently come through in my work. Sometimes these associations are made unconsciously, and it is only at some later stage that I might recognise their significance. However, there are some explicit and recurrent references to individual paintings that I consistently find compelling, curious or strange, both in terms of the artist’s approaches to composition, or to the work’s narrative content. A painting by Pietro Longhi, titled Clara the Rhinoceros (1751), has interested me
Career Development
Alison Pilkington, Nature, 2017, oil on canvas
for some time. I have made several paintings that express my fascination with its strangeness and my preoccupation with interpreting its meaning. This was something that I explored at length during my PhD research. Magritte is another important touchstone for my work, based on the artist’s lifelong exploration of painting as something ‘inherently mysterious’. Magritte’s oeuvre rendered everyday objects within strange, unfamiliar or uncanny scenes and this is something that has frequently inspired me. I also love paintings from the early seventeenth-century Baroque period, including work by Rembrandt, Velasquez, Rubens and Poussin. I try to recreate a bit of their drama in my paintings, through the use of strong light sources, experimentations with scale, and through the suggestion of underlying narratives. JL: Much of your work displays a preoccupation with depth of field. Can you discuss your paintings in terms of trompe l’oeil and your treatment of surfaces? AP: I think this grew out of my preoccupation with the specifics of the medium of painting. Such inquiries included an exploration of how the introduction of light often creates shadows and highlights. I’m also interested in how scale and composition can create visual tension within a painting or across an entire body of work. These are the more formal elements of composition, but I try to consider them in tandem with the narratives that that I am developing in the paintings. Making paper maquettes and collages using ‘flat colour’ challenged me to consider the types of brushwork and paint coverage that create impressions of ‘flatness’. Cutting through the paper and folding it back to reveal another layer of colour underneath works on a formal level, while also having symbolic meaning relating to the self – to concealing and
revealing parts of the self. It is me attempting to give shape to these thoughts. Much of this exploration started with the maquettes and thinking about the three-dimensional aspect of an object in space. Flaps, holes, tentacles and shadows occurring within these sculptural objects gradually evolved and were transformed through painting. JL: In your current solo exhibition, ‘How We Roam’, there is a sense that the characters in your paintings are embarking on curious or speculative journeys. Is this a metaphor for the creative process? AP: It is, yes. There are references to classical portraiture, landscape paintings and the sublime in art history. Many of my paintings depict figures in the wilderness, perhaps conquering the terrain, or having reached the summit of a mountain, as in the painting Wanderer. For me, the idea of a figure roaming the wilderness is undoubtedly a metaphor for the creative process, which can push an artist out of their comfort-zone. It can make us feel vulnerable, as we test out new things, but ultimately the process rewards and re-energises the human spirit. This simple motif is developed across this new series of paintings, which I hope prompts the viewer to ask questions about the work and to be curious.
Alison Pilkington is an artist who lives and works in Dublin. ‘How We Roam’ is currently showing at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon until 2 June and will subsequently be presented at the Ashford Gallery, RHA in September 2018. alisonpilkington.com
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Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Career Development
Making Waves RECENT GRADUATE GAVIN MCCREA DISCUSSES HIS PRACTICE AND FUTURE PLANS.
Gavin McCrea, Vapour 3, 2016, spray, acrylic, resin, fibre glass, oil on canvas; image courtesy the artist
Gavin McCrea, Untitled, 2017, polythene, handmade tape, Perspex, card, spray, oil and wood; IT Sligo; image courtesy the artist
ORIGINALLY FROM Sion Mills near Strabane in County Ty-
rone, I now live and work in Rossnowlagh, County Donegal. While growing up, I always felt a need to create. I enjoyed art in school, but the other subjects were never really of interest. I would spend my homework time drawing and making up surf posters, copying logos from surf magazines and generally avoiding doing coursework. In an attempt to keep me in education, my dad enrolled me on a diploma course in art and design in the North West Regional College in Derry. The college environment suited me a lot better than the formal grammar school system, and I completed the two-year course in 1997. From 1998 to 2003, I surfed as much as possible, supplementing my lifestyle by working in surf shops and giving surf lessons. It was during this time that I began exploring the notion of creating again. I started painting, spraying and repairing surfboards, as a way of establishing some form of a career. Collecting old broken surfboards that were beyond repair and recycling them into pieces of art, I developed a style of painting inspired by the sea. I was influenced by 1970s rock posters and California surf artists likes Rick Griffin and Jim Phillips, often creating illustrations of giant dream-like waves. In 2007, I had a group exhibition, titled ‘Horizons’, in Leitrim Design House. Over the next few years, I had numerous group shows around Ireland, developed posters and worked on commissioned pieces. Since 2011, I have been artist-in-residence for Sea Sessions – a surf and music festival in Bundoran, County Donegal – where I create various site-specific installations inspired by surfing and street art. Returning to education in 2014, I embraced my second chance at education by treating it as a full-time job, working in the studio and being open to everything. As a student at Sligo Institute of Technology, I had access to new resources and a wealth of knowledge through the lecturers in the Fine Art department. The art college environment helped to fuel what would prove to be my biggest artistic leap to date. In 2016, I graduated with a BA in Fine Art and my degree show
was longlisted for that year’s RDS Visual Art Award. I created a body of work driven by my love of the ocean, from which I derive so much pleasure. With this work, I began to broach environmental concerns through references to the global manufacturing of surfboards. Using construction materials such as resin and fibreglass, my process-based paintings incorporated tapes and stencilling, as well as techniques to create drips, smears and layering. These elements converged to evoke polluted seas around the world. In 2017, I graduated from Sligo IT with a first-class honours degree. The work included in my degree show was again longlisted for the RDS Visual Art Award and made it to the last 26. I was also awarded the inaugural Graduate Solo Show Award from Hyde Bridge Gallery in Sligo. My concerns now having shifted slightly, I had produced a body of paintings that attempted to immerse viewers within the two worlds that are of most interest to me: surfboard construction and the layering processes of painting. I combined large canvases and transparent substrates made from polythene and acetate. Gestural paint marks, drips and smears were juxtaposed with hard-edged geometric shapes, while the use of transparencies allowed viewers to observe the painting process from start to finish. Informed by abstract painters such as Dona Nelson and Dannielle Tegeder, the works began to populate the space itself – some leaning against the walls, others freestanding on the floor – acting as components of a bigger picture. Instead of simply producing individual paintings and hanging them in a gallery, I was actually using the space itself as a canvas, with the paintings becoming compositional elements within a bigger framework. Finding a suitable workspace after graduation proved difficult, as studios are hard to find in rural areas of the northwest. I eventually moved into a space in a former amusement arcade – just a stone’s throw from Rossnowlagh beach – which consists of two large rooms. While my application for an emerging artist studio residency in The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, was unsuccessful, I was subsequently
awarded a place on the gallery’s mentoring programme with the director, Sarah Searson. This mentoring programme aims to help new emerging artists to navigate the world of funding, residency applications and career development. I created a new body of work for my solo exhibition, ‘Innermost Limits’, at Hyde Bridge Gallery (23 January – 13 February), which was opened by the artist Ronnie Hughes. The title comes from a 1960s surf movie I used to watch incessantly as a boy, by pioneering surf cinematographer, George Greenough – one of the first filmmakers to capture the vantagepoints of surfers within waves. The work in the show was created utilising various transparent surfaces, including corrugate, PVC, polythene, glass, acrylic sheeting and acetate, combined with handmade tapes. The transparency of these surfaces, and the visibility and scale of the stretchers, gave the work a dynamic and immersive feel. Each overlay of paint offered multiple vantage points and varying ways to engage with the work from different angles. Throughout the space, the transparent painted surfaces acted as filters, veils and sometimes barriers, conceptually informed by childhood journeys through border checkpoints into the south of Ireland. I am interested in how I can create works that will further activate the gallery space, immersing the viewer in the painting process. Working on my own in a rural area, without the benefits of the college environment, and with little or no access to other practicing artists, I find that I have begun to trust my instincts and believe in the work more. With regards to what the future holds for my work, I am excited to see what comes down the line and will continue to apply for residencies and opportunities that will further develop my practice. In terms of postgraduate education, an MA is on the cards in the next year or two, but for now, I am working towards my next solo exhibition, which will take place in The Custom House Studios and Gallery at Westport, in early 2019. I look forward immensely to creating a new body of work for a different audience and venue and the challenges that might entail. I will continue to work intuitively and revel in the happy accidents that occur in the process.
Gavin McCrea is a visual artist who lives and works by the sea in Rossnowlagh County Donegal.
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
Public Art
Seafaring: Traces of a Transient Community SHEELAGH BRODERICK DISCUSSES HER PODCAST-BASED PROJECT, ‘PORT WALKS’, COMMISSIONED BY DUBLIN PORT AS PART OF THEIR 'PORT PERSPECTIVES' PUBLIC ART PROGRAMME.
WHAT IF YOU are a visual artist whose practice has become
dematerialised? What if the parameters within which you choose to make work excludes making more ‘stuff ’? What if you succeed in securing a commission to make new work? These are some of the questions I faced in 2017, when I was awarded a commission as part of Dublin Port’s public art programme, ‘Port Perspectives’. What followed was an intense period of research and making that I am still wondering about. ‘Port Walks’ is an online art project exploring contemporary seafaring through the medium of podcasts. It takes advantage of the close proximity of the Great South Wall to the shipping channel entering Dublin Port, and is curious about the lives of seafarers who pass so close to – and yet so distant from – those who walk, run, stroll and wander along the Great South Wall. When I began my research based at the Seafarer Centre, I had a set of expectations about how the work might proceed; but the actuality of meeting with the seafarers prompted responses that I had not anticipated. Simple conversations about working lives at sea revealed stories about personal sacrifice and the politics of globalisation. From the shore, many regard the sea as a site of romance and drama, yet the oceans have become sites of primary transit for globalised trade, delivering our desires in shipping containers. In Ireland, Dublin Port handles almost 50% of the Republic’s trade. Two thirds of all containerised traffic destined for Ireland arrives at Dublin Port. The seafarers who operate these vessels have been called an ‘invisible community’. Over 7,500 seafarers pass through Dublin Port each year from countries such as the Philippines, China, Russia, Ukraine and Indonesia, working rotations at sea of up to nine months (and sometimes more) with just a few months' shore-leave. The turnaround time for ships in the port has become shorter and shorter and can, in some cases, last only a matter of hours. The podcast format was chosen with the intention of developing traces of this transient community of seafarers, long after they had departed. In addition, podcasts made it possible to situate the work at the Great South Wall, while also making it available to listeners anywhere. There are three podcasts, loosely connected by the temporal themes of past, present and future. The first podcast, Containers Changed Everything, refers to the ways in which systems of intermodal transport distanced ports from the public eye, becoming a silent radical force that transformed, not only shipping and seafaring, but also global trade, production and consumption. The second podcast, Beyond The Horizon and Beneath The Surface, reflects on tensions existing between global and national interests. These tensions are exposed in the operation of flags of convenience, port state control measures and the oversight of seafarer training. Beneath the surface, seafarers struggle to stay close to family using the internet and must contend with the ship as both a work place and a home for long tours of duty. The third podcast, Sea Change, considers factors shaping the shipping industry that point towards autonomous ships as the next innovation
Sheelagh Broderick, Port Walks, 2017, digital montage, situated on the Great South Wall; image courtesy the artist
that will transform shipping. This sea change will have consequences for seafarers, shore workers and walkers alike. Commentators were later invited to reflect on the podcasts with newly commissioned texts. Dr Jackie Bourke observed: “walking affords an emplaced experience… the walks along the Great South Wall add an intensely sensory dimension, which creates a tangible connection between the listener and the seafarers. As you walk the Great South Wall listening to the description of their lives, you share a sense of the wind, the saltiness, the rolling waves and the precarious nature of life at sea.” Conversely, Professor Declan McGonagle attended to the ways in which the “the particular setting or ‘situation’ for this project has, in effect, been transformed into an ‘art space’, so art can happen anywhere. It has successfully raised questions about what is hidden and what is needed and is, therefore, a humane art.” Creating podcasts extended an invitation to the imagination of the listener, probing lives at sea, just as the Great South Wall itself acts as a physical probe, extending out almost 2 kilometers into Dublin Bay. Dr Bourke remarks: “The project weaves our everyday lives including the food we eat, the clothes we wear and all our creature comforts, into that rich tapestry of the life and industry of the port, and sheds light on the human lives behind it all. It is a very participatory piece of work, where you journey with the artist; exploring, questioning, challenging assumptions, and revealing some uneasy truths.” Research was carried out at the Seafarers Centre on Alexandra Road, with support from the Flying Angel Mission and Stella Maris. I visited ships entering the port with Dermot Desmond, Ireland’s only Ships’ Visitor. The Centre Manager, Noeleen Hogan, allowed me use of her office as a temporary studio in which to record interviews. Rev. Willie Black was always on hand to offer advice, based on 20 years of experience in developing the service, as was Rose Kearney of Stella Maris. The staff at Dublin Port were always helpful in
response to my frequent requests. Seafarers were assured anonymity throughout. An initial phase of research introduced me to the work of journalists Rose George and Ian Urbina, academic research from the Seafarers International Research Centre at the University of Cardiff, and the scholarly field of Critical Logistics, which, ironically, I first encountered in podcast form. I discovered that Critical Logistics is not about physically moving things; it’s a form of critique focusing on logistics as a mode for organising social and spatial life, while addressing the ways in which the movement of goods is foundational to contemporary global capitalism. Meeting and speaking with the seafarers exposed the human costs and dilemmas precipitated by these logistical arrangements. As Katherine Atkinson pointed out, “Port Walks reveals experiences and skills of the labour of migrant workers in a private, contained space to a public space. From the invisible to the visible, the labour of global citizens is intrinsic to the lives of local citizens.” Further developing this theme, McGonagle remarked: “In my view, the creation of empathy is, and always has been, what art within the human project, has been for.” ‘Port Walks’ resides in the transitory encounters between seafarers and listeners, persisting in an empathetic echoing beyond the realm of traditional sites of art production and reception. As stated by Dublin Port CEO, Eamonn O’Reilly, “Finish your walk and go home to your family. No midnight-watch for Great South Wall walkers.”
Sheelagh Broderick is an artist whose work is usually site-specific and generated collaboratively. The podcasts are available on iTunes, Soundcloud and Stitcher, as well as from the website. portwalks.ie.
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Public Art Roundup
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
ART OUTSIDE OF THE GALLERY
Chromatic Sounds
Tempus
Artist: Marisa Ferreira Title of work: Chromatic Sounds Site: St Raphael’s College, Loughrea Commissioning body: Department of Education and Skills, Per Cent for Art Scheme. Date advertised: 2016 Budget: €35,000 Commission type: Public Art under the Per Cent for Art Scheme Project Partners: St Raphael’s College, Rina Whyte (Project Manager/Curator)
Artist: Lynda Cronin Title of work: Tempus Site: Innovation Park and Ride, Ottawa, Canada Commissioning body: City of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Date sited: October 2017 Budget: $37,000.00 (CAD) Commission type: Public Art for OC Transpo, Park and Ride-Rapid Transit Project Partners: Fabrication: Black Truck Inc., McIntosh Perry Engineering, Ottawa Powder Coating.
Description: Artist Marisa Ferreira has created a public artwork on the façade of St Raphael College’s school building that aims to appreciate art in all its forms. The work, titled Chromatic Sounds, explores the ways in which art and music reflect the “glory of God”, whilst also acknowledging St Raphael’s history as a school initially founded by Clonfert Mercy Sisters. The artwork was developed in collaboration with the students of St Raphael’s College during a two-day workshop, when the children made drawings that expressed their synesthetic ability to “hear colour and see music”, connecting geometric shapes to the rhythms of the classical composers Maurice Ravel and Mozart. This process allowed the children to instill their own sense of identity and ownership in the piece. Ferreira then took the outputs of these workshops to finalise the design of the finished artwork.
Description: Tempus is a public artwork created by Irish-born artist Lynda Cronin. The piece is made up of several undulating colour petals that varying in scale, representing the movement of light from sunrise to sunset. The piece aims to remind the viewer of the essential role of nature in our daily rhythms, greeting passengers from dawn to dusk. Cronin's artwork is inspired by time, movement and sustainability. Nature is a constant and essential indicator of time with such predictability also echoing the reliability of Rapid Transit. The directional arrows within the petals mirror the navigational system of pick-up and drop-off points. The abstract organic feel of the piece reflects the sustainability of intelligent transit systems.
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Opportunities
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2018
GRANTS, AWARDS, OPEN CALLS, COMMISSIONS
Funding
Open Calls
OUTBURST QUEER ARTS FESTIVAL 2018
TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS 2018
Deadline 25 May, 5pm
Deadline 31 May
Email submissions@outburstarts.com
Email opencall@tulcafestival.com
Deadline 31 May
Email info@artsandhealth.ie
Web issuu.com/outburstarts
Web tulcafestival.com/2018-open-call
Web wexforddocumentaryfilmfestival.ie
Web artsandhealth.ie
LOCUST PROJECTS, MIAMI, USA
GENERATOR PROGRAMME, FRANCE
SUNNY ART PRIZE, LONDON
ARTIST IN THE COMMUNITY SCHEME
Outburst is Belfast’s annual festival of local and international queer art, performance, film and creative ideas. An open call for submissions is now open for the twelfth iteration of the festival, which is due to take place from 8 – 17 November 2018. The festival organisers are particularly interested in proposals that are “audacious, illuminating, unexpected and wildly entertaining”. They also are enthusiastic about ideas that get more LGBTQI+ people from all kinds of backgrounds involved in making performance, music, writing, film, visual art and in queer community. Outburst programmes work that: has a lesbian, gay, bi, trans/non binary, intersex or queer focus, with an emphasis on original storytelling, fresh approaches and challenging insights; is created or presented by a queer writer or performer; is of particular interest to people who are LGBTQI+; and/or offers a genuine opportunity for queer experiences and issues in all their complexities, contradictions and diversities. Outburst can cover artist/project fees, travel and accommodation, venue, marketing, tech costs and other essentials. For more information, visit the website.
As part of their 20th anniversary season, Locust Projects are organising an exhibition, titled '20/20', to celebrate the gallery’s roots in experimentation. Over a consecutive twenty-hour time span, twenty artists will each be provided a onehour temporary exhibition. The event, opening in September 2018, will take place in the Project Room at Locust Projects and be viewable from the garage door opening. The space will be divided into two 6’ x 6’ chambers allowing one artist to set up in a concealed environment while another is presenting their work. Each project will be unveiled on the hour and will be recorded on video. After the artist’s hour-long window is over, the projects will be reinstalled in the main gallery space. $500 production budget and $220 will be offered to artists as a W.A.G.E. fee for their artistic labour. For artists selected from 150 miles beyond Miami, $300 scholarship will be offered to offset travel and any other costs they may incur for their participation. This open call is only open to artists who have never exhibited at Locust Projects before. Full information on the open call and the application submission method can be found via the link below.
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts has announced details of its 2018 Open Call, to be curated by Linda Shevlin. The theme of the festival is ‘Syntonic State’, which takes dual cues from Galway’s merchant and mariner histories, and from the concept of nostalgia, with its cultural links to revelry and hedonism. The comfort we take in looking to the past – particularly during times of political and social crisis – forms the premise for multiple artistic responses. TULCA is curated through invited artistic participation and an Open Call process. The final selection of artworks will be based on thematic connection, artistic quality and feasibility. There is no submission fee. Artists must include in their application: a concise artist’s statement (max. 200 words); CV (max. two pages); five examples of existing work you feel are appropriate to the theme of the festival; and examples of previous work. Artists working in 3D are encouraged to apply. For full brief and application requirements visit the TULCA website. Applications should be submitted via the email below.
Deadline 31 May, Midnight EST
40mcube and EESAB have joined to propose a new programme for artists and curators, in partnership with the contemporary art network of Brittany including the contemporary art centers: La Criée (Rennes) and Passerelle (Brest), Frac Bretagne (Regional Contemporary Art Fund), Archives de la Critique D’Art (Rennes), Documents D’Artistes Bretagne, the company Self Signal, the law firm Avoxa, 02 and Le Chassis magazine. GENERATOR is a programme aimed at emerging and newly-established artists and curators. The programme selects four recent graduate artists each year and gives them the means to dedicate themselves to their practice for a seven-month period. GENERATOR aims to provide young artists and curators the crucial edge on critique, technique and competences developed in Brittany, which is a dynamic region composed of many contemporary art organisations dedicated to exhibitions, collections and research. The programme provides artists with: a stipend of €3,000 (including VAT); housing financial assistance under certain conditions; studio provision; critical support from professional partners; and professional work experience. For curators: a stipend of €1,000 (including VAT); housing proposal; networking opportunities; and a working space.
Email exhibitions@locustprojects.org Web locustprojects.submittable.com/submit
WEXFORD DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL
Submissions are now being accepted for the 6th Wexford Documentary Film Festival 2018. Organisers are looking for exciting, challenging and creative documentary films of any length. There is an open theme for this year’s festival, however the festival has a strong focus on films that highlight social, political and environmental issues. Once again, the festival presents the popular three-minute film challenge, which accepts film submissions in all genres including fiction, animation and documentary. Awards for submissions will be made in the following categories: Special Jury Award for Best Feature-length Documentary; Special Jury Award for Best Short Documentary; Best International Student film; Best Film – Three-Minute Film Challenge; Best Student Film – Three-Minute Film Challenge; Best Wexford Film – Three-Minute Film Challenge. Wexford Documentary Film Festival accepts entries via FilmFreeway.com, the world’s best online submission platform. FilmFreeway offers free HD online screeners, unlimited video storage, digital press kits, and more. For more information and application details visit the festival website.
DOCUMENTATION BURSARY
artsandhealth.ie invites applications for a €4,000 bursary to produce a short film, audio documentary or publication about an arts and health project. Applications are invited from artists working in healthcare settings, healthcare professionals, arts and health organisations/partnerships and others working in the field of arts and health. The documentation bursary aims to: showcase arts and health practice to a national audience; raise awareness around the impact of arts and health practice; and inspire artists, healthcare staff and service users involved in arts and health projects. Previous bursary winners have had their work screened at national film festivals, broadcast on RTÉ and shown at healthcare conferences. The 2018 artsandhealth.ie documentation bursary is funded by the HSE and the Arts Council.
Deadline 5 June, 5pm
The Sunny Art Prize is an international art competition hosted by Sunny Art Centre, London. This fine art award is a global platform, giving an opportunity to emerging and established artists to showcase their talents to a wider audience. They aim to display artistic and cultural diversity to the international art scenes of London, Beijing, Guangzhou and Macau. Sunny Art Award will promote an exchange in creativity between Western and Eastern cultures. Sunny Art Prize are looking for a variety of submissions, which can range from two-dimensional works such as paintings, drawings and photographs, to three-dimensional sculptures, ceramics and jewellery. A total cash fund of £6,000 is awarded to the art prizewinners. Please note: The entry fee for this competition is £25 for one artwork, £32 for two artworks. For more information and application details see the website below.
The scheme is open to artists from any of the following artform disciplines: architecture, circus, street art and spectacle, dance, film, literature (Irish and English language), music, opera, theatre, visual arts and traditional arts. The projects can take place in a diverse range of social and community contexts, e.g. arts and health; arts and cultural diversity; arts and older people; as well as with any communities of interest. The aim of the scheme is to encourage meaningful collaboration between communities of place and/or interest and artists. It is essential that consultation take place between the artist and the community group, so that both parties are involved in deciding on the nature of the project realisation. Group ownership of the art should be maintained at every stage. The project realisation may result in a variety of outcomes.
Deadline 25 June Deadline 20 June, 11:59pm
Email support@create-ireland.ie
Deadline 16 June
Email artprize@sunnyartcentre.co.uk
Telephone 01 473 6600
Web cipac.net/IMG/pdf/-510.pdf
Web sunnyartcentre.co.uk/artprize
Web create-ireland.ie
professional development Spring 2018
Northern Ireland
Republic of Ireland Dublin City
Roscommon
Belfast
Ards & North Down
SUSTAINING YOUR PRACTICE II
WRITING ABOUT YOUR WORK WITH JOANNE LAWS
VISUAL ARTISTS HELPDESK/ PROJECT CLINIC
VISUAL ARTISTS HELPDESK/ PROJECT CLINIC
PROJECT MANAGEMENT FOR THE VISUAL ARTS
Fermanagh & Lakelands
In association with the Bealtaine Festival & the RHA School Practical presentations & afternoon panel discussion Date/Time: 15 May. 10:30 – 16:30. Location: Royal Hibernian Academy Places/Cost: 50+. €5 refreshment. PEER CRITIQUE MIXED MEDIA WITH SEAMUS MCCORMACK
In partnership with the RHA School Practical presentations & afternoon panel discussion Date/Time: 15 Jun. 10:30 – 16:30. Location: Royal Hibernian Academy Places/Cost: 6. €100/60 (VAI members).
Kerry MENTORING, ARTIST TALK & PEER SHARING EVENTS FOR KERRY VISUAL ARTISTS
With visiting artist Marcus Cope, founder of the Marmite Prize for Painting Date/Time: 10 Aug. 11:00 – 13:00. Location: Killorglin, Co. Kerry. Places/ Cost: 20+. FREE.
Meath VAI ARTISTS' CAFE AND SHOW & TELL
In partnership with Solstice Arts Centre A professional practice talk and Show & Tell event Date/Time: 10 Aug. 11:00 – 13:00. Location: Solstice Arts Centre, Navan. Places/Cost: 20+. FREE.
ROI Bookings and Information To register a place or to find information on any of our upcoming Professional Development events in the Republic of Ireland, visit: visualartists.ie/professional-development-_
Development Partners
In partnership with Roscommon Arts Centre Date/Time: 11 May. 11:00 – 14:00. Location: Roscommon Arts Centre. Places/Cost: 10. €20/10 (VAI members). DOCUMENTING YOUR WORK WITH TIM DURHAM
In partnership with Roscommon Arts Centre Date/Time: 25 May. 10:00 – 16:45) Location: Roscommon Arts Centre. Places/Cost: 10. €20/10 (VAI members).
Sligo VISUAL ARTISTS CREATING AND CURATING SPACES
Date/Time: 13 Jun, 18 Jul, 15 Aug. 11:00 – 16:00. Location: Visual Artists Ireland [NI] Places/Cost: 6. £5/FREE (VAI Members)
Date/Time: 17 May, 13:00 – 17:00 & 18 May 10:00 – 15:00. Location: Visual Artists Ireland [NI] Places/Cost: 10. £35/£25 (VAI Members)
ARTIST'S SHOW & TELL
Date/Time: October. TBC. Location: TBC. Places/Cost: TBC.
SYMPOSIUM ON ARTIST-LED SPACES
Date/Time: May. TBC. Location: TBC. Places/Cost: TBC.
In association with Sligo Arts Service Date/Time: Autumn Date TBC. Location: Sligo. Places/Cost: 20+. €10/FREE (VAI members).
BELFAST OPEN STUDIOS: SPEED CURATING
Other events in planning for Spring/ Summer 2018 in Dublin and regionally: Marketing & Social Media for Visual Artists Artist 1-to-1 Clinics - Legal, Financial & Career Advice Child Protection Awareness Training Creative Proposals Tax & Self Employment Developing Opportunities for your Work Peer Critique - with the RHA Working with Digital Images Health & Safety for Visual Artists & Studio Groups
Other events in planning for Spring/ Summer 2018 in Belfast: AV and technical installation skills Writing proposals and applications Artform: Sculpture & Installation
NI Bookings and Information To register a place or to find information on any of our upcoming Professional Development events in Northern Ireland, visit: visualartists.org.uk/booking
Date/Time: 16 May. 11:00 – 16:00. Location: North Down Museum. Places/Cost: 6. £5/FREE (VAI members).
Date/Time: October. TBC. Location: TBC. Places/Cost: TBC.
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 Professional Development Training web page. We often repeat workshops when there is a strong demand for a topic.
VAI Show & Tell Events VAI will schedule Show & Tell events during 2018 and invites interested artists, groups, venues or partners to get in touch if interested in hosting a Show & Tell. E: monica@visualartists.ie
Artist & Tutors Panel Visual Artists Ireland has an ongoing open submission process for artists and arts professionals interested in being part of an available panel of tutors contributing to the VAI Professional Development Training Programme. For details go to our training registration page and click on Register for the PDT Artists’ Panel.
