AAEX (Art as Exchange). Bernhard Gaul, Member & Co-Founder. An Tain Arts Centre. Elaine Cronin, General Manager

An Táin Arts Centre

Elaine Cronin General Manager

Droichead Arts Centre

Collette Farrell Director

INSPIRED BY THE lore of the cultural giants of Louth, An Táin Arts Centre was established in 2014 as an independent, community-focussed cultural hub for the people of North Louth. Dundalk has a thriving arts presence and at An Táin Arts Centre we hope to amplify local programming and provide opportunities for artists in the North East.

An Táin Arts Centre is based in the Town Hall building in Dundalk, and receives grant funding from Louth County Council and the Arts Council of Ireland. We are grounded in community and collaborative practices in performance and visual arts contexts, and this ethos is reflected in our programming, encompassing theatre, film, music and visual arts from local, national and international practitioners. An Táin Arts Centre gives particular focus to local artists and performers, with additional support given to artists at the start of their career through our emerging artist and residency programmes.

An Táin Arts Centre’s Basement Gallery is programmed throughout the year with solo, group and community exhibitions. A series of talks, workshops and presentations runs concurrent to our exhibition programme. This has included visual art classes for children and adults, art history lectures, artist talks, artist workshops, gallery tours for school and further education groups, outdoor urban art interventions, and family craft workshops.

Since our launch and inaugural exhibition, Ciaran O’Sullivan’s ‘Double Back’ (2014), exhibited work has included Brian Hegarty’s ‘I’ll be your Mirror, The Album Sleeve Project’ (2015), Orla Barry’s ‘Otherworldly’ (2015), Paul Woods’ ‘Oradour, Elegy for a Town’ (2016), Els Boghart and Declan Kelly’s ‘On the Way / Onderweg’ (2016), Aileen Hamilton’s ‘Chain of Pulses’ (2017), Lisa Fingleton’s ‘Holding True Ground’ (2018), Leanne Mullen’s ‘Drawing Breath’ (2018), Michelle Rogers’ ‘Secret Places’ (2019), and Louth Craftmark’s ‘Glowing Works That Make the Heart Sing’ (2020). To date, there has been five exhibitions in our Emerging Artist series, Aoife Ward’s ‘Becoming’ (2014), Eimear Murphy and Eileen O’Sullivan’s ‘In Search of Place’ (2015), Neil Waters and Inga Kazokait’s ‘Hidden Dundalk’ (2017), Mark Bourke (2018), and El Harrington’s ‘A Far Place’ (2019). Proposals to exhibit work in the Basement Gallery are accepted on a rolling basis.

Our Summer residency programme is open to recent graduates and artists at the start of their career, looking to establish a collaborative practice in a community setting. The aim of the residency is to assist artists to research and develop new work and give them the time and space to develop their practice in a community setting. The recipients of the emerging artist residency have included Una Curley (2016), Roseann Berrill (2017), Sean McGuill (2018) and Rozzi Kennedy (2019). The deadline for each year’s residency is in the springtime.

Ceramic artist and facilitator Etaoin O’Reilly is An Táin Arts Centre’s artist-in-residence for 2020. Etaoin is a graduate of NCAD (2014), and of the Design and Crafts Council of Ireland’s Ceramics Skills and Design Course (2016). She is also a former artist-in-residence at NCAD (2016) and LSAD (2018). Etaoin hopes to explore the fading industry and skills of bone china factory workers, with an exhibition of new works planned for the month of September.

Many of our former artists in residence continue to work with us, including painter Rozzi Kennedy (our 2019 artist-in-residence), who has developed a collaborative outreach project with participants from the Birches Alzheimer Day Care Centre. Her project, ‘Memory Matters’, will focus on exploring the diverse lived experience of people with dementia, culminating in a presentation of new work that will tour to local venues. Rozzi is a member of the Ring of Gullion Handcrafts and Artists Collective, and works from her studio in South Armagh. She is a graduate of LSAD (2008), and is also a former artist-in-residence at The Cill Rialaig Project (2012).

An Táin Arts Centre hopes to be a place for the community to celebrate in creativity and enjoy the best of local and national art. These have been a difficult few months globally, and it continues to be an uncertain time for the arts in Ireland; but, even if the doors to our building are closed, our inboxes and phone lines are always open to conversation and collaboration.

antain.ie DROICHEAD ARTS CENTRE celebrates thirty years in 2020. It originally opened in Scholes Lane, in late 1989/early 1990 and subsequently moved to its current site, The Municipal Centre, Stockwell Street in 1994. With the assistance of European funding and fundraising, the arts centre purchased a Georgian Building, Barlow House, in 1999. Now a vibrant multidisciplinary centre in the heart of Drogheda town, Droichead Arts Centre provides an extensive curated arts programme, including theatre, music, film, visual arts, opera, dance, comedy, literature, family/children, outreach and festivals. Droichead supports the work and development of professional artists in the North East region and also collaborates with other festivals, partners and networks. The centre is housed over two buildings: Stockwell Street, which hosts a modern 169 seater theatre, a bright contemporary visual arts gallery and a café/bar; and Barlow House, a Georgian style townhouse, which hosts artists’ spaces and print studios.

One of Droichead’s core strategic aims is to support the development of professional artists by providing opportunities for partnership, showcasing work through productions and co-productions, solo and group exhibitions and new commissions. On top of this, we offer a limited number of open calls, as well as our ‘Artist in Association’ and ‘Company in Residence’ programmes, and our ‘First Solo Award’, which supports artists at a key point in their careers by offering them their first solo exhibition. We are committed to providing spaces for local artists, and our recent ‘Borrowed Ground’ project in 2019, was designed to draw attention to the lack of available workspaces for visual artists locally. We created eight purpose-built studios in our gallery, in which 11 artists worked for a period of eleven weeks. From this, we have also now instated a permanent ‘Borrowed Wall’ on the landing of our Stockwell Street venue, where one artist will be chosen to exhibit a single piece each month. Since 2019, we have dedicated one of our Barlow House rooms as a permanent space for artists to develop and create work, free of charge. Our print studio, The Yard, is also available to use for a nominal charge.

The beginning of 2020 featured ‘EMIT’ by Vivienne Byrne in our gallery. This new body of work sought to navigate the rhythms and tempos of time unfolding, with a series of mixed-media installations, video footage, projections and traditional drawing techniques. Future exhibitions include ‘Shifting Walls’, a group exhibition curated by Sinéad Smith, with five artists from the North-East region – Kate Beagan, Jo Cummins, Roisin Duffy, Jackie Hudson Lalor and Niamh O’Connor – reflecting different perspectives on mental health, addiction, menopause, adult children, empty nest syndrome, and aging parents. ‘Objects and Oscillations’ is a multi-medium exhibition by Brian Hegarty. Appropriation, minimalism and repetition are explored through installation, video, audio and collage. Elements such as vinyl records and cassettes are used in the exhibition as both subject matter and material. The exhibition also feature aspects from thirtythree-45, a crossover project in Hegarty’s practice, where he promotes underground music, runs a DIY music label, publishes photo zines and streams an internet radio station. The Louth Craftmark exhibition, ‘Vestige’, features selected contemporary craft, design and visual artworks. ‘Taisce

Vivienne Byrne, Reflections on Future Past, 2019; photograph by Jenny Matthews, courtesy of the artist and Droichead Arts Centre

Lu’, curated by Claire Halpin and supported by Louth County Council Arts Office, includes work from the council’s collection. John Moloney’s ‘In a Landscape’, curated by artist/curator Dorothy Smith, will hopefully begin next year’s programme. The exhibtion will take place inside and outside of the gallery space, accompanied by a booklet of postcards.

We also continue to work with the Borrowed Ground artist collective, to support them in their search for more permanent studio space in Drogheda. We have commissioned Dorothy Smith to develop a publication on the project, featuring drawings and photographs, exploring the experience and needs of the artists participating in the experimental residency. The findings will be situated in the wider context of studio availability, asserting what a supported and visible artists’ presence can contribute to the cultural economy of a town/region and the role that public and private bodies can play in this provision.

Outreach and engagement is an important part of our visual arts programme, and artists facilitate free workshops in our gallery and print studios for 2nd level students. Tours based on the Leaving Certificate gallery question, accompanied by a resource pack are also available for all exhibitions. With every exhibition, we now have a opening and closing event. Too many exhibitions close and disappear. At Droichead we want to celebrate each exhibition and each artist. Future plans include artists cafes for artists working in all disciplines, where artists can meet with each other and the arts centre, to explore further training and development needs. In all of this, COVID-19 hangs over us; everything I have outlined in this article will happen, but we don’t know when. The challenge now is how do we continue to support artists and arts workers? How do we encourage our audiences to come back and engage with us? I know one thing – the arts sector is resilient, but it also will need proper support from Government to move forward again.