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The Eviction

ADAM DOYLE DISCUSSES THE RATIONALE BEHIND HIS RECENT DIGITAL IMAGE AND ITS CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE.

THE INSPIRATION FOR my artwork, The Eviction (2021), came to me in the boxroom of my mother’s house in rural Wexford. I had recently returned from living in Clonmel for a spell, after leaving college. The optimism I had felt, on nights out with mates and during carefree student life, had totally diminished.

Growing up, I had imagined life as an ascending stair toward a house and a nuclear family. When I entered my mid-twenties, however, I saw how that was a luxury now completely out of reach for me and most of my peers. I wouldn’t get the opportunities my parents had; I wouldn’t be able to offer my kids any security – if I could even afford to have kids at all. Instead, my life would likely be entirely lived subordinate to landlords, outside of Ireland altogether or, God forbid, in the box room, thereby forgoing relationships, babies, and the trappings of adulthood to be financially stable.

Having been forced to leave the house I grew up in during my early teens – due to family circumstances rather than eviction – I had already attached monumental importance to the sanctity of a space that is truly one’s own. Though I wasn’t thrown out by bailiffs, the reality of seeing your possessions go into a skip, living in hotels, and watching family members struggle to keep the head through it all, still made a deep impression on me. Being a young enough man, I realised I still had relative mobility, even if security was out of the question. Unfortunately, some of my friends were not in the same position. When young children or family members in need of care become part of the equation, the lack of protection quickly becomes an existential threat.

And this existential threat becomes a hard reality for some; bailiffs do knock on people’s doors and the Gardaí have been documented standing by while people are thrown out onto the kerb. I drew on these truths and made what I believe to be an honest and obvious parallel to the reviled landlordism of the 1900s. The Eviction is a

scene depicting the sharpest, coldest end of the state’s failed housing policy, but the inspiration came from a desire to depict the utter travesty that Ireland has foisted upon its poor, its vulnerable, and its young. According to housing expert Rory Hearne 11,868 notices to quit were issued in Ireland last year. Between 1849 and 1854, there were 48,740 evictions, averaging 8,123 per year. At the current rate, modern Ireland is actually surpassing the rate of evictions during the famine era.

The process of making the piece itself was rather simple. I digitally super-imposed figures over a depopulated image of Daniel MacDonald’s painting, Eviction Scene (c.1850). I grabbed the Gardaí from media images of the Strokestown eviction and the North Frederick Street eviction, both events in 2018 that saw the establishment putting the interests of property, banks, and private landlords before people. There have since been calls for greater transparency on how An Garda Síochána police evictions, and their relationship with private security operators. Without rental protection, tenants in Ireland are simply a resource; become unprofitable or inconvenient and your landlord, with state backing, can throw you out.

For the most part, the recent reaction to the piece was a flurry of the exact same emotions I felt when creating it – a desire for change and a sense of betrayal by a country whose leaders only seem to offer condescending platitudes rather than workable solutions. The Eviction has received all the vitriol, condemnation, and faux outrage that one might expect from a money-hungry monster, finally catching a glimpse of itself in the mirror.

Adam Doyle’s prints of The Eviction are currently available for purchase, with 100% of profits being donated to a homeless charity.

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The Queeratorial

AOIFE BANKS OUTLINES THE RATIONALE UNDERPINNING HER LONG-RUNNING CURATORIAL PROJECT.

THE QUEERATORIAL BEGAN with the question: what is a queer space? What does it look like, or feel like? Is it material, emotional, intangible, invisible? What are the material components that make up a queer space? In a curated space, how can the addition, subtraction or movement of objects and bodies create a queerscape? Is a queer space one that deviates from the hegemonic cishet structures that we usually encounter in our day-to-day lives? Is it a space queered by the presence of bodies, seen as ‘other’, that inhabit it? Is it a moment of divergence, or deviance?

As a curator, these questions have accompanied me through years of research into the conceptual and material potential of both the queerscape and the phenomenology of the queer body in space. The queerscape, as I see it now, is an ever-fluxing exchange between Mind - Body - Space - Object. No one can exist without influence from the other. Just as our mind informs our bodily movement and positioning, the spaces we inhabit and the objects that surround us inform the ways in which our limbs move and rest. We are in constant communication with what surrounds us, and what surrounds us inevitably becomes a part of us.

As Sara Ahmed writes in Queer Phenomenology, orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance.1 Heteronormative and cisnormative hegemonies orient the queer mind and body, so as to make them queer, or ‘other’. As we navigate this world, we are constantly reminded of this otherness. It informs where we go and how we journey through. Deviating from the ‘straight’, our path through life is oriented by our queerness; it determines how we interact with the bodies we encounter and the spaces we inhabit. This otherness that has been imposed upon us informs our bodies as we find ourselves in uncomfortable positions – rigid, bent out of shape –in order to maintain our palatability in an often-intolerant world.

The question of how we are constantly directed or oriented throughout our lives leads us to question how we, as queer subjects, may reorient, or disrupt space. The impression of space upon a queer body constitutes the relations that occur between corporeal matter and architecture. Just as we are informed by the spaces that we inhabit, we can inform these spaces to form a queer spatiality or queerscape; a place of rest, a space where we are not ‘other’.

After years of thinking in and around the spatial relations of queer interactions, the flux of affect between bodies and space, and the journey of orientation and disorientation, I was met with a temporary respite to a never-ending stream of enquiry: the waypoint. A waypoint is a point or place on a route or line of travel – a stopping point. The waypoint allows us a moment of rest

from a constant state of flux.

By way of example, in the summer of 2021, I curated the group exhibition, ‘Shiftings’, at Kilkenny County Council Office, which included sculptures by Kian Benson Bailes. Kian’s practice is informed by investigations into rural Ireland, the aesthetic language associated with rural and regional art spaces, and queer communities. In this exhibition stood a sculpture of a púca – a mythical creature said to be a shapeshifter in Celtic mythology. The púca features consistently throughout Kian’s practice, appearing as ephemeral queer monuments in regional galleries. These waypoints are made in response to the feelings of uneasiness that often accompany one’s journey through an unknown or treacherous landscape and considers manmade land markers as navigational tools. The idea of a waypoint was, according to the artist, loosely based on video game experiences from the 1990s in which there were no options to ‘save progress’ unless one was at a ‘waypoint’. This instilled anxiety throughout the gameplay yet brought a sense of security when one reached the waypoint.

The respite this offers is familiar to many of us; a sense of relief that washes over us as we enter a familiar space of safety, in which our identity is acknowledged, and we are truly seen and accepted. The waypoints that I happened upon, during my journey as a young queer in a staunchly homophobic community, were largely embedded in visual culture; teasing pop music videos or obscure sapphic films were little monuments of queerdom that allowed me to exhale the tension I didn’t realise I was holding and just be. After spending so long analysing and hypothesising the affectual relations between the Mind - Body - Space - Object, perhaps it’s time to exhale, if just for a moment, and be. Perhaps this is what a queerscape could look like: a person sitting in any space at all, mind still, body slack, perfectly at ease.

Aoife Banks is Curator and Programming Coordinator at Luan Gallery.

1 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006)

Paintings on Your Pillow

CORNELIUS BROWNE REFLECTS ON HIS ANCESTRAL LANDSCAPE AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE IN HIS CHILDHOOD PAINTINGS.

ALTHOUGH SHE LIVED with us until her death in 1977, when I was eight years old, I never saw my grandmother stand or walk. My perch on the edge of her lumpy mattress often bore dirt from our waterlogged fields, but these marks sang in harmony with the bubbling plaster and black mould of the corner in which Maggie O’Donnell was slowly leaving the world. She and I – our lives briefly overlapping and often talking over each other – were the hopes and dreams of families who for untold generations had worked the clay of this narrow ambit of west Donegal. We belonged to smallholdings that relied on migratory labour – tattie-picking, building sites, and hospital cleaning in Scotland – as well as child labour, knitting, seashore foraging, domestic service, and hiring fairs to keep body and soul together. It was only with the confinement of grave illness that my grandmother finally knew rest.

On certain mornings, her longing for weather, fields and sea blossomed disturbingly. Her weathered skin and calloused hands and feet had been earned. Her wild hair was the whitest thing I had ever seen. I remember, vividly, the evening it dawned on me that under this mop was the knowledge of where every tree grew, every stream flowed, and every wildflower clump sprouted in a landscape I was just beginning to know. Together, we stepped into this mirror. Across years, as my parents tended my infant brother and sister, who arrived close together, I was my grandmother’s companion on word-walks as she relived her long life. Her intimacy with the coastline held a tenderness I thought odd for a place of such ferocious nature. We gazed at boats from the shore whose timbers had rotted away long before I was born. We clambered over drystone walls and headed into the hills, meeting storms that almost lifted us into the air in that dank bedroom.

My grandmother was trapped inside her mirror, but I could come and go freely.

My earliest expeditions, the year I started school, were taken to test the accuracy of her reflections. Always, I was delighted to find a hidden well in the right place, or a lane going where it had gone the night before in speech. However, something began to gnaw. Returning empty handed to Granny’s bedside felt inconsiderate. I had heard of souvenirs, tiny objects in which holidaymakers (a concept as alien to me as Martians) stored memories of trips to foreign lands. Soon, on my walks outside the mirror, I was making drawings and paintings of the trees, boats and sea that filled my grandmother’s yearning. At first, these were on the insides of cigarette packets using pencils and crayons. In no time, I was swiping Corn Flakes boxes before the cereal had been eaten and had got my hands on cheap watercolours. My grandmother loved birdsong, and could mimic a variety, so I tried to make my pictures sing like blackbirds or robins. Granny was often asleep when I came home with a souvenir, and I’d place the little painting on her pillow, for when she would wake.

The morning came when my grandmother’s bed was empty. I mirrored that emptiness for many months. I had fallen into the habit of painting, however, and it occurred naturally that I filled this void with industry. I had never seen a painting by anyone else, or even a reproduction, and didn’t know that art galleries, museums or artists existed. I had no name for the things I made out of boxes, wire, household paint, ashes, driftwood, hardboard, seeds, sand, gravel, wool and sticks. I just needed to use the odds and ends that nobody else wanted. Painting now in the same place where my grandmother lived her life, I still try to paint as a bird sings. As a child, I carried my paintings home out of love, and this is something that continues.

Cornelius Browne is a Donegal-based artist.

Cornelius Browne painting near his grandmother’s birthplace, 2022; photograph by Paula Corcoran, courtesy of the artist.

Why Latin American Art Matters Now

VERONICA SANCHEZ DISCUSSES THE EVOLVING IDENTITY AND GROWING CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE OF LATIN AMERICAN ART.

FOR YEARS THERE’S been a constant level of questioning around Latin American art. What is it? Can it truly be classified as art? Does it resonate with others on a global level? Critics suggest that what Latin American art generally portrays has hindered its ability to connect with a more international audience, since it has proven to consistently comment on provincial political and social issues of the moment. Where artists choose to portray themselves as political messengers, critics question whether this places them more as advocates or activists rather than artists. Others suggest that Latin American art poses a challenge to popular European twentieth-century notions of what art is. Furthermore, there are Pre-Columbian influences within Latin American art, which critics believe place the genre even further from the globalised art world.

Mayan, Olmec, and Aztec influences continued to reverberate among Latin American countries throughout the 1900s. Indigenismo, although a movement in literature, was also experienced in art and became known as Pictorial Indigenism. In very broad terms, indigenismo was an intellectual trend that denounced political and economic exploitations of Native American populations. However, it’s worth noting that not every country within Latin America had Pre-Columbian influences. For example, the work of Argentine artist Alejandro Xul Solar was highly influenced by Cubism, Spanish and Portuguese languages, and various intellectuals like Jorge Luis Borges. Despite being from Argentina, Solar’s work had very minimal Pre-Columbian influence, which is not wholly surprising since Argentina did not have a significant Indian civilization. Whereas Mexico and Peru, as the locations of the capital cities of the Aztec and Incan empires, are typically identified as the regions where Indigenismo flourished.

Diego Rivera, a renowned figure in Latin American art, drew many influences from Pre-Columbian art, which can be seen in various murals such as The Offering (192328). Artists like Francisco Goitia painted native Mexico by immersing himself in the Civil War; Tarsila do Amaral devoted herself to capturing the essence of Brazil in her paintings; while Saturnino Herrán created powerful paintings that depicted indigenous Mexicans with heroic force and dignity. Such artists uplifted the lives of their own people, but their art was so much more than political propaganda; it was a means of restoring narrative and giving people the strength to continue.

Latin American artists have consistently found themselves at the nexus of political and social upheaval, utilising the arts as a means of combating these issues. Over the course of history, Latin American countries have suffered greatly through conquests, monopolisations of land, civil wars,

rebellions, authoritarian regimes, uprisings, violence, drug epidemics, and more. Throughout Latin American history, artists had a civic responsibility to their people and country. Jamaican-born English writer and art critic, Edward Lucie-Smith, phrases it perfectly by saying: “Because political structures have failed at times to support a sense of national identity, Latin American audiences have consistently turned to literature and the visual arts to discover the real truths about themselves...”1 In times when government institutions and systems continued to fail, people found stability and liberation in art.

Now seems a particularly relevant moment for Latin American art to be experiencing a resurgence. There’s been a greater call from individuals, especially younger generations, to be re-connected with our roots, with nature and with ancestors, to build a new foundation from which future generations can benefit. As already outlined, a lot of historic Latin American art contains ‘ancestral’ and indigenismo influences; however, many contemporary artists are also responding to a global call for action when it comes to political systems, environmental issues, immigration laws, reproductive rights, policing, and so on. There’s a greater public need to support a sense of identity. As Latin American art infiltrates the contemporary art canon, it gives us spaces to feel seen and heard, and liberation from the conflicts surrounding us.

With the recent appointment of São Paulo-based curator, Adriano Pedrosa, as curator the International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale 2024 – the first Latin American to take on the prestigious role, indeed, the first curator based in the southern hemisphere – there are renewed aspirations for the rise of Latin American representation in the contemporary art world. In addition, The Whitney Museum recently appointed Marcela Guerrero as its first Latino Senior Curator, specialising in work by artists from Latin American and Caribbean regions such as Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. The messaging of Latin American art is now more relevant than ever! May it be a vibrant moment that galvanises recognition of the struggles of these countries, through art that empowers its people by honouring the culture.

Veronica Sanchez is a young artist and up-and-coming curator. She has a bachelor’s degree from New York University specialising in The Power of Art in Reclaiming the Narrative of Self for Latinos.

1 Edward Lucie-Smith, Latin American Art Since 1900 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2020) p. 10.

On Parallel Play

SARAH BROWNE OUTLINES HER RECENT FILM-MAKING PROJECT CO-CREATED WITH AUTISTIC YOUNG PEOPLE IN NORTH DUBLIN.

‘PARALLEL PLAY’ DESCRIBES a type of play between children where each child may be engaging in similar activity, but this play appears to be beside each other rather than quite between them – adjacent, together, but not usually making eye contact or talking that much. It is often described as a phase of learning that precedes more obviously social activity, such as associative and cooperative play. Within a neurotypical understanding of what kinds of play are most ‘developed’, and what kinds of socialising represent full maturity, parallel play that continues beyond early childhood can be seen as an inability to socialise ‘properly’; it can also be seen as a deficit in communication that might form part of a diagnosed disorder.

Echo’s Bones is a collaborative film-making project with autistic young people that takes ‘parallel play’ as a method of being and creating together but turns any pathological value judgement of such play insideout. Echo’s Bones borrows its title from a short story by Samuel Beckett, set in north county Dublin. The project – our parallel play – takes its title from the dead-end of this unpublished story and runs off with it in another direction, in another time. The young people who took part, aged 16-22, mainly did not know each other before responding to the call-out for participants. For some, it was their first chance to meet ‘people like us’. Over three months, the group of 13 met online and explored representations of autism in the media, developed writing and performance, created maps of our pandemic routes, and explored works by Samuel Beckett and disabled and neurodivergent artists, such as Jess Thom (Touretteshero), Sharif Persaud and Mel Baggs.

Through the development process, we identified a set of representational principles and proposals for our film: autism shouldn’t be the only interesting thing about a character (but it’s annoying not to acknowledge it at all); we could emphasise the capacity for sensory pleasure (rather than considering sensitivity only in terms of pain and overwhelm); we should emphasise complexity of experience and emotion; and we must avoid repeating boring, inaccurate and harmful stereotypes. The motivation that emerged was partly corrective, a way for the group to produce a picture that counters media and medical representations that do not align with their inner lives.

We referred back to early psychological utility films documenting autistic behaviour to create our own disclaimer: This is not a (neuro)typical film / intended for screening in sensory-friendly environments / characters appearing in the film are fictional / may or may not contain reference to echoes, bones, or Samuel Beckett. Our disclaimer is also an in-joke: in mainstream media, autistic people are typically shown as isolated or

alone, but there is autistic community too. This task – to create an autistic ensemble without a ‘main character’ – emerged as the central challenge to the artistic, social and political imaginary developed through the project.

Autism within Echo’s Bones is not treated as a deficit or a disorder, rather as a condition of sensitivity and divergence from what’s socially and cinematically measured as ‘normal’. As a condition, it is a way of asking what a neurodivergent cinema, and art, and world could be like. We can look to Beckett’s writing for a cast of characters who might be talking from dustbins or buried in a hill, moving with difficulty, recording themselves talking and then listening back, muttering over each other, gibbering into the dark, or unspeaking altogether –sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious to witness.

As a project, Echo’s Bones questions why such neurodivergent styles of language and communication may be socially rejected or subjected to psychiatric scrutiny in everyday situations but valued as artistically exciting and formally experimental in others. Echo’s Bones is also a way for me to enquire into what normate modes of communication, dialogue, speech – and ‘manners’– are baked into the artistic discourses of ‘socially-engaged practice’. I think of documentation of many people in a room, engaged in vigorous activity and discussion, and wonder about what forms of social engagement might be possible if that activity was unspoken, nonverbal, or out of sync: who are the implied authors, collaborators, and participants in such projects – and who is included or excluded as a result?

So far, Echo’s Bones has been screened at the Light House Cinema, Dublin, both as an initial community screening and a premiere public event at the conclusion of the commission. It’s also been presented by LUX Scotland as a sensory-friendly screening at Aberdeen Art Gallery, including a live-captioned talk and Q&A. This summer it will be screened at the Middletown Centre for Autism annual conference, where the young people will present it to an audience comprised mainly of professionals in education, psychology, and public policy. A book reflecting on the project, Echo’s Bones: a parallel play, will be published in 2023, featuring newly commissioned writing by Blindboyboatclub, Hamja Ahsan and Roy Claire Potter – further extending our method of parallel play to engage with other neurodivergent artists.

Echo’s Bones by Sarah Browne was commissioned by Fingal County Council through Infrastructure 2017-2021, funded by the Per Cent for Art Scheme.

Communicating Access

IARLAITH NI FHEORAIS APPLIES THE PRINCIPLES OF ACCESS TO THE CURATORIAL BRIEF FOR TULCA FESTIVAL 2023.

AS DISCUSSED IN my previous column, access is a conversation; it is an ongoing dialogue with oneself and those around you. Holding an open conversation around access is essential in creating a culture that ensures that our ever-changing needs are centred. In that sense, the foundation of access is the clear and consistent sharing of information, and that is where we should begin.

In considering clear and consistent communication, there are a number of access tools and practices that can be implemented to ensure that disabled, d/Deaf, and chronically ill people can access key information and make informed decisions. As with everything concerning access, there are adaptable tools that can be applied in a way that works for you, your project or organisation. For the recent TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2023 open call, I used suggestions on accessible events from the San Francisco-based disability justice centred, POC and queer performance art project, Sin Invalids.1

As curator of TULCA Festival 2023, I launched the open call in February, in consultation with festival producer, David Finn. This included a curatorial brief and practical information on how to make a submission, involving several versions that would make the open call more accessible. This included an Easy Read document in a downloadable PDF format, using a large and simple size 14 font, recognisable images, and short, jargon-free sentences. Easy Read documents are designed for people with intellectual and learning disabilities but are useful for people who find reading difficult, have memory issues, English isn’t their first language, or anyone who is in a rush. Easy Read documents are often used for open-calls, job descriptions, reports and meeting minutes.

We also included an audio version of the open call. This is a clear, well-paced audio recording of someone reading a document. You can either use professional recording equipment for a high-quality file, hire someone to make the recording, or if resources are limited, you can record it yourself using the Voice Memos app (or similar), which is what I did. We also included a downloadable Microsoft Word document of the standard text, which can be viewed by visually impaired people who use screen readers. Finally, we also provided an Irish version, translated by Seán Ó Muireagáin. Access is an intersectional practice and providing an Irish version honours the bilingual nature of County Galway. All of these versions are archived on the TULCA website (tulca.ie).

When communicating to audiences, another essential tool is an access statement, which includes access information relating to an event or venue, such as whether there are steps, wheelchair access, accessible bathrooms, quiet rooms, or public trans-

port connections. Events should also outline whether there will be a sign language interpreter, audio description, captioning or breaks; requests to wear a mask, or not wear perfume, can also be outlined in an access statement. It is equally important to communicate what isn’t accessible, such as steps or inaccessible bathrooms, so that audiences can make informed decisions about attending. An email that is checked regularly should be provided, and/or a phone number, where access enquiries can be made.

In terms of everyday communication, which often has the greatest impact on how we work, there are also some tools we can adopt. Firstly, it’s best to ask what method of communication is best for those you work with. Some people find emails inaccessible and might prefer texting, voice notes, or phone calls. Everyone works at different paces, so it’s important not to pressure people to reply urgently. If you prefer certain ways of communicating or take a certain amount of time to reply, you can state that in your email signature. Others may also need support when attending meetings, such as hiring a support worker to transcribe for them, hiring a sign language interpreter, or needing regular breaks.

I have shared a number of tools and practices we can use to make communication more accessible, but there are so many ways this can be done. Take stock of your own needs and centre that. Accessible communication is one of the most cost-effective methods of improving access in your practice or organisation. Equally, it is essential to ensure colleagues, artists, participants, and audiences are included and kept informed about your programme, opportunities and any access barriers they may face. Access is an act of solidarity, so I want to thank Jamila Prowse for showing the way in accessible communication, including the use of voice notes over email, and the importance of taking our time. I would also like to acknowledge the work and legacy of Sins Invalids and to thank Saverio Cantoni for sharing this information with me. Finally, I want to thank Róisín Power Hackett for her advice and support in relation to the TULCA open call.

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

@iarlaith_nifheorais

1 Sin Invalids suggestions on creating accessible events can found at: https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/ access-suggestions-for-a-public-event

Back to School

JENNIE RIDYARD OUTLINES HER EXPERIENCE OF CONTINUING EDUCATION IN ART AND DESIGN AT NCAD.

WHEN I WAS 13 and heading into high school, something dastardly happened: I was meant to be taking art, but I ended up in the German class. Scheisse! How did this mix-up even happen? Well, at my intended school, we were given a choice of two electives, though one had to be accounting. The remaining options included subjects like Latin, economics, and art, but I was lumped into German. Please, I begged my parents, please make them change me to art. No, said the parents – lovely people normally – you’re better off doing something useful, like German. This, I might add, was in South Africa in the 1980s; learning Zulu would have been a lot more useful. So would art! But no meant nein, and so German I attempted, and German I failed, while my dream of an art career became just another tiny personal tragedy.

“Maybe you can do art after school”, said my parents, “if your maths mark improves.” Instead, I became a rebel. I finished school with bad grace, got pregnant and became a waitress, and then the world’s worst bank employee – the accounting lessons hadn’t worked either. Finally I became a journalist and, in time, a published author. I’m not the only one with a similar story of naysayer parents, missed opportunities, or dreams that slipped away – but it’s never too late to have a happy childhood. I know this because I now study art part-time in the department of Continuing Education in Art and Design (CEAD) at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), where there are upwards of 500 mature students. We are office workers, homemakers, managers, doctors, IT specialists, teachers, architects, academics, salespeople, surfers, and more. We range in age from twenty-somethings to pensioners. We come from all over the world, a vibrant community united by one thing: a yearning to make art.

I moved to Ireland in 2004 with my Irish partner, but I knew next to no one, and I was quietly, achingly lonely. “Go to night school”, people said, so I did. I attended short courses in everything from literature and architecture to film studies and food science, but the one that stuck was art. I later signed up for The Drawing Challenge summer course at NCAD. It was a full week of daytime classes for both beginners and improvers, dedicated to drawing, which included working with pastels, charcoal, graphite, self-portraits, still life, and life drawing.

I loved it, so next I applied to CEAD’s one-year University Certificate in Drawing and Visual Investigation (DVI) – one of several part-time, accredited courses at NCAD which don’t require a portfolio. There are also certificates in Visual Arts Practice (VAP), each focusing on one area of study, such as painting, ceramics, textile design, sculpture, or even creative embroidery. DVI was busy but invigorating, involving two

nights a week of lectures and practicals and an essay in the first semester. I made friends and almost accidentally created a body of work. Thus emboldened and armed with the necessary portfolio, I applied for the Higher Diploma in Art – a two-year part-time programme. And God laughed, because 2020 happened; my dad died, my family in South Africa were unreachable, and the world imploded. Everyone’s Covid story is different, yet ultimately the same.

In September 2021, I accepted my deferred place on the Higher Diploma and threw myself into the most stimulating, exhausting, mind-bending two years of my life, alongside a group of people who I suspect will remain my friends forever. The Higher Diploma presupposes a certain level of skill in drawing – it’s not for beginners – but we have practical workshops in sculpture, film, photography, printmaking, and installation art, and modules in painting and multimedia too, under the guidance of a cast of inspiring tutors, all artists themselves. We’re encouraged to ‘play’ with materials to expand our practice. It’s a deeply supportive environment, with encouragement and constructive criticism coming from both classmates and tutors alike.

In addition, for the first half of each year, there are weekly online lectures on theories and concepts in critical cultures, where we learn about things like neoliberalism’s effect on the art world, the role of museums, political art, public art, and what art is now. We each had to submit an academic essay, and we lost ourselves in the heavenly warren that is the NCAD library. During the summer break, we even organised our own outings to exhibitions, followed by mandatory cake.

The Higher Diploma takes students who have progressed through the shorter certificate programmes and stretches them further, engages them deeper; we explore our developing interests and our emerging artistic identities. We are even planning and managing our own exhibition. Two years is nearly over now. Soon we’ll be submitting our final projects – mine’s a clay quilt –and then we will graduate. Best of all, we can then apply directly for admission to the final year of NCAD’s Bachelor of Arts degree.

Jennie Ridyard is a copywriter and columnist living in Rathmines who is currently studying on the part-time Higher Diploma in Art at NCAD. The CEAD annual graduate exhibition runs at NCAD from 30 June. ncad.ie

Making and Place

NOELLE ENGLISH REPORTS ON THE MAKE SYMPOSIUM 2023 AT MTU CRAWFORD COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN.

THE MAKE SYMPOSIUM on 4 March at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork brought together an exceptional line-up of guest speakers, including two eminent theorists – British anthropologist, Tim Ingold, and Finnish architect, Juhani Pallasmaa. The tension between their dual perspectives on embodiment, in particular, made this a really thought-provoking seminar.

Professor Ingold, with his characteristically probing and nuanced examinations, challenged the static idea of embodiment within the maker, and the implications of this idea for epistemologies of growth and making. The maker is not, he asserted, a sink to receive the sediment of previous generations, but a demiurge who launches new beginnings. Similarly, life is not an already-written prospectus, but rather a never-ending process of rewriting the prospectus itself. Capturing the centrality of trust within the making process, he compared it to the act of walking and trusting the floor ahead.

Ingold uses language and imagery in a purposeful way, and during the panel discussion he offered a fascinating lexicon of alternative terms to the ones commonly used in art theory and practice. For example, rather than the idea of tacit knowledge as an iceberg, he suggested the metaphor of an archipelago of islands through which knowledge flows. Similarly, rather than the term ‘embody’ he suggested ‘animacy’; he also offered the wonderful term ‘hapticality’ as an alternative to ‘relational’; and instead of ‘reflective practice’ he suggested ‘attunement’. Central to Professor Ingold’s rejection of embodiment was a rebuttal of ethnocentrism – defined as the evaluation of other cultures based on preconceptions framed by one’s own ethnicity – in which the static tower of incremental knowledge dismisses the indigenous experience.

Juhani Pallasmaa’s presentation on the embodied and empathic imagination considered architecture as part of the ‘flesh of the world’. Professor Pallasmaa embraced the term embodiment, but in the context of Paul Valéry’s description of the architect who tends to a building as though it were their own body. A gifted architect, according to Pallasmaa, feels and imagines the building, its countless interrelations and details, as if it were an extension of their own physicality and self. Describing a building as ‘the architect’s embrace’, he said that there are distinct sensual and erotic qualities in meaningful spatial and architectural experiences.

It was interesting to hear the architect examine the concept of aesthetic embodiment, which had just been dissected by Ingold, through a shift of emphasis towards the philosophical and poetic. Side by side, these presentations showed two distinguished thinkers challenging the con-

straints of inherited knowledge in fascinatingly divergent ways.

The panel of visual artists was led by sculptor Eilis O’Connell, whose impressive body of work – ranging from public art commissions to pieces created for exhibition at Eileen Gray’s modernist house in the south of France – confirm her legacy as an important Irish artist. Her slide show was complimented by understated yet moving descriptions of her relationship with each of the pieces, in particular, those now located in her garden in Wicklow. In the context of this international panel discussion, the uncomfortable truths that O’Connell told about the need for public works of sculpture to be maintained and respected, raised urgent questions about Irish society’s ability to value our relationship with urban and artistic environments.

The next presentation was delivered by acclaimed weaver and designer, Ismini Samanidou, whose work incorporates her Greek identity, while also responding to the international spaces in which her projects take place. Among these spaces was her residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut, during which she restored and created new work on Anni Albers’ looms, in keeping with the foundation’s aim to continue her artistic legacy.

The final speaker was the inimitable American visual artist, Ann Hamilton. Describing her process of creating works – such as her project for the Cortland Street subway station in New York City, or her walking meditation structure on the Mekong River in Laos – she often asks herself: “How to form when what you are responding to has no form? What is needed? Why am I here?” Her turn of phrase was exquisite in describing the feeling of being on a swing in her installation, the event of a thread at the Armory in New York, as “the heart falling open.”

Hamilton’s engagement with the rest of the panel was equally delicate and sensitive, as she highlighted the importance of the written word, both created and erased, in her work. She also likened trust within her process to a maker passing a needle through cloth, knowing where it will reappear, thereby threading her own thoughts back to those of the previous speakers with effortless sophistication.

Dr Noelle English is a witness writer based in Cork, where she is working with The People’s Land Trust across writing and social art practice. plot2220.ie

Keening Garden Door

DAY MAGEE CONSIDERS THE ANCIENT FUNERARY CUSTOM OF KEENING AS A PERFORMATIVE DEVICE.

Day Magee, Keening Garden Door 2019, performance as part of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2019, ‘Tactical Magic’, curated by Kerry Guinan; photograph by Jonathan Sammon, courtesy of the artist and TULCA Festival.

THIS IS HOW tears are made. The amygdala signals the hypothalamus. The autonomic nervous system triggers the sympathetic nervous system, inducing the body’s fightor-flight response. One’s heart rate increases. The openings between one’s vocal cords close, so as to prevent bodily secretions from entering the lungs. The hypothalamus then produces acetylcholine, a chemical bound to receptors in the brain, activating the lachrymal glands beneath the eyes.

A body that fulfils the conditions to be socialised as male is told that boys don’t cry. I remember my father, fatigued from a gruelling bus shift, coming home to some infraction on my part, admonishing me, then snapping “those aren’t tears – those are crocodile tears!” And that was that. At seven years old, I imagined a crocodile crying a river in which to lay in wait. I would go on to conceive of my tears at best as vulgar displays of emotional wealth, and at worst, crude tools of manipulation. I dared not reach for them again for many years.

On a cancer ward 19 years later, my father’s voice pushed through his failing lungs to randomly tell me: “when a child puts on a bee costume, it actually feels that it’s a bee… he’s going inside the bee, wearing the bee, and in some way is able to reproduce it… oh, I don’t know what I’m talking about…” The executive performativity of being – life insisting, persisting upon itself, to the point of becoming. Five days later, he was gone. My mother would read to me Psalm 56: “You have collected all my tears in your bottle.”

Death taught me how to cry again. I recorded, with his permission, my father’s last gurgling breaths, mediated through a ventilator. Weeks later, I fitted a makeshift butterfly net with shards of rose quartz, said to contain feminine energies. Playing his breaths from a nearby speaker, I spun the net through the sheer air, magnetising

the otherwise masculine soundwaves, so as to catch them – the sound of the past mediated through a speaker, through the present. Time is a language of its own. It communicates itself, consecutively punctuating events like sentences, its structures ever fluctuating in dynamic rhythm. It is a multitude of voices articulating and wavering accordingly, each a parallel world with its own distinct energetic signature. Upon absorbing the last of his voice, my own began to sound.

Keening was an Irish funerary practice – a term derived from the Gaeilge ag caoineadh, meaning to cry. It is a vocal lamentation of ecstatic grief in the form of wailing, improvised without time signature. Often unacquainted with the bereaved, the assigned keener acted as a proxy for mourners to express their grief vicariously. Historically, the role of the keener – to enact a literal performance of emotional labour – was assigned to female, matriarchal figures.

I performed four keenings over clear quartz, charging the crystals in a transubstantiating manner over time with the sonic reproductions of loss. The quartz, carried from one successive iteration of the work to the other, was kept in a glass bottle of water from which I would drink. Each performance reflected the first four stages of grief. In 2019, a little over a year after his death, I performed Keening Garden Door as part of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, ‘Tactical Magic’, curated by Kerry Guinan. The charged quartz were set like teeth into a door frame. The portal was rooted in a mixture of soils, including some from my father’s grave. I keened a fifth and final time, before passing through the Door into Acceptance.

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

Saying Hard Things

NEVA ELLIOTT DISCUSSES THE ROLE OF VULNERABILITY IN HER ART PRACTICE.

“LIVING AS MATERIAL” just reading your article now, it’s beautiful. Would love to hear more of your thoughts on this, especially “living with transparent vulnerability”. Day Magee messages me on Instagram after the last issue of VAN comes out, having read my column, which ran next to theirs.

Living with transparent vulnerability, saying the hard, uncomfortable, and unpretty things... There is a short answer; how you live when you have nothing left to lose. When the worst has already happened, you arrive at a place where people’s opinions don’t matter anymore. Discomfort doesn’t register when crowded out by its louder siblings: grief, sorrow, and heartbreak.

Of course, that’s a somewhat glib response. There will be people in your life whom you care enough about to not want to hurt through your actions, and there is always something to lose, even if self-preservation is not high on your agenda anymore. What are those feelings that hold us back? Shame, embarrassment, fear of failure or being different, othered, beyond what is acceptable, and of making others uncomfortable. One of the motivations in making my work is the hope of creating a connection that negates these creeping feelings for someone else. If I can say the hard thing, you don’t have to say it, and you will know that you are not alone. For me, this artmaking has been a kind of “living as material”, where working through grief became working.

In the making, there is only yourself; it wasn’t until standing in the gallery before my recent solo exhibition opened that I realised other people would actually see the work, read the words I had written, and know. I had exposed myself. The predicament is wanting to reach even one person to whom this may matter, but in doing so, also reaching those I know personally. My realisation that they would see and read the work came with wanting to protect them from what was an unsanitised expression of my struggle with grief and my guilt of not doing widowhood ‘right’. From the exhibition, some works revealing this vulnerability are:

Letters from men who are not my husband (2017-2022)

I asked him to write me a letter, he said he would, but did not get to write it. After he died, whenever a man was interested in me romantically or sexually, I asked him to write me a letter. I stopped asking when I fell in love again.

I am discomforted, a bad widow for being romantically and sexually attractive and attracted to others. I am guilty of still being here, with a functioning body, without the mark of widowhood so visible as to repel others. In my life, I acknowledged the existence of these feelings, confronting them through the act of asking. The later

artwork gave this process presence and put it high on the wall, just out of reach.

On honeymoon with a man who is not my husband (2018-19)

We planned a honeymoon to Italy, which we did not get to take, as our wedding was brought forward on the advice of palliative care, and he died 19 days later. On our second wedding anniversary, I went to Italy with another man and took photographs with him there.

I see my face in selfie after selfie from a mini-break in Rome, my companion blackened out. I see my eyes tired and weary, pushing myself to be here and do this. The night I arrived I caught a fever; hot, sleepless crying that could be put down to germs picked up on a Ryanair flight but felt like bodily insurrection, saying to go through this was too much to ask.

The Boxer (2020)

I met a man who was a kickboxer. Looking to feel something other than my emotional pain, I wanted him to hit me. When he would not, I asked him to write down why.

For me, it was not an opportunity to make a piece but to have a real, momentary release from emotional pain. Taken alone, this could be called self-harm by proxy; being an artist, I examined my behaviour and turned it into art. Here is my depth of grief, my uncomfortable, unpretty feelings and actions made manifest.

Putting work like this into the world is not without difficulty. Making a new piece recently and writing the accompanying note, my boyfriend (yes, I have one, bad widow) said, “Do you want to say so much, baby?” Protective of me, he suggested some edits. I accepted them, for now, as I further interrogate myself about what I’m doing and why, considering how it affects me and those around me.

Am I trying to create the connections to have something positive come from a traumatic experience? Is it survivor’s altruism, being brave and saying hard things for those who cannot? Is this my fighting back so as not to drown, or have I nothing left to lose except my practice, and so everything goes into making? Apologies, TMI.

Neva Elliott is a contemporary artist based in Dublin. Her solo exhibition ‘How to create a fallstreak’, a body of work around grief and healing, ran at The Linenhall Arts Centre from 21 January to 4 March.

nevaelliott.com