+353 (0)58 54061
St Carthage Hall Chapel Street, Lismore Co Waterford, P51 WV96 For opening times of each location: www.lismorecastlearts.ie
Lismore Castle Lismore Co Waterford, P51 F859
Virginia Overton: Untitled (Cascade) 28 May - 21 August 2022. Launch 28 May, 3.30pm The Mill
Caoimhe Kilfeather: Experiments in Living 28 May - 3 July 2022. Launch 28 May, 2pm St Carthage Hall
The Mill Lismore Co Waterford, P51 A2R5
girls girls girls 2 April - 30 October 2022 Lismore Castle Sophie Barber, Louise Bourgeois, Elene Chantladze, Petra Collins, Sian Costello, Dorothy Cross, Genieve Figgis, Iris Haeussler, Eimear Lynch & Domino Whisker, Roni Horn, Cassi Namoda, Sharna Osborne, Josiane M.H. Pozi, Cindy Sherman, Alina Szapocznikow, Harley Weir, Francesca Woodman, Luo Yang. Curated by Simone Rocha
Exhibitions across 3 locations:
SIANE M.H POZI • IRIS HAEUSSLER • HARLEY WEIR • GENIEVE FIGGIS
2ND APRIL—30TH OCTOBER 2022
Elene Chantladze, Untitled, Mixed media on stone, 7 x 5.6 x 2.5cms. Courtesy the artist and LC Queisser
ROSS • EIMEAR LYNCH & DOMINO WHISKER • ELENE CHANTLADZE • FRANCESCA WOODMAN •
Lismore Castle Arts Programme Spring 2022
The Visual Artists’ News Sheet
VAN Issue 3: May – June 2022
A Visual Artists Ireland Publication
Inside This Issue
LISMORE CASTLE ARTS ARTS & DISABILITY COLUMNS WITH OTHER MATTER RÓNÁN Ó RAGHALLAIGH
The Visual Artists' News Sheet May – June 2022 On The Cover Francesca Woodman, Self-portrait talking to Vince, Providence, Rhode Island, 1977, Gelatin silver estate print; Photograph courtesy The Woodman Family Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery, © Woodman Family Foundation / DACS, London. 5. 6. 8.
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Regional Focus: Longford Engage Longford. Rosie O’Hara, Director of Engage. Roads and Roundabouts. Marian Balfe, Visual Artist. Genius Loci. Ciara Tuite, Visual Artist. A Sociological Gaze. Amanda Jane Graham, Visual Artist. Hidden Heartlands. Emily Brennan, Visual Artist. Am I Inside or Outside? Gary Robinson, Visual Artist. Immersive Process. Siobhan Cox-Carlos, Visual Artist. Myth Memory. Gordon Farrell, Visual Artist.
Editor: Joanne Laws Production/Design: Thomas Pool News/Opportunities: Shelly McDonnell, Thomas Pool Proofreading: Paul Dunne
Career Development Performative Rituals. Barry McHugh interviews Rónán Ó Raghallaigh about his celtic and pagan influences. Critique Cover Image: Angela Gilmour, Cladoxylopsida Wattieza (first forests, 383 Ma, Gilboa, US), 2022, acrylic on FSC birch panel. ‘Shadow Forests’ at The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion, Cork Gerry Blake at Municipal Gallery, dlr Lexicon Aoife Shanahan at Golden Thread Gallery Conor McFeely at St Augustine’s Old Graveyard, Derry ‘With Other Matter, Part One’ at Roscommon Arts Centre Exhibition Profile Black Heart in Flight. Clare Scott reflects on ‘girls girls girls’ at Lismore Castle Arts. Consequences of Language. Rod Stoneman reflects on ‘Mountain Language’ at Galway Arts Centre. Stories Taking Shape. Darren Caffrey considers current exhibitions at VISUAL. On Steady Ground/Unsteady Ground. Jonathan Carroll interviews Cora Cummins and Saoirse Higgins about their show at dlr Lexicon.
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Residency Blessing, Curse, or Inoculation. Maria McKinney reflects on her Bolay Residency at Linenhall Arts Centre.
38. 39. Project Funders
Member Profile Like gold to airy thinness beat. Gillian Fitzpatrick and Justin Donnelly. Peeling the Stone. Orla O’Byrne. Le Segrete Vite. John Keating. A Good Impression. Maria Noonan-McDermott. Last Pages Opportunities. Grants, awards, open calls and commissions. VAI Lifelong Learning. Upcoming VAI helpdesks, cafés and webinars. Corporate Sponsors
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The Visual Artists' News Sheet:
Organisation Profile Black Church Turns Forty. Alan Crowley discusses the evolution of Black Church Print Studio.
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Principle Funders
Columns A Painter’s Sunrise. Cornelius Browne considers the benefits of early morning painting for a self-taught artist. One Last Thing. Introducing a column series by the Department of Ultimology. The Perils of Obedience. Evan Garza reflects on contemporary art and activism in Ireland. The Social Turn. Miguel Amado considers the civic agenda of art and its contributions to activism. The Practice of Looking. Róisín Power-Hackett considers how VTS could become more accessible for people with visual impairments. Anticipatory Time. Paul Roy considers the temporalities of maintaining an art practice whilst living with a long-term illness. Pathology of Energy. Iarlaith Ni Fheorais reflects on Arts & Disability Ireland’s Curated Space programme 2021. Body Without World. Day Magee reflects on chronic pain.
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First Pages News. The latest developments in the arts sector. Roundup. Exhibitions and events from the past two months.
Visual Artists Ireland: CEO/Director: Noel Kelly Office Manager: Bernadette Beecher Advocacy & Advice: Shelly McDonnell Membership & Special Projects: Siobhán Mooney Services Design & Delivery: Alf Desire News Provision: Thomas Pool Publications: Joanne Laws Accounts: Dina Mulchrone Board of Directors: Michael Corrigan (Chair), Michael Fitzpatrick, Richard Forrest, Paul Moore, Mary-Ruth Walsh, Cliodhna Ní Anluain (Secretary), Ben Readman, Gaby Smyth, Gina O’Kelly, Maeve Jennings, Deirdre O’Mahony. Republic of Ireland Office Visual Artists Ireland The Masonry 151, 156 Thomas Street Usher’s Island, Dublin 8 T: +353 (0)1 672 9488 E: info@visualartists.ie W: visualartists.ie Northern Ireland Office Visual Artists Ireland 109 Royal Avenue Belfast BT1 1FF T: +44 (0)28 958 70361 E: info@visualartists-ni.org W: visualartists-ni.org
Project Partners
International Memberships
ARC is a practical taught MA course delivered over 18 months. It is open to artists, curators, critics and those interested in connections between art and other fields.
Masters in Art and Research Collaboration (ARC)
ARC students develop and produce ambitious self-directed projects for presentation in a range of contexts, including gallery exhibitions. Classes take place at The LAB in Dublin city centre and students have full access to IADT campus production facilities, including studio access during the summer months. For further information and to apply visit iadt.ie Closing date for applications is 27th May 2022.
Image: Jamie Cross
Institute of Art, Design + Technology, Dún Laoghaire iadt.ie | @myIADT | maeve.connolly@iadt.ie
Image: Nic Flanagan
IMMA INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL 2022 20 June – 8 July
Art and Politics #4 Self-Determination
Yael Bartana / Jumana Manna / Banu Cennetoglu Ibrahim Mahama / Eimear Walshe / Hông-Ân Tru’o’ng Lydia Ourahmane / Stephen O’Neill / Laura McAtackney Padraig Regan / Jessica Zychowicz / Yael Vishnizki-Levi Sofiia Korotkevych / Lia Dostlieva / Olia Fedorova Valerie Karpan / Maryna Marinichenko A public programme of free online talks featuring national and international artists, theorists and educators. Book at imma.ie.
summerschool@imma.ie +353 1 612 9900 imma.ie
South East Technological University School of Art and Design, Wexford
Ri ssole BA Hons Art Degree Show Paul Quay, Wexford Opens 12 May 18:00 Runs to 27 May 2022
F. E . M C W I L L I A M G A L L E R Y & S T U D I O
The Soul of Matter Derick Smith 12 April – 19 June
Colin Davidson, Towards Cave Hill from Botanic, Belfast, oil on canvas, 2022
Colin Davidson Selected Paintings 1986-2022
LUAN GALLERY
Luan Gallery, Elliott Road, Athlone | www.luangallery.ie Tues – Sat 11 – 5pm Sun 12 – 5pm Tel: 090 090 6442154 info@luangallery.ie
11 June -10 September 2022 www.femcwilliam.com
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
News
THE LATEST FROM THE ARTS SECTOR Niamh McCann Wins Solas Nua’s Norman Houston Award Solas Nua in Washington, DC, is delighted project initiated by Solas Nua in Washto announce that Dublin-based visual art- ington, DC, dedicated to the memory of ist Niamh McCann has been selected for Norman Houston, the former Director of Solas Nua’s inaugural Norman Houston the Northern Ireland Bureau (NIB), in the Multi-disciplinary Commissioning Award. United States. The project includes the The Norman Houston Multi-disci- Norman Houston Short Film Award, preplinary Commissioning Award is a bi-an- sented to the best short film form Northnual commission for a new work open to ern Ireland at Solas Nua’s annual Capital artists working in any discipline on the Irish Film Festival and the Norman Housisland of Ireland. Part of the overall Nor- ton Multi-disciplinary Commissioning man Houston Project, this commission Award. will comprise of a six-week research and Niamh McCann is a Dublin based visual development residency at STABLE Arts artist. Her work is a considered, individuin Washington, DC, travel and accommo- al voice in contemporary Irish art, effortdation provided (in 2022), followed by a lessly correlating strands of three-dipresentation of the new work produced mensional work, painting/drawing and for the commission (in 2023). Expenses installation. McCann is represented by covered by the commission will include the Green on Red Gallery in Dublin. production costs and fees, travel, accommodation and shipping. The Norman Houston Project is a new
Basic Income for Artists Scheme Opens The Irish Government has launched a new and pioneering pilot scheme to support artists and creative arts workers. The Basic Income for the Arts pilot scheme will examine, over a three year period, the impact of a basic income on artists and creative arts workers. Payments of €325 per week will be made to 2,000 eligible artists and creative arts workers. The scheme opened for applications on 12 April and closes 12 May. The scheme was launched by the Taoiseach Micheál Martin TD, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar TD and the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin TD, at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin’s Temple Bar on 5 April. It is recognition, at Government level, of the important role of the arts in Irish society. It also places a value on the time spent developing a creative practice and producing art. The main objective of the scheme is to address the financial instability faced by many working in the arts. • The Basic Income for the Arts pilot scheme will run over a 3-year period (2022 – 2025). • The pilot scheme will be open to eligible artists and creative arts sector workers. It is important to note that that the Basic Income for the Arts is not a Universal Basic Income. • Grants to the value of €325 per week will be paid to successful participants. Payments will be made on a monthly basis. • These payments will be reckonable for the purposes of income tax. All successful participants will need to register with Revenue as self-employed. • The Department expects a high volume of applications and it will not be possible to provide funding to all eligible applicants. • Selection will be a non-competitive process. Once an applicant satisfies the eligibility criteria they will be included in an anonymised random sampling process to determine the pilot participants from the pool of eligible applicants for the BIA Pilot. • Funding for the scheme will allow for approximately 2,000 eligible applicants to participate in the pilot scheme. More information and application guidelines can be found at gov.ie/basicincomearts The portal will close at 1pm on Thursday 12 May. Applications may be made through the online application portal which will open on the 12th April. The portal and application form are
available in both English and Irish. The scheme will have two application streams as follows: • Stream 1: Practicing Artists and Creative Arts Workers. This covers all artists and creative arts workers who can demonstrate sufficient evidence of eligibility as set out below. • Stream 2: Recently trained applicants. This streams covers recently trained artists and creative arts workers who cannot yet demonstrate that they have engaged in a creative practice where their creative work makes a key contribution to the production, interpretation or exhibition of the arts. Please Note: As this is a research pilot, it is important to apply to the stream which best represents your practice currently. Further information regarding Stream 2: This stream is intended to research the impact of a basic income on those who have completed a relevant training course, graduate degree or an arts related apprenticeship who have not yet have engaged in a creative practice. A maximum of 200 places are available under this stream. Stream 1: Applicants will be asked to provide evidence of their eligibility as an artist or creative arts worker by uploading two pieces of evidence. There are three categories by which applicants can demonstrate their eligibility, and applicants must be able to provide two pieces of evidence from any of the following three categories: • Evidence of membership of a relevant resource or art form representative body. Please note this is not a requirement, and/ or; • Proof of income from your work as an artist or a creative arts worker, and/or; • Proof of active engagement within your creative field/art form. Stream 2: Applicants under Stream 2 must supply supporting evidence of having been trained in their chosen artform(s); for example by providing evidence of a qualification or training. CCI Paris Announces Award Recipients Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, has announced the recipients of 38 artist residencies, 10 language bursaries and 2 Old Library and Historical Archives Research Fellowships at CCI for 2022-2023. Artist Residencies 38 artists across the spectrum of artistic back-
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Niamh McCann, Vase #1, 2018, installation view at Hugh Lane Gallery; image courtesy of Solas Nua.
grounds will spend one month in Paris to develop their proposed projects, which range from the development of a socially-engaging documentary set in Montreuil, an area of Paris with a large Malian population, sometimes called Bamako-sur-Seine, to the creation of an origami-inspired temporary pavilion in the CCI; and from a collaboration exploring the Glass delusion, in which people feared that they were made of glass and likely to shatter into pieces, to a study of the catacombs, the ‘invisible city’ beneath Paris. CCI has partenered with 17 organisations for its artist residencies: Visual Artists Ireland (VAI), Music Network, Contemporary Music Centre (CMC), Moving on Music, Design & Crafts Council Ireland (DCCI), Graphic Studio Dublin, Literature Ireland, Poetry Ireland, Draoícht, Meath Arts Office, Ealaín na Gaeltachta, Cork County Arts Office, Corcadorca Thatre Company, Waterford Spraoi, Abbey Theatre, Cartoon Saloon and Tomi Ungerer Estate. The recepients of the Visual Arts & Design Residencies are: • Sinéad Bhreathnach-Cashell • Suzanne Clarke, DCCI • Mark Garry • Anna Macleod • Louise Manifold • Cian McConn, VAI • Niamh McGuinne, Graphics Studio Dublin • Celina Muldoon • Sharon Murphy • Alex Pentek, Cork County Arts Office VAI member Cian McConn completed his MFA at the Royal College of Art, London in 2012. He is a visual artist and performer whose multimedia practice embraces image-making, performance and collaboration. Thematically he works with concepts of identity, persona and the performance of the self in relation to gender and community. His current body of work is related to queer representation and modes of survival. Recent exhibitions and performances include ‘ON EDGE: Living in an Age of Anxiety’, Science Gallery London, ‘I AS IN US’ with Vivienne Griffin (IRL), MNAC, Bucharest, ‘AUGUSTO’ with Alessandro Sciarroni (IT) and ‘no sense left to be shared’ with Nicole Bachmann (CH) Kim McAleese appointed as Director of Edinburgh Art Festival The UK’s largest annual festival of visual art is
delighted to announce Kim McAleese as its new Director. She takes up the position ahead of the 18th edition of the festival, which returns from Thursday 28 July to Sunday 28 August 2022. Kim McAleese is a curator originally from Belfast, who is co-founder of the Household collective and a previous co-director of Catalyst Arts. Most recently, Kim was Programme Director of Grand Union in Birmingham. Founded in 2004, Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) is the platform for the visual arts at the heart of Edinburgh’s August festivals, bringing together the capital’s leading galleries, museums, production facilities and artist-run spaces in a city-wide celebration of the very best in visual art. Each year the festival comprises newly commissioned artworks by leading and emerging artists, alongside a rich programme of exhibitions curated and presented by partners across the city. As Edinburgh celebrates 75 years since the foundation of its August festivals, McAleese joins Edinburgh Art Festival to deliver an ambitious, compelling and strategic vision for its future growth and success. Kim McAleese said: “Scotland has always been close to my heart, and I cannot wait to begin working there. Over the past few years, I have learned so much from artists working and living there, so really hope to continue these relationships and have them flourish. Collaborative working and co-commissioning has been an essential part of how I operate and see the world, and really hope to bring that to the festival.” Iain McFadden, Chair of Edinburgh Art Festival, said: “The EAF Board of Trustees are delighted to welcome Kim as the new Director, joining the festival at an important moment of development. Kim’s career has demonstrated her outstanding commitment to artists, audiences and partnership working, and the Board and I am confident she will bring the same dynamic vision and collaborative leadership to EAF.” Edinburgh Art Festival is a registered charity supported by Creative Scotland and the City of Edinburgh Council.
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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Exhibition Roundup
Dublin
Belfast
Hang Tough Hang Tough presented ‘Memories of the loud silence’, a collection of oil paintings from their Open Call 2021 winner, Mirza Cizmic. Mirza Cizmic was born in 1985 in Bosnia and Herzegovina and resides in Helsinki. His artistic practice is a way of interpreting the world, not through the eyes of a painter, but through his personal experiences and instincts which are divided into two parts. One is objective and formal while the other is subjective, belonging to Cizmic as an individual. On display from 14 April to 1 May.
IMMA IMMA presented ‘REWIND << FASTFORWARD >> RECORD: Revising the Rainbow’ (RFR), a changing exhibition that evolved over a three-week period through a series of public talks, workshops and performances in response to the exhibition ‘The Narrow Gate of the Here-And-Now: Queer Embodiment’, to coincide with the OUTing The Past Festival 2022. The RFR initiative is aimed at engaging with LGBTQ+ community groups to uncover queer histories and expand their retelling. On display from 23 March to 13 April.
ArtisAnn Gallery Cara Gordon’s solo exhibition, ‘Here and Somewhere’, represents a new departure in her art. Based on fleeting observations seen from the window of her studio, the paintings depict not only the figures passing by, but also reflect the constantly changing light, the weather and the seasons. Cara is an award-winning artist who has exhibited widely throughout Northern Ireland. She is a member of the Royal Ulster Academy of Art and won the 2021 RUA Perpetual Gold Medal. On display from 6 to 30 April.
imma.ie
artisann.org
The Ireland Institute Inspired by the poetry of the late Patrick Kavanagh, Declan Campbell’s exhibition, ‘The Sense of Wonder in the Ordinary’, presented both still life and figurative paintings. His work features found and discarded everyday objects – including coloured cartons, household sponges, toothpaste boxes, food storage containers and coloured glass bottles – exploring all colouristic possibilities with these seemingly mundane items. Before commencing painting, Declan builds a multi-layered pop-up structure of discarded objects which becomes a starting point. On display from 31 March to 6 April.
Kevin Kavanagh In ‘Luminous Gatherings’, William O’Neill dedicates a meticulously considered and sharply honed painterly skill in the depiction of a selection of conceptually elusive objects. These objects appear again and again, shifting in subtly varying compositional arrangements. Bananas, fine china, vintage electronics, old and outmoded equipment, a fake plant, yellow peppers; an array of quotidian items share the canvas as signifiers in a series of dramatic groupings. O’Neill merges solemnity and whim in a manner that often conjures a sense of absurdity. Exhibition continues until 21 May.
Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich Noel Connor was born and raised in Andersonstown and as a child, he travelled into and out of town on the number 12 trolley bus. Trolley buses were withdrawn from service in 1968. For this project, ‘Waiting for the Number 12’, he has tracked down and worked directly with the actual bus which made that very last journey along the Falls Road, passing Broadway Presbyterian Church, now Cultúrlann, as the artist explores a transition from innocence to the realities of late 1960s Belfast. On display from 24 March to 28 April.
Gallery 545 Rosie McGurran’s exhibition ‘Corners of Time’ presented a series of new paintings inspired by the people and places of Belfast, moments of growth and transformation in her life, and imagined characters. Suspended between reality and fantasy, these artworks tell stories of the past. Realistic figures and familiar places combine with characters and views of a timeless imaginary world. Fascinating girls and women are undisputed protagonists, depicted as individual portraits or grouped in tableaux, and often portrayed as self-absorbed, independent, or content. On display from 26 March to 10 April.
theirelandinstitute.com
kevinkavanagh.ie
culturlann.ie
gallery545.com
Project Arts Centre ‘Metabolic time / Am meitibileach’ is a group exhibition and public programme that considers ideas around time and the preservation of collective memory. Through artworks and methods that interrupt, reroute or circle around ideas of progressive, linear time – time as imposed by the state, by colonising powers, by institutions like museums that define our civic identity – it asks if we can recuperate other possible forms of time-reckoning that have been forgotten or suppressed. On display from 26 February to 9 April.
Return Gallery, Goethe-Institut Irland From September 2021 to April 2022, the Goethe-Institut’s Return gallery hosted ‘The German School’, an exhibition programme of artworks from the film class of the internationally known Städelschule Art Academy in Frankfurt. Initiated by Irish artist and Städelschule Professor, Gerard Byrne, the programme presented diverse new work from 24 students who originate from across five continents. Even in the wake of the past 18 months of isolationism, ‘The German School’ programme reflects an appetite amongst younger artists to connect internationally, affirming a constellation of localities.
PS² ‘Ladders’ is an installation taking as a starting point a series of research photographs made by Jan McCullough a little over ten years ago. Stemming from a long-standing fascination with the human acts of construction, fabrication and DIY, McCullough began to investigate workspaces, and in this specific warehouse discovered a series of purpose-built ladders, created by workers to reach and repair sections of trains, which were rebuilt and repurposed time and time again. On display from 1 to 23 April.
QSS Artist Studios QSS partnered with Sonorities Festival to present two exhibitions of installation artworks as part of the 2022 festival programme. Quills That Whisper netlabel presented ‘Quotations’, a selection of works by artists featured on the label including Una Lee, JJ Devereaux and HIVE Choir. Cyrill Lim & Marcel Zaes presented A Land Unknown, an installation piece that collects various visual, tactile, sonic and humanmade phenomena. The pieces are sculptural and yet they stand in as placeholders for that which is absent. The festival ran from 6 to 21 April.
pssquared.org
queenstreetstudios.net
Declan Campbell, Structure no 1 Pyramid, 2022; image courtesy the artist and The Ireland Institute.
William O’Neill, False and genuine positioned together, 2020, oil on canvas, 60 x 80 cm; image courtesy the artist and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.
hangtoughcontemporary.com
projectartscentre.ie
Mirza Cizmic, Stolen Memories, My Favorite Toy, 2022; image courtesy the artist and Hang Tough Gallery
goethe.de
Catalyst Arts ‘Ogham’ was an experiment in collaboration and reaction at Catalyst Arts, Belfast (22 Feb – 31 March). Three artists, Stephanie Tanney, Brian Kielt, and Rachel Macmanus – whose practices share similar threads across different mediums – undertook a three-week residency in Catalyst, which culminated in a presentation of work. ‘Ogham’ foregrounded how these artists explored each other’s methods to create new ways of developing and exhibiting work. The residency was open to the public, who were invited to come along and chat to the artists. catalystarts.org.uk
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Exhibition Roundup
Laura Kelly, ‘Shouty Snow Echo’, 2022, installation view; photograph by Paul McCarthy, courtesy the artist and Mermaid Arts Centre.
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Bog Cottage, ‘Life in The Community’, installation view, April 2022; image courtesy Bog Cottage and Hyde Bridge Gallery.
Bennie Reilly, Dinorama (Athens), 2022, oil on canvas, 140 x 100cm; image courtesy the artist and The Dock.
CCA Derry~Londonderry ‘Herding surrogates’ was a live event coinciding with artist Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh’s solo exhibition ‘Ferox’ at CCA, which took place on the evening of 13 April. Visitors joined Ciarán on-site at Lenamore Stables in Muff, County Donegal, to experience an installation and participate in live action role play (LARP). Guests used surrogate prosthetic equine ears, containing binaural microphones. Through live reading of a short story by the artist, participants were invited to engage with stories of interrogation and forced conditioning during political incarceration.
Regional & International
126 Artist-run Gallery Marking its 15th anniversary – and to celebrate this ‘Celtic Model’ of artist-led management and its importance on an international scale – 126 Artist-run Gallery hosted a book launch of Artist-run Democracy: Sustaining a Model (Onomatopee, 2022), on 8 April. It is an archival publication that focuses on the volunteer directors, the educational value of the project, its challenges, and its relevance internationally as a progressive artist-run model. Additionally, a diverse selection of 10 former board members from over the years have made written contributions.
Art House Laois Laois County Council presented ‘In Trust. In Gratitude. In Hope.’, an exhibition featuring the work of over 64 artists who have been part of the Laois Arthouse programme since its establishment in 2011 by Laois County Council Arts Service. This tenth Anniversary exhibition is a unique opportunity for the artists and Laois County Council to celebrate the achievement of ten years of exhibition making, artist hosting and creative place-making with the surrounding community of Stradbally, County Laois and beyond. The exhibition runs until 27 May.
BARK Lab Christopher Colm Morrin’s exhibition ‘Unknown Landscapes’ was on display at BARK Lab in Berlin from 5 to 22 February. Christopher Colm Morrin’s landscapes do not attempt to reflect reality, but rather are direct reflections of the cartography of the soul. Dark surfaces are broken through on the canvases in order to provide a framework for luminous elements or glistening horizons. The Irish-born artist studied psychology and philosophy in Dublin and has a degree in psychoanalytic therapy from DBS University.
126gallery.com
arthouse.ie
bark-lab.de
Custom House Studios + Gallery Custom House Studios + Gallery presented ‘Remmidemmi’ by Susanne Wawra, which ran from 17 March to 10 April. Remmidemmi is a German colloquialism for exuberance, frolicking, antics – a noisy, busy indulgent shindig. Something is happening; people are moving, creating joyous chaos. They are celebrating, making music and dancing, having the craic. We experience a communal high in these events through a life-affirming breaking out of the ordinary, the everyday. On display from 17 March to 10 April.
Droichead Arts Centre Upstate Theatre Project presented ‘The Morning Side of the Mountain’ on 1 May, during Drogheda Arts Festival 2022. Upstate, Visual Artist Vivienne Byrne and musician/composer Breifne Holohan introduce storytellers Peadar and Kathleen Elmore and their home in the Cooley peninsula. Their life story is presented and told through pre-recorded audio conversations with the couple, projected family photographs, and film footage of the Cooley landscape along with music especially composed and performed live.
Hyde Bridge Gallery The artist collective Bog Cottage presented their first solo show ‘Life in The Community’ at the Hyde Bridge Gallery. ‘Life in The Community’ is a reflection of the collective’s time spent living in Sligo over the past two years. The show featured works by artists Roberta Murray, Orla Meagher and Kian Benson Bailes, including paintings, ceramics, textiles and sculpture. The show also featured ‘The Land Question’ by Eimear Walshe, which had a special screening on opening night. On display from 26 March to 16 April.
customhousestudios.ie
droichead.com
bogcottage.com
KAVA An exhibition of new work by Galway-based artist Mary Foudy O’Halloran, ‘Revisited’, opened on Friday 15 April at the Courthouse Gallery, Kinvara, supported by Galway County Council. The body of work revisits the everyday lives of rural Irish women in the 1940s, 50s and 60s and reworks the ordinary objects and tools of their hard physical labour. The exhibition aims to be a conversation between the viewer, the artist and the unacknowledged, allowing them to speak. On display from 15 to 24 April.
LHQ Gallery Cork County Arts Office presented ‘MICROCOSM’, a new solo exhibition by Cork-based artist David Kavanagh in LHQ Gallery, county library. A graduate of MTU Crawford College of Art and Design, David regularly exhibits in Cork and nationally. David’s art practice is primarily drawing based, utilising ink and paint on Nepalese handmade lokta paper. His minutely detailed and observed drawings depict found objects and natural forms to create miniature fictional societies and universes. On display from 10 March to 8 April.
kava.ie
corkcoco.ie
Mermaid Arts Centre In ‘Shouty Snow Echo’, Laura Kelly uses an experimental approach to drawing to evoke imaginary snow-covered, transient and uncertain landscapes. In the exhibition, she employs assemblages of materials in a large drawing installation which combine both abstract and representational elements. Aspects of the pictorial landscape tradition – for example the horizon line, vignettes, panoramas and vistas – feature in work that alludes to snow-cover and its role in creating ambiguity in our perception of a landscape. On display from 19 March to 30 April. mermaidartscentre.ie
ccadld.org
Jane Lombard Gallery Supported by Culture Ireland, Anita Groener exhibited new and recent works in ‘say the dream was real and the wall imaginary’, a group exhibition curated by Joseph R. Wolin in Jane Lombard Gallery, NYC. This exhibition brings together eight artists who investigate walls, borders, and boundaries – both physical and ideological – and ways to think beyond them. Featuring: Ambreen Butt, Margarita Cabrera, Becci Davis, Anita Groener, Spandita Malik, Tom Molloy, Azita Moradkhani and Kanishka Raja. On display from 11 March to 23 April in New York City. janelombardgallery.com
The Dock Bennie Reilly’s solo exhibition, ‘The Louvre of the Pebble’, continues at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, until 18 June. This exhibition of painting and mixed-media sculpture is informed by the artist’s ongoing interests in museology, nature and history. The presented works are based on accumulations of photographic documentation, collected at museums around the world, and an abundance of natural curio and bric-a-brac gathered and scavenged over time. Precious stones, objects and artefacts are presented as painted ‘still life’ and assembled into three-dimensional ‘trophies’. thedock.ie
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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Columns
Plein Air
Ultimology
A Painter’s Sunrise
One Last Thing
CORNELIUS BROWNE CONSIDERS THE BENEFITS OF EARLY MORNING PAINTING FOR A SELF-TAUGHT ARTIST.
INTRODUCING A COLUMN SERIES BY THE DEPARTMENT OF ULTIMOLOGY. AN UNHAPPY ANIMAL on a screen paces its
Cornelius Browne, Easels at sunrise, 2022; photograph copyright and courtesy the artist.
THIRTY YEARS AGO this summer, I complet-
ed the Fine Art painting course at NCAD, in what proved to be a false dawn. Two decades of creative darkness followed. For the first years of that long night, during my early twenties, it felt odd not to paint. Before college, as a teenager, I was an obsessive painter – not fully grown, yet already a bona fide outsider artist. I believed that formal art education would lead me inside, but it pushed me further out. Still colour-speckled from painting my degree show, I bought a slim book, sacrificing that evening’s meal. Before me now, I see it has taken the shape of the many pockets I have carried it in. Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande was published in 1934, and, although pleasantly of that time, still stands today. Harnessing the unconscious, Brande advises, is key to writing well. She counsels rising an hour before one customarily rises. Without having read or spoken, write any sort of early morning reverie. You find me during the morning of commencing a new body of painting, to be exhibited at the Regional Cultural Centre in Donegal in March 2023. This will be my third solo, and I have developed a pattern: I devote one year to each show. The first paintings belong to sunrise, the middle to afternoon drifting into evening, and the last to night, meaning I finish my exhibitions in frosty moonlight. This time around, paintings will gather in groups in the gallery, in accordance with calendar and clock. My sunrises will flock together under the title ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’ – a line borrowed from William Wordsworth. A quiet revelation for me was the dawning that Brande’s advice for writers can migrate across to painters. Not long out of bed, not a word uttered, the human world asleep, with the sun climbing to adorn the eastern sky, I set about painting and indeed feel the unconscious in the ascendant. The early-morning painter appears unfettered to a degree, often not the case when I come to my easel trailing vestiges of routine life. Many of my breakthrough pictures were painted before breakfast. I did not attend my graduation ceremony, although I lived just a few streets away. I have no memory of lifting from its envelope the degree certificate I collected months later from
NCAD’s front office. Long afterwards, another talismanic paperback began taking the shape of my pocket, well as I was by then along the road of the autodidact. Richard Hoggart published his autobiographical social science masterpiece, The Uses of Literacy, in 1957. Hoggart grew up in poverty, finding salvation through education, with scholarships opening a path. His book should now be a relic – in the 1960s it became a kind of Bible for first-generation university students, yet it still sparks recognition among some people breaking the family mould by studying into adulthood. One doesn’t have to be of Hoggart’s generation to see a kindred soul in his portrait of an intense individual, emotionally uprooted by education from his original class, who has yet to find a home in his new, socially elevated grouping. My level of engagement with compulsory education had already disturbed my roots. My parents’ patchy schooling began age seven and ended before their thirteenth birthdays. My experiment with higher education caused me to belong nowhere. An autodidactic stream flows richly through the working-class landscape. Welsh miners’ libraries of a century ago are celebrated for bringing Das Kapital, Darwin, and Dickens to pit villages. Early nineteenth-century shepherds in the Cheviot Hills maintained a circulating outdoor library, leaving books they had read in designated crannies in boundary walls. The next shepherd who came that way could borrow it and leave another in its place, each volume gradually carried through a circuit of 30 to 40 miles. My lifelong self-taught journey has been taken in the hope of an education, and by extension a form of painting, free of middle-class cultural hegemony. The title of my exhibition, ‘All Nature Has a Feeling’, comes from English Romantic poet, John Clare, who attended school sporadically until age 12. His turning point came a year later, when a villager lent him a battered copy of James Thomson’s The Seasons. Often, I have wished to reach across two centuries to thank with a handshake that unknown weaver. Cornelius Browne is a Donegal-based artist.
enclosure. It is dog or wolf-like, but I don’t recognise this jumble of familiar canine features, zebra-striped with a threatening jaw. “What’s that called?”, my son tugs. A nice thing about the questions of a three-year old is that most of the time, you have the answer – but we learn this together. The animal, the caption reads, was called a thylacine or Tasmanian tiger, and this video is footage of the last-known captive one, filmed in a zoo in 1935. Living in the wild in mainland Australia until the start of the twentieth century, the last confirmed sighting of a wild thylacine was in 1930. Its numbers had depleted before then, but the colonial agenda and intensive agriculture extinguished the species. The thylacine was seen as a pest, killing sheep brought to graze in Tasmania, and bounties were awarded for hunting them. Completely wiped out, blame was put on its uncomfortably (for us) big mouth. “It’s called a thy-la-cine”, I tell my son, instinctively asking him to repeat the name after me. How do we confront a video of a living being whose whole kind has been obliterated from existence by ours? Is there some way to look directly at this, to acknowledge the actuality of loss in a way that can be shared with children? Ultimology is a term that explores ways we can look at endings. We learned the word through the work of writer and linguist, Ross Perlin, who runs the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) in New York, a welcoming centre where endangered languages are collected, celebrated and shared. In the ELA someone might drop by and record a lullaby in the language of their homeland. This is a way of sustaining vulnerable entities. In Ultimology we see potential for a practice of paying attention to endings in the present, informed by our experience of looking at visual art. The thylacine could be considered a victim of what Deborah Bird Rose describes as the collateral damage of colonial pursuits. In her research with Aboriginal people, she describes how white Australian settlers disrupted a sense of time in the communities they colonised:
“They looked straight ahead to the future, a singular path of optimism and salvation informing their dreams and deeds. This future is a characteristic feature of commitments to modernity, that complex of symbolic and material projects for separating ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Moving toward this future requires ruthless ambition – and the willingness to participate in great projects of destruction while ignoring extinction as collateral damage.”1 If the thylacine was still around today, would its fate be any different? History helps to sort through material such as this, collating and contextualising the past; but perhaps we also need some way to actively sit with the enormity of loss, both human and beyond human. History also strives to develop empathy, according to the Department of Education curriculum. At our first conference on Ultimology in 2016, artist Isabel Nolan outlined the empathetic potentials of looking at art. Describing a portrait, she said: “A particular juxtaposition of lilac blue and pink shadow lends not just volume, but a poetic drama to the soft pleats in a white garment. And so we wonder not simply ‘who is the person wearing this fine, billowing shirt?’ but also ‘who made it, maintained it, fastened it upon the sitter that morning with cold or warm hands and their mind filled with an endless list of other thankless tasks to be done?’”2 Nolan illuminates how looking closely at images can reveal not only their subject but the multiple worlds that led to their creation. In Ultimology we hope to explore this way of looking, paying attention to endings as they unfold, revealing their possibilities. In these columns, we will expand on some of the tactics we use to do so. The Department of Ultimology is an ongoing project by Fiona Hallinan and Kate Strain. Notes: 1 Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (eds.), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) 2 Isabel Nolan, Curling up with reality (Kerlin Gallery, 2020)
A thylacine on a screen at the Museum of Natural Sciences, Belgium, 2021; photograph by Fiona Hallinan.
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Columns
9
Arts & Activism
Arts & Activism
The Perils of Obedience
The Social Turn
EVAN GARZA REFLECTS ON CONTEMPORARY ART AND ACTIVISM IN IRELAND.
MIGUEL AMADO CONSIDERS THE CIVIC AGENDA OF ART AND ITS CONTRIBUTIONS TO ACTIVISM.
RECENTLY I’VE BECOME preoccupied with
ON 22 FEBRUARY
Dublin’s architectural and city planning history following British colonisation, particularly for its near total absence of a city square. When I first moved to Dublin last October to research the IMMA Collection and the history of Irish protest movements, I attended a number of ‘Save the Cobblestone’ protests. I trailed crowds from Smithfield, up and down the quays, and followed protestors to the front steps of the Dublin City Council building. What surprised me was that these demonstrations never took place in or concluded at a square, until I realised that one didn’t exist. For centuries, whether consequential or intentional, Dublin’s city planning has offered no central commons for the public to gather en masse; perhaps not surprising for a previously colonised metropolis with a rich history of protest. In June 1912, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and other suffragettes famously smashed several windows of Dublin Castle in protest of votes for women being omitted from the Home Rule Bill. When Declan Flynn was killed in 1982, the march that followed his murderers’ acquittal filled the streets with nearly a thousand demonstrators from Dublin’s Liberty Hall to Fairview Park, leading directly to Ireland’s Pride movement. Repeal the Eighth demonstrators used the same playbook, making themselves and their message of reproductive justice unavoidable and unmissable to lawmakers, the Dáil, and the public. The absence of a public square in Dublin’s city planning has had the foreseeable result of forcing these demonstrations onto the streets – and into mainstream consciousness. Rebellion is, in many respects, a uniquely Irish inheritance. While driving around West Cork in late March, I passed a sign directing drivers to a Mass rock, one of several stones and fragments of former church across Ireland where Catholics secretly congregated, at a time when observing Mass was against seventeenth-century Penal Law. In order to remain clandestine, these services of religious resistance were infrequent, and news traveled by word of mouth between parishioners. One can imagine these confidential communications as existing only through ‘virtual’ means, shared privately among those in the know, and with little or no physical evidence. This is the way queer communities gathered for millennia – in baths, bars, theatres, toilets – prior to the internet and gay hookup apps. (No offense, but I’ll take a cruising spot over a Mass rock any day.) Not only is it the nature of marginalised peoples to find and preserve near-silent forms of transgression; it is paramount to our survival. I share all this not to link suffragettes with abortion rights activism, nor queers with the Catholic Church (much can be said there), but rather to ground these histories in a collective unwillingness to accept subjugation and discrimination by unjust systems of power which, whether through laws or civic architecture, denied these groups the freedom to gather. As I investigated the IMMA Collection and the historical events and cultural shifts in Ireland since the museum first opened in May 1991, I
was struck by the number of artists whose work unpacks legacies of resistance in both an Irish and global context. There’s the irrefutable impact and dignity of the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment; groundbreaking film works and historical examinations by Eimear Walshe, Helen Cammock, and The Otolith Group; the mythology and feminist ideology of Alice Maher; witchy and queer cyanotypes by Breda Lynch; the riotous impasto of Derek Jarman’s paintings; and captivating photographs by Zanele Muholi, Willie Doherty, and Richard Mosse, to name a few. Currently on view is Shane Cullen’s staggering multi-panel work, Fragmens sur les Institutions Républicaines IV (1993), which conveys transcribed ‘comms’ smuggled in and out of the Northern Irish H-Blocks prison from 1981-2. Yet all the while, as I was performing this research, completely unbeknownst to me, there was also a history of protest and a link to Long Kesh in my husband’s extended family in south Belfast. When William Burns was shot and killed by the British Army during the Falls Curfew of 1970, as he stood in the doorway of his home before the curfew was announced, it galvanised his nephew Paul Burns to become active in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA). Eight years later, he married my mother-in-law’s cousin, Kate, became a director at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and later died from a prolonged illness in 2014. When my husband and I drove up to Belfast to see the Burnses recently, Kate surprised me with an exceptional gift: the opportunity to examine Paul’s spectacular archive of materials from his time with the NICRA. In it, flyers for commemorations of Derry’s martyred dead one year after Bloody Sunday, solemn and intricately designed posters demanding the end of internment, illustrated notices for demonstrations supporting the 1981 Hunger Strike, and a six-metre-wide banner, dotted with hand-painted shamrocks from an anti-internment march in the streets of Belfast. I took this as a sign from Paul, from the beyond, that the work of confronting and unpacking injustice through art and activism is crucial. As with the discrimination in Northern Ireland which gave rise to NICRA, the Black Lives Matter movement – co-founded by queer Black women and artists – was sparked by senseless murders at the hands of law enforcement and a passionate collective desire to demand and bring about political and social change. The activism of the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment played a leading role in the consequential referendum guaranteeing reproductive justice in Ireland. Artists have been at the centre of these and other protest movements denouncing repression, brutality, and persecution, and they will continue to confront injustice everywhere, even if they have to take to the streets. Evan Garza is the 2021-2022 IMMA Fulbright U.S. Scholar and a Visiting Research Fellow in History of Art at Trinity College Dublin.
2022, The Guardian announced the removal of Alistair Hudson from the directorship of The Whitworth in Manchester. The news piece stated: “The director of the Whitworth Art Gallery is being asked to leave his post by the University of Manchester [which controls the museum], after a row when a statement of solidarity with Palestine’s ‘liberation struggle’ was removed from an exhibition by a human rights investigations agency [Forensic Architecture].” The University of Manchester had, apparently, capitulated to pressure from pro-Israeli government lobbying groups demanding disciplinary action against Hudson, a process that seems to have been initiated in the summer of 2021 following the opening of Forensic Architecture’s presentation, Cloud Studies, 2021. As The Guardian also reported on 16 August 2021: “Part of the exhibition addresses violence used by Israeli forces against Palestinians and was accused of being ‘incendiary and by its very nature one-sided’ by [an organisation] which advocates for Israeli causes.” I used to work with Hudson at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, where he put forward – and we experimented – a ‘useful’ vision for the museum. As we once co-wrote, this idea is based on “a civic agenda focused on use-value, community building, activism, and making.” The repurposing of the museum “is carried out under the rubric and provocations of Arte Útil and the longer, subaltern history of art as a mechanism for societal transformation, [offering] a working, real-time model that applies the emerging principles of the decolonised and the post-artistic.” The situation at The Whitworth illustrates a tension within the cultural field: an understanding of art as an autonomous sphere removed from society, versus a practice implicated in social issues, of which Arte Útil is an example. Arte Útil, a Spanish expression introduced to the lexicon of art by Tania Bruguera, translates into English as ‘useful art’. Yet, its advocates intend ‘útil’ to encompass a broader notion of art as a tool or device. Bruguera states that “Arte Útil moves beyond a propositional format into one that actively creates, develops and implements new functionalities to benefit society”, indicating a shift from representation to activism. Hudson has adopted the notion of ‘useful art’ for the museum’s reinvention. He has also taken inspiration from nineteenth-century thinkers such as John Ruskin, who instigated the involvement of artists in mundane tasks, to dispute the tradition of art’s autonomy in favour of a functional vision of art. His approach engages with the narratives of institutional self-criticism known as ‘new institutionalism’ – which promotes an understanding of the gallery as an ‘active space’ that is “part community centre, part laboratory and part academy, with less need for the established showroom function”, as formulated by Charles Esche. The appearance of Arte Útil is part of the ‘social turn’ – a concept which entered art’s vocabulary in 2006 with the publication of Claire Bishop’s essay, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration
and Its Discontents’ in Artforum. The article was republished in an extended form in 2012 as the first chapter of her book, Artificial Hells (Verso Books, 2012). She describes a return to socially engaged art through participatory processes involving communities and applies it to various artists. In outlining these principles, Bishop identifies a prevalent tendency to judge some projects not through their aesthetic effect but an ethical imperative, manifested in their social impact. She argues for the primacy of aesthetic effect within any practice, including that which is socially engaged, asserting that otherwise it could not even fall under the category of art. Bishop criticises Grant Kester’s notion of socially engaged art to defend the need for any project to be art and not merely the output of social work. In his 2004 book, Conversation Pieces (University of California Press, 2010), Kester argues that specific projects challenge the traditional understanding of art, implying a shift away from the visual and the sensory towards “discursive exchange and negotiation”. Bishop comments that “the discursive criteria of socially engaged art are, at present, drawn from a tacit analogy between anti-capitalism and the Christian good soul... The artist should renounce authorial presence in favour of allowing participants to speak through him or her. This self-sacrifice is accompanied by the idea that art should extract itself from the ‘useless’ domain of the aesthetic and be fused with social praxis.” In opposition to the aesthetic as the primary means of evaluating socially engaged art, are the ideas once put forward by Boris Arvatov. He has been influential in critiquing the autonomy of art, specifically in reclaiming the significance of a productivist approach to artmaking, which seeks an existence for art beyond the aesthetic. Arvatov was one of the leading promoters of productionism, a Russian movement that argued for art to transform the world not just by redesigning everyday objects, but by fully integrating them with the production process – out of the studio and into the factory, suggesting a life for art beyond ‘art’. His ideas are informed by John Ruskin and William Morris’s notion that art should be based on use value, as opposed to the dominant ‘bourgeois art’ that is informed by commodity value. Within this intellectual framework, I consider the artist’s role as a producer, and thus a political operator, as discussed by many theorists, from Walter Benjamin to Gregory Sholette. Arte Útil seems the ideal counter-narrative to Bishop’s dismissal of the potential for socially engaged art to effect change. In addition, I advance a proposal for curating as a civic activity which understands the curator as an ‘organic intellectual’, in line with Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of the role of the intellectual in social change: to produce a counter-cultural hegemony by representing society’s excluded groups, known as the subaltern. Miguel Amado is a curator and critic, and director of SIRIUS, Cobh, in County Cork.
10
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Columns
Arts & Disability
Arts & Disability
Anticipatory Time
The Practice of Looking
PAUL ROY CONSIDERS THE TEMPORALITIES OF MAINTAINING AN ART PRACTICE WHILST LIVING WITH A LONG-TERM ILLNESS.
RÓISÍN POWER-HACKETT CONSIDERS HOW VTS COULD BECOME MORE ACCESSIBLE FOR PEOPLE WITH VISUAL IMPAIRMENTS.
BAD HEALTH IS a time vampire. When an art-
VISUAL THINKING STRATEGY (VTS) is a
ist finds themselves diagnosed with an illness, the decision-making process around spending unspecified periods immersed in your practice is taken off of your hands. Time becomes elastic and chaotic. At that moment, all the time that has passed, the previous activities and actions, have the potential to grind to an unwanted halt. Concurrently, the time ahead begins to warp and strain. Some activities stretch vaguely into the distance, feeling unreachable. Others press into your face. You feel the intense presence of limited time; the constraints feel insistent, demanding a capacity you might no longer have. You perch on this unsteady stool, wondering how to address what is now ahead of you; wondering how not to fall in the doing. This new time is mutable, seemingly unknowable, so it requires a fresh understanding, and sometimes a new vocabulary with which to communicate its challenges. An ill artist is in a peculiar position. A figure often hidden away in the solitary studio space can risk, through incapacity, becoming more hidden. Their ill body is also a new temporal body, its voice adding caveats to time and space. There are considerations of distance and gradient, the width of the door, the reliability of an elevator, the proximity of smoke and steam, the steps, the train and bus. So much is new and different, scary and unknown. Having a spinal injury, and subsequently being diagnosed with the disease Sarcoidosis in my lungs, it was important for me to be able to have a studio in my home, as I was unsure of my ability to be consistently mobile. This led to the decision for us to leave Dublin and move to a more rural location, where it is more realistic for me to have this space, and I am also less exposed to some of the physical challenges of living in a city. In these new circumstances, a complex relationship with one’s own body arises. Initially there is the simple process of understanding the changes the illness engenders in a purely personal way, the changes in ability and capacity, fear of the unfamiliar or unknown. There can also develop the dichotomy of the artist/ill artist – the sense of not wanting to be an artist whose illness defines them – yet at the same time realising that the impact and presence of the illness may be conceptually visible within their practice and also, when it is more physically affecting, in their actual process. It is often quite important that, ultimately, the artist does not feel defined by their illness, whilst at the same time being able to examine it in their work. Alison Kafer discusses the altering nature of the prognostic moment of an illness in her book, Feminist Queer Crip (Indiana University Press, 2013). Kafer acknowledges how one changes one’s orientation to the world, looking at what she calls ‘anticipatory time’. Everyone uses anticipatory time almost unconsciously to a degree – it’s the unseen hand directing alarm clocks and bus timetables, to be there on time, to know the process that brings you to the right place at the proscribed moment. These temporal consider-
ations have been expanded in thinking around disability and abelism into what is referred to as ‘Crip Time’ – understood as that peculiar, aforementioned, uncertain, liquid time. Now, to make an appointment I must allow time for the additional unseen barriers – the uneven pavements and stubborn doors, the alternative routes, the need for assistance, the strain of distance, inclines and steps. So, as an ill artist I must also adjust; the processes become altered. I enter the studio and I am already tired. How do I accommodate this fatigue into my practice? I cannot stand for hours, experimenting with ideas across a canvas in mere hope – that is too much expense. Efficiency is the catch word, energy and strength are on the clock. So, I use processes such as monoprinting to make work within these crip time constraints, works with an immediacy, a direct and efficient technique, wherein I get to witness my ideas quickly forming, under the shadow of rapidly waning stamina. This overall experience is addressed initially as a loss; as the lack of capacity or capability, engendering a grief for what appears to be gone or might never be again. But within this, there are new ways to communicate; the idea is not erased, the intention is not diminished. The ill artist might not have the time or energy to act as they once did, but they still have the intent, and often, within the experience of illness, this intentionality becomes focussed. Seeing the impediments to certain approaches, they adjust and consider new ways of doing. Often, these new ways become the reading and deciphering of the new vernacular of anticipatory time, while strategising and thinking multiple moves ahead. The ill or disabled individual is not the lesser artist, but may be the more direct artist, more disciplined. When I learnt that there are processes that I can no longer use, due to having limited lung capacity and sensitivities to certain materials, I was compelled to find new ways. I didn’t necessarily abandon the intention, rather I reconsidered the path, and in some ways, I became more efficient and clearer. I am not a ‘better’ or ‘worse’ artist as a result of my condition; I am just an artist with an altered approach. Paul Roy is an artist and writer living in Westmeath, who recently graduated from NCAD with an MA in Art in the Contemporary World. paulroy.eu
method of touring visual artworks that was developed by The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. The methodology was developed by cognitive psychologist, Abigail Housen, and veteran museum educator, Philip Yenawine. The tour guide asks the viewer to look at the artwork and then asks them a few questions. Ultimately, with VTS, the viewers are facilitated to describe the artwork, suggesting its styles and influences, while reflecting on what it might mean. In Spring of 2021, I was invited by Dublin City Council Arts Office to undertake a disability audit of ‘The Practice of Looking’ – DCC’s online introductory training, which teaches people how to facilitate VTS discussions. In doing the audit, I noticed that research was limited on VTS and people with visual impairments. DCC Arts Office granted me funding to do some further investigation. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is signed and ratified by Ireland. Article 30 asserts: “States Parties recognise the right of persons with disabilities to take part on an equal basis with others in cultural life and shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that persons with disabilities… enjoy access to cultural materials in accessible formats.”1 This means that visually impaired people have the right to access VTS. The 2003 essay, ‘Very Nice to My Visual Imagination Memory: An Enquiry into the Aesthetic Thinking of People Who Are Visually Impaired’, by Abigail Housen and Karin DeSantis, is the only one I could find written by a co-founder of VTS New York, on museum guided tours and visual impairment. It seems that no significant published research has been conducted on VTS and visual impairment. My investigation hasn’t had the scope to be significant, due to budget constraints; however, I believe it to be a step in the right direction. My research included an interview and audio description/VTS session with four participants who are visually impaired. All of them have some level of sight. Three of the participants wanted the VTS questions to remain the same. One of the participants wanted them changed to be more inclusive and gave some suggestions. In place of ‘What’s going on in this picture?’, she suggested ‘What is your impression or sense of what is going on in this picture?’ For ‘What do you see that makes you say that?’ she recommended ‘What gives you that impression / experience / sense / feeling to make you say that?’ She believed the final question ‘What more can we find?’ should remain unchanged. There was a discussion about what kind of artworks would suit VTS for visually impaired people. Most participants preferred 2D work, like painting and photography. However, one participant made important points, stating that he wasn’t in favour of any type of artwork when it came to access because he thinks “the task really at hand is to make accessible what is there… you should be able to use the same material and adapt it … to make it work for everyone”. He
went on to say: “Whether it’s The LAB, The Hugh Lane, IMMA or the Butler Gallery, all of them use public money and therefore whatever it is they do, they have a responsibility to make it accessible.”2 From this initial investigation, I have found that, as of yet, there is no published format that welcomes people with visual impairments to join a VTS conversation. Therefore, I recommend the following steps that could make VTS more accessible to people with visual impairments. However, I must caveat that in my investigation, participants all had some level of sight. 1. Unlike usual VTS sessions, a high-resolution image of the artwork and an audio description text / audio that includes wayfinding information and an artist biography should be sent to participants in an accessible format a day or so before the discussion. 2. Have VTS sessions on Zoom or have wi-fi and a webpage with a high-resolution image of the artwork available to view in the gallery. Most participants found it easier to view artworks on screens, thanks to having access to magnifier technology on their devices. Often museums and galleries don’t allow viewers to get close enough to artworks to see them. 3. A VTS session should begin with an audio description of the image. If specific details of the artwork are mentioned, include a detailed image of it in the Power Point presentation. 4. At the beginning of the VTS session, the facilitator should acknowledge that the session participants may have different levels of vision. Facilitators should also invite participants to use the magnifier technology on their device and zoom in on the artwork. 5. The new more inclusive VTS questions suggested by the one participant should be trailled in VTS sessions with visually impaired people, as part of further research. I would like to thank all four interview participants, including Emilie Conway, for generously giving me their opinions and experiences. Róisín Power Hackett is a visual artist, writer and curator Notes: 1 ‘Article 30 – Participation in cultural life, recreation, leisure and sport’, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Disability, un.org 2 All quotes in this paragraph come from online interviews conducted with participants through Zoom. A report of these interviews is available upon request from the author.
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Columns
Arts & Disability
Arts & Disability
Pathology of Energy
Body Without World
IARLAITH NI FHEORAIS REFLECTS ON ARTS & DISABILITY IRELAND’S CURATED SPACE PROGRAMME 2021.
DAY MAGEE REFLECTS ON THE EMBODIMENT OF CHRONIC PAIN.
IN 1978, SUSAN Sontag began to write about
IN BODY WITHOUT World (2022), a vertically
illness, stigma and myth in Illness and Metaphor (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978) shaped by her own recent experience of breast cancer. The book traced the history of disease through the metaphors that had snowballed around it, describing this process as a “pathology of energy”.1 Mostly focusing on tuberculosis and cancer, Sontag revealed how these moralising myths and metaphors impacted the treatment of patients negatively as a result of the shame and blame they produced, stating that “as long as a particular disease is treated as an evil, invincible predator… most people… will indeed be demoralised by learning what disease they have”.2 Returning to the subject in 1989 with AIDS and its Metaphors (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989) Sontag analysed a more incessant drive of myth-making and stigmatisation around queer bodies amongst the horror of a new contemporary plague. From this critical perspective, the innate quotidian nature of illness is understood, including how these myths can grow more vengeful when queer, trans, Black, brown or Indigenous people are concerned. I came to both texts in 2019, as I began to revaluate my practice in terms of disability, emerging out of the radicalising experience of reading Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability3 (New York University Press, 2006) This trifecta of texts pinpoints how many of the apparent medical, physical and biological disabling conditions are socially reproduced and maintained. Critical engagement with the material of illness provided a valuable tool in redressing how disabled and ill people understand themselves in relation to power. I invited artists to respond to the idea of a ‘pathology of energy’, including the myths, stigmas and subjectivities associated with their illness or disability. In early 2020 I applied for Arts & Disability Ireland’s Curated Space programme, an online exhibition opportunity to commission new work by artists Panteha Abareshi, Day Magee and D Mortimer. ‘Pathology of Energy’ opened online on December 7 2021 after a gloriously slow incubation. Panteha Abareshi is an LA-based artist whose work is rooted in their experience of living with Sickle Zero Beta Thalassemia. For ‘Pathology of Energy’, Abareshi produced NOT A BODY (2021), a moving image work which opens with a flashing human skeleton over a white background, the spine extended, as if stretched from both ends. A hospital wristband flashes across the screen, reading: “THIS IS NOT A BODY BUT”. With a harsh industrial, slightly gloopy sound, hospital tags emerge with hand-written text. The terms ‘misdemeanour’, ‘non-committal response’, ‘long tiresome goodbye’, ‘losing battle’, ‘implanted memory’, ‘slap in the face’, roll onward with a poetic ferocity. The film deals with naming, with the building and losing of identity, and how you often have to give your body up to others whilst in hospital – a depersonalised object in a bureaucratic medical system. Day Magee created Body Without World
(2021), a looping moving image work with harsh flashing intensity. Magee is a genderqueer performance and visual artist based in Dublin, whose work is concerned with the subjectivity of a queer sick body, orientated via fundamentalist Christianity and the performing of self-mythology. Body Without World focuses on an image of the artist, legs crossed against a jet-black background with concentric ovals framing their body, each passing through, as if pinned to a distorted and writhing human-like form. This layering of bodies directly intervenes in myth from a Crip perspective, rewriting the fairy tale of The Princess and the Pea as a story of neuro-sensitivity and chronic pain – a retelling that vicariously embodies the experience of a body in pain and the unreal inner-world that this experience creates. A long-time collaborator and friend, D Mortimer, wrote the personal essay, Limp as a Mince: Disability, Desirability, for ‘Pathology of Energy’, playing with the Crip trope of the limp and transforming it into an effeminate mince, recalibrating the semiotics of the movement of queer disabled bodies. Exercising the experience of trans disabled people within medical institutions, Mortimer states that: “Twisted means crippled but it also means perverted.” From this position, Mortimer peruses Jean Genet’s Miracle of the Rose (1948), following the author’s criminalised youth into prison, performing acts of care through sexual and political transgressions with other prisoners. I couldn’t sum it up any better than Mortimer’s closing lines: “It’s what Genet said about his ‘pack of poor devils’, their puking, their limping and their kinks, their womanly laughs and their fantastic seizures. It is in their flaws that they are shown to be ‘wounded, irreplaceable’, irreducibly fucked, and totally themselves.” Working with the three artists was an honour which allowed for a generous deep dive into the terrain of queer crip people in myth, the institution and our inner worlds. This generosity was compounded by Arts & Disability Ireland’s unwavering commitment to access. Working with Amie Lawless and Pádraig Naughton was a masterclass in accessibility, with each conversation centred on the health and wellbeing of the artists, myself and audiences, allowing us to slow down and shift priorities where necessary. This methodology was a binding thread which held the work together and asked (as Mortimer does in Limp as Mince): “What can we learn from our battered bodies, our shame infested sources… about the giving and receiving of care?” Iarlaith Ni Fheorais (she/her) is a curator and writer based between Ireland and the UK. @iarlaith_nifheorais
Notes: 1 Susan Sontag, Illness and Metaphor (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1978) p 61. 2 Ibid. p 6. 3 Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
oriented moving image reveals my seated body, legs crossed, eyes closed, and head tilted in a meditative pose. A halo containing six nested ellipses crown the skull, encompassing the torso and the limbs, which are increasingly, concentrically distorted. Hovering further still over the composition, in a spine-like formation, are seven digital bodies – photogrammetric scans of my body captured through a phone – themselves suspended in erratic motion and spinning out of sync in mock yogic poses. The visual is augmented through a sonic element comprising distortions of mechanical and human sounds, recorded during one of many nights spent on a stretcher in A&E, thrashing and wailing from the pain of a days-long migraine. The pain resembles a hot, throbbing poker thrust into the eye, the skull seeming to twist at a quantum, granular level, contracting tighter and tighter around the brain. From here, a profound ache seems to burrow in every direction across one side of my upper body, deepening with even the slightest motion. The muscles of the afflicted side become spontaneously tenderised, as though iron wires are snaking through and constricting the nerves from within. An overwhelming fatigue rises up through me, whilst simultaneously, the pain is too acute to sleep. Light, sound, and anything visually more intricate than a blank surface become walls of sensory noise closing in around the mind, which itself is stretched tautly across whatever could be left at the centre of the self. This can last a few hours, days, or even weeks. The triggers can be arbitrary in occurrence (I lift my arm at a particular angle as simultaneously the sun is refracted from a metal surface at its own specific angle), or as generalised as the shifts in one’s mood, posture, or sleeping pattern. For something so common, few understand it. For the first two years I was largely bed-ridden, the bed frame becoming both a landscape and an extension of my body, morbidly interacting with two slipped discs and sciatica, as inactivity became the default mode of being. Mental survival itself becomes fervent, even deranged in its quality, as the days isolated in a dark room begin to number. A well-worn idiom across contemporary wellness thinking and cognitive behavioural therapy, is the notion of “living in the moment” as a means of achieving happiness, or gnosis, if not enlightenment. Chronic pain functions as a shadow of this temporal fetish, pain itself being an acuity of time – a contraction of perception that chains the mind to each moment’s crawling passage. It is the very ‘being in the moment’ that afflicts the chronically ill. Time is stretched further by physical inactivity, as one becomes ever more rooted to the bed in perpetual recline. In physical isolation for weeks on end, one’s location is static and the environment unchanging, with employability and socialisation becoming ever less possible. Simultaneously, when one’s condition abates just as suddenly, health and executive function return as though nothing had ever happened,
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invisible to any witness. This results in a double life, each half its own constituent of shame as the adult rites of passage are few and far between, if not entirely evacuated. These dual temporalities are traversed back and forth, experienced as an automatic gaslighting of the self, induced by the body. The condition’s goalposts change freely, much to the chagrin of doctors; conditions such as these test the limitations of contemporary medicine. I remember one doctor, the head of his department, telling me as I leant on a cane: “there’s nothing wrong with you, you need to go home and sort out your priorities”. Friends and even family begin to look for evidence of how your lifestyle may have manifested this – and so do you. Over years of careful observation, micro-managing diet, activity, many different kinds of medication, and co-ordinating these in tandem with one another, one is held to impossible standards of self-surveillance. One cannot help but question “is this all in my head?” – which, technically, it is. The body becomes but a panopticon for the purposes of identifying pain, never mind enduring it. Dissociation from one’s corporal materiality becomes a necessary habit, its intellectualisation at least lending itself to creative pursuits. Eventually, as enough time is accumulated through the lens of pain, pain becomes one’s world, a basic feature of reality whose perpetuity should render it mundane and yet, the whole evolutionary function of pain is to circumvent one’s acclimation to it. American academic, Elaine Scarry wrote about how physical pain destroys language, but pain – itself a signal generated by the body – is the body’s own language, producing both hypervigilance and the will to its own transliteration, if not negation. Further still, if language creates the world, as is reflected both in contemporary theories of social construction and in ancient creation myths, pain is perhaps a form of world-making. Though pain is incommunicable through words, it reciprocally generates its own expression in a behavioural feedback loop, dramatised and enacted in the body’s performance. It is this dynamic that is neatly paralleled in performance art, if not art as initiated through performance. The medium is the same as and indivisible from that which all other life is mediated through – the body moving through time and space in wilful, dynamic rhythm. The self is as much a witness to the work as the audience, dramatising itself to itself through the body, reconceptualising it and giving way to new self-conceptions in a practical, psycho-somatic-analysis. So, as I perform art, I perform my life; just as I perform pain, I perform healing. Day Magee is a performance-centred multimedia artist based in Dublin. Body Without World (2022) was commissioned by Arts & Disability Ireland and presented as part of ‘Pathology of Energy’ – an online exhibition curated by Iarlaith Ni Fheorais. daymagee.com
Regional Focus
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Roads and Roundabouts
Longford
Marian Balfe Visual Artist
Engage Longford Rosie O’Hara Director of Engage
ENGAGE HAS COME a long way since it was
founded in 2013. It was launched on Culture Night that year as an artist-led, voluntary initiative to promote visual art in Longford. The fundamental objective of Engage is to procure permanent dedicated visual arts infrastructure in Longford to connect, support and build the capacity of artists by providing workspace and exhibition opportunities for graduate, emerging and established artists. Our first initiative was refurbishing the former Providers shop on Main Street as a gallery space, curating a dynamic programme of exhibitions and events from local, national and international artists across a diverse range of disciplines between 2013 and 2017. The scale of the space allowed great scope for exhibiting a broad range of work including installations, sculpture, film, soundscapes and painting. Additionally, it demonstrated the potential and need for a permanent exhibition space in the town. Links were established with educational institutes by hosting educational events, school visits, artist talks, workshops, and projects with transition year and FETAC students. During that time, Engage members lobbied for more permanent exhibition and workspace for artists and we continue to do so. The building was purchased by Longford County Council in 2017 with the gallery element forming part of the blueprint for a proposed new digital, innovation and creative hub at the site. This ambitious project is still in development. Engage members also founded the annual Cruthú Arts Festival, incorporating additional pop-up venues and exhibitions, as well as curating a strong visual programme and a legacy of street art from 2014 until 2018. In 2018, Engage leased property from the council and following an extensive renovation programme, Garvey’s Yard Art Studios was opened in 2019. They now provide spacious, affordable space and the opportunity for artists to work and develop their practice in Longford. The four studios facilitate artists working across a number of disciplines and are a valuable asset to the local arts scene, adding to the growing creative vibrancy of Longford. Although the pandemic delayed some plans for the group over the past two years, it has allowed others to develop. ‘Soul-Us’, a temporary public art project saw a series of light projections on buildings in Longford town through the winter and spring of 2020-21, and allowed Engage to connect with audiences through lockdown. During this time, Engage also developed the concept and design of an outdoor exhibition and market space adjacent to Garvey’s Yard Studios. Now, that installation, Aonach, 2021 – a collaboration between Engage and Longford County Council – brightens up the streetscape as a standalone art piece and breathes new energy into the area by providing a framework for a covered craft fair and outdoor exhibition area. Engage has also played a part in the social
development of Longford with its contribution to the Longford URBACT group. It’s helped inform policy and an action plan for the redevelopment and regeneration of Longford town centre. Art ignites change, and through collaborative work with other community organisations we have engaged the public and opened opportunities for further development of the local arts scene, inspiring others to emulate the work we started. It’s great to see artists we introduced and mentored continue to develop projects in the area. The Urb Security project – of which Garvey’s Yard, Aonach, is part – is included in this drive and is part of a wider initiative involving participants from eight European regions. The project seeks to create an enhanced sense of pride of place, security, and a new sense of identity for areas that currently have a high level of anti-social behaviour and poor public perception. The Garvey’s Yard project is part of a bigger vision we have for the town: to improve Longford, through public art projects, as a place to live, and to transform the perception of the town as a dynamic and desirable place to live, work and do business. A project later this year will continue the area’s artistic overhaul, with a mural further connecting the studios and installation with the Main Street and the development of two more studios.
Exterior shot of Engange building; photograph by Dave Butler, courtesy of Engage.
Marian Balfe, Green doily from Gran Canaria, 2021, oil on paper; image courtesy of the artist.
I’M NOT REALLY, totally from Longford. I am
hesitant to completely credit (or blame) the county for my being an artist. I was raised in Cloontuskert, a Bord na Móna village in the depths of the Roscommon bog. Designed by Frank Gibney, the post-war town planner and architect, and built on a site adjacent to the abbey of St. Mary’s (founded by brothers St. Brendan and St. Faithleach circa 520AD), Cloontuskert was an interesting place to grow up. In the midst of perfect, axial symmetry and radiating arterial roads my friends and I played in an ancient cemetery. We made obstacle courses of tombstones and crumbling crosses and behaved in a generally sacrilegious way. There was no one person in Cloontuskert who directly led to my interest in art or drawing, but the atmosphere and context held a lasting effect. In school, the teachers had us enter every art competition going; An Garda Síochána slogan posters, Telecom Éireann callcards, credit union posters, Community Games Art. I found there was always an onslaught of logos where these competitions were concerned and perfected my draughtsmanship skills appropriately. My ultimate success came when I won a colouring competition with HB Ice Cream; I received a mountain bike and a Twister for everyone in the school. Longford was a different kettle of fish, it felt urban and anonymous. It didn’t have the same pleasing symmetry as Cloontuskert. Sitting in our bungalow’s flat roof extension, I practiced my signature and drew incessantly in order to escape housework, farm work, etc. The playroom in the extension was my first real studio, where I insisted on having my art teacher over to coach me in the lead up to the Community Games Art competition. At the time I drew Steffi Graf playing grass court tennis; I was mortified by the mess and overall aesthetic of our farm and sought to escape its reality. After coming from Cloontuskert, a multi-award winner of the National Tidy Towns competition, I was offended by the grass on our front lawn growing long and unruly. I tried to cut the lawn numerous times but the lawnmower was old and my weak adolescent arms could
never seem to get it started with the fervour it required. Instead, I drew the tightly trimmed tennis courts of Wimbledon and deliberately did not tell people where I lived in case they would see the length of the grass. An aerial photograph of the bungalow and surrounding farm is pinned to my studio wall. It is black and white, taken sometime in the 60s. The pride with which this photograph was once commissioned stands in stark contrast to my teenage mortification. I’m no longer mortified, but I’m not really, really proud either. I am, however, interested in how the farm operated, the aspirations it once presented and what it has now become. The farm was sold amid the Celtic Tiger and was somewhat haphazardly redeveloped for housing and industry. There are approximately four roundabouts, a couple of roads that lead nowhere, an estate partly controlled by NAMA and a primary care centre where the farm once stood. Located on the outskirts of Longford Town, the lawns and fields are still unruly; the four roundabouts and the nearby bypass haven’t quite succeeded in refining the place. Whether it’s the abundance of infrastructure or the familial tie I am always drawn back to this farm and industrial zone. I obsess over the roundabouts and countless laminated planning application signs. I think about the farm’s proximity to both the bog and the bowling alley; is this really just coincidence? I had not lived in Longford for a prolonged period until I returned home during the lockdown in 2021. I had had a baby and convinced my urbanite husband to relocate, temporarily. The time I spent at home was restorative; come hail, rain or shine, I pushed the buggy along regional roads and became strangely attracted to agri-spec cars. I dreamt of my daughter growing up to become a mechanic or, at the very least, a VW Bora TDI owner. I had no ‘in’ to the agrispec scene though; no petrolhead connections, and I returned to my art practice. I spent an hour every morning painting in my mam’s garage, a full colour aerial photo of the farm hanging behind me. @marian_balfe
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Regional Focus
Genius Loci
A Sociological Gaze
Ciara Tuite Visual Artist
Amanda Jane Graham Visual Artist
I ONCE CARRIED a root of a cactus back from
Spain. It grew and continues to grow, and now the prickly pear often appears in my studio through the brushstrokes. I never would have imagined that a trip taken years ago would form the basis of my most recent solo exhibition, ‘Nostalgia’ (10 December 2021 – 31 January 2022), held in the library of my hometown of Edgeworthstown, County Longford. I travelled alone a lot when I was younger, stemming from curiosity, an inner searching for ‘home’, and the intention of becoming a travel writer. My work is often based on the feelings that are evoked by memories of place; nature, travel and experiences. Past reflections are combined with current personal, societal and political discourse. From a young age, I’ve been subconsciously researching and collecting notes. My background in fine art, performing arts and journalism results in a multidisciplinary approach and I use imagery and words to explore dark yet real elements with vigour and poetic essence. When I arrived back from Australia after three years away, I moved to Wexford to study Fine Art at Gorey School of Art. Since then, I have looked at the world differently. I’m now a full-time visual artist and writer, currently dividing my time between my residency at Abbey Road Studios in Athlone – sister venue to the Luan Gallery – and working at Cill Rialaig in County Kerry. It’s great to have a base in the midlands and the southwest, satisfying the inherent wanderer. This allows me to share stories and paintings countrywide with pieces exhibited in the Luan Gallery, contemporary art spaces in Kerry, government buildings and private spaces both national and international. The drive between Kerry and Longford means I am familiar with the country’s ever-changing landscape; from the mountains to hills, rocks to rivers, my perspective shifts. I feel that I’ve somehow created an invisible thread between places. Previous bodies of work have been influenced by living among Aboriginal artists, research in Palestinian refugee camps, and residencies on the ancient Bolus Head in Southwest Kerry.
As an expressionist painter, I work on several canvases at a time. I might start on the floor, moving around the canvas with freedom, resulting in fluidity. I create energy through colour, building up texture, wiping away histories, dissolved to reignite again. The paintings are living entities, open to interpretation, each viewer continuing the narrative depending on their story. There is no finality. With a background in journalism, it’s inevitable that words are an integral part of my practice. Giving each piece a title is a pleasurable challenge. It’s a natural process to sit with the paintings and, depending on the theme, words appear, sometimes with playful ironic undertones. Painting, to me, is an embodiment of the present moment that only a dip in cold water could match. I’m delighted when the work goes to its new home. The bright tones and abstract marks have sparked memories in other people. My next solo exhibition is at the Cill Rialaig Arts Centre this August. I’ll be continuing the themes of place and displacement, as well as the juxtaposition of my journey and that of the Irish who emigrated in the 1800s from the west and from famine workhouses – like the one where my studio in Abbey Road now sits. I also have a mural commission for a cultural building in the midlands in spring. I’m looking forward to working beyond the confines of a studio, making my work visible to wider audiences. If travel is possible, I’ll be attending an awarded writing residency in Central Italy, where I’ll focus on completing a book of poetry. Lockdown has reminded me to remain flexible with plans. So, we just have to go with it. As an artist, I am well versed in the unknown which I try to accept as a blessing. I now see that everything I have gone through in the past, appears at some stage in my art. I will continue to revitalise the foreignness, question familiarity and reconfigure journeys. Travel and place still inform my practice, even though I’ve been grounded (happily) on this island of home. ciaratuite.com @cicituite
Ciara Tuite, Long Grassin’ It, 2021, acrylic, oil bar, charcoal on canvas, 76x100cm; image courtesy of the artist.
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Amanda Jane Graham, Romans in Rollers, 2020; photograph by Anna Leask, courtesy the artist.
AS A SCOTTISH-BORN,
Drogheda-raised, Dublin-based hairstylist, it wasn’t easy to foresee a career as an artist when I moved to Longford 20 years ago. The move changed my life profoundly and is the cornerstone of my creative practice. Rural life has afforded me the time and space to reconnect with long-held fine arts and sociological passions. Going to college became an achievable ambition; in 2011, I graduated from NCAD with an MA in Fine Art, and in 2019 an MLitt from Maynooth University in Interdisciplinary Research combining Fine Art and Sociology. My work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently in The Dock Arts Centre and in the RHA’s Ashford Gallery. My artworks emanate from the sociological gaze, and my rural location offers the solitude and scope to nurture this view. My work is autobiographical and autoethnographic; I narrate my story through a reflexive practice. I dig deep into personal history and excavate memories, experiences and emotions, some of which are challenging but rigorously scrutinised, and almost always, humour emerges. I articulate a personal audit through my visual and textual language. Living in County Longford has evoked fortuitous coincidences that have correlated with my life and practice. A large part of my work focuses on family histories that occurred in Butte, Montana, at the turn of the last century, and the contribution of the Butte Irish to the 1916 Easter Rising. The man who first discovered copper in Montana is Marcus Daly; the Copper King is from my neighbouring town, Ballyjamesduff, and my family history is part of his legacy. This connection allowed me to establish new relationships and collaborations, causing the work to evolve from a visual art exhibition to a theatre performance and a radio documentary. I was immensely privileged to receive Leitrim County Council’s Spark Residency at Image Skillnet – a training network for the hair and beauty sector – located in another nearby town, Drumshanbo. Before moving to Longford, I had a great career as a hairstylist and had the honour to work with some of the country’s leading stylists. The residency brought together my in-depth knowledge of hairdressing, art prac-
tice, and sociology. I had often wondered why the many years I had spent working as a hairstylist had never emerged within the work, but this residency changed that. I was always aware that I engaged with the viewer in the same way I communicated with clients. In the salon, the mirror is the third eye. While standing behind a person, a stylist can look straight at the client. My artwork is my third eye. I speak directly to the observer in an intimate visual language. While working as a stylist, I experienced discriminatory remarks and negative stereotyping. I was curious to discover where this bias originated. As I researched, a rich and fantastic history that I was unaware of unfolded, and the social bias emerges as an inherited viewpoint from the eighteenth century in Paris. The space and tranquillity that my home offers were critical to the interrogation of my experiences, and the artworks erupted organically. I revaluate historical art from the perspective of a hairstylist through my creative practice. I highlight the significant contribution of hairstylists to art history by directly placing the hairdressing profession within the frame of historical portraiture. It is a joy to continue working with the Spark Residency to bring this project to fruition. Although my home and studio life are remote, I have always felt a strong creative connection through my work, particularly throughout the north midlands. I have been fortunate to get to know inspirational artists. I had a studio in the Leitrim Sculpture Centre for four years, and for several years, I covered the visual art exhibitions and events for a local radio show across five counties. Initially, I outlined visual art exhibitions for a radio audience and went on to interview artists about their exhibitions. I gained unique insights into the magnificent creative work happening across the region. Moving to Longford has wholly changed my life and practice. The simple, straightforward lifestyle is critical to the evolution of my creative career, and importantly, this location makes connecting with other creatives attainable. It allows me to live my dream. amandajanegraham.com
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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Regional Focus
Hidden Heartlands
Am I Inside or Outside?
Emily Brennan Visual Artist
Gary Robinson Visual Artist
Emily Brennan, Gaia, 2018, video still; courtesy of the artist.
LONGFORD IS THE county most people pass
through on their way to the outer edges of the island. If you are one of those travellers, you are probably familiar with our conveniently located McDonalds on the N4, right on the midpoint between Dublin and Sligo. Although I went to school in the town, my strongest memories exist far outside it. Closer to Lough Ree and the marshy low-lying land to its east is the landscape which I constantly refer to or rely upon in my practice. I grew up surrounded by the grassy fields where our dairy cows grazed, occasionally riding my grey mare to the end of the paddock to round them up for milking. When barley had been cut and its straws separated from the seed, it was like getting new toys. Firstly, bales of straw – scratchy and itchy, but the perfect building material for forts. A new one needed to be built each summer, as the previous one was dismantled and used as bedding throughout the year. Secondly, the grain. While awaiting collection, the grain heads are piled high in the clean shed. We could always find a platform from which we could dive into our golden, granular pool. Then emerge, wellies filled with barley and arms coated in ladybirds. Another permanent fixture of summer was footing turf on the bog. The plot would begin like an acre-sized baking tray, with rows of brownies placed upon it. The many weeks-long process would begin by methodically turning crackled back logs of peat and building them into stacks. Place two sods parallel on the base, about two inches apart, wet side up, then two more on top, turned ninety degrees. Continue until the stack is about knee height; any higher and it is likely to blow over in the winds that should be drying it. What you are left with is hundreds of stacks – the midland’s version of black, robust sandcastles. As children we were dragged to the bog reluctantly, accompanied by a flask of tea and a sleeve of club bars. When chocolate bribery didn’t work, my parents resorted to guilting us with the promise of a warm house in winter, heated by our labour. We would return with toasted shoulders, eyelashes dusted with peat and fingernails outlined in black. As a 16-year-old, I could never
understand why my almost 80-year-old grandmother would go there voluntarily, when she had such an easy out. I understand it more now. There is a certain romanticism or sentimentality to this kind of labour and way of life. Its transaction is simple. No currency involved, but it has clear value. It is these images of home which inform all of my work. No matter how hard I try to draw inspiration from my current urban Dublin environment, it never bleeds. This is also the case for my sister, a painter living in Dublin, whose work has used the landscape as raw material. Longford, its images and textures, are what made me an artist, but it is also what forced me to leave. The lack of visual arts activity and opportunity means there was only ever one path, if I intended to pursue a career as an artist, and it was the train to Dublin. I am co-founder of BKB Visual Arts Studio in Glasnevin (bkbstudio.webnode.com), an artist-run studio space which I someday hope to replicate in Longford. Last year I was the Longford recipient of a pilot bursary scheme called Platform 31, in which the 31 local authorities of Ireland came together to fund 31 artists across all disciplines. It was an invaluable experience which I used to deepen my research. My current practice looks at the possibilities before a place like Longford, where housing is cheaper, but industry is sparce. Working from home for large multinational corporations doesn’t require you live in the city. I think one of the main challenges facing the county is visibility. Longford, sandwiched between the ‘Wild Atlantic Way’ and the ‘Ancient East’, has been branded the ‘Hidden Heartlands’ by Fáilte Ireland. Hidden, the middle, the in-between. The stop for McDonalds on the way to Strandhill Beach. How do we convert this to a centre, a meeting point, a place you can return to? A place where people stay, because why wouldn’t they?
MY EIGHT-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER once asked me: “when I’m in the car, am I still outside?” In fairness to her, it’s a good question. Five years later, I’m still trying to find an answer. Sometimes I feel the same way when I am asked about my art practice – am I inside or outside? I suppose it depends on where you’re standing. As an artist living and working in Longford, I focus on the environment and people surrounding me. This includes what I see, hear, and feel, allowing me the freedom to make work using found materials and installations that reflect my situation. I use installations in particular, to invite viewers to contribute and become part of the work by leaving notes or messages. This has included mounds of sticks, broken footpaths, memory boxes, and wet concrete to write in. I find that by just walking around, I pick up interesting snippets of conversations on the streets and include those in work. Notes left around the house, shopping lists, parking tickets, tax disks, daughter’s train tickets, till rolls, receipts – anything I can use will be added to the work. Since 2006, I have been exhibiting in The Origin Gallery, where Noelle Campbell Sharp continues to be very supportive of my work. I have also stayed in Cill Rialaig on several occasions. In 2013, I was involved in setting up Engage, an artist-led group promoting the visual arts in Longford through engagement, education, and inclusion. We curated several exhibitions on a voluntary basis. The generosity of the local community and the overwhelming goodwill of every artist who exhibited was very positive. In 2014 my father passed away after a long illness. We were very close, and his loss affected me for many years. My mother became ill shortly after, passing away in 2019, and I never got a chance to grieve properly. It was around this time that my work began to change, as I did. It was no longer about where I was and became more about who I was. Why make art? Am I painting with any purpose? Should I continue? These questions made me more resolute and determined to work harder. I took my delayed grief into the studio and began to experiment more freely than I had before. I am more influenced by poetry than painting and now make art for the pure and honest sake of it, attempting to tell a story, sometimes with no direction or expectation. I have always used text in my work and began writing on blank roadside billboards, taking work out of the studio into the fresh air,
which helped me to breathe. In 2021, an Arts Council Agility Award allowed me to develop new work, and I recently completed a sculpture, The Circle of Courage (2022), commissioned by Longford County Council’s Library, Heritage, and Archives services, as part of the Decade of Centenaries, to commemorate the 1921 Ambush at Clonfin, County Longford. Studio time is a solitary pursuit. I enjoy working by myself but have been fortunate to collaborate with other artists, including Thomas Brezing, David Newton, John Kingerlee, Sean Cotter, and John Blackburn. I have recently started to work with Ciara Hambly at Hambly & Hambly in Enniskillen, and I’m glad to have the opportunity to exhibit there later this year. I also have been incredibly lucky to be selected, along with artist Katarzyna Gajewska and musician Clara Tracey, for the gallery’s John Richardson French Residency Award this April and May. The residency will culminate in an exhibition at the Château in Dampierre-sur-Boutonne, along with Irish artist Eamon Colman. Through Hambly & Hambly, the Northern Ireland Civil Service has purchased some of my work for their collection and late last year I was invited to exhibit at the ‘Ground Zero 360’ exhibition, which opens on 9 September 2022, in Houston, Texas, to commemorate the first responders who died in the 9/11 attacks and their families. For me, now, just being able to think and work is a priority – getting into the studio to move paint around the place, have the occasional studio dance, and just keep going. @garyrobinsonfrenchhallstudio
@emily_brennan_1
Gary Robinson, The Mother, The Daughter and The Holy Spirit, 2021/2022, 3600mm x 1400mm, gesso, acrylic, oil, collage, indian ink, pencil, oil bar and net curtain on canvas; image courtesy of the artist.
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Regional Focus
Immersive Process
Myth Memory
Siobhan Cox-Carlos Visual Artist
Gordon Farrell Visual Artist
A NATIVE OF County Roscommon, I have tra-
versed the border to Longford. In 2019 I took a year out to explore a little further and headed off travelling, finding myself in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. I returned to Europe where I was happily spending time with a German sculptor, safe in the hills north of Rome, but returned to Ireland on the advice of family, and indeed the Irish government, when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Back at the ranch, I was using an outhouse as a studio, but as the weather got colder, I secured a two-week residency at Roscommon Arts Centre which allowed me to see the value and necessity of getting a studio of my own again. I secured a studio in the Engage initiative in Garvey’s Yard, just off the Main Street in Longford town and I have been happily painting there ever since. It is great to have a warm, dedicated space at a reasonable rent with WiFi and access to local facilities (the art store, Farrell Coy, is just across the street). I have long-standing links with Longford and attended my first art class there in the VEC (now Longford and Westmeath ETB) in the late 1980s, and with whom I now work as an art tutor. In 2003 I attended Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT) where I completed the (then) six-year part-time diploma course, before graduating with an honours Degree in Fine Art from Limerick School of Art and Design (LSAD) the following year. I was initially a figurative painter but that has evolved to semi-figurative and, at times, pure abstraction, with the artworks themselves dictating the direction. American artists, especially abstract expressionists, are a major influence on my work. Colour has always been a key element in my work and over time, texture and pattern have come to play an important role. I particularly like collage and after three or four layers of paint, I will reach for my collage materials, which could vary from newspaper to pages from old books, fabric or broken jewellery. The pandemic did allow me the time to complete an intense three-month online painting course with the American artist, Nicholas
Wilton, which helped me re-focus and to think more about my art making. I work more intuitively now and am intrigued at what can emerge as the layers develop. I enjoy the ‘push and pull’ of interacting with the paint and the surface and working intuitively. I love the excitement of being immersed in this process, not knowing how it is going to evolve. Longford is proving to be a great base for my part-time teaching jobs, which compliment my arts practice. I am on the Roscommon County Council Artists Panel and am working with Creative Schools on designing and painting murals with students. I am delighted to be involved, as an Engage artist, with a really exciting project designing murals for the interior of a double decker bus in The Attic, a hang-out space and after school facility for local students in Longford. I have exhibited my work all over Ireland, England and the United States, including juried shows in Florida and a solo show in City Hall in Providence, Rhone Island. Over the years I have had numerous amazing residencies in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre and Cill Riallaig and also a three-month residency in Fort Lauderdale in Florida in 2004. My work is held in public collections in Ireland and private collections all over the world. I have been working towards a solo exhibition which opens in May at Solas Art Gallery in Ballinamore. I plan to exhibit paintings in two of the rooms and installations in the other two spaces. My paintings are colourful, bright, emotive, happy and created from the heart. Above all, I hope that the viewer will forget these turbulent times and experience even a moment’s joy and happiness in the presence of one of my pieces. siobhancoxcarlos.com @siobhan_cox_carlos
Siobhan Cox-Carlos, mural with students from Boyle Community College, acrylic on panels (3 of 6 panels shown, measuring 8’ x 24’ in total); photograph by and courtesy of Siobhan Cox-Carlos.
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Gordon Farrell, Manannan mac Lir, 2013; photograph by Eamon Farrell, courtesy the artist and Engage.
AS A NATIVE of County Longford, I grew up
in an apartment above the family bar in the centre of town. It was a magical time in my life. In the 1970s and 80s the bar clientele included men and women who were born in the earlier part of the twentieth century. They often sat me down beside the hearth and told me tales of ancient heroes, the adventures of Celtic gods, and mythical places that were not that far away from where I was sitting. The stories of Queen Medb and the Tuatha Dé Danann stayed with me till this day. When I was nine years old, my family travelled to the United States on holiday. The experience I took home from that trip was my visit to MoMA in New York. Art was no longer painting and drawing; it was everything and anything. It was Robert Rauschenberg. It was Monet and his water lilies. Longford looked different upon my return. As a teenager, I frequently visited the Carrol Gallery on New Street, around the corner from my home. This was where I learned about the scope of artistic practice – the visual language and the opportunity to talk with professional artists. After majoring in painting and graduating from IADT Dún Laoghaire in 1998, I worked in the United Arts Club in Dublin as the Art Convenor until 2007. That year I moved back to Longford. Moving back was a new beginning for me creatively. My studio was built, and I planned to stay. My paintings were abstract, focusing on the formal elements of mark-making, line, texture, and so on. The boglands near my studio, about a mile outside the town, were my subject. In the summer I painted and camped beside the River Inny, named after the mythical figure Ethniu, who reputedly died in the rapids in its lower reaches. And so, I gradually discovered the myth and memory associated with the landscapes of County Longford. After seven years of exhibiting around Ireland and exploring the nature of paint and its limits, I felt I needed a change in my work, so, I stopped painting for a year. In 2013, I co-founded Longford’s Cruthú Arts Festival. I am joint chair for Engage Longford, a non-profit initia-
tive to promote Longford as hub for contemporary visual art. It was during this year that I began to research the history of the county in earnest. The turning point for me was discovering the medieval collection of poems in the Lebor Gabala Erenn (Book of Invasions), which included the Mythological Cycle and the Historical Cycle. My research on local mythology expanded; I read until the story became an image. Celtic mythology associated with Longford became my new love, as did the historical figures from the county. Artists such as Anselm Kiefer taught me the importance of mythology and the value it brings to a society and a culture. Gradually I developed a vocabulary I could work with. The local art suppliers was visited less, and I spent more time in local DIY stores and thrift shops looking for found objects with mythical associations and meaning to use in my work. As I discovered more about Longford’s history, my artistic process took on a whole new dynamic. My ‘abstract bog’ works were generally small (22 x 16 inches) but discovering the fantastic and the sublime in the early Irish manuscripts demanded that the work increased in scale. The process became more physical. My materials included lead, paint, plaster, earth and stone dust on 8ft x 5ft wooden panels. Panel sizes seemed to grow to suit the heroic stories and the characters involved. I travelled to specific sites in the county that were directly connected to local myths and legends. A good example of this is a story called The Wooing of Etaín set on Ardagh Hill, which I can see from my studio window. I continue to interview local historians and conduct research in the Longford County Archives. I consider myself extremely lucky to be able to draw from the county’s rich history and culture and produce work directly associated with my home. Recently I received a bursary from the County Longford Arts Office, and I am currently working on an exhibition based on the poems of Longford poet, Padraic Colum (1881-1972). gordonfarrell.com
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Career Development
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Rónán Ó Raghallaigh, Faiche Dún Luáin, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 140 cm; photograph by Marcus Cassidy, courtesy of the artist.
Barry McHugh: What is a day in the studio like for you?
Performative Rituals BARRY MCHUGH INTERVIEWS RÓNÁN Ó RAGHALLAIGH ABOUT HIS CELTIC AND PAGAN INFLUENCES.
Rónán Ó Raghallaigh: Stylistically, I try to work as economically as possible. I think this might have started through observing the paintings of Matisse, in which he uses very confident lines, and that’s enough. Celtic art of the past is famous for being so detailed, psychedelic and kaleidoscopic, but when you look at how they have rendered a body part, it’s quite simplistic – often using just a single line. I read an interesting statement in a book on Celtic stonework that I feel sums this up quite well: “It’s as though the minute they saw the shape of the form, they were happy to let the stone have its own say in the artwork.”1 I think if you are making something with chalk, it should be obvious that it is chalk. Lately, my idea of the studio is starting to expand a bit, because a lot of the work I do is outside of the studio – like visiting ancient landmarks in Ireland, stone circles, and places like that. I end up bringing back objects that I find during those visits and including them in my shows – like the stag’s skull that you would have seen in ‘VAE VICTIS’ at Platform Arts in Belfast (7 – 29 January 2022).2 Definitely, the work is getting more ritualistic and meditative. I try to almost make the studio into a druid’s cave. I lock myself away with incense and candles and throw on some music as loud as possible to get into the right frame of mind, and just paint. My routine is to get in around 11 am and paint until 6 or 7 pm. Those are the hours that work best for me – I’m not someone who would paint during the night. BM: Speaking of druids, you rebaptised yourself as a druid in 2021. How did that come about, and has that influenced your subsequent work? RÓR: The whole thing about the druids is that they are liminal figures
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
in society; they have one foot in this world and one foot in the spirit world. That unfixed identity appealed to me. Part of becoming a druid was changing my name to Rónán Ó Raghallaigh – the Irish version of Ronan O’Reilly. I’d always felt like I had an underground identity as a Celtic artist. In the middle of the first lockdown, I was doing an MA in Art in the Contemporary World in NCAD. I can’t remember the exact moment, but I made the decision to position myself as a Celtic artist and felt the best way to achieve this and to take on that Celtic persona would be to become a druid. Even before my baptism, I’ve always been interested in the more esoteric aspects of painting. I’m interested in delving into the unconscious and alternative methods of making art. Becoming a druid did change the way I approach art making, as it gave me the confidence to do more performative rituals. I don’t think I could have done them as Ronan O’Reilly. BM: What sparked your interest in paganism? RÓR: It partly comes from when I was younger. My dad was a building contractor, and when I was a teenager, I would join him on jobs. We would be working in the glens of Wicklow, and one day we stopped on the side of the road for him to show me a stone circle in the field. I remember him telling me it was four thousand years old, and that his dad would bring him there as a kid. At the same time, I was getting into rock and metal music. Thin Lizzy was a big one because they had an album called Black Rose, which had lyrics that mention Cú Chulainn and Queen Meadhbh. I think coming across that at the same time as my dad was showing me that stone circle had a profound impact on my interest in Irish mythology. Irish mythology is often considered surreal and illogical, and the stories are indeed wondrous and chaotic. There has been this stereotype, projected over the centuries by schol-
Career Development ars, suggesting that Celtic myths are infantile compared to the great Greek stories. Irish mythology has suffered because of how it was recorded, in different books, written hundreds of years after the fact. Some of these stories finish abruptly because some monk did a bad job recording them, which feeds into the seemingly fragmented nature of the stories. The reality is that all mythology is chaotic. BM: It’s interesting how you approach your paintings, referencing Irish history in the titles. RÓR: My whole practice is based on contemplating the colonial impact on the Irish-Celtic psyche. For me, one of the most important paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland is Daniel Maclise’s The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife (1854), which depicts the marriage in 1170 between Norman military adventurer, Richard de Clare (‘Strongbow’) and Aoife, daughter of Dermot McMurrough (King of Leinster). You can see the defeated Celtic tribesmen at the bottom. Even though it’s a historical painting, it’s almost mythic, and feeds into a national psyche that one of the most important parts of our history is that we were defeated. And this comes up time and time again, in how we depict ourselves. I’m very interested in paintings of historical moments, and another one stands out – a well-known painting, Napoleon Crossing The Alps (1801), by French neoclassicist, Jacques-Louis David. It shows Napoleon in his regal glory, riding a great white steed in a storm, but it is, as far as I know, actually quite inaccurate. It was quite calm weather, and Napoleon was riding a regular horse, not that great stead depicted in the painting. I like the idea of myself as an unreliable narrator. My paintings are actually history paintings, depicting scenes and figures from Irish history, like Boudicca, the Celtic queen, or the Irish being sent to work in the Caribbean. Yet they are
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unreliable as historical sources; they are mythic paintings, but they are grounded in history. Barry Mc Hugh is a curator and writer based in Sligo who currently runs the blog, Painting in Text. paintingintext.com
Rónán Ó Raghallaigh is an artist from Kildare. In 2021, he graduated from the National College of Art and Design with an MFA in Art and the Contemporary World. On Bealtaine 2021, Rónán held a family ceremony where he was re-baptised as a druid with the Irish version of his name, rather than the English one he was given at birth. ronanoraghallaigh.com
Notes: 1 Lloyd and Jennifer Laing, Art of the Celts: from 700 BC to the Celtic
Revival (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992) 2 Vae victis is a Latin phrase meaning “woe to the vanquished”, “defeated” or “conquered”.
Rónán Ó Raghallaigh, Paráid Nietzsche, 2021, acrylic on canvas; photograph by Marcus Cassidy, courtesy of the artist.
Rónán Ó Raghallaigh, Boudica, 2021, acrylic on canvas; photograph by Marcus Cassidy, courtesy of the artist.
Rónán Ó Raghallaigh, ‘VAE VICTIS’, installation view, The Complex, September 2021; photograph by Marcus Cassidy, courtesy of the artist.
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The Visual Artists' News Sheet
Critique
Edition 61: May – June 2022
Angela Gilmour, Cladoxylopsida Wattieza (first forests, 383 Ma, Gilboa, US), 2022, acrylic on FSC birch panel; photograph by Angela Gilmour, courtesy of the artist and Sample Studios at The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion.
Critique
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2022
Angela Gilmour and Beth Jones, ‘Shadow Forests’ The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion, Cork 16 March – 23 April 2022 WHAT IS A tree? This is one of those incredu-
lously obtuse questions that would, ostensibly, seem to have a pretty straightforward response; maybe something like: plant-like things with wooden trunks and leaves. But, like most queries that present themselves as almost too obvious, the answer is far from simple. It turns out that many of the oldest known tree groups, such as the Gilboa (an extinct species from around 380 million years ago), were actually leafless. What is more, ‘trees’ – or what we typically classify as such – do not belong to a traditional monophyletic group. That is, the common ancestors of many trees are things which are not trees – the maple and mulberry tree are two such examples. This is similar to the more widely known phenomena of carcinisation, which sees crustaceans evolving into crab-like forms. In an instance of convergent evolution, different groups of plants – in some cases, both geographically and temporally dislocated – keep turning into trees. Yes, trees exist, but the category of ‘tree’ can be thought of as an abstraction; a theoretical model that provides some semblance of order to a network of vast complexity. Thinking of trees as symbolic abstractions is useful when considering the exhibition, ‘Shadow Forests’, by artist Angela Gilmour and writer Beth Jones, recently presented at The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion in Cork. Because although it’s about trees – things which are so omnipresent as to be taken for granted – the distinction here is that these models are extinct. The various works function like aesthetic ‘time machines’, offering viewers some kind of momentary glimpse into an atavistic past. Like the convoluted ancestry of the category of ‘tree’, the presented artworks outwardly articulate another kind of institutional ambiguity, drawing upon exhibition-making genealogies, both within the art gallery and the natural history museum. The exhibition was developed from field research undertaken by Gilmour and Jones at different sites that contain tree fossils from ancient forests, including the Catskill Mountains in New York State and Svalbard in the Northern Arctic. The various pieces on show – acrylic paintings, 3D-printed fossil casts, ink drawings, and video – present themselves as the empirical results of these studies, with the most successful examples being those which more overtly lean into that tendency.
The five paintings on display here channel the formality of Romanic landscapes, wherein, historically, nature became the site of an aesthetic sublime. The most interesting of these, Borehole through deep time (first forests – 383 Ma Gilboa, US) (2022), eschews this tendency, adopting an almost kitsch, Sci-Fi demeanour, with the scene of extinct Gilboa trees claustrophobically framed by a borehole that exists as a portal into an era, so unfathomably removed from our own that it becomes impossible to adequately comprehend. This jarring juxtaposition can also be observed in the delicate ink drawings, which depict various species of long extinct trees. Upon confronting these artworks, I am immediately reminded of the human past; between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, botanical illustrations abounded in journals dedicated to the natural sciences. Hand-drawn illustrations eventually gave way to photography, and so paintings like these automatically conjure pre-industrial histories, but measured in the more manageable hundreds of years, rather than hundreds of millions. The conceptual thematic of the show is the idea of ‘deep time’, which armed mankind with scientific knowledge of timescales that existed beyond traditional temporal understandings. The vast current of recorded human history, spanning roughly 5,500 years, collapses into the seemingly infinite unfolding of a terrestrial chronology that extends backwards millions, hundreds of millions, and billions of years. As the video works, Shadow Forests (2022) and Dreaming of Trees (2022) inform the viewer, the coal deposits that were instrumental in kickstarting and then accelerating the industrial revolution – the precursors to our own post-industrial, information-societies – formed over millions of years. We are set to strip them all from the Earth in less than half a century. Any solutions to the problem of ecological destruction are rife with complexities, but perhaps the motivation for finding a way forward is a substantial understanding of the deep past.
Beth Jones, Untitled 1, 2022, Resin 3-D printed leaf fossils and petrified wood from Longyearbreen Glacier, Eocene period; photograph by Angela Gilmour, courtesy of the artist and Sample Studios atThe Lord Mayor’s Pavilion.
Laurence Counihan is an Irish-Filipino writer and critic, who is currently a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in the History of Art department at University College Cork.
Angela Gilmour, The Dawn of Trees, (first forests, 385 Ma Cairo,US), 2022, acrylic on*FSC birch panel; photograph by Angela Gilmour, courtesy of the artist and Sample Studios at The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion.
[L-R] Angela Gilmour, Cladoxylopsida i, 2022, ink drawing on eco handmade paper; Cladoxylopsida with Aneurophyte, 2022, ink drawing on eco handmade paper; Borehole through deep time (first forests - 383 Ma Gilboa, US), 2022, acrylic on **FSC birch panel; photograph courtesy of the artist and Sample Studios at The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion
Angela Gilmour, Lycopsids (first forests, 380 Ma, fossilised High Arctic), 2022, acrylic on FSC birch panel; photograph by Angela Gilmour, courtesy of the artist and Sample Studios at The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion.
Critique
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2022
Gerry Blake ‘Home Place’ Municipal Gallery, dlr Lexicon 25 March – 3 June 2022 GERRY BLAKE’S EXHIBITION, ‘Home Place’,
at the Municipal Gallery, dlr Lexicon presents a series of photographic portraits of people in their homes and a separate series of vacant buildings, developed by the artist over the last three years, while travelling around Ireland. In this context, photography plays the dual roles of storytelling and documentation. Works are titled after each subject’s first name, which tends to add warmth and a personal feel to the already intimate images. The majority of the wall labels are direct quotes from the portrait’s subject; individual voices describe how they got their home, or why they live in this particular place. Direct and conversational language is applied throughout, describing life in cottages, converted buses, boats and house-shares. The gallery space has a narrative quality, carrying a range of microworlds, created by each subject’s unwavering intent to gain autonomy, personal space and dignity. The works in the main space are all the same size and placed equal distance apart, which somehow emphasises the distinct stories even more. A partition wall shows an unframed photographic work of what appears to be an abandoned house behind a wooden fence, with a large, derelict, Victorian house on the other side. Featuring in the series is a photograph, titled Kamla, who is the proud owner of a house in Cork. Vivid, cared for flowers and the subject’s personal style contribute to a powerful atmosphere of home life. The piece Cian depicts a new owner of a boat, which he sailed from England to Ireland. He is fully immersed in the boat’s interior, the natural light illuminating him, while highlighting his persistence in making a home. Eoin is sitting outside his new cottage. His pose confirms that he is comfortable with the process of renovation, surrounded by tools and crumbling, fertile textures. Angela is a portrait of a woman in her lightfilled kitchen, which echoes the composition of Jackie Nickerson’s contemplative photographic portrait, Seamus Heaney (1932-2013), Poet, Playwright, Translator, Nobel Laureate (2007), housed in the National Gallery of Ireland collection. The light is even, harnessing a balm of earned and uninterrupted peace. Courtney shows a woman sitting on the steps of a converted bus in which she has been living for the past year. She describes the logistics of making her home happen, and the freedom it gives her. It feels significant that she is sitting on the steps in a way someone would sit on a stoop or exterior porch of a house. The photograph Jin shows the subject posing with his bicycle outside the house. He describes how renting with many other adults is still expensive, but it is as good as it gets. Having his bicycle to hand suggests a yearning for independence. The pieces David and Lois present a father and daughter side by side in separate photographs; both subjects are photographed inside the bus. The label describes with a feeling of necessity how David drove the bus to his site and worked on it to make it habitable. He says, “It has a cooker, beds, a compost toilet and a sink that takes in water from a barrel outside”. Both images are populated with lots of objects, shelving, cobwebs, and soft light, which tell a story of homely warmth. David is looking down, pensive and content, yet there are traces of a weight on him. Lois is looking up, wearing a sparkly top, framed by a background of cosy things such as cocoa, a kettle, stove, coffee pot and gingham
cloth. At the back of the gallery, a smaller subspace exhibits another set of images, uniform in scale and curation. ‘Empty Houses’ is a grid of photographs of vacant buildings across Ireland. Having moved through warm, honest, difficult, and playful depictions of people in their homes, this part of the show confronts the viewer with a starkness of abandoned, uninhabited buildings. Out of the 16 pieces, some buildings have been burnt, others neglected, and there are houses that are recently vacant. One has an open gate, signifying what came before or more pertinently, what should be. The silence that hovers over these images shares the sensibility of British artist George Shaw’s articulations of afternoon suburbia. In comparison to Shaw’s paintings of empty suburban homes, Blake’s photography is pure documentation of static, neglected buildings as innate things, their stillness faced with a foreboding permanence. In a sense, ‘Home Place’ suffers in its simplicity; it does not address the complexities of the housing crisis, but cuts to the heart of the issue. ‘Empty Houses’ lays out undeniable misuses of land and resources which fail to nurture our relationships with buildings. Overall, the exhibition sets out its own familiar logic, whereby buildings and people inform and protect each other. Jennie Taylor is an art writer living and working in Dublin. jennietaylor.net
Gerry Blake, Courtney, 2021, photograph; courtesy of the artist and Municipal Gallery, dlr Lexicon.
Gerry Blake, Beara, 2019, photograph; courtesy of the artist and Municipal Gallery, dlr Lexicon.
Critique
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2022
Aoife Shanahan ‘OXYgen’ Golden Thread Gallery 3 March – 20 April 2022 ‘OXYGEN’ AT GOLDEN Thread Gallery, Belfast,
is an exhibition of recent work by Dublin-based artist, Aoife Shanahan. Lining the gallery’s Project Space, 14 monochrome silver gelatin prints are organised as a pair, two groups of three and a larger sequence of six. Joyce, Grid #2, and Grid #3 (2018) of similar dimensions, all feature grid-like patterns. At first, they seem like charcoal rubbings – not of natural objects, but rather of industrial materials, such are their semi-regimented compositions of horizontal and vertical elements. Their treatment is reminiscent of the threshold effect in image manipulation software, the hard contrast of black and white suggesting raised surfaces cast into relief. On closer inspection, however, Joyce, for example, contains smudges and tones, textures, thin lines and dusty particles – like powder chopped into lines with a razor. Grid #2 is significantly denser – resembling a cropped detail of some vast skyscraper. Grid #3 is less busy and seems to exist after the crescendo of events in Grid #2. Joyce owes its title to Shanahan’s admission that when she “look[s] at this piece for long enough, the silhouette of James Joyce with his infamous bowler hat always peers back.” I also experience this pareidolia as I progress through the show, encountering waves,
vegetation, mushrooms, mycelia, rock formations and galaxies, in what in many cases, must be a mixture of planned and random processes. The exhibition title, ‘OXYgen’, is a reference to ‘OxyContin’, the highly addictive opioid medication used in pain treatment. Legally available on prescription, it is also a commonly abused street narcotic, ground into powder then injected or snorted. Shanahan manipulates the drug in powdered form – both dry and in suspension, it would seem – to create a series of photograms, a form of camera-less photography pioneered by Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy and others. A second trio of works are like cross-sections of landscapes. Activity concentrates around a thin, white horizontal crease, where the photographic paper must have been folded to form a tent, onto which the narcotic powder was dropped or dribbled before being exposed – the series title, ‘Cascade’, perhaps a clue to this process. The effects created are highly evocative. In Folded Paper Cascade #17 (2019) and Folded Paper Cascade #13 (2019), the white line midway becomes a forest floor with an intense burst of activity just above and below ‘ground level’. It extends simultaneously upwards towards the canopy and deep underground. In Folded Paper Cascade #9 (2019) the evap-
orated dribbles leave powdery trails, forming tiny white filaments, like hyphae venturing out into the inky blackness. Simultaneously, I am reminded of nocturnal aerial photographs, punctuated by concentrations of electric light in built-up areas. This micro to macro shift is also seen elsewhere in the show, from the detailed ‘Waves’ series to the swirls and galaxy formations of Cosmic #1 and Cosmic #2. Works from the ‘Seascape’ and ‘Waves’ series are arranged from small to large to small again. In Seascape #4 (2018), waves crash against rock formations, drenching them in rivulets of foam and sending spray into the air. In Seascape #6 (2018) the waves clash with a furrowed landscape in seismic fluctuation, like two battling forces in some distant geological era. I am reminded of Tracy Hill’s ‘Matrix of Movement’ series, in which the artist manipulates data from commercial geomatics technology to create immersive monochromatic landscapes. In Waves #1 and Waves #2, fungi-like forms colonise all available space, creating networks of gills, crevices and ledges; they also resemble wrinkled sand formations or tissue under a microscope. Two further ‘Seascapes’ complete this absorbing sequence, in which scale and detail surge and subsequently subside – a metaphor perhaps
for the stimulant’s euphoric rush and inevitable comedown. According to the gallery text, the works are an attempt to highlight how abstraction can be used as an “effective way of talking […] about the issues surrounding addiction” and “issues surrounding photographic representation”. Shanahan, who has a degree in pharmacy, has engaged intensely with an unusual medium, the history of which is fraught with corruption and mass addiction due to aggressive marketing by its manufacturers Purdue Pharma, owned by the billionaire Sackler family. This is not the first occasion where photography and big pharma have collided. Nan Goldin – herself a recovering OxyContin addict – through her activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) has taken on the Sackler family directly by staging protests in the major art institutions that have benefitted from its philanthropic donations. This has prompted the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Tate Britain and Tate Modern to remove plaques bearing the family’s name. However, these considerations aside, Shanahan’s works achieve a stark and mysterious beauty in their own right. Jonathan Brennan is an artist based in Belfast.
[L–R]: Aoife Shanahan, Joyce, 2018, unique photogram, selenium-toned silver gelatin print; Grid #2, 2018, unique photogram, selenium-toned silver gelatin print; and Grid #3, 2018, unique photogram, selenium-toned silver gelatin print; photograph by Simon Mills, image courtesy of the artist and Golden Thread Gallery.
‘OXYgen’, installation view, Golden Thread Gallery, March 2022; photograph by Simon Mills, image courtesy of the artist and Golden Thread Gallery.
Aoife Shanahan, Folded Paper Cascade #17, 2019, unique photogram, selenium-toned silver gelatin print; photograph by Simon Mills, image courtesy of the artist and Golden Thread Gallery.
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2022
Critique
Conor McFeely ‘Mariner’ St Augustine’s Old Graveyard, Derry Permanent light installation CONOR MCFEELY’S ‘MARINER’ is a permanent
light installation in the old graveyard of Derry’s historic St Augustine’s church. The public artwork was commissioned by Art Arcadia, an artist-run residency organisation providing local and international artist residencies, whose premises are situated within St Augustine’s Heritage Site.1 Thirteen cylindrical white LEDs tubes are installed throughout the grounds, among the tombstones. They are programmed to sequentially fade from sunset to midnight, as a light seeming to travel on an oblique course to dispersed coordinates. The title, ‘Mariner’, refers to NASA’s Mariner programme, a series of robotic interplanetary probes sent to explore and orbit nearby planets between 1962 to 1973, named as such to evoke the spirit of nautical exploration of the unknown. The LED tubes are installed on the ground parallel to various gravestones, in reference to the “sculptural presence and history” of the monuments. A viewer primarily sees the work from outside the graveyard, from Derry’s city walls, through a black iron fence, its visual lattice segmenting the work. The lights of ‘Mariner’ are barely visible during daylight hours, then grow in dominance as night falls, the inky darkness punctuated by warmly lit geometric edges. The lights reflect and distort upon stone surfaces, highlighting a stark difference between the grand, ornate monuments of polished stone, and the weatherworn, craggy faces of humbler graves, provoking reflection not just on the diversity of life that has ended here, but on the way social positions are delineated even in death. ‘Mariner’ was originally installed in September 2021 and has since become part of a series with the more recent ‘Mariner II’, a development on the earlier installation. The notion of ‘Mariner’ as an older work that has been superseded – chronologically or artistically – by developments in the artist’s practice, brings to mind the recently deployed James Webb Space Telescope, the expressed purpose of which is to retrospectively observe the history of the universe through the medium of light. Space telescopes work not by viewing distance on our planetary scale, but rather by observing the spectrums of light emitted and occluded by distant objects in the universe. Distant light emissions must travel vast interstellar
space to be observable by us, meaning the JWST isn’t observing light being emitted in real time, but rather light emitted eons ago, that is only now reaching us. The light of ‘Mariner’, travelling among the tombstones, can be seen to reference time, or rather an idea of time as an observable object. This intentionality, this adherence to the physical logic of the space, promotes an awareness of connections both literal and symbolic, and invites viewers to look at the possible connections between the graveyard and the wider city. The location of ‘Mariner’ is a nexus of local and national history. Fronting onto Derry’s city walls, St Augustine’s Church stands on the site of Colmcille’s (Saint Columba’s) first known monastery in Ireland; the site is overlooked by the Apprentice Boys of Derry Memorial Hall, and directly opposite the now-empty plinth of the Governor Walker statue, destroyed by an IRA bomb in 1973. The itinerant lights moving around the space symbolically align with the nodal points of history found in all directions. From where I’m standing, one light is aligned to a tall stone at the southwesterly edge of the site. If I look beyond, about one-hundred yards or so up the city walls, I can see a ghost rising from the corner battlement; a towering apparition of khaki-green rectangles, bolted horizontally around a pillar. It’s a British Army watchtower, dismantled in 2005. Today there are heritage signposts, groups on walking tours, and antique cannons poking through the embrasures, with people draped over the gun-barrels taking selfies – but I can still see it there. The theory of time as a physical presence – of light on a journey – prompts me to reconsider the nature of this memory I have. It’s as though the light that bounced from the watchtower into my eyes is still on a journey, creating a mental topography personal to me, overlaid onto that shared with everyone else. Kevin Burns is an artist and writer based in Derry. Notes: 1 Conor McFeely will undertake a residency at Art Arca-
dia in July. His exhibition will open at St Augustine’s Old Schoolhouse on 29 July (continuing from 2 to 6 August).
All images: Conor McFeely, ‘Mariner’, 2021, installation view. Art Arcadia at St Augustine’s Heritage Site, all photographs by Paola Bernardelli, courtesy of Art Arcadia.
Critique
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2022
‘With Other Matter, Part One’ Roscommon Arts Centre 29 January – 12 March 2022 ‘WITH OTHER MATTER, Part One’, the first of
two themed exhibitions, was recently on view at Roscommon Arts Centre (RAC). This ambitious group show, curated by Naomi Draper, set out to explore the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on the artists’ relationships and interactions with ‘other matter’ – that is, the non-human and material world. In showing works created during the lockdown, 23 in total, the exhibition invites us to re-think our experience of isolation. At its core is the question of our interconnectedness with the environment, and the potentially transformative effects of what poet Sandy Solomon calls “the great confinement”.1 French philosopher Bruno Latour, himself a curator, recently described this period of isolation as a time for humans to positively recalibrate our relationship with the world around us.2 Latour explores the impact of lockdown isolation, and, like many of the artworks on view in ‘With Other Matter’, raises the possibility of a ‘metamorphosised relationship’ with our natural and material environments. Latour advocates a curatorial approach to art that enables the generation of new knowledge, especially in relation to ecological matters (in evidence most recently at the Taipei Biennale 2020, which he co-curated). ‘With Other Matter’ is similarly concerned with the production of knowledge and the potential of the gallery space as a site of reflection. In the open call for the exhibition, artists were invited to share new works influenced by a changing relationship with the material world during lockdown. There is a conscious aim to explore new creative processes and ways of relating to matter, including and especially the natural world. ‘With Other Matter’ sets itself the curatorial objective of creating a dynamic interaction between the individual artworks in the show. The bricolage-style presentation resonates with Latour’s proposition that all things, including human beings, stand in non-hierarchical relation to each other. In multifarious ways, using an array of media and processes, the works by the 14 exhibiting artists interrogate human interaction with nature and the material environment, which the pandemic restrictions have cast in sharp relief. The works are displayed without titles, numbers, or names of artists to guide the viewer; however, a detailed catalogue is provided. There is no obvious sequence in the presentation. For example, of the three hyper-realist oil paintings (2020) by Dave Madigan, one is hung apart, and situated among other works. Two smallscale graphite line drawings on paper by Betty Gannon are positioned either side of two watercolours, Fading Hydrangea 1 and 2 (2021) by Catherine Kelly Desmond. This presentational mixing succeeds in promoting the overall thematic coherence of the exhibition and flattens visual hierarchies. Its success is also due to the high standard and quality of the works on show. Nollaig Molloy’s Carbon-image (2022), a drawing using homemade charcoal with an accompanying digital video, evokes confinement and clutter, and in common with all of the artworks shown, is open to multiple interpretations. Ciara Roche’s series Hooker’s Green Interior 1- 3, ( 2021) captures the subtle diurnal shifting of light experienced within the confines of isolation. The three small-scale paintings use a limited palette, mainly Hooker’s Green. Hauntingly rendered in oil on paper, they are reminiscent of Edward Hopper paintings, or the reversal
of light and shade in a photographic negative. Noel Molloy’s sculpture, WHEN IS A THUG NOT A THUG, provides a synthetic counterpoint to Martina Coyle’s wall-mounted installation of soft-hued, floral photographs, ‘Lost and Found’. Issues of authenticity and identity are evident in Darren McGlynn’s humorous sculptural installation, Trust Me I’m Irish (2021). This work combines materials as diverse as faux fur, concrete, limestone and block-print, into a teetering, monumental whole. The fragility of taken-for-granted norms and expectations are exposed by way of the sculpture’s overall construction, and the use of contrasting materials. Untitled 2 (Everything and Nothing) (2021), a giclee photographic print by Kathryn Kelly, evokes subtle change and regeneration in a rural Irish landscape setting. Many of the works make overt reference to the planet and to ecosystems, for example Dorota Borowa’s series, ‘Ice Prints Black Series’ (2021) and ‘Ice Painting 5’ (2020). Here, in four exquisite works, the artist gives expression to her interest in the possibilities of painting with water. Other works invite the viewer to reconsider everyday materials and objects, including Robert Dunne’s slick architectural sculpture, Composite (2020), which uses plaster, steel, wood and paint, and Celine Sheridan’s infant forms, From the Mould/Embed (2021), rendered in laser-cut foam. Sinead Smyth’s assemblage, Auto-Accumulation, combines organic and non-organic materials, while Ida Mitrani’s sprawling wall and floor installation, Malleable Realities (2021), uses organic materials, plastics and digital images. Despite or indeed because of its eclecticism, ‘With Other Matter, Part One’ provides a rich and provocative aesthetic experience, while interrogating the inter-dependency between humans and the material environment – a pressing concern in these precarious times. Mary Flanagan is a writer based in County Roscommon. Notes: 1 Sandy Solomon, ‘The Great Confinement’, The New
Yorker, 7 June 2021. 2 Bruno Latour, After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis, trans. Julie Rose, (Polity Press, 2021).
‘With Other Matter, Part One’, 2022, installation view, Roscommon Arts Centre; photograph by Naomi Draper, courtesy of the artists and Roscommon Arts Centre
‘With Other Matter, Part One’, 2022, installation view, Roscommon Arts Centre; photograph by Naomi Draper, courtesy of the artists and Roscommon Arts Centre
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Exhibition Profile
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Installation view, ‘girls girls girls’ [L-R]: Petra Collins, Untitled, 2016, two framed photographs, 87x87 cms; Dorothy Cross, Stilettos, 1994, shoes, cow hide, cow teats, Collection of J & M Donnelly; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of the artists and Lismore Castle Arts.
THOUGH SOME OF us avoid all but the most utilitarian fashions – for fear
Black Heart in Flight CLARE SCOTT REFLECTS ON ‘GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS’ AT LISMORE CASTLE ARTS.
of triggering flashbacks of being stuffed, howling, into our Sunday best for family photoshoots – the blooming of puffy dresses above pale legs that sprout from chunky boots among the hot-panted, fake-tanned girls of recent fashion, are difficult to ignore. Much of this strange flowering is due to the burgeoning influence of Irish designer, Simone Rocha, whose creations reflect and subvert femininity, as if via a cracked, funfair mirror. That is to say, the tensions running through Rocha’s designs, drawn in part from the artworks she has chosen for ‘girls girls girls’, will be relatable even to those who have no interest in ‘girly stuff ’. Rocha has gathered this gang of female artists – young and old, famous and emerging, living and dead – to create space for new conversations to arise. The show being primarily painting and photography, some sculpture and one video work, there are no great departures from the formal. Instead, the exhibition rests on the quality of the artworks and the immaculate presentation that contains any potential dialogue. The paintings – figurative, naïve, instinctive – foil to the photographic pieces, many of which are black and white, are initially the most striking works. Sophie Barber’s The Greatest Song a Songbird Ever Sang (2019-20) depicts twin, leggy, pink, tent-houses on thick, black impasto, the sagging canvas lapping the shining floor. It is the biggest work on show and, unstretched, the one that most obviously tests boundaries. It is held in check by the link to Sharna Osborne’s Untitled dancer, a photograph of a blurred, gyrating torso, trailing squiggles of pink light that palely echoes the wobbly tent-legs at the other end of the vaulted hall. Another guy-line runs from Barber’s Kim and Kanye by Juergen again (2021), a tiny oil on stuffed canvas showing the kissing stars – since swallowed by the black hole of West’s creepy stalking – to Francesca’s Woodman’s Self-portrait talking to Vince, Providence, Rhode Island (1977), which shows the artist half cowering, her mouth jammed open with an object, a brace gone mad
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
or decorative, plastic words – the kind you might find on a cake. Some smaller works are allowed to venture from the wall, albeit in an orderly fashion. Two presentation cases contain the work of Georgian artist, Elene Chantladze – eight paintings on unevenly cut paper, cardboard or stone, some titled in biro. The melancholy rising from her dreamlike, blurred faces and wide, fearful eyes, is heightened by the airless cases. On the wall beyond, Iris Häussler’s Tochter der Schwester Der Mutter (Niece) (1999) floats, a flowered blouse trapped within a block of dirty wax, itself trapped in Perspex. Less a conversation, more a shared suffocation. Paintings on more traditional supports are allowed to chatter freely. In Genieve Figgis’s macabre, hilarious Upstairs Downstairs (2021), a group of figures with fried-egg eyes grin meatily across at Cassi Namoda’s Conjoined twins in soft blue dressing (2020), who sport vaguely familiar, dark monobrows and little black boots – the kind a servant might wear. To their left, is Petra Collins’s Untitled (2016), a pair of framed photographs. The first image forces the eye to adjust to yet another set of twins – girls? sex dolls? They awkwardly spoon in a living room chair, petite feet in white ankle socks hovering above the water that laps all around them. In the gap between this and the second part of Untitled, one makes a quick zig over to Dorothy Cross’s pair of hairy, teated, Stilettos (1994), encased in plinth-based Perspex, before zagging back to Collin’s pair of disembodied feet jammed, surreally and incompletely, into shoes that sit on a graffitied desk. In the windowless upper gallery, a row of Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits, Untitled (1976/2000), hangs catty-corner with a row of Roni Horn photographic close-ups, Untitled (Weather) (2010-11). Where Sherman is keeping her distance (as usual), Horn’s anonymous white face is pressed up against the frame. The only colour in the room comes from one of Alina Szapocznikow’s triffid-like Sculpture Lampe X (1970), a mouth on a yearning stalk, lit from within. Sian Costello’s Wishful Self Portrait III (2020) features two blurred little girls, one in a puff of white dress, another headless. Painted on canvas paper, they are slightly torn and grubby – bed-time versions of Costello’s other little girl, Wishful Self Portrait II (2020), in the brighter main gallery. In the tower, Louise waits; Janus in Leather Jacket (1968) dangles blackly, while Untitled (No.7) (1993) is neatly arranged on a chunky plinth that crowds the space. The latter comprises two pairs of smooth, disembodied bronze arms, a Monopoly-like house protruding from one. One pair of hands covers the other pair protectively. If seen as a reference to traditional marriage, one in which a girl merely exchanged one ‘daddy’ for another, it underlines the monstrousness of the transgression represented by the jagged black heart’s rude attempt at flight. Rocha’s impeccable curation extends to the title – ‘girls girls girls’ is a tease, a layered legend. A deliberate avoidance of that other descriptor of the female of the species, the exhibition can also be taken as reference to adolescent transformation, the historical infantilisation of the female, or an ironic nod to her role as man’s plaything. Back in the main gallery, Luo Yang’s skinny Jian San (2017), looks out at us, eyes narrowed as she leans on a market stall and sucks on a cigarette. Her bra is visible through the thin material of her orange top. Around her, pink, red and yellow butchered carcasses hang, headless, disemboweled or in chunks, impaled on hooks. Reflected in the gaze which challenges us from a stall festooned with body parts, lies a subversion of the fashion industry’s objectification of the female body. Despite this viscerality, the exhibition’s precisely orchestrated interactions and unyielding sophistication echo, intentionally or not, the long history of prohibitions felt deeply in the writhing, female heart.
Exhibition Profile
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Installation view, ‘girls girls girls’, Round Tower [L-R]: Louise Bourgeois, Untitled (No.7), 1993, bronze, silver nitrate patina, 12.1 x 68.6 x 43.2 cm, courtesy Hauer & Wirth; Louise Bourgeois, Janus in Leather Jacket, 1968, bronze, dark and polished patina, hanging piece, 30.5 x 55.9 x 16.5 cm, Edition of 6 with 1 artist proof, courtesy The Eason Foundation; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy of Lismore Castle Arts.
Clare Scott is an artist and writer based in County Waterford. clarescott.ie
Curated by Simone Rocha, ‘girls girls girls’, continues at Lismore Castle Arts until 30 October 2022. A catalogue will be published this summer to accompany the exhibition. lismorecastlearts.ie
Francesca Woodman, Self-portrait talking to Vince, Providence, Rhode Island, 1977, Gelatin silver estate print; Photograph courtesy The Woodman Family Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery, © Woodman Family Foundation / DACS, London.
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Exhibition Profile
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Sarah Pierce, Gag, 2015-2021, installation, mixed-media and debris, customised easels, digital photographs, and framed lithographs by El Lissitzky; photograph by Tom Flanagan, courtesy the artist and Galway Arts Centre.
Dèyè mòn gen mòn / Beyond the mountains, there are more mountains… – Haitian Creole proverb THE GROUP EXHIBITION, ‘Mountain Language’ at Galway Arts Cen-
Consequences of Language ROD STONEMAN REFLECTS ON ‘MOUNTAIN LANGUAGE’ AT GALWAY ARTS CENTRE.
tre (4 February – 16 April), takes its title from a short play that Harold Pinter wrote in 1988 after a trip to Turkey with Arthur Miller. Its starting point, the unrelenting oppression of the Kurdish minority by the Turkish state, a series of heart-rending scenes follows a group of prisoners in an unnamed country and explores the control of language as a mechanism of domination.1 Historically this focus on the consequence of language reminds us of the critical debates surrounding the ‘politics of representation’ in the 1960s and 70s, arguments and theories about the ways that systems of language and image hold us, place us, and partly generate our identities. The new director of GAC, Megs Morley, has made an exhibition that takes a journey through the gallery to understand how languages, visual and verbal, make meaning socially. ‘Mountain Language’ suggests versions of the relationship of a contested past to the possibilities of the present, and the construction of different futures. Sarah Pierce’s contribution is key to the exhibition as a whole; an assemblage around issues of history and power, built from the discarded materials of the refurbishment of GAC and the assembly of the exhibits. It continues the artist’s exploration of staged tableaux connecting to the work of Alice Milligan and Maud Gonne; the themes of Milligan’s writing in Glimpses of Erin (1888) reinvented in tableaux vivants (living pictures) – politicised hybrids of theatre and pictorial art, devised by the indomitable Milligan during the Irish Cultural Revival. At the exhibition opening, appropriately enough, Hildegarde Naughton (Fine Gael TD for Galway West) stepped lightly through the assemblage just before the staged performance took place of three women strik-
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
ing dramatic poses and making ambiguous gestures. Pierce’s work questions the delineations between order and disorder and re-imagines a role for the artist in history. As in the 2015 IMMA exhibition, ‘The Artist and the State’, she invokes El Lissitzky and a tradition of radical Modernism, conjoined with the debris of smashed frames of wood and paper. There is a project for the present, involving memory with body and gesture, and envisaging women’s articulate presence in the history of the future. Meanwhile, a crumpled and discarded Union Jack lies amongst the detritus. Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s startling image of a face, Untitled (Adversary) (2020), is made up of overlaid AI generated portraits which echo the process of machine learning as it evolves new identities – an unnerving indication of digital means to reconfigure ourselves. Her work circles the question of “slipperiness in representation and how we construct meaning – within this the ways in which, culturally, meaning is constructed for us”.2 Her recent exhibitions use the title of the 1565 text, Inscriptions or Titles of the Immense Theatre – the earliest instruction manual for creating private collections and museums – setting out a basis to collect objects which reinforces Western Imperial assumptions, here disrupted by Ní Bhriain’s display of delicate and exquisitely placed objects, combining the natural, geological and archaeological. There is a visual rhyme with Alice Rekab’s votive objects, displayed as part of a complex installation, including a short film, showing the tactile surfaces of the earth and the extraction and exploitation of materials from it. Research and theory are not too far away; the books and pamphlets laid out on an adjacent table by the gallery window point openly to the constellation of thinking and discourse that surrounds the exhibition. They could remind one of the bibliography of theoretical texts that Pier Paolo Pasolini concealed in the closing credits of his notorious last film, Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom (1975). It is an indication of the connections of the individual artworks and the exhibition as a whole with other worlds of ideas and words – which can be called their ‘intertextuality’. There is a significant presence of film in the exhibition. Perhaps this relates to Morley’s vibrant practice as a filmmaker, or a signalling of an important loosening of the demarcated roles of curator and artist in the institutions of the art industry. Duncan Campbell’s The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy (2016) is a mockumentary which utilises re-enactment to offer a critique of the misrepresentation of the disappearing culture of the west of Ireland, described as “a world which is slowly dying”. A sequence with a basking shark invokes Robert Flaherty’s 1934 fictional documentary film, Man of Aran, and undermines the usual deployment of archive as an ‘avowal of truth’. As the film makes clear, “the way people present themselves is not reality”. Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020), by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, is a film “dedicated to tenderness”. It undertakes an ambitious reproach to the ‘black soot’ of a culpable world, where a radical sensibility struggles to emerge from listening, thinking, touching skin and earth. The violence of an economic system building borders against migration, while creating irreversible ecological devastation through mining and extraction, is questioned by forms of connection, intimacy and empathy. Instead of dismay and depression, the film offers routes to new subjectivity. As Annie Fletcher suggested, when launching the exhibition, there may be a generational movement in which the role of the artist as critic, disruptor and attacker of actuality changes in an adoption of transdisciplinary practices, to go far beyond negation and resistance, replacing denunciation with a search for languages involving new forms of love, kinship, connection and tenderness. ‘Mountain Language’ is an ambitious exhibition that asks the spectator to compare and associate the connections and divergences of artistic modes of thought which, in different ways, contest dominant discourses. As the French novelist Michel Butor once described: “This is the system of significations in which we are held in everyday life and in which we are lost.” Rod Stoneman was a Deputy Commissioning Editor at Channel 4 in the 1980s, CEO of the Irish Film Board in the 1990s and an Emeritus Professor at NUIG after setting up the Huston School of Film & Digital Media. He has made several documentaries and written a
Exhibition Profile
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number of books, including ‘Seeing is Believing: The Politics of the Visual’. Notes: 1 In 1996, Mountain Language was to be performed by Kurdish actors
of the Yeni Yasam company in Haringey in North London. The actors obtained plastic guns and military uniforms for the rehearsal, but a worried observer alerted the police, which led to an intervention with about 50 police officers and a helicopter. The Kurdish actors were detained and forbidden to speak in the Kurdish language. After a short time, the police realised they had been informed of a theatrical performance and allowed the play to go ahead.
2 Mine Kaplangı, ‘Interview: Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’, Artfridge, 14 April 2020, artfridge.de
Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Inscriptions IV, 2020, photographs and sculptural works, installation view; photograph by Tom Flanagan, courtesy the artist and Galway Arts Centre.
Alice Rekab, Family Bodies, 2013, unfired terracotta, dimensions variable; photograph by Tom Flanagan, courtesy the artist and Galway Arts Centre.
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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Exhibition Profile
Tom dePaor, ‘i see Earth’, 2022, installation view, VISUAL; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy the artist, the Irish Architecture Foundation, and VISUAL.
THREE DYNAMIC INSTALLATIONS continue at VISUAL, Carlow, until
Stories Taking Shape DARREN CAFFREY CONSIDERS A TRIO OF EXHIBITIONS CURRENTLY SHOWING AT VISUAL.
22 May. ‘i see Earth’ is a cumulative exhibit of works by renowned Irish architect, Tom dePaor. Looking back at some of dePaor’s celebrated projects over the past three decades, we can see his manner of creative solutions and exact appreciation for detail. With a catalogue that includes the stylish and functional Pálás Cinema in Galway, and more temporary commissions, like his peat briquette structure for the Irish Pavilion at the 12th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, the accompanying film by artist and long-term collaborator, Peter Maybury, is a rich resource. On Being There (2022) reflects back over notebooks, photographs and footage of dePaor in action, while four hefts of rock, provided as seating, suggest stepping-stones. Both the film and the seating feel natural, with content and context each resolved to suit the shape and character of dePaor’s work. An epic and immersive multimedia installation occupies the large hall, with Nathalie Weadick of the Irish Architecture Foundation reconfiguring a selection of dePaor’s works. Two large-scale video projections play on opposing walls as a diorama of wire-frame structures hangs or stands upright, cutting into the projected images and rendering these slight forms only partially visible. Each is said to be modelled on the traditional blue and white Willow Pattern motif for ceramics, although this reference is perhaps more of a starting point. The hand-painted finish is perfectly met but within this shifting atmospheric setting, the familiar oriental illustration may not fully translate. Blocked-out windows mean the only consistent light comes from two neon blue cross beams hung in the centre of the space. This makes dePaor’s watercolour works difficult to appreciate whereas the prose poem that is pinned to the wall and tracks all the way around the space is enhanced by the staging. Drawn from the radio exchanges of a Soviet cosmonaut re-entering the earth’s atmosphere, previous, next (2022) delivers a pulsating first-person narrative. When asked what he could see from his spacecraft, Yuri Gagarin replied, “i see Earth”
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
– his words are elaborated here to form a preternatural but no less human story about interactions with space. In the adjacent gallery, backed by a permanent outdoor water feature, the work of Christopher Steenson is presented under the title ‘Soft Rains Will Come’ – a meteorological forecasting that is supported by photographs of marshlands and variously flooded landscapes. Each of these framed prints hangs facing an arrangement of twelve transistor radios, creating a spatial sound installation that combines live shortwave radio and field recordings to transmit a live broadcast within the gallery space. Questions around how we encounter landscape and technology are touched on here – as well as our relationship to receiving and distinguishing intelligence across active networks. When a female voice comes into the mix, speculating on the causes of a catastrophe, the voice seems more selfaware than the fiction supposes. This aspect offered by the oracle is distinct from the chatter of found recordings and highlights the work as a form of storytelling. By engaging the incidental as a feature of the momentous, the radio broadcast effectively communicates the apocalypse from a relatively safe distance, as if it has already occurred. Referencing entropy
Exhibition Profile and failed digital communications, Steenson asks what obsolescence means in the context of recurrent change. His use of the camera to share a contemplative gaze also instructs us to see afresh as we wonder on these Lovecraftian images of Irish boglands. There is more fantasy and mythos in One Hundred Steps (2020), a film installation by Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, co-commissioned by VISUAL and Manifesta 13. The single-channel film and printed carpet were first shown in Marseille in 2020. Following its Irish premier at VISUAL, One Hundred Steps will tour to venues nationwide over the next 18 months. Executed across dual locations, and presented as two distinct but corresponding chapters, the 30-minute film is split between historical buildings in Ireland and France – a seventeenth-century, Anglo-Irish colonial manor, and a nineteenth-century mansion in Marseilles – both open to the public as decorative arts museums. The film begins with a car pulling up outside. A man and young girl enter the house for a guided tour, before the girl, loosening herself from the man’s grip, slips out for a wander. Soon she finds a miniature doll’s house and a bed where she sleeps to dream, the camera drawing us in through the strings
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of a standing harp. Throughout the rooms of both houses, visitors reveal themselves as performers. In Marseille, where men sit at a table playing a hand of cards before taking up their drums, there is an allusion to Paul Cézanne’s famous paintings of card players, but there is also a specific musical heritage which traverses any Eurocentric framing. When in a hallway, we meet a lone dancer who steps with rhythm and purpose, it becomes clear that the interpretation of these spaces is about living memory, even as previous narratives remain present. Inside the walls of each ornately preserved museological setting, cultural traditions strum and jig their way around shared colonial realties, offering roots which, although transitory, are equally if not more established. Presented alongside Bob Quinn’s documentary series, Atlantean – first broadcast in Ireland in 1984 and positing links between Northern African and Celtic cultures through folk practices like song and dance – One Hundred Steps only adds to the story. Darren Caffrey is an artist, living and working in Kilkenny.
Tom dePaor, ‘i see Earth’, 2022, installation view, VISUAL; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy the artist, the Irish Architecture Foundation, and VISUAL.
Christopher Steenson, Soft Rains Will Come, 2022, indeterminate sound artwork for twelve Cold War-era radios placed on stilts (to protect against eventual submersion). Infinite duration (or until the electricity stops). Bespoke algorithmic audio system, live shortwave radio signals, field recordings, voiceover and collected shortwave radio recordings. Broadcast via four radio transmitters. Dimensions variable. ‘Soft Rains Will Come’, installation view, VISUAL; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and VISUAL.
Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, One Hundred Steps, 2020, single-channel film and printed carpet (8m x 6m), installation view, VISUAL; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artists, VISUAL, and Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo / Rio de Janeiro.
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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Exhibition Profile
On Steady Ground/Unsteady Ground JONATHAN CARROLL INTERVIEWS CORA CUMMINS AND SAOIRSE HIGGINS ABOUT THEIR RECENT EXHIBITION AT DLR LEXICON. ‘ON STEADY GROUND/Unsteady
Ground’ was a collaborative exhibition at dlr Lexicon (11 December 2021 – 13 March 2022) by artists Cora Cummins and Saoirse Higgins, awardees of a Visual Art Commission from Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, funded by the Arts Council. The exhibition included etching, video, photography and sculpture, and connected the artists’ shared interests in landscape and environmental change. The exhibited works reflect on the effects of losing what seemed permanent. Jonathan Carroll: You both cite specific books as being key to the development of your ideas for this exhibition, which works beautifully within the library setting. One of the books on display is by amateur astronomer, Lady Margaret Lindsay Huggins, who was originally from Monkstown, County Dublin. Cora references another Monkstown astronomer who had a part of the moon named after him. Can you explain the importance of these books? Cora Cummins & Saoirse Higgins: We share an interest in similar reading material, such as Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (1977), and writings by anthropologist Tim Ingold, nature-writer Robert MacFarlane, and Orkney filmmaker Margaret Tait. We also wanted to include figures of local interest, such as the telescope maker Howard Grubb and Lady Huggins. The book in the exhibition is called The Atlas of Representative Stellar Spectra, published in 1897, which features work by Lady Huggins and her husband William. She was a pioneering astrophysicist, born in 1848 in Monkstown, who worked in the emerging field of astronomical spectroscopy. They set up an observatory in their home in London and used dry gelatin photographic plates to record their findings. JC: The centrepiece of the exhibition is Monument (2021) by Cora, in which nine large prints of sections of a mountain are displayed to form a larger mountain. What is the symbolism within this work? CC: I am interested in how the clichés of grief are often linked to geographical terms: ‘hit rock bottom’, ‘avalanche’, ‘cliff edge’, ‘waves’, ‘bogged down’, ‘sink hole’, ‘getting over that mountain’. I felt the need to make a large piece for this show; I wanted it to feel monumental and for it to be a monument for my deceased husband, Jason Oakley. There is also a literary reference here. In Grief is the Thing with Feathers (Faber & Faber, 2015) by Max Porter, the widower tries to communicate how grief stricken he is by describing a gigantic monument he wants to build in his wife’s memory. I was also thinking about the urge to climb tall mountains and in particular, the story behind George Mallory’s numerous attempts to scale Everest. JC: Your struggles with grief are also embodied in the large copper sculpture, Fallen, which is a product of making Monument. Could you speak about the physical nature of these works? CC: Working on an etching of this scale is very physical and each plate was etched and also aquatinted. Fallen is a mirror piece to Monu-
ment. I re-used the copper plates that made the etching. I twisted and crunched them by hand to create a crumpled heap, a fallen monument, a failed mountain. JC: During one of your exhibition tours, you mentioned the term ‘pathetic fallacy’, coined by John Ruskin. How does this relate to your work? CC: I have always worked through landscape and my work has always had a personal story behind it. I suppose in the years following Jason’s death, I would walk a lot and see things in my surroundings that reminded me of my sadness. I remember learning about ‘pathetic fallacy’ in school and thought it was something I was definitely experiencing. JC: Saoirse, the exhibition is clearly split in two. Cora’s work is concerned with the ‘unsteady ground’ of the title (precarious mountain ranges, cracks in the ice, crumbled forms). Does your work offer steadier ground? SH: I am also looking at moving, shifting, or fragile ground within daily and seasonal changes… the island contracting and expanding, ebbing and flowing as the tide moves in and out, and also as sea levels rise and land disappears. Papay is a low-lying island, standing just 45 metres at its highest point. I am looking at physical, tangible anchor points and tools that we use in the landscape. JC: In your piece, Survival Tools of the Anthropocene, we go underwater and into the sky; we join fishermen and a community project on Papay. What are these tools of survival? SH: The ‘tools’ are influenced by Annales School historian, Fernand Braudel (1902-85). For Braudel, time could be divided into three durational scales: short term events, medium term ‘conjunctures’, and long-term structures, which unfold over centuries or millennia and are termed the longue durée. I interpret these durations as three interconnected island viewpoints: the local – from the island looking out to sea; the relational – the way islanders care for their environment and community, while looking to the future; and the long – the view from the island to the external world. These three scales – as much geographical or spatial as they are temporal or durational – are returned to repeatedly in my work, in film, photography, sculptures and archival material. JC: There is no narration for this video, besides an initial list of actions. Has enough been said? SH: There is audio at the beginning of the video with the sound of wind whistling through the kite from high above the island. Then the ‘narration’ moves to text between the videos with a list of words that describe change and movement. The videos are a collection or lexicon of change over at least two years on the island. But language and dialogue are extremely important tools of survival. How we explain, discuss and speak about issues of climate change (and to whom) influences what we understand and how we might respond.
Cora Cummins, Monument, etching, 2021; photograph by Áine Teahan, courtesy of the artist and dlr Lexicon.
JC: I love that you both include work on the celestial, with one of your pieces (a postcard visitors can take with them) referencing Lady Huggins directly. These works are the most hopeful within the exhibition. Do you agree? SH: The postcard shows an image I took on Papa Westray of the star spectra of Orion using a special camera filter called a star grating. It is collaged onto a still image from some of the aurora time lapses I took on the island last year. The aurora happens every year at around this time and represents hope and the power of nature. The interesting aspect for me, looking up at the enormous 360-degree night sky, is that it connects us all no matter where we are. We are looking into the past tense, with stars moving away and towards, changing at different time frames. CC: We like to see ourselves as pioneers of hope and love. My mezzotint Aurora was made to respond to Saoirse’s images of the Aurora. JC: In your work, you both connect the local to
the global and resonate subtly with the climate crisis. But you are not scientists and offer no obvious solutions. What, therefore, is the role or responsibility of the artist (if any) in this crisis? SH: I wish we could solve it that easily as artists. And who says scientists have the ultimate solution anyway? They have their expertise and research agendas but it’s the combination of us all co-existing – artists, advocates, policymakers, communities, publics, scientists, and designers who need to address this. The ‘hyperobject’, as described by Timothy Morton, is upon us. We see this in the Ukraine right now and during the pandemic, when macro actions happening ‘elsewhere’ directly affect us. As artists, we keep the dialogue flowing, interpolate between the silos, and open up ways to make transformation happen. Jonathan Carroll is an independent curator based in Dublin.
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Organisation Profile
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Black Church Turns Forty ALAN CROWLEY DISCUSSES THE EVOLUTION OF BLACK CHURCH PRINT STUDIO. THIS YEAR, BLACK Church Print Studio celebrates its 40th
anniversary. For the past four decades, the studio has provided support for professional artists and printmakers. A member-centred organisation, Black Church Print Studio was established by artists, and is run by artists, for artists. The studio strives to maintain and develop contemporary printmaking in Ireland. This focus on current printmaking practices was a deciding factor in the establishment of the workshop. The debate in the eighties was whether printmaking would remain fixed in tradition, or expand to include emerging media and processes. Liam Ó Broin, Michael Byrne, Pádraig O Cuimín, Phoebe Donovan, Sara Horgan and John Kelly, former members of Graphic Studio Dublin, established their own studio with a focus on innovation and inclusion of emerging media in print. This studio was to become Black Church Print Studios. The print workshop is at number 4 Temple Bar in the heart of Dublin’s city centre. For the use of this building, the studio has a ‘Cultural Use Agreement’ with Dublin City Council. The name ‘Black Church’ was taken from an originally proposed site of The Black Church at St Mary’s Place, off Parnell Square. The old Dublin saying goes: “Three times around the Black Church and you meet the devil”. That site proved too costly to renovate and did not proceed, but the name Black Church was retained. In October 1982 the studio opened its doors in a warehouse building in The Coombe. Loughlin Kealy, now Professor of Architecture in University College Dublin, advised on the initial workshop layout. In setting up, both new and second-hand equipment was installed, and a workshop practice was established. But in 1990 the building was so badly damaged by fire that the studio was rendered homeless again. In 1994 the studio took up residence in its current building in Temple Bar. As part of the redevelopment of Temple Bar, this site was custom built as a printmaking workshop, designed by architects McCullough Mulvin, the late Niall McCullough and his wife Valerie Mulvin. Construction proved difficult
as access is restricted on all sides by existing buildings and narrow streets. The installation of the workshop was accomplished via crane, prior to the completion of the roof. The workshop building merited the 1996 Architectural Association of Ireland Downes Bronze Medal. The impressive wood and bronze entrance door was commissioned as part of a Percent for Art scheme for the new building. It was designed by Dr Andrew Folan, Head of Print at the National College of Art and Design, and architect Valerie Mulvin. An abundance of light is essential in an artist workspace, and a notable feature throughout the building is the natural light that comes from both the front and back. At ground level, a double-height gallery space is occupied by The Library Project, run by the PhotoIreland Foundation since 2013. Above the gallery on the first floor is a lithographic and digital print area. The second floor is the etching area, and the top floor is for silkscreen and traditional photography. All areas are shared spaces, which is conducive to the sharing of ideas, skillsets and establishing a strong communal sense and comradery among members. With over 70 members and an equivalent number of non-members accessing the workshop, Black Church Print Studio is a significant resource for artists in Ireland. Members are provided with unrestricted access, subsidised printmaking materials, teaching positions and exhibition opportunities. The focus in Black Church Print Studio is the evolution of printmaking, where traditional techniques are integrated with new and emerging processes, crucial to the development of a contemporary printmaking practice. With this in mind, a Risograph digital duplication machine and a new large-format Epson printer have recently been acquired. The studio runs an International Artist-in-Residence Programme, established in 2008 to attract international artists to the workshop. This programme furthers the professional development of the resident artist and bolsters the profile of the studio. The four-week residency provides complete workshop access and accommodation. In recent years this
Margot Galvin (studio member) working on the screen-printing floor, Black Church Print Studio, 4 Temple Bar, Dublin; photograph by Juliana Scodeler, courtesy of Black Church Print Studio.
programme received support from IMMA’s Production Residency, where resident artists are introduced to cultural practitioners on residency at IMMA. This year the international artist is Belle-Pilar Fleming, a screen-print artist from Colorado. The Process Residency Programme is a second programme, aimed at promoting collaboration between an invited non-printmaking artist and Black Church Print Studio. Over a 12-month period, the resident artist is given access to printmaking processes by an allocated master printmaker from our membership, and our Technical Manager, David McGinn. The resident artist can work in new and exciting directions where their practice intersects with printmaking. This year the studio is delighted to welcome Dublin-based artist Niamh McCann, who works in a multiplicity of mediums including sculpture, installation, video and painting. On 8 September 2022, the studio will exhibit a 40th anniversary show in its ground-floor exhibition space. Curated by Donna Romano, Head Librarian at National College of Art & Design, the show will comprise works from members, residency artists, and selected work from the studio archive. Black Church articles from NIVAL will also be on display, including past exhibition publications, catalogues, videos, slides, artists’ papers and printed ephemera. For more details of our 40th anniversary programme, membership profiles, Friends Scheme, and new online print shop please visit our website, or contact our General Manager, Hazel Burke. Black Church Print Studio is supported by the Arts Council, Dublin City Council and Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. Alan Crowley is a lecturer at Limerick School of Art & Design (TUS) and Secretary to the Board of Directors at Black Church Print Studio. blackchurchprint.ie
Installation of a large etching press through the second-floor window of Black Church Print Studio, 4 Temple Bar, Dublin (prior to the installation of the windows and roof of the building), circa 1994; photograph from the studio archives, courtesy of Black Church Print Studio.
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Residency
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Maria McKinney, Goat skull scan, 2021; image courtesy of the artist.
THE BOLAY RESIDENCY is named in honour of visual artist Veronica
Blessing, Curse, or Inoculation MARIA MCKINNEY REFLECTS ON HER BOLAY RESIDENCY AT LINENHALL ARTS CENTRE.
Bolay, who sat on the Board of Directors of Linenhall Arts Centre for 13 years. She is remembered for her contribution to the artistic community in Mayo and for her kind and generous nature amongst her peers. The focus of the annual Bolay Residency is to open the local community to an artist who will benefit from a supportive environment and dedicated studio time at a pivotal stage of their career. This two-month residency provided by the Linenhall offers studio space, accommodation, artist fee, materials budget, and an additional fee for mentoring. The artist is selected through a one-stage open call, administered by Visual Artists Ireland, and culminates in a solo exhibition in the Linenhall the following spring. The opportunity to spend two months in Castlebar near the west coast was extremely welcome, as the support and change of environment gave me the space to digest the stop-start nature of the past two years. I was the second Bolay artist-in-residence, with the first being Bryan Gerard Duffy in 2020. The newly renovated studio is a large, high-ceilinged private space with a sink and its own bathroom. Next door is a new digital media suite, which the resident also has 24-hour access to. Accommodation is an entire cottage in Lough Lannagh holiday home village, about a 20-minute walk away from the Linenhall. I spent a lot of my time cycling out to Clew Bay, looking at hills, and visiting a couple of farms with rare cattle breeds. Though at one of these in Lisnolan, I was diverted from cows to the ‘Old Irish Goat’. I was completely unaware that herds of wild goats still roam the hills and mountains around Ireland. A concerted effort is currently underway to get the Old Irish Goat officially recognised as a distinct breed – one that is at risk of disappearing completely. Hunting, and the import of British breeds a century or so ago, resulted in escapees crossbreeding with the indigenous
Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
wild population here, meaning that very few true Old Irish Goats remain today. Their 15 minutes of fame came about last year, when they were introduced in a controlled manner to the hills of Howth. This form of conservation grazing reduces the undergrowth that has potential fuel for wildfires, thus protecting the multimillion-euro properties in this exclusive peninsula. It seems for any rare breed to become recognised and protected, it must justify its existence through both an economic and environmental lens. There is much research justifying the need for genetic diversity across all life forms. This diversity provides protection against, say, a novel pathogen that has evolved to exploit a particular weakness in a species. Genetic diversity would hopefully mean that not all individuals carry this weakness, and so the species overall could survive the threat. Genetic analysis performed through Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) genotyping has confirmed the Old Irish Goat as distinct from other European goat lines. I’m experimenting with used SNP ‘chips’, gathered from research labs around Europe, as adornments for a wearable cloak. Refractive rainbows are created when high frequency light hits their embedded nanotechnology. Objects found in the archives of the Museum of Country Life in Turlough Park have repeatedly served as points
Residency of departure for my work. Many are handmade, or at least with minimum industry to still retain the individual marks of their maker. These things communicate a willingness to learn from and exploit a material’s potential. I am drawn to this handiness and resourceful approach to materials, as both are important methods of my own practice. A consideration of the corporeal has also come increasingly to the fore, in particular with regard to the agricultural processes we’ve developed to produce the food necessary to fuel our bodies and our actions. These techniques have drastically evolved over the past two generations, primarily through the intervention of scientific methods and technological innovation. While on the Bolay Residency, I took the opportunity to 3D scan some cow forelegs, held in the Museum of Country Life archives. Originally found in the eaves of old byres, these body parts had mummified over the decades. The catalogue card states a couple of seemingly contradictory functions to this custom. The first is the intention to thank God for his gift of this animal, that it was not despised, and they wished him to send more of the same. The second explanation was the belief that the animal died as the result of a spell cast by a neighbour. If the calf ’s foot was hung above the entrance to the byre, should the neighbour return to cast another spell, they would be distracted by the foot and the spell diverted. However, there is another floating theory that is particu-
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larly relevant in today’s context: by putting this diseased body part in close proximity to its living relatives, it could have performed an early form of inoculation. Through exposure to a miniscule amount of a pathogen the immune response is triggered, creating antibodies for future protection. Maria McKinney is an artist from Donegal, based in Dublin, who works with a range of media. Her exhibition in the Linenhall Arts Centre opens on 6 May. The Linenhall Arts Centre Bolay Residency 2022 and International Artist Residency 2022 are now open for applications – deadline 7 June. thelinenhall.com
Maria McKinney, research image, Clew Bay, 2022; image courtesy of the artist.
Maria McKinney, research image, Clew Bay, 2022; image courtesy of the artist.
Maria McKinney, studio image, 2022, Bolay Residency; image courtesy of the artist.
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Visual Artists’ News Sheet | May – June 2022
Member Profile
Like gold to airy thinness beat
Peeling the Stone IT’S THE LAST Monday of July 2021. I am with
‘Moon Gallery: Test Flight’, installation view, 2022, International Space Station cupola; Photograph by NASA Space Place & Nanoracks, courtesy the Stichting Moon Gallery Foundation and the artists.
IT IS A rare and humbling thing to look up at
the night sky, see a dazzling point of light silently wandering across it, and know that you have art there. On 19 February a two-stage Antares rocket launched from Wallops Island, Virginia, USA. This mission sent a spacecraft into low Earth orbit to rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS). It was carrying crew supplies, experiments, vehicle hardware and an art gallery. ‘Moon Gallery: Test flight’ features the work of 64 international artists, and the entire exhibition fits into a small 8 cm x 8 cm grid. It is curated by the Stichting Moon Gallery Foundation in Amsterdam. Our contribution to the gallery is Like gold to airy thinness beat (2021) – a tiny sculpture of a golden ship that fits inside a 1 cm cube. In 2021 we responded to an open-call from the Moon Gallery Foundation, looking for submissions for an exhibition to send to the ISS that will: “carry important values for humanity not only at this point on Earth but also for a future multi-planetary society”. The Foundation promotes international cooperation between the creative/artistic and space/technology disciplines. Ultimately, its goal is to send 100 artifacts to the Moon as early as 2025. This would be the first permanent museum on the Moon. The call-out resonated strongly with us. We both have a long history of creative activity in the area where art and space overlap. The exhibition brief offered a tantalising contrast: both extraordinary freedoms (from gravity and planet Earth itself ) and formidable restrictions (each artwork must fit into a tiny 1 cm cube). One of the touchstones for the piece was the idea of solar sail technology. Solar sails allow spacecraft to be propelled not by rocket engines, but by light itself. Once free of Earth, these vast (but very thin) sails can unfurl. Photons can impart momentum to an object, so solar sails can catch the gentle pressure of sunlight and carry new ships across space to other worlds. This connects our most advanced technology to one of our earliest forms of transport. This technology suggested the title of our piece, derived from the poem A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning written by John Donne around 1612. He wrote this love poem to his wife in England before voyaging to Europe. He assures her that their connection will not breach but expand “Like gold to airy thinness beat”. Remaining connected while being separated by
vast distances is one of the central ideas of the poem; we thought this would resonate strongly with the primary audience for the exhibition – astronauts on the ISS. Making the work was initially daunting as it was handmade and we had no experience of working on this miniature scale. But the piece gradually evolved to fit its intended environment. Wood, paper, gold leaf, shell gold and resin combine to suggest the form of a medieval square-rigged ship known a ‘cog’. An important consideration for us was creating work for a microgravity environment. Allowing the sculpture to float in a way it never could on Earth was in creative tension with ensuring the delicate piece would be held in a stable position, in order to survive a rocket launch. Eventually we agreed to allow the piece to move and accept the risk of it being damaged, as we felt that vulnerability would further enrich the context of the work. Finally watching the gallery launch into space was one of many extraordinary events that continue to re-contextualise the work. In March, the Moon Gallery was displayed floating in the space station’s cupola. There, in the observation area with windows that provide a panoramic view of Earth, the art is recontextualised again against a background of deserts and teal oceans, an exhibition space that is an entire planet. The ISS is regularly visible overhead and some evenings we go out to view it – a bright star moving across the night skies, a reminder of what is possible.
seven others in the sunny garden of Campo dell’Altissimo Summer School in the tiny village of Azzano in Northern Italy. We are listening intently to the instructions of sculptor and experienced stone-carver, Sven Rünger. We are overlooked on almost every side by the Apuan Alps – the calcareous mountain range which, only yesterday, I tried to photograph from my aeroplane seat on the approach to Pisa. Our (as yet untouched) marble stones originated up in those mountains somewhere. It has been explained to us that these stones are waste matter, washed down from the quarries which have been active in this region since the reign of Augustus, over 2,000 years ago. Earlier, we were brought to a very dried-out river Serra, further down the mountain, and tasked with finding a stone to carve. It was a strange experience to pick my way through piles of beautiful white stones, looking for one which would stand out to me in some way. All of these river stones have developed a sort of outer crust; a porous-looking layer which forms a protective skin between the exterior elements and the delicate, crystalline structure of the marble within. Back up at the Campo, the first instructions have been given and we are ready to pick up our tools and tackle the initial stage of removing that tough outer skin. Sven calls it “peeling the stone.” On the ground, the white, dusty residues from last week’s class surround us like ghostly entities. I am drawn to that dust. My own studio practice often entails the creation of a similar little snowdrift of calcium carbonate. For years I have been drawing in chalk. Chalk and marble share the same chemical formula: CaCO3. Where chalk has a temporary effect on the world, marble suggests permanence. Chalk is cheap, marble is expensive. Chalk is light, marble is heavy. I quickly discover that peeling a river stone is not like peeling an orange. There’s a violence to the process which reverberates through my body. The steel on steel of hammer against chisel is arrhythmic and jarring. Dangerous shards shoot towards my face and ping off my goggles. “This is the fun part”, says my nearest neighbour and seasoned carver: “Let out all your frustration – it’s a kind of therapy!” I don’t feel any of her glee. I feel beaten, as though I’m absorbing these blows. They stay in my system for days. By the third day, the worst of that feeling has left
me. I find that the stone is softer and less resistant underneath its skin and carving something begins to seem like a possibility for the first time. A crack appears: a slight flaw in the stone which needs to be worked out with more heavy blows. When the fissure is no longer there, my stone is left with a hollow that exactly fits the base of my left palm. Placing my hand into it is calming and feels weirdly familiar. I spend the rest of the week carving the impressions of my palms and fingertips into the stone. The more I am sure of my intentions, the more the marble seems to soften – it feels as though I could scrape it out with a spoon. The inside of my stone is a slightly dark grey, which accentuates the shadow on the indentations I am making. After a week there’s a presentation of our work to a small gathering of local artists and supporters of the Campo. I speak about my fascination with materials, the unexpected violence of carving, and my response to that. I make it known that touching is allowed, and almost everyone sidles up to try out my piece, to experience a soft way of entering stone, to feel their skin’s compatibility with the marble and to feel the differences between the shapes of my hands and theirs. Orla O’Byrne is an artist based in Cork who is currently enrolled on the MA in Art & Process at MTU Crawford College of Art & Design (CCAD). O’Byrne’s research trip to the marble-quarrying region of Northern Italy was funded through the Valerie Gleeson Development Bursary 2020.
Gillian Fitzpatrick is a multi-media artist based in Ireland. gillfitzart.com
Justin Donnelly is an academic in TU Dublin, with a background in astrophysics and interests in the visual arts, writing and filmmaking.
Orla O’Byrne , Hand on stone, 2021; image courtesy of the artist.
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2022
Member Profile
Le Segrete Vite
A Good Impression I AM THE second youngest in a family of sev-
John Keating in his studio, 2017, photograph by Lar Boland, courtesy the artist.
ON 5 MARCH in the heart of Florence, the
exhibition ‘Le Segrete Vite’ was opened in the House of Dante Museum. The House of Dante is the site of the birthplace of the celebrated Italian poet and philosopher, Dante Alighieri. The prestigious venue sits in the birthplace of the Renaissance – the city of Florence, home to Michelangelo’s David, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation. Described by Mark Twain as “the city of dreams”, Florence is abundant with timeless art. The opening evening was well attended, including by the six participating artists – Alberto Bessone, Sandra Bresin, Ezio Ciprian, Fausto Nazer, Lucia Serafini and I. The exhibition of four painters and two sculptors was curated by Prof Giancarlo Bonomo and Dott Raffaella Ferrari. The opening was also attended by members of the Society of Fine Arts (Società delle Belle Arti – Circolo degli artisti ‘Casa di Dante’). I was invited to participate in the exhibition following success at The Premio Nazionale D’Arte Bologna (31 October 31 – 20 November 2020), which was also curated by Prof Giancarlo Bonomo and Dott Raffaella Ferrari in collaboration with UNESCO. I was awarded first place in painting by the Juried Committee made up of art critics, journalists, gallery directors and UNESCO representatives. The theme of the exhibition in Bologna was ‘L’idea della Belezza’ (The Idea of Beauty). I exhibited six pieces in Florence. The oil paintings used my technique of carving and breaking into the surface to create three dimensional and textured works, inviting the viewer to see behind the first layer of canvas. The curators opened the exhibition with an explanation of the theme, Le Segrete Vite or The Secret Life. Each artist was exploring the private lives each of us inhabit – the infinite number of personalities each of us have, both knowingly and unknowingly, and those aspects of ourselves which are rarely seen or made public. The exhibition explored the ways in which these worlds can be entered through the universality or ‘access point’ of art. The sculptures and paintings collectively comprised of dynamic rhythmic gestures, in realistic and abstract forms, hinting at expression beyond language. The exhibition received positive press attention.
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My first introduction to the magical world of art was in my hometown of Clonmel, where an inspired teacher Molly Bracken turned her classroom into an ‘atelier’ painting and sculpture area. From there I went on to study at the Crawford College of Art & Design, Trinity College Dublin, Loughborough University, and The Arts Student League of New York, which I attended as a Fulbright scholar. I have exhibited with world renowned artists including Lucien Freud, Giacomo Manzù, Rainer Fetting, Enzo Cucchi, KK Hödicke, Arnulf Rainer and Hermann Albert. I have received over 25 awards, including a Gold Medal of Honour at the Olympic Fine Art London. I have exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in the US, Italy, Spain, Greece, Monaco and China. My work is included in private and public collections in Ireland, the US, Australia, Italy, Greece and England. I have guest lectured and tutored on the drawing studies course at the National Gallery of Ireland, National College of Art and Design, Dublin Institute of Technology and at the University of Pittsburgh. Dante wrote that “beauty awakens the soul to act”. The works of art exhibited at Dante’s House, each in their own way, invite just that.
en. I come from a very creative background; my mother was a fashion designer in the 1950s and 60s, and my father was a radio officer with a penchant for short story writing. His long letters home would entertain us endlessly with his exciting travel adventures from around the world. It’s no wonder I grew up with an overactive imagination! I was raised in a small village in Donegal, where neighbour knew neighbour, and it wasn’t unheard of for a session to get going. The piano would start up and the singing would commence, followed by storytelling and dancing. This was a regular occurrence. Everyone seemed welcome and the key was always in the front door. Through my child’s eye, there was harmony. Always quiet and shy, I became an observer, unwittingly noting every detail and committing them to memory, so I could recreate them in later life. Rather than being stifled growing up in rural Ireland, we as children, were cosseted by our community. We embraced our surroundings, free to roam and play. The back fields, the woods and forests, the river and laneways were our playgrounds. We welcomed each season and could read the sky as well as any farmer around. It was a life of simple pleasures where friendships, family and home life were central to our happiness. My artistic journey, I realise now, stemmed from these early childhood experiences but it was only in my teens, when I attended college in Dublin and qualified in Fashion and Design, that I truly understood my passion for creativity. During my studies, I had the opportunity to design and make a full collection for the London and Paris Fashion Weeks and watched in awe as my creations strutted down the catwalk. Still unsure of the direction I was taking, I
returned to college to study Fine Art. It was there that I rekindled my love of painting and in 1990, I had my first solo exhibition in Letterkenny, County Donegal. The feedback and encouragement I received helped direct me on my current path. As an artist and poet, my work is intuitive. Although influenced by what life throws at me, I find myself constantly returning to my roots, including my deep love of folklore and storytelling. I am anchored and inspired by the shared colloquial histories in which stories and people are often ingrained in the landscape. I believe each space has a spiritual connection and demands reverence, so I strive to interpret and portray the essence and atmosphere of these magical places in my paintings and writing. My current solo exhibition, ‘Time-Lapse’, is one that is very close to my heart. It presents an ongoing body of work that I have been developing over a number of years, while helping care for my mother living with Alzheimer’s. The Abbey Arts Centre in Ballyshannon, County Donegal, hosted the first exhibition from 10 February to 22 March. The exhibition will be presented at the Ardhowen Theatre in Enniskillen in May, before resuming its journey. Funding for the exhibition was awarded by The Irish Hospice Foundation, supported by The Creative Ireland Programme, with additional funding from Leitrim County Council. Maria Noonan-McDermott is a visual artist and poet based in Kinlough, County Leitrim. Her work is represented by Lahinch Art Gallery (Clare), Hambly & Hambly (Enniskillen), Leitrim Design House (Carrick-on-Shannon), Hamilton Gallery (Sligo), and Gallery 1608 (Antrim). marianoonan-mcdermott.com
Originally from Clonmel, John Keating now lives and works in Dalkey in south Dublin.
Maria Noonan-McDermott, The Red Chair, oil on canvas; image courtesy the artist.
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Opportunities
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2022
GRANTS, AWARDS, JOBS, OPEN CALLS, COMMISSIONS
To keep up-to-date with the latest opportunities, visit visualartists.ie/adverts
Residencies
Jobs / Funding / Awards / Commissions
Boyle Sculpture Trail Roscommon County Council invites submissions from artists for one sculptural artwork as part of a Sculpture Trail. This is funded under Fáilte Ireland’s Developed and Emerging Destination Towns Capital Investment Programme. The scheme will provide a platform for artists to respond creatively to public space, to the history, story and community of Boyle, in particular the Cultural Quarter of Boyle, the location of King House and the Pleasure Grounds. The commissions are also intended to provide opportunities for dialogue and participation with the local community. Representatives of various groups in the town will be involved in selecting the artworks. The value of each work must be between €7,500 to €10,000. Up to six sculptures will be selected with a total budget of €47,500. One work per artist. This amount is fully inclusive of all costs including fees to the artist, any necessary research, production/realisation, installations, groundworks, insurance, documentation, maintenance file and VAT.
Easter Snow Gallery Exhibition The Séamus Ennis Arts Centre are inviting you to submit proposals for end of 2022/early 2023 exhibition programme in our Easter Snow Gallery. Closing date for receipt of applications is 30 May, 2022. Please include the following in your application: • Covering letter and up-to-date CV; • Details of your availability and when you would prefer to exhibit your work; • Between 8 and 12 high resolution images of your work. An Artist Fee of €100 is provided to the artist and an exhibition opening, marketing and promotion support is also provided.
Waterford Artist Online Mentoring Scheme The Arts Office, Waterford City and County Council is pleased to announce details of the Big Look online mentoring programme for visual artists. This programme aims to help emerging visual artists with an existing practice in painting and/or drawing to make breakthroughs in their artistic practice by connecting them to artists they can learn from. The scheme is open to artists who are resident in Waterford city and County Council administrative area and is run in partnership with Artform School of Art Dunmore East with the support of the Arts Office, Waterford City and County Council. Selected mentees will benefit from 12 hours of online one-to-one mentoring time with a matched mentor. Mentors taking part in the scheme are Catherine Barron, Eamon Colman, Julie Cusack, Gabhann Dunne, Maurice Quillinan and Dave West. Total funding of €7650 to be divided among six successful mentees each of whom will be awarded 12 hours of one-to-one online mentoring over the course of six months.
Bolay Residency The Bolay Residency is a supportive, funded residency provided to an artist based in Ireland or Northern Ireland. Feeling disconnected from your practice or your career can happen for a myriad of reasons – health, financial, family or caring responsibilities; or a creative block. You might take time away from the studio, it may happen by choice or it may be because of something completely out of your control. When you get back to making work, you may know where you want to go but the terrain feels different. The Bolay Residency aims to offer one such artist excellent support as well as the time and space to develop their work and reconnect with their practice. During the residency, the Linenhall Arts Centre will provide facilities and resources for productive experimentation, dialogue, and collaboration. The eight-week Bolay Residency 2022 will take place from 24 October to 18 December (one preparation week, plus seven weeks on-site) and includes a studio, self-catering accommodation (partners and children welcome), tailored mentorship, an Artist Fee of €8,000, materials budget of €2,000 and an exhibition opportunity in 2023.
Deadline Tuesday 31 May, 4pm
Deadline Monday 30 May
Deadline Wednesday 18 May, 11:59pm
Deadline Tuesday 7 June, 5pm
Web roscommoncoco.ie
Web tseac.ie
Web biglook.art
Web thelinenhall.submit.com
Email artsofficer@roscommoncoco.ie
Email info@tseac.ie
Email info@biglook.art
Email shelly@visualartists.ie
Arts and Disability Connect – Round One The Arts and Disability Connect scheme is designed to support artists with disabilities to be ambitious, to develop their practice and to connect with arts organisations and arts professionals in the Republic of Ireland. The awards available are: • New Work, €15,000 • Research and Development, €5,000 • Mentoring, €3,000 • Training, €1,000 Artists and people supporting them to apply for Arts and Disability Connect funding can book in applicant support up until Thursday 12 May. This is for up to 30 minutes of support either on the phone, Zoom or by email. During this time we can review a draft application, answer any queries and give feedback. If you have access requirements to participate, please email connect@adiarts.ie in advance of your meeting.
VAI Award: Experience! 2022 Experience! The goal of this award is mutual learning, growth and the encouragement of collaboration between different generations and levels of experience within VAI’s membership. It seems simple enough, but the part that differentiates this is “mutual learning and growth.” The award is designed in response to the positive reactions that we receive from our events where artists of different areas of practice and across different generations share their work and experiences. The award is flexible as to what can be applied for. It may be for an exchange of mentoring, cross-generational research, or even a mutually developed project. What is key to VAI is that it must show the development of mutual understanding and development in keeping with our work supporting artists at all stages of their career. The award will provide funding of 3000 Euro. It is open only to current VAI Members. Group applications must ensure that all members of the group applying are current members.
VAI Award: Exchange! 2022 Exchange! The goal of this award is for VAI members to come together to exchange and create understanding of different cultural contexts. As we see on a daily basis, our cultural backgrounds are what shape us and inform our viewpoint and areas of practice. It is our way of living, how we see the world. But, this may also present a challenge as we seek to participate fully in the visual arts. Therefore, the purpose of this award is to provide support to artists who may wish to collaborate with each other and create an opportunity for growth and better understanding across different cultural identities. The award will provide funding of 3000 Euro. It is open only to current VAI Members. Group applications must ensure that all members of the group applying are current members. The successful awardees will be paid in two tranches, 1,500 Euro upon provision of an updated version of the plan that they submitted, and the balance upon submission of a final report of their experience and findings, which may also be published in The Visual Artists News Sheet and/or the Members’ Area of the VAI website.
International Artist Residency The aim of the Linenhall International Artist Residency is to invite an artist not living in Ireland to experience life and culture in the West of Ireland. During the residency artist will be expected to have a clear plan to develop new work or relevant research. The Linenhall will facilitate events for the visiting artist and local artists and communities to meet and engage with one another. We hope the visiting artist will complete the residency with new experiences, ideas and inspirations based on their time in Mayo and will have made lasting connections to the artist community in Mayo. The residency will take place in Autumn 2022 over eight weeks, with both an on-site and offsite element. The initial two weeks of the residency will be Preparation Weeks when the artist will be paid a fee for research and development of a residency plan before travelling to Castlebar. The artist will then have full on-site access to The Linenhall artist studio and accommodation for six weeks from Tuesday 20 September to 30 October. Funded eight-week residency includes €8,000 artist fee, €2,000 materials budget, accommodation, studio and travel expenses.
Deadline Monday 16 May, 4pm
Deadline Wednesday 1 June
Deadline Friday 1 July
Deadline Tuesday 7 June, 5pm
Web adiarts.ie
Web visualartists.ie
Web visualartists.ie
Web thelinenhall.submit.com
Email connect@adiarts.ie
Email siobhan@visualartists.ie
Email siobhan@visualartists.ie
Email shelly@visualartists.ie
Lifelong Learning Summer 2022 Date/Time
Event
Places
Cost
Thursday, 12 May 4pm
VAI Webinar Artist Talk with Candice Breitz
70
€5 (VAI members) €10 (Non-members)
Friday ,13 May 2-5pm
VAI Helpdesk with Shelly McDonnell
6
Free
Tuesday, 17 May 5pm
VAI Webinar Artist Talk with Liza Lou
70
€5 (VAI members) €10 (Non-members)
Wednesday, 25 May 3pm
Visual Artists Café Introducing... Kerry
70
Free (Kerry-based artists) €5 (VAI members) €10 (Non-members)
Friday, 27 May 2-5pm
VAI Helpdesk with Shelly McDonnell
6
Free
Friday, 3 June 2-5pm
VAI Helpdesk with Shelly McDonnell
6
Free
Tuesday, 21 June 11am-12:30pm
VAI Webinar The Artist’s Guide to Funding & Applications
70
Free (Cork-based artists) €5 (VAI members) €10 (Non-members)
Tuesday, 21 June 2-5pm
VAI Clinic Funding & Applications
8
Free (Kerry-based artists only)
June (Date TBA, visit visualartists.ie for more information)
VAI Clinic Creative Proposal Workshop
8
Free (County Cork-based artists only)
Thursday, 23 June 3pm
Visual Artists Café Show & Tell
70
Free (Kerry-based artists) €5 (VAI members) €10 (Non-members)
Friday, 24 June 10am-2pm
VAI Helpdesk with Shelly McDonnell
6
Free
Lifelong Learning Partners
1 June — 18 September 2022
Eva Gonzalès is what Dublin needs. hughlane.ie Charlemont House, Parnell Square North Dublin 1, D01 F2X9 In partnership with The National Gallery, London
2022.PHOTOIRELAND.ORG
28 AUG 7 JUL
photoirel and
PHOTOIRELAND FESTIVAL 2022
Image copyright by Daragh Soden from the series Ladies & Gentlemen