5. Column. Kim Macaleese. Forward.
6. Column. Fifi Smith. The MExIndex.
8. VAI News. VAI projects, campaigns and events.
8. News. The latest developments in the visual arts sector.
10. Regional Focus. Wexford’s visual art resources and activity outlined by Wexford Arts Centre, Cow House Studios, Gerda Teljeur, Aileen Lambert, Rosie O’Gorman and Michael Fortune.
13. VAI Valerie Earley Residency. Freedom of Thought & Space. Aoife Flynn details her time on the VAI Valerie Earley Residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre.
14. Career Development. A Balanced Life. Mary Catherine Nolan profiles Conor Walton and the development of his art career.
15. Profile. Self Directed Peers. Sue Reid profiles The Place Art Collective.
15. Profile. Rewarding & Showcasing. Dara O’Leary introduces the RDS Annual Student Art Awards.
16. Career Development. Don’t Rock the Boat! Peter Morgan reflects on multiple pasts and futures.
17. Profile. Against The Binary. Colin Martin profiles the Royal Hibernian Academy School.
18. Profile. Promoting Partnerships. Tania Carlisle introduces Arts & Business NI.
19. Critique. ‘El Lissitzky: The Artist and the State’ IMMA; Laura Gannon, WCAC; Anna McLeod, The Dock; Ruth E. Lyons, Mermaid; Jan McCullough, Belfast Exposed.
23. How is it Made? Obscuring & Revealing. Miguel Martin describes and discusses his drawing process.
24. Profile. Experimental Decade. James Merrigan looks at 10 years of The LAB, Dublin.
26. Confernece. A Mother World. ‘Motherhood & Creative Practice’, South Bank University, London.
27. Profile. Building on Potential. Tania Kiang details the aims and activities of the Gallery of Photography, Dublin.
28. Profile. Brilliant Trees. Jonathan Carroll talks to Vaari Claffey, Curator of ‘Magnetism’, (28 June – 27 September 2015) held at Hazelwood Estate, Sligo.
30. Profile. Room Upstairs. Jackie Barker profiles Void’s new gallery space.
31. VAI Regional. Visual Narration. Muireann Ni Dhroighneain details visual arts in the Gaeltacht.
31. VAI Northern Ireland. Northern Exposure. Rob Hilken, VAI’s Northern Ireland Manager, profiles the new VAI [NI] Office and the recent ‘Introducing Belfast Galleries’ event.
32. Profile. A Good Start. Carmel Daved profiles Start Studios, Mohill, County Leitrim.
32. Public Art Roundup. Public art commissions, site-specific works, socially engaged practice and other forms of art outside the gallery.
33. Profile. Doing & Not Doing. Elaine Grainger reflects on 10 years of directing and curating Talbot Gallery & Studios, Dublin.
34. Opportunities. All the latest grants, awards, exhibition calls and commissions.
35. Best Practice: Governance. The Benefits Of Accountability. Noel Kelly, CEO Visual Artists Ireland, and Tania Carlisle, Learning and Development Manager at Arts & Business NI, discuss the implications of new governance requirements for visual arts organisations.
36. VAI Professional Development. Current and upcoming workshops, peer reviews and seminars.

Cover, Jason Oakley Tribute

5. Column. Sarah Pierce. Divisions of Pleasure.
6. Column. Jonathan Carroll. Charlotte Rampling’s Toes.
8. VAI News. VAI projects, campaigns and events.
8. News. The latest developments in the visual arts sector.
9. Regional Focus. Visual art resources and activity across the border region, North and South
are outlined by: Townhall Cavan, Fermanagh Arts Office, Aftermath project and Marilyn
Lennon.
12. Tribute. Jason Oakley. VAI staff and board members past and present pay tribute to Jason Oakley.
14. Public Art. Moody River. Joanne Laws profiles the ‘Tolka Nights’ public art weekend.
16. Career Development. Humour was the Key. Alan Phelan talks to Caroline McCarthy.
17. Residency Profile. Soundscape Ireland. Alberto Flores discusses sound art in Ireland and his
residency at Fire Station Artists’ Studios.
19. Critique. Chris Campbell-Palmer, Platform; Eoin Mac Lochlainn, Olivier Cornet; Gary Coyle,
RHA; Rhona Byrne, TBG+S; Mel French, Luan.
23. VAI Event. Belfast Open Studios. Belfast Open Studios 2015 is profiled by VAI and artist Brian Kielt.
25. Residency. Kaleidoscope of Colour. Catherine Davison reviews the Largo das Artes residency, Brazil.
26. Profile. On the Threshold. Marianne O’Kane Boal introduces ‘Liminal Spaces: Art, Architecture and
Place’, which ran at The Model, Sligo.
27. Public Art. The Lives We Live. Michael O’Hara interviews Ciaran Benson about the new public art
programme for DIT’s Grangegorman site.
28. Festival. Out in the Open. Household Collective, Belfast describe their most recent project ‘Out in
the Open’, which took place across Belfast in September.
30. Profile. The Wow Factor. Sheelagh Broderick covers the Cork Ignite project.
31. Residency Profile. Not so Baltic in the Baltic Sea. Mary-Ruth Walsh reports from a residency she
undertook at Aabenraa Artweek in Denmark.
32. VAI Northern Ireland. Around Corners. Rob Hilken, VAI’s Northern Ireland Manager, gives an update
from the region.
32. Profile. City as a Gallery. Eimear Henry of Belfast City Council discusses the City as
Gallery project.
33. Public Art Roundup. Public art commissions, site-specific works, socially engaged practice and
other forms of art outside the gallery.
35. Opportunities. All the latest grants, awards, exhibition calls and commissions.
37. VAI Professional Development. Current and upcoming workshops, peer reviews and seminars.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet (VAN ) is the primary all-Ireland information resource for visual artists. The first VAN of 2016 begins with columns from Irene Murphy, who discusses moving to a home studio, and Jonathan Carroll, who talks about his recent trip to London to visit a talk by P.J. Harvey and an exhibition by Ai Weiwei.

Our regional focus for this issue is South Dublin, with features from artists Dorota Borowa and Shevaun Doherty alongside updates from the South Dublin Arts Office and RUA RED.

Residency reports come from a wide variety of locations: Barry Kehoe introduces the Kooshk art writer’s residency in Tehran, Iran; Ruth le Gear details the CCA Laznia residency in Gdansk, Poland; Kiera O’Toole describes the time she spent at the Courthouse, Tinehaly, Wicklow; and Louis Haugh gives a detailed account of his residency at ARTfarm in County Galway. In our Northern Ireland coverage, Alice Clark details a new residency developed by Catalyst Arts aboard a ship.

In her ‘How is it Made?’ piece, Vanessa Donoso López writes about her exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art, in which she explores language and interpretation. Jennifer Trouton explains the processes behind her large-scale painting work The Ties That Bind.

The January/February issue also includes a wealth of features on new initiatives, projects and spaces. Founders Michael Hanna and Jacqueline Holt introduce Artists’ Moving Image Northern Ireland, an online platform and archive for moving image works. A4 Sounds, a studio and exhibition space in Dublin, is described by the collective members that run the space, and Mirjami Schuppert and Dave Loder introduce the Ulster Research Salon. Our ‘Career Development’ piece comes from Eamon O’Kane , while Michaele Cutaya provides a detailed report on Tulca 2015.

Reviewed in the ‘Critique’ section are: Niamh McCann, VISUAL, Carlow; Lisa Fingleton, Siamsa Tire, Kerry; Paul McKinley, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin; and Katherine Elkin and Seamus Harahan, CCA, Derry.

As ever, we have details of upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public art roundups, news from the sector and current opportunities.

Members of VAI receive a copy of the VAN delivered straight to their door. The News Sheet is also available to pick up free of charge in galleries and arts centres. Selected articles featured in the print edition are available at the Visual Artists’ News Sheet Online here: www.visualartistsireland.com

Installation view of ‘Softening the Stone,’ image courtesy of Platform Arts

Chris Campbell-Palmer
‘Softening the Stone’
Platform Arts, Belfast
4 September – 24 October

‘SOFTENING the Stone’, a solo exhibition of work by London-based Chris Campbell-Palmer (b. Belfast, 1990), marks an exciting time in the career of the artist and in the evolution of Platform Arts as an exhibition space.

Founded in 2009 as a studio group for contemporary practitioners, Platform’s ambitious approach to the development of their exhibition programme is highly impressive, as is this presentation of new work by Campbell-Palmer. The exhibition marks the launch of Platform’s reconfigured gallery layout, which has seen the venue transformed from an expansive 3000-square-foot gallery into two distinct, and arguably more manageable, exhibition spaces. Despite the reduction in size of Platform’s main exhibition space, it by no means feels like a compromise in terms of scale, and the gallery remains capacious and industrial – an ideal setting for Campbell-Palmer’s sculptural and relief works.

Upon entering the gallery through a new, dedicated reception area, Campbell-Palmer’s uncanny sculptural works immediately promote visual pleasure and intrigue with their sugary-sweet yet muted colour palette of pastel pinks, oranges, blues and purples. The artist has been successful in his masterful manipulation of recognisable forms – including flowers, a cupboard, and a hand-propelled wheel cart – as their scale and colour play with their familiarity and confuse our relationship with them. Other objects within the space are less recognisable, and we struggle to determine their manipulated forms, searching for something familiar. Not only are we often left wondering what specific objects are supposed to be, but the materials from which they have been created are also somewhat alien. Campbell-Palmer utilises a plethora of materials including Plastidip, Flintex and Herculite to produce these obtuse stylisations.

In the accompanying exhibition text, Campbell-Palmer references the “Disneyfication of archaeology”, through which small reminiscences develop into extravagant fictions in the generation of artificial sceneries. This reference to Disney is an important one, as the sculptural works on display have similarities with the props that furnish Disney’s theme parks – physical recreations of those originally found in animated worlds. Shape and form are familiar yet exaggerated, colours aren’t quite true to life, and the softening of hard edges gives everything a cartoon-like aesthetic. In fact, what immediately came to mind upon navigating the space was the opening marketplace scene from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) as if filtered through a highly imaginative contemporary-art practice.

Throughout the gallery, large stone-like bottles are placed on textured rubber mats, their cork tops ineffective at capping the liquid within, as fluorescent ooze leaks down their sides. To the rear of the space, oversized, seemingly-malleable nails have been hammered clumsily into the wall, some lying misshapen on the gallery floor. This evokes a strange fusion of Claes Oldenburg’s sculptures and Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s I Can’t Work Like This (2007), wherein the scale of domestic objects is exaggerated (Oldenburg) and common tools of installation are heightened to become the art object itself (Sadr Haghighian).

The exhibition’s single video work is also of note, projected floor-to-ceiling against an entire wall of the gallery. Aesthetically distinct from the other works presented, this subtle and captivating piece repeatedly attracts our attention, its presence continuously felt but not dominating the space. Without this video work, the exhibition would not feel lacking, but its inclusion demonstrates Campbell-Palmer’s acute understanding of the potential to display seemingly very different works alongside each other, building a multi-layered and immersive environment rather than one of discord.

At its core, Campbell-Palmer’s work is about experimentation – working with new materials and concepts in a way that is both playful and rewarding. He utilises liquid processes to produce set forms (often not knowing what the result will be), and the same could be said of Platform Arts as an organisation. Its fluid approach to its studios and gallery spaces since its inception has been a similarly successful experimentation: trying things out, pushing boundaries, seeing what works and what doesn’t. The maturation of Platform Arts has been a pleasure to witness over the past few years in particular, and its refreshing programme of exhibitions has set it apart from many galleries and artist-run venues in Belfast.

‘Softening the Stone’ is one of those rare moments when artist and venue achieve a moment of perfect balance, poised at equally exciting times in their development. The debut of this new exhibition space is a significant new chapter in the growth of Platform Arts (simultaneously looking forward with ambition and building on past successes), with Campbell-Palmer’s meticulous presentation of work setting a very high standard.

Ben Crothers is a curator and writer based in Belfast.
atticusandalgernon.com

Gary Coyle, After Watteau, photo by Paul McCarthy

Gary Coyle
‘Into The Woods’
RHA, Dublin
4 September – 18 October 2015

THE overwhelming feeling upon entering into the RHA’s Ashford Gallery, given over to Gary Coyle’s compact solo exhibition, is of crossing into the realm of fantasy and fairy tales. This is thanks to the show’s eponymous work which covers all four walls, a floor-to-ceiling ‘wallpaper’ featuring digitally-reproduced drawings of a dense Northern European forest of dark blue birch trees.

Tucked among the trees, there is a little cabin picked out in a lighter blue, a refuge from the dense woods, or a possible haven for the lost traveller. But the cabin, it transpires, is a representation of the isolated shack built by the USA’s notorious domestic terrorist, Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. Coyle is fascinated by American boogeymen, including serial killers, and allusions to these sinister characters appear again and again in his work.

This enveloping image of threatening woods provides a claustrophobic backdrop for Coyle’s series of skillfully drafted charcoal drawings, some with intricately rendered ersatz elaborate frames. The frames reference the artist’s interest in the significance of this convention in display and the ways in which it was adopted by Modernist artists and their supporters. For Coyle the addition of a formal ‘box’ around a work seems to adhere to French philosopher Louis Marin’s adage of the frame “autonomising the work in visible space”. We also learn in the supporting information that influential twentieth-century art dealer Paul Guillaume presented his Modernist artist’s works in the ornate gilded frames that his customers found easier to digest than their minimalist, avant-garde counterparts.

The works collectively allude to fashions in contemporary art, from the appropriation of images from the Internet to the ‘archival impulse’ that pervades much of contemporary art production. Together, they are not singularly autonomised by their framing (or lack of it) so much as defined by it. This is territory Coyle has visited before, where his explorations of the Gothic and its nameless horrors pulse beneath diverse narratives.

In Curtain, the subject matter is apparently banal. Plain theatre drapes are closed across a stage, eclipsed by the charcoal drawing of an ornate molded frame surrounding it. Dreaming Different Dreams II, where a clutch of bright-eyed fluffy cats gaze inscrutably from within another fancy mount, presents a mawkish picture familiar to today’s millions of Internet users, where adorable felines are standard fare.

The latter image is redolent of another fashion in art, the Victorian love of cutesy animal paintings from the likes of Horatio Henry Couldery or the only slightly less sentimental Edwin Landseer. Coyle’s wry take on this very twenty-first-century bit of pop culture is revealed as nothing new at all.

There are more playful art historical references such as the portrait Gregory, framed by white space and executed in the shape of an oval, recalling seventeenth or eighteenth-miniatures and the Romanticism of Gainsborough. The boy, a callow looking youth with limpid eyes, is the picture of nobility and its genetic manifestations: the features are slightly exaggerated, the face a little too long, the chin a little too weak.

Coyle is not always quite so mischievous. There’s a Turner-like haziness to The Death of Disco, where the artist sketches softly billowing clouds of smoke framed by another depiction of a gilt frame, finely rendered in charcoal and appearing as trompe l’oeil. But the scene recalls a real event that took place in Chicago in 1979, when local radio DJ Steve Dahl canvassed baseball fans to bring disco records to a match at the city’s Comisky Park in order to destroy them. After using explosives to blow up a pile of these records, the stunt went awry when the fans flooded the pitch and a riot ensued, possibly incited by the racist and homophobic subtext of Dahl’s campaign against disco music.

More darkness is explored in After Watteau, a portrait of a parka-clad Clown modelled after Watteau’s Pierrot (aka Gilles). Unlike the benign Gilles, Coyle’s clown is more akin to the figure in the immensely creepy outsider paintings by the late US serial killer John Wayne Gacy. A killer of young men, Gacy painted his clowns while in prison, gaining infamy and seeing his work sought after by collectors including cult filmmaker John Waters. After Watteau’s clown menaces from beneath a fur-trimmed hood and also wears a collar and tie, evoking a kind of thug-like figure both absurd and terrifying.

The exhibition reverberates with layers of ideas, subtle (and less subtle) jokes, and occasional insinuations of unmentionable horrors. Immersive and compelling, Coyle traverses the boundaries between digital and analogue visual culture, reframing perceptions of mass produced images and reproductions. Gratifyingly, the list of works and prices provided to potential buyers offers the perfect ambiguous assurance that “Prices listed include framing”.

Anne Mullee is an independent curator, art writer, filmmaker and researcher.

Mel French, Fledgling, 2015, wax, tree, steel

Mel French
‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place’
Luan Gallery, Athlone
5 September – 30 October

MEL French is well known as the recipient of public commissions, but ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place’ at the Luan Gallery is her first solo show. The two handsome rooms of the gallery, one dark and one bright, offer the artist a resonating setting for her sculptural exploration of affects.

Entering the building, we first face Interjection (2006), an aluminium bust on a plinth. The screaming figure with its distorted features and bulging neck muscles belies the classical format. It aptly sums up the impression left by the summer’s news with its escalating emotional appeal to our attention; only the outrageously loud will be heard. In the darkened gallery, four works are set up. Permeo (2005) is a near life-size group of two bodies simultaneously fighting each other off and entangled together – quite literally – as the arm of one goes right through the torso of the other and back. They seem unable either to embrace or get away from each other.

Resting on a shelf along the wall, Fleeting (2015) is a sleeping head made of wax, a back light shining through its translucent material. The title alludes to transitory experiences and forms in state of flux. The work brings to mind Constantin Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse (1910), but where the smooth curves of the modernist work were self-contained and timeless, Fleeting’s soft material slowly merges with its support as its expression passes. Wean (2015) is a cluster of 20 heads on the floor, tilted upwards, mouths at the ready, looking up impatiently at a suspended blanket as newly hatched birds await their feed. Somehow the intense expectation in those upturned faces suggests our own greediness towards earth’s dwindling resources.

Hatchling (2015) continues the human / bird analogy with three small casts of a baby bird’s body with a human head composed on two antique high chairs set back to back. The accompanying text elaborates on the vulnerability and defencelessness of the baby bird fallen from its nest, but all I could think of was the creepy dinner scene with the carving of the tiny chicken in David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977).

More successful for me in their association of bird and human affects were Dwell I and Dwell II, two small, carefully made up nests of human hair. These last two works sit alongside three others in the brightly lit gallery space in the renovated part of the building, a high-ceilinged room with tall windows. The striking Relative Distance (2003) comprises two life-size figures. Standing on a plinth is a plaster figure of a woman violently retching, while on the floor in front of her is a female form dissolving into a gelatinous mass. The well-defined body of the former contrasts with the shapelessness of the latter. Black Dog (2015) is a human-animal hybrid with a female body and a dog’s head, its black form made of painted plaster bent over its reflection in a dark basin. Tuning forks are hung by nylon threads from the ceiling over the figure. French is literally embodying the expression ‘black dog’, which represents depression. The tuning forks allude to a seventeenth-century experiment in which they were rung to alter mental states. Hung thus, they accentuate the downward pull of the work while activating the air around the inert mass of the body.

Mater Matris (2015) is a half-life-size cast of a woman’s body lying on its side with eight protuberant teats on her flanks, the slightly pink whiteness of the plaster reminiscent of sows. Set at the end of the glass corridor overlooking the river, Fledgling (2015) is composed of dried branches arranged into a tree, from which a wax baby is suspended as the unlikely fruit of the dead tree. Perhaps pursuing the human-animal associations to the vegetal world, it continues the nurturing theme that runs through the exhibition. The naturalism of French’s works and the human-animal hybrids invite comparison with Patricia Piccini’s show at the Galway International Arts Festival this summer. The effects produced were, however, very different. Piccini’s organic grotesques played on the fascination / repulsion response that her work produces. French’s emphasis is on emotional empathy; the animal hybrids function as metaphor for our emotional states. The three earlier works, from the early 2000s, display an intense expressivity that calls for our attention. In the later works, the metaphorical hybrids have displaced the expressivity; they work best when closely relating to their material, be it hair, wax or wood.

Michaele Cutaya is a writer on art living in County Galway.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet (VAN ) is the primary all-Ireland information resource for visual artists. For this and the May – June issue we have invited art critic James Merrigan as guest editor. For this issue he proposed the theme of sex, which threads its way through the contributions by Alan Butler, Jennifer Mehigan, Alan Phelan, Emma Haugh, Sarah Devereux and Merrigan in the thematic essay ‘Situational Erotics’.

Our regional focus for this issue is North Down and Ards, with features from artists Laura Butler and Sharon Adams, alongside updates from The Braid Arts Centre and Larne Museum and Arts Centre.

‘Residency’ reports come from Iranian artist Siamak Delzendeh, who recently undertook a critical writing exchange at IMMA, and Katherine Waugh, who programmed a series of films as part of her project residency at the Workhouse Union in Callan, Kilkenny.

In his ‘How is it Made?’ article, ‘Norway (Sex) Diaries’, Alan Phelan tells of filming a new work on Roger Casement’s sexuality on location in Norway. In her article, Sue Rainsford introduces her process-oriented writing and describes working with Bridget O’Gorman for her exhibition at The LAB, Dublin.

‘Career Development’ pieces in this issue cover a broad range of practices and feature artists at various stages of their careers. On the painting theme, Alison Pilkington talks to Donald Teskey about his influences and his choices, while Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty introduce their collaborative practice. Alan Butler talks to Jennifer Mehigan about her emerging practice.

Reviewed in the ‘Critique’ section are: Sean Lynch at Limerick City Gallery; Bridget O’Gorman at The LAB, Dublin; David Lunney at Eight Gallery, Dublin; group show ‘She Devil’ at Golden Thread, Belfast; and Niamh O’Doherty, Victoria J. Dean and Laura Smith at Galway Arts Centre.

As ever, we have details of upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public art roundups, news from the sector and current opportunities.

Members of VAI receive a copy of the VAN delivered straight to their door. The News Sheet is also available to pick up free of charge in galleries and arts centres. Selected articles featured in the print edition are available at the Visual Artists’ News Sheet Online here: www.visualartistsireland.com.

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet (VAN ) is the primary all-Ireland information resource for visual artists. For this issue, art critic James Merrigan continues as guest editor. In his column ‘Where’s Our Marty Baron?’, he discusses the role of the editor and of the art critic.

Our regional focus for this issue is County Meath, with features from artists Aileen Hamilton and Aidan Flanagan, alongside updates from the Meath County Council Arts Office and Solstice Arts Centre.

‘Seminar Report’ articles come from Chris Hayes on ‘Artist-Led Island’ held at Sample-Studios, Cork, Emma Dwan O’Reilly on ‘The Value of Criticism’ at the Glucksman Gallery, Gavin Murphy on ‘Proposition: An Art of Ethics’ at the Burren College of Art and Rebecca O’Dwyer, who attended Dan Fox’s talk at Spike Island, Bristol titled ‘Pretentiousness: Why it Matters’.

In ‘Career Development’ pieces, Vagabond Reviews describe their curatorial practice, while Teresa Gillespie and Jonathan Mayhew interview each other on their approaches to making art. Lily Cahill and Rob Murphy introduce their collaborative practice in a ‘How is it Made?’ piece about their recent works.

Other articles come from Lucy McKenna, who discusses her residency at the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium, and Tom Watt, who talks to Declan Clarke about his work in overlook spaces. In VAI news, Noel Kelly summaries findings from the recent survey The Social, Economic and Fiscal Status of the Artist.

Reviewed in the ‘Critique’ section are: Martin Healy at Crawford Art Gallery, Patrick Hennessy at IMMA, Alex Pentak at Bailick Park, Midleton, a group exhibition on Kathleen Lynn across Mayo and David Quinn at Federesky Gallery.

As ever, we have details of upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public art roundups, news from the sector and current opportunities.

Members of VAI receive a copy of the VAN delivered straight to their door. The News Sheet is also available to pick up free of charge in galleries and arts centres. Selected articles featured in the print edition are available at the Visual Artists’ News Sheet Online here: www.visualartistsireland.com

The July/August Visual Artists’ News Sheet (VAN) is available and has been sent to all members. Selected articles on art criticism, artist-led spaces, funding in Northern Ireland and online works are up on the new VAN blog at: http://visualartistsireland.com

The July/August issue of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet was guest edited by Linda Shevlin and features articles from Anna Macleod, Dominic Stevens, Aoibheann Greenan and many more.

VAN Online:
visualartistsireland.com

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet (VAN ) is the primary all-Ireland information resource for visual artists. Artist and curator Linda Shevlin continues as guest editor in this issue, which takes ‘participation’ as its theme. In their columns, Shevlin, Annette Moloney and Katherine Atkinson discuss ideas around this theme relating to their repective practices and roles in the Irish art world.

Our regional focus for this issue is Lisburn and Castlereagh, with updates from R-Space as well as artists Patricia Lavery, Helen Sara McLarnon and Andrew Cooke.

The theme of participation is continued in Aideen Barry’s piece, in which she describes the making of Silent Moves, a collaboration with participants from Scannán Technologies and the Ridgepool Training Centre. Michael McLoughlin also discusses his approach to long-term collaborative projects and the role of the artist in this process. In her ‘Project Profile’ Clodagh Emoe details the devlopment of her audio project with participants living in Irish direct provision centres.

This issue features several international projects: Rory Prout and David O’Kane in Arba Minch prison, Ethiopia, Michelle Boyle on residency in Kerala and Anastasia Artemeva reporting from the Moscow Biennale for Young Art.

‘Seminar Reports’ come from Tara Kennedy, who attended Create’s ‘Extending Architecture’ series of public talks, and Lily Power, who discusses the broad ranging closing seminar for Eva 2016: ‘Still (the Barbarians’.

Reviewed in the ‘Critique’ section are: John Byrne at The LAB, Dublin; ‘Two Birds/One Stone’ at Farmleigh Gallery, Dublin; David Fagan at Tactic, Cork; Kevin Killen at Queen’s University, Belfast; and ‘Creative Peninsula’ at Ards Arts Centre.

As ever, we have details of upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public art roundups, news from the sector and current opportunities.

Members of VAI receive a copy of the VAN delivered straight to their door. The News Sheet is also available to pick up free of charge in galleries and arts centres. Selected articles featured in the print edition are available at the Visual Artists’ News Sheet Online here: www.visualartistsireland.com

The Visual Artists’ News Sheet (VAN ) is the primary all-Ireland information resource for visual artists. Members of VAI receive a copy of the VAN delivered straight to their door. The News Sheet is also available to pick up free of charge in galleries and arts centres.

In light of the historic vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland, we asked Cecily Brennan to reflect on the contributions of the Artist’s Campaign. In other columns, Victoria Durrer, lecturer in Arts Management and Cultural Policy at Queen’s University Belfast, discusses a new collaborative research project, aimed at evaluating the impact of art as a catalyst for reconciliation. VAI NI Manager Rob Hilken reports on the symposium, ‘Best Practice in Developing Sustainable Artist-led Workspaces’ which took place on 11 June in Belfast.

In the How is it Made? section, Aidan Kelly Murphy interviews emerging artist Áine McBride, while Sarah Ellen Lundy discusses her ecology-themed art practice. Daniel Bermingham interviews Eimear Walshe and Emma Haugh about their recent exhibition, ‘Miraculous Thirst’, which ran at Galway Arts Centre from 5 – 25 May. Brenda Moore-McCann outlines some of the new work commissioned by Sirius Arts Centre as part of the ongoing Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland project, ‘One, Here, Now’, including new work by Brendan Earley, showcased in his solo exhibition, ‘Present Perfect’. In other features for this issue, Jonathan Carroll discusses some of the main international contemporary art fairs attended by Irish commercial galleries, while Christopher Steenson provides an overview of Visual Artist Ireland’s Get Together 2018 and also reports on Sonorities, a sonic arts festival that took place across Belfast in April. In the new Art Education section, facilitators offer insights into ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ – an education programme for the 38th EVA International. Two conference reports also feature: Rebecca Kennedy reports on the Turbulence symposium at The Model, Sligo, while DIT students and inaugural Create fellows, Gemma Browne and Bianca Kennedy, report on the recent CAPP staging event in Madrid.

Organisation profiles for this issue come from Cork: John Thompson outlines the evolution of the artist-led intitiave, the Guesthouse Project, while Kirstie North interviews Mary McCarthy, Director of the Crawford Art Gallery, about her future plans for the gallery, including its renovation and extension.

The Regional Focus for this issue comes from Omagh and Fermanagh. Insights on the realities of living and working in the region are offered by visual artists Helen Sharp and Susan Hughes and sculptor Simon Carman, while Noelle McAlinden discusses the evolution of Fermanagh Live Arts Festival.

Reviewed in the Critique section are: Martin Gale at Taylor Galleries; Elizabeth Magill at the Ulster Museum; Sarah Walker at Oliver Sears Gallery; Gerry Blake at Mermaid Arts Centre; and Leo Boyd at Atom Gallery, London.

As ever, we have details of the upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public art roundup, news from the sector and current opportunities.

Selected articles featured in the print edition are available at the Visual Artists’ News Sheet Online here: www.visualartistsireland.com

Cover Image. Nom Nom Collective, Ropey Smurf , paint and ink on repurposed album cover.

5. Roundup. Recent exhibitions and projects of note.
5. Column. Jonathan Carroll. Fag Ends.
6. Column. Linda O’Keefe. Socio-sonic Textures.
7. Column. Mark Fisher. A Time for Shadows.
8. News. The latest developments in the visual arts sector.
8. VAI News. Research, projects and campaigns.
9. Regional Focus. Visual arts resources and activity in Wicklow.
12. VAI Event. Belfast Open Studios. A profile on the Belfast Open Studios event.
14. MAC International. Archives & Time Machines. Hugh Mulholland interviews Mairead McClean, winner of the inaugural MAC International Award.

16. VAI / DCC Critical Art Writing Award. Attentive Festivalisation. Rebecca O’Dwyer, winner of the 2014 VAI / DCC Critical Art Writing Award discusses festivalisation.
18. Art in Public. Art is Always Unfinished Business. Jonathan Carroll reports on the ‘Creative Time Summit’ and ‘Jochen Gertz: Participation, Commemoration & Public Space’.
19. Critique. Damir Ocko, TBG+S; Art & Activism, Fire Station Artists’ Studios; Debra Bowden, Toradh Gallery; Sinead McDonald, Draiocht; Nom Nom Collective, White Lady Gallery.
23. How is it Made? Blind Spots & Future Memories. Barry Kehoe talks about exhibiting the work of Nina Fisher and Maroan el Sani.
24. Project Profile. Duncan Campbell. IMMA Director Sarah Glennie talks to Turner Prize winner Duncan Campbell.
26. Residency Profile. Still Life in Mobile Homes. Sarah Allen profiles two residencies supported by Fingal Council, and the exhibitions / events that emerged from them.
27. VAI West Of Ireland Representative. Lateral Approaches. Aideen Barry looks at new supports for artist-led spaces outside normal funding
structures.
28. Festival Profile. Artistic Foundations. Brendan Fox profiles Foundation14 in Tullamore.
29. Commission Profile. Transcending Borders. Lily Power talks to Jaki Irvine and Alistair Hicks about Deutsche Bank Ireland’s new aquisition and art collections policy.
30.VAI Professional Development. Towards a New Hybridity. Bea de Sousa discusses her visit to Ireland.
31. Career Development. Complex, Incomplete & Thriving. Claire Power looks at the contemporary art scene in her new home of Brussels.
32. IVARO. Taking the License. Alex Davis emphasises the importance of artist copyright.
32. VAI NI Manager. ACNI Cuts. Rob Hilken discusses cuts to the arts in Northern Ireland.
33. Organisation Profile. A Mission to Progress. Sara Hanley profiles the DLR Artists’ Network.
34. Public Art Roundup. Public art commissions, site-specific works, socially engaged practice and various other forms of art outside the
gallery.
35. Opportunities. All the latest grants, awards, exhibition calls and commissions.
36. VAI Professional Development. Current and upcoming workshops, peer reviews and seminars.

Installation View of ‘Studies on Shivering’ at TBG+S, 2014

Damir Očko
Studies on Shivering
21 November 2014 – 24 January 2015
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin

The clear and ordered manner in which Damir Očko’s works are arranged in ‘Studies on Shivering’ may initially conceal the extent to which Očko intends for these works to slide across into each other and cross-pollinate. This process of synchronous readings makes for a demanding experience in which our own cognitive processes are implicated. A musical score is presented with a poem embedded within it and we read in the opening inter-titles to the film TK that the piece is “for voice and string”. This invitation to experience a work in a way that seems initially incongruous to it, places a hesitancy within the audience – triggering the sense that a more authentic reading of the work may lie elsewhere. This strategy of deflecting hierarchies of meaning permeates the entire show and ultimately forces us to reflect upon how we derive meaning from sensory stimulus and how that might effect our perception of the world.

A group of nine collage works on paper constitute the TK Scores. Here, a poem is arranged in sequence across nine sheets of paper; interspersed with the poem is an experimental music score.   While the score is formally interesting, containing curiosities such as gold and silver foil in amongst its furious lattice work of black marks, as an audience we also know that what we are looking at is code.

We feel that a truer experience of the piece would be an aural one – listening to musicians navigate and interpret the musical text. There are similar deflections at work in seeing a poem printed as an art-piece. To experience the full force of both mediums, they need to be embodied: activated by being played or read. It is as though the physical manifestation of these works in the exhibition can be compared to seeing the tip of an iceberg above water. We suspect that a more ‘true’ or authentic understanding of what we’re seeing is present elsewhere and what is made physically apparent serves only as an indicator of the work’s existence, not its true nature.

As we journey further into the exhibition we realise that this emphasis upon our own sensory mechanisms is the fulcrum around which this exhibition turns. Očko’s film TK is located at the centre of the exhibition in a dark and enclosed space. The film depicts people shivering. One sequence within the film features a number of men standing, close to naked, in a frozen landscape, fixed to the spot and shaking with the cold; this sequence is inter-cut with a close-up of a shaking elderly hand, attempting to write on a sheet of white paper. Beyond the obvious harshness of what we’re viewing, a more unsettling impression develops: that the stressed bodies we are witnessing represent a wider sense of unrest and incapacity within more bodies than just the ones depicted in TK.

A strange and provocative dichotomy springs from the film. On one hand Očko places trust in the audience’s ability to navigate the complex sensory world presented both in TK and in the wider exhibition. He trusts that we can leap from the stimulus of poetry to projected images and back to our memories of a printed musical score on the wall outside. However, in TK we see two groups of people who appear to embody potential, yet are presented enacting struggle: the cold men are all young and fit, yet have been fixed to the spot; all they can do is shiver in the face of their extreme circumstances. Meanwhile, the elderly hand struggles to enact one of our greatest human achievements: writing. Presenting such disempowered figures at the centre of a show that also trusts in our capabilities as sensitive and thinking beings invokes difficult questions around the ways in which power is distributed and embodied.

Documents that were derived during the making of TK are on display in the gallery and foreground a sense of the art objects in ‘Studies on Shivering’ as fleeting and unstable repositories for the ideas underpinning them. A black and white photograph describes what we understand to be one of the cold men in TK departing the film-location with a duvet wrapped about him and a car in the distance. A group of 16 large white sheets of paper containing what we believe to be the shaky and barely legible writing created in the film are on display across one wall of the gallery. While these Untitled works seem to authenticate the experiences in TK, they also suggest that, although the film is positioned centrally within the exhibition, the creative impetus in the making of this film is resonating out from it, finding material expression as it departs from these documents, and we imagine this creative energy moving and echoing through future materials not yet evident.

A fascinating polyphonic experiment is set in motion through ‘Studies on Shivering’. Like the simultaneous playing out of musical melodies, we are called on to allow each of the parallel moments within the exhibition to reside within us and ultimately challenge and deepen our understanding of the ways in which images, sounds and ideas move through us.

Sarah Lincoln is a visual artist based in West Waterford.

Sinead McDonald ‘Self Portrait If I Hadn’t Walked Home Via Camden Street in 1989’

Sinead McDonald
Uchronia
28 November – 7 February 2015
Draiocht, Blanchardstown, Co Dublin

Artist Sinéad McDonald does not like her photo being taken.1 So what motivated McDonald to produce her first solo exhibition made up almost entirely of self-portraits? The answer is that while McDonald is the subject, artist, photographer, director and all-round protagonist in this series of works, they are fictions.

The show’s title, ‘Uchronia’, which literally means other time, draws the viewer into the realm of the ‘what if’. As the press release for the exhibition states, “these images investigate fate, free will and predestination, truth and longing, and look at how decisions, accidents and circumstances can change us utterly. What is it that makes us who we are? What if we could go back and undo things? Do we really have the power to shift our own narratives?”

McDonald is a Dublin-based artist, photographer and digital media producer and a graduate of the Art in the Digital World Masters at NCAD. She describes her research and practice as focusing on issues of authorship and narrative in portraits and images of people, and the creation of identity in online and offline spaces. McDonald’s work incor- porates new technologies: digital production, web based art and physical computing, alongside photography, video and historical lens-based processes.

‘Uchronia’ was shot using a medium-format film camera with the shutter release cable plainly visible in each frame. The analogue quality of the medium produces a richer photograph, deeper in detail. It is a slow and deliberate process where each of the 10 frames per film spool must count, a process at odds with today’s digital point and shoot technology. It seems appropriate that McDonald chose this contemplative technique for these contemplative studies.

McDonald’s titles and imagery suggest a disclosure of the artist’s deepest feelings of guilt, shame and self-loathing, intimated by works such as Self Portrait at My Son’s Grave on His Birthday. McDonald’s works are self-consciously speculative exercises. Tellingly, in each image McDonald passively looks past the lens and out of the frame. Rather than a confrontational stare, viewers are presented with a near submissive gaze.

Sinead McDonald, ‘Self Portrait at my Son’s Grave on His Birthday’

Each shot shows the artist in a variety of (mostly) occupational environments that imagine McDonald as a farmer’s wife in Self Portrait If I Hadn’t Met My Now Ex Husband, as an information technology professional in Self Portrait If I’d Finished My First Undergraduate Degree in 1995 and as a school teacher in Self Portrait If My Parents had Called Me Irene Sinead Instead of Sinead Irene. The photographs detail what she might have looked and dressed like and the surroundings of her imagined daily grind.

Working with Finnish artist Elina Brotherus, who also mixes real and fictive biographical elements in her work, McDonald wrote her biography in just two pages. This condensed list of key events was used to form the basis of her uchronian paradigm. The speculative possibilities and realities of McDonald’s subsequent enquiries into the ‘what if’ can be understood as a kind of ‘anti-biography’.

While pose and expression are consistent throughout the works, each Sinead McDonald life is unique and contrasting. The viewer is not taken on far-fetched time-travel to historical or futuristic eras. The work is set in the now and depicts the reasonable and plausible commonplace existences that McDonald did not choose. Titles narrate how she was guided toward particular choices, while the photographs depict what might have been for McDonald as the somewhat unwilling but very real and central character. While the scenes are staged and fully kitted out prop wise, McDonald’s photographs are natural and lit using ordinary daylight. The images remain uncontrived and unedited and are not studio constructs. It appears as if McDonald is stepping into each scenario to check that it was never the right fit for her.

Obvious themes exploring fate and predestination are inherent in these works. ‘Uchronia’ questions how much control we really have, if any, over life. If random occurrences as banal as seeing a poster advertising a philosophy course in Self Portrait if I Hadn’t Walked Home via Camden Street in August 1989 can ultimately determine a major life juncture, then how arbitrary is life, and does free will exist?

McDonald’s work also challenges the wisdom of altering life’s past pain and difficulties. The Grandfather Paradox, an idea first posited by philosopher David Lewis in the 1970s, maintains that changing the past, even in the smallest way, negates the need or desire for change and presents an infinite contradiction. While this may be universally true and makes for interesting conjecture, it is somewhat distracting from McDonald’s profound and deeply personal experience.

There is an argument that visual art should be solely explicable from observation, that it should not require excessive background reading and explanation to be appreciated. Contrary to this argument, ‘Uchronia’ is a layered work that ultimately reveals more to us through pondering the narrative that McDonald sets.

Emer Marron is an arts manager and occasional art writer.

Note
1. In an interview with the writer, November 2014

Debra Bowden, ‘Cave V11’, 2013, pigment, oil bar and mica on paper

Debra Bowden
Beginnings
17 November – 16 December 2014
Toradh Gallery, Ashbourne, Meath

Cows. Why are they such a popular subject for paintings? In many hands, even when well executed, they come across as sentimental, chocolate-box images, anodyne and unchallenging. In Debra Bowden’s work, now showing at the Toradh Gallery in Ashbourne, Co. Meath, they are none of the above. Of the 24 pieces on display, the majority feature this benign-seeming animal, but its representation goes well beyond the simply bovine, reaching as far back as prehistoric times.

In its subject matter, execution and choice of palette, Bowden’s work evokes the primitive cave drawings of Lascaux and Chauvet. These works are fascinating. Were they recordings or decorations? A means of communication or ritual markings? Whatever their purpose, they are a vivid reminder of that most human activity: creation, and a rebuke not to confuse primitive with paltry or puerile.

The warm ochres and rough materials that Bowden uses – sand, pigment, mica – bring us on that heady journey into the depths of prehistoric markings, reminding us of our origins and remonstrating with us for assuming that in our evolution we have somehow left behind the primeval. Recently, there have been anecdotes about cattle becoming more aggressive, explained perhaps by their lack of human contact in an environment which is more industrialised and less peopled than in the past. When Bowden speaks of exploring that “empathetic relationship between man, his environment and the indigenous animals that inhabit it,” she is asking us to examine just how strong that relationship is now, and to wonder what we may have lost over time.

In this exhibition, Bowden shows six images from what is presumably a larger series – the numbering here is not sequential – of which ‘Cave I’ is the most dramatic. It presents to the viewer an animal that, although familiar in form, has nothing of the bucolic or pastoral. This is a beast, a force to be reckoned with, presented in strong, minimal lines and earthy, tactile media. There is confidence and coherence in Bowden’s conjunction of skill and subject matter.

Debra Bowden, ‘Free’, 2013, sand, pigment and oil bar on board

Her palette too shows confidence. Apart from the ochres, which dominate, there are occasional strong but harmonious lines of red, black and yellow, as in ‘Family’. Her work is pleasing to the eye, but never merely decorative, and for the fellow artist, her use – and combination – of media such as oil bar, sawdust, and mica, and her range of support – paper, board, wood – are a call to greater exploration. Beginnings proclaims an artist fully engaged with her process.

However, some works, though still eye-catching, are less successful than others. ‘Horn’, a piece of carved found wood, feels out of place in this exhibition, though the other work in carved wood, ‘Ice’, fits in, perhaps because the subject matter is of a piece with the overall theme. The three pieces based on sheep seem a little overworked and lack the looseness and confidence that otherwise characterise Bowden’s work. A handprint on one rings a false note, and two of the titles confuse: there seems to be too little difference visually between ‘Free’ and ‘Fenced In’ to justify the opposition.

Indeed, in many cases the works are somewhat undermined by their titles. Bowden’s pieces appeal to the imagination in a visceral way which links us to those cave people who first drew on walls many aeons ago. Titles such as ‘Black Sheep’, ‘Cowgirl’, ‘Thirsty’ are too literal for images that are all about non-verbal communication. They jolt the viewer into the now and leave nothing to the imagination; they demand an interpretation which is limiting, both to the viewer and the work.

Throughout ‘Beginnings’, Bowden demonstrates a completely personal style, especially in relation to the potentially banal subject matter of cows and sheep. It is clear from the work – and supported by her comments – that she is exploring, testing her themes, her media, her practice. She is reaching back “to the beginning of art,” attempting to understand what we are trying to communicate when we make marks on paper, canvas, wood or cave walls. She doesn’t always get it right, but she has the confidence and the commitment to push beyond the mis-hits, and delve further and deeper to reach for her truth. That is what art is all about.

Mary Catherine Nolan is a Dublin-based artist and writer with a background in linguistics.

Speakers at the Fire Station Artists’ Studios seminar, 2014

Book Review / Anne Mullee
Art & Activism
Editors: Liz Burns and Clodagh Kenny
Published November 2014

The latest publication from Fire Station Artists’ Studios is less of a manifesto or call to arms and more of a provocation asking, ‘what does activism really mean to artists?’ The book is a slim volume containing a collection of interviews and essays. In the introduction co-editor Liz Burns explains that she chose the title as an attempt to open up discourse around the idea of the artist as activist, primarily focusing on work that emerged from the ‘Troubling Ireland’ mobile think tanks, which began in 2010.

The book offers insight into the diverse collection of contributions from artists Anthony Haughey, Kennedy Browne, Anna McLeod, Susan Thompson and Augustine O’Donoghue, with further responses from cultural geographer Bryonie Reid, curator Galit Eilat and the now-director of Fire Station, Helen Carey.

It was launched in a week when activism – in the form of the country’s water charges protests – and the decade of commemoration were in the news, following the release of the government’s controversial promotional video for the 1916 commemoration. Despite marking a key anniversary of the birth of the State, this latter offering was criticised for failing to mention the actual players in the 1916 Easter Rising[1], indicating a sanitising of Ireland’s bloody past in a toothless rebranding exercise – the strapline for the commemorative year is ‘Ireland Inspires’.

While protests and activism may be firmly on the agenda today, in 2010, when Danish curatorial collective Kuratorisk Aktion were commissioned to devise and lead ‘Troubling Ireland’, the country was relatively new to recession and the cumulative effects of austerity were yet to bite. Perhaps because of this and the still-recent glow of the Good Friday Agreement, the objectives of the project were, as Kuratorisk Aktion put it, to “explore socially engaged art and (how?) curating can engage a problematic like ‘Ireland’”.[2]

Using a methodology of postcolonial discourse merged with transnational feminist critique, Frederikke Hansen and Tone Olaf Nielsen of Kuratorisk Aktion invited artists and thinkers to respond in different ways to the subject, with the resulting responses taking place over the ensuing three years in the form of think tank symposia. These comprised discussions, presentations, art works and essays.

Thus, when the pair began their interventions, activism was somewhat rhetorical in an Irish context. This is the position taken by Helen Carey, then Director of the Limerick Gallery of Art, who asserts in her short essay about the exhibitions she commissioned to commemorate the 1913 Lockout, that “Irish artists are witnesses, not provocateurs”.[3] This is an apt observation on the many projects included in her programme of Lockout exhibitions, including Jesse Jones’s The Struggle Against Ourselves, Anthony Haughey’s Dispute and Darek Fortas’s Coal Story. Haughey’s work is shown in part here, and explores the closure of the Lagan Brick Works, the Republic’s last red brick factory, which closed its doors overnight leaving workers unemployed.

The longer pieces in the book provide plenty of starting points for anatomising the idea of ‘Troubling Ireland’ and the many questions and enquiries prompted by the nature of art and activism. Liz Burns’s interview with Hansen and Nielsen offers a useful framework for exploration of activism in Ireland from an outsider perspective, an approach that immediately seems more objective and less volatile than those posed from within. The pair talk about how addressing post-colonial issues in Ireland such as ‘double-speak’ and self-silencing assisted their approach to their practice, while the longevity of the project gave them the opportunity to revisit the same group of artists through the duration of the think tank programme.

Curator and writer Galit Eilat, meanwhile, provides an edited version of the presentation she gave at Fire Station’s 2013 ‘Art and Responsibility’ symposium, where she discussed a selection of the actions she has participated in at home in her native Israel. Preferring the term ‘responsibility’ rather than ‘activism’, Eilat has taken part in works addressing her home country’s controversial ‘Green Line’, the 700km wall dividing Jewish settlers and Palestinians. While in other contexts these might be viewed as distinctly ‘activist’, she prefers to see this kind of work as artists engaging with politics, rather than being ‘political’.

In the short time since the events that inform the book took place, however, much has changed in the social, if not political, landscape. This raises the question of whether those who contributed to Act and Activism might well reframe their thoughts if they were writing today.

Nonetheless, this is an enjoyable collection the responses from the highly-engaged participants of Kuratorisk Aktion’s multi-faceted exploration of an Ireland ‘troubled’ by its many difficult legacies.

[1] E. O’Caolli, Don’t mention the war – 1916 video fails to mention Rising, Irishtimes.com, 13 November 2014

[2] F. Hansen, Kuratorisk Aktion in conversation with Liz Burns, Art & Activism, 2014, p14

[3] H. Carey, ‘Contemporary Art and Commemorative Activity’, Art & Activism, 2014, p.55

Ropey Smurf, paint and ink on repurposed album cover

Nom Nom Collective
‘Nomstalgia’
White Lady Art Wellington Quay, Dublin
29 Nov – 23 Dec 2014

The Nom Nom Collective comprises eight artists who have worked together for around a decade, five of whom are included in their current exhibition ‘Nomstalgia’, at White Lady Art on Wellington Quay. Lints (Denmark), Poncho (Ireland), Dr Lamps & Mr Splink (Ireland), Loki (Ireland) and Jine (Ireland / Canada) have taken part. The other three – Askim (Brazil), DS (France / Ireland) and Met10 aka The Assistinator (Denmark) – are not in the show for various reasons. The collective members describe themselves as street and graffiti artists, supplementing their respective practices with jobs in graphic design, illustration, advertising and publishing.

Nom Nom gave themselves a brief for this exhibition, taking the theme of nostalgia as a starting point. Given their age profile, their inspiration stems from the 1980s and early to mid 1990s. Overall, popular media dominates and there is often overlap between artists whose formative years ran in parallel. They pay homage to cartoons, television drama, toys, video games and other iconic phenomena including the old Irish Punt coinage and obsolete technologies.

The White Lady Art Gallery is far from a white cube space. The exhibition literature describes how the work is hung ‘salon style’, which is funny given that a bank of shampoo chairs remains in the gallery, left over from its previous life as a hair salon. Coming from the fine art world, I had to swallow my white cube inclinations and embrace this whole other art culture, sinks and all.

Loki’s oeuvre in watercolour and ink is dominated by super-feminine female characters – sexy, self-possessed, sashaying – as well as male comic heroes that she has converted into wonderfully costumed, super-sexed heroines, including female versions of CP30 and R2D2, the Ninja Turtles, the Ghostbusters and the T101 (in an image created with Sarah Connor). These are exaggerated genotypes – over-styled, big hair, tiny wastes, luscious lips and big saucer eyes that are sometimes blanked out – casting them as them indifferent rather than oblivious. The dynamic of Loki’s characters is tempered by their small scale and delicate hand-made execution. The elegant fine lines, confectionary colours and just a tiny hint of bony fragility successfully camouflages their other worldly potency. The drawing skill and handling of watercolour and ink reveals an accomplished and restrained finesse.

‘Lints’, Who Killed Robin

Nintendo, Super Mario, Dungeons and Dragons and other icons of the 1980s occupy the memories of Poncho and Dr Lamp & Mr Splink. Poncho’s heavily outlined ‘portraits’ of power up items from Super Mario Bros in his Mario Slots series, titled Flower, Star and Mushroom, depict strangely misplaced and slightly perplexed looking characters trapped in opaque backgrounds of solid red, blue and green. Like Grandpa Simpson they have become wrinkled and sagging and are surreally melting off the page. Dress Up Arnie is a startled Arnie from Terminator 2 separated from his pants (and his genitals), still waiting it seems, a full generation later, to be reunited with his clothes. Poncho’s work is solid and distinguished, though of an acquired taste.

Dr Lamp & Mr Splink is one artist who switches between street art (Dr Lamp) and graffiti (Mr Splink or Splink). Of all the work in this show his is the most nostalgic in the traditional sense. He has crafted a series of weapons: daggers, swords and knives, all beautifully sculpted in MDF, a most unlikely material. They are touching mementos to the childhood fantasy world of adventure and play, replicating actual weapons from cartoons and toys, rendered trompe l’oeil with paint to appear realistic. Though they are too fragile to play with, they have a warmth and density that is distinctly sculptural. Duck Hunt is a wall-based work that takes on the ‘flying ducks’ ornaments, popular in living rooms throughout the late twentieth century, and featuring in the eponymous 1980s Nintendo game. The ducks are made of composite square MDF units, evoking the primitive pixelated appearance of early video game technology. It is a work of devotion, earnestness, excitement and joy.

Danish artist Lints brings the audience into faraway and unfamiliar worlds. As in Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr Who and other science fiction creations, these are depictions of strange and outlandish creatures in their own environment, faithfully observed according to the ‘prime directive’. The motivation for this work seems less playful and more abstract than works by either Loki, Splink or Poncho. There is a sense of a struggle for invention and a desire to become totally of itself rather than of the influences that clearly run through it. Like Loki, Lints also uses watercolour and the medium lends itself well to his imaginative and colourful compositions.

It is most difficult to pin-point the nostalgic influences in Jine’s dreamy and ephemeral works on paper. Hanging loosely on clips like pages from a sketchbook, the images reveal the process of invention and re-invention filtered through years of exposure to the same sources that appear in the other artists’ works. There is an experimental and fresh approach to mark-making, rendering various tangible textures to the characters and a three dimensional depth. They are stong pieces but could have benefitted from more work.

Nostalgia is a tricky theme to approach for any artist, with far too many opportunities to appear overly-derivative or hackneyed. On the whole the Nom Nom Collective manage to strike a balance between homage and their own personal critique of the material they are working with. ‘Nomstalgia’ is a full and enjoyable show with a lot to see, remember and think about.

Carissa Farrell is a curator based in Dublin 

Cover Image. Amanda Ralph, Paper Boats, River Brosna, Clara 2000. Public Art Commission for Offaly Co. Council. Re-installed at Lough Boora in 2014.

1. Cover Image. Amanda Ralph, Paper Boats, River Brosna, Clara 2000. Public Art Commission for Offaly Co. Council. Re-installed at Lough Boora in 2014.
5. Roundup. Recent exhibitions and projects of note.
5. Column. Treasa O’Brien. Roads of Least Resistance: Irish Attitudes to Protest and Civil Disobedience.
6. Column. Amy Kieran. Exploring Visual Arts Audiences in Northern Ireland.
7. Column. Matt Packer. Dimishing Agency.
8. VAI News. Research, projects and campaigns.
9. Regional Focus: Louth. Arts Office, Brian Hegarty, Creative Spark, Declan Kelly, Droichead, Highlanes.
12. Residency. A Beautiful, Evocative Place. Clea Van Der Grijn details her recent residency in Mexico.
14. VAI / DAS Residency. New Monuments. Dorothy Hunter describes her project for the VAI / DAS award.
15. Project Profile. The Food, the Bad and the Ugly. Stephen Brandes details the whys, whats and hows of the Domestic Godless, a group of artists who explore the potential of food as a vehicle for artistic endeavour.
16. Art in Education. Overlapping with Young Minds. Anne Bradley interviews Jennie Guy about Mobile Art School and other projects exploring the role of contemporary artists and curators in schools.
17. Gallery Profile. Capturing Creator Participants. Kenneth Redmond talks to VAI about DLR Arts Office’s new Municipal Gallery housed in the LexIcon Library and Cultural Centre.
18. Public Art Case Study Risk and Trust. Cliodhna Shaffrey interviews Marie Brett about her project ‘Amulet’ (2009 – 2015), which explores infant loss.
19. Critique. Teresa Gillespie, Wexford Arts Centre; Thomas Brezing Droichead; Sabina Mac Mahon, Belfast Exposed & QSS, Belfast; Hugh Frazer, Doorway Gallery, Dublin; ‘Cosmic Dust’, Visual, Carlow.
23. Public Art Case Study. The Future of Place. Hollie Kearns and Rosie Lynch profile ‘Forecast’, a project focused on Kilkenny towns Callan, Castlecomer, Graiguenamanagh, Mooncoin and Thomastown.
24. Conference. Psychoswimography: Santa Barbara. Vanessa Daws on her participation in ‘On The Beach: Precariousness, Risk, Forms Of Life, Affinity And Play At The Edge Of The World’, Santa Barbara, USA.
25. Festival. Retrieving the West. Michaële Cutaya profiles Wild-Screen / Scáil-Fhiáin, a contemporary artists’ film event organised by Una Quigley and Louise Manifold, which took place in Connemara (7 – 8 March).
26. Career Development. The Joy of Collision. Miranda Driscoll, Co-founder and Director of the Joinery, Dublin discusses its closure and her move to the Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh.
27. Career Development. Dialogue with Space. Ben Crothers discusses curating ‘Glumba Skzx’, an exhibition featuring artists from Northern Ireland held at Ex Elettrofonica, Rome.
29. Public Art Case Study. Submergence & Resurgence. Amanda Ralph discusses the re-installation of her public artwork Paper Boats.
30. Project Profile. Re-opening Experience. Alice Butler profiles the Experimental Film Club.
31. 2014 Valerie Earley Residency Award. Details of this year’s award and announcing Aoife Flynn as the 2014 Valerie Earley Residency Award recipient.
31. Institution Profile. Creative Peninsula. Lauren Dawson profiles Ards Arts Centre.
32. VAI West of Ireland Representative. More More More … Aideen Barry reports on the Claregalway Visual Artists’ Café (5 February).
32. VAI NI Manager. Big Impressions. Rob Hilken discusses printmaking facilities in Northern Ireland.
33. Public Art Roundup. Public art commissions, site-specific works, socially engaged practice and other forms of art outside the gallery.
34. VAI Professional Development. Current and upcoming workshops, peer reviews and seminars.
35. Opportunities. All the latest grants, awards, exhibition calls and commissions

Teresa Gillespie, below explanation (clocks stop at 3pm and existence continues), mixed media with found objects and video, 2014/15

Teresa Gillespie
‘below explanation (clocks stop at 3pm and existence continues)’
Wexford Arts Centre
12 January – 7 February 2015

“Phenomenology fails to provide a guaranteed tether to the world and its things. The relationship between consciousness and content remains to be worked out.” (Arthur C. Danto) (1)

The annual Emerging Visual Artist Award (EVAA) is one of the most sought-after visual art opportunities in the country. The winning artist is awarded €5,000 and a solo show at Wexford Arts Centre (WAC). As the 99% majority of visual artists in Ireland could be categorised as ‘emerging’ the profile of artists who do apply is most likely very colourful.

The profiles of EVAA recipients suggest that the term emerging applies to new and relatively young artists. Since 2006, when Seamus Nolan was the inaugural winner, three male and six female artists have taken home the award. Yes, strange to see the gender imbalance swaying the other way for a change in an art context. The last five artists to win the award have been female. A turning of the tide perhaps?

Just over a year after receiving the award in 2013, Teresa Gillespie’s resulting solo exhibition at WAC is a sprawling shag pile of heavily textured and layered materialism. The theory behind the art is derived from Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical novel Nausea (1939), a makeshift narrative delivered as a series of diary entries by a protagonist who one day pulls the scab off existence to find nothingness underneath. This old existential chestnut (a chestnut tree root being the main visual maker of nausea in Nausea) originates in Sartre’s proposition that “existence precedes essence”. In one particularly existential moment the protagonist, Roquentin, observes that “the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses”.(2)

And this is what Gillespie gives you in both galleries at WAC. Downstairs in the main gallery, among visual impressions of sinuous intestines and monastically draped and bound bodies, floor-bound monstrous masses the size of a Pilates ball are hermetically sealed in an insert cast of folded material. Throughout, the artist’s stagecraft alternates between hard representational props and soft sculpture: Gillespie’s art is the love child of Claes Oldenburg and Eva Hesse. In another memorable instance, a chair peeks out from underneath a red velvet curtain attached to a confessional-like timber compartment. Standing on one leg, the chair bears the weight of a pregnancy bump made of hardened clay. Amongst these stillborn manifestations of swollen beginnings or endings (depending on your existential bent) a projected film work shows the camera lens drunkenly scanning and fondling up-close textures. If inanimate objects could make sex tapes then this is how they would look.

There is more of the same upstairs in gallery two, where the windowless and artificially-lit ambience lends itself better to Gillespie’s formalism. Further, the smaller and more intimate space seems to foster greater consideration with regard to display, where wall decoration comes in the form of a framed primordial ‘mud-scape’.

However, what held my attention for repeated viewings upstairs is the single film work. It comes closest to what, in many respects, is Gillespie’s visual re-description of Nausea, especially how Danto describes the book as “a series of almost philosophical still lifes, the nearest artistic predecessor being, perhaps, Chardin, where the humblest objects – a pitcher, an egg – are rendered eloquent in their ordinariness and metaphysical in their presence”.(3)

Gillespie’s art positions the body and consciousness, the terrestrial and the celestial, the real and the representational in close proximity. These intimate embraces of opposites collaborate to elicit a perceived density to her art objects. This may also explain why the language and the references that the artist uses to theoretically situate her work are equally dense. Frustratingly, this density creates a verbal impasse for the observer, like those experienced by Roquentin in Nausea: “things are divorced from their names”.(4)

Overall, there is nothing attractive or repulsive, spectacular or banal at WAC. The mind’s eye wanders over the manifold textures that both conceal and give shape to the mutable floor-bound furniture. However, the exhibition as a whole is insidiously latent, waiting in hiding for the observer to activate the landscape with their own psychological baggage. Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘the fold’ comes to mind: “the coils of matter, and the folds of the soul”.(5) There are also visual nods to that other philosophical chestnut ‘abjection’ at WAC. That said, Gillespie’s art is not the tomato and chocolate sauce abjection of Paul McCarthy. Rather, it is between beauty and the beast that Gillespie leads the observer, down the rabbit hole of existential angst and phenomenological blockage.

James Merrigan is an artist and art critic at billionjournal.com

Notes
1. Arthur C. Danto, Nausea and Noesis: Some Philosophical Problems for Sartre, October, Vol. 18 (Autumn 1981), p. 18
2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, (trans.) Lloyd Alexander, New Directions, New York, 1969
3. Danto, op. cit., p. 6
4. Sartre, op. cit.
5. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, (trans.) Jonathan Strauss, Yale French Studies, No. 80, 1991, p. 227

Maimie Campbell, The Death of Cuchulainn, 1929, tempera on board 67 x 55 cm

Sabina Mac Mahon
‘An Ulaid – South Down Society of Modern Art’
Belfast Exposed and Queen Street Studios, Belfast
16 January – 28 February

Sabina Mac Mahon’s research project, An Ulaid – South Down Society of Modern Art, is displayed in two different venues in Belfast: Belfast Exposed Photography and Queen Street Studios & Gallery.

Belfast Exposed’s downstairs gallery bears all the familiar hallmarks of a museum-based show, in which factual information and a collection of artefacts are utilised to construct characters and tell a story. The open layout – vitrines, free-standing and wall-mounted display cases, framed archival photographs and an abundance of wall panels – provides detailed information on a group of seven artists: Maimie Campbell, Pauline Doyle, Edward Hollywood, Sarah Leonard, Iris McAragh, Heber O’Neill and Thomas Pettit, who co-founded the South Down Society of Modern Art in rural Northern Ireland in 1927.

Mac Mahon has included an incredible amount of detail in the texts incorporated in the exhibition, which appear to be thoroughly researched and chart the formation of the group, their inspirations, travels, influences, styles, output and eventual decline in 1930. Hand-written postcards, aged and frayed, contain correspondence between the members whilst abroad. Black and white photographs show a group of smiling young artists and the spaces and places where they grew up and in which their meetings and art making took place. Even the biscuit tin in which Mac Mahon found the memorabilia that initiated her research project sits on a plinth under a protective case.

None of the actual artworks made by the Society are displayed at Belfast Exposed, but are presented separately at Queen Street Studios: paintings and drawings inspired by Fauvism, Cubism, Pointillism and other styles that the group’s members encountered when travelling and studying on the continent. In Mac Mahon’s own words, “[their work] generally speaking, approaches the standard of enthusiastic amateurs rather than that of professional artists”. The works produced in the three-year lifespan of the group are unexceptional and their story, though well-illustrated, is largely uneventful – no doubt mirroring the trajectory of so many other groups that didn’t quite make art history: wealthy middle class artists who, after a grand tour, became inspired to replicate the famous works and styles they so admired, but never quite managed to surpass them.

Mac Mahon has faithfully recounted their tale and the layout of the show at Belfast Exposed guides you clearly around the displays and objects as she they unfold from beginning to end. The gallery’s printed material, however, subtly hints at a different story. It does not present a standard archive show of a group of Northern Irish artists that nobody (remarkably, really) has ever heard of, but also states that the exhibition is “a speculative exercise, which playfully explores photography’s relationship to truth and its role in the illustration and imagining of history”. Alarm bells may be triggered by these words in the average viewer. In fact, none of it is real.

Sabina Mac Mahon, ‘An Ulaid – South Down Society of Modern Art’ installation view, QSS Gallery, photo by Tony Corey

What happens after the ‘unveiling’, when fact turns into fiction, and when the curtain is drawn back and the wizard behind it is revealed? Some will view it and leave without discovering the truth. Others will feel deceived, or forced to ask the exasperating question: “So what now?” Some, like me, may have already realised in their initial experience of the show that something was amiss (before it had even opened, in fact, when those ‘warning bell’ words stood out in the press release and triggered a suspicious feeling of construct).

If you like being fooled, and enjoy the deftness of Mac Mahon’s writing and replication, you will have found the unveiling amusing and clever. If you are interested in how galleries and other arts institutions present history, fact and truth, then Mac Mahon’s thorough knowledge of museum and gallery displays (she is currently undertaking an MA in Museum Studies) evidenced in this show will impress.

For me, this exhibition really started to function as a result of the conversations I had with others about it. These included: questions surrounding belief systems present in the everyday, and how we are sometimes convinced by ‘evidence’ that supports them. The power of museums when presenting history as entertainment and the responsibility that galleries have when knowingly ‘misleading’ their viewers (something that Belfast Exposed have been careful about: all the clues are presented clearly, and the gallery invigilators have been advised to discuss the fictional elements of the show when engaging with visitors).

Mac Mahon is no doubt acutely aware of the specific context of Northern Ireland, and its plural histories. After all, this is a place where, in 2010, the then culture minister Nelson McCausland publicly urged the Ulster Museum to put on exhibits acknowledging that the world was made only several thousand years ago, in order to “reflect the views of all the people in Northern Ireland in all its richness and diversity”. ¹

Take from it what you will, but Sabina Mac Mahon’s research project ‘An Ulaid – South Down Society of Modern Art’, above demonstrating the careful fabrication of an imagined history of art, has also provided sufficient food for thought.

Alissa Kleist is a Belfast-based curator.

Note
1. Henry McDonald, ‘Northern Ireland minister calls on Ulster Museum to promote creationism’, The Guardian, Wednesday 26 May 2010