DR KATE ANTOSIK-PARSONS REVIEWS THE HAYWARD GALLERY TOURING EXHIBITION CURRENTLY AT VISUAL.

Motherhood is a subject often idealised or hastily dismissed as unworthy of critical attention within contemporary art. However, ‘Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood’, curated by Hettie Judah at VISUAL Carlow (27 Sep 2025 – 11 Jan 2026), offers an important corrective. This impressive, large-scale, group exhibition brings together over 60 international artists from the 1960s to present day. Organised thematically by Creation, Loss, Maintenance and The Temple, it considers the richness and complexities of motherhood through art. A Hayward Gallery touring exhibition, staged at four UK venues over the past two years,¹ in its current iteration for VISUAL, it includes additional works by Irish artists, which help to anchor the curatorial inquiry within the immediate landscape. 

In Creation, wonderous and strange, sometimes monstrous, maternal bodies are imagined, as new selves emerge and interdependent relationships develop. Angela Forte’s tapestry, Birth of Two Selves (1994), envisions birth as a rupture and a continuance of the self. In Hermione Wiltshire’s vinyl images, Nicola Preparing for Birth (2008), pregnant bodies assume athletic labour poses, with birthing understood as both an event and a process. The Frankenstein-esque altered bodies of Annegret Soltau’s photographs evoke birthing interventions like episiotomies and c-sections. Liss LaFleur’s digital audio libretto But they can’t steal my joy (2022) queers maternal embodiment by translating spoken word into synthesised sound, encapsulating the experience of (m)others. 

Inspired by neonatal intensive care experiences, Pauline Cummins’s video Becoming Beloved (1995) deals with autonomy, survival, and the unfolding connections between maternal and infant bodies. Similarly, Fani Parali’s Incubator/Flight (2022) – a delicate pencil drawing of a pre-mature baby resting solemnly in an iron-framed incubator – hovers between fragility and resilience. Other works, like Lea Cetera’s womb-shaped hourglass, and time-lapse textile images by Tabitha Soren, skew temporalities, with maternal time running counter to linear time.

In Loss, artists sensitively explore miscarriage, forced adoption, abortion, and death. In the unflinching Annonciation (2009-13), Elina Brotherus’s photographs navigate her journey through infertility treatments. Emma Finucane’s sculpture, Politics of the Womb (2017/2025), charts the legal restrictions of the (since repealed) Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution and its consequences for reproducing bodies, including maternal deaths and terminations for medical reasons. Patricia Hurl’s Study for Jingle Bells (1987) depicts a haunting emptiness in the aftermath of a stillbirth. Dealing with stigma, Paula Rego’s stark etchings, Abortion Series (1999), and Tracey Emin’s confessional video How It Feels (1996) offer candid insights into the lived experiences of abortion. Nearby, Rachel Fallon’s Aprons of Power (2018) gesture to the absences, and invisible (re)productive labour, of the women and girls sent to Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes.

In Maintenance, named for Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance Art (1969), the labour and responsibilities of motherhood become a generative force. The stunning, large-scale images of Clare Gallagher’s photographic series, Second Shift (2019), elevate the mundane daily minutia of domestic care. Billie Zangewa’s exquisite hand-stitched collage of a sleeping child, Temporary Reprieve (2017), is a moment of quiet beauty amidst the chaos of childrearing. Rachel Fallon’s Maternal Chain of Office – Order of Our Blessed Lady of the Food Bank (2018) raises issues about class and the impact of economic austerity on mothers’ abilities to provide their children basic necessities. The absent body of the child from Cassie Arnold’s school uniform, constructed from bulletproof vest material, calls to mind maternal fears for school-attending children in the United States, where gun violence is sadly normalised. Alongside this, Christine Voge’s black and white images in the sanctuary of a women’s shelter contemplate mothering in difficult circumstances. 

The ‘kitchen table’ area in VISUAL’s main gallery space suggests a matricentric activism, reframing the mother as a force for societal change. The archival documents and photographs that represent the interventions of second wave feminist collectives, like The Hackney Flashers and Polvo de Gallina Negra, scrutinise the conditions of artists and mothers in the 1970s and 80s. However, this section may have benefitted from the inclusion of a contemporary feminist art collective, to give a sense of current maternal art activism. Situated at waist height, the small touchscreen displaying Bobby Baker’s Timed Drawings (1983-84) offers glimpses into brief moments in which an artist mother must eke out her creativity. Marlene Dumas’s collaborative mother-daughter works subvert the separation between art and life, the parent-child relationship becoming a creative, artmaking force. 

The Temple offers sensitive and nuanced self-portraits of motherhood. Renee Cox’s portrait of Black maternal power, Yo Mama Series (1992-94), is flanked by Leni Dothan’s Sleeping Madonna (2011), and Catherine Opie’s Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004), upending classical Madonna and Child imagery and complicating dominant notions of motherhood. The composition of Ishbel Myerscough’s family portrait, All (2016), is evocative of nesting dolls, its intimacy and realism revealing a mother’s emotional labour, just as Trish Morrissey’s Eupnea (2023) entwines memories and dreams with maternal hopes and anxieties by focusing on breath. It highlights the fragility of life, and for this writer, it recalled the intense realisation of the impossibility of protecting a child from every potential harm. Overall, this exhibition complicates patriarchal or simplistic understandings of motherhood, instead offering numerous thought-provoking and challenging engagements with the messiness of art and motherhood. 

Dr Kate Antosik-Parsons is a contemporary art historian and a mother of four, who writes about reproductive justice, feminist art and embodiment. 

kateap.com

¹ Past exhibition tour venues and dates: Dundee Contemporary Arts (19 April – 13 July 2025); Millennium Gallery, Sheffield (24 October 2024 – 19 January 2025); Midland Arts Centre, Birmingham (22 June – 29 September 2024); Arnolfini, Bristol (9 March – 26 May 2024).

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AENGUS WOODS REVIEWS A RECENT EXHIBITION AT SOLSTICE ARTS CENTRE. 

Infinity is one of those rare concepts that does not so much pervade western thought as haunt it. Since the calculations of Dedekind, Godel and Cantor, we tend to think of infinity primarily as the concern of mathematicians. Yet, starting with Zeno’s paradoxes, going all the way to Hegel’s distinction between two forms of infinity, we see that its ability to create aporias and vanishing points within and without the fabric of reality has driven philosophers and artists to distraction for millennia. 

‘Of Peras and Apeiron: ends and infinity’, the superb group show at Solstice Arts Centre in Navan (6 September – 25 October 2025), takes its title from the ancient Greek terminology. Aristotle notoriously relegated infinity to the realm of the potential (rather than the actual) in keeping with the classical world’s generalised fear of the infinite. The ancient Greek worldview prized order, proportion and clear delineations. Infinity, on the other hand, promised chaos and disorder, with yawning chasms lurking in the fabric of time. Infinity and its repercussions return and return, throughout the history of art and philosophy. The perspectival advances of early renaissance drawing, and the complex computations around modern quantum physics would be unthinkable without Cantor’s multiple infinities.

Nonetheless, despite its full embrace by modern mathematics, something of the Greek anxiety around infinity remains with us. Descartes claimed that it was the only concept that could not be produced by humans and must be seeded in our minds by God. Hegel, by contrast, argued that it is precisely the mind that is infinite. We, ourselves, would then be the very source of that which so de-stabilises us.

This odd tension between the concept and the mind, between system and individual, pervades this exhibition. Works by Ray Johnston, Gerald Caris, Ronnie Hughes and Neil Clements, at first glance, seem to be working within the legacies of minimalism and Op art. But these presentations are wonderfully deepened and enriched by the inclusion of a substantial number of works by Channa Horwitz, dotted throughout the exhibition. Horwitz, a remarkable conceptual artist who only achieved due recognition in the last years of her life, produced works based on complex numerical and spatial systems of her own devising. Her Rhythm of Line works, exquisite drawings on Mylar and utilising gold leaf, bring to mind Sol Lewitt, but they are executed with a delicacy and sense of colour that elevates them entirely to their own realm. Add to this her Sonakinatography compositions, dating from 1969 to 1996, expansive hand-written systems of numbers on graph paper. They are mysterious and suggestive, at once reflecting the focused energies of the scientist and the obsessive ruminations of the outsider artist. 

The Sonakinatography works are essentially scores; systems of notation to be interpreted at will by others. This intimate connection between system and practitioner, between the concept and the mind considering it, is key to Horwitz’s works, and in turn provides a connective tissue between the other artists in the show. Across the presented works, human touch grounds abstract complexities or provides the essential input for systems that might otherwise be detached from anything beyond themselves. Sixteen rotated forms (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) (1975) by Roy Johnston are a case in point. Each of the 16 units that from the individual work are composed of grey painted fabric, stretched over three-dimensional constructions, organised in shifting patterns. The austere and programmatic language of the work is, however, softened by its painterly sensibility and the tangibility of the artist’s touch. 

Likewise, Ronnie Hughes’s paintings, at first glance, seem to represent complex geometrics of colour and shape. However, closer inspection reveals traces of the hand. The pull of the paint bears traces of brushstrokes; clusters of triangle and diamond, in their various undulations, point to long hours taping and tracing lines and shapes. Neil Clements’s clean, tight paintings are pleasingly rigorous but his choice of tread plate as a painting surface also points to the human life and labour underpinning their execution, and the art-historical intellectualism they evince.

The labour of the artist bleeds into questions of labour more generally in the works of Grace McMurray. Knitted objects, fabrics and woven materials draw parallels between aesthetic systems and those of social organisation and labour hierarchies. Made of painted and woven satin ribbons, We aren’t on the same wavelength (2022), by virtue of its abruptly fragmentary appearance, points to a system that is, at least in principle, both spatial and temporally endless.

The works of Dannielle Tegeder and Suzanne Triester share with Horwitz that inclination toward the obsessive that might be most optimistically taken as the human mind attempting to make sense of the sheer plethora of reality. Tegeder’s pieces feel richly symbolic. Conjuring ladder with handbook of one shape meaning, and Standard line, with Fixed Element (2024), in particular, seems totemic in its presentation of finely crafted patterns in painted wood, suspended, drawing the eye upward. Treister’s prints, in their invocations of Kabbalah and shamanism, reverberate with that other abiding association with the infinite: mysticism and the precise mechanisms of how the individual can, or indeed perhaps cannot, maintain themselves in the grand flux of being and time.

Overall, the show intriguingly brings to light the attractions and the challenges of system thinking, while dual notions of infinity permeate everything as creation and dissolution. Nonetheless, of the many minimalist, conceptual or systematic artists, hovering in the background of this show, none seems more pertinent than Agnes Martin. Her grids, lines and dots incessantly highlight the attractiveness of systems, to which the exhibiting artists are evidently in thrall. And while these systems can exceed and evade our control, extending ad infinitum, they can sometimes be tamed and shaped, at least momentarily, by the hand and the mind.

Aengus Woods is a writer and critic based in County Louth. 

@aengus_woods

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MIGUEL AMADO INTERVIEWS BARBARA KNEŽEVIĆ ABOUT HER NEW TOURING EXHIBITION.

Miguel Amado: Your exhibition ‘Gvozdene Kapije / The Iron Gates’ presents a film of the same title and a group of corresponding sculptures, influenced by Lepenski Vir – an ancient settlement on the banks of the Danube River in eastern Serbia. Your encounter with this culture has triggered reflection on your European heritage and upbringing in Australia. What is the framework that informs these works?

Barbara Knežević: This is the first time that I am engaging with notions of identity in my practice. Yet I am not claiming to have a unique position – this is not a story specific to me, but an Australian story of displacement after the Second World War, a story of the Balkans and a story about migration. We live in an era defined by people migrating globally, and so my subjectivity is one that is shared widely. My focus is on what happens when people are forcibly relocated and re-establish themselves somewhere else. I am interested in the diaspora, namely in first and second generations of people born to migrants.

MA: You want to reclaim your diasporic experience?

BK: Yes. I made a couple of decisions – minor things, but nevertheless powerful – that helped me in that undertaking, for instance to put the diacritic marks on my surname and to learn the jezik (language or tongue), or what is now known as Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian.

MA: This is your first film – a feature, 48 minutes long. What led you to choose this medium? Was there a storytelling aspect that you felt was required to examine such complex themes?

BK: I wanted to explore the narrative potential of sculpture. I had been researching votive objects from Europe, mainly Greek, Roman and Etruscan traditions, and then I cast my eye a bit further back and came across the sculptures of Lepenski Vir, which were found along a stretch of the border between Serbia (then Yugoslavia) and Romania during the construction of the Iron Gates, a dam on the Danube River, in the 1960s. There are three reasons why these sculptures interested me. Firstly, there is a claim by the archaeologist who discovered them, Dragoslav Srejović, that they are the first monumental sculptural forms in Europe. On the other hand, they are part of what archaeologist Marija Gimbutas conceptualises as a culture structured by matriliny. Finally, the inhabitants of Lepenski Vir lived alongside the sculptures in their dwellings, and there is some evidence that they produced them over a series of generations.

MA: Aesthetically, the sculptures are unique; they are carved in sandstone and express a hybrid of human and a certain fish that is common in the region. The fish (Moruna) is one of the five characters in the film. The others are one of the sculptures (Water Fairy), the mountain (Treskavac), the river (Danube) and the dam (Đerdap), who each materialise through voiceover.

BK: The characters were all written from a first-person perspective, describing their experiences and relationships to one another, in a polyphonic arrangement. I had accumulated a vast amount of visual and written material, and realised I could not ‘translate’ all this research through a single perspective, nor use a purely documentary approach. I had to employ the device of fiction, and these characters were what facilitated that.

MA: This fictional dimension is mainly complemented by three types of imagery: speeches-to-camera by experts, who offer explanations of the sculptures; archival footage, associated with the construction of the dam by the Yugoslav and Romanian governments, which provides a political context; and the dance sequence, in a hotel situated in what became the Lepenski Vir archaeological site, interspersed with views of welded-steel-chain tapestries, specially produced for the site by artist Zvonimir Šutija, from which you got the inspiration to create a sculpture that the dancers manipulate.

BK: The archival footage, which includes former Yugoslav president, Josip Broz Tito, and ordinary citizens of both Yugoslavia and Romania, helps me navigate temporal shifts, in line with the methodology of the essay and experimental genres in cinema or journalism. The choreographed element is a way of articulating the link between people and matter via embodiment and, through that, feminist discourse.

MA: Is this why the performers are all women?

BK: Yes, in allusion to Gimbutas’s reading of the Lepenski Vir culture as matrilineal. Each performer embodies a character, whose voice is also female.

MA: The sculpture you created has a circular shape, referring to cyclicality, collectivity and spirituality.

BK: The sculpture evokes the whirlpools common in this part of the Danube River, as well as the dam’s turbines. This motif represents spinning into something one cannot escape. I fabricated and welded the piece myself. This was quite labour intensive and emotional, and related to the life of my grandmother, who was forced to make munitions in a German factory during the Second World War.

MA: The various registers are brought together in a scene where you appear, reflected in a hotel room mirror, slamming down clay and speaking in jezik, like the other characters. The scene gives the impression of both dislocation and introspection, even psychological charge – there is a ‘fantastical’ atmosphere that suggests a spectral presence, which points towards memory and civilisation. This allows you to simultaneously insert yourself into the past and distance yourself from it – particularly concerning your grandmother, who was deported to Germany and a victim of forced labour.

BK: This scene is the punctum – it breaks the fourth wall (which also happens at the beginning and the end, with the crew and the cast for the characters) and empowers me to revisit and interpret the sculptures of Lepenski Vir through the lenses of my family’s condition and movement from Europe to Australia. My position as author is that of both insider and foreigner, a liminal space occupied by someone between geographies and histories.

Miguel Amado is a curator and critic, and director of Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, County Cork.

siriusartscentre.ie

Barbara Knežević is an artist based in Dublin. Gvozdene Kapije / The Iron Gates (2025) was commissioned by, and presented at, Solstice Arts Centre (29 March – 30 May 2025) as part of a tour that includes Sirius Arts Centre in 2025, and Wexford Arts Centre and Regional Cultural Centre in 2026. The tour is curated by Rayne Booth with support from Sirius Arts Centre.

barbaraknezevic.com

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JOHN GRAHAM REVIEWS THE CURRENT EXHIBITION BY MOHAMMED SAMI AT THE DOUGLAS HYDE GALLERY.

The Artist’s Eye programme at the Douglas Hyde Gallery invites exhibitors in Gallery 1 to select artists for Gallery 2. The Baghdad-born, London-based painter Mohammed Sami has chosen the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader. Designed to show the importance of influence, the pairing is instructive, and even more so if you put the separate exhibition titles together. Suggesting a stymied address, ‘To Whom it May Concern – I’m Too Sad To Tell You’ offers a plaintive note that illuminates both practices.

Sami makes very big paintings showing ostensibly very little, their outward appearance bristling with dark interiors. A painting called Law Books (2023) is almost three meters high and consists of a painted brick wall. The painstakingly modular surface has eruptions of red, a seeping wound or inferno. I wrote ‘blood shadow’ in my notebook, but that doesn’t have to mean anything. Unless the bricks are stacked volumes, the ‘Law Books’ of the title remain a mystery. We can speculate about analogies, but the only certainty is that Sami’s titles do a lot of work.

In a series of well-known short films, Bas Jan Ader rolls off rooftops and cycles into canals with an absurdist insouciance. In the wake of his final work, In Search of the Miraculous (1975), the artist’s corpus persisted but his corporeal presence disappeared. Projected onto a suspended screen in Gallery 2, his three-minute black and white film I’m too sad to tell you (1971) is formally similar to Andy Warhol’s 16mm Screen Tests but is their dramatic obverse. As though foreseeing his own cult, Ader’s ‘living portrait’ eschews studied nonchalance for performed emotion, an agitated close-up of weeping. In the absence of bodies – a feature of Sami’s work too – the human stain, the bodies’ leftover presence, seems everywhere. 

Directly opposite Ader’s work in Gallery 2, a vertical painting is called The Operations Room (2023). Rattan chairs are gathered around a circular table. From the acutely downwards point of view, a patterned carpet is a scramble of brushy marks. With a title suggesting military planning, the painting’s sickly palette of violets and maroons is punctuated by a creeping lacunae, a shadow leeching across the table like the dark side of a forbidding moon.  

A smaller painting from 2020 shows a trompe-l’oeil tabletop in a blood-red room. A potted monstera casts a shadow that looks more like a burn. The plant itself (named from the Latin word for monstrous or abnormal) has a sinister aspect too, its perforated leaves like spooky masks. Though the subject is cryptic – the painting is called Still Alive – Sami’s mark-making techniques are plain to see, with paint sprayed, smeared and dragged across the surface as though the material itself was unyielding. 

A nominee for this year’s Turner Prize, the Iraqi painter’s work has become increasingly visible, with an accompanying narrative of trauma at once represented and repressed. A dichotomy of the visible and the invisible also plays out on the canvases themselves, a game of hide and seek, reflecting, perhaps, a culture of control being challenged by protean image making. 

An exception to the embargo on human figures elsewhere, the familiar figure of Ruhollah Khomeini occupies the top half of a large painting on the back wall of the gallery. Supreme Leader of Iran from 1979 until his death ten years later, Khomeini became better known in the west as simply The Ayatollah. He appears here as a painted projection, an illuminated untouchable, looming over a vast assembly. That his audience is rendered by a loose brushing of liquid blacks testifies to Sami’s economic mark-making and my own willingness to see what isn’t there. Called Brick Game (2024), the title refers to a version of Tetris. An irregular host of white shapes could be bricks ascending in the manner of the outmoded video game but are more suggestive of mobile phones being held aloft. That reading is inconsistent with Khomeini’s era, but the era of painting is always now. 

Born in 1984, Sami came of age in the presence of war. In the gallery setting, the raised hand of the Iranian leader could be understood as a welcome or a warning. The work by Ader conveys a similar ambivalence. As legacy and troubling continuance, both practices mine a difficult past to fashion an infinity of traces: Sami’s haunted surfaces, Ader’s exit ghost. 

John Graham is a Dublin-based artist and writer.

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SADBH O’BRIEN REVIEWS A CURRENT EXHIBITION AT IMMA.

Featuring over 40 Irish or Ireland-based artists, ‘Staying with the Trouble’ at IMMA feels especially important to the current moment. The exhibition is grounded in the research of Donna Haraway and is titled after her seminal text, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016).

A prominent figure in contemporary eco-feminism, Haraway offers reassuring perspectives on how we can respond to, and make sense of, troubling times. Where catastrophic events and seismic geopolitical shifts are triggering and can overwhelm us into inertia, Haraway gives us proactive methods to sit with, counteract, and think around these complex systems. Her expansive thesis conjures a biomorphic, multispecies space of storytelling, which denounces human exceptionalism and decentres capitalist viewpoints of the world. 

This is a space of transmogrification in which genders and genres can be indeterminate, unresolved and of course, open to what she calls ‘Tentacular Thinking’. From this, the curators have used five propositions, as defined by Haraway: ‘Making Kin’, ‘Composting’, ‘Sowing Worlds’, ‘Critters’ and the ‘Techno Apocalypse’. However, strictly categorising each artwork into one of these is tricky, since most are multi-faceted and interwoven across multiple perspectives.

The first works encountered are rooted in a type of magic. In Kian Benson Bailes’s sculpture, Self Actualiser (2024), four spider-like creatures, playfully adorned with frills, phalluses, and bells, hang from coloured thread. Their knotted web evokes a playful and creative engagement – a woven dance. The multi-eyed faces are both mischievous and wise, evoking the supernatural, and alongside the small ceramic figurine, Weather Statue (2025), and textile creature, Archiver ii (2025), reflect the artist’s interest in folklore customs and craft traditions.

The theme of ‘Composting’ arises in Bea McMahon’s ‘low-tech’ biomorphic breathing sculptures, Ierse Stoofpot/ Irish Stew (2024). The paper structures are stained with organic matter, such as beetroot, turmeric, coffee, and cabbage – a potent concoction influenced by Macbeth’s witches’ brew. Earthly, human, and cyborg, the work’s continuous inflation and deflation is controlled by exposed mechanical apparatus. Aoibheann Greenan’s compelling film, The Ninth Muse (2023), combines moving image, performance, and sculpture. A witch-like husky whisper conflates sinew with cables, skin with plastic, creating a speculative narrative on techno-human experience. It highlights looped technological systems and sits at the intersection of neuroscience, techno-feminism, myth, and magic.

Storytelling is central to the proposal of ‘Sowing Worlds’, focusing on planting ideas, relationships and stories that can influence potential futures. Visually striking works by Samir Mahmood and Sam Keogh expand this allegorical approach with colourful, figurative scenes, informed by the Mughal miniature painting tradition and sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries, respectively. 

Venus Patel’s enrapturing film, Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse  (2023), confronts and dismantles the heteronormative and transphobic preaching of religious indoctrination. Patel plays a self-proclaimed transexual Texan preacher who is attempting to convert the public to an LGBTQ cult, baptising her followers, who emerge from biblical waters as hybrid queer creatures. In this way, Patel flips abusive anti-trans and homophobic sentiments back towards heteronormative constructs in a truly effective manner. 

Companionship and cohabitation between the humans and non-humans that share this planet are central to ‘Making Kin’, which proposes forming bloodlines to other planetary organisms. Alice Rekab uses their mixed-race heritage to consider identity through familial connections across two distinct places. In nest of tables (Red): together in difference (2022), Rekab blends the domestic and familial to highlight the symbolic influence of animals within cultural history. 

Given that agriculture forms part of Irish heritage and contributes significantly to the country’s economy, it’s unsurprising that several works deal with farming practices and its by-products. For example, Watchorn’s sculpture, Surrogate II (field) (2021), a bevelled block of beef fat and leather rosette, mechanically bolted by gate clamps to a weathered fragment of a shipping pallet, demonstrates the artist’s clever and intuitive use of materials. Here, a tension occurs between life, death, and the stark inhumanity of systems designed to extract maximum value from livestock. 

McKinney’s Drumgold Holly Embryo Transfer (2021) is a curiously striking sculpture comprising a crescent-shaped, galvanised, steel cattle feeder, flipped on its side and weighed down by sandbags. Hanging from this is a brightly coloured sculpture, woven from artificial insemination straws. Inspired by a protective talisman, made from a bunch of holly found in a Wexford farm, the woven straws form clusters of berries, from which pointed cattle horns emerge. It calls to mind the very real grief and suffering in Andrea Arnold’s film, Cow (2021), showing the life of a dairy cow through the animal’s eyes, beginning with a heart-breaking postnatal separation. Like the film, McKinney’s work exposes stark systems of physical and psychological control, built into the engineering of farming apparatus, and questions the impact of bioengineering on our bovine counterparts. 

Bridget O’Gorman also examines systems of power, specifically how civil infrastructure excludes those of us who have access or mobility issues. Highlighting a world rife with barriers, her installation, Support | Work (2023), forms a system of precarious, suspended pulleys, made from haphazard parts of mobility aids and fragments of mosaic flooring. The combination provokes a sense of phantom pain, as one imagines the brittle sculptures falling to the floor.

‘Techno Apocalypse’ draws on religion’s preoccupation with the end of the world; however, the presented works aim to variously subvert or dismantle end-stage capitalism. Both Austin Hearne and Luke van Gelderen focus on patriarchal systems of identity from a queer perspective. Hearne’s Curtains of Celibacy and Glory Box (both 2023) reference church interiors and confessionals, while alluding to institutional hypocrisy and oppression within the Catholic Church. Employing interior design techniques, including hand-painted wallpaper, the artworks subvert ‘divine’ authority by building an opulent, ecclesiastical den of secrecy and queer desire. 

Van Gelderen’s film, HARDCORE FENCING (2023), examines the influential tropes of contemporary masculine identity emerging from digital culture and far-right politics. The film exposes the deep fault lines of insecurity, unpredictable anger, and violence – forces that have recently been seen on the nation’s streets. This is further evident in clips of riots, fires, and protests in Eoghan Ryan’s Circle A (2024). The film records a group discussing the term ‘anarchy’ and its role in contemporary society, unravelling its place within academia and lived experience in an increasingly polarised political landscape. In the face of accelerating global conflict, Diaa Lagan’s paintings offer reflection on political upheaval. Arabic calligraphy is laser-cut from Perspex, framing imagery of ancient Islamic architecture, designed for peace and tranquillity. 

Continuing at IMMA until September, ‘Staying with the Trouble’ takes time for viewers to navigate, since the featured artists (too many to mention here) variously pull from complex material, digital, and metaphysical realms. Returning to Haraway’s argument for expansive ways of thinking about the world right now, the exhibition illustrates how humans are deeply woven into systems of interconnectedness, to which we have a profound and urgent responsibility.

Sadbh O’Brien is an artist and writer based in Dublin.

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JOSEPHINE KELLIHER REFLECTS ON THE PRACTICE OF MICHAEL KANE.

Michael Kane was among the first artists to join the fledgling Rubicon Gallery in 1990. We worked together intensively for 25 years and continue to collaborate. Michael’s exhibition ‘Works on Paper’ at Taylor Galleries (22 May – 21 June) coincides with his 90th birthday, so this is an ideal moment for me to reflect on the specific characteristics and narratives of his work.

The Labour of Creativity 

For decades, Michael’s home in Waterloo Road was his studio – or his studio was his home. There, I encountered a factory of creativity, a place of doers and makers. Michael alternated between the barely defined borders of his studio and living spaces, while his daughter, Aoife, and son, Oisin, worked separately on their own projects. Each had a private workspace, and everyone’s endeavour felt equally important; results and outcomes were shared and marvelled at collectively. 

In my own experience, creative projects were not often validated and categorised as ‘labour’ at that time. Similarly, ‘labour’ was not seen as creative, and the uneven process of creative labour was rarely the subject of animated conversation between adult and child. I observed there, Michael’s view on the imagination as a sacred space for creativity, a territory worth defending, in which information and emotions collage into something greater than the sum of those parts.

Michael works every day; he doesn’t wait for inspiration or any special circumstances. Michael wears work clothes, and he takes breaks for food, errands, periods of reading or news, but keeps these short. He’s intolerant of unscheduled interruptions. Michael has several projects on the go and is always starting new things. He assembles and manipulates materials and imagery; by sheer effort and trust in the process, his big bold paintings are laboriously coaxed into being.

Michael’s perspective and regard for his own labour explains his choice of subjects. Many monumental pieces portray the nobility, resilience and value of people engaged in physical labour and he celebrates mechanics, construction workers, stevedores, and factory workers as much as he does poets, gods and athletes. 

Michael’s imagery is enriched by his reading, which he dismisses as “unscholarly and unsystematic,” although his autobiography, BLIND DOGS: A Personal History (Gandon Editions, 2023) chronicles an impressive reading list, already completed in his teens. Michael’s fluency in ancient Greek and Roman literature is an important context for his work – from the series ‘Agamemnon Felled’ to others exploring the fates of Icarus, Marsyas, Narcissus and more. He also published original poems informed by the classics: REALMS (1974) and IF IT’S TRUE (2005). 

The Greeks saw their gods as utterly fallible, whose desires, ego and hubris are just like our own. Michael’s gods are full of struggle; they are sometimes depicted god-like, roaming the city, and sometimes appear in their ordinary human form. His interest in literature is balanced with an insatiable appetite for news, and both inform Michael’s understandings of human nature. 

Places and People

Born in county Wicklow, Micheal wanted access to the bigger world of his imagination and, in many crucial ways, he found that in Dublin. The city is the backdrop for so many works that he has been described as a painter of urban spaces. Speaking with curator Seán Kissane in 2008, Michael said: “I don’t think I do urban landscapes as such. I do versions of an urban atmosphere, or something like that.” 

Arriving in Dublin in his twenties, Michael interacted with writers Brendan Behan, Anthony Cronin and Patrick Kavanagh, painters James McKenna, Alice Hanratty, John Kelly, Charlie Cullen and Micheal Cullen, and several musicians, including Ronnie Drew and others in The Dubliners. Dublin was where Michael found his community of creatives and formed the “first inkling” of the possibility of life as a professional artist. 

Michael also invested in building an ecosystem to support other artists. In the 70s he founded the sociopolitical magazine, Structure, commissioning original writing and art from young creatives. He established Independent Artists, an alternative to the rigid, prevailing gallery system, and was co-founder of Project Art Centre, a radical arts venue in Temple Bar. Michael was among the first members of Aosdána. So, while it’s true that Michael was drawn to Dublin as a place, it was the community, world vision, and sense that creatives could live collectively that kept him in the city. 

Feminism and Tenderness

Michael often paints women. He is interested in the ways that women show up in the world and is aware of how the world shows up for women. His female subjects are mothers, gods, labourers, lovers, artists, survivors, students, and sex workers – each depiction, though complex, is wholly unambiguous. The women in his paintings squarely stare down or dismiss the viewer as they go about their business.

Michael never depicts women in fanciful poses; they assert themselves in the picture plane as they might assert themselves in a world that is often neither fair nor easy. He catalogues a malevolent cast of male characters circling these women – from the leering elders around the biblical Susanna to fiendish predators Michael recalls from twentieth-century Ireland. There is real tenderness in small drawings, watercolours and prints of women and girls that address violence, abuse, and cover-ups by church, school, and society. Many stories from this period recur in works throughout his career, never forgotten nor fully resolved.

When I started Rubicon Gallery, I was 21 years old, and a recent graduate. Michael was 55, a senior art college lecturer, and an established artist and cultural figure. I never felt less than Michael’s equal; business and creative directions were all up for discussion. I was invited to offer robust points of view, however contrary to his own, and together we negotiated solutions. Visual artists often won’t describe what they plan to do; meaning percolates through in the making. Sometimes it’s challenging to reduce what is done to plain words, because these things are often part of a longer unfinished body of work. Working with an artist over several years, I see that glimmers of insight emerge between the cracks and meaning coalesces over time. I am privileged for the time I spend with Michael in his studio, and for his personal humour and the stories that illuminate the work.

Josephine Kelliher works internationally as a Curator, Art Advisor and Cultural Strategist.

Michael Kane’s exhibition ‘Works on Paper’ runs at Taylor Galleries from 22 May to 21 June. 

taylorgalleries.ie

Michael’s work is also being shown in ‘Staying with the Trouble’ at IMMA (2 May – 21 September).

imma.ie

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ANTONIA HELD REVIEWS A RECENT EXHIBITION AT WÜRTTEMBERGISCHER KUNSTVEREIN STUTTGART.

In a time when images and their contexts are consumed and forgotten in the blink of an eye, the question arises: Are we still capable of truly looking? As streaming services flood us with endless content, and algorithms dictate our viewing behaviour, reality becomes increasingly blurred. It is worth pausing and reflecting on an artist who not only utilised the medium of television but radically questioned it: Samuel Beckett.

The exhibition ‘On Television, Beckett’ at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (19 October 2024 – 12 January 2025) presented for the first time all seven television plays that Samuel Beckett produced between 1966 and 1985 for the South German Broadcasting Corporation (SDR, now SWR) in Stuttgart: He Joe (1966), Geister Trio (1977), … nur noch Gewölk … (1977), Quadrat I and II (1981), Nacht und Träume (1982), and Was Wo (1985).

Curated by Gerard Byrne and Judith Wilkinson, the exhibition highlighted Beckett as a visual artist, portraying him as a precise designer of his works. Newly discovered photographs and production documents from the SWR Historical Archive, which document Beckett’s creative process over three decades, demonstrate that Beckett was not only an author but also deeply involved in the direction, visual composition, and editing of his films – pushing the boundaries of television as an artistic medium. His minimalist yet innovative aesthetic infused the medium with new depth and solidified his status as a visionary artist.

In the expansive exhibition space of the Kunstverein, the film works were projected within four cubes, which together formed an open, slightly offset fifth space, resembling a courtyard, the design of which borrows from Geistertrio. This was supplemented by two CRT monitors, one displaying Beckett’s film, Film (1965), the other a part of Alexander Kluge’s Deutschland im Herbst (1978), alongside a conversation with Otto Schily – lawyer for the far-left militant group, Red Army Faction (RAF) – and Eberhard Itzenplitz’s 1970 film, Bambule, which had originally been written by RAF member, Ulrike Meinhof, and therefore had for some time been banned from broadcast.

The exhibition vividly connected Beckett’s collaboration with SDR to the political history of Stuttgart. During the German Autumn of 1977, when the city was in the international spotlight, due to the actions of the RAF and the Stammheim trials, Geister Trio and … nur noch Gewölk … were created. Beckett’s themes – isolation, repetition, and the search for meaning – reflect the societal tensions of that time and touch on questions of freedom, control, and existence.

In Beckett’s television plays, he employed a radical reduction that questioned the very nature of the medium itself. That contemporary artists continue to engage with these works not only shows Beckett’s enduring relevance but also underscores the transformation and evolution of the media landscape since then. This was impressively addressed and expanded upon in the artists’ talks on 11 January.

The event included a conversation between Declan Clarke and Gerard Byrne about Clarke’s new film, If I Fall, Don’t Pick Me Up (2024), which had been shown to the audience the previous evening. Known for his cinematic investigations into modernity, conflict, and the hidden stories behind historical upheavals, Clarke brings a narrative sensitivity that can be compared to Beckett’s storytelling. While Beckett used television as a medium to abstract movements and question the structure of time, Clarke does something similar in his cinematic examinations of history and ideology.

Another engagement with Beckett’s ideas was found in the works of Doireann O’Malley, who merges virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and 3D technologies with cinematic and installation techniques. While Beckett explored television as a technological frontier, altering perceptions of body and space, O’Malley starts from a similar point, but in a world where machine intelligence and digital identities are already part of our daily lives. In their conversation with Judith Wilkinson, it became clear that their works address not only media transformations but also identity, gender, and perception, reflecting the changing narrative strategies in art. Beckett’s characters, often caught between dissolution and repetition, thus find a modern counterpart in O’Malley’s explorations of fluid identities and alternative states of consciousness.

The programme also addressed the artistic research projects of 2014 Turner Prize winner, Duncan Campbell, and the subsequent conversation between the artist and the curator bridged Beckett’s work with the present, opening up space for discussions. Campbell’s films, which deal with historical figures and political topics, explore the boundaries between documentary truth and narrative construction. This approach recalls Beckett’s staging of language and memory; where Beckett used forgetting, unreliability, and fragmentation as narrative strategies, Campbell questions the mechanisms by which history is constructed and passed down. Just as Beckett blended absurdity and seriousness, Campbell works with the tensions between documentary accuracy and narrative manipulation. In both, what appears as fact often remains a subjective and manipulable representation of reality.

‘On Television, Beckett’ made clear, through its combination of archival research, a comprehensive presentation of Beckett’s works, and conversations involving contemporary artistic reflections, that creative innovation often arises not from an abundance of possibilities, but from the conscious limitation to the essential – an idea more relevant than ever in times of information overload and manipulative media strategies. Perhaps herein lies answers to the yearning for authenticity in an increasingly simulated world. Beckett showed us the way – now it is up to us to truly look and continue his gaze.

Antonia Held is an art historian based in Stuttgart, Germany.

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JOANNE LAWS REFLECTS ON THE CURRENT EXHIBITIONS AT DUBLIN PORT. 

Clearly building on the momentum, scale and ambition of Ireland at Venice in 2022,¹ the curatorial team at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios has partnered with Dublin Port Company to present ‘Longest Way Round, Shortest Way Home’ – a pioneering offsite project in the context of a working port. The title draws on James Joyce’s Ulysses (Shakespeare and Company, 1922), specifically a quote from the novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom: “So it returns. Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”²

Travelling by boat for the press preview on 2 July was a novel and embedded way to experience the city from the river. We set off from Temple Bar along the quays, through the towering Financial District and sprawling Docklands, with the Liberty Hall ‘CEASEFIRE NOW’ banner as backdrop. This journey served to highlight the seaward expansion of the once compact, pre-suburban Dublin, chronicled in Ulysses. Cranes and shipping containers ushered our arrival into Dublin Port – the site of transit and the convergence of logistics on a global scale.

TBG+S is presenting solo exhibitions by Yuri Pattison and Liliane Puthod in The Pumphouse on Alexandra Road until 27 October. Though aesthetically and materially distinct, these site-specific works share several points of convergence – and some unexpected synchronicities – not least in relation to the perceived ghost status of mechanical systems in the digital age. 

Installed in the disused Pumphouse No. 2 – among the 1950s machinery that once controlled the flow of water to the graving docks, where old boats were repaired or dismantled – Pattison’s work expertly harnesses digital technology, while also alluding to its precarity. Mounted on the wall inside the entrance, clock speed (the no more) conceptualises relations between time and labour in the workplace. A looping sequence of clockfaces morph into images produced by a now obsolete Artificial Intelligence generation tool. Although cutting-edge a few years ago, this software proved unstable and difficult to scale, apply to new domains, or train on small datasets; it would collapse without carefully selected hyperparameters. For me, this artwork highlights a dichotomy between the tangible labour of the mechanical age (memorialised in the dials, levels, gears, and pumps of obsolete machinery) and the disembodied, virtual nature of work in an era of digital acceleration.

The main element is a video installation, Dream Sequence, presented on a cinematic scale via a large LED screen. Rendered using gaming software, the video follows the course of an imagined river (based on a conglomeration of real rivers) from its source in a remote forest, through post-industrial landscapes, towards a harbour and ocean sunset. The work channels the symbolic qualities of water as a carrier of history and folklore, as well as data – in this instance, drawn from monitors in Dublin Port that record atmospheric changes such as water quality, temperature, air pollution, and light levels. This live environmental data is then processed to influence aspects of the installation, perpetually connecting it to external realities. It also informs the fluctuating water levels of a model landscape – its miniature buildings periodically submerged – as well as the composition of a live musical score, being delivered by an automated player piano.

This instrumental soundscape offers points of connection with Puthod’s installation, Beep Beep, which, during my visit, emitted French melancholic music, interspersed with radio static. Echoing a Joycean-style epic journey to a place once recognised as home, the artist travelled across her native France to bring her late father’s car to Dublin. This iconic Renault 4 from the 1960s required year-long restoration by specialist mechanics to become roadworthy, and its subsequent 900km road trip was live-streamed via Twitch. Upon arrival by ferry into Dublin Port, the car became the main component of Puthod’s installation within two conjoined shipping containers. Encountering the vintage car in this context, one feels nostalgic for a time when things were made by hand, or skilfully repaired with diligence and care. 

Though touched by the work’s tender backstory, I was not prepared for the emotional impact of entering the space. Passing through a threshold of industrial PVC strip curtains, the smell of oil and bitumen transported me to my own late father’s shed. There, he could be found among DIY detritus – paint tins, epoxy resin, buckets of creosote, varnish, turps, and other pungent liquids. Hands almost permanently stained with oil, he was happiest dismantling mechanisms, spilling forth sprockets and springs, or lubricating engine parts to keep them running beyond their time. He is gone eight years now, and the signs of his enduring presence around me have slowly begun to fade. 

If the vehicle’s journey is ongoing, as suggested by its loaded roof-rack, then the handmade and found objects populating this cenotaph may well be votive offerings – small relics and mementos expressing dedication to the deceased that will aid their journey into the afterlife. Further illuminating this passage are a series of neon works that emanate a blueish glow. For me, they conjure the atmospheric ghost lights of Irish folklore, said to be encountered on marshland by lone travellers at night. These cartoonish light drawings variously depict a puff of air escaping from a back tyre, or a speech bubble exclaiming “No Pressure!” On the radiator grille, we find a single neon teardrop.

The impulse to journey through familiar landscapes can be overwhelming when we lose someone. There, we hope to find evidence of their existence that will somehow hold past, present, and future together in energetic confluence. The artist’s journey of reclamation resonates with me for these reasons. In constructing this temporary repository, she has created a kind of multi-dimensional portal – an in-between space, where fathers can always be found, mending broken things. 

Ambitious artistic projects such as these form part of Dublin Port Company’s broader plan to create a heritage zone at The Pumphouse. It is one of three cultural venues that make up the ‘Distributed Museum’ – a concept featuring in the Port-City Integration programme, aimed at increasing public access and awareness of maritime heritage. Dublin Port is clearly a space of potential, particularly when one considers the cultural regeneration of docklands in other cities, including London, Liverpool, and Glasgow. I recently attended the launch of Edinburgh Art Festival in Leith – once an industrial port for shipbuilding and manufacturing that fell into dereliction in the 1980s. Four decades later, the area has been rezoned for residential, cultural, and commercial purposes, attracting a younger and more affluent demographic in its latest phase of regeneration. 

Visible just beyond Pumphouse No. 2 are the grain silos of the former Odlums Flour Mills – the site of The Arts Council’s proposed new artist campus, comprising 50 artist workspaces. Such infrastructure is badly needed in the city, particularly if these studios can be subsidised, or include a residential strand that would help counteract the exodus of artists, due to spiralling housing costs. In my opinion, direct investment in commissioning and production is also urgently required. As superbly demonstrated by ‘Longest Way Round, Shortest Way Home’, given sufficient supports, the sector can capably deliver biennial-quality projects to augment and sustain the professional practices of artists.

‘Longest Way Round, Shortest Way Home’ continues until 27 October. The Pumphouse is well sign-posted, and is located a ten-minute walk from The Point Luas stop. For details, visit: 

templebargallery.com

¹ The TBG+S Curatorial Team, Clíodhna Shaffrey and Michael Hill, curated Niamh O’Malley’s exhibition, ‘Gather’, for her representation of Ireland at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.

² James Joyce, Ulysses, with introduction by Declan Kiberd (London: Penguin Books, 1992) p.492.

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SARAH LONG INTERVIEWS MARIANNE KEATING ABOUT HER LATEST FILM AND TOURING EXHIBITION. 

Sarah Long: An Ciúnas/The Silence (2023) builds on your body of films exploring Irish histories, particularly the diaspora. The work was recently presented as a three-channel installation at The Showroom in London (13 October 2023 – 13 January 2024) and will soon tour venues throughout Ireland. Can you talk about how this work fits your larger oeuvre and at what point these ideas around presentation began to develop?

Marianne Keating: Over the last decade, my practice has focused on tracing the legacy of the Irish diaspora in the Caribbean, examining Irish-Jamaican anti-colonial ties and both countries’ fight for self-determination through a series of film installations. With An Ciúnas/The Silence, I wanted to push my film production, integrating these complex intersecting narratives in one space. By allowing these histories to be complex, these lingering archival impulses give voice to these histories, returning a voice to what had once been rendered mute. I aimed to highlight how these movements and themes are interconnected and that nothing exists as a singular moment.

From the initial concept of An Ciúnas/The Silence, I wanted the screens to also have a role in the narrative, with no one screen holding dominance or hierarchy. The use of 5:1 sound design was also crucial in the space. For example, when the dialogue comes from the left screen, the left speaker becomes the active speaker, drawing the viewers to turn and interact with that screen, making them active rather than passive participants.

The three-channel installation allows me to highlight multiple legacies of colonialism and how, until those systems that are still in place are fully broken down, true decolonisation can never be achieved. As Audre Lorde states, and which is highlighted in the work, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” This work allows the viewer to see how these threads intertwine and overlap.

SL: The work highlights how Empire’s power structures create dualisms that strengthen its position. Could you speak more about this idea, particularly your provocation, “How Free is Independence?”

MK: The work interrogates how far it may be possible to upend the loop of “unfree independence” that left countries tied to or subjugated by systems set up by the British Empire. Here we see how, after Independence in Ireland, the mechanism of oppression remained and passed to the Catholic Church, which, although a different power, was a power nonetheless that continued to control the population through oppression and subjugation. In the context of Jamaica, I examine the resulting impact of the Irish diaspora on contemporary politics. The work traces how men of Irish descent replaced the outgoing colonial body and that, although change was coming, it was to be based on the systems devised by the coloniser rather than a new, radical approach. 

The legacy of colonialism can be seen in how borders were utilised in the 20th century in Ireland and Jamaica, as well as each country’s relationship with Britain today. The role of a border becomes interchangeable depending on the dominant countries’ economic needs. For those who emigrate, the reason has not really changed from that of the Famine years, with economic survival being predominant.

The work’s presentation as a continuous loop reflects that even though the viewer is witnessing historical moments of liberation, migration, and the fight for self-determination and independence, the topics, tensions, and troubles have remained the same throughout history in many ways – highlighting the seemingly endless loop of unfree ‘independence’.

SL: The work’s bilingual title, An Ciúnas/The Silence, is also striking because of its implied dualism: English and Gaeilge; Ireland and the diaspora; the archive and what is lost, censored, or otherwise hidden. 

MK: The title of the exhibition can be read in many ways that examine the pervasive power of Empire and the intersecting erasures within Irish diasporic histories. ‘The Great Silence’ stemmed from the Famine, which reduced the passing down of lore between lost generations of Irish speakers in the Gaeltacht regions through death and migration. The silence equally refers to survivors of the Famine, “who would not talk of the past” and “would remain silent as to why and how they had survived.” More recently, ‘the silence’ refers to those who remained in Ireland and chose not to talk about the possibility of the failure of those who migrated. Materially, the silence references the near-total destruction of public records held at the Public Records Office of Ireland at the beginning of the Irish Civil War during the bombardment of the Four Courts in Dublin.

SL: The work is strikingly insightful, with a firm grounding in research, statistics, and archival sources. Can you describe your approach to working with these materials?

MK: Through my films I move forward and backwards in time, manipulating time, modes, and forms of production, and incorporating many sources and creating new, dense and complex narratives. My montage style allows me to incorporate many modes of production, from textual graphics to archival black and white photographs taken with traditional large format cameras or 35mm film reels, which invites the viewer to explore the historical past. Often, the viewer accepts these images as genuine, unedited, and natural without staging or bias, but this is often not the case.

Through the process, I digitally sample many sources (colour, black and white, still and moving images, as well as sound), recombining this visual and aural data to share with the audience. In some films, I use this method to disrupt present-day footage filmed with a 4K camera by distressing the footage and reducing it to what Hito Steyerl describes as a ‘poor image’ – a substandard copy that is deficient and inferior to its higher quality original. It may no longer be the hierarchical premium quality original, but it is still an image, and in its lower resolution format concedes universal access, decolonial in its approach.

SL: The work has been exhibited in The Showroom in London and will soon tour Ireland. How do you envisage these different contexts and sites will impact the work’s reception?

MK: In one way, that is a tricky question; I left Ireland in September 2011 after the recession pushed me out. The story I am telling is so much a part of all of us, yet by leaving, you are no longer the same; you are different. You see Ireland through an outside lens because you no longer get to see the day-to-day changes, and you are othered by the process. In one way, I tell these histories to inform people of all nationalities who don’t know them. Still, many people in Ireland will speak to aspects of these histories better than I do, as I’m not a historian.

But from what I have found from those of all nationalities who have watched my films, the compassion, empathy and understanding for all countries that have shared similar histories – colonialism, migration, and the struggle for economic survival – unites us all together. Our continued solidarity is our strength. All we have to do is look through our eyes and see the same in others. 

Sarah Long is an artist and writer based in Cork. In 2020, she created The Paper – an online forum for discussing and responding to the Cork art scene. 

@thepapercork

Marianne Keating is an Irish artist and researcher based in London. The Irish tour of ‘An Ciúnas/The Silence’ was initiated and organised by SIRIUS, and is curated by SIRIUS Director Miguel Amado, with Rayne Booth as Project Manager. 

mariannekeating.com

‘Áilleacht Uafásach /A Terrible Beauty’ runs at The Model in Sligo from 16 March to 19 May and includes a larger presentation of the artist’s work. Subsequent tour venues include Galway Arts Centre, Rua Red, Limerick City Gallery of Art, and Wexford Arts Centre.

themodel.ie

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ELLA DE BÚRCA REVIEWS YVONNE MCGUINESS’S RECENT SOLO EXHIBITION AT BUTLER GALLERY. 

Upon entering Yvonne McGuinness’s exhibition at Butler Gallery, I am immediately immersed in a world where the past, present, and future enact various assemblies in a symphony of sight and sound. The exhibition, aptly titled ‘Rehearsals’, is a regional exploration of various themes, ranging from theatrical improvisation and play to political engagement and the fluidity of change in Ireland. These inquiries are encapsulated in two new video works: Priory and Schoolyard, both made in 2023.

The auditory experience is a standout feature, reminiscent of Brian Eno’s ambient compositions. A soundtrack – featuring a blend of organ tones, chirping birds, playing children, distant applause, and a muffled, prophesying orator – transports the viewer to a different realm. The audio is punctured by short mantras, each spoken three times – foreboding phrases that chronicle a lack of control, an imminent flood, and a fall.

Priory is a large-scale immersive video projection that plays with the senses. Overlapping visuals of fabric blowing in the wind create a sense of chaos and beauty. Members of the Equinox Theatre Company (an inclusive ensemble based in KCAT arts centre in Callan) gather in the ruins of Callan Augustinian Priory, setting up a mise-en-scène of chairs and a podium. As we draw nearer, the visuals become more layered, and we see the group perform as audience to a blurry speaker. The echo in the soundtrack is so potent that it obscures the narration. The audience becomes unruly, waving flags bearing images of rocks, and chanting phrases like “The water’s coming in.” The assembled performers break away individually, each enacting their own spirituality, as the power of the orator’s words dissolve. 

Schoolyard presents a contrasting, yet complementary vision. Here, a multi-channel installation of different sized screens depicts a moving tableau of children at play. On the largest screen, we see them quickly constructing a ‘scene’, using sticks, ropes, plastic, and tarpaulin. Their creation is reminiscent of medieval scenes, carved into the cornices of cathedrals, with the children posing on tables, chairs, and ladders as saints and prophets. The piece is punctuated by close-ups of individual children on the smaller monitors, chanting mantras such as “It’s out of control,” and “Careful, it’s going to fall.” Fluorescent colours – a kaleidoscope of vivid greens, pinks, blues, yellows, and oranges – reflect from the screens, creating a mesmerising effect. 

While distinct, the two video works share thematic concerns. Both are parable-like, echoing ancient Ireland, while suggesting spiritual approaches to construction and holistic relationships with play. The sense of foreboding in both pieces conjures apocalyptic imagery of biblical floods or other climate related disasters. The older group in Priory resonates with a ghostly, communal aura, poetically alluding to the dwindling power of the church in Ireland. I was surprised by the religious potency of the younger group’s ad hoc creation, the residue of Ireland’s ascetic past still reverberating through new generations in layers and echoes. Both groups reference the structure of ritual. 

A significant element in the exhibition is the use of green silk flags, which appear in both videos, while also being physically present in the exhibition, as part of a large-scale fabric assemblage, adding a tactile and grounding element. The flags bear images of rocks in various compositions; some floating singular on the green backgrounds, others assembled into arches, cloisters, and pillars. The vivid green not only roots the exhibition in Irish heritage but also serves as a metaphorical green screen, prompting considerations of Irish culture as something that can be superimposed onto. This feature is particularly poignant when considering the themes of religion and spirituality, exploring ideas of faith as both a grounding force and a framework for personal identity. 

‘Rehearsals’ is a reflective journey, situated in the magical crossover between play, improvisation, legacy, and heritage. It encapsulates a sense of wistfulness, as if foregrounding parts of Irish culture that are disappearing, while simultaneously pushing the boundaries of artistic expression, interpretation, and collaboration. 

Ella de Búrca is an Irish visual artist and lecturer at SETU Wexford College of Art. 

elladeburca.com

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