SHARON KELLY OUTLINES A NEW BODY OF WORK CREATED WITH AN ARTS COUNCIL OF NORTHERN IRELAND SIAP AWARD.

Over the past ten months, I have been developing a new body of work, supported by a Major Individual Award (SIAP) from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI). This award, given in recognition of contribution to creative life in Northern Ireland, is the highest value awarded to artists in Northern Ireland: £15,000. The award supported the purchase of materials, equipment, services, the buying of time for research, concentrated development, and the production of a body of work.

‘Disposal of Fullness’ was the phrase around which my ideas have evolved. The term references a process in dressmaking of easing or gathering in fabric as a way of adjusting or reducing garments. I have been interested in garment construction, patterns and sewing processes since a teenager in the 1970s, when dressmaking was still on the school curriculum. Over the last five years, it has reemerged both in imagery and construction processes, as I developed sculptural pieces exploring fragility and resilience of mind and body. Ideas embedded within ‘Disposal of Fullness’ relate to female experience, control and constraint, the older woman, and life experience – and of course, themes of fragility, perseverance and resilience are still paramount. 

This was an opportunity to undertake research in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, where I explored historical costumes, past dress codes and behaviours – for example, how to handle and control the fullness of a skirt. During the development period, back in the studio, the work expanded organically and instinctively in various directions, connecting the drawing aspect of my practice with three-dimensional work. I tested drawing surfaces and processes, utilising drafting film and, crucially, began to use sewing pattern tissue paper. This old, yellowed and extremely fragile tissue paper became a significant medium with which I created an over-sized imaginary skirt shape by collaging pattern shapes, securing and bolstering them by overlapping and stitching. 

I then ‘traced’ the outline of this large shape onto drafting film – a semi-transparent, but robust material. I used hand drawing and rulers to create lines and markings based on sewing pattern construction lines across this outline and, over a period of weeks, I added many more connecting lines, which populated the entire shape. The 2D work really benefitted from this crisscrossing of drawing and sewing processes; of tracing, cutting and altering shapes.

Related to these ideas, I created a set of female heads, based on drawings of women striking demure poses, painted in bold, flat, red gouache. With assistance from Seacourt Print workshop in Bangor, I developed screenprints of four of these for printing onto paper and textile. The textile prints were used in a sort of patchwork process to create an ‘upside down’ skirt, fixed with an embroidery hoop at one end and suspended from a fishing net. 

The 3D work sprang from the research and development period and was based on plans of historical dress forms and written notes relating to the postures and bodily stances recommended for women in past eras. Several large skirt-like forms, around two metres in height, were fabricated from uncoated raw steel and ‘dressed’ with a veil of collage, using sewing pattern pieces or stiffened organdie, and stained using a Japanese tataki-zomé or ‘flower pounding’ technique, in which plant colour is transferred onto paper or fabric by hammering. I worked in the County Armagh countryside to collect wildflowers to stain lengths of organdie. I used my own body shape as a template to paint female shapes in sepia and red-toned ink onto the fabric used to dress the metal structures.

Torso forms have been created from wire, Fosshape, a heat mouldable fabric, and wax – entirely new techniques for me. A set of used walking frames that have been drastically elongated, so as to render them useless, offer a myriad of possibilities for further development, display and presentation at some future point.

This body of work was led very much by instinct and feeling, tapping into ideas relating to women’s lives that are so often ‘put on hold’ or embedded in someone else’s story. The work also speaks to circumstances where life has taken its own path; where traces of experience stain or remain; where plans may have been imagined but never realised, or remain unfinished, unfulfilled. 

The beauty of the sewing process is very much tied up with imagined potential, and a possible coming into being – a flat shape becoming a real object. I wanted the work to speak through the language of sewing and making. Threads are left hanging, imagined shapes are outlined, points of reference or landmarks are offered. Already marked, fragile, used paper has been mended and restored yet remains precarious, and all material choices are resonant.

Sharon Kelly is an Irish artist whose work encompasses drawing, painting, print, installation, sculpture and moving image. She is based at QSS Studios, Belfast, and County Armagh.

sharonkellyartist.com

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MARILYN LENNON AND SEAN TAYLOR PRESENT AN OVERVIEW OF THEIR DURATIONAL ARTWORK IN TRAMORE VALLEY PARK. 

The KinShip project, like the concept it honours, attempts to expand the bounds of social art practice beyond human relationships to include the wider community of life in reciprocal, ethical connections. This durational artwork is situated in Tramore Valley Park – a 170-acre plot of land that, from 1964 to 2009, was used as a municipal landfill for Cork city. The area first opened up as a city park in 2015 before fully opening to the public in 2019. It’s a rich and complex public site that, in its own way, archives the excess of human intervention and consumption. Older Cork residents, who used to send their waste to ‘de dump’, walk over their own refuse histories on a stroll through the park. Either subconsciously or consciously, being in the park, with its ghostly reminders of the past, prompts us to confront our own actions, biases, and role in damaging habitats.

As a public space, Tramore Valley Park is managed by Cork City Council, who are engineering the substructure to support a new biodiverse habitat on top of three million tonnes of historical city waste. In her survey of ecological approaches to climate change and conservation, Emma Marris argues that many ecosystems are heavily altered by human activities and our approach to conservation should adapt to include concrete cities, brownfield, or toxic wastelands.¹ For some, the involvement of artists commissioned to undertake a public art project which focuses on climate change in a remediated landfill site, may appear as greenwashing or ‘art washing’ damaged ecosystems. However, this view oversimplifies a highly complex situation that intersects a diverse array of interests, from local authorities to community leaders, multiple life forms, scientists, and engineers, and from people who occupy the park on a daily basis to national policymakers. 

At play in the heart of KinShip are processes of creative and dialogical enquiry, and a broad interdisciplinary and collaborative effort to reshape thinking and decolonise our relationship with nature. One of the calls to action Donna Haraway makes in her writing is “staying with the trouble.” She encourages us to resist the temptation to retreat or disengage in the face of environmental crises. Instead, she calls for active participation and collective efforts to mitigate the damage, restore ecological balance, and build sustainable futures.² This means acknowledging the complexity of the issues at hand and working within that complexity.

In late 2021, in partnership with Cork City Council, we won funding to initiate the project through Creative Ireland’s first Creative Climate Action Fund open call. The project has since engaged with a combination of artists, community groups, engineers, scientists, ecologists, architects, and educational institutes amongst others to confront the legacy of this municipal landfill through overlapping strands of creative enquiry (creativeireland.gov.ie). At the outset, under the funding call, the preferred participation in the work was with the public, but this has proved to be an unhelpful silo.

Leading the process has meant holding continuous dialogue, working consistently with a core working group of representatives in the city, as well as others who enter for shorter periods, to create an emergent and generative public artwork that includes multiple voices, tests, and provocations. 

To date, a diverse range of activities and events have taken place as part of the KinShip public programme, including: A talk by Cork Beekeepers Association about the importance of pollinators and their work as beekeepers; The (Waste) Fibre Flows Laboratory, an interdisciplinary space examining our complex relationships with waste material, led by artist Collette Lewis; ‘Laboratory of Land Flags’, an exhibition of co-created flags made by local communities during workshops with artist Chelsea Canavan; Eco-Kite Festival and kitemaking workshop, led by artists Amna Walayat and Kim-Ling Morris; and Staying With the Trouble – a one-day symposium to showcase the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and the input of diverse forms of knowledge in addressing rights of nature and climate action.

We undertook to archive and map all aspects of the KinShip project as this facet is often invisible to those who are outside of a social art process. This documentation, titled ‘The Midden Chronicles’, archives all meetings, conversations, agreements, contestations, small decisions, and larger initiatives. In 2023, drawing on this archive, we created an artefact, The Midden Chronicles Map – a five by eight-metre map highlighting a few short months of the archive. It acts as both an artwork and a momentary reflective snapshot of the multifaceted and complex inter-relational nature of social art practice. The map is an illustration and visual record of the collective and contributory nature of all aspects of the project, and the effort given by all contributors, collaborators, and partners (lennontaylor.ie).

While ‘The Midden Chronicles’ archive contains material and ephemera that document the project, it also subtly reveals sets of values or assumptions, whether about the role of art, community involvement, or even practical discussions – for example, how much an artist or other should be paid. We may become aware through ongoing interactions that collaborators have brought different sets of values to the collaboration that weren’t initially obvious but could subsequently be addressed within the mechanisms of the project. These hidden economic, cultural, or ethical dynamics are revealed through the dialogical process, making the duration of the project not just about a specific context, but also about navigating the complexities of differing values, power relations, and goals within a collaborative framework.

The KinShip Art Project was initiated by LennonTaylor – a collaboration of Marilyn Lennon and Sean Taylor. The artists have worked together for over 15 years and were joint programme leaders of Ireland’s first MA programme in Social Practice and the Creative Environment (MA SPACE), which ran for ten years at Limerick School of Art and Design. In 2023 LennonTaylor received the Public Sector Award from Cork Environmental Forum for their work on the KinShip Project.

lennontaylor.ie

¹ Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).

² Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin In The Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016).

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ROISIN AGNEW INTERVIEWS VIVIENNE GRIFFIN ABOUT THEIR RECENT EXHIBITION AT BUREAU GALLERY NEW YORK SUPPORTED BY CULTURE IRELAND.

For Vivienne Griffin, Ireland’s susceptibility to extractivist uses of technology can be traced back to its Catholic roots. “I realise I’m sitting here wearing this giant fucking cross,” they laugh, “but I do believe that. Technology is entering the last frontier – our psyche, a colonisation of the mind, your spirit or your soul. I think in Ireland we’re vulnerable to these things.” The act of ‘profanation’ is one way to think through Griffin’s sprawling ‘anti-disciplinary’ practice, one that in recent years has gravitated towards sonic works that pair AI and coding with motorised harps and national-religious iconography. Central to it, is a movement between registers, a “passage from the sacred to the profane by means of an entirely inappropriate use (or, rather, reuse) of the sacred: namely play,” as Giorgio Agamben defines it. But when this passage from the sacred to the profane arguably involves the tools of your own self-dispossession, what then?

Play and its derivatives are conceived of by Griffin as part of the importance of the artist-as-beginner, pointing to Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (a 1970 book of teachings by Sōtō Zen monk, Shunryu Suzuki) as a recurring influence. “The minute you start becoming an expert, you start narrowing and reducing the possibilities, whilst the beginner is always open,” Griffin says. It’s unsurprising, then, that when Griffin was offered the opportunity to collaborate with a researcher at the Turing Institute as part of their current residency at Somerset House Studios, they saw another opportunity to begin from the beginning. “I was learning about algorithmic processes, but I was really interested in them with regard interpersonal and social issues,” Griffin says. Collaborating with researcher Cari Hyde-Vaamonde, a former lawyer and current researcher in algorithmic governance and the carceral system, Griffin began to “build a visual world and visual metaphors that [Hyde-Vaamonde] uses in judicial/judge decision-making contexts.” The visualisation came out of Hyde-Vaamonde’s perceived need to make her research legible and counter a type of jadedness around algorithmic bias in relation to recidivism (the predicted likelihood of re-offending) and the main algorithm used for this calculation in the American carceral system, Compass. “I got stuck at one point; it’s not like my other work,” Griffin admits. “Direct political work – there’s no kind of other ‘read’ you can have on it.”  

Understandably suspicious of politically frontal art-making, Griffin is nevertheless wrestling with some of the bigger dilemmas at the heart of contemporary art practice, as their recent show, ‘The Song of Lies’ at New York’s Bureau Gallery, makes clear. In the same video work that encompasses their collaboration with Hyde-Vaamonde, (aptly named MERCY) Griffin employs a techno-textual cut-up technique, suggestive of what they term ‘the collective unconscious nervous breakdown’. “I was writing from the perspective of lots of different voices and they all did merge into one, into this character – racing thoughts, fragmented sentences, spewing poetry, thoughts about the apocalypse,” they say. 

But what are the origins of this nervous breakdown? This seems to be answered by Griffin’s other recent work that has seen them employ AI model Runway ML on datasets of their own drawings to create large-scale pieces. “I draw all the time, but I was experiencing burnout. I thought it would take [the AI] a long time, but it only took ten minutes” they say. “I felt defeated as an image-maker. I just thought, we’re done for. But then I went back to these images –  they are so vacuous. A lot of my drawings have text and political content, and the machine learning ones had done this thing, where they interpreted words as shapes.” The result is disorienting – a meditation on the post-post-post instability of contemporary (dis)reality and the role of language as a placeholder, a meaningless shape, emblematic of the disinformation age. “I was trying to mash together the man and the machine; it felt like a self-annihilating technology.” 

But Griffin is no techno-pessimist. Their faith in art’s ability to adopt and adapt technology, and their determination to put themselves in the novice seat, has brought them to work increasingly with sound and coding in their capacity as an ‘antidisciplinary artist’. “I found the term in a job advertisement that went out from MIT. They were looking for people that could bring together disciplines that aren’t usually put together,” they say. “Others understand it as ‘anti-formal disciplines.’” Subsequently, during their PhD in Queen’s University Belfast’s Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC), Griffin learned simultaneously to code and to gain more formal understanding of music that let them hear new sounds, learning to use Max MSP, with support from Pedro Rebelo. “I’ve tried to do a linear course with coding, but what you end up doing is being on YouTube a lot of the time, copying things other people have made and putting them together in lots of ways that you want.”  

A bricolage-like methodology seems to steer Griffin towards materials and assembly, techniques of demystification where everything is ‘technology.’ “A lot of my work is around technology but a lot of it is also around old traditional ways of working with materials,” Griffin explains. This pull between the technics of the new with technology of tradition means they could be said to be involved in a form of technological interpellation. In a recent collaboration at Somerset House with Belfast harpist Úna Monaghan, a motorised robot was placed on one harp, with the performance turning into a duet between robot and harpist. In another piece, A Heavy Metal Incense Burner (2024), a hand sandcast incense burner connected to a chain, whose every link was made by Griffin, is discovered to have been originally a product of a 3D file they bought online.

If profanation is play as method, then Griffin employs it as an act of enquiry and demystification – an encounter with breakdown and self-dispossession that is not without hope. One can always begin again from the beginning. They admit owing to the Arts Council of Ireland their ability to keep training and learning new skills. “The funding models provided by the Irish state are incredible and fantastic. It’s a model that other countries should be looking into.” What is next? A work on sixteenth-century ‘harp burnings’ that Queen Elizabeth carried out on Irish harpists, Griffin says. “I’m calling it ‘postcolonial psychosis’.” A perfect metaphor for one’s drive to self-destruct and start over.

Vivienne Griffin is a Dublin-born visual artist currently based between London and New York. Their solo exhibition, ‘The Song of Lies’, ran at New York’s Bureau Gallery from 11 July to 16 August 2024 and was supported in part by Culture Ireland.

viviennegriffin.com

Roisin Agnew is an Italian-Irish filmmaker and researcher based in London.

@roisin_agnew_

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Jonah King

VAI Member

For over a decade, I have delved into the intersection of science, technology, and our evolving relationship with nature. As a digital media artist and filmmaker, my work encompasses writing, performance, and education. These diverse approaches allow me to challenge and reconsider the anthropocentric views that often dominate ecological discussions.

Traditionally, my creative process involved collaboration with actors and non-actors, drawing on methods from filmmaking and theatre that were collectively devised. However, the constraints imposed by the Covid-19 lockdown forced a shift in my practice. Unable to engage in physical collaborations, I turned to 3D software to simulate my production model. This transition led me to explore artificial intelligence, virtual reality, motion capture, and digital avatars – emerging technologies that offered new dimensions for my work.

At the time, I was very inspired by Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay, A Cyborg Manifesto, which argues for a rejection of boundaries between human, animal, and machine. I was drawn to these new artistic tools as a method of reflecting an extended ecological body in the digital realm in a way that mirrors Haraway’s ideas and my own explorations throughout my practice to date.

This thinking led to a major VR project called Honey Fungus (2021-ongoing) – an eco-erotic, sci-fi, VR experience derived from an AI-generated amalgamation of Smithsonian field research and amateur erotica. The project includes a narrative led by a queer sentient ecological being, manifested as an omnipresent mycelial entity, guiding the audience through an entangled ecology to uncover the orgasmic potential of soil and weather systems. 

I incorporated ideas around body transfer experiences in virtual reality, which I encountered through research taking place in Barcelona University’s psychology department, that demonstrated how quickly subjects adapt to the augmentation of their body’s form. I used Unreal Engine game development software to build immersive environments and invited collaborators to contribute text and audio. I developed a process to mimic mycelium growth in 3D – a digital hand-drawing technique using a pen-tablet and the open-source 3D software, Blender. I have been 3D printing these drawings and incorporating them into a new body of sculpture.

The first iteration of Honey Fungus was presented at VISUAL Carlow’s ‘Speech Sounds’ exhibition in 2022. I am now completing the final version, which includes four chapters inspired by the fungal reproduction cycle. In this immersive journey, viewers descend the stem of a mushroom into the mycelium networks, interact with spores that communicate with them, expand fungal hyphae through bodily movements, and finally, are launched into the sky, where they disperse spores and seed rain.

Developing Honey Fungus has revealed that immersive technology offers a distinct experience from traditional video. In VR, time feels different, and attention spans are shorter. Unlike traditional video, where framing and editing direct the viewer’s focus, VR demands subtle guidance through sound, colour, and movement. This approach draws more from practical magic than cinema, emphasising interaction over mere immersion.

Transitioning from filmmaking to VR has deepened my engagement with the audience, providing a profoundly embodied experience of the concepts I have explored throughout my career. Remarkably, 57% of our cellular mass is not human. We exist within a complex web of macrobiotic interconnection. I hope Honey Fungus encourages viewers to reconsider where one body ends and another begins and, through virtual reality, embrace the idea of a ‘second body’ that connects us all.

Jonah King is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working between Dublin and Brooklyn. 

jonahking.com

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Temporary Pleasure
Rave Architecture Collective

Temporary Pleasure was conceptualised in 2018 as a response to the nightlife crisis in Ireland, where the most restrictive licensing in Europe applies, and more clubs were closing than opening. Inspired by temporary clubs and DIY movements since the 1960s, founder and space-maker, John Leo Gillen, explored ephemerality as a way to dance around the red tape associated with permanent bricks and mortar spaces, and to better meet the needs and energies of cultural moments and local scenes. He imagined a club with no fixed location or time, existing only in a certain place and moment, for a few weeks or just a night, before changing shape and location again.

In 2021, when John was joined by project manager Irini Vazanellis, architect Stan Vrebos, and visual artist Jennifer Mehigan, the collective was formed. We are a rave architecture collective that designs temporary club spaces for temporary pleasure. We began with our flagship workshop, ‘What Makes a Club?’ in Barcelona. The workshop, a week-long design and build intensive, has since had numerous iterations in different cities and we continue to develop the format and structure.

The intention is to explore how space design, intersecting with multiple art forms, has a direct influence on the experience and energy of a club. We do this by gathering a group of 20 or so participants who come from different backgrounds and callings. We believe collective design breeds collective experiences. We blend architects with multimedia artists, DJs, promoters, producers, builders, community leaders, and movers, to create a club from scratch.

We guide the process by breaking down club design into three fundamental areas – Space, Programme, and Ethos – and asking the following questions: 

Space: What houses the club, where do the dancers go, where do performers go, where do we rest, how does the traffic flow to the bar or the toilets, how do we allow for the different energies of the audience and artists, how does material choice transfer a certain feeling?

Programme: What happens in the club, who performs and why, when and how do things take place, and what is the intended flow of energy throughout the day/night?

Ethos: Why are we here, what is the spirit of this club, in what socio-political context does it exist, what do we stand for, what will not be tolerated, what will be encouraged, and how do we communicate all of this online and in the space with limited time?

The culmination of a week’s work of designing and building is a 12-hour celebration where the energy of the workshop participants is shared with a wider public. Communicating the group’s intentions for the enjoyment of the space can be challenging and is where we most lean on visual art. It’s a fun, intense experience, and it’s simply a pleasure to see a huge group of people dancing in a space you have created with your friends. Then, it disappears, dies, changes shape, and waits to be born again.

We think a lot about not only what we have filled the space with, but also what is left behind after it’s gone. There are of course the materials and structure, which our architect Stan selects and designs with a sensitivity to buildability, material cycles and reuse. And there is the energetic footprint we left behind with the workshop, which we optimistically hope has a ripple effect, beginning with the 20 workshop participants, the performers, and the people who enjoyed the club when it was briefly open.

Architecture, visual art, and music intertwine in most of what we do, and when we imagine projects, we rarely exclude any of the three disciplines. We do this in our own projects and when designing for others, and love connecting with multidisciplinary creatives in the different cities we have the pleasure of working in.  In 2024, Temporary Pleasure is an architecture, design and production collective operating in Brussels, Berlin, and Barcelona. We are exploring commercial work, club scenography for local scenes, and bringing the club to unexpected places. See you on the dancefloor.

Temporary Pleasure is a rave architecture collective that designs temporary club spaces.

temporary-pleasure.com

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Richard Malone

VAI Member

Textiles carry a personal and political weight through which I understand the world, and in turn, myself. For me, the medium represents labour practices, class, nationality, the domestic and the industrial, gender expectations, queerness, desire, human experience, hungry capitalism, and its exact opposite. 

The commonality of textiles in our lives may have led to it being somewhat overlooked in art historical contexts. The labour that is responsible for textiles production is almost categorically invisible. We are surrounded by and inundated with garments, textiles, bedlinen, sportswear, home-furnishings that are created by human hands, without signs of the humans who created them. Textiles exist uniquely across disciplines – an embroidery is a drawing, fabric has form, stitch and weave are both action and performance, a painting is often on woven canvas. It’s this very transience and lack of formal categorisation that consistently engages me. Textiles are both expansive and overlooked.

Material has a way of situating me in the world with certainty – a direct link to where I’m from, and the lived experiences and environments I discovered myself in. It can also ‘other’ me entirely, expressing queerness through dress, or working-class identity through material and process choices. I utilise textiles, I realise now, for their humanity and complexity. It is these same multiplicities that I believe every human to be made of. A body of work can exist outside of traditional categorisation, as a person can. 

Textiles communicate the labour I have understood from a very young age. In Wexford, we lived opposite Pierces Foundry that once employed my grandfather, while the Max Mauch factory employed my father. My grandmother was a seamstress at the local hospital who later worked out of her home making cushions, curtains, upholstering, altered clothes, created various ribbons for horse shows, and plaited wool bands in Wexford colours. I was always fascinated by the materiality in each of these spaces, the sways between warmth, care, compassion and the industrial, functional, metallic. Each represents graft and labour, ritual, action, and community, but these processes have lost value in our culture. They’re not fast enough, not cheap enough, not automated enough. 

I have witnessed a very real decline in employment in my lifetime. Factories closing down, conglomerates moving in, jobs being lost, and the very real culture that surrounds this labour being eradicated. These skills are culturally significant; however, it is a sincere lack of value and respect for these working-class cultures that has led to their dismissal. The work that I make carries that same labour – whether metal bent around my own body that I’ve welded, or the thousands of invisible stitches that can render a sculpture weightless. Seeing this labour occupy space in galleries, museums, and art institutions gives me a sense of pride, and a conceptual manifestation of the identity politics it stems from.

After completing a FETAC Art and Design course in Waterford, I studied Womenswear at Central Saint Martins, mainly because I understood a certain class pressure to graduate with real, employable skills. However, helping my grandmother with a cross-stitch or witnessing her skill and love for sewing was equally significant, and I learned as much about colour, working on building sites with my dad, as I did in art school. Learning is embedded in my work, and without the formality of education, the link to the place I’m from might still be the same. The material language that I know hasn’t changed.

Textiles have been significant in my experience of identity. They carry ideas of sentimentality and nostalgia – a smell, the closeness to our skin, intimacy of touch, or flags, which can communicate national or regional identities without language. They also represent the gendered roles and opposing materials of working-class environments. Men worked with concrete, wood, plaster, or metal, in factories or on building sites; whereas women’s labour centred on the domestic, where I witnessed the care and craft of mending or stitching – a linoleum tablecloth, the texture of a tea towel, the hum of a sewing machine. 

As a child, and more so as an adult, I find this difference fascinating and confusing, likely because I haven’t found a place in either world. My own gender identity is not something I consider definitive, so I lean on these multifaceted experiences in my own work. In all its complexity, I have a certain refusal to rely on the visual tropes associated with the intersections of my identity. I’ve witnessed scores of extremely privileged and wealthy people commodify ideas of uniform, utility, labour, and class, as a way to communicate that one is more grounded, or perhaps that we live in a meritocracy, which of course is untrue. It baffles me to watch the culture I’m from become fetishised, which is not the same as honouring or respecting it.

I sincerely believe that our lived experiences, labour, and cultural realities – as queer or gender fluid people, immigrants, or the working class – to be valuable. It is my intention to develop a language that recognises the transience and the overlaps in our identities, refusing categorisation. This is a quiet act of resistance. In many ways, my research exists to make sense of something that is invisible and complex. Hopefully it illustrates the important culture of textiles, its inherent labour and humanity, as well as the medium’s very real connection to identity and the lived experience of otherness.

Richard Malone is an Irish multi-disciplinary artist working between London and Wexford.

@richardmalone

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Sinéad Kennedy

VAI Member

I am a multi-disciplinary visual artist and musician. I work with fabric when making flags, textile sculptures, and costumes, but I also make drawings, collages, paintings, zines, and short stories. Both of my grannies knit Aran jumpers for a living, working for factories in Donegal, and my dad spent some time working in the textile factory in Kilcar, before emigrating to America, so I suppose textiles are in my blood.  

I was born in The Bronx, New York, in 1990. We moved to Ireland in 1997, first to Donegal where my parents are from, and then to Meath. I moved to Dublin for college and have been here since. I graduated from NCAD in 2013. My undergrad was in Fashion Design, where I acquired technical skills like sewing, pattern-cutting and illustration. During my time in the Fashion Department, I went to London to do an internship with Gareth Pugh, which confirmed my intuition that the fashion industry was not for me. Instead, I wanted to make sculptures out of fabric, rather than rapidly making garments to reflect seasonal trends. 

I avoided computers and technology as much as I could, during my time in NCAD, preferring to work with my hands. A few years later, I enrolled in a Springboard MA course in Creative Digital Media in TU Dublin. There were modules in critical theory, interactive technologies, and graphic design, which I got a lot from. I did the course to get away from working in the service industry, as my main income was from waitressing (and teaching music). I still much prefer working with my hands in an analogue way as opposed to looking at a screen, and this is reflected in my art and music practices. I play the fiddle, bouzouki, dabble with analogue synthesizers, and I collect tape cassettes and vinyl records. 

Over the past ten years, I have moved around different studios in Dublin, including Talbot Studios, Monster Truck, Hendrons Studios, A4 Sounds, and also sheds in gardens in rented homes, and spare rooms in friend’s houses. The studios I most enjoy are ones where like-minded people are milling around, talking about the various projects they are working on, as opposed to the solitary studio, where you are on your own. 

Since 2019, I have been building a fictional world called Grand Land and making civic paraphernalia for it. I made a series of flags to represent the inhabitants of Grand Land, some of which were shown in VISUAL Carlow last summer. When making them, I was thinking about ideas of emigration and movement from one place to another. The larger tapestries depict a sequence of revolutionary events in Grand Land’s history. I was looking at the Asafo flags from Ghana, John Hargrave and The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift’s clothing logos and flags, and also artists who have made flags, in particular The American Flag (c. 1974), The Black German Flag (1974) and The World Flag (1991) by James Lee Byars, and The Gates (2005) by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. I was also interested in the professional and industrial clothing designs of Varvara Fyodorovna Stepanova. Closer to home, I was greatly inspired by The Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment and the flags and banners they made for protests and demonstrations. For me, the only function of art is to ignite social change; anything outside that is decoration.  

I have taken a short break from Grand Land. My dad passed away during the summer and I am still catching up with myself after that. I still have a few projects on the go, some music gigs here and there, a series of cat illustrations as revolutionary leaders, and I made a nice big Palestinian flag and hope to make some more. I’m moving into a new studio in December and plan on getting back to Grand Land then. 

Sinéad Kennedy is a visual artist, designer, and musician based in Dublin.

@sineadok

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Basic Space 

Siobhán Mooney

Basic Space is an independent, voluntary-led art organisation, founded in 2010 by Kari Cahill, Hannah Fitz, Greg Howie, and Hugo Byrne, while they were students. Basic Space was established during the recession and from frustration at the lack of exhibition spaces for emerging artists in Dublin. A vacant warehouse was secured just behind Vicar Street and a studio and exhibition space were set up. The venue became an essential testing ground for creative dialogue and risk-taking for a wide range of artists.

Providing a space for ‘things to happen’, and a place to experiment for a community of artists, was the driving force for Basic Space in these early years. Important collaborations and connections were made with other artist-led spaces in Ireland and across Europe at this time. In 2012 Basic Space took part in IMMA’s Residency Programme, which was followed by a move in 2013 to Eblana House in The Liberties. 

From 2016 onward, Basic Space occupied a number of locations in Dublin. As the years progressed, empty space around the city increasingly got swallowed up by development. The logistics became almost impossible and it was no longer viable for Basic Space to exist in a physical location. This new nomadic presence led to increased collaborations with established art institutions. Basic Space programmed residencies, staged exhibitions, and held events under an ethos of exploring new and alternative ways of programming without a dedicated base. It became a flexible site for collaboration and engagement, and as different iterations emerged and co-directors came and went, these core principles allowed Basic Space to evolve and adapt to changing socio-economic and political circumstances, while continuing to provide a supportive and safe platform for a diverse range of artists. 

Over the past 13 years, Basic Space has initiated over 50 projects through the dedication of 19 different co-directors, who have striven to maintain the organisation as a vital and useful space for the creation and dissemination of contemporary art. Basic Space have collaborated with 126 Artist-Run Gallery, Ormston House, Gallery Eight, CCA Derry~Londonderry, TBG+S, Galway Arts Centre, and ONONO Rotterdam, to name a few. More recent projects include: inviting Diana Bamimeke to curate the exhibition ‘On Belonging’ in the Library Project; a Basic Space commissioned t-shirt from the artist Emma Wolf-Haugh, with proceeds going to support MASI; a solo show by Cara Farnan, hosted by Backwater Artists Group in Cork; and a self-improvement table quiz fundraiser, devised by David Fagan and John Waid. 

In the summer of 2020, Basic Space hosted a series of Instagram conversations with various practitioners in response to and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. In December 2022 Basic Space were invited to be co-selectors, along with Gavin Murphy and Mark Cullen, for  Periodical Review 12 in Pallas Projects/Studios. Most recently, in collaboration with MART Gallery, Basic Space invited Kasia Kaminska and Samuel Arnold Keane to run an urban foraging and anthotype workshop.

Basic Space also curates Basic Talks, a monthly series of informal talks with leading contemporary practitioners, in partnership with the Hugh Lane Gallery. This crucial activity provides steady funding for Basic Space while offering an open platform for artists, curators, writers, and collectives to present their practice in the form of lectures, workshops, presentations, and performances to new audiences. This relationship with the Hugh Lane was forged in 2016 by the directors at the time and, so far, 45 Basic Talks have taken place. Francis Fay, Manal Mahamid, Vanessa Daws, and Venus Patel are among the most recent speakers.

Basic Space is currently funded on a project-by-project basis. While this affects our ability to make long-term plans, it also affords us a degree of flexibility and receptivity that is at the core of how we engage with the artists, audiences, and institutions that we work with. Ireland is well out of recession, but there are still not enough spaces for artists to work. Back in 2010, when Basic Space was founded, artists could just about afford to rent a studio and live in the city; however, this has now become almost impossible. 

A lot has changed in the intervening years, but the ethos on which Basic Space was founded – collaboration, inclusivity, experimentation, engagement and providing space for artists – remains as relevant and important as ever. We hope to keep evolving and producing dynamic and valuable events with a strong focus on underrepresented communities within the art world. As an artist-led space in a world increasingly dominated by profit-driven forms of expression, Basic Space exists solely for artists. 

Upcoming events include Basic Talks from Laura Fitzgerald, Jonathan Mayhew, and Ciara Roche; an event with Conor Nolan, based on a residency borne from a collaboration between Basic Space and VOID Gallery in Saskatoon; and some exciting fundraising events in autumn.

Siobhán Mooney, Laura Harvey-Graham and Ella Litton are the current Basic Space co-directors.

basicspace.ie

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Gareth Kennedy

Artist and Lecturer

NCAD FIELD emerged out of dual needs in 2020: as a mode of outdoor third-level pedagogy, which enabled face-to-face contact during the pandemic; and also to introduce critical ecological thought and action into the college’s art and design curricula. 

Nested in the suite of Studio+ courses offered in the third year of undergraduate study at NCAD,¹ FIELD is unique in an Irish third-level context, in that more than 80% of the programme is delivered outdoors. Coursework is responsive and grafted onto seasonal time. Students have the opportunity to experience all four seasons in the FIELD through seminars, workshops, and a programme of critical texts that have been carefully assembled in response to site, context, and season. 

Each semester unfolds with an initial six weeks of ‘entanglement’ or led coursework, to generate common ground and frames of reference. In the spring-summer semester just past, this included: Guerrilla Grafting (after Margaretha Haughwout and Seoidín O’Sullivan); Broken World Thinking & Repair (after Mierle Laderman Ukeles); Soil Time: The Pace of Ecological Care (after Maria Puig De La Bellacasa); Tree Communities (in collaboration with artist Steven Doody and the research project, NovelEco²); The Commons, Hospitality & The Hungry Months (after Silvia Federici, as part of the SpaceX Symposium at NCAD³); and finally in week six, Seedsharing for the Earthbound (with the Center for Genomic Gastronomy and the Butler Gallery⁴). 

After this eclectic mix of encounter, students move into a more self-directed ‘correspondence’ phase, from which they generate their own work and research with a view towards creating twenty-first-century ‘naturecultures’.⁵ An ultimate outcome of coursework is that students ‘common’ their knowledge through choreographing and programming a whole day in the FIELD.

The remarkable and unique site for all of this activity is the FIELD itself. Located beside the college, the site has evolved over the last 20 years from being a derelict carpark to being remediated and ‘guerrilla composted’. A committed voluntary force of students and local volunteers, under the visionary lead of retired businessman, Tony Lowth, undertook this work.⁶ The space became a thriving site of urban horticulture before falling into disuse. The removal of regular human presence, accelerated by the lockdown, led to a remarkable ‘rewilding’ of the site. The teeming biodiversity of the site today sees its reappraisal not as ‘brown field’, which speaks to a language of development, but as a Novel Ecology.⁷

FIELD students are asked to contend with this dynamic intersection of human and non-human worlds, attaining a new-found curiosity, resilience and creativity to consider some of the most pressing issues of our century. 

Gareth Kennedy is an artist and lecturer in Sculpture and Expanded Practice at the National College of Art and Design. Since 2020, he is lead coordinator on NCAD FIELD.

ncad.ie

¹ Other Studio+ courses include: Microstudios, D8 Neighbourhood Residency, Videolab, Visual Culture, Art with Health and Wellbeing, Drawing: Analysis and Synthesis, and Making Materiality. Art and Design students step out of established disciplines to apply themselves to context-specific and bespoke learning experiences that suit their particular skills and ambitions.

² NovelEco is a five-year European Research Council (ERC) research project led by Professor Marcus Collier (School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin). The aim of NovelEco is to explore novel ecosystem theory as a bridging concept and a conduit for rewilding urban society (noveleco.eu). 

³ Commoning and Radical Care, A SPACEX RISE Symposium, NCAD, March 2023 (ncad.ie). 

⁴ See Butler Gallery’s annual commission, The Soil Project (butlergallery.ie)

⁵ Natureculture is a synthesis of nature and culture that recognises their inseparability in ecological relationships which are both biophysically and socially formed. Cultural production here seeks to deconstruct the classic nature-culture dichotomy, inherited from western Enlightenment thought.

⁶ A short film on the remarkable work of Tony Lowth, titled Our Mountain (2016) and produced by The Perennial Plate, is available on vimeo.com. This short film is testimony to Homo sapiens’ ability to arrest organic material flows and make soil – the bedrock of complex terrestrial life – rather than just deplete it.

⁷ Novel Ecology refers to a place where, by virtue of human influence, the future environment that arises is unlike any ecological environment we experience today, or those that prevailed historically. With thanks to friends and collaborators at NovelEco, who introduced this concept to the course. 

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Marie Farrington 

VAI Member

‘Glossaries for Forwardness’ is a multi-platform project examining convergences between landscape and memory through the architecture of the Museum Building in Trinity College Dublin (26 April – 23 September). This project arose from my artist residency at Trinity Centre for the Environment (2021-22) where my research approached geological sampling methods as ways to explore our interpretation of landscape, and how land can participate in its own representation and display. 

Built in 1853 by Cork architects Deane, Son & Woodward, the Museum Building is a seminal work of Ruskinian Gothic architecture. The building itself can be thought of as a geological collection; it is constructed from a vast catalogue of stone types, indexing examples of Caen Stone, Armagh Limestone, Cork Red Limestone, Kilkenny Black Limestone, and Connemara Marble. 

My practice employs casting to construct sculptural archives that capture residual aspects of sites, mapping how materials are coded and transformed over time. The works in ‘Glossaries for Forwardness’ were developed by repurposing and inverting analysis procedures used by the Department of Geology, translating processes such as thin-sectioning, microscopic imaging, and resin-mounting into modes of making in the studio. This was informed by research into philosopher Isabelle Stengers, who proposes the scientific method as a practice to negotiate new ways for human and non-human relations to cohabit. The reality-generating potential of scientific field study emerges as a way to enable landscape to direct images and imaginations of itself. This became an important methodology for me to question how the interpretation, appropriation, and conservation of landscape can be reckoned with collectively in light of climate change. 

‘Glossaries for Forwardness’ is curated by Rachel Botha, whose curatorial approach to the exhibition and its visual identity referenced the building’s materiality and design, the geology and geography departments housed within the building, and its existing displays. Site-responsive sculptural and textile interventions, installed throughout the foyer of the Museum Building, perform a reflexive sampling of the building’s interior, through an extensive material glossary which includes volcanic olivine dust, bio-resin, anthracite, acid-etched glass, muslin, drafting film, and cast ink. In collaboration with Stanisław Welbel, a six-channel spatial audio installation emanates from the building’s ventilation system, composed on a synthesiser by assigning sounds to the various stone types to build a layered soundscape. 

Exploring geology’s links to memory and visibility, ‘Glossaries for Forwardness’ offers an invitation to reimagine human relations to land. Just as the geological research that underpins this project is co-determined by the natural processes it attempts to represent, the presented works make space for the active agency of landscape to emerge. As deep-time materials intersect with momentary human gestures, ‘Glossaries for Forwardness’ activates the Museum Building to engage in a co-creative process whereby the geological actions that formed its architecture – layering, folding, stacking, accumulation, and erasure – become concentrated in the act of making. The exhibition is a call for forwardness, a linear push across one state of being and into another – solid to liquid, inner to outer – encouraging a critical engagement with the representative frameworks through which the climate crisis is mediated. 

‘Glossaries for Forwardness’ is supported by the Arts Council, Trinity College Dublin, Trinity Centre for the Environment, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Dublin City Council, and Fire Station Artists’ Studios. The exhibition is accompanied by a programme of talks, screenings, listening sessions, and a publication, with texts by geologist Dr Quentin Crowley, writer Anneka French, and me. A collaboration with the Department of Ultimology in September will include a talk exploring a range of visual and written resources, where stones signify endings, followed by a participatory workshop with artist Anaïs Chabeur. 

Marie Farrington is an artist based in Dublin. She is artist-in-residence at Dublin City Council’s Residential Studios, Albert Cottages, and is currently presenting work in ‘Hammerheads’ at Solstice Arts Centre (1 July – 16 September). Forthcoming projects include a residency at SEA Foundation, Tilburg, and a solo exhibition, ‘Relics in Reverse’, at PuntWG, Amsterdam in 2024. 

mariefarrington.com  

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