Profiles

Brenda Moore-McCann: I am struck by the dynamism and ambition of your painting practice in dealing with difficult content that condenses contemporary political events through multiple perspectives. How and when did you decide to address issues of war and conflict in your work? Claire Halpin: Around 2008, I made the shift from using family photographs as source material in my paintings to newspaper photographs, particularly sites of conflict. I was drawn to media images that echoed the composition of biblical, Renaissance, and Byzantine painting. In 2010 I did a residency in Georgia where my training as an icon painter solidified this new direction in my work. I was visiting sites…

It is a rare and humbling thing to look up at the night sky, see a dazzling point of light silently wandering across it, and know that you have art there. On 19 February a two-stage Antares rocket launched from Wallops Island, Virginia, USA. This mission sent a spacecraft into low Earth orbit to rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS). It was carrying crew supplies, experiments, vehicle hardware and an art gallery.  ‘Moon Gallery: Test flight’ features the work of 64 international artists, and the entire exhibition fits into a small 8 cm x 8 cm grid. It is curated by the Stichting Moon Gallery Foundation in Amsterdam. Our…

It’s the last Monday of July 2021. I am with seven others in the sunny garden of Campo dell’Altissimo Summer School in the tiny village of Azzano in Northern Italy. We are listening intently to the instructions of sculptor and experienced stone-carver, Sven Rünger. We are overlooked on almost every side by the Apuan Alps – the calcareous mountain range which, only yesterday, I tried to photograph from my aeroplane seat on the approach to Pisa.  Our (as yet untouched) marble stones originated up in those mountains somewhere. It has been explained to us that these stones are waste matter, washed down from the quarries which have been active in…

But when we sit together, close… we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.¹ – Virginia Woolf Art practice often sits here, I think, making an unsubstantial territory, things sitting close to others, gathering into a form that produces a particular frequency of shifting information. I think about painting’s language being situated here, as an intricate system of knowledge production. The ‘building’ of painting, layers of material and support, force me to consider the physical matter of it, and how this matter offers itself. To think of painting as stark matter is somewhat awkward; it becomes unsure of its identity.  I primarily…

I describe myself first and foremost as a painter, where the substance of paint informs other processes in my practice as a visual artist. In 2003 I made the decision to leave my career in cultural heritage management to become a fulltime artist. I probably could not have picked a more difficult time with the responsibility of four small children and a move from Dublin to Cavan, which was then described to me as a ‘cultural backwater’.  But I am reminded of a conversation between Alex Katz and Theo Dorgan in IMMA in 2007, as part of the ‘Alex Katz: New York’ exhibition. The artist said he learned to paint…

I am writing this sentence during a five-hour durational lecture-performance, entitled Title, to be announced (2021). I am the performer, and the performance has so far lasted about 45 minutes. There is an audience, which upon last glance consisted of five people – six including my own body. I am writing this on my iPhone, which is concealed from the audience by a white towel that has the words ‘Hospital Property’ woven into its fabric. I am in the strange space of writing an article about a festival that I am in participating in, while also trying to make sense of something irreducible to language.  Moments later, I switch from…

The Berwick Film & Media Art Festival (BFMAF) was established in 2005 by filmmaker Huw Davies and artist Marcus Coates in the Northumberland town of Berwick-upon-Tweed. BFMAF is funded by Arts Council England, BFI, local and county councils, and supported by a host of academic, project and programme partners including Newcastle and St. Andrews Universities, feminist film distributor, Cinenova and the National Film Archive of India. The unique location of Berwick – an ancient garrison town on the English-Scottish border, bounded by the River Tweed and the North Sea coast – makes this a beneficent setting for a twenty-first-century UK film festival. The festival’s many exhibitions and events take full…

If we compare an archive to a grave, then reading, or more precisely research, will be the path toward exhumation, and an exhibition, as it were, the resurrection. – Nikolai Fedorov   Anton Vidokle has been making a series of films that explore Russian Cosmism through cinematic devices and an engagement with biopolitics, universalism, revolution, and museology. His latest exhibition, ‘Citizens of the Cosmos’ (9 September – 16 October), was curated by myself with Alexandra Balona for Rampa in Porto, Portugal, in co-production with SIRIUS. Russian Cosmism is a constellation of theories and projects – philosophical, artistic, scientific – informed by the writings of the Russian philosopher, Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903),…

Within this space there is no avoidance. There is a confrontation, pure and distilled. The feminine is synthesised through worrying thoughts, far reaching oppressions and gynocentric victories. This subject is mobile and furtive – there is a protagonist, but she is only sensed through a layered mythology crystalised in a myriad of forms. Bullo provokes us to enter her burgeoning manifesto, and to engage with her past and her future. It is rare to coexist with a system of objects and ideas working so fluidly together, communicating on multiple levels, verging on the psilocin.  We navigate between cast breathing vessels, twisting tubing, sacrificial entities, the protective gaze of Medusa heads,…