Profiles | The VAN & miniVAN

The miniVAN

From gritty urban graffiti to abstract surrealism, The miniVAN deftly navigates the ever-evolving artistic landscape, reflecting the pulse of modern culture.

Inspired by the pioneering spirit of Visual Artists News Sheet, The miniVAN sets out to redefine the landscape of contemporary art, providing a comprehensive platform for both established artists and emerging talents. As we honour the roots of the past, we fervently embrace the spirit of change, envisioning a future where art continues to inspire and challenge the human experience.

Packed with captivating features, exclusive interviews, and thought-provoking editorials, each issue of The miniVAN is a collectible art piece in itself. Readers can expect insider insights, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and a celebration of the unsung heroes shaping the artistic zeitgeist.

The visionary team behind The miniVAN comprises renowned art writers, respected artists and curators, and passionate creatives dedicated to curating an enriching experience for readers and artists alike.

The miniVAN invites you to embark on an extraordinary journey that transcends the boundaries of imagination. Whether you’re an art aficionado, a budding artist, or simply curious about the transformative power of visual expression, The miniVAN promises to ignite your passion and broaden your horizons, bringing you from the inside of an artist’s studio to the wide realm of creative practices that exist outside of how we think of visual art.

Member Profile | Material Acts

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KATHRYN MAGUIRE OUTLINES HER LATEST RESIDENCY AND RECENT DEVELOPMENTS WITHIN HER PRACTICE. I am a visual artist and educator whose practice incorporates socially engaged projects, environmental awareness projects, and public art projects. I create sculptural installations and interventions to explore ideas with communities and within the gallery space. A recurrent theme in my work focuses on voices of the silenced and the non-human, exploring how they might have agency in memory and history. Exploring geology, the history of materials, and the circular economy, my current work concentrates on lithics, minerals, and mining. I examine rocks and minerals from various international locations, through a situated, land-based practice. Increasingly, my work engages processes…

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Member Profile | The Rhythm of Life

ELLA DE BÚRCA INTERVIEWS ELIZABETH COPE ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF HER PAINTING PRACTICE. Ella de Búrca: Could you open up on your early influences and what led you towards painting? Elizabeth Cope: As children, my father used to take us around to all the different monuments. We had some of our family buried in Killín Cormac in County Kildare. I remember seeing Ogham stones in the graveyard (that were later stolen) and you’d have to translate them into Latin. These kinds of things were inspiring to me. When I was nine, my sister Phil came home from Paris with a box of oil paints; it was the smell of those…

Claire Halpin, The Towers That Be – Larne, 2022, oil on gesso, 30cm x 40cm; image courtesy of the artist.

Member Profile | Augmented Auguries

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…

Orla O’Byrne , Hand on stone, 2021; image courtesy of the artist.

Member Profile | Peeling the Stone

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…

Michelle Boyle, View to the German’s house, 2021, oil on canvas, 1.5 x 2.2 m, on location Lough Ramor, Cavan 2021; image courtesy of the artist.

Member Profile | Great Work in Marginal Places

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…

Eilis O’Connell, ‘In the Roundness of Being’, installation view, VISUAL Carlow; photographs by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and VISUAL Carlow.

Member Profile | Biomorphic Forms

JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS EILIS O’CONNELL ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF HER PRACTICE OVER FIVE DECADES. Joanne Laws: Perhaps you could start by outlining the environment and appetite for sculptural practice in Ireland in the late 70s, as you graduated from Crawford School of Art and Design? Eilis O’Connell: There was a passion and intensity for sculpture in those days. I remember a show called ‘OASIS’ (Open Air Show of Irish Sculpture) and annual exhibitions like Living Art and Independent Artists. I first exhibited my work as part of The Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1972. Can you believe that I was so brazen, to put my work into a national…

Mermaid_Mags Group of Small Glazed Ceramics

Member Profile | You Begin

MARGARET FITZGIBBON OUTLINES THE EVOLUTION OF HER PRACTICE. I completed a BA in Sculpture at Crawford College of Art and Design in the 1980s. Soon afterwards, I joined the recently formed Cork Artist Collective (est. 1985) and became a director, serving until 2006. Not only did CAC provide me with a studio, but also the fellowship of other emerging artists. During the 90s, I completed a range of public art works. For example, in 1997, I was commissioned to create a site-specific commission for University College Cork, Ten Foolish and Wise Virgins, comprising ten bronze and stone sculptures, sited in the foyer of the O’Rahilly Building. In 2008, I completed…

‘Moon Gallery: Test Flight’, installation view, 2022, International Space Station cupola; Photograph by NASA Space Place & Nanoracks, courtesy the Stichting Moon Gallery Foundation and the artists.

Member Profile | Like gold to airy thinness beat

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…

Natasha Pike, We make an unsubstantial territory, 2020-21, acrylic on board and dresser hooks; photograph by Dara McGrath, courtesy the artist and Clonakilty Arts Centre.

Member Profile | Vibrant Matter

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…

Rachel McManus, Keep Smiling, 2021, performance at FIX21; photograph by Ben Malcomson, courtesy the artist and Catalyst Arts.

Festival Profile – An Example of Something Inside Out

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…

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