THOMAS POOL INTERVIEWS THE ARTISTS FROM THE FREELANDS ARTIST PROGRAMME AT PS² AND THE  FREELANDS STUDIO FELLOW.

Thomas Pool: How has your participation in PS2’s Freelands Artist Programme helped you grow and evolve your practice in ways that wouldn’t have been possible without it?

Christopher Steenson: That’s a difficult question to answer. After two years being on the programme, it’s now difficult to imagine an alternative version of reality, where it wasn’t part of my life. I’ve just been trying to keep my head above water, making the work I need to make. I suppose being part of a programme like Freelands can provide a form of credibility to your practice. I’ve been given a lot of opportunities over the past two years in Ireland, the UK and further afield, and I wonder if being part of the Freelands Programme has helped in some way. I think with these types of fellowship programmes, there’s an accumulation of small moments and experiences that shape your development. Usually, it’s the ideas that emerge through studio visits and group crits. The ideas generated from those encounters simmer away subconsciously, slowly opening up new perspectives on things. They’re invaluable and life-changing; however, they’re also elusive in their exact origin, and certainly not enumerable. 

Dorothy Hunter: No matter how strong the artist community is, you always feel a bit isolated. With the tight resources in Northern Ireland in particular, it can feel like you’re trying to forge a way with only so many routes through, cut off from the rest of Ireland and Britain. A lot of funding is structured to be short-term and pre-planned, where you have to deliver in a linear way. The Freeland’s Artist Programme countered this; for the first time I was trusted to use funding in a way that most benefitted me as an artist – whether that’s exploring materials, simply covering rent, or trying something out but maybe finding another, better way. For me, it meant being able to waste less time splitting my attention across multiple types of freelance work; being able to spend serious time in the studio and in research; and being able to travel to do so, when otherwise I wouldn’t have had the option. It’s also pretty unique to have such a long-term curatorial relationship in one’s practice that doesn’t have the implicit pressure of the ‘end product’. Things could just develop, and more interesting and inspiring conversations were then possible.

Susan Hughes: Here is just one example of many: in the summer of 2022, we got an email from our curator Ciara Hickey, to say that some of the practice-based PhD students at the University of Ulster had organised crits in PS2 with Sarah Brown and Alice Butler. There were a few places left and they were opening them up to the Freelands artists. I put my name down and suddenly I had a deadline. Before the crit, I started to panic; what on earth was I going to show? I frantically finished off a video experiment I’d been thinking about, but hadn’t had the impetus to actually complete. A few weeks later, Alice Butler contacted me to say that Dublin-based initiative aemi (artists’ and experimental moving image) thought my film would be suitable for their forthcoming touring programme. I was invited to add subtitles and send them a high-resolution file if I was interested in proceeding. I sure was! Thus ensued the most amazing year of touring with my film to cinemas and art venues across Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden with aemi and two other Irish filmmakers, Holly Márie Parnell and Lisa Freeman. The experiences and relationships that emerged from this opportunity have been totally invaluable.

Tara McGinn: Being part of the Freelands Artist Programme provided me with a small stipend with no specified outcomes; so, there was little pressure to produce or achieve external goals of any sort. This gave me a liberty I hadn’t had before, safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t have my time wholly consumed in chasing freelance gigs and funding opportunities, which negatively impacts time better spent on professional development. The Freelands programme has granted me travel and networking opportunities that I could never have dreamed of accessing before. Crucially, it gave me the chance to grow, to fail, and get back up again on my own terms.

Jacqueline Holt: My acceptance to the Freelands Artist Programme at PS2 coincided with a difficult period in my personal life, when family became more of a priority. In one respect, it could be seen as bad timing; however, in reality, the consistency of support through regular meetings with the PS2 curator, Ciara Hickey, allowed me to maintain and develop my practice during this difficult time. With her practical advice and organisational support, I have been able to experiment with new ways of working through a series of experimental workshops. The discussions around these ideas, with Ciara and the other curators we were introduced to during the programme, as well as my fellow PS2 artists, were invaluable in helping to develop and articulate a methodology of practice. This has also been helpful in successfully presenting my ideas to funders for the development of this new work.

TP: How has the programme been tailored to you as an individual artist?

CS: I’ve used the Freelands Programme as way of reaching out to people for advice or mentorship at moments when I’ve needed perspective with certain projects. It’s provided avenues for conversation and dialogue that might not otherwise be as readily or formally accessible. A way of coming up for air, so to speak. I do wonder whether being on an island like Ireland might isolate artists from wider ‘artworld’ networks. A trip to London or Berlin isn’t as straightforward as it is for our artist peers in Britain or mainland Europe. We’re separated from these ‘cultural centres’ by a body of water. This makes it more difficult for us to travel to these places, and for international artists and curators to come in. That said, I think one of the most valuable aspects of the programme has been connecting with a group of peers – both locally in the north, and with the other UK artists and institutions. Each year of the programme, there’s been a symposium for all the participating artists and institutions to get together from across the UK. The first of these (for our cohort) took place in Belfast in September 2022 and was hosted by PS2. The second was in November 2023 in Edinburgh and was hosted by Talbot Rice Gallery. Those occasions have been so rewarding for meeting new people and experiencing place through a unique lens, either as a ‘host’ or as a visitor.

DH: I think it became apparent early on that we enjoyed talking about the wider conditions in which we work, how our practices form in that, and how we could expand through conduits like reading groups, group crits, and exhibition visits. We gathered a lot as a group and could learn from and be involved in one another’s work in supportive ways – something usually only possible in art school. I need to step outside my regular working conditions to get some perspective with changes of scenery and short, focused bursts. Residencies in PS2 and Digital Arts Studios and doing some practical courses as part of the programme allowed me to treat my way of working a bit differently.

SH: We have had time and space to deepen our practices, and our curator Ciara Hickey has had two years to get to know us deeply as artists. Her conversations with us are entirely tailored to who we are as individuals navigating our practices. This thorough attention to detail has heightened the value and quality of the support she can give us – when she helps us with applications, when she has conversations with us leading up to exhibitions, and when she pushes us to push ourselves. Anything we’re interested in trying out with the group, we are supported to do, whether that be organising a crit or film screening, reading a text together, or trying an experimental way of working collaboratively.

TMG: The programme isn’t so much tailored but could be described as open-ended. I was part of the final cohort of a five-year programme, which meant that we received a wealth of data and feedback that previous cohorts perhaps had not. We were paired with local curator Ciara Hickey, who selected the successful applicants with a genuine desire to work with each of us. For me, this was a far more personal and warm relationship, which formed the foundations of a lasting professional connection. Many opportunities with curators can be fleeting, temporary, and sometimes cold in the face of achieving set outcomes or deadlines. This circumstance gave me the chance to understand the role a curator can play in assisting my career choices, as well as my own expectations on my work and myself. This contributed to better working relations with other curators whom I had the opportunity to work with during the programme; I learned when to reach out and when to clearly define my own boundaries. In this sense, the tailoring came through my own initiative – I learned to articulate my own needs, allowing for a more considered approach to navigating institutional demands.

JH: I wouldn’t say it was tailored for me, but more a case of me leaning into what was on offer and finding out what was helpful. For me, the conversations were the most important part of the programme. We were given an allowance for mentoring that allowed me to engage in a series of conversations with other artists and curators that I was curious about. It also allowed me to get practical advice on the use of cameras and prime lenses. I was able to meet up individually with the curators invited by the programme as well as with the curators from the other Freelands Artist Programmes across the UK. For me, the programme was an opportunity to excavate and articulate my practice and spend time working through new processes.

TP: What can you tell us about the work you’ve created so far?

CS: I’ve been making work that deals with our relationship with time and environment, through sound, video, writing and photography in response to specific sites and archives. For example, in March last year, I worked with PS2 curators-in-residence Cecelia Graham and Grace Jackson to create the artwork Let it run all over me (2023), which responded to – and was presented within – an underwater tunnel in Belfast’s Lagan Weir. Another solo exhibition from last year, titled ‘Breath Variations’, responded to the work and concepts of artist John Latham and was presented in his former home and studio at Flat Time House, London. For the recent exhibition at the Freelands Foundation in London (16 – 23 February 2024), I developed a new artwork, titled The long grass (2022-4). The work stems from a research residency I undertook with Ormston House, Limerick, in 2022 that focused on the conservational status of the corncrake in Ireland. The artwork itself is a 35mm slide projection, which uses the corncrake as a vehicle to discuss ideas relating to contested land use, memory and (post)colonial identity. The work comprises a series of anonymised textual material presented alongside photographs I made during visits to corncrake conservation sites around Ireland. There is also a synchronised sound component to the work, which – for the Freelands exhibition – was presented outside the gallery, broadcasting the corncrake’s distinctive call out onto Regent’s Park Road. You might say it’s a freedom call of sorts. 

DH: During the programme, I kicked off a project that I’ll probably be returning to for the rest of my life… I’m looking at the politics and knowability of subterranean cave networks and have spent the last two years gathering material, writing, and experiences. I started this off as ‘fully conscious movements, fully different time’ – my solo exhibition at Golden Thread Gallery (25 March – 20 May 2023) – which involved a set of fabric sculptures, drawings and films that look at naming and mapping processes for the underground, working with and thinking about how language relates to things that can’t be readily evoked, which I hope to explore further in new work.

SH: My current solo exhibition, ‘Stones from a Gentle Place’ at CCA Derry~Londonderry (20 January to 28 March), has given me an opportunity to show work from the past couple of years as well as brand new work. The presented works encompass a range of media including sculpture, video, audio installation and archives. The exhibition follows my own encounter with bioluminescence while swimming in the sea at night, and my subsequent observation of how humans throughout history have made sense of natural phenomena, the stories associated with such occurrences, and the physical and cognitive effects on the body. During my participation in the Freelands Artist Programme, I have had the time, money and mentoring to support extensive and very fun research into these connections between folklore and natural phenomena. I have travelled within Ireland and over to the Netherlands, connecting with museum archivists, storytellers, musicians and mariners to gather stories and film footage. Now with successful funding applications, I can continue my research into the next stage, when I will create a significant new film work.

TMG: I have recently become interested in the work of Eileen Gray and the queer spaces she produced as indirect rejection of the modernist architecture of the early twentieth century. In response, I created several new works including a site-specific installation in the PS2 project space in Belfast. I subverted familiar forms with new materials, blurring the line between feminine and masculine qualities, merging their similarities, and making visible what interior design generally seeks to hide in plain sight. For example, the invisible plinth, boxy and painted white, acts as an island blended into the background of the white cube. I playfully undermined this concept and constructed what appears to be a vintage coffee table out of craft materials. Titled A Resting Place (or a coffee table to be exact) (2023), it is art as plinth, plinth as art. The exhibition last June was titled ‘An Intimate Public’, a figure of speech I had read in an essay from Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011), which had stuck with me for almost an entire year before the exhibition even came into being.

JH: I work with various media including sculpture, print, photography and film. Over the last couple of years, I have made several films and recently finished making what turned out to be a very labour intensive wall hanging for the final Freeland’s exhibition at the Mimosa Gallery in London. Over the course of the FAP I have been developing a way of working with video that aligns more with the values of my process orientated, fine art practice and that I can scale up. Previously, my film work has used what I have to hand and what I could create by myself. Over the last year, I have attended a workshop on improvisational, performer-camera practices, led by Pete Gomes, and participated in a PHD research Constellations therapy session. I want to feed these experiences into creating larger scale work by collaborating with other artists through an intuitive process of improvisation that frees the agency of those participating. As part of this process, I have started a series of film workshops to test and develop this method of working, and am looking forward to seeing how this process plays out.

TP: As a recent graduate, what has the Freelands Studio Fellowship meant for you and your practice?

Ciarraí MacCormac (Studio Fellow): To be awarded the Freelands Studio Fellowship was incredibly exciting; it meant that I could completely focus on my art without having a side job to maintain my practice. I am fully aware that this kind of opportunity doesn’t happen out of thin air, and I felt that it came at the right time for me personally. It’s such a generous award for artists and it has provided a foothold for me to progress my work. As a graduate of Bath School of Art, I was able to apply for the Fellowship in Belfast School of Art at University of Ulster. It was very exciting to get a sense of what it might have been like to study there, and to work on the famous seventh floor alongside current students. 

TP: How has having access to the university library and workshop facilities, as well as your own studio space and mentor, helped you develop the trajectory of your career?

CMC: Accessing the library was what I looked forward to most when I started – I pretty much spent all of my time there. When you leave art college, you definitely take facilities and technical support for granted. Straight away, I made plans to create additional drying trays for my paint skins, meaning that I could make more than one piece at a time. I have really enjoyed sharing my work with students, getting some teaching experience, and discussing how painting can exist in a multitude of ways. My mentor is the artist Susan Connolly – we both are massive paint nerds. Susan was the perfect fit for the mentorship, as she is a well respected painter and arts educator, and of course, we both make paint skins. This specific process involves applying layers of paint to a glass frame, which are then peeled off and attached to walls and ceilings. Once hung, the paint skin oozes, collapses and buckles, as the material creates its own form. Liberated from canvas and frame, this technique dissolves distinctions between painting and sculpture and invites the viewer to move in the space. I feel excited to share this new body of work and hopefully develop my career through the connections I’ve made this past year. 

TP: What can you tell us about the solo exhibition you presented at the end of your fellowship?

CMC: My exhibition ‘After the Fact’ ran at Ulster University Art Gallery from 1 February to 1 March. This was my very first solo show and it meant a lot that it happened in Belfast. I exhibited only a fraction of the paintings I have made throughout the fellowship. My focus over the last year has been exploring the longevity of the paintings, and I have invited materials that can support these works and be more self-sufficient. This has allowed me to be more ambitious in scale and create an exhibition in which the bodies of paint control the viewers’ bodies as they navigate the space around the work. 

Christopher Steenson is an artist who works across sound, writing, photography and digital media to forge ways of listening to the future.

christophersteenson.com

Dorothy Hunter is a cross-disciplinary artist, writer and researcher, living and working in 

Belfast.

dorothyhunter.com

Susan Hughes is based between the North and South of Ireland and is a studio holder at Orchid Studios in Belfast.

susanhughesartist.com

Tara McGinn is an interdisciplinary artist from Enniscorthy, currently based in Belfast, where she is a member of Flax Studios.

taramcginn.com

Jacqueline Holt is a visual artist working with moving image, photography and sculpture.

jacquelineholt.org

Ciarraí MacCormac is an artist from Antrim who currently lives and works in Belfast.

ciarraimaccormac.com

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ORIT GAT INTRODUCES THE WORK OF JESSE CHUN.

Jesse Chun, an artist working between New York and Seoul, invented the term ‘unlanguaging’. It’s an extension of ‘languaging’, which is an existing idea in linguistics – if ‘language’ is a fixed state of meaning, ‘languaging’ shifts it to an ongoing production of meaning. The term was first invented by A.L. Becker and later used and contextualised within a postcolonial framework by Rey Chow in her book, Not like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

For Chun, unlanguaging is an alternate location that is not in opposition to this term, but rather, puts forth another way of languaging. It is the act of unfixing language itself. What lies underneath the production of meaning? Unlanguaging offers other ways of navigating language. The drawings in her ongoing series, score for unlanguaging, are made by (mis)using stencils for the English alphabet. Chun uses a Roman alphabet stencil, not to make English, but to make new abstractions that escape its semiotic structures; that map new cosmologies of language.

What Chun liked about these stencils, these found objects, is that they break up the characters to make up their shapes. “A lot of what I’m doing,” Chun explains, “is taking English apart to see what’s beneath all these structures. For me, rather than trying to produce meaning, I try to unfix meaning itself and to propose other semiotic trajectories.” 

Chun, who was born in Korea and grew up in Hong Kong during the British colonial period, where she learned English, says she made up the word ‘unlanguaging’ to find other ways of navigating language. However, the ‘un’ prefix does not set the term in opposition; language is not a binary. 

The stencils, like living across cultures, are about undoing and making up again. And all I can think about by way of a comparison is how Arabic speakers send text messages transliterating Arabic characters into numbers. It’s called ‘Arabizi’, a confluence of Arabic words and English characters, with Latin numbers used as stand-ins for characters that don’t have an English equivalent. I’ve seen it everywhere, but I can’t read it. I have to use Google to understand it. Even words I know – good morning – become 9ba7 el 5air. There’s something so cool about it: the way it makes language alive, the flexibility of the solution to a problem with a new digital technology like texting, and a new way of communicating being introduced through the use of this unique ‘chat alphabet’. 

Chun and I talked over video about this work. I recorded our conversation on my phone, and then never even transcribed it. Instead, I sat at my kitchen table in London and listened to the audio file, to the two of us non-native English speakers coming together to speak about speaking. I listen to it to be reminded of small details of our conversation. A book, an idea, a terminology. “I was thinking about the untranslatable space, and how you visualise that,” Chun explains. I look at these drawings and think of them as language not broken up, but as a form of connection. “When I was thinking about language”, Chun says, “I wanted to have new words.”

Orit Gat is a writer and the guest editor of this issue.

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Ciara Healy: I enjoyed the performance of your live artwork, SPIN SPIN SCHEHERAZADE (2019), in Crawford Art Gallery in late June, as part of Cork Midsummer Festival. Judging by the rich collection of stories presented in the show, these last few years have been very busy for you. What have you been doing? 

Orla Barry: I’ve been herding, lambing, dosing, shearing, haymaking, sheep dog-training. There have been pedigree sales, art seminars, sheep discussion groups, Arts Council applications, Bord Bia audits, farm inspections, tax collections. Exhibitions, performances, livestock shows. I’ve collaborated with human animals and farm animals. I’ve been an attentive nature student, as well as a keen observer of the farm industry and the art world. I have been a bit of a hermit sometimes. I’ve been working hard at combining my work as an artist with running a pedigree flock of Lleyn sheep for over a decade.

CH: Rural Ireland has changed a lot in recent years. How did your practice evolve when you re-located back to County Wexford from Belgium? 

OB: I returned to Ireland to live on my father’s tillage farm in 2009, and I established a pedigree Lleyn sheep flock in 2011. In many ways, while I was in Belgium, the Irish landscape never left me. It loomed large, but it was romanticised in works such as Foundlings (1999) and Portable Stones (2004), which were primarily concerned with the experience of remembering the land. When I got back to Ireland, my work became about the experience of making a living in and with the land. 

I grew my flock to 70 and presented them at livestock shows. The language of art and pedigree breeding replicate each other, and I found that interesting and humorous. Coming from a farming background meant that if I was going to farm, I had to do it properly. The farming I embarked on was no hobby and the creative work that emerged as a result came from the doing. Trying to run all those things at once was nearly impossible at times; to be a farmer, an artist, a lecturer, was a big ask. There was a marked difference between remembering the landscape when I was living in Belgium and drowning in the muck of real farming when I returned to live in Wexford. There were no preconceived ideas – the farming came from necessity. My days were filled with beauty and death, love and violence, as I embodied all identities at once, and from this experience, much richer creative work emerged. 

CH: SPIN SPIN SCHEHERAZADE conveyed this rich complexity through collaboration. 

OB: Yes, the first and most important collaborations in the work have been the human-animal relationships I foster on the farm. SPIN SPIN SCHEHERAZADE (2019) is a sequel to BREAKING RAINBOWS (2016). In both these works, I collaborated with Einat Tuchman, a Belgian-Israeli performer, with whom I have been making work for the last decade. My involvement with Einat evolved because I have always been interested in language and the ways in which it is spoken by native and foreign speakers. There is also humour and a kind of incongruity when someone as dazzling and cosmopolitan as Einat, presents and performs stories about a sheep with a prolapsed uterus, of lambs being slaughtered in the meat factory, of deals in the mart, of judging flocks and feeling the testicles of pedigree rams! I am interested in the tension between the visceral and factual here too. 

The performance platforms and artworks I constructed for Spin Spin are white, highly engineered, and spotless – there is not a straw bale in sight. A tension emerges when these sterile surfaces are used as a stage for Einat to tell stories of intense kindness and love, blood and guts. My desire to contradict the clichéd imagery of farming can be confounding for an audience. It is unclear to them if I actually do farm. I tell my farming stories to Einat so that she knows them almost in an embodied way. Our linguistic worlds combine. The audience then gets the impression that her experience as a narrator is an authentic experience as a farmer. 

CH: How does the audience experience this collaborative work and how does it all come together in a gallery space? 

OB: Einat moves around the space and occasionally stands on the platforms the audience is sitting on, so the audience has to move around too. Chance plays a significant role in how the work is experienced. While Einat is performing my stories, I make toast. The toaster is a performative device that punctuates each story. When the toaster stops, Einat stops, and asks the audience to direct her to continue or to move on to another story. For the audience, it might feel like things are a bit out of control, as Einat jumps from one story to the next. Especially when these stories are intense or moving, about death or a complex birth. The audience might be totally engrossed, laughing or crying, then suddenly this emotion is brought to a halt. It is unsettling as there is no beginning, middle or end. 

This type of disjuncture is integral to my work; it is how my dyslexic mind works, and it is how farming works. Making toast was also my way of being in the performance, and using bread is both personal and political. My grandmother’s family were in the famous Kelly’s bakery in Wexford. When I was researching Spin Spin, I thought about the fact that she was at the end of the farming cycle making bread, and my father, as a tillage farmer, was at the beginning of the cycle, growing grain. While the toast references my grandmother, it is also a product of capitalism, bread being the staple food that has kept workers alive across Europe since the Industrial Revolution. Toast is something you live on when you are lambing. At 2 o’clock in the morning, a cup of tea and a slice of toast keeps you going, before you run back out into the rain to deal with the unknown in the darkness of the lambing shed. 

CH: It is clear from your stories that your animals and the people you have worked with over the years – on the farm, in the pedigree sales community, and as the former secretary of the Breeders’ Association – are important influences, but who else has inspired your work? 

OB: I like to think of myself as a minimalist-expressionist. My world is a crossover between Edvard Munch, Hanne Darboven, and Beatrix Potter! I admire her because she was a knowledgeable and skilled Herdwick pedigree sheep breeder, as well as a conservationist and successful artist. I remember when I started farming, I suddenly understood everything to do with fables and fairytales. I am the embodiment of all of that, the exhaustion, and the elation of it. I am so happy to have had the opportunity to do it. I have become a kind of anthropologist of my own rural community.

Ciara Healy is a writer and Head of Department for Fine Art & Education at Limerick School of Art & Design, Technological University of the Shannon. 

ciarahealymusson.ie

Orla Barry is a visual artist and shepherd who lives and works on the south coast of rural Wexford.

orlabarry.be

SPIN SPIN SCHEHERAZADE will be presented at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios from 5 to 7 October in association with Dublin Theatre Festival.

templebargallery.com

The work has been translated into French and will enter the collection of Musée des Arts Contemporains (MACS) in Grand-Hornu, Belgium, where it will be shown as part of the artist’s significant solo exhibition in April 2024.

mac-s.be

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“The material of which we speak is almost the stuff of magic. By an accident of nature molten silicon (the most common material in the earth’s crust), when cooled carefully, instead of becoming a crystalline and opaque material, remains molecularly amorphous and transparent to the visible spectrum of radiation that reaches us from the sun, to which our eyes are attuned… If we were to wish such a material into existence we might well give up at the apparent impossibility of it.” ¹ 

The above quote, a fragment from a longer text, is one of many extracts that I stitched together with lines from other texts, written perhaps decades prior, in an act of assemblage – a physical, sculptural, concrete reassembling of words for a new purpose. This direct lifting was purposeful, while retaining anachronistic language styles was materially and temporally important. 

The entire project was rooted in a chance encounter during a visit to one of the ‘stores’ on the NCAD campus, the place where those books not readily available on the library shelves go – some to be forgotten, possibly to be deaccessioned, gems hidden among old copies of Art in America and random DVDs. Turning around, I chanced upon a literal ‘stack’, dust laden, barely a borrower’s stamp on the inner page – a selection of lovely, overlooked books about glass.

Elsewhere, in the library’s main collection, was the encyclopedic 1960 edition of Glass in Architecture and Decoration by Raymond McGrath & A.C. Frost. This book was to become a key research tool, but also provided a central visual motif for the subsequent work, and a narrative thread by way of its primary author. Born in Australia of Irish descent, McGrath was among the pioneering architects in 1930s England, preeminent in the use of glass, light and colour. The Second World War saw him move to Dublin, where he became OPW Principal Architect, and designed a building familiar to us all in the Irish art world – the RHA Gallagher Gallery.

This project – which amounted to several years of research into the history and cultural impact of glass – culminated recently in an exhibition comprising a film, installed and photographic works at the Irish Architectural Archive (IAA), which also houses McGrath’s documents, drawings, correspondence, and other materials. Over ten years after shooting part of my film, Something New Under the Sun (2012), in the IAA’s reading room, the archive gallery provided the perfect ‘coda’ (or loop) to a body of work concerning time, the built environment, and how we view the world. The involvement of the IAA added a whole new aspect to the project, both in terms of enthusiasm, support, and in allowing me to select from the McGrath Collection to curate a show within a show.

I was fortunate to work closely with exceptional collaborators including Karl Burke, Louis Haugh, Michael Kelly, Oran Day, Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll, and Chris Fite-Wassilak. NIVAL and NCAD Library were ever helpful, allowing repeated access to the ‘stack’, much of which appeared in the film. Support from IADT allowed me access to the National Film School’s incredible studio, with the invaluable help of staff and several students on the production. The project was made possible through initial funding from DLR Arts Office, and subsequently The Arts Council, to produce the film, exhibition, and a school workshop series, devised by artist Marian Balfe. An accompanying publication was published by Set Margins’, Eindhoven. 

Gavin Murphy is an artist and curator based in Dublin.

gavinmurphy.info

‘Remaking the Crust of the Earth’ ran at the Irish Architectural Archive from 16 March to 28 April 2023.

iarc.ie

¹ Michael Wigginton, ‘An instrument for distant vision’, in Louise Taylor and Andrew Lockhart (Eds.), Glass, Light & Space: New Proposals for the Use of Glass in Architecture (London: Crafts Council, 1997)

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The buzz was very particular, before entering Cork’s Granary Theatre in mid-December to attend the premiere of Conversations on a Crosstown Algorithm (2022). The new work, by Doireann O’Malley, was co-commissioned and presented by the National Sculpture Factory in association with Cork Midsummer Festival. 

Speaking to people beforehand who had been involved in the work’s presentation added to a slight sense of mystery around it. “Whatever you’re expecting, it’s not going to be that”, they said. They weren’t trying to be evasive. Conversations proved to be one of those precious experiences where any attempt to describe it immediately requires a qualifying, and probably contradictory, counter-description. The true nature of the work inevitably falls between any thumbnail encapsulations that might be proffered. This is particularly appropriate for Conversations as it presents a dizzying interrogation of human identity, while equally questioning the integrity of material reality and the role of technology in a moment of general systemic crisis.

O’Malley describes Conversations on a Crosstown Algorithm as a 3D theatre play. Although it has the three-act structure of a play and its presentation in a theatrical context is important, it is essentially an hour-long 3D animation. However, the label, ‘theatre play’ is not at all whimsical. It serves to initiate the theme of systems and identities in freefall, even before the ‘play’ begins, by calling into question the category of ‘animated film’ that it might otherwise have quietly slotted into. 

Entering the theatre, the ‘theatricality’ of Conversations is immediately apparent. An enormous freestanding LED monitor, more suggestive of advertising than cinema and upon which the ‘play’ will be screened, dominates the dimly lit space. At its base, the ground is scattered with a covering of dirt and rubble while a bright light hitting the back of the screen further illuminates the theatre space. The concept of presenting an animation that will constantly draw attention to its virtual nature and the fragility of its image as ‘theatre’ – a medium that traditionally prides itself on live physicality –  provides an appropriate frame for the multilayered identity trips that follow. The setting causes the animation to be ‘performed’ rather than simply ‘screened’ through rooting it in a contrastingly tangible reality.

When the lights go down, the audience finds itself submerged in total darkness, along with the voices of the play’s two characters. Samantha (Mathea Hoffmann) and Olda Wiser (Juan Carlos Cuadrado) share this womb of darkness with the viewers and begin speaking from a place of oneiric privacy as their images emerge only ever so gradually from the gloom. Yet it is the privilege of not being seen, of not having to present an image of self, that allows a friendly intimacy to blossom almost immediately between these two queer figures from different generations. Samantha confides that, by having defined themselves by their accomplishments, they are trapped without a true sense of self. Olda reveals how traumas have led to a yearning to constantly shift dimensions, to keep escaping. 

When the lights crash on, things change; the scene moves to a strange, chaotically morphing space – part lounge, part casino and part data storage facility. The characters have also changed, grappling with tenser outfacing personas shaped by the massive pressure of societal conditioning that is everywhere reinforced by technology. Identity is navigated like a nightmare video game, defined by externally generated rules from which escape is no longer possible. The play’s end strongly suggests that it is too late to flee to the ‘real’ world outside of the duo’s virtual space because that world is already ablaze. 

The pessimism of O’Malley’s vision is somewhat leavened by the wittiness of the dialogue and the compellingly frenetic trippiness of the imagery. This reaches a notable highpoint in a scene exploring Samantha’s hellish fixation on tennis that culminates with hundreds of tennis balls cascading down like a spectacularly denatured hailstorm. But the essential darkness of the piece is consolidated by a series of what might be described as ‘documentary’ interjections in which an AI voiceover variously describes the controlling influence of fungi on the animal mind, the complexities of racial profiling in surveillance technology, and the planned development of cyborg insects to be released into nature as spies. The systems of control, discrimination, and surveillance that the characters have internalised and propagate are far from being purely subjective conditions.

The eloquent immateriality of the 3D animation is perfectly suited to conjure the unstable universe of Conversations on a Crosstown Algorithm. It engagingly conveys the unhinged capacity for morphing at the speed of thought that permeates this space, while also highlighting the fragility of the characters through glitches that sometimes cause the edges of the figures to flicker in and out of vision, making hands and feet merge with the flooring, for example. Conversations on a Crosstown Algorithm builds a witty but ultimately frightening model of a world so trapped by failing systems that any attempt at self-transformation or escape lead to dead ends. 

Maximilian Le Cain is a filmmaker living in Cork City. He is currently Film Artist-in-Residence at University College Cork. 

maximilianlecain.com

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“As the sunset burns over the hills in almost unbearable beauty, as the sea turns silver, and the first stars hang above the dark slopes of Croaghaun, you sigh… then you sigh again.” — H.V. Morton, In Search of Ireland (Methuen, 1931)

In a Contrary Place (2022) is our new short film and accompanying storytelling performance that explores the impact of colonisation and American culture on Irish national identity. Through this work, we are pursuing an ongoing interest in the construction of official and folk records, and how these can contribute to a collective sense of possibility or paralysis. Following the old folk stories that warn against trespassing on fairy paths, often occurring in ‘contrary’ places in the Irish landscape, this work comprises a series of cautionary tales set against the dominant myths that we are led to believe about ourselves and our homeland. 

Storytelling – oral, written and visual – has throughout history provided a means to create a common identity, and it is in this context that we are testing the possibility of creating a new narrative identity for Ireland. This work was presented as part of the Askeaton Contemporary Arts Welcome to the Neighbourhood residency programme in June, and at Cairde Sligo Arts Festival in July.

A specific focus of our research is the ways in which ideas of the rural west occupy the popular imagination, and how this construction can be used to interrogate the intersecting subjects of colonialism, tourism, art history, capitalist expansion, environmental destruction, and protest. Following these lines of enquiry, as well as Svetlana Boym’s assertion that “progress is not just temporal but also spatial”,1 we move through centuries of Irish history, and across the Atlantic to the United States and back again. We are hoping to tell and retell a story of Ireland that will acknowledge our struggles, admit our complicities, and build our capacity for solidarity.

“People cling with pathetic heroism to their holdings with a dumb ferocity of affection. Existence [for many of them] would simply be impossible were it not for the money coming in from [relatives in] America” – Paul Henry

Telling powerful stories nonverbally, images have long been used as propaganda for the building and expansion of nation states. Landscape painting was a key component in eighteenth and nineteenth-century British imperial ideology. During this time, unsettled nature (and nations) would be enclosed, not only by the administration of the Empire, but also inside the confines of a picture. These often-innocuous images were used to whitewash colonial projects and to advertise foreign settlements to prospective emigrants, as well as to promote tourist campaigns. In the US, these aesthetics (as adopted by the western genre) broadly acknowledge the struggle for the hard-won freedoms of the ‘new world’, but often depict none of the associated terror inflicted on indigenous communities. 

Closer to home, Paul Henry’s romantic painting, In Connemara (1925) was used by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway Company to promote rail holidays in Ireland, and to the present day, remains fixed in the collective consciousness as an iconic and authentic vision of the west of Ireland. Henry intentionally constructed these premodern idylls, chastising Achill women who arrived to model for him wearing modern stockings and high heels instead of barefoot and dressed in their grandmothers’ shawls.2 This kind of romanticised, depopulated, and primitive representation of Ireland was subsequently adopted by the modern state’s own tourist industry, sitting uneasily alongside our colonial past. As Stephanie Rains writes: 

“The depiction of Ireland as a pre-modern idyll for visitors (and, by implication, for the Irish too) is one of the most consistently recurring themes of the nation’s tourist imagery. This process has its roots within colonial imaginings of Ireland in which the land and its people were co-opted into the Romantic vision of unspoilt landscapes and equally unspoilt inhabitants…”3

“Now charlatans wear dead men’s shoes, aye and rattle dead men’s bones / ‘Ere the dust has settled on their tombs, they’ve sold the very stones” – Liam Weldon, Dark Horse on the Wind, 1976

There is a troubling inconsistency between the promotion of our landscape, culture, and heritage by official tourism campaigns while the government simultaneously acts against those interests. Examples of this include granting prospecting licenses in environmentally sensitive areas, constructing roads through national monument sites, or giving the Disney corporation unfettered access to the incredibly delicate Skellig Islands, to name a few instances. Contradictions in our State abound: we uphold our neutrality yet permit US warplanes to refuel at Shannon Airport; we proclaim ourselves ‘Ireland of the Welcomes’, yet hold asylum seekers in draconian, for-profit Direct Provision centres; all while our state forestry corporation, Coillte, sells large swathes of public woodlands at a time when the State has pledged to increase forest coverage to meet its climate targets.

Why is this hypocrisy so deeply embedded in our national consciousness, imagining on the one hand magical, unspoilt lands of wild beauty and creating, on the other, a corporate tax haven whose ecosystems have suffered a profound “transformation of identity [and] a loss of defining features”?4

There has long been a cognitive dissonance in the way Ireland conceives of its own identity, which, Joep Leerssen suggests, can be seen as “a measure of the discontinuity and fragmentation of Irish historical development (itself caused by its oppression at the hands of the neighbouring isle)’.5 One interesting instance of this dissonance was the Round Towers debate of the nineteenth century, in which erroneous versions of Round Tower history were used to bolster myths of a ‘primordial Gaeldom’, with the towers becoming part of nationalist iconography alongside shamrocks, wolfhounds, red-haired women and harps. This kind of cultural nationalism was specifically “fed to the American Irish market” of the day, with facsimile Round Towers even being used in initiation ceremonies of the Ancient Order of Hibernians.6 

“Hey, is that real? She couldn’t be.” – Sean Thornton, The Quiet Man, 1952

It is impossible to separate Ireland’s current narrative identity from that of the United States, given our complete immersion in Western mass media. Indeed, Ireland’s construction of ‘global Irishness’ – namely the figure of the plucky, roguish underdog – is appropriated from Irish American culture, rather than the other way round.7 In promoting this kind of essential Gaelic character, we run the risk of propagating dangerously ethnonationalist and exclusionary narratives that nostalgically long for ‘simpler times’, with all their patriarchal familiarity. 

Meanwhile, American pop cultural narratives often simplify the struggles faced by Irish people at the turn of the century, in order to create their own foundational myth. Epic land-rush capers such as the 1992 flop, Far and Away, show displaced but spirited emigrants, braving the Atlantic to gain prosperity with nothing but hard work and perseverance. This fantasy of the American Dream has endured as the country’s origin story, relying on a European emigrant perspective that would become the basis for white nationalism in America, an ideology enthusiastically embraced by many Irish immigrants.8 In the late 1800s, Irish American workers moved westwards across the United States, laying the Transcontinental Railway line. They organised into regional gangs, following a shared history of agrarian struggle back home, and fought each other for jobs, purposely displacing many African Americans and minority workers. Noel Ignatiev writes that “there have been (and continue to be) moments when an anticapitalist course is a real possibility and that the adherence of some workers to an alliance with capital on the basis of shared ‘whiteness’ has been and is the greatest obstacle to the realization of these possibilities.”9 

“We don’t need hope; what we need is confidence and the capacity to act.” – Mark Fisher

Throughout this research process, we have looked backwards – contrary to the arrow of progress – in search of moments of lost potential in our history that could evolve Ireland’s narrative identity today. One such moment came during the Land War in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when the cause of tenant farmers was identified as being central to the Irish national interest. Through public speeches, songs and grassroots activism, an Irish national identity was constructed in opposition to landlords and British imperialists.¹⁰ This lies in stark contrast to today’s ‘Brand Ireland’ – a land of a thousand welcomes to tax-avoidant tech giants and their energy-hungry data centres. Mark Fisher argued that direct action alone will not be sufficient to halt capitalist expansion; we “need to act indirectly, by generating new narratives, figures and conceptual frames.”¹¹ Perhaps it’s time for a new mythology.

Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty are 

collaborative artists based in the Northwest of Ireland who use performance, video, sound installation and storytelling, informed by 

site-responsive research, in order to open up spaces of renewed reflection.

ruthandniamh.info

Notes:

¹ Svetlana Boym, ‘The Future of Nostalgia’, 2001, in The Svetlana Boym Reader (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) p225

² Mary Cosgrove, ‘Paul Henry and Achill Island’, 1995 [achill247.com]

³ Stephanie Rains, The Irish American in Popular Culture 1945-2000, (Irish Academic Press, 2007) p111

⁴ Padraic Fogarty, ‘The Slow Death of Irish Nature’, 2018 [cassandravoices.com]

⁵ Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, (Cork University Press 1996) p140

6 ibid, p143

7 Stephanie Rains, ibid, p140

8 Noel Ignatiev, ‘How the Irish became White’, 1995, p3

9 ibid, p212

¹⁰ Tomás Mac Sheoin, ‘What happened to the peasants? Material for a history of an alternative tradition of resistance in Ireland’, 2017 [interfacejournal.net]

¹¹ Mark Fisher, ‘Abandon Hope, summer is coming’, 2015 [k-punk.org]

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On 13 November 2021, predictably disappointing news for Earth’s citizens and planetary wellbeing emerged from the COP26 summit in Glasgow. Greta Thunberg and activists responded by urgently calling on UN Secretary General, António Guterres, to declare the climate crisis a Global Level 3 Emergency – the UN’s highest category – to enact a coordinated effort, similar to the global pandemic response. But importantly, a seismic cultural shift from the ground up is also urgently needed. More than science or politics, informed creativity has social power to imaginatively and inclusively introduce citizens’ hearts to new values and activities that will advance a just and life-sustaining era.

In Ireland, the Department of Education is developing strategies for the momentous UNESCO-mandated shift across the formal and informal learning landscape to prioritise citizens’ urgent understanding of integrated sustainability and social justice. For the creative sector, this shift will insist on ‘ecoliteracy’ and collective-planetary wellbeing values in education. Corresponding training for cultural policy writers, art administrators and educators, and new long-term funding models to sustain creative workers interested in maintaining community wellbeing, is also foreseen¹.

In trying to imagine such widespread sustainable cultural renewal, the new artist-led Breaking Cover Collective developed engaging performative responses to the ecological emergency in 2020, including an innovative six-month ecoliteracy training programme. On 4 September 2021 the collective staged an inaugural two-hour performance for 100 people in the grounds of IMMA.

Embodying wisdom, beauty and an inclusive ethos needed for a better world, the 15 members of the collective were led by Paola Catizone (performance artist, facilitator and member of IMMA’s Visitor Engagement team) and included: Rennie Buenting (organic farmer and ceramic artist), Carmel Ennis (gardener and dancer), Karen Aguiar (dancer), Thomas Morelly (illustrator and XR activist), Laura O’Brien (embodiment practitioner), Miriam Sweeney (student), Mary Hoy (visual artist), Paul Regan (performance artist), Hilary Williams (performance artist) and Sophie Rieu (therapist and artist), Rebecca Bradley (painter), Tom Duffy (musician, artist and educator) and Deirdre Lane (environmental activist and consultant).

Breaking Cover Programme

Paola Catizone has over 30-years’ experience in performance art and holistic education. During the first lockdown, Paola recognised the unprecedented pause in human activity as a window of opportunity to reimagine sustainable cultural renewal. Paola developed a programme proposal on art and ecology and initially imagined involving 18 to 35-year-old participants. However, given the complexity of the topic, many who gravitated to Paola’s invitation and committed to attend sessions over six months, were mid-career creatives and professionals, perhaps better established to grapple with this complex and confronting topic, as well as younger people and students. Older, seasoned artists also became involved. It was realised that the real power of the group was because it was intergenerational.

During the pandemic lockdown, startling images from global media of animals ‘breaking cover’ as humans withdrew, were an important reminder that thriving ecologies are paramount for interconnected personal, collective, and planetary wellbeing. ‘Cows on the beach, coyotes in the car park’ became the working subtitle. 

The Social Power of Performance 

IMMA agreed to Paola hosting two in-person pilot sessions at the front lawn pavilion in the summer of 2020. Working with physical, relational and educational group processes, the feedback from participants was resoundingly positive. However due to COVID-19 restrictions, the six-month Breaking Cover training programme was delivered online. This meant a larger group (oscillating between 30 and 50 people) benefited. Invited eco-social artists, scientists, philosophers and activists – myself (The Hollywood Forest Story / Haumea Ecoversity), Lisa Fingleton (Kerry County Council’s first artist-in-residence/The Barna Way), Mary Reynolds (We Are The Ark), Oana Sanziana Marian (Active Hope Ireland) and V’cenza Cirefice (Dublin EcoFeminists) – helped initiate participants into the expansive concerns that ecological insights advance. Ideas from ecological philosophers Gregory Bateson, Glenn Albrecht and Joanna Macy provided foundational concepts. Whole-of-institution co-creative processes for conviviality, inclusivity and political ecological reorganisation were inspired by Andrea Geyer’s IMMA exhibition, ‘When We’. Also crucial were relational, dialogical art processes and employing performance art’s historic politicism to engage public awareness.

From July to September 2021, Paola’s outdoor workshops for the collective included movement and music, Theatre of the Oppressed, Gestalt, Slow Looking Art, and performance practices. Artist Celina Muldoon visited three times to support the process. Composed of professional artists, enthusiastic students, educators, movement experts and activists, Breaking Cover Collective’s combined resources and co-creative activity, accelerated learning and powerfully motivated the collective toward their first performance. 

Inaugural Performance 

The Breaking Cover performance at IMMA was comprised of four parts over two hours:

Individual performances: These arose from the group’s tension between individualism and awareness of interconnectedness. 

The drum: After the individual performances, a drum called the collective to the IMMA courtyard to form a large circle. Breaking Cover member Tom Duffy’s experience with ritualistic Brazilian drumming reverberated an ethical transmission for the event, as within the drum each performer had previously written their intentions for their work. After gathering, the collective walked in a slow procession to the formal gardens. A viewer later shared that it came naturally to follow slowly along, to the pace of the drum.

The Banquet: In the formal gardens was a long banquet table, decorated with herbs, plant dyes and animal skulls. After a spoken-word lament by Deirdre Lane, focussing on Ireland’s boglands, the formal-looking dining event degenerated into chaos. Performers noisily toasted and poured their drinks onto the table, then gradually served the meal by emptying three wheelbarrows of earth onto plates, which overflowed onto the table, forming a mound of layered electrical and plastic waste, resembling landfill. Excessive consumption was the theme of the banquet, and viewers later shared that feelings of grief and shame overwhelmed them while watching.

The Die In: As the once beautiful banquet table degenerated, keening from Paola and Hilary Williams prompted the group to walk towards a meadow. There, XR activist and artist Thomas Morelly with a megaphone called out the names of extinct species. Performers fell and rose, dying over and over, until the last creature, the dodo, was called. The lighting of a small flame symbolising hope concluded the event, and performers led a slow walk back to IMMA’s Studio 10. 

The Breaking Cover Collective’s vision was to activate the power of performance art to communicate the urgency of the ecological emergency and re-enchant our relations to Earth and the wider community of life. With this positive response, the collective hopes to create future ecological performative actions in the near future. 

Dr Cathy Fitzgerald is an Ecosocial artist, researcher and founding director of Haumea Ecoversity.

Breaking Cover, Art and Ecology Encounters, is an IMMA programme which began with a set of pilot workshops in 2020. In 2021, IMMA funded a six-month Breaking Cover Programme. Paola Catizone and all Breaking Cover participants would like to express their gratitude to IMMA for its vision and for its support. In particular, we are thankful to Helen O’Donoghue, (Senior Curator and Head of Engagement and Learning) and Louise Osborne (Engagement and Learning Fellow) for making this project possible.

haumea.ie

Notes:

¹The author gratefully acknowledges a 2020 Art Council Professional Development Award that enabled her to receive accreditation in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) with leading professors involved in the UNESCO chair of ESD at Earth Charter International, UN UPeace, Costa Rica. Cathy and Paola also wish to acknowledge Dr Paul O’Brien’s prescient teaching on art and ecology over many years at NCAD, which supported their work.

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Joanne Laws: We were thrilled to hear that Array has been nominated for this year’s Turner Prize, along with four other UK-based art collectives. Do you have a sense of the work that led to your nomination? 

Emma Campbell: It still does feel very bizarre when people congratulate us! As far as we understood from the jurors this year, they were specifically trying to look at arts collectives who had in some way kept up a version of their practice during lockdown, perhaps around issues of community cohesion. They also mentioned the ‘Jerwood Collaborate!’ exhibition we did in London, but to be honest, our social media presence seems to have been a big part of it. We were also asked to do a video for A-N, because they had a special series on artists and social change, which the jurors mentioned. 

Clodagh Lavelle: Normally nominations are based on an exhibition that has happened previously, but because no galleries were really open last year, it focused on groups who were still visibly trying to work together in isolation. We created videos together, made online work and kept that sense of community alive through birthday nights and dress-up Zooms like the QFT screening of the DUP Opera, for example.

JL: What was the rationale for originally establishing the Array collective? Did you have any founding principles, in terms of your collective identity, or how you might define a discourse or build communities for your collaborative practice?

EC: It happened organically at first, because there are lots of overlaps between friendship, art practice and community practice, but also because we were all just at the same rallies and protests. It wasn’t as if we were dropping into another community to speak on behalf of anyone else; all of us were in some way directly affected by the stuff we were protesting about, like equal marriage and abortion rights. A couple of people from Array were running an activist stall, while others were doing stuff with Outburst and Pride, but it wasn’t until we were asked to do the Jerwood exhibition in London, that we began to formalise our work. 

CL: For the Jerwood show, we realised that we were a collective, rather than just 11 people putting in a lot of work. We didn’t talk about our values before that because they were implicit in some ways, but we did write a statement for the Jerwood exhibition and organised a symposium with ‘house rules’ which outlined being respectful to one another and having the craic, whilst talking about some serious issues. We’re all about hospitality and activism and karaoke and food and dancing and acting the maggot!

JL: The political situation in Northern Ireland is central to your projects, which often take the form of public processions, rallies and material activism on issues like reproductive rights or equal marriage. What is the role of art in giving visibility to national conversations such as these? 

EC: I think art was really central to the campaign for abortion rights particularly. I think what works really well at protests are these kind of repetitive motifs – like Leanne Dunne’s repeal jumper, for example – which people can very easily identify with, as part of a larger community. Artists can also bring a bit more reflection and nuance to conversations on sometimes difficult issues. Because these issues are so serious and traumatic for many people, it’s nice to be able to have something that can lighten the load a little bit with a sense of humour. I think colour and spectacle is really key. It’s been important for social movements for hundreds of years, when you think of trade unionist banners or Suffragettes banners, the Irish rebellion and so forth. However, none of us are under any illusions that it’s the art that makes the change. We are very aware that we are a small part of much larger movements, where there’s a lot going on. 

JL: Many of Array’s members have backgrounds in artist-led spaces, most notably as former directors of Catalyst Arts in Belfast. Has this artist-led grounding and DIY ethos has shaped your working methods? 

EC: Neither of us have been involved with Catalyst but others have. The unpaid directorships can make them inaccessible for some, but others gained good insight and experience. Array are careful enough to not take on work that would push us beyond our reasonable capabilities as a group. We’ve made decisions to decline work before, just because we thought we couldn’t take it on, since it might not be good for everybody’s mental health or whatever. Lots of us are involved in community activist organisations, some work with young people, a number of us work with Household, and these kinds of things inform what we do.

CL: And the culture is definitely changing, as we are becoming more aware of artists working for free. The labour exchange model of days gone by – “I’ll help you out, you help me out” – has lessened as we have more life commitments, homes, children etc. There can be a lot of burn-out in the arts, especially within that model of working and it limits who can take part as well. The whole Turner thing is a big deal, and it came as a surprise. One of the things we have for this project is a self-care/mental health message thread, in case anyone finds it too overwhelming, so that we can be there to support each other.

EC: We’re very clear with each other that we don’t expect everyone to be putting in 100% all of the time. That’s one of the joys of having 11 of us. People have multiple day jobs and caring responsibilities, so it’s very much about making accommodations for that and making sure that nobody feels too much under pressure. There’s also something in the safety of being with your people – the kind of people you don’t feel like you have to explain yourself to all the time. 

JL: It’s worth considering the dynamic of friendship – which, historically, has sustained all kinds of co-ops, collectives and artist-led projects. While artistic collaboration, peer support and shared labour are all central to the process of making things public, it is friendship and the desire for collectivity – the parties, shared meals and common interests – that allows these things to endure. Are you all good friends?

CL: I think that is absolutely key. We enjoy each other’s company and have a deep love and respect for each other. Because of the culture of doing everything for nothing, you could so easily give it all up, if you were driving each other soft. We drink together, we dance together, we enjoy sparking off each other and coming up with ideas and all of that is definitely rooted in friendship and care for each other – that’s more important than anything else. Yes, our careers as artists are important to us, but our relationships and love for each other is key. 

EC: And I think that even extends beyond the 11 of us in Array. We don’t just lift up each other’s work; we also want to share with our other friends in the community and draw attention to other people and bring them onboard. There’s something really welcoming about the arts community in Belfast. It’s really small and supportive and there’s generally a sense of camaraderie and pulling each other through some awful shit as well, not just the cultural backdrop of being in the north but also what Clodagh was talking about – this idea of being instrumentalised for your labour as an artist and the precariousness of our spaces. Even at a base level, Array have been my childcare on occasion; we’ve been through many life events together and it’s nice to have our art family. 

Array Collective are a group of individual artists rooted in Belfast, who join together to create collaborative actions in response to the socio-political issues affecting Northern Ireland. 

arraystudiosbelfast.com

The Turner Prize exhibition will take place at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry from 29 September 2021 to 12 January 2022, as part of the UK City of Culture 2021 celebrations. The winner will be announced on 1 December 2021 at an award ceremony at Coventry Cathedral broadcast on the BBC.

theherbert.org

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Matt Packer: The Experimental Film Society (EFS) was founded in Tehran, four years before your move to Dublin. To what extent did these different contexts alter your vision for EFS? 

Rouzbeh Rashidi: In 2000 I founded the Experimental Film Society. I made films in Iran until 2004 and then I moved to Ireland. During my filmmaking adventures in Iran, I would organise private screenings of new work (my movies and films by others) for friends and peers. During that time, I realised that you could not expect any support from film festivals or government agencies. If you want to survive, you must create the culture you want to be part of and build it yourself from scratch. Naturally, it is not a one-person job, so an experimental film collective was needed to achieve this goal. When I came to Dublin, I continued making films. As time passed, I came into contact with like-minded filmmakers in Ireland, and EFS started to grow again. Although an international entity, it must be admitted that the Middle East and Ireland form the two definite geographical poles of EFS. Arriving in Ireland, I found myself in a similar situation to what I had experienced in Iran: Irish film history can boast a few notable figures in experimental film, but there was never a substantial tradition of alternative cinema. Nothing was happening I could relate to or fit into as a filmmaker. Therefore, creating the safety and infrastructure of EFS was the only way for me to survive, both as an avant-garde artist and immigrant at the same time.

MP: One of the things that interests me about EFS is the relationship between the ‘institution’ of EFS and its constituent filmmakers. You have been very active in writing about your work, self-organising screening programmes, and publishing anthologies of the EFS back catalogue. There’s a comprehensive, self-appointed, institutional ‘apparatus’ that surrounds your work as filmmakers that seems to be driven by more than just the pragmatics of promoting and distributing your work?

RR: I am not a writer; I am only a filmmaker and nothing else. But I write my ideas to contextualise and support my work. I find it very constructive to create a literature of ideas about what I do. All of us at EFS are engaged with the craft of filmmaking and are filmmakers first and foremost. But we are also animated by a passion for film history; our films are constantly interacting with, incorporating, or ingesting the history of film directly or indirectly in a creative and mysterious love affair. Therefore, a platform to discuss this has become necessary.

After more than two decades of making and screening films, I came to the realisation that I need to explain myself in critical terms to survive as an artist. And by ‘survive’, I mean to continue making and screening films. EFS has organically created an underground niche for itself, but the type of work it produces is still fragile and emerging, as far as its visibility is concerned. For a long time, I felt the work should speak for itself, but I have seen that frank and, if necessary, controversial discussions around it have only had positive outcomes. Therefore I have decided to systematically write about what I do in my films, what I think about cinema in general, and how I feel about the work of others.

MP: Historically, there’s been a lot of discussion about definitions of cinema, film, video, which have in turn been channeled through the separate discourses of film and visual art respectively. I’m not sure I want to rehearse these arguments here, but I do think it’s interesting that you’re currently presenting the work of EFS within a visual arts exhibitionary context at Project Arts Centre. To what extent are you interested in these different conditions of presentation – the exhibition, the screening etc. – in terms of how they ‘perform’ the work itself? 

RR: For me as a filmmaker, the most important thing is to refute the fact held by many, that the invention of cinema is now fully formed and complete. Consequently, I never believed that cinema only exists in traditional screenings and presentations such as in theatres. At the same time, I never accepted that cinematic material presented within a visual arts exhibitionary context betrays their cinematic DNA. I am always interested in discovering and finding out how a cinematic project can inhabit a space. It all depends on how you present, weaponise, juxtapose and orchestrate your projects. Every film I ever made began as an exhaustively plotted narrative in its primordial stage. By the time it was rendered, filtered and materialised through me, it had lost its original form, context and even purpose. What remains is an unexplained ancient artefact in the form of an apparition – an eolith with the free will to cast a spell – a ritualistic experience for the audience designed by the filmmaker. Hence, I always seek a traditional or non-traditional space to present these works, as long as I am committed to the idea of ‘cinema’ itself. 

MP: I’d like to turn to your film work, specifically your ‘Homo Sapiens Project’ (2011-ongoing), which is a kind of vast compilation ‘framework’ of shorter video pieces. It’s a mammoth project, both in terms of its scope and undertaking. I’m interested in the way that ‘HSP’ renders the human body with a certain elasticity, both as an ambivalent subject of the lens and also in the act of viewership – an engagement which can only ever feel partial and insignificant when faced with the work’s totality. 

RR: Perhaps if I provide some of the reasons I decided to create the ‘Homo Sapiens Project’, it would somehow answer your question. I began by asking a fundamental and yet simple question: what is the notion and existence of cinema in the 21st century? Form, in my view, is the most essential and vital part of cinema. When you conceive a unique form, then narrative (and I believe all cinema is narrative to a degree), drama, or story can be articulated with it. Then I realised that I needed a system that provided me with the ability to engage with filmmaking on a technical level, such as experimenting with different camera formats, lenses, filters and apparatus. I also wanted to eliminate the name, identity and even purpose of each instalment without having the pressure of putting them in the circulation of screening and distribution. This agenda perhaps correlated with my continuing existential grasp of immigration. The films one makes are nothing but the haunting shadows and lights of the movies that one has seen in the past. There is no original film, except for the very first ones by the medium’s pioneers. Therefore I decided to render all my experiments through the prism of science-fiction and horror cinema, because they are the foundation of my upbringing as a cinephile and discovery of the medium. 

Finally, I wanted to create a project that I would forget about immediately on the spot, even while in the process of making it. Due to the massive production rate of the work, I can’t remember making much of it. What this amnesia has not swallowed up seems to exist in an artificial memory, as if implanted in my mind by someone else without my knowledge. The whole project seems so alien and distant. I always dreamed about having a secret underground cinematic life in my work, like a metaphorical secret addiction. If my feature films can be seen as a day job to earn a living, I created ‘Homo Sapiens Project’ as a private nightlife to feed my addiction to filmmaking. They serve no purpose, and I could comfortably live without them. The sheer volume of instalments in this series makes it impossible for audiences to watch all of them, yet I still plan to continue making them. 

Matt Packer is the Director of Eva International.

eva.ie

Rouzbeh Rashidi is an Iranian-Irish filmmaker and founder of the Experimental Film Society.

rouzbehrashidi.com

The exhibition, ‘Luminous Void: Twenty Years of Experimental Film Society’, ran at Project Arts Centre from 13 May to 25 June. A book of the same name was also launched in late 2020, which can be ordered on the EFS website. 

projectartscentre.ie

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When we want to know___ about things we don’t know ___senses tell us ___how we feel¹

The Record Keepers is a sculptural artwork at Cabra Library, commissioned specifically for children aged six to twelve by Dublin City Libraries together with Dublin City Arts Office and curated by Sheena Barrett. This artwork comprises a series of clear Perspex display plinths containing amethyst crystals, purple powder-coated bent steel forms with large ellipse-shaped bases, amethyst-printed lycra fabric hanging from the upright steel structures, and a series of shiny, purple glazed ceramic coils resting on the surfaces of screens, steel and Perspex. 

Two semi-circular, fabric-covered forms act as seating devices. These forms extend an invitation to the audience to sit around and with the work. It is an invitation to contemplate the work by ‘being-with’ rather than ‘looking-at’ the artwork, providing a platform for a slower form of contemplation that suggests habitation and hospitality. On three screens placed among these objects are a series of video works that act as an affective, sensory mediation tool as to how visitors might engage with the work. These video works encourage an attentiveness to the senses and how they can be engaged to experience and explore the objects in the space. 

The Record Keepers is part of a series of works that I have been making that fall under the banner of ‘Tools for Wellbeing’, which considers the talismanic use of objects (particularly artworks) as tools for healing, pleasure and joy. ‘Tools for Wellbeing’ springs from my intrigue for the moments when the human body and other matter come into proximity for the purposes of non-medical, non-scientific healing. It holds the implication that encounters created in the context of sculptural art making have the potential to reveal a deep human faith in the power of objects, materials and the agency of things other than human. 

In the production of The Record Keepers, and in my practice more broadly, I pose a number of questions that are central to generating the work. Can some sculptural artworks be a space where the truer material relationship between humans, matter and objects can be discovered through an allowance for multisensory encounters? Can artworks, and our experiences of them, be phrased as a unique engagement with materials and objects, unlike any other type of utilitarian, tool-use engagements with objects in the world? Can certain sculptural artworks be a space where invisible material exchanges, and vibrant encounters between the matter of the human body and other non-human entities, become sensate or reveal themselves to us? Are these encounters where we more fully acknowledge the agency of objects and materials? Or as curator Sheena Barrett remarks in the mediation text from The Record Keepers: “Can an exhibition make us feel better?”² The Record Keepers is an artwork that also happens to have been specifically commissioned for a young audience, aged between six and twelve years old. My methods for The Record Keepers were ultimately no different than those I would use for less defined publics, or the broader publics that I would ordinarily consider as the audience of my work. The same questions were at stake. 

The Record Keepers engages encounters with the senses and particularly with joy, through the repeated motifs of crystalline objects, colour, form and surface, producing an exuberance or excess. Joy is posed in this work as an important and radical (though not exclusively) human experience, that involves all of our sensory and intellectual faculties. The Record Keepers proposes a joyful materialism that implicates human and non-human agency and engagement and suggests this artwork as a space for sensory exploration that includes language and sense of sight, but that also exceeds it. In fact, this exhibition was originally conceived to allow the primarily young audience to engage with a sense of touch, inviting gentle handling of the amethysts. This haptic engagement with the objects was intended as a way of re-navigating and reprioritising the sensory order for encountering the things around us – in other words, to circumvent a (perceived) reliance on sight as a primary mode for encounters with artworks. 

In the publication, Matters of Care, María Puig de la Bellacasa carefully and critically describes what the implications of touch may be for imagining different forms of knowledge and more than human worlds:

“…much like care, touch is called upon not as dominant, but as a neglected mode of relating with compelling potential to restore a gap that keeps knowledge from embracing a fully embodied subjectivity. So how, then, is reclaiming touch opening to other ways of thinking if it is already somehow an alternative onto-epistemic path? …thinking from, with, and for marginalized existences as a potential for perceiving, fostering and working for other worlds possible.”³

De la Bellacasa describes here the potential of touch for new worlding by engaging new forms of embodied, inclusive intersectional, materialist, feminist knowledge. De la Bellacasa is not uncritical of the deployment of touch in this essay and fully considers the ethics of touch, noting the etymology of touch from the Italian toccare, meaning ‘to hit’. She notes that to touch “doesn’t automatically mean being in touch with oneself or the other.”⁴ Ultimately, touch, when deployed ‘care-fully’ is proposed by De la Bellacasa as being “reclaimed as a form of caring knowing.”⁵ This type of ‘caring-knowing’ resonates strongly with my sculptural studio practice and specifically with the work produced for this exhibition.

The Record Keepers was originally scheduled to open in mid-March 2020. Of course, the planned haptic, physical engagement with this work was halted by the onset of the pandemic. Suddenly, surfaces presented themselves to us as dangerous; touch meant contamination and exposure. What could this mean for this exhibition, and more broadly for my practice that is so grounded in material encounters, proximities to objects and to the collective experience of viewing and making art? Acting with care in the context of the pandemic meant the removal of touch. A year later, I have returned to thinking that after prolonged periods of screen-based virtual experiences, what may be desired and even essential, are the touches full of ‘careful knowing’ that material and physical encounters and proximities with artworks produce. The exhibition was installed in December 2020, when we had a brief window to place the work in Cabra Library. Soon after, the library closed again to the public, as another steep rise in COVID-19 cases occurred, and at the time of writing, it has not reopened. The exhibition remains untouched. 

Despite this, the exhibition has been seen by over 500 children online, utilising video footage of the exhibition. Multi-sensory engagements have been created via considered haptic workshops delivered through Cabra Library, Dublin City Arts Office and Superprojects, and created by artists Olivia Normile and Claire Halpin. These workshops call on senses and emotions generated by the imagery and footage of the work. While this is a proxy for a much-desired real-life engagement with the work, the responses and drawings, care-fully mediated by Olivia and Claire and produced by the young participants, have been a revelation about what is possible in terms of haptic online pedagogies and how we can (re)engage our senses via simple mechanisms of drawing, painting, watercolour and artistic practices.

When hands touch gently ___we meet with things __we join together ____in space and time⁶  

Barbara Knežević is an artist and educator living and working in Dublin.

Notes: 

¹Barbara Knežević, The Record Keepers, 2020, HD Video.

²Sheena Barrett, exhibition text for The Record Keepers (Dublin: Dublin City Arts Office, 2020).

³María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) p 98.

⁴Ibid. p 99.

⁵Ibid. p 98.

⁶Barbara Knežević, The Record Keepers, 2020, HD Video.

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