My heart leapt when I read his lacerating take on The Clash: “The music is unredeemable: a frustrated, frustrating, blocked, blunt, ugly sludginess. None of the Pistols’ cascading Glam power, none of Lydon’s sorcerous incandescence…” His assessment of Glastonbury was equally glorious: “What’s positively sinister about Glastonbury now is that it’s not just accidentally crap, it’s systematically crap – the hidden message screams out: it’s all finished, roll up, roll up, for the necrophiliac spectacle, it’s all over.”

But if there was frustration and fury, there was also unrelenting fascination with – and mesmerised fixation on – pop’s most urgent or undervalued presences. K-Punk’s texts combined an entirely non-precious and energetically conversational commentary on the passing world of pop culture with generous, undemonstrative displays of theoretical agility and – increasingly, over time – clear-sighted political insight and commitment.

When Francis Halsall, Tim Stott and I had the chance in 2006 to organise a mini-symposium at NCAD, K-Punk – AKA Mark Fisher – was the first name on our list. And to be honest, our main reason for wanting to plan this symposium was so that we could bring Mark to Dublin. Hence our chosen theme of ‘Hauntology’: a punning post-structuralist concept first dreamt-up by Jacques Derrida, but made more immediately compelling by Mark. In a series of revelatory blog posts and related articles (later collected in his 2014 book Ghosts of My Life), Mark helped to broaden the scope and implications of ‘hauntology’ through explorations of ghostliness in assorted songs, stories, sites and images – sensing out the manifold and melancholy ways in which contemporary culture remains haunted by the spectres of unresolved pasts or unrealised futures.

In different forms, with varying intensities, the ‘spectral’ was for Mark a source of necessary disruption: its disconcerting effects were flickers of instability in the apparently ‘real’ world that we are conditioned to believe in: that “sunny, gleaming world of the postmodern or the end of history” (to borrow from Fredric Jameson, a thinker whom Mark greatly admired). Mark’s own term for our apparently post-historical, ideologically static present-day predicament was ‘Capitalist Realism’. It’s a concept discussed in the accompanying article: one of the many columns he wrote for VAN – pieces commissioned, with typical savviness, by the unforgettable Jason Oakley, who tragically passed away in October 2015.

Capitalist Realism was also the subject (and title) of Mark’s best-known book: a text written in resistance to the shrugging assumption that “not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it”. The book rejects the “business ontology” that has begun to dominate all forms of labour, learning and leisure, rebutting the commonplace understanding that “it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business”.

Capitalist Realism is a book that I’ve recommended to scores of students over recent years – but more encouragingly, it’s a book that students have repeatedly recommended to me. More and more, its arguments seem relevant to the current ‘realities’ of education: to the experience of students and to the demands made on staff. And, in fact, one standout memory I have of Mark is of his speech at a degree results meeting for the Goldsmiths Department of Visual Cultures in 2015 (Mark was a lecturer and exams officer there during my stint as external examiner), during which he made a special point of both celebrating the exceptional efforts of students and staff, and also challenging, with impressive clarity and sincerity, some of the exhausting, absurd new norms of life in higher education.

One crucial thread through Mark’s work is depression. Not only did he make an important case for re-politicising mental health – encouraging us to de-personalise depression, refusing the “privatisation of stress”, connecting it instead to wider situations of social malaise – but he was also courageously frank about his own struggles. Even as now, with deep sadness, we learn that these struggles finally overwhelmed him, we can be sure that his writings have inspired numerous readers who suffer from similar types of ongoing distress. ‘Inspiration’ is, indeed, what most comes to mind in relation to Mark. I can’t imagine how much those closest to him –most of all his wife and son – will miss him; but I know Mark and his work will continue to be an inspiration for many, many people, for a very long time to come.

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In my column for this publication a few months ago, I called for a new negativity, in the spirit of Herbert Marcuse’s claim that the proper function of art was to be a “Great Refusal”. What better answer could I get than the massive ‘NO’ painted on the grass of Parliament Square in London during one of the recent series of protests against government cuts in the UK? Only four weeks ago, this kind of negativity still seemed to be only a distant possibility in a place like the UK. When, at a conference on public art and civility organised by SKOR in Amsterdam at the end of October, I suggested that there would soon be expressions of massive public anger in the UK, some of the UK-based delegates were sceptical, accusing me of “revolutionary nostalgia”. I was confident that they were being unduly dismissive – but I still didn’t anticipate the scale of the recent protests.

Like Ireland, the UK has been at the forefront of what I have called ‘capitalist realism’ – the view that, since capitalism is the only game in town, all we can do is find a way of accommodating ourselves to it. Part of leftist capitalist realism has been the disavowal of people’s own pessimism and disillusion and its projection onto others. Nothing will happen; people will remain apathetic. That kind of diagnosis has been blown apart by the astonishing student movement that has changed the political landscape in the UK so dramatically since November. Apathy is dead, said a placard at one of the London protests. The game has changed, the protestors have chanted, and so it has. What we’ve seen is an efflorescence of oppositional activity: not only massive protests – which have led to increasingly naked displays of antagonism – but occupations and flashmobs invading chainstores. Comparisons with ’68 have inevitably been made, but this movement is in many ways much more remarkable than what happened 40 years ago. ’68 came at the end of the “cultural revolution” of the 60s – a series of challenges to the monolithic Marxist meta-narrative (its claim that everything could be reduced to class conflict). ’68 presupposed both a credible leftist political project (from which it could deviate) and a social democratic context (which provided the conditions for its exorbitant demands). But both of these have definitively disappeared. They are a distant memory even for the parents of many of the teenagers who took part in the recent UK protests. The current movement has had to build itself up almost from nothing, in a situation where the revolutionary left has no infrastructure and the moderate left has long since acquiesced to capitalist realism; and, perhaps most astonishingly, it has been constructed by those who had previously been the most obvious victims of capitalist realism – the young. And it should also not be forgotten – even though it often is – that ’68 failed. The new breed of protestors expect to win. They do not have the ingrained defeatism – and romanticism of failure – that has been the vice of so much of the so-called radical left since the 60s. Another difference between ’68 and now is the class composition of the protestors. Where the university students of the 60s were a small elite, many of the students involved in the current wave of demonstrations are working class. ’68 was about a short-lived alliance between workers and students, but many of today’s students are already workers, forced to do part-time – and often full-time – jobs in order to support their studies. Similarly, the Fordist model of the worker (as someone who does 40 hours a week in a factory for 40 years of their life) has long since been replaced by precarious work, which assumes “flexibility” and short-term contracts. Finally, new technology has played a crucial role in the current movement. The rapid-response nature of the protests has only been made possible by social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

In the UK, the government has targeted education, the arts, public services and benefits, imposing cuts that are breathtakingly punitive. The justification for cuts in all these areas has been the capitalist realist rationale that “there is no more money”, but opponents have rightly identified this as a thin pretext used by the rump of neoliberalism in order to pursue its uncompleted ideological project of totally eliminating public space. But this has created the conditions for an alliance between all those groups, which are ‘naturally’ hostile to neoliberalism. In terms of art and education, what we are potentially seeing here is the reconsolidation of a relationship between bohemia – those elements of the bourgeoisie, which disdain business values – and the working class. That relationship – which allowed the arty working class to escape drudgery, and for the bohemian middle class to make contact with the mutational energies of proletarian culture – was the engine of British and Irish popular culture during the 60s, 70s and 80s. Could today’s antagonism revive this? I see no reason not to be optimistic.

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TINKA BECHERT REFLECTS ON HER EXPERIENCE OF ART AND SCIENCE RESIDENCIES, INCLUDING THE SPARK RESIDENCY IN LEITRIM.

My father dedicated his life to aerodynamics, turbulence research and the then emerging fields of bionics and biomimicry, so I have been around the sciences most of my life. When I was five, we visited the NASA facilities in Houston. Physics had a tangible aura of excitement and adventure for me, but it was only much later that I began to understand how challenging this highly creative discipline really is. My upbringing instilled a firm belief that human curiosity, wonder and a need for reason are shared driving forces across both the arts and the sciences.

There has been a growing interest in art-science collaborations in recent years, both in Ireland and internationally. A number of residencies and awards currently support various opportunities for inter-disciplinary collaboration – a proposition that seems to merge the apparent objectivity of scientific research with the more subjective individual experience of artistic endeavor. As a visual artist, I have been invited to participate in a number of residencies across a range of settings – from museums and academic institutions to laboratories and factories – and have developed several bodies of work at the intersections of art and science. Working in scientific contexts has been hugely enriching for my practice and has led on to many other opportunities.

In 2010 I took part in a residency in Giza, Egypt, where I initiated my ‘Triangulations’ project retracing the expedition made in the 1840s by the Egyptologist Richard Lepsius. The bulk of the project was realised during another residency the following year at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW), one of Germany’s most distinguished and historic institutions. The work was well received and I was particularly pleased with the positive reactions from the in-house scientists who showed great interest in the complex project. I was subsequently invited by the Neues Museum, Berlin, to outline my project in a book about Lepsius that was published in 2012. It was particularly gratifying to feel that Egyptologists within the specialist field of archaeology perceived my contribution as valuable.

In 2013, I was invited to showcase a 10-year retrospective of my work in a large Kunsthalle outside Berlin. A comprehensive monograph, Of Painting and other Adventures, was published to coincide with the exhibition, which offered useful ways to contextualise the work and helped me recognise my recurring interests. I had initially been concerned that developing research-based projects in science settings might somehow negatively impact on my established painting practice; however, my use of different materials across a range of media has in fact reaffirmed painting as the backbone of my practice, particularly regarding my approaches to composition and installation.

The following year I undertook a fellowship at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, Institute for Advanced Study, Delmenhorst, Germany, where I worked alongside neuroscientists to observe cutting edge research on neuroplasticity. It has been important for me to consolidate my experiences in science contexts with gallery exhibitions. Having been out on a ‘pioneering limb’ with scientists for a long time, I found my gallery exhibition in April 2016 very refreshing, not least because I was reminded of the wide-ranging knowledge existing within the art world that sits in contrast to the extreme specialisms that tend to occur in the sciences. Overall, it has been an enriching experience for me to explore the symbiotic relationships between art and science and it is always beneficial to connect with people outside the echo chamber of one’s own peer group.

2016 SPARK ARTISTS’ RESIDENCY PROGRAMME

Last summer I was awarded a six-month supported residency as part of the SPARK Artists’ Residency Programme, a partnership project of Leitrim County Council Arts Office and the Leitrim Local Enterprise Office. The SPARK Residency was initiated in 2012 and is aimed at artists who are interested in working in new environments and companies interested in collaborating with artists and promoting creativity within their organisations. Leitrim County Council Arts Office has been remarkable in developing this residency over the years and has built strong partnerships within the county. Because of the support structures offered, the proximity to my home, and the relatively long duration, SPARK enabled me to develop more in-depth dialogues than are usually possible in residency situations.

The 2016 SPARK Residency was hosted by Prior PLM Medical – a medical device company situated in Carrick-on-Shannon. My recent residency in the neuroscience research centre in Germany, coupled with my previous experience in science settings, meant that I was quite familiar with the medical sector. Prior’s is a family-run business employing about 30 staff members who research, invent and manufacture medical devices in collaboration with firms across Ireland, Europe and the US. Their work is highly ambitious, involving physics-driven research, product design, engineering and precision mold making: a dizzying array of activities and a new world of material investigations for me to learn about.

During the site visit in May 2016, I was pleased to encounter an unexpected open-mindedness towards art and design among the staff. I subsequently found them to be very patient during my observations and questions about their fields of expertise. I hope that my interactions were somewhat mutually beneficial, even if the employees just got to view what they do every day in a new light. I quickly began to understand that one of the major strengths of the company is the way in which scientific theory and material knowledge of tool-making and engineering are successfully interlinked.

During my residency at the company, I learned a lot about their intriguing inventions. I witnessed the highly unusual application of the historic Schlieren imaging technique, which was used in conjunction with innovative medical devices. I encountered engineering processes in which ‘shadows’ facilitate highly precise measurements. The shadowgraph technique dates back to the seventeenth century and has origins in optics and the development of telescopic lenses. The use of shadowgraph processes in the factory makes visible microscopic details, such as thermal differences, that are generally invisible to the human eye.

Making something visible through the use of shadow is an intriguing concept. I began to direct my artistic thinking towards mapping and measuring the ‘immeasurable’. The use of shadow in early cinema and popular culture was also a point of reference, in its capacity to create mysterious, threatening or foreboding atmospheres. Metaphorical notions of shadow also poignantly convey the physical, emotional and psychological aspects of illness that the medical device sector is ultimately trying to assist.

The artworks I developed explore the effects of light and shadow and are punctuated with the inhalations and exhalations of human breath: the literal inspiration and expiration of corporeality. The use of transparent materials in an installation made from industrial packaging offers behind-the-scenes glimpses into the production process. Machines used to manufacture medical devices are theatrically lit to cast sharp shadows. Not only do these machines support man in his frail existence, but they merge and interact to form new entities.

The interactions of organic and mechanical systems take centre stage in a new site-specific artwork, which offers a fitting way to conclude my residency in this remarkable environment. The reception and opening of the exhibition ‘Shadow of Ourselves’ takes place at 6pm on 31 March 2017 in the industrial complex (behind Kennedy’s petrol station), Dublin Road, Carrick-on-Shannon.

Tinka Bechert is an artist, originally from Berlin, who lives and works in Sligo.

Images: Tinka Bechert, Shadowgraph close-up; still from Illuminate.

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Marina Abramovic, Sonja Alhäuser, Domestic Godless, Elif Erkan, Fiona Hallinan, Siobhan McGibbon, Abigail O’Brien, Thomas Rentmeister, Neil Shawcross, Glucksman Gallery, Cork, 25 November 2016 – 19 March 2017

THIS exhibition, curated by Professor John Cryan, Chris Clarke and Fiona Kearney, draws on research by Cryan and colleagues at the Anatomy and Neuroscience department of UCC, in order to “explore how digestion relates to our mental and emotional states”.

A flesh pink wall forms the backdrop to Siobhan McGibbon’s The cell that consumed me (2014). The work comprises three minimal wall-hung lamps and three mechanical hands, each holding a Viewmaster – a device for viewing slides that simulates binocular depth perception. McGibbon has replaced the film slides with cartoonish drawings depicting bodies merging with trolley legs and bulging, blobby, fleshy growths. Venous Malformation (2012) and Proteus Syndrome (2012) are figures created from fiberglass resin painted an immaculate shiny white; realistic and life-size from feet to above knees, they then meld into bulbous, tumorous blobs. The statues’ pristine material seems at odds with the mutation depicted, exaggerating their grotesqueness. These works embody many of the themes and practices that run through the show: art as research laboratory, interdisciplinary crossover, close looking as a tool for acquiring knowledge, the processed versus the raw, a blending of the alluring and the repulsive.

In the video The Onion, Marina Abramovic is shown in close-up eating an onion, her face dominating the frame, with blood red nails and matching lipstick. It is easy to be dismissive of Abramovic, her celebrity status side-lining her artwork, but her artistic persona is an intrinsic component of her work. Eating the onion provokes tears; the physical act of crying then becoming the emotion of sadness. The sound of the piece is a combination of atmospheric sounds from the performance: the crunch of the onion, the sniffling and snorting of the artist and a voiceover. The latter is a commentary provided by Abramovic that alludes to the tropes of melodrama and noir evoking the femme fatale. In a jaded voice Abramovic speaks her ennui: “I am tired of waiting for endless passport controls. Fast shopping in shopping malls. I am tired of more career decisions, museum and gallery opening, endless receptions.”

Thomas Rentmeister’s work Untitled (2011) is an enormous wall piece composed of Nutella spread on laminated chipboard. The smell of the Nutella is underwhelming but pleasant. It did taste good though. Just joking! This is a gallery: no touching, unless it is explicitly invited. Should it be called a painting? It certainly resembles a painting with its vast size and expressive swirling brushstrokes alluding to monolithic, monochrome paintings. All this grandiosity is undercut by the aroma of Nutella. Usually the tendency with works of this size is to move back, to capture the whole field in sight. This work invites the viewer to come closer – to become a sniffer! The thick-textured chocolaty swirls bring to mind shit. Is this a shit painting? Is it perhaps a joke on value judgements and taste? Rentmeister’s other piece, a sculpture also Untitled (1993), takes the form of a large, shiny brown resin blob, plopped on the gallery floor. The piece tempts touch with its smooth, shiny, rounded surface, but there is a sign explicitly admonishing the viewer from doing so. Rentmeister’s and Abramovic’s pieces both prompt the speculation that once senses other then sight are brought into the field of art, it starts to become more unstable.

Elif Erkan’s sculptural works mingle living ‘ingredients’ with inanimate materials. Taken Care Of (Lotus Eater/Shelter Piece) (2016) combines plaster, seaweed and wheatgrass. Triangular plaster structures reminiscent of corrugated iron stand on a low chipboard platform. They seem to be contaminated – rusting, decaying or perhaps becoming something else. The two smaller wall pieces have an organic earthy quality. Their titles, Frown and Small Talk, invite the viewer to anthropomorphise them. They evoke political theorist Jane Bennett’s notion of vital materialism, a vibrant matter.

The installation by Domestic Godless’s (2016) contains texts and objects which riff off Nietzsche’s theorisations on the correct philosophical diet. A poster describes their experiments in developing suppositories to combat “philosophical, gastric disharmony”. Neil Shawcross’s paintings depict food products, his Heinz Condensed Cream of Tomato Soup (2013) evokes the famous Warhol painting featuring a different brand of the same product. Abigail O’Brien’s photographs of bread-making are surprisingly repellent in their gloopy, oozy viscosity. Sonja Alhäuser’s drawings combine portrayals of feasts and harvests with those of ingestion and excretion. Fiona Hallinan’s (2016) installation awaits an audience that will animate it with their presence. Her sculptural arrangement anticipates the food and the diners that will transform it into a site of conviviality, no longer art but life.

‘Gut Instinct’ attempts to ferment a dialogue between different areas of research, one goal-orientated (science), and the other more speculative (aesthetics). The result of this dialogue is an exhibition that offers many entrances into aesthetic taste.

Catherine Harty is a member of the Cork Artist Collective and works in a variety of media including painting, photography and video. She holds a Masters in Contemporary Art Theory from NCAD, and in Fine Arts Practice from Birmingham School of Art, University of Central England.

Images: Siobhan McGibbon, Venous Malformation, Proteus Syndrome (both 2012) and The Cell That Consumed Me, 2014; photo by Tomas Tyner; Thomas Rentmeister, Untitled, 2011; photo by Tomas Tyner; Abigail O’Brien, Judy Chicago, 2013; lambdachrome print, 88 x 120cm; image courtesy of the artist.

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Locky Morris, Naughton Gallery, Belfast, 8 December 2016 – 29 January 2017

Clock speaker radio, printed mug, foam lining, laser crystal photo frame, photograph, hand cleanser dispenser, sunglasses, workshop broom, photograph, tilt display stand, C-print aluminium plate, mounted photographs, pigmy light, screw, rotating photo cube, painted MDF pedestal display case, photographs, city centre paving block, mounted photographs, cardboard box, office cabinet (adapted), adapted digital photo frame, JPEG, adapted shelf, five-litre Poundstretcher utility box, spool of thread, photograph, plate stand, plastic strips for wall plugs, wall plugs, cable ties, small plate stand, four-gang extension lead, night light, cotton buds, acrylic paint tube, decorating clips, mounted photograph.

The above may read like the by-products of spring clean that will end up at either the charity shop or the recycling centre. To some extent that is exactly what they are, but on this occasion they are also the edited materials list of Derry-based artist Locky Morris’s recent exhibition ‘Stop Lookin’ at Photographs!’, held at the Naughton Gallery in Belfast.

While well known for his public artworks, Morris is probably most renowned for his politically-themed sculptural installations relating to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which featured Belfast bin lids and army helicopters. His recent work, and this show in particular, could not be more different. ‘Stop Lookin’ at Photographs’ features a series of new and previously unseen work, including installations, images and sculptural assemblages that focus on the role of the photograph within the artist’s wider practice. Morris intelligently incorporates photography as a genre into his recent work rather than photography as a medium. Though photographs have often featured in his previous works, they were usually incorporated into sculptural installations. In some instances, photography featured without the use of actual photographs, such as in the work Itch, in which scratchings from a lottery scratch card are set under a Jessops magnifier lupe.

As you might expect from the list of random, everyday objects from which the installations are made, these works produce an iconography of ordinary life – more specifically the artist’s everyday life. However, the everyday is presented in the extreme, becoming an absurd, hyperactive representation of daily detritus. This is most evident in the piece Loom Band on Turd, a fairly self-explanatory piece in which a digital photo frame proudly displays a photograph of a vertical dog shit with a loom band placed on the top like a crown on its head. Equally, in Frozen Export, a frozen bottle of lager is shown at various stages of defrosting across six printed photographs.

In other works, photography is entangled with other mediums in a more complex way. Teabreakdowns features a mug printed with the image of a mug hanging from an adapted clock radio. This is flanked by images of the decayed pencil used for too many years to stir the tea for lack of a teaspoon. Most interesting though is First Thing, in which a photograph of a contraption made from assorted household materials (wire, cotton buds, an extension lead) is placed above a box containing those same materials. In these works Morris shows his matured skill at blending photography and installation into one single medium.

The Naughton Gallery is a unique space. Situated in one of the wings of the elaborate Tudor-style Queen’s University buildings, the space is about four times as long as it is wide. It can easily feel as though you are walking through a corridor lined with artworks. One of the most satisfying aspects of ‘Stop Lookin’ at Photographs!’ is the curator Ben Crothers’s sensible consideration of such a space. Morris’s work suits the long gallery space perfectly, due to the combination of photography with both wall-based and floor-based installations. In Morris’s varied work, the distinctions between mediums are eradicated and a seamless connection is formed between all areas of the gallery. Furthermore the works in the exhibition equally benefit from the long narrow gallery space as they could easily be overwhelmed by a larger space.

A practice focused on everyday life using everyday objects could easily threaten to become repetitive. Thankfully though, Morris’s works are so precisely focused on seemingly inconsequential incidents and moments that the everyday life he presents becomes wonderfully theatrical and comical. Take for example Michelangelo’s House, in which a photo of scaffolding is printed onto all six sides of a rotating photo cube encased within a glass display case. Or Stop Lookin’ at Photographs, comprising a cardboard box filled with printed photographs, contained within a wood and glass cabinet and topped with a photograph that bears the exhibition title. If this, and Morris’s many other outlandish and absurd image-based installations in this show are not comedy gold, then I don’t know what is.

Iain Griffin is an artist based in Belfast.

Images: Locky Morris, Opening Act, 2016; photo, readymade frame, artist’s keyboard flight case; Teabreakdowns (2007, reconfigured 2016); printed mug, clockradio speaker, metal stand, A4 showcards, artist’s studio table, audio; photos by Simon Mills, courtesy of the Naughton Gallery.

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Alice Burns, Charissa Martin, Elaine McGinn, George Robb, Paula Clarke, Stephanie Harrison, Arts and Disability Forum, Belfast, 2 – 22 January 2017

The work of six recipients of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Individual Disabled/Deaf Artists (iDA) grant scheme comes together in ‘Guest 2’, a thought-provoking and challenging exhibition curated by artist Colin Darke at the Arts and Disability Forum Gallery. The exhibition space on Belfast’s Royal Avenue is modest but well-executed, benefitting from large windows and glass walls, which flood the space with natural daylight and create an attractive setting in which to consider the work of this diverse range of artists, whose practices encompass printmaking, photography, glasswork, video and performance.

Before entering the space, we are confronted with two large-scale sculptural works by Charissa Martin, which hang in the glass-walled entrance to the gallery. These three-dimensional textile works are said to express the realities of the artist’s own physical pain through the manipulation of fabric, which has been distressed, pierced, knotted and twisted. Their off-white colour and rigid form resemble surgical casts from which something has broken free following an unthinkable physical injury. We are left only to imagine the suffering that must have been endured.

The main exhibition space contains work by four of the six artists selected by Darke: Alice Burns, Paula Clarke, Stephanie Harrison and George Robb. Visually, Robb’s photographic work is dominant within the space, the deep blacks and fiery oranges of the Eleventh Night bonfires undoubtedly familiar to the majority of visitors. In contrast, Harrison adopts a softer colour palette, but similarly considers the social history of the city through her practice as a printmaker, with references to Belfast’s shipbuilding industry. As an artist diagnosed with inherited Multiple Sclerosis, Harrison’s work also contains a highly personal consideration of family and memory, which Darke has successfully grouped alongside Alice Burns’s Synapse (2016), a small glass-fused sculptural piece which explores the complex notions of memory: a visual representation of the neural networks in the human brain that are involved in memory and recall.

Paula Clarke’s Wild Horses (2013) – video documentation of a previous performance – is a particularly successful work – simultaneously frustrating, humorous and thought-provoking. Within her practice, Clarke uses performance and video to translate theatre, music and poetry through British Sign Language, in this case re-enacting Britain’s Got Talent star Susan Boyle’s rendition of Wild Horses by The Rolling Stones. In the original performance, Clarke signed along to the music, but here we find a mute video with nothing but the title to assist us in our understanding of the piece. Unless, of course, one can read sign language. And there lies the crux of this work: we are frustrated by our inability to understand the piece with no audio or textual support, and as a result are struck by our privilege in a world which is not often so accommodating to those who are deaf. Accessibility has been reversed as we are confronted by our own limitations.

Two photographs by Elaine McGinn lead us out of the main exhibition space to the site of her two-hour performance piece, We Are Fluid (2017), a short part of which I was fortunate enough to see upon my first viewing of this exhibition. Within her performance, McGinn navigated the gallery and street outside with her mouth full of pins – almost to the point of choking – allowing them to spill from her mouth as she moved, falling to the floor and pushing them into the gallery walls. She also marked the walls by tapping and dragging a larger metal object, which filled the space with persistent clatters and tings as it came into contact with other surfaces in the gallery and entranceway. In such a vulnerable state, McGinn expressed a striking sense of control, composure and strength, enabling the audience to become absorbed within the piece, rather than feel tense or fear for her safety.

McGinn’s accompanying photographs document a previous version of the performance, and aid the audience in interpreting the physical remnants, which remained in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. On a repeat visit to the space, I found the gallery floor scattered with the fine metal pins once held within the artist’s mouth, along with an upturned chair and red sheet of fabric used within the original performance. Upon closer inspection when leaving the gallery I also noticed several pins on the windowsill and the street outside, debris from a beautiful work of performance, and undoubtedly one of the highlights of this exhibition.

‘Guest 2’ successfully calls attention to the important work that ADF is doing in the promotion of disabled and deaf artists in Northern Ireland, with the iDA grant scheme proving fundamental to their development and exposure.

Ben Crothers is Curator/Collections Manager at Naughton Gallery, Queen’s University, Belfast.

Images: George Robb, Fire, 2016; Elaine McGinn, We Are Fluid, 2017; Charris Martin, The Duality of Pain, 2015; images courtesy of ADF.

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Mark Garry, Luan Gallery, Athlone, 11 February – 22 April 2017

The Luan Gallery appears to float over the River Shannon like a perfectly formed geometric ice block. The site and architecture of the building allude to fusion between natural and environmental conditions – concerns that are further elaborated in Mark Garry’s ‘An Afterwards’, currently installed across the Luan’s gracious exhibition spaces.

A native of County Westmeath, Garry often spent time in Athlone as a child, and this exhibition presents new works that attempt to forge connections between kinship and place. The cool intensity of Garry’s diverse body of work – which includes lithographs, oil paintings, video and Giclée digital prints – is given nuance by the nostalgic inclusion of (admittedly excellent) amateur artworks by his parents. This intimate familial gesture also functions to support a Beuysian assertion that everyone is an artist.

The eponymous centrepiece of the exhibition, An Afterwards (2017), is a surging, rainbow-like structure composed from multilinear threads held in tension by aluminium braces. The aerodynamic piece evokes ethereal sensations as a spectrum refracting light above the heads of viewers. This installation exemplifies Garry’s familiar sculptural approach, while channeling the natural world and its climatic states. Art that gives us direct physical sensations and moves us emotionally helps us understand the world in a direct bodily way. According to Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson – who is best-known for his immersive sculptural installations that harness elemental materials such as light, water and temperature – this “felt feeling” has the power to mitigate the numbing effects of information overload, inciting us into action and motivating us to turn our thinking into doing. [1]

On encountering Garry’s work in the past, I have felt this too. His artworks enable new experiences of nature and help us to sense something phenomenal that we recognise as not unfamiliar. With his spatio-temporal installations, Garry offers refreshing ways to engage with and feel the beauty of the world. Another piece that achieves this is Afterglow, a double-sided glass frame set into a triangulated walnut bracket. Behind the glass is a volcanic stream of powdered pigment, which forms a pyramid of densely-layered, effervescent colour. Garry recreates this work for each exhibition. The piece glistens with its own temporality, like a flower preparing to wilt.

All of the artworks shown in this exhibition express Garry’s formative experience of the rural, while also conveying a profound relationship with the classical and romantic traditions of landscape art. Garry acknowledges the influence of nineteenth-century German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, particularly his depictions of stoic contemplative travelers in solitary relationships with sublime, bleak and dramatic landscapes. Friedrich’s influence is keenly felt in Darondo, Garry’s emotionally complex photographic diptych in which the statuesque figure of the late William Daron Pulliam – a 1970s funk/soul singer from San Francisco – gazes out from a high window across a forested landscape. The image is tinted and mirrored to suggest a hallucinogenic daze.

Conversely, a series of new oil paintings, Landmass II – VI, propose ways of looking into nature, rather than gazing across its terrain or admiring its scenery. Using an abstract, Colour Field approach, the artist explores layers of resonant colour, achieved through successive staining and the pooling of paint. Scraping and erasing reveal underlying substrata of contrasting pigments which conjure micro-topographies and fractal landscapes.

Manifesting a similar approach towards the subject matter of seascapes, North of the West (2017) is a new single-channel moving image work developed in collaboration with cinematographer Padraig Cunningham. Recorded at Mullaghmore – an exposed peninsula on Sligo’s Atlantic coastline – the film depicts scenes of turbulent, foaming water, evocative of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s haunting portrayal of a sentient ocean in his 1972 film Solaris. Gustave Courbet’s monumental 1870 painting, The Wave, also comes to mind, when the camera zooms out to reveal a tormented, glowering sky in a dyadic relationship with the sea. This hypnotic piece is adequately projected within the space; however, it could benefit from future screenings at a larger, more cinematic scale, as I feel its enigmatic drama could be more persuasively communicated in a fully immersive setting.

Supplementing the film is a musical score entitled Drift, which evolved out of a collaborative performance in Horseshoe Bay – a natural amphitheater on Sherkin Island off the west coast of Cork. A vinyl disc is poised to play on a record player, which gallery visitors are invited to activate if desired. Music-making is an important strand of the artist’s practice. According to Garry, music generates entire networks of relationships and is fundamental to how we experience the world and each other. [2]

While Garry’s installations are the beating heart of this exhibition, his two-dimensional pieces, including photographs, painting and etchings, serve to elaborate on the experiential aspects of his sculptures and moving image works. The sensorial and physical experience of installation allows us to transcend cognition and trigger our capacity for action – something that is increasingly urgent in the face of climate change and potential ecological demise. ‘An Afterwards’ addresses such topics in subtle, discerning and relevant ways.

Áine Phillips is a visual artist, writer, curator and academic living in County Clare.

Images: Mark Garry, North of the West (install shot) HD FILM; Seville; Etching; images courtesy of the artist.

[1] olafureliasson.net

[2] Quoted in Aidan Dunne, ‘Mark Garry’s show of many threads’, Irish Times, 13 February 2014.

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