The July/August issue of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet is out now. It has been sent out to all members of Visual Artists Ireland, as well as to art galleries and art centre across the country.

In light of the historic vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland, we asked Cecily Brennan to reflect on the contributions of the Artist’s Campaign. In other columns, Victoria Durrer, lecturer in Arts Management and Cultural Policy at Queen’s University Belfast, discusses a new collaborative research project, aimed at evaluating the impact of art as a catalyst for reconciliation. VAI NI Manager Rob Hilken reports on the symposium, ‘Best Practice in Developing Sustainable Artist-led Workspaces’ which took place on 11 June in Belfast.

In the How is it Made? section, Aidan Kelly Murphy interviews emerging artist Áine McBride, while Sarah Ellen Lundy discusses her ecology-themed art practice. Daniel Bermingham interviews Eimear Walshe and Emma Haugh about their recent exhibition, ‘Miraculous Thirst’, which ran at Galway Arts Centre from 5 – 25 May. Brenda Moore-McCann outlines some of the new work commissioned by Sirius Arts Centre as part of the ongoing Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland project, ‘One, Here, Now’, including new work by Brendan Earley, showcased in his solo exhibition, ‘Present Perfect’. In other features for this issue, Jonathan Carroll discusses some of the main international contemporary art fairs attended by Irish commercial galleries, while Christopher Steenson provides an overview of Visual Artist Ireland’s Get Together 2018 and also reports on Sonorities, a sonic arts festival that took place across Belfast in April. In the new Art Education section, facilitators offer insights into ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ – an education programme for the 38th EVA International. Two conference reports also feature: Rebecca Kennedy reports on the Turbulence symposium at The Model, Sligo, while DIT students and inaugural Create fellows, Gemma Browne and Bianca Kennedy, report on the recent CAPP staging event in Madrid.

Organisation profiles for this issue come from Cork: John Thompson outlines the evolution of the artist-led intitiave, the Guesthouse Project, while Kirstie North interviews Mary McCarthy, Director of the Crawford Art Gallery, about her future plans for the gallery, including its renovation and extension.

The Regional Focus for this issue comes from Omagh and Fermanagh. Insights on the realities of living and working in the region are offered by visual artists Helen Sharp and Susan Hughes and sculptor Simon Carman, while Noelle McAlinden discusses the evolution of Fermanagh Live Arts Festival.

Reviewed in the Critique section are: Martin Gale at Taylor Galleries; Elizabeth Magill at the Ulster Museum; Sarah Walker at Oliver Sears Gallery; Gerry Blake at Mermaid Arts Centre; and Leo Boyd at Atom Gallery, London.

As ever, this issue has details of the upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public art roundup, news from the sector and current opportunities.

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CHRISTOPHER STEENSON REPORTS ON SONORITIES FESTIVAL – AN EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND SOUND ART FESTIVAL THAT TOOK PLACE IN BELFAST FROM 17 TO 22 APRIL.

If someone asked you where they might find a week-long, international festival dedicated to the latest developments in experimental music and sound art, you might recommend somewhere like Berlin. But since 1981, when Sonorities was founded at Queen’s University (QUB) as a “festival of twentieth century music”, Belfast has been just the place for an exploration of all things sonic. This year’s Sonorities Festival, which featured artists from over 40 countries, made a conscious effort to be more inclusive and open to the general public. By partnering with Moving on Music, the Belfast Film Festival and the club nights and labels, RESIST and Touch Sensitive, Sonorities was more widely-publicised and integrated within the city than it has been before, reaching beyond the festival’s usual academic circles.

Most of the programme revolved around music and performance, with emphasis on how new technologies can be used to augment the music-making process. This theme was variously explored through concerts in the Sonic Arts Research Centre’s (SARC) world-renowned Sonic Lab and during a one-day symposium, which focused on “techno-human encounters” in sound production, performance and composition. The opening performance, Re-Breather, by Franziska Schroeder, Jules Rawlinson and Dara Etefalghi encapsulated the festival’s reputation for daring experimentalism, comprising computer-generated visuals and the choked sounds of an electronically-treated saxophone, played without its mouthpiece. Other performances took place in Accidental Theatre, where highlights included Jon Kipp’s and Stuart Bowditch’s sound-sculpture performance, Fogou, and the slow motion body movements displayed by Federico Visi for SloMo Study #1.

In conjunction with Belfast Film Festival’s programme of screenings and events, festivalgoers experienced a different kind of audiovisual delight with a new performance by People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett), titled The Mirror (2018). Working for over two decades as a multimedia artist, Bennett weaves together audio and moving image material to create collage-based works. The piece began with a chimeric soundtrack formed from cover versions of the song The Windmills of Your Mind (first made famous by the English crooner Noel Harrison). The lyrics to the song – which reference circles in spirals, wheels within wheels, turning carousels and tunnels – act as a roadmap for the recurrent imagery in the 40-minute performance. As the audience entered a hauntological world of Hollywood films and radio hits, a fractal and circular narrative was formed, whilst all the while being propelled forward by Bennett’s accomplished methods of live audio mixing. Other noteworthy video works included Fergal Dowling and Mihai Cucu’s surround-sound, fixed media piece, Ground and Background.

Sonorities also included an array of exhibitions and installations. In SARC’s basement-level Broadcast Room, the sound art collective Umbrella presented newly created multimedia works. Titled ‘Same Place’, the exhibition featured work by 11 members of the collective, who each explored different locations around Belfast and their related soundscapes. John D’Arcy’s North Street, for example, acted as a commentary on the Royal Exchange development that will see parts of Belfast’s historic North Street demolished to make way for a new retail area. In the video, D’Arcy walks along North Street with a virtual reality headset, intercutting his vantage point with simulations of a shopping centre. The open soundscape of North Street is contrasted with clinically-produced pop music, reverberating within the shopping centre’s enclosed environment, creating an amusing – if not bleak – future vision of the area.

Other works on the grounds of QUB included John Kefala-Kerr’s Book of Bells in the Graduate School, whilst off-site there were exhibitions in QSS Gallery and Framewerk. As implied in the title, ‘Silent Sonorities’ at QSS inverted the general paradigm of the festival by focusing on the act of listening rather than sound-making. In one room, Iris Garrelfs’s project, ‘Listening Wall’ featured a selection of “listening scores”, encouraging visitors to engage with their auditory environment via several verbal and graphic instructions. The project is motivated by the isolationist stances that currently typify the modern political climate. In the context of Belfast’s Peace Walls and Northern Ireland’s continuing deadlock at Stormont, as well as a divisive focus on national borders in the era of Brexit and Trump, Garrelfs sees the ‘Listening Wall’ as a means of connecting people in the face of increasing threats of separation. However, the exhibition’s amateur presentation in the gallery, which saw pages affixed to walls with Blu-tac, could have been more refined.

In the second space at QSS was ‘SchuhzuGehör_path of awareness’ by Berlin-based artist Katrinem. Katrinem’s practice concentrates on sound and its relationship with space, which she investigates through performance-based ‘listening walks’. Originally developed in 2012 at Festival Klangstätten in Braunschweig, Germany, ‘path of awareness’ has since evolved into an international project with the artist recording her walks in various locations, including Marseille, Tehran, New York and, now, Belfast. Maps of these routes were presented on the gallery walls, while a video monitor with headphones, showed documentation of these walks, comprising video stills and binaural recordings, captured from Katrinem’s own ears, as she walked through the different locations. In these recordings, the artist’s “soundful shoes” act as a percussive focal point for the listener, revealing the material and spatial qualities of these environments and how they change as the walks progress.

Glasgow-based artist Calum Scott’s sound sculpture, Scare the Deer, was shown at Framewerk in the east of the city. The work draws influence from the Japanese suikinkutsu sound-producing water ornaments and shishi-odoshi water devices, used by farmers to scare away crop-threatening animals. Taking these traditionally analogue modes of sound production, Scott’s sculpture also incorporated modern technology – such as Max software, Arduino boards and servomotors – to create a marvelously complex, yet graceful piece of work. Water dripped down into a set of metal buckets, creating delicate bell-like sounds. As the buckets were filled, they moved downwards and were tipped out, in a computer-coordinated dance. It was a highly meditative piece that invited prolonged periods of listening and viewing, proving to be a highlight of the festival programme.

The site-specific exhibition, ‘House Taken Over’, was curated by sisters Ciara and Nora Hickey. Taking place inside the curators’ family home in south Belfast, the exhibition was inspired by the discovery that the house was previously used as the Northern Irish Intelligence Headquarters during World War II. Logs recorded by a secret network of listeners across the country were forwarded to ‘Heathcote’ house, to be logged, before being sent on to code breakers at Bletchley Park. Lorcan McGeough’s parabolic sculpture, Swallow (2017), rose up from the lawn outside. Echoing the appearance of an ‘acoustic mirror’ (large, concrete structures used in WWI to detect the sound of approaching enemy aircraft), the work immediately suggested the presence of intruders. Its resemblance to a trumpet or a satellite dish seemed to imply that the secrets of Heathcote were finally being broadcast into the world.

Paintings, moving image works and sound installations – each toying with the ideas of military surveillance, radio communication and audio technology – were installed in different parts of the house. Searching for the artworks, visitors got the impression that they themselves were spies in search of lost historic objects. In the living room, Dorothy Hunter’s audio installation, Unofficial Secret (2013), softly announced itself from the fireplace, playing field recordings from a Cold War-era spy base in Berlin. Similar in content, Allan Hughes’s audio and video work, The Listening Station I (2008), was played on a video monitor in the downstairs bathroom, showing footage of the British army’s communications base, Black Mountain, in northwest Belfast. A concurrent soundtrack called out numbers, reminiscent of an intelligence war tactic. Meanwhile in the dining room, Colin Martin’s paintings, Stasi Museum II and Drum machine, visually referenced locations and technologies used for spying and music-making respectively.

Over the five days of the Sonorities programme, it was hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer variety of work on display. From concerts to installations and insightful presentations, you might not have liked everything you encountered, but you certainly came away with a whole new appreciation of what the possibilities of sound can and will be.

Christopher Steenson is Production Editor of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet. He also practices as a sound artist.

Image Credits
Calum Scott, Scare the Deer, installation view at Framewerk, Belfast; image courtesy of the artist.
Stuart Bowerditch performing Fogou at Accidental Theatre, Belfast; image courtesy of Sonorities Festival.
John D’Arcy, North Street, 2018, video still; image courtesy of the artist.
‘House Taken Over’, installation view; image courtesy of Ciara Hickey. 

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CURATOR DANIEL BERMINGHAM INTERVIEWS ARTISTS EIMEAR WALSHE AND EMMA HAUGH ABOUT THEIR RECENT EXHIBITION, ‘MIRACULOUS THIRST’, AT GALWAY ARTS CENTRE (5 – 25 MAY).

Daniel Bermingham: The exhibition title, ‘Miraculous Thirst’, is a totem for shameless desire, in the face of personal sexual trauma. During the development of your show, Ireland responded to a particularly violent period of national sexual trauma. Can you discuss the relationship between personal and collective trauma?

Eimear Walshe: Coming from the online lexicon, ‘thirst’ is a playfully condemning word for shameless displays of queer desire. I use ‘miraculous thirst’ to describe persistent, undisguised desire that has been suppressed, under whatever personal or systemic regime. Such desire should not exist – especially in the context of the dystopian legal, medical, political and sexual landscapes that we’ve been subjected to in Ireland – but somehow it still does. It’s painful to acknowledge how intertwined national and personal sexual traumas are. I think it’s appropriate to name a lot of the desire that I see around me in Ireland as ‘miraculous’. Personally, I’d beatify many of my friends and lovers for not just going on sex-strike over it.

DB: I’m curious how some of your artworks operate. You used gay men’s literature in the performance, Sex in Public, and incorporated the body in Clothes for Queer Cruisers, denoting a ‘dyky land reclamation’ of the male cruising area of  the Teufelssee in Berlin. Is this an intentional reclamation of queer history from cis gay men¹?

Emma Haugh: I would say that the borders here are quite amorphous; it’s a bit of a trickster move that marks desire and sexuality as a terrain that can be shared. It took me some time to unravel the implications of these appropriating actions for myself. I understand them more and more as a performative questioning of identity, ownership and spatial politics in relation to history. I don’t so much propose to reclaim history – or the future – from gay men; I propose that I am already there and perform an alternate narrative of visibility.

DB: How do you see the role of our individual queer histories (dyke, non-binary, trans, cripple, fag, poly, bi) and does this inform a certain hybrid futurity in your work?

EW: I think those histories were central; the show integrated and emphasised a set of united interests, without ignoring difference. There were a lot of shared motifs in the work and common reference points. Snakes were recurring figures, so, in a serpentine fashion, I think of our work as picking up where the other leaves off. For me, the exhibition facilitated a different type of thinking – thinking with agency around desire and thinking with hope – making space for futurity in queer discourse without centring reproductive futurism.²

DB: ‘Miraculous Thirst’ touched on the overlapping discourses of queer theorists, José Esteban Muñoz, Gloria Anzaldúa and Kathy Acker. Did these textual inclusions amount to a homage?

EH: I would say it’s more of a presence. The desire was to bring these people and their brilliant work together and to acknowledge, through dedication and remembrance, their importance in queer world-making practices. I would say it’s also a citational act of love, to stay close to the voices of those who inform our work.

DB: You have previously spoken about the “obviousness” of work that speaks for itself. Can you discuss your desire and intent?

EW: I think I’ve been using ‘obviousness’ as another way of speaking to what might be euphemistically be called ‘visibility’. Obviousness is a way of psychologically grappling with what’s implicit in an artwork, regarding the extent to which work reflects its author. In the same sense that ‘thirst’ implies some kind of ‘indiscreetness’, I wanted the sculptures to be flirtatious or wanton in some way. Take for example the word, ‘Middle Spoon’, which was rendered in pink cursive neon on the gallery wall. You can interpret that as a proposal, in the sense of a neologism, or as a proposition, maybe even a personal ad! Or as an idle fantasy, a threat to society – inclusion gone too far, or not far enough, depending on what you project. In the spirit of indiscreetness, I’d say the works are also a retort to two classic harassment slogans: “Do you have to advertise it?” and “Get a room!” The collective works answered “yes!” and “no!” respectively.

DB: Your performance, Sex in Public, (which took place on 5 May as part of the exhibition) used self-described “theory poetry”, comprising the quite slippery use of language. I want to say this was an attempt to establish a future queer language, but what informed it?

EH: This was directly informed by Kathy Acker saying that she wanted to increase possibility and her own pleasures within her writing – a process that involved her use of reappropriated, plagiarised texts. I wanted to try this method as a means of loosening control and rigidity within my own writing practice, so that multiple voices and histories could be channelled through the avatar of my performing body. I find it interesting that an audience so easily ascribes the spoken experience to the speaking body – I enjoy playing with this device. The texts have been appropriated form literature written by gay men describing experiences of sex in public, and also from theory dealing with sexual politics and public space. They all come together with me as the channel, with my own desires being loosely woven between the reappropriated words.

DB: We have proposed a certain open-ended futurity for the show and artworks. Where do you see this afterlife enacting itself?

EW: The exhibition operated around the idea of an ever-expanding horizon of hope, I think. For me, that’s ongoing work – involving making and learning new vernaculars in language and images – and I see this already manifesting in the aftermath of the exhibition. I remember the first time I saw a show by Emma Haugh; it left a pressing question in the back of my mind, one that’s still unresolved. That’s a real gift. I’m really glad we got to show together, and hopefully these works meet again in the future, to perform some more miracles.

Eimear Walshe makes sculptures, writing and research with a focus on queer theory and feminist epistemology. Walshe is research fellow at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and will initiate The Department of Sexual Revolution Studies.

Emma Haugh is a visual artist and educator based in Dublin and Berlin. She is interested in reorienting attention in relation to cultural narratives and develops her work from a queer/feminist/working class questioning of what is missing? She is co-founder of the performative publishing collective, The Many Headed Hydra.

Daniel Bermingham is a curator based in London. Bermingham is interested in publicness, community space and pedagogy, particularly with regard to intersectional queer and crip audiences.

Notes
¹ As a prefix, ‘cis’ refers to the term ‘cisgender’, denoting people whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.
² The term ‘Reproductive Futurism’ was developed by American academic, Lee Edelman, to describe the tendency to define political value in terms of a future “for the children”, insisting that the power of queer critique is in its persistent opposition to this narrative and, therefore, to politics as we know it. Edelman argues that to be queer is to oppose futurity. See – Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004).

Image Credits
Eimear Walshe and Emma Haugh, ‘Miraculous Thirst’, installation view, Galway Arts Centre, mixed media, dimensions variable; photograph by Tom Flanagan.
Eimear Walshe, Middle Spoon, 2018, neon, 130 x 30 cm; photograph by Tom Flanagan. 

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AIDAN KELLY MURPHY INTERVIEWS ÁINE MCBRIDE ABOUT HER EMERGING PRACTICE.

Aidan Kelly Murphy: Prior to studying art, you obtained a degree in structural engineering. Was this something you had planned or was it something that just evolved?

Áine McBride: It wasn’t some grand master plan. I dabbled in painting, knowing that there was something interesting there, but not knowing how to articulate it; being an artist was never framed as something I could realistically pursue. I was interested in looking at art and had friends who were artists so I had an idea of what was going on, but more from the periphery. About halfway through studying engineering, I knew that I wasn’t really interested in pursuing it professionally. Then I went to New York, where I went to a lot of galleries. When I came back, I applied to do an undergraduate degree in art and rented a small studio where I developed a portfolio myself.

AKM: Aside from the architectural and structural aspects of your work, what other influences do you feel this discipline has had on your practice?

ÁMcB: I didn’t have that much of an interest in architecture until I studied art, when it and engineering started to manifest in my work in interesting ways. The bigger connection is more to do with ways of piecing things together, in terms of modularity and layering, rather than, say, the physical capabilities of actual structures. In my sculptural practice, I continue to come back to this idea of creating some sort of landscape, and then occupying that landscape by building it up in iterative ways. In an abstract way, that’s the influence of my engineering background.

AKM: Your work can be described as ‘site-specific interventions’. With that in mind, how does your approach change when installing in gallery spaces or in the public realm?

ÁMcB: I tend to use the term ‘site-responsive’, because the setting helps to make the work, but when the work is made, it is mobile, so it can go elsewhere. ‘Habitat HQ’, an offsite project at The Douglas Hyde (13 – 24 March 2017), was a great exercise, in terms of acknowledging how a work operates in a space. When installing the work, I became aware that one of the places I wanted to install work was a spot where a homeless man came in everyday to read, and whilst the work would have looked well there, I’m not going to put in anything in such a way to disrupt how he engages with the space. It’s more about occupying spaces that were either empty or had had space taken away. A lot of these things come back to a political sensitivity or importance, but not in an overt way. Galleries deal with space in different ways; I’m interested in how they tether themselves back to something that’s outside that space, to consider what’s feeding the work.

Mother’s Tankstation doesn’t have a window to the outside, which lends itself to being more of an enclosed space. However, it’s not a clinical white cube; the space has architecture and a domestic aesthetic. ‘Work suite’ at MTS (21 February – 28 April) opened up a new way of working. Things that I thought were individual works, merged and moved towards being conceived as ‘clusters’. I knew they should be presented near one another, but it wasn’t until they were installed, that their proximity emerged and they fused into a singular thing – which was great, because now I’m more open to that prospect.

AKM: How do you feel about terms like minimalist or post-minimalist being attributed to your work?

ÁMcB: I don’t know how much artists can situate their own work, and even if it’s interesting for them to do so. I think you put the work out and it’s for other people to interpret it. I was reading a text by Liam Gillick, where he was talking about people being overly familiar with what’s going on and making work that very easily slots itself into the ongoing dialogue, and what ends up happening is that they slip stream and get immediately absorbed. Eventually you encounter people who are making art that just looks like other art.

AKM: You avoid sensationalising your materials and objects; is this to maintain the mundane aspects they exhibit in their normal usage?

ÁMcB: I avoid ornamentation, but I’m aware that design is nearby. Design is something that I think about, but I would be wary of making things appear too ‘nice’. I use a lot of trade materials that are fairly basic. It’s important to find a way of demarcating those lines where you let new materials in and use them, whilst also being careful not to fetishise them or rely on nice materials and finishes to do something for you – you don’t want it to look too tasty.

AKM: Do you think growing up in Donegal has made you acutely aware of the urbanity of cities, thus informing a different view on how these spaces work?

ÁMcB: I grew up just outside Letterkenny. I love cities, but I’m never really looking for the park in the middle. I prefer cities that have life in them; those that have a lot of development can actually be sterile. Cities or spaces within cities that are very pristine are denying their reality on a political level. They haven’t fixed things, they have just pushed people out that they don’t want, who occupy spaces elsewhere. Dublin is different, as these lived-in spaces are still visible, and as such we can become more engaged with the fabric of the city. In Donegal, I have a connection to the bog; my father was from Falcarragh and I would have gone there with him to visit my grandmother. I find that dark, barren, amber landscape really rich. The bog for me is about the flatness; you become more aware of your own body in relation to this space. I would have a stronger relationship to that terrain and think it’s more reflective of ‘Irishness’ than the rolling green hills.

AKM: The largest continuation of a landscape in Ireland is probably around the Meath/Westmeath area, with its flat bog land and marshes. Do you think those long straights show the possibility of a landscape?

ÁMcB: You hit on something there with ‘possibility’. I have been thinking a lot about this and I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m attracted to spaces in flux. It’s because they haven’t been completely defined in terms of what they are yet, so there’s still potential. For a while I kept coming back to the concept of ‘provisionality’, but I think it’s more about potential. Which again is political, because it could potentially be something for everyone or something we need before it’s finished, but once it’s complete and fully defined, there is no longer the space for possibility.

Aidan Kelly Murphy is a writer and photographer based in Dublin.

Áine McBride is an artist based in Dublin.

Image Credits:
Áine McBride, ‘Work suite’, 2018, installation view at Mother’s Tankstation.
Áine McBride, floor unit, 2018, plywood, timbre, formica, paint, mild steel fabric.
Áine McBride, t unit, 2018, plywood, timber, tiles, tile adhesive, grout, jesmonite, mild steel, paint; all images courtesy of the artist Mother’s Tankstation

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KIRSTIE NORTH INTERVIEWS MARY MCCARTHY ABOUT HER NEW ROLE AS DIRECTOR OF CRAWFORD ART GALLERY, CORK.

Kirstie North: Congratulations on becoming the new director of the Crawford Art Gallery. I think all of us in Cork were delighted when we heard that you had been appointed. What first attracted you to the Crawford?

Mary McCarthy: Well I’m now three months into the job, but a lot of things attracted me to Crawford. The first is its potential, because it really has a very important legacy in the city, and nationally in terms of presenting shows of contemporary art and shows of the collection which are culturally very significant. These are shows that have a very particular accent and that look in a different direction; the organisation is grounded in its location in Cork, but it has amazing international connections. When it was founded in 1884, parts of the building had been here since the 1730s, so it’s an organisation with a lot of history. What attracted me to the post is the potential to connect those worlds – the realm of the collection and contemporary artistic responses – and the responsibility that this organisation has to both aspects.

KN: As you say, Crawford is quite unique in Cork and nationally, in terms of its history, collection and contemporary programme. Can you tell me a little bit about your short-term plans for the gallery?

MM: Yes, well I’ve arrived! We are working on a strategic plan that will establish a set of parameters for us all to work towards and benchmark where we want to go. That is quite a consultative process internally, with some external stakeholders. It will be a three-year plan, because we will be recalibrating physically in the next five to ten years. The board, the staff and I are all very committed to bringing this building up to standard. It needs investment to better facilitate visitor experience and artist experience alike. As we have three buildings from three different periods, there is significant work that needs to be done on the fabric of this site. We have the old customs house, where the restaurant is, which was built in 1734 while the building that houses the sculpture gallery and west wing originates from the 1830s. Then there is the most recent building, which was once a courtyard, built between 1998 and 2000. It’s very exciting to be a part of the new build, as the site will span four centuries. It’s a huge challenge to make sure that we create something that is of its time, but something that also enhances the legibility of these three existing sites. So short-term plans are quite externally focused, as we are looking at our visitor experience and how audiences navigate these spaces. Something I hadn’t really thought about as much when I took up the position, perhaps naively, is that the galleries are actually really busy. We have over 200,000 visitors a year and this figure is rising. We are now open seven days a week. This year, there were 20,000 visitors in the month of May alone. It’s a big social space in the heart of the city.

We also have a very strong programme of exhibitions over the next 24 months and we need to look at what resources we will need to support these ambitions, especially in terms of staffing, as we are a small team. Another key vision of mine and the team’s is that we collaborate more. We have done this very quickly with Sirius on the Brian O’ Doherty Project, and we are collaborating with the Midsummer Festival on a whole range of events that are not simply visual art events. These will bring in different audiences and facilitate different experiences of the building which is much more than just a gallery because of its heritage. For example, the extraordinary library is an example of how the histories of these spaces and their former functions are still present and are of real interest to our artists and our public. We probably need to start telling that story, either digitally online, or somehow discretely through our visitor experience.

KN: Perhaps also through artist commissions?

MM: Yes absolutely, artists very often want to go beneath the surface of the galleries and I’d like to provide resources for artists to have a longer lead-in to shows. I think that Crawford has always had a good relationship with contemporary artists, enabling artists to make shows for this building, and helping to stretch artistic practice. I’m keen to support younger artists through a number of rolling projects, rather than just big exhibitions. There will be new rooms for this, where artists can test out new ideas, so we want to support this type of risk-taking that pushes an artist’s practice. Also, in previous times, Crawford played a significant role in touring Irish artists’ work. For example, the exhibition, ‘0044: Contemporary Irish Art in Britain’, was a big show of Irish artists’ work which toured to PS1 in New York in 1999. So, Crawford’s legacy as an advocate for Irish artists is really important. We have a distinct voice, as we look to other Atlantic port cities for historic connections between Cork and London, Boston or New York; it makes sense to look at those points of resonance.

KN: So, in terms of long-term plans, you mentioned the expansion. Do you have an idea of what is going into that space yet, and how the new Crawford Art Gallery will eventually look?

MM: That’s a really interesting question, and one I asked immediately when I started. The answer is that it’s not yet fully formed. There are different options, but I think the masterplan is to restore the fabric of these existing buildings, to improve the wayfinding systems, but to restore them sensitively so that you still feel you are transitioning through the centuries. Our challenge is to make sure that we don’t lose the feeling of this very special place where you can have this intimate experience with art that is not over-monitored or over-monetised. By reconfigurating this building, for example, by having storage in the middle, we will have to take artworks into temporary storage off-site for a longer-term. The new-build that we are considering will be a tall structure at the rear of the site, where the lecture hall and restaurant is currently located. This new structure would house new administration spaces, so that the team can be in one space, as currently they are not and this has a detrimental effect on communication between staff. Excitingly, the explore and learn section of the gallery, which is very important to us, will have a central space within this new structure. The collection will also be housed here, in a new environmentally controlled space. It is desirable that there will be several galleries of a really exquisite scale; they won’t be huge, but they will be quite simple spaces, perhaps for singular artworks, large-scale work, digital works or work-spaces. Then there is the potential to have more spaces like the restaurant, offering coffee-pods and more rest-points for visitors as they move through the galleries. We also need to consider how we interact with the urban environment. At the moment there is one entrance; we would envisage a much bigger entrance, and potentially more than one, creating a much more open engagement with the heart of the city. The real challenge is how we engage materially and architecturally with the existing three sites. The quality of Irish architects is exceptional and their investment in the culture of this place leaves me with no doubt that this will be achievable. The real challenge for us is the pre-brief and getting this right. That’s why we are doing the two projects together, the refurb and the new-build, so we can see the space overall. Studio spaces are an option too. There used to be studio spaces here and these are on the plan at the moment. We would like to encourage research and to have artists onsite.

KN: I’ve seen that format work well in other galleries – having studios and spaces for research onsite.

MM: Yes, absolutely, and we get a lot of research requests from people who want to view the collection. We have a breadth of really interesting and seminal works from bequests and there are certain works that we might not have on display that people want to see. Sometimes we have researchers coming internationally who want to study an artwork, and at the minute that’s a little cumbersome – we would like that to be easier, to encourage live research on the collection. Artists and the public do not see the world as a separation of the historic and the contemporary, so we need to encourage this dialogue between past and present to create natural points of contact. It doesn’t have to be a curatorial agenda, its more about how these two parts of the house are activated together. We are going to embark on a whole programme called ‘activating the collection’ to unearth ways in which we can display three or four works, over an extended period, giving a whole new range of contextual information on those works. There are some really fascinating stories, such as how the Canova casts arrived from London, and how Sean Keating’s Men of the South (1921–2) was bought directly from the artist in the 1920s.

KN: This reminds me of how works from a historic collection and contemporary art can really activate one another as they did at EVA International this year. Sean Keating’s Night Candles Are Burnt Out, 1927, become a centrifugal point for contemporary art in a way that I thought was very affective.

MM: Yes, and sometimes these narratives are not necessarily linear for artists, they are more contextual I think. It will be exciting to look behind what we have. There are amazing stories surrounding our works and, in some cases, women behind those works. Take John Lavery’s painting The Red Rose (1923), (or Lady Lavery’s Rose), for instance. We recently did a whole restoration on The Red Rose and we know that there are lots of other faces beneath the surface, so the number of women, literally, who are behind that canvas is amazing. These are the things that I think will be interesting to escalate; the compelling stories that we already have.

KN: What excites you the most about becoming director of the Crawford gallery?

MM: For me, it’s just about being around art every day. I don’t take that privilege lightly. In terms of what there is to do, I am excited and deeply challenged by the new capital development. I am aware, and the institution is aware, of the responsibility within the many regulations and frameworks, to deliver something really great, something strikingly different and bold.

Kirstie North is an art historian and independent curator who lectures at University College Cork.

Image Cedits
Phillip Toledano, from the photographic series Maybe, 2015; © Phillip Toledano. Shown as part of the exhibition, ‘Phillip Toledano Maybe: Life & Love’, in Crawford’s Lower Gallery (16 March – 24 June 2018).
Dragana Jurisic, 100 Muses, 2015, © the artist; courtesy of Caoimhe Lavelle. Shown as part of the exhibition, ‘Naked Truth: The Nude in Irish Art’, Crawford Art Gallery (13 July – 28 October).
Robert Fagan, Portrait of a Lady as Hibernia, c.1801, oil on canvas © Private Collection. Shown as part of the exhibition, ‘Naked Truth: The Nude in Irish Art’, Crawford Art Gallery (13 July – 28 October).

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Atom Gallery, London
5 – 26 May 2018

There is an immediate urgency to ideas surrounding the digital – whether in terms of its technological capabilities, the dark underbelly of its culture, or in its increasing influence across political and economic spheres. It feels definitive of the present moment in a way that is all-consuming, whilst also being difficult to fully articulate. Belfast-based street artist and printmaker Leo Boyd wrestles with the philosophical questions posed by artificial intelligence, by taking influence from the work of Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom. Are we living in a computer simulation? Perhaps life as we know it is nothing but fragments of data on some other being’s hard drive…

Boyd’s recent exhibition, ‘Welcome to the Simulation’, was presented at the small-scale commercial Atom Gallery, featuring paintings and prints that reference techno-utopianism, religious belief, political radicalism and retro advertising. Boyd’s titles clearly show an interest in puns, evident in a piece referencing agitprop titled Keyboard Warriors, or the Holy Mary with a heart emoji on her chest called Our Lady of the Emoji. This kind of punning isn’t limited just to artwork titles; it’s evident in how images are mashed up and used to communicate their message. When Mary’s sacred heart is substituted for a digital icon, it’s determinedly satirical, but also signals the relationship between technology and belief, contrasting an information economy with religious tradition.

Boyd’s artworks demonstrate a wide and varied assortment of gestures and marks. The flow between paint and print is fluid but controlled. It’s in this interrelationship that the works are at their best. When it’s just paint or just print, the works feel somewhat insubstantial; a little too small, with their surfaces failing to capture much attention beyond the visual gimmicks. Every artwork contains at least one character, and every character has a computer for a head. Sometimes this works to humorous effect, as in God Does Not Play Sims or Searching for Signal; the former shows a protester holding a sign with the titular phrase boldly printed on it, and the latter shows a huddled group of monks looking dramatically into the distance. Boyd’s work is weird and playful because of this, but can sometimes miss the mark, with the joke coming off a little too trite. Other moments feel adolescent in approach; one piece is a pixelated image of a Cézanne painting that is wholly out of touch with a generation of painters who’ve used glitch art to great effect, such as Enda O’Donoghue or Konrad Wyrebek.

While Boyd’s varied mark-making lends a kind of energy to his art, the far-reaching references in the works make the original premise feel quite flippant. There is a notable disconnect between the ideas of Nick Bostrom, the supposed premise of the exhibition, and what the artworks in question are actually addressing. Looking across the paintings and prints, we see religion, political movements, landfills, soldiers, gaming and so on. The series of references is so broad, it becomes incoherent. We could say that digital technology is so pervasive today that it has influence across all cultural arenas; that we can’t understand belief, power and consumption without it. But these notions are very far removed from specific points that Bostrom raises.

Contemporary art has an uneasy relationship with puns. What is gained in humour and accessibility, feels like a subtraction from the deeper meaning and dialogue found in a more ambiguous approach. Banksy might be the most established critical shorthand for a brand of street art that embraces both politics and humour. And while he may lack credibility amongst critics, he’s more than made up for it in mainstream popularity. In one sense, this isn’t surprising, as his street art borrows from and sits comfortably within the world of popular, accessible visual culture. One of the most interesting things about Banksy is this gap between his critical standing and his widespread popular appeal. The phrase contemporary art is not as broad as it seems, instead signalling a hyper-specific ecosystem of white cube galleries and the rolling series of art fairs and biennales that they participate in. Humour in art is always risking this gap.

Chris Hayes is an Irish art critic based in London and Assistant Editor with CIRCA Art Magazine.

Image Credits
Leo Boyd, God Does Not Play Sims, screen print and paint on plywood, 63 x 76 cm; image courtesy Atom Gallery

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Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray
19 May – 30 June 2018

When is a photograph just a photograph? How can we ask questions of the photographic image that interrogate the specificity of the medium, without having the subject matter consume our attention? The flippant answer is that we can’t; or at least it is not possible without turning a blind eye to the material world disclosed through the photographic image. Even the vernacular modernism of the 1950s and ‘60s, which sought to create a culture of ‘photography for photography’s sake’, drew on the flow of everyday life to gesture towards photography’s intrinsic characteristics as a medium of visual communication.

These questions may seem too large to contemplate in relation to Gerry Blake’s exhibition of photographs depicting the everyday rituals of sea swimmers. However, such modest projects exploring the seemingly inconsequential routines of people’s everyday lives frequently bring such medium-specific questions into sharp relief. It is difficult not to speculate about the lives of the subjects who ritually swim in the ocean or conjecturing how their bodies provide clues to an individual’s identity, at the expense of questioning what such images may say about photography more broadly. This is not to say that Blake’s exhibition has deliberately posed questions about the specificity of the medium that may somehow have become overshadowed by his subject matter; rather it is sometimes through micro-photographies exploring everyday life that larger questions of the medium arise.

This iteration of ‘Into the Sea’ consists of 22 photographs, taken at ten bathing spots along Dublin’s coastline over a 12-month period. Mostly a series of portraits taken from behind (showing bathers either entering or observing the sea), the photographs are punctuated with the architecture of bathing spots, including rusted metal railings, concrete steps and the cracked walls of changing rooms. In addition, an illustrated poster print documents these locations. Within the gallery, the photographs are loosely configured into groups. Framed photographs are accompanied by white-bordered prints, pinned directly to the wall. There is a visual clarity to the photographs and high production value to the prints. The differences in framing convey alternating approaches: the wooden frames prompt enclosure of the pictorial space, establishing sequential relations between photographs; while the white borders of prints bleed into the gallery wall, deliberately positioning the viewer in relation to the subject matter.

The exhibition opens with three photographs – 7.00 a.m. September #1 (2016), 7.00 a.m. September #2 (2016), and 8.00 a.m. September #2 (2016) – close-up, distant and elevated back-facing portraits of female swimmers looking towards or entering the sea. These photographs document distinct moments, but their configuration in relation to one another makes it difficult not to interpret them as the depiction of sequential actions. In another pairing of photographs – 11.00 a.m. May (2017), and 1.30 p.m. November #2 (2016) – two bathers, one female the other male, grip onto metal railings from the left and right-hand sides respectively, as they descend into the sea. The effect draws the viewers’ eye into the blank wall space between the two photographs. It is through such configurations of distinct moments that questions emerge around the specificity of the photographic image.

Distinctions of time and place are erased, as the photographic series establishes relationships between the subject, photographer and viewer. Notably, the artwork titles eschew the specificity of place and exact dates in favour of time and calendar month. Such contextual ambiguity allows the representation of discrete, ritualistic moments of individual swimmers to be brought into relationship with one another. However, this ambiguity is not without its problems; the anonymity of the subjects, combined with the rear-view portraits is troubling. The viewer’s identification with individuals is relegated in favour of accentuating a generic temporality. Blake’s exhibition touches on broader questions of photography, but in a way that only raises more questions about how the medium can allow the viewer to identify with the subjects, while making them appear as remote and anonymous figures within the pictorial frame.

Justin Careville is a lecturer in Historical and Theoretical Studies in Photography at IADT Dún Laoghaire, where he is also chair of the BA (Hons) Photography programme.

Image Credits
Gerry Blake, 2:00 p.m. October #3, 2016, location: Low Rock, Malahide; photograph © Gerry Blake.
Gerry Blake, 3:00 p.m. October #1, 2017, location: Sandycove; photograph © Gerry Blake.

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Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin
10 May – 22 June 2018

“When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult.” ¹

Oliver Sears Gallery is located in a Georgian building on Molesworth Street. It was designed as a home, but now its rooms are beautifully used to show artwork. Recently shown at the gallery was Sarah Walker’s ‘Tree Drawings on the Sky’, a series of nine tapestries based on drawings from the period immediately prior to the death of her mother, the art critic Dorothy Walker (1929–2002). While walking to the upstairs gallery, the building’s former use as a living space was tangible. The setting transported me to the story of a family told by these tapestries.

All but one of the pieces depicts a single tree. Each tree tapestry has a dominant colour and a distinct style, depicting a frozen moment. Trees can symbolise many things, from family relationships and nature, to sustainability and life. Walker’s tapestries feature trees she encountered whilst driving around Ireland, during the winter of her mother’s death. However, it was interesting to notice that eight of the nine pieces do not give a sense of travel or motion, and that the titles, which include Spring Tree and Autumn Tree, do not mention winter. It felt like these lushly woven tapestries are Walker’s poetic lament.

The ninth tapestry, Road, stood out in terms of size, format and technique. Larger than the other pieces, it depicted a full scene of trees planted on the side of a road at night. Weaved in a tighter knit of wool and silk, this tapestry-painting acts as the narrative driver of Walker’s story. Headlights are depicted on the grey road but there are no cars. Together with the other darker work, Tree Before Dark, these pieces told of the loneliness we sometimes feel when life – and sometimes the life of others – takes over. Prior to turning the work into tapestries, Walker captured the trees using thick impasto layers of paint, giving the impression that they are popping out of the canvas. The other works, which have the quality of drawings-turned-paintings-turned-tapestries, featured boldly coloured images, placed in the centre of a white background. The mix of weaved materials worked very well with this idea of impasto. The white backgrounds remained flat and allowed the longer threads in different colours and textures to give the pieces a sculptural quality. They existed like symbolic objects, silent and soft, calling to mind moments of waiting for a cycle to draw to its close.

Compared to the use of tapestries within wider contemporary art practice – where it can often form part of a socio-political commentary – Walker’s use of the medium is quite personal. Notable artists using tapestry in their work include: Isabel Nolan, who creates woven paintings in response to geographically and historically specific stories; Jim Ricks, whose Afghanistan-made hand knotted carpets display drone catalogues; and Grayson Perry, who uses tapestry as an upper-class marker of wealth, to convey intricate storytelling. Walker’s choice of style, production, and even her choice of tapestry fabricator, stayed true to her family’s story. Here, again, the external detail revealed in the exhibition statement completes this narrative: Sarah Walker produced these pieces with the same fabricator as her mother’s best friend, Irish artist Patrick Scott (1921–2014).

The interactions between the quiet sitting room-like space, the thickly painted tapestries, and the cluster of darker, tighter weaved pieces, successfully conveyed the role of trees within Walker’s story, as witnessing her mother’s last few months. The layering and mixing of colours made visible the process of production, in what I would consider to be accomplished ways. It would be interesting to see such techniques used with more complex imagery, while pushing this impasto-weaving concept even further might produce pieces that would exist as painted-sculptural tapestries. Having said that, ‘Tree Drawings on the Sky’ successfully created a sense of intimacy, through telling the story of an inevitable time in any family’s life.

Dr Moran Been-noon is an independent curator and artist based in Dublin.

Note
¹ Hermann Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte, (Trees. Reflections and Poems) (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1984)

Image Credit
Sarah Walker, Mauve Tree, 2018, wool, 100 x 120cm; image courtesy the artist and Oliver Sears Gallery

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Ulster Museum, Belfast
11 May – 23 September 2018

‘Headland’ is a major exhibition of recent paintings by Elizabeth Magill, powerfully displayed across two large gallery spaces at Belfast’s Ulster Museum. Developed in partnership with Limerick City Gallery of Art and the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (both of which have hosted the exhibition already), ‘Headland’ has finally come to Belfast and will by no means disappoint those who have long anticipated its arrival.

The exhibition, which presents 24 landscape paintings, draws attention to Magill as one of the region’s finest painters. The bare limbs of trees dominate the dimly-lit gallery spaces, twisting their way across the majority of the works on display. Beyond the dark branches lie half-concealed, uncanny landscapes, rich with colour and detail. Magill’s non-naturalistic colour palette is particularly worthy of mention, with toxic yellows, fierce reds, and enchanting purples making these landscapes seem both recognisable and otherworldly, as if conjured from the artist’s dreams. Magill may be depicting real Northern Irish landscapes, but they have been processed through the filters of memory and imagination, creating rich dreamscapes that captivate the viewer.

The works are simultaneously beautiful and unsettling, calm and eerie. The red branches that crackle and splinter across Red Bay (2016–17), for example, could be viewed as autumnal, but also suggest something more sinister, as the blood red pigment diffuses into the water below. Solitary figures, almost ghostly in their appearance, can be seen in many of Magill’s landscapes – strolling along a beach, sheltered under a tree, or rowing across a lake – giving the works a haunting quality. Similarly, flocks of birds often dominate the multicoloured skies, while splashes of bold colour seem almost violent in their application across more naturalistic undertones.

Despite the synthetic colour palette used in the many of the works, there is strong sense of natural and seasonal cycles. As one moves through the exhibition, wintery, snow-capped mountains and the aforementioned autumnal shades, give way to the new buds of spring, and the warm, dewy, almost stifling forests of summer, as strong rays of sunlight burst magnificently through the branches. Within the exhibition, one feels like something of a voyeur, spying on scenes that we perhaps should not be viewing. Large branches in the foreground provide a kind of concealment or protection, as if allowing us to observe without being seen ourselves, offering cinematic perspectives that I have rarely seen used in painting to such great effect.

The large canvases clearly demonstrate Magill’s sophisticated use of mixed media, incorporating painting, screen printing and photography to create multi-layered works which reward closer inspection. One work, Les Demoiselles (2014–15), is particularly alluring. Directly referencing Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1901), the painting again features Magill’s signature branches, which slice across the canvas. The faces of several women begin to appear, almost camouflaged, in beautiful hues of yellow and purple. As hidden creatures within the forest, the women feel almost nymph-like, not fully noticeable at first glance, but then impossible to ignore. Magill’s art historical interest in this Picasso painting is further explored in one of a series of nine smaller works. Here, the artist uses collage to depict Picasso’s famed angular women, set against her own signature brushstrokes.

The smaller, intimately scaled works on display are demonstrative of the artist’s ability to work across a range of scales, and it is impressive  how much detail Magill can incorporate into these works, giving them just as much atmosphere as the larger pieces. In the smaller paintings we see a couple promenading by a lake, a remote cottage and a particularly vivid twilight scene, amongst other striking landscapes. ‘Headland’ no doubt comes at a prolific and exciting time in Magill’s career, and it is promising to see such an established talent continue to push boundaries and experiment within her work, testing new theories and embracing new approaches. This exhibition has been a highlight of the Ulster Museum’s recent fine art programme and is highly recommended.

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

Image Credits
Elizabeth Magill, Wildlife, 2016–17, oil and silkscreen on canvas, 153 x 183cm; image courtesy Hugo Glendinning and the artist
Elizabeth Magill, Only Tune, 2016; image courtesy Hugo Glendinning and the artist

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Taylor Galleries, Dublin
11 May – 2 June 2018

Martin Gale’s realist oil paintings, presented in his recent solo exhibition ‘Bloodlines’ at Taylor Galleries, bring to mind the work of masters of the American Realism genre, including Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper. Whilst Wyeth expressed a rural American splendour and Hopper depicted lonely urban dwellers of apartments and American diners, Gale’s paintings are distinctly Irish – resulting in singular visions of our own ‘wild west’ (though probably Kildare, where the artist lives). Minus Wyeth’s ethereality and doubling down on Hopper’s ominous isolation, Gale paints technicolour scenes reminiscent of The Quiet Man, minus the humour, suggesting Ireland, at moments, as perhaps No Country for Old Men.²

Born in 1949, Gale is a member of both Aosdána and the Royal Hibernian Academy, and has been exhibiting at Taylor Galleries since 1981, while his art is in many major public collections nationwide. Considering Gale’s career thus far, the paintings are formally perfect; one could not fault his application of oils. The real art, however, is in Gale’s framing – the back of a man’s head and body going somewhere fast, jacket flapping, in Short Step, or the foregrounding of a hare in Harrier, as a distant jogger passes – which creates odd angles and disquieting viewpoints. Unlike Wyeth’s dreamlike painting, Christina’s World (1948), which inspired the film Days of Heaven ², Gale’s skies are cloudier and noir-esque, with a predominance of greens and greys, attributable to the Irish weather. Like Hopper’s paintings, it’s not Gale’s people or their stylings that are desolate or downcast, but the contexts in which they are placed and the spaces that encase them.

The men that populate these environs are mostly alone, coming towards or away from the viewer on puddled roads and laneways, journeying to do something, or having already done something – it is left to us to speculate as to what. The physical transience of these protagonists probes at the greater existential transience of us all. A couple of outstanding instances featuring lone women – The New Girl, displayed individually in an upstairs hall, and the politically timely The Appointment – are loaded with ambiguity, akin to Cindy Sherman’s staged photographic series, ‘Untitled Film Stills’ (1977–80).

The works are realist, sure, but in a dramatised way. Everyday moments – waiting, walking, conceivably hesitating – are elevated, escalated, through Gale’s scenes. Due to a lack of subjective choices, we all see ourselves as the hero or antihero of our own reality. Gale’s paintings reflect this inner state, this spotlight that we, at times, imagine ourselves to be illuminated or imprisoned by. Technical illumination is certainly one of Gale’s skills. In Brighter Later, one of the smaller, unpopulated environs, light hits the horizon whilst the road ahead veers off course, suggesting much more than sundown – perhaps the end of the road in its entirety.

We hit a stumbling block when it comes to animals. The gallery’s press release highlights a focus on birds and animals, most notably horses, with the titular implication of an equine presence within the artist’s family history. While obviously bookending the premise of the exhibition, I found these animal paintings to be somewhat shoehorned in. They were not operating at the same level of nuance and complexity as the more peopled paintings. In conjunction with the human subjects, the presence of an animal or bird within a canvas seems totemic or eternal. Along with the aforementioned successful foregrounding of the hare in Harrier, a larger work titled One for Sorrow (which features a man facing a foreboding magpie) articulates the permanence of nature, while highlighting our own ephemerality.

The artist’s best works have an edge; a composition that is particular or peculiar, alluding to something – or, bone chillingly, to nothing – on the horizon. We read Gale’s human subjects as being laden with anxious landscapes. However, when depicted alone, his animals often lack the depth achieved in other works, where human presence can suggest a kind of finitude. In my view, Gale’s five watercolour studies were least successful – the artist’s dramatic edge quite literally watered down – and there were generally too many paintings on display – twenty-nine works spread over four rooms, halls, stairs and landings. Those that broke from the herd were indeed quite startling, suggesting that our twisting rural laneways are perhaps not as pastoral as they seem.

Lily Cahill is co-editor of Critical Bastards Magazine based in Dublin.

Notes
¹ No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007, based on the 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy, which took its title from the W.B. Yeats poem, Sailing to Byzantium (1928).
² Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick, 1978.

Image Credits
Martin Gale, Harrier, oil on canvas, 105 x 120 cm; image courtesy of the artist and Taylor Galleries
Martin Gale, Weekender, 2017, oil on canvas, 105 x 120 cm; image courtesy of the artist and Taylor Galleries

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