The January – February 2019 issue of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet is out now.

This issue features a range of conferences, exhibitions, residencies and events that took place towards the end of 2018, while also profiling several ongoing artistic projects and collaborations.

In columns for this issue, Miriam Logan outlines some philosophical perspectives on activating creativity and Róisín Kennedy reviews the recently published collection of Brian O’Doherty’s letters, edited by Brenda Moore-McCann. Maeve Mulrennan discusses the recent ‘Reframing the ‘90s’ conference in UCC and Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, while Diana Bamimeke reports on ‘Winter Seminar: The Lives of Artists’ at TBG+S and the RHA. In this issue’s regional column, Manuela Pacella discusses recent exhibition highlights in Northern Ireland.  

Career Development articles come from Pádraic E. Moore, who interviews Irish artist Doireann O’Malley about her recent solo exhibition at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, and Róisín Power Hackett, who reflects on her recent performance event at The LAB Gallery, which included mentorship with Amanda Coogan.  

Evgeniya Martirosyan reports on her recent residencies in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre and Praksis, Oslo, while Christopher Steenson interviews Danny McCarthy and Mick O’Shea about their recent collaboration, which emerged out of their participation in the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island, Florida. 

In the How is it Made? section, Veronica O’Neill reflects on Clea Van de Grin’s touring show, ‘Jump’, and Michele Horrigan describes the folklore underpinning her recent exhibition, ‘Where Does The Law Stand With Leprechauns?’ at The LAB Gallery, Dublin. Áine Phillips reviews TULCA Festival of Visual Arts 2018, curated by Linda Shevlin, and Aidan Kelly Murphy interviews Eoin O’Dowd about Dublin’s former Eight Gallery. Coverage of recent VAI Events includes Chris Steenson’s report on the various happenings at this year’s Belfast Open Studios, and Kevin Burns’s review of the final iteration of the New Spaces project.

The Regional Profile for this issue comes from County Mayo, with organisational insights from Orla Henihan (Linenhall Arts Centre), John McHugh (Custom House Gallery), Ronan Halpin (Achill Artists Group) and Edward King (Heinrich Böll Residency). In addition, artists Norah Brennan, Breda Burns and Saoirse Wall discuss the realities of maintaining an arts practice in the region. 

Reviewed in the Critique section are: ‘Infrastructures of Now’ at NCAD Gallery; Maud Cotter at Limerick City Gallery of Art; ‘Manmade’ at Millennium Court Arts Centre; Tomas Penc at Triskel Christchurch; and Chris Doris at The Model.

As ever, we have details of the upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public art roundups, news from the sector and current opportunities.

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ÁINE PHILLIPS REFLECTS ON TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS 2018, CURATED BY LINDA SHEVLIN.

A person in complete accord with their environment is described as being in a ‘syntonic state’. Curated by Linda Shevlin, this year’s edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts in Galway examined this concept. The artists, thinkers and writers assembled by Shevlin offered different perspectives on this theme, generating various possibilities for viewers to attain syntonic experiences through art.

A vibrant example of human and environmental accord was created on the opening night by Aoibheann Greenan with The Life of Riley. Taking the form of a street procession, led by a lone piper, the work involved a number of Galway buskers, who entertained the crowds, alongside the artist and her cast of performers, animating the nighttime city streets and leading the audience from the festival gallery to the club. Greenan’s performance incorporated wildly embellished, hybrid costumes and props that mingled elements of Irish and Mexican visual motifs. Darkly funny, bizarre and congruent with Galway’s street performance culture, the event also presented a contemporary take on histories of the Great Famine period, a subject in Ireland deserving of new modes of analysis and interpretation. Video documentation of the performance was later presented to great effect on the top floor of the Fishery Watchtower Museum, a unique Victorian building that houses a collection of fishery memorabilia and vintage photographs.

TULCA was originally initiated 16 years ago, by Galway artists and curators, to counter the distinct lack of visual art spaces and resources in the city. This deficiency unfortunately persists, with space now at a premium, in the run up to Galway 2020; however, TULCA continues to enliven empty venues with contemporary art each year. Columban Hall, a former Congregational church, was theatrically lit to produce a unifying sense of anticipation and discovery. Helen Hughes commanded the space with her series of collapsed inflatable forms, deluged with paint, like extravagant mollusks or the discarded parts of an alien apparatus. Both Laura Ní Fhlaibhín and Rosie O’Reilly’s installations were complex narrative works involving multiple elements, correlating with each other to give the impression of an uncommon museum.  

Another repurposed space, the festival gallery at Fairgreen House, displayed ‘Empathy Lab 2018’, a series of paintings by Colin Martin exploring ambiguous sci-fi subjects betraying modernist futuristic fantasies. Martin’s realism utilises a calm and banal painterly execution, to chilling effect. Robot children and cyberphobic computer banks assert the future is now and it is sufferable. Conor McGarrigle’s #RiseandGrind gave the opposite impression. His ordered algorithmic systems of thought, manifested across interconnected screens, seemed beyond human apprehension and tolerance. Denis McNulty’s video installation, David (Timefeel), featured the music and animated stills of a fresh-faced Bruce Springsteen, trapped in an endless recursive edit. 

An exquisite contradiction to these restrained works was Stella Rahola Matutes’s Babel, teetering upright pillars of shimmering borosilicate glass. Invigilators hovered nearby to defend the delicate baroque shafts from the vibration of viewer’s footfall. This building has a vast underground concrete edifice, which was occupied by Jesse Jones’s Zarathustra, cinematic documentation of the Artane Band performing in an abandoned Ballymun swimming pool, wistfully redolent of failed housing projects in Dublin’s recent past. The bleak chamber was haunted by the notorious past atrocities and abuses perpetrated on the children of the original Boys Band, part of the Artane industrial school. 

As explored in much of the works included in Shevlin’s edition of TULCA, the ‘syntonic’ also evokes sensations of longing for previously experienced states of harmony or oneness with our surroundings. Nostalgia and a yearning for an idealised past or future, was succinctly expressed in Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009), the work of Cyprien Gaillard installed in 126, Galway’s artist-run gallery. This 16mm film has the aura of seductive lost worlds. A mirrored tower block dissolving in a controlled explosion, and the sun-drenched rutting contests of young men, provided haunting metaphors for evanescent desire.

In syntonic accord at the Electric nightclub, Mark Leckey’s 1999 cult film, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, used found footage to show the evolution of Britain’s nightlife, from Northern Soul and disco to rave culture. Joanne Laws also developed this theme with her text for the festival’s catalogue, which presented an ethnography of rave culture, rooted in her lived experience. She writes memorably that “when returning to a place where I’ve previously spent a lot of time, I half expect to see ghosts of myself in the street, going about everyday business”.¹ These phantoms of place and identity were further elaborated in Bassam Al-Sabah’s newly commissioned CGI film work and sculptural installation, Wandering wandering with the sun on my back (2018), at NUIG Gallery. The film features a shimmering young man, trapped in a series of bizarre architectures located in dystopian, desert-like landscapes. Reminiscent of computer game aesthetics, the film implicates the viewer in the protagonist’s struggle to endure traumatic displacements, amidst transcendent, hallucinogenic transformations. 

Galway Arts Centre’s ground floor collocated the vibrant neo-fauvist-style paintings and shrine-like banners of Eleanor McCaughey, in her multipart work, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed. In close proximity, Gavin Murphy’s wall installation and narrative video explored the material and cultural histories of the now-defunct Eblana Theatre at Dublin’s Busáras. The work captured fading aspirations of the modern Irish state to locate public memory in our past fantasies of social organisation. Upstairs in the centre, Paul Murnaghan tethered a blackened inflatable island to a heavy weight, under a relentlessly blowing fan, a sad and funny tableau in contrast to Marcel Vidal’s pitch-black colonnades, which incorporated petrified deer hooves and hardware materials, implying a sadistic but satirical violence. 

Ciarán Óg Arnold showed the intriguingly titled photographic series, I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed, channeling Wolfgang Tillmans’s sentiment that “only when you are aware of how tragic life can be, can you also enjoy the depth of a party through the night”.² Other works at the centre were Ciara O’Kelly’s dual-screen video installation, which uses the promotional languages of corporate advertising, with slick humour and elegance. Susanne Wawra’s photo-transfer paintings, based on personal archives from her childhood in East Germany, were suggestive of the dim and aching memory of lost social realities.

TULCA events this year included a ‘Nostalgic Listening Club’ with Mark Garry, where participants honoured and shared beloved music collections, housed across old and defunct formats, such as cassette tapes, vinyl, gramophone discs and CDs. The Domestic Godless returned to the city soon after a GIAF residency, resuming their crusade to bring flavoursome tastes to celebrate and expand the culturally and historically entangled relationship between society and food. Collaborating with Deirdre O’Mahony in Mind Meitheal, along with EU research centre, CERERE, they presented new imaginings for a ‘heritage cereal renaissance’. Giving material form to this project, Sadhbh Gaston’s emphatic embroidered fabric banners were installed in Sheridan’s on the market. In addition, British writer and journalist Owen Hatherley spoke to Declan Long about his new book, Ministry of Nostalgia, described as a “stimulating polemic” against “austerity nostalgia”. This was followed by a screening of the radical documentary HyperNormalisation by British filmmaker, Adam Curtis, which was introduced by Conn Holohan. 

In all, TULCA 2018 provided a rich mix of speculative viewpoints on syntony – a state that seems difficult to attain in modern life, as evidenced by the disconnect we currently manifest, in relation to our ecological and political environments. Clearly, a syntonic state is something to aspire to.

Áine Phillips is an artist based in County Galway. 

Notes
¹ Joanne Laws, ‘Feed Your Head: The Speculative Futures of Rave’, TULCA 2018 catalogue essay.
² Wolfgang Tillmans quoted in Ha Duong, ‘Photographers Who Captured the Ecstasy and Abandon of Rave Culture’, 7 September 2018, artsy.net.

Image Credits
Mark Leckey, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, 1999, video installation, Electric; photograph ©Jonathan Sammon, courtesy TULCA Festival of Visual Arts.
Jesse Jones, Zarathustra, HD film, installation view, Fairgreen House; photograph ©Jonathan Sammon, courtesy TULCA Festival of Visual Arts.
Eleanor McCaughey, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, 2018, installation view, Galway Arts Centre; photograph ©Jonathan Sammon, courtesy TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
‘Nostalgic Listening Club’ with Mark Garry, 10 November, The Mechanics Institute; photograph ©Jonathan Sammon, courtesy TULCA Festival of Visual Arts

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PÁDRAIC E. MOORE INTERVIEWS IRISH ARTIST DOIREANN O’MALLEY ABOUT HER RECENT SOLO EXHIBITION AT DUBLIN CITY GALLERY THE HUGH LANE.

Pádraic E. Moore: Before we discuss your recent work, perhaps you can offer some insights into your background?

Doireann O’Malley: I was born in Limerick and lived there until the age of nine, returning in 1999 to study Sculpture and Combined Media at Limerick School of Art & Design. Gerard Byrne, who has been a formative influence on my practice, was teaching there at the time. After this, I completed an MA at the Belfast School of Art, studying under Willie Doherty. At the time, I was working mainly in photography and focusing upon a range of subjects – such as female representation, androgyny and mythology – that have, in fact, become prominent again within my work in recent years and were the focus of my exhibition, ‘Prototypes’, at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (22 June – 14 October 2018). Before art college, I attended a Catholic convent school in Clonakilty, County Cork, and I think that this experience had a lasting impact upon my work. At that time, in the mid-to-late 90s, institutions of that antiquated nature were coming to an end, having remained largely unchanged for decades. The physical environments, theatrical interiors and the expansive fields, which I ran in daily, have haunted my dreams ever since, sealing a growing desire to make films.

PEM: I read in the exhibition press release that your work is often directly shaped by material gleaned from dream analysis?

DO’M: Around five years ago, I began visiting a Jungian psychoanalyst and attending dream analysis workshops. This encouraged me to see dreams as a useful resource for my work, so I started recording them. Initially, I was writing about my dreams and then began to develop a script of experimental texts. For some time now, the ultimate goal has been to succeed in capturing a dream on film and this is reflected in the style that the ‘Prototypes’ series is shot in. I made a conscious decision to create the effect of moving through the scenes in a dreamlike manner, with dreams being recalled through analysis and narration. One of the protagonists, Pol Merchan, participated in an extensive workshop where our dreams were analysed with a Jungian psychoanalyst. The rest of the cast participated in a shorter workshop. These dreams were then transcribed and incorporated into the script. This dreamlike approach also enabled me to underscore aspects of the trans body, as an interesting site for deconstructing theories, including alchemy, transhumanism and a queering of psychoanalysis.

PEM: Judging by the outcome, I’m guessing that the production process involved a large team?

DO’M: The project required considerable funding and logistical organisation. Several project grants were invaluable to the development and production of ‘Prototypes’, including: a small production grant at The XPOSED Queer Film Festival in Berlin; a research grant from the Berlin Senat; a 2016 media art grant from the Foundation of Lower Saxony at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art; a Stiftung Kunstfonds project grant; and an Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Award. Having realised that I wanted to make cinematic productions, I worked with Albrecht von Grünhagen and Matan Radin, who used Arri cameras on several dolly and gimbal setups, in order to film scenes from several different perspectives, as I had written the script for multiple screens. This allowed me to create the impression that the viewer is drifting along in a disembodied manner, essentially creating a dreamlike atmosphere. I wanted the viewer to feel as though they were part of the narrative, as opposed to being a voyeur. In several scenes, the gaze of the camera is almost machine-like, in its scanning of the protagonists. The soundtracks were composed by Armin Lorenz Gerold, with whom I developed an improvisational way of working. The second film was shot only a few months before the exhibition in The Hugh Lane and involved a larger cast and crew. 

PEM: Did you use scripts in ‘Prototypes’? 

DO’M: The films are essentially collages of material shot over a two-year period. The communities that I have met in Berlin have had an impact upon me, and all of the protagonists have some prior experience with performance. The fact that they were largely playing themselves was conducive to improvisation; it helped to shape the film-making process in unexpected ways and many of these elements were included in the script. In the case of Prototypes I, I also used material gleaned from the psychoanalytical dream responses, interviews, the protagonists’ own writings and experiences, as well as from theorists such as Karen Barad. In the first film, the protagonists learned the scripts, whereas in the second part, Jamie McDonald (who plays the Director of the Institute) and I designed three different games for the characters to use while improvising. The second film was non-scripted, but certain parameters helped to structure the direction of conversations.  

PEM: Does Science Fiction inform your work?

DO’M: I suppose on some level I’ve always wanted to recreate Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)! Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) was hugely inspirational. I’m particularly inspired by her depiction of time travel and also the way that she creates worlds in which there is a possibility for sexual variance that is not so polarised. The writer Octavia E. Butler was also a huge influence. The film features voiceovers comprising extracts of writings by Karen Barad, who looks at theoretical physics from a queer perspective. The Director of the Institute’s dialogue also appropriates elements of Lao Tzu’s epic Tao Te Ching. Ultimately, the films were a patchwork of references to feminist theory, art history and science fiction. I am also interested in spirituality as methodology for focus and transformation. 

PEM: Can we discuss the representation of non-binary individuals in your work?

DO’M: Gender is probably one of the most contentious and oppressive structures within society. Transgender politics have made a massive dent on these structures, ultimately proving the need to recognise and celebrate difference to the binary system, or to potentially dismantle it altogether. My intention in making ‘Prototypes’ was to create a tableau that functions in relation to the history of representation that also deals with the depiction of queer bodies. There is a push towards being definitive, in terms of binary choice that reproduces stereotypical notions of the ideal. As you will know from ‘Prototypes’, I have worked with several trans and intersex people and this is certainly something that they have encountered in their own lives. I am interested in exploring these ideas and how they reflect upon society in general. 

PEM: Can you discuss the Marrakech residency that was awarded as part of the Berlin Art Prize? 

DO’M: The residency will be in Queens Collective in Marrakech, which is founded upon cultural activism, feminism, community engagement and artistic exploration. It is focused on gender equality, female empowerment and vulnerable communities. I am really excited to meet the artists there and potentially work with them on a film. 

PEM: Are there any specific ways that you hope to develop your work in the immediate future?

DO’M: I’m eager to find more immersive ways of showing my films that will incorporate several screens, multiple perspectives and bigger installations. I am really interested in the idea of creating environments in which moving image pieces can be experienced. Next year, I will participate in a mentoring initiative called The Berlin Program for Artists. I want to continue working with museums and galleries, but I would also like to make bigger productions. I am developing two ideas for films, one set in Ireland in a convent and the other in Vienna, with a couple of the protagonists that I worked with in ‘Prototypes’.

Doireann O’Malley is an Irish visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Berlin. doireannomalley.com

Pádraic E. Moore is a writer, curator and art historian currently based in Brussels and Dublin.  padraicmoore.com

Image Credits
Doireann O’Malley, Prototypes, HD film stills; © Doireann O’Malley, image courtesy the artist,
Doireann O’Malley, ‘Prototypes’, installation views, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; photographs © Ros Kavanagh.

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KEVIN BURNS REVIEWS THE FOURTH AND FINAL INSTALMENT OF VAI’S NEW SPACES EXHIBITION PROGRAMME IN DERRY.

It’s about four in the afternoon: I’ve just bothered someone in an office to buzz me up to the first floor; I ascend a grand Georgian staircase, lined with Rothko posters; I wait while they switch everything on; and now I’m watching a stage eat itself. There are four metal scaffolds with stage lighting, mirrored in quadrants, cyclically contracting then expanding, like industrial foliate. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice that a progress bar has appeared at the top of the screen, with a timer counting 3, 4, 5 – then it’s gone.

I’m at the Fashion & Textile Design Centre, one of four eponymous ‘new spaces’ in Derry, where sixteen projects have been situated from July to December, in four instalments of four projects each. New Spaces is a joint venture between Visual Artists Ireland and Derry City and Strabane District Council, supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Challenge Fund that, as decreed in an early press release: “Allows people to experience exciting and challenging contemporary art in new ways”. Certainly, off-site art projects can offer experiences distinct from those in the more utopian setting of an art gallery, with characteristics often borne out of the frictions inherent to such projects. Indeed, part of New Spaces’s remit is to encourage emerging curators to engage with – and learn from – the challenges that can result from curating art projects in unconventional settings. The exhibitions for each instalment were curated by Rebecca Strain, Edy Fung, Alice Butler and Mirjami Schuppert, who were selected during an open-call in early 2018, based on the strength of their site-responsive proposals. The fourth and final round of exhibitions ran from 17 November – 15 December 2018.

In Ebrington Square on Saturday 1 December, Shipsides & Beggs Projects – an artistic collaboration between Dan Shipsides and Neal Beggs – presented ‘Zombie Line, Wheel and Wire’, a film screening and accompanying artists’ talk, curated by Alice Butler. Shipsides and Beggs reflect on the post-war geographies and defunct military infrastructures of the Dolomites in Northern Italy, focusing on the iron cables originally used as messaging and scouting routes for Italian soldiers during the First World War. The film leans on the disoriented visual logic of psychedelia to figuratively spin these cables into bicycle wheels, enacting a visual genealogy of the bicycle – from darling of the Italian Futurists and a favoured political symbol of Mussolini, to military vehicle (including – incredibly – the ‘UVF Bicycle Corp’), and hyper-masculine symbol, resplendent in immodest Lycra. Imagery recurs cyclically throughout, joyously asserting the possibilities of film as a nonlinear medium, where duration does not necessarily prescribe that narrative should run in parallel.

Yarli Allison’s ‘[Backspace]’ is a four-part series of installations reflecting on growth, degrowth and evolution, filtered through biographical episodes. Part four, Infant, was due to take place at Gwyn’s Café & Pavillion in Derry’s Brooke Park, concluding the series with gestures of rebirth. But it was cancelled. From what I gathered while waiting for my coffee, the work was intended to involve an object suspended from the ceiling, which set off a dispute over whether it would “fit”. The artist opted to deliver a performance piece in the park grounds on the opening night instead. Evidently, artistic interests clashed with the spatial logistics of a working café, laying clear some of the practical limitations of off-site art projects: these aren’t utopian spaces where we are encouraged to loiter and just think for a little while; they are often functional spaces with their own set of demands. I would probably have ordered that coffee anyway – Gwyn’s is a beautiful café in an idyllic setting – but as I did so, I was aware of an implicit exchange: “I can’t just ask to see the art, and then walk out!”

At the Sion Stables heritage centre in Sion Mills is a more harmonious relationship between project and location. Presented within a large glass case, Hiroko Matshushita’s Dualism of Storytelling is a delicate cut-paper installation, resembling a frieze, embossed on both sides of an unfurled, folded scroll. It is a take on Snow White, told between two narrative threads on either side of the paper, one in English and the other Japanese. The story is illustrated with silhouette portraiture, reminiscent of traditional Regency imagery, where one might see scenes of fox-hunting, or courtship in elegant hats. In an adjacent space stands Emma Hirsk’s sculpture, The Womanly Art of Welding, two elongated metal frames standing upright with a protuberant abstract form emerging from their centres. Both projects were curated by Rebecca Strain and installed among a permanent collection of artifacts from Sion Mills’ history as the company town for the Herdman Flax-Mill, established in 1835. Among the collection is a photograph of men at work in the mill, shovelling through an indoor desert of flax seed: the posture of the figures resonates with Matshushita’s illustrations, which in this context evoke an idealised remembrance of uneven relations between lords and tenants, employers and workers. As a model mill town, Sion Mills itself can be seen as symbolic of the duality pertinent to Matshushita’s work. Proud as the town is of the Herdman family legacy, Matshushita cautions against mistaking noblesse oblige for equity. Hirsk’s sculpture likewise speaks to its stablemates, aspiring to “situate the feminine in the natural environment”. The welded frames have a right-angled structure and verticality that is purposeful, suggesting labour and industry. They seemed at home in a museum of horse grooming tools and seed-weighing equipment, while also channelling the obscured histories of female industrial labour, not noticeably represented by the numerous archival images of magnificently moustached gentlemen.

The aforementioned video at the Fashion & Textile Design Centre, is an element of Dave Loder’s audio installation, A Wh( )ly ring(ing), which builds on Loder’s conceptually ambitious practice of capturing and reproducing ambient auditory and kinetic forces. Curated by Mirjami Schuppert and occupying a large room, A Wh( )ly ring(ing) purports to engage with the imperceptible ringing of Derry’s City Walls. It comprises an array of small copper coins wired together, plugged into an audio mixer and outputted to a speaker. This contraption is installed amid an arrangement of geometric fabric patterns, a television displaying the stage, and another switched off and facing out of the window. The premise and aesthetic of the work implies that the copper coins somehow receive phenomena from the environment and make them audible. Only it doesn’t – I can’t hear anything. What I can hear are environmental noises: the electrical humming of the television; the gentle creaking of the windows, as though the white paint was crawling off the frames; the ominous rumblings of a large building’s infinitesimal swaying; the faint, fluctuating sound of air conditioning. If this speaker is actually producing any sound, it is lost amid the noise of the road and the people chatting beneath. But the audio system appears to be producing something, because we can read the display on the audio mixer, which indicates audio tracks are playing in sequence, much as the television plays video on a loop. The other television, inactively gazing out of the window, is even more ambivalent: is it supposed to be playing something, or did the gallery attendants forget to switch it on? A Wh( )ly ring(ing) creates an unreliable narrative that generates friction between trust and knowledge, bringing to mind the distressing disputation around climate science – a subject that is at once ambient and remote, but terrifyingly vast in scale. Whether or not one ‘believes’ in the science, depends largely on our trust in those who practice it. Quite apart from how it might operate under studio or gallery conditions, in this context A Wh( )ly ring(ing) symbolises the impossibility of total, empirical knowledge. We have to rely on trust – institutional and personal – to construct the truth. 

The concept of ‘bringing art’ to places where normal people conduct their everyday lives is nothing new, so I don’t honestly consider it an important outcome of New Spaces, as such. However, there is something revelatory about the dysfunction that can occur in off-site projects, where the formal utopian concepts of art practice generate productive friction with the priorities of non-art spaces. But the viewer must be autonomous for this to happen. Civic art programming aspires to contrive a viewing experience – it is a spectacle, however low-key – by bargaining our agency as viewers for an experience of revelation. We need to retain awareness of our agency, and decide how strenuously to exercise it; whether to buy the coffee, or not to buy the coffee…

Kevin Burns is an artist and writer based in Derry.

Image Credits
Shipsides and Beggs Projects, Zombie Line, Wheel and Wire, video still, image courtesy of the artists.
Emma Hirsk, The Womanly Art of Welding, image courtesy of Rebecca Strain.
Hiroko Matshushita, Dualism of Storytelling; image courtesy of Rebecca Strain.

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CHRISTOPHER STEENSON INTERVIEWS DANNY MCCARTHY AND MICK O’SHEA ABOUT THEIR SERIES OF NEW RELEASES, WHICH EMERGED OUT OF THEIR PARTICIPATION IN THE ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG RESIDENCY.

Christopher Steenson: How did you both come to be invited to participate in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island in Florida?

Danny McCarthy: An American artist, who was sitting on the selection panel for the Rauschenberg Residency, recommended us. You cannot apply to go on the residency, as it’s by invitation only. I knew we were to be invited on an American residency, but when this arrived in my inbox it was like winning the Lotto – the terms were so generous. In fact, they were so good that Mick thought it was spam and binned it until I rang him!

Mick O’Shea: Yes indeed, I thought it was like being invited to share in the inheritance of an African princess.

CS: Working together as The Quiet Club, you have recorded a new album, ‘No Meat No Bone’. Several tracks on the album (Jungle Road, Waldo Cottage, Laika Lane) refer to locations on Captiva Island. How important was the residency – its location and the people you met – in influencing this new release?

DMc: The studios came about when Rauschenberg moved to Captiva Island in the ‘60s. A developer in the area was starting to buy up properties on the island. So, Rauschenberg went to many of his neighbours and said, “I will give you one million dollars for your house and you can live there as long as you want, or until you die”. That way, he ended up owning a huge block of properties in the middle of the island and stopped it from being overrun by developers. When he passed away, his son [Christopher Rauschenberg] set up the Rauschenberg Foundation, which now administrates the residencies. The album title comes from something we saw in the kitchen the first night we arrived. So, before we did anything, we had the title. 

MO’S: The studio was an empty double garage on Jungle Road, where we could pull the double doors wide open and find ourselves fully immersed in the wildness. We arranged to meet there at 2pm every day to work together. The names of the tracks come from places on the residency. We would have done field recordings in some of these places. The whole atmosphere of the studios was that of intense creativity.

DMc: Outside of that time, we worked on our own practices. As the days progressed, other artists came to listen to what we were doing, and we encouraged them to join in. These included American hip-hop artist Jasari X, poet Jane Hirshfield, dancer Victoria Marks, painter Bob Tanner and British filmmaker Margaret Williams. So, we have a whole lot of separate recordings made from these sessions. 

CS: What differentiates this release conceptually, from the other works created under The Quiet Club moniker? 

DMc: The work came about by being in that space at a given time. One of our precepts as The Quiet Club is that we don’t talk about what we will do, and we do not talk about it after we have done it.

CS: What conversations were had during the recording sessions?

MO’S: All good conversations are made up of balanced times of speaking, listening, reacting, agreeing and disagreeing. We try to bring this to our playing. Before we play, we are in normal conversation mode – not discussing what we are going to play, which instruments, or for how long, but checking in with each other. When we are playing, we continue the conversation non-verbally.

CS: Danny – What led you to make The Rauschenberg Scores during the residency?

DMc: When being shown around the vast studios, Matt Hall – Rauschenberg’s Chief Technician and Assistant – pointed out several large tables that he had made specifically for Rauschenberg. The tables were scored with Stanley knives, and stained by paints and inks. Some sections of the tables were very beautiful. I took photographs of the parts that inspired me and developed them into large-format prints on some thirty-year-old handmade paper that Rauschenberg had left behind. The title, The Rauschenberg Scores, both refers to the marks on the table made by Rauschenberg and the graphical score that I developed these marks into.

CS: A score is also used by composers to order sound, serving as a set of directions for performers, with ambiguities in the score leading to degrees of interpretation. How do The Rauschenberg Scores fit with the conceptual premise of  a composer?

DMc: The scores are open to interpretation, as both visual objects and scores to be used by musicians or sound artists. I have made other works like this for The Quiet Music Ensemble, including: The Dead (flat) C Scrolls; Listen, Listen Again, Listen Better; and The Great Listenin(g). Interestingly, when I first made these prints, I pinned them onto the studio wall in a horizontal formation. But when I came back the following morning, one of the pins had been removed from each of the prints, so that they now hung at an angle and really looked much better. Matt Hall said that this was Rauschenberg’s doing and I am inclined to believe him. I choose to perform the scores on a grand piano in the main studio building. This was a piano that had been played by John Cage, Morton Feldman and John Tudor, amongst many others, so it carried a lot of history. Whilst doing the recordings alone in the studio late at night, sounds appeared as if from nowhere and were incorporated into the recordings. I really believe that Rauschenberg played an active part in creating the work. The place was infused with his spirit.

CS: In an era dominated by online streaming platforms, how important is it that these releases are experienced as both physical and sonic objects? 

DMc: Our releases come in limited editions and are very specifically designed and packaged, mostly by Mick, with accompanying notes, insert cards, texts and so on, intended to enhance the experience of listening.

MO’S: The visual and tactile nature of a LP/CD cover reminds me of when I used to buy LP’s based on the cover alone, wondering if the sound would live up to the artwork. The physical package of ‘No Meat No Bone’ has the look of a 7” sleeve, which is bigger than conventional CD covers; this gives me more space to be creative. The images on four inserts show our time in Captiva. On the back cover is an image of the Fish House, an iconic building on the property. The red geometric pattern, which covers the front and part of the back, relates to the drawings I was doing while on residency. 

CS: After your time at the Rauschenberg Foundation, you made your way to the Black Iris Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, where you recorded an improvised performance in collaboration with Stephen Vitiello. What is your relationship to Vitiello?

DMc: Stephen had invited us to lecture and exhibit our work in the University Of Virginia, so we wound up doing a gig in the Black Iris Gallery as well. I have known Stephen for a very long time now. I first met him in 2006 when I curated the ‘Bend It Like Beckett’ CD for Art Trail. I spelt his name wrong on the album credits and we have been friends ever since, as has Mick.

MO’S: In 2010, Stephen was one of our guests when we were on residency in the Crawford Gallery, Cork, as Strange Attractor Ireland (with Anthony Kelly, Irene Murphy and David Stalling). We have played numerous times since then. It’s always a pleasure.

CS: What is your approach to collaboration and improvisation with other artists like Vitiello? 

DMc: The main approach we have to collaboration and improvisation with others is the ability to listen. Listening is the core of our practice.

CS: Are there any new projects on the horizon for both of you? 

MO’S: We do not talk about it.

Mick O’Shea works with sound, food, drawing, and anything else he can get his hands on. Danny McCarthy is a pioneer of performance art and sound art in Ireland. Christopher Steenson is a sound artist based in Dublin. ‘No Meat No Bone’, ‘The Rauschenberg Scores’ and ‘Black Iris’ are released by Farpoint Recordings. farpointrecordings.com

Image Credits
Danny McCarthy, Picture to be Listened to Wearing a Blindfold, 2016 – 2017; courtesy of the artist.
The Quiet Club recording with Jasari X while on residency at The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captva Island, Florida; image courtesy of the artists.
Danny McCarthy, one of The Rauschenberg Scores, photographic print on antique paper; courtesy of the artist

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Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown
2 November 2018 – 23 January 2019

The current exhibition, ‘MANMADE’, at Millennium Court Arts Centre, features the work of several artists examining marine debris, coral life and metaphors of irrevocable danger carried by the sea, based on increasing levels of human pollution that threaten the oceanic ecosystem. The centre has developed an accompanying public programme, comprising a range of outreach activities, aimed at promoting environmental consciousness. This agenda acts to both serve and subvert the curatorial theme: collectively the artworks explore this subject and its associated materials, yet the conceptual integrity of the exhibition is undermined, in its framing as some sort of awareness campaign.

One element that weaves throughout the works on show, is the repeated use of text in various forms, each uniquely interpreting the multiple elements embedded within the curatorial inquiry. In Ghost Net (2016) – a collaborative work, by Kathryn Nelson, Julie McGowan and Sandra Turley – a large white cotton fishing net is rendered almost invisible. The net’s presence is betrayed by the webs of overlapping shadows it casts onto the surrounding walls, intertwining with the soft yellow lettering of the accompanying wall text. These short verses highlight both the sinister function of the apparatus and its delicate qualities, alluding to human intervention in the environment, including the ancient tradition of fishing, which is being quietly scrutinised. These short and momentary poetics reflect this antagonism; emerging broken and lost, the words are reassembled, ultimately changing their agency. 

This shift in agency corresponds on a fundamental level with the reclaimed materials that feature widely in the exhibition – once considered pollution, now categorised, arranged and reconstituted as artworks, and given autonomy in the gallery context. Recent Ulster University graduate, Kate Ritchie, presented a series of sculptural installations titled Beachkeeping No.1, No.2 and No.3. The artist’s regular beach combings were presented as a cabinet of curiosities – taking the form of a traditional kitchen dresser – as well as stacked Perspex boxes on the gallery floor. Categorised by colour, shape or form, the variety of collectibles included animal bone, multicoloured rope floats, petrified sea sponges, workman’s rubber gloves and manufactured objects of all shapes and sizes, reflecting Ritchie’s durational commitment to this work. Some objects have been eroded beyond repair, to resemble the abstract sculptural forms of Tony Cragg. Unfortunately, Uniform of Debris (2018), a video and sound installation by Kathryn and Roy Nelson, was experiencing technical difficulties during my visit, and therefore cannot be discussed in this review. 

Shambles on a bodyboard (2018) is another text-based work, developed by Mitch Conlon in collaboration with Belfast based tradesman Bobby Seggie. The slogan, “She/He/They Deserve to Hear the Wetlands Play”, refers to a time when Conlon’s socially-engaged practice came into contact with activism and protest. The projection distils a potential mantra of social change, carving out a slightly more localised political position amongst the rubble. Seggie employs the traditional methods of handmade signwriting, with the large white typeface amplified by the saturated colour image of rippling water, creating a pared back and mystifying aesthetic. Apparently, the work is incomplete, however this presentation in the arts centre functions as an initial design plan – a work in motion ebbing at the shoreline – that resonates with the accumulative threads of neighbouring artworks.  

The projection work sits in stark opposition to another piece of text – a large black vinyl statistic on the adjacent wall, proclaiming that the amount of plastic dumped every minute into the ocean equates to that of a truck-load. The inclusion of this statement is problematic. Situated beside a series of interpretive artworks, it has a flattening effect, framing them as some sort of ‘awareness campaign’, with a ‘child friendly’, educational doctrine. The publication reinforces this line of inquiry, claiming that the exhibition “explores the devastating long-term effects plastic is having on our precious oceans”, thus positing linear and prescriptive interpretations for the work on show, while masking other potential narratives that remain unrealised. This shiny black declaration provoked my scepticism, because it is not an artwork by one of the artists involved. It strikes me that conflicts between curatorial intention and public relations have become increasingly common within public institutions, which runs the risk of diluting the nuanced intentions behind certain artworks, in order for them to appear more topical or ‘accessible’. This can also result in artistic validity being outweighed by thematic generalisations, as a bridge to tentatively connect artistic practice with the mainstream public.

Tara McGinn is an artist and writer currently based in Belfast and an MFA candidate at the University of Ulster.

Image Credits
Kathryn Nelson, Julie McGowan & Sandra Turley, Ghost Net, 2016, cotton and text; image courtesy of Millennium Court Arts Centre.
Kate Ritchie, Beachkeeping No.3, 2018, found mixed plastics, bone, wood and cabinet; image courtesy of Millennium Court Arts Centre

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NCAD Gallery, Dublin
21 September – 30 November 2018

The glass modernist façade of the NCAD Gallery may be considered a portal into the machine itself. To function, this machine depends on an engaged, creative, intellectual exchange between students, researchers, lecturers and artists, who are in turn inherently dependent on the infrastructures and resources the machine affords them. ‘Infrastructures of Now’, curated by Anne Kelly, interrogates this interdependency, critically addressing questions of autonomy, institutional expectations and the technical methodologies and languages engaged by the contemporary practitioners it frames. The works featured in this exhibition have at some point – either notionally or physically – passed through the engine rooms of this machine: the campus libraries.

Unearthed from the collection at the National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL), is documentation chronicling the processes of textile designer Leslie Eastwood. Presented in a vitrine are intricate frame point designs, burnt orange upholstery swatches (destined for DART and Dublin Bus seating in the early eighties) and designs for musician Paul McCartney’s office. Among the documentation are black and white photographs of Jacquard looms and of Eastwood himself, who passed away in 1999. This is Kelly’s instigative threshold, where we witness the symbiosis of two distinct languages: that of the artist’s hand and analogue technology, a mutualism that ultimately translates idea into form.

Andrew Folan’s sculptural work further manifests this symbiosis of language. A floor-based glass box displays white laser-sintered polyamide flowers, which are 3D derivatives of his digital animation The Prometheus (2010). This series is otherworldly, stark and unnaturally flawless. In contrarious proximity, Shane Keeling’s punky ceramic slip vases – punctured with screws and the smirking statement “flowers are gay” – scoff at the utilitarian notions traditionally associated with his medium.

Alan Butler and Elaine Hoey’s video work, Prospero AI, imagines a futuristic artist residency programme, where participants can work under the tutelage of a super artificial intelligence system. The work brims with the utopian promise of a Facebook recruitment commercial. It cringes with aspirational notions of how our surplus time should be spent, playing on our technological dependency and innate need to belong to something bigger than us – even if that is, in this case, a dystopian institution that determines our thinking and ensures our compliance.

Channelling a similar dependency, Jessica Foley’s audio sculpture, Holes (2018), consists of a mound of porous stones, eroded by the coastal environment they’ve been extracted from. The stones are piled around a computer-generated voiceover (reciting poetry relating to the topography and geology of Portrane, County Dublin) like a group of devotees assembling around a magnetic prophet they have inadvertently created. Mark O’Kelly’s painting, Leaders and Followers (2010), depicts an ominous cinematic woodland scene, with the central protagonist surrounded by onlookers and adorned with flowers. At first glance, this scene could be mistaken for an art college party, but O’Kelly’s composition pertains to sinister hierarchical systems and our blind collective propensity toward docility.  

Tom O’Dea’s A Séance for Pierre Méchain (2018) is a transparent technical cornucopia of hardware and software, sculpturally amplifying its energy source with exposed wires, antithetical to the efforts of the French mathematician and astronomer to conceal his miscalculations. Circuit boards contain text referring to the revision of International System of Units in 2019, conveying humorous scepticism towards universally accepted knowledge bases and their malleability. In Adrian Duncan’s mixed-media sculptures, Love Notes From a German Building Site (2018), three small-scale figurative works whisper in sharp satisfying angles on the floor, appearing to comment on his larger suspended geometric work that engages with the architecture of the institution that supports it.

Articulating a multifarious vocabulary, all of these works lilt with institutional accents. If the NCAD Gallery is a portal into the machine itself, ‘Infrastructures of Now’ succeeds in illuminating the languages that fuel it. Kelly’s bilingual curatorial approach pitches immanent concerns (regarding institutional and hierarchical adherence) against the evolution of technical languages engaged with by contemporary practitioners. However, perhaps the true threat to creative autonomy is the movement toward a symbiosis of these technological and institutional avatars, supported by the self-referential ideologies of the machine itself.

Brendan Fox is a writer, curator and visual artist based in Dublin and Rome.

Image Credits
Tom O’Dea, A Séance for Pierre Méchain, 2018; photograph by Anne Kelly, courtesy of NCAD Gallery.
Jessica Foley, Holes, 2018, installation view, NCAD Gallery; photograph by Anne Kelly, courtesy of NCAD Gallery.

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Triskel Christchurch, Cork 
11 October – 22 December 2018

In large black type, the word “ENDUSER” confronts visitors, while underneath, an inscrutable text begins: “you owe me, big smooth eggs of divine fertility laid out of the window into the endless landscape.” The phrase “you owe me” is repeated throughout this text: “you owe me…snow… strawberries…colour…”. Some, but not all, of the things ‘owed’ also appear in the presented artworks. 

Penc presented two distinct and consecutive phases of this exhibition, each running for approximately a month at Triskel Christchurch – an eighteenth-century neoclassical Georgian church, which functions as Triskel Art Centre’s main auditorium. The titular artwork, ENDUSER, featured in both iterations, comprising four holographic projections, sited at balcony-height, near the corner pillars of the nave, which were activated by viewers’ movements as they passed through the space. When not activated, this work exists as a mechanical structure, a single blade propeller on a steel pole. When triggered, the blade whirs into motion. As the speed increases, the spectral apparition of a ghostly head appears, revolving 360 degrees on its axis, before cutting to an upright rotating hand. In the context of the overall show, I would relate the hand and the head to making and thinking; to creation, production and measurement.

A two-minute film loop, titled The last Judgement, is projected onto the first of two screens in the aisle, hung from the ceiling. The film features three figures – naked, hairless and devoid of genitals, reminiscent of action men dolls – inhabiting a bleak computer-generated world. They trudge atop a revolving disc; one figure wears knee-length black boots and pulls a rope attached to the wheel’s axel. His labour in this dystopian gymnasium is being converted to energy. Of course, virtual, remote and unseen slave labour exists in our world, supplying the commodities that keep capital moving – from coltan mining in the Congo to textile factories in Bangladesh. The scene reveals a bleached rudimentary landscape, populated with geometric shapes and small figures that seem to be plucked from the hellscape of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. A short looped computer-generated film, Strawberry Advertisement, depicts a landscape of strawberries; sumptuous and seductive in their fleshy unreality and perhaps plucked by one of Bosch’s unfortunate eunuch slaves. During the exhibition’s run, a story emerged of needles being found in strawberries in Australia, which shut down the country’s multi-million-dollar strawberry industry for several weeks. Speculation abounded of disgruntled pickers engaging in sabotage – a needle in the fruit replacing the spanner in the works. 

The second instalment of the show included two film works and a sound piece. Digital Waste Disposal Site, a computer-generated animation, features a static snowy landscape over which footage of seven long flags has been superimposed. The flags move, but are not tethered to anything, bringing an uncanny aspect to the scene. It is a picturesque vista with pine trees and snow-covered cabins, the light suggesting dawn or dusk. The unfurled flags could suggest the simple measure of wind direction, hinting at windmills – an early method of harnessing nature’s energy – or they may refer to political projects, the unfurling of the red flag a symbol of the masses rising up against their masters. In a similar vein, Marked for Deletion comprises a still image of a beautiful seascape, with horizontal and vertical lines superimposed on the composition’s lower portion. A gridded cube moves through the arrangement, recalling the modernist desire to purify the artmaking process from the emotional subjectivity of the ‘tortured artist’ of popular cliché. Both films show the natural landscape – an archetypal subject in Romanticism – being contested by another force.

Hanging from the ceiling between the projection screens is Closing Credits, a steel-frame cube which triggers a cacophonous alarm when approached. This extended note adds to the low-level electronic hum already filling the space. It is a heavy looking industrial piece; the nuts and bolts are exposed, highlighting its materiality. This work oscillates between being a sculpture and a piece of equipment, housing the technology. The themes that emerge in ‘ENDUSER’ are consumption and production. The finished products are displayed in all their beauty and seductiveness, while the labour spent during production of these artworks is hidden away. 

Catherine Harty is a member of the Cork Artists Collective and a director of The Guesthouse Project.

Image Credits
Tomas Penc, ENDUSER, 2018, audio/visual installation, holographic projectors, sound, duration 3:50 minutes, dimensions variable; photograph by venividiphoto.net.
Thomas Penc, Strawberries Advertisement, 2018, computer-generated animation, loop, duration 1:30 minutes, and The Last Judgement, 2018, computer-generated animation and sound, loop, duration 2:04 minutes; photograph by venividiphoto.net.

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The Model, Sligo
17 November 2018 – 27 January 2019

This extensive exhibition by Chris Doris is installed across five gallery spaces at the Model, exploring a number of thematic strands, influenced by components of the artist’s life, namely: meditation, psychotherapy, psychology and neurobiology. Doris brings these professional interests into play and reinterprets them in the gallery context, showcasing a unique range of observational modes, as well as a lucid, coherent range of artworks. 

What might initially appear as hard-edged abstraction within the galleries, is softened through the introduction of the outside world. Natural light is present in three of the five spaces; it appears to have been deliberately choreographed to create dynamic interplays with Doris’s paintings. There is clearly an influence of Colour Field painting of the 1940s and 50s – from American artists, such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, to British artists including Robyn Denny. Doris undoubtedly has a distinctive and personal style, but there is a sense of acknowledging abstract art precedents.   

Gallery D features an interesting combination of paintings referencing nature. A convex painting, akin to a large human eye, confronts the viewer, featuring heavy impasto and a black circle on an off-white background. The canvas is deep and its edges feature interlocking multicoloured stripes. Entitled The Empty Field (2) (2017), it interrogates the formal construct of painting, the language of production, or perhaps even something beheld by the eye – an empty field beyond. 

Opposite are two sister-works, identically constructed in opposing colours. The End of a Beginning (2017) consists of a deep black arc pointing upward, with a three-quarter white circle contained, and a blue edge to the canvas; while The Beginning of a Beginning (2017) features a white arc, a black three-quarter circle and a bright yellow edge. Between these works, above the arched windows, is a smaller work, Wave (2017), evoking the sea or perhaps a sound wave. Opposite, three long vertical strip paintings on steel, A Dying Light (2017), are three-quarters black, with white at the lower ends, suggesting the close of day.         

The artist employs conceptually provocative titles, encouraging the viewer to consider personal, experiential or universal narrative threads. The paintings prompt the mind to enter into a dialogue with the eye. Many of the exhibited works are titled Open Painting, with no further differentiations given – a simple titling device that signals Doris’s generosity to the viewer. As part of this open invitation, these paintings require interpretation and engagement; they lie dormant until confronted by the attendant interchange of the viewer. According to the artist, the focus is the metaphorical ‘empty field’ with “emptiness” being “held as a field of potentiality”. 

Doris’s expansive ‘open paintings’ sit in stark contrast to his text-based paintings in Gallery B. Where the other four galleries feature highly restrained, elemental and purist paintings, the black walls of this small windowless space are heavily concentrated with a salon-style hang of 43 paintings. Various slogans and messages compete for the viewer’s attention, such as: ‘This is an attempt at an image of God’; ‘Be composed, then decomposed’; ‘A painting makes visible implicit unknown values’ and so on. 

There are also four totemic sculptures installed on the floor. Is this installation an artistic response to the pure paintings exhibited elsewhere? Does it represent the artist’s musings on art and its purpose? Is it a range of thoughts gathered through self-introspection? Regardless of the artist’s rationale, a dichotomy is set up between this chaotic hub and the other streamlined spaces, providing a unique mindscape for contemplating the exhibition’s multiple identities. 

The exhibition is not the exclusive product of the artist’s investigations on his theme – it was accompanied by two unique participatory events. At the exhibition launch, Doris facilitated a “public inquiry”, entitled ‘Songs of Being Seen’, consisting of spontaneous group vocalisation, lasting three hours. The second aspect is an extension of Doris’s ‘relational inquiries’ series, entitled ‘Taking History’, where the artist offered one-to-one confidential sittings over two days. During these sessions, individuals became part of a “series of private, joint inquiries with the artist, into the sitter’s dominant self-forms and their origins”, thus adding an analytical dimension to the practice of conventional portraiture.

Marianne O’Kane Boal is a writer on art and architecture and a member of AICA.

Image Credits
Chris Doris, ‘The Empty Field’, installation view, The Model, Sligo; photograph by Heike Thiele, courtesy of The Model.

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Limerick City Gallery of Art 
30 September 2018 – 6 January 2019 

The fundamental experience generated by Maud Cotter’s solo exhibition, ‘a consequence of – without stilling’, at Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) is appropriately described in the exhibition text as “a mercurial landscape of the mind… a place where matter and consciousness mix”. 

Cotter, who was one of the founders of the National Sculpture Factory, Cork, displays an uncanny understanding of, and meticulous control over, the materials she uses, as dramatically evident in two large-scale sculptures: without stilling (2017–18), a skilfully imagined construction, produced entirely of finely cut Finnish birch ply in the South Gallery; and matter of fact (2016), a vast tube-like structure which commands immediate attention in the Foyer Gallery, at the heart of LCGA. The scale and intricate detailing of this sculpture, which is fabricated in looping mild steel wire, gives the initial impression of some sort of mechanical structure, reminiscent of an engine or turbine, appearing to drive the exhibition’s momentum.

Walking through the exhibition, one of the first things that struck me was the prevalence of pencil marks on the walls and sculptures, appearing at first as ‘remnants’ from the unseen processes of construction and installation. Contrary to what we were taught in art college – that a work is only finished when it’s perfect, without blemish or mark – Cotter uses these pencil lines to make visible the ‘manufacturing’ of artworks and her unfolding thought processes, as part of the planned construction. Initially, it was challenging for me not to perceive these pencil lines as flaws; however, they soon became a recurring thread that helped to anchor individual artworks and give a sense of continuity across the gallery spaces. These marks culminate in the corner of the Link Gallery, where a custom-made table – with construction pencil marks intact – displays small sculptural maquettes, along with an extract from Sarah Kelleher’s text, A Solution is in the Room, developed in collaboration with Coracle Press. 

‘A consequence of – without stilling’ appears as the fantastical world of an artists’ studio, where everything has meaning, and each artwork contributes to the genesis of the next one, in the art-making process. The exhibition includes numerous material amalgamations, constructed in seemingly found materials, such as lengths of wire, cable and cotton netting, reminiscent of discarded fishing nets. Cotter displays a thorough understanding of how incongruent materials might relate to each other, while masterfully shaping them into the most aesthetically alluring organic forms. In the Ante Gallery, we are enticed by an elegant, free-standing, triangular construction, draped with latex, titled & bone (2017–18). Like many of Cotter’s assemblages, it incorporates industrial materials, including hazard tape, rubber hose and high-tension cable, while three phallic-like constructions, titled a dappled world/ one, two & three (2017), dangle on the adjacent wall. 

In the South Gallery, Without stilling feels like entering the artist’s personal imaginary aquarium. Hundreds of Finnish birch ply formations – shaped like child-like drawings of fish – have been knitted together repetitively, to create an asymmetrical natural form, reminiscent of a large school of fish, swimming in unison in mid-air, creating a palpable sense of movement. Coupled with the cotton netting used in other works – such as Falling into many pieces | Three (2016) and the moon is falling (2018) – an undeniable nautical tone begins to emerge, underpinned by notions of conservation and pollution. It strikes me that many of the materials used by Cotter could be readily found on many of Ireland’s beaches, washing up as domestic waste, or as the discarded biproducts of industry or manufacturing. 

Cotter’s playful landscapes at LCGA attentively combine found and pre-existing materials to implant experiences of internal consciousness. The works reflect a desire to propagate form and concept, with the aim of instilling order amidst the chaotic. Cotter’s current exhibition at LCGA will be followed by two subsequent iterations: ‘a consequence of – a breather of air’ at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, in spring 2019; and ‘a consequence of – entanglement’ at Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane in 2020. 

Simon Fennessy Corcoran is a curator and current board member of 126 Artist-run Gallery, Galway.

Image Credits
Maud Cotter, without stilling, installation view, Limerick City Gallery of Art; photograph by Roland Paschhoff, courtesy the artist and domobaal.
Maud Cotter, & bone,installation view, Limerick City Gallery of Art; photograph by Roland Paschhoff, courtesy the artist and domobaal.

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